It Could Happen Here Weekly 210

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Speaker 2 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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Speaker 2 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 11 Get ready for anarchy in Atlanta.

Speaker 12 It should be clear to all Americans that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country.

Speaker 13 State-of-the-art, organized, and well-funded activists and criminals.

Speaker 7 On April 29th, 2025, after almost exactly four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the construction of a state-of-the-art police training facility dubbed Cop City,

Speaker 7 the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially opened atop of the South River Forest in DeKalb County, Georgia.

Speaker 15 One, two, three, cut.

Speaker 16 The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open.

Speaker 17 A handshake between Governor Brian Kemp and a relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Speaker 3 Getting here

Speaker 7 has not.

Speaker 3 been an easy journey.

Speaker 16 The opening of the $118 million complex for police, fire, and E-911 personnel, which includes academic, leadership, and simulation centers, came after not months, but years of public pushback.

Speaker 2 Stop Cop City! Shut it!

Speaker 7 This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.
I've been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop City movement on this show since 2021.

Speaker 7 I first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from inside of the protest encampments in spring spring of 2022, and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story more in depth in 2023.

Speaker 7 My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement, as well as my ability as a reporter. But this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement.

Speaker 7 Every other report or miniseries I've done on Stop Cop City was written while the movement was still ongoing, and the final outcome had yet to be fully determined.

Speaker 7 Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti-police, anarchist, or leftist struggles.

Speaker 7 I believe that we will win and Cop City will never be built were common turns of phrase, and not just repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed.

Speaker 7 But now, six months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement, based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists, and forest defenders, analyzing the movement's rise and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge between the 2020 protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity, and increased state repression against quote-unquote radical left terrorists.

Speaker 7 We don't have enough time to retread a complete, in-depth, play-by-play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to break down the movement into a series of discrete phases.

Speaker 7 After organizers learned about the plans to build Cop City in April of 2021, the movement to defend the Atlanta forest first took form with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of 2021, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in partnership with local government.

Speaker 7 To quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote,

Speaker 7 Early stages of the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy. Just absolute, this is what we're doing.
This is what we're about. This is the goal.

Speaker 7 If you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be a part of this. That was just what we were doing, unquote.

Speaker 7 In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the land lease ordinance authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city-owned land in the South River Forest to build a Cop City.

Speaker 7 After this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eschewed.

Speaker 7 And soon after, the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest and the start of the pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project.

Speaker 7 To again quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist: quote, persistent encampment occupation.

Speaker 7 Lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing what to do at all.

Speaker 7 Small incursions would get made, but they just had not figured out what to do about it yet. There was just kind of like free reign, unquote.

Speaker 7 For the first half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and decab sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage.

Speaker 7 Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group SHACK, showed early promise in getting subcontractors like Reeves Young Construction and material suppliers to drop out of the Cop City project.

Speaker 7 But after this stream of steady success from fall of 2021 to May of 2022, the police were forced to up the ante.

Speaker 7 and started conducting large-scale raids in the forest to remove forest offenders and damage encampment infrastructure.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, May of 2022 is the end of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids, where the paralysis phase is broken.

Speaker 7 You're getting your multi-agency large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in a lot of work. That really leads up to January of 2023, so where Tort got killed, unquote.

Speaker 7 Prior to the police killing of Torteguita during a forest encampment raid on January 18, 2023, the occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre-construction.

Speaker 7 But the killing of Tortuguita essentially marked the end of the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high octane intensity.
Let's call this the revenge phase.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March 5th.

Speaker 7 During the South River Music Festival on March 5th, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.

Speaker 7 The crowd repelled police, and construction equipment was set on fire.

Speaker 7 The cops retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units in Atlanta, kettled the festival, and eventually arrested 23 people, charging them with domestic terrorism.

Speaker 7 After the events of March 5th, the movement entered an odd limbo phase, with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City Coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.

Speaker 7 During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted.

Speaker 7 Following this denial of operating space, the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear-cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.

Speaker 7 About a month later, the bail fund and legal defense nonprofit, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud.

Speaker 7 Just a few days after the raid, the city council approved a $67 million Cop City funding package.

Speaker 7 The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the Cop City land lease ordinance on the upcoming November ballot.

Speaker 7 Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before.

Speaker 7 There was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.

Speaker 7 Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized week of action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country, or even the world, who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions, and protests against Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and contractors hired to build the facility.

Speaker 7 The summer of 2023 saw the sixth organized week of action. But it too was caught in this limbo phase.

Speaker 7 And without the forest as an operating zone, the week of action struggled to find its purpose despite the surge in movement participation around the city hall budget vote earlier that June.

Speaker 7 The next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police, the repression phase.

Speaker 7 which really sets in around August of 2023 with the RICO indictment charging 61 people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism.

Speaker 7 State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to the current trial phase.

Speaker 7 To quote an Atlanta anarchist, quote, I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long-term prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the one to close the book by doing this.

Speaker 7 Because you don't want to let them define the narrative of this forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of the trial and calling it.

Speaker 7 Otherwise, the movement gets stuck in this permanent, like, zombie phase, where we're still saying Stop Cop City is this thing that's happening when it's

Speaker 7 built. It's built.
It's right there, right?

Speaker 7 Like, it doesn't mean that we all just go home, but it means that you're like a veteran of this battle now, and there's new shit to do, new stuff to work on.

Speaker 7 Even in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame to a specific factor in why the fight to stop Cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal.

Speaker 7 But we can track a decline in momentum, which allowed the state to gain the upper hand.

Speaker 7 For nearly three years, state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges made little impact.

Speaker 7 The use of terrorism charges as a repression tactic started back in December of 2022, following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged with domestic terrorism.

Speaker 7 This was the first time that charge has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in 2017 in response to the white supremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.

Speaker 7 Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed, Tortogita was killed by police in another forest raid.

Speaker 7 But this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the movement to fight Cop City, which then only grew.

Speaker 7 Similarly, the clear-cutting of the forest itself wasn't enough to demoralize the people in Atlanta.

Speaker 7 Rather, the hesitation to build on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like March 5th provided the state an opening while the movement was stuck in limbo.

Speaker 7 Throughout this limbo phase, the movement was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects leading to March 5th.

Speaker 7 But as the energy tapered down, the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then dealt a pretty significant blow with the RICO indictment.

Speaker 7 The RICO charges in August of 2023, followed by the series of house raids in February of 2024, were a pretty crippling one-two punch that stifled the momentum to almost a complete standstill.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, a lot of people will argue their opinions about what was the stifling thing.

Speaker 7 I think some of the more electorally or mass movement, big tent-minded people would argue that like March 5th takes a lot of the wind out of the sails.

Speaker 7 I think a lot of people would disagree with that, just because like you can build on the momentum of a March 5th. You can build on like a triumphant battlefield victory.

Speaker 7 It's a lot harder to build on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning. It's hard to build on that.
⁇

Speaker 7 Despite the RICO charges, acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough to propel the movement.

Speaker 7 After the referendum campaign was effectively nullified by the state in fall of 2023, there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials.

Speaker 7 Something multiple activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies and adapt after the forest occupation became impossible to maintain.

Speaker 7 Especially considering just how much weight people had put into that strategy, but then did not come up with a clear next step after the police were able to suppress that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their own strategies.

Speaker 7 The ODA loop is a four-step military decision-making model used across a large variety of professional fields, including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible.

Speaker 7 Then, orient, synthesize information with background knowledge. Decide on the next course of action using that newly synthesized information, and finally act.

Speaker 7 And the results of your actions should then send you back to step one. Failure to act act at all or too slowly often ends in defeat.

Speaker 7 To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, you need contingency lines, right?

Speaker 7 Either things that you're willing to escalate in the current line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable, or a complete change in strategy.

Speaker 7 It could be change in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those are valid options.
Doing both of them at the same time can be extremely effective.

Speaker 7 But at the end of the day, you have to, when the cops start start to break out of paralysis.

Speaker 7 An example from any eco-defense or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have to escalate in some way.

Speaker 7 The occupation, the defense of it, has to escalate in some way to prevent them from feeling safe coming in or trying to. Or the physical space of action has to change.

Speaker 7 Because Now they need to recalibrate to, oh shit, like not only is the occupation less assailable than we thought thought, because there's been a change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit going on everywhere else.

Speaker 7 And that significantly impedes their ability to have an Oda loop to do battle with. You can even look at the ice pickups that got a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Speaker 7 They were not expecting that many people just to show up. You can see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass of rage and getting really close to those guys that they fucking panic.

Speaker 7 They freak out. Like it's it's very clear, even just in the small amount of their faces and their movements, that you can see that they were panicking.
Unquote.

Speaker 7 Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland. And I've seen this before with Bortek during the 2020 protests in Portland.

Speaker 7 I think anyone who has watched the cops retreat has seen this before. But the more the same thing happens, the more you get used to it, the more you experiment and find ways to adapt and overcome.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, cops panic, and you can see it in the way they walk. Like they weren't ready for that.
And next time they might be, which means you have to add something new.

Speaker 7 A new spice has to get thrown in, a new flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through crowds like that until someone hits them at the end of the day.

Speaker 7 And whether you're like confronting them on the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to knock people's doors to get them out, eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy.

Speaker 7 And eventually, you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you are using. Unquote.

Speaker 7 To orient back to Atlanta, all these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of March 5th, the seeming impossibility of continued forest encampments, or the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum.

Speaker 7 In these moments, the police police and the state were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally so during the quote-unquote block Cop City protest in October of 2023, where police easily repelled a protest march from even reaching the road to the Cop City construction site.

Speaker 7 And the state continued to push their lines forward with the joint FBI-ATF raids on activist houses in February 2024, which further stifled the movement and was coupled with months to years-long years-long persistent surveillance and intimidation, denoted by cops, parked outside of homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance, and hidden cameras placed in front of activists' homes and a local community center.

Speaker 7 One of the more frightening incidents came in May of 2024, where a resident of one of the homes raided that February woke up in the middle of the night to a bright light outside the bedroom window, only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps on fire.

Speaker 7 One of the things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the way people talked about fear as a tool.

Speaker 7 Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a common refrain to overcome the fear that the state used as a weapon.

Speaker 7 But the first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to the state using fear.

Speaker 7 It was in early 2022 when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam-style booby traps demonstrated that the cops are not impervious super soldiers.

Speaker 7 Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training.

Speaker 7 They are susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us, Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, but while we understand our own fear, I think people often fall into the trap of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them.

Speaker 7 Because the state feels like this monolithic, machine-like, this unassailable entity that it is not.

Speaker 7 It's made up of people with flaws and emotions who have the same cortisol response to being threatened that you or I do.

Speaker 7 A big part of the lessons learned from Atlanta has to be a willingness to engage with them in a way that is personally endangering. That is the single way out.
They're human and they get scared.

Speaker 7 The fear that I think had them so tight until May of 2022 was a fear that manifested itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is a normal human remotion to danger.

Speaker 7 So whether you're the most hardened SWAT team guy going up against the craziest eco-freak in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that.

Speaker 7 But what really had them so tight was fear as a matter of them being paralyzed by it, that they could not find out how to move.

Speaker 7 And once they did find out around May of 2022, we really start to see things change. And like they were scared enough in the woods to shoot someone to death.
Like they were still afraid.

Speaker 7 We were able to instill an immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if if you're going to be on the very nimble, small, green team insurgency side of things.

Speaker 7 You have to make your enemy afraid of the dark. But also, you have your defensive strategy against fear.

Speaker 7 You would hear all the time in Atlanta the whole let the fear wash over you and through you mantra.

Speaker 7 That was a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because you have to find a way to move through that paralysis. Unquote.

Speaker 7 Eventually, and with the help of a multi-agency task force, the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed by it.

Speaker 7 In contrast, the pseudo-paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only set in very late into the movement as a cumulative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics.

Speaker 7 As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep stop cop city in this sort of unalive zombie state, where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local result is pretty clearly finished.

Speaker 7 But in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is at this point a burgeoning police state and right-wing power bloc.

Speaker 7 Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, internalizing not just in terms of like lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta.

Speaker 7 As the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot of the way that ICE operations are currently happening.

Speaker 7 That necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them.

Speaker 7 Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing, at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it.

Speaker 7 And it is probably like unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop Cop City is doing a rally here. Like when it's built, it's there.
And now we need to move on to other things.

Speaker 7 We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's still a police state to engage with here.

Speaker 7 You don't need the container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police. Unquote.

Speaker 7 And there are other things happening in Atlanta. There's ice rates happening in Atlanta in the north suburbs of the city.
Cop City is actively being enacted.

Speaker 7 And if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are, which are now happening on a nationwide scale.

Speaker 7 An early irony of the movement was that though Cop City was conceived as a training ground for police, first it became a training ground for anarchists.

Speaker 7 As Top Cop City became the first mass movement following the 2020 George Floyd protests, whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from the 2020 uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might look like.

Speaker 7 Atlanta Police Chief Darren Schearbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training Center grand opening.

Speaker 19 Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to rally here, in this spot and on Peachtree Street from across the nation and literally the globe, we were up against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta Police Department.

Speaker 19 And we ourselves put out the call for help. And no sheriff said no, no police chief said no.

Speaker 19 The Georgia State Patrol, the Department of Natural Resources should side by side with this department as did the FBI and the ATF.

Speaker 19 Because we all knew that that playbook was successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across this country and public safety would be stymied wherever we go.

Speaker 7 While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response, the state also used the movement to test out strategies for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics, well before the Cop City facility was finished being built.

Speaker 7 And now, with this specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the state are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power, deploys National Guard, increases ACE operations, and continues repression against organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide.

Speaker 7 To quote an Atlanta anarchist, quote, I think it's a matter of reimagining the struggle that you're a part of. Insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.

Speaker 7 And if you were part of this thing here, you are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.

Speaker 7 This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the Atlanta forest, stop Cop City, is something to be learned from and valued.

Speaker 7 and also moved on from, and to move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion, such that the state has as well.

Speaker 7 They have taken lessons learned from here and followed them through to their nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well.
That doesn't mean you have given up.

Speaker 7 It just means that there's new shit happening.

Speaker 7 It's helpful to reimagine yourself not as just we're in Atlanta and we're doing Stop Cop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide anti-fascist struggle against like a fascist police state.

Speaker 7 Unquote. This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City.
One of the movement's key slogans was, Cop City is everywhere.

Speaker 7 Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in weeks of action.

Speaker 7 The physical fight to Stop Cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies.

Speaker 7 This nationwide drift also happened on the side of the state, with similar police training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities.

Speaker 7 And the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a national level.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, Now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and the strategies of repression, both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their propaganda and their messaging, has gone outwards from here.

Speaker 7 And so too, then must our lessons learned, both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also how we make connections to the rest of the country.

Speaker 7 People who came here are now back home and will make connections to the people around them. The cops in different cities, they have big conferences.

Speaker 2 They talk to each other.

Speaker 7 They learn from each other. There's no reason that we shouldn't be.
You know, doing so with caution and security culture. Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on.

Speaker 7 But we have things to learn from each other. And if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially teach people.

Speaker 7 Even if that was just like, here's how we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like 400 people in a day, or here's how we sneak around in the middle of the night. Unquote.

Speaker 7 This is a representative of the Fire Ant Movement Defense at a Cop City trial press conference from September 2025.

Speaker 21 The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents now stalk communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed, snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches.

Speaker 21 Who can argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless expansion of police power?

Speaker 21 Now that Trump commands them,

Speaker 21 now that they are his police, The very people who helped lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders, his his camps, his federal troop deployments, but they built the logistics.

Speaker 21 They funded the training centers. They expanded the surveillance.
Liberal governments like Atlanta's helped pave the way for the descent of our country into autocracy.

Speaker 7 As Marlon Kratz of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote, what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.

Speaker 7 This is a test run of a repressive playbook that authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover what they can get away with. ⁇ Unquote.

Speaker 7 Let's look at some examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and the strategies for counterinsurgency that are spreading in the era of Trump 2.0.

Speaker 7 In January of this year, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a resolution titled, Deeming Certain Conduct of Members of Antifa as Domestic Terrorism and designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with domestic terrorism.

Speaker 7 The Atlanta-based surveillance company Flock Safety gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated Cop City construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters repeatedly toppled.

Speaker 7 Flock has grown massively the past four years with over 80,000 quote-unquote AI-powered cameras in 49 states. These cameras complete over 20 billion scans per month.

Speaker 7 Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread all around the country and are used by all manners of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs who have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women seeking abortions.

Speaker 7 Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local Flock camera network to make over 3,200 searches from January to November 2025.

Speaker 7 In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.

Speaker 7 This order calls to, quote, unleash high-impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials, and search resources to officers in need, unquote.

Speaker 7 It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense to police officers who, quote, unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law, unquote.

Speaker 7 This tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm.

Speaker 7 The order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to quote, seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution, and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions.

Speaker 7 Unquote.

Speaker 7 The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local or state law enforcement agencies that might might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.

Speaker 7 And then finally, quote: The Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies, as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement and shall determine how military and national security assets training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

Speaker 7 Unquote.

Speaker 7 As the police become further militarized, the military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 7 contains a section directing the Secretary of Defense to, quote, designate an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that, quote, a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment, unquote.

Speaker 7 Later in October of 2025, the Department of Defense sent out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have their own quick reaction forces operational by January 1st, 2026, with crowd control equipment and two full-time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit.

Speaker 7 The units contain on average 500 troops per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within 8 to 24 hours.

Speaker 7 The initial portion of the Bureau training courses cover how to, quote, form squad-sized riot control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a riot control formation, how to supervise a riot/slash crowd control operation, crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training, unquote.

Speaker 7 On September 22nd, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 7 Three days later, Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 on countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence, which calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to, quote, investigate all participants of these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.

Speaker 7 The memo orders local joint terrorism task forces to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights, unquote, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are, quote, responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct, unquote, as previously described.

Speaker 7 The Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to, quote, identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence, and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams.

Speaker 7 The memo also instructs the IRS to, quote, take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism, unquote, and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

Speaker 7 Quoting the memo one final time, quote, investigations shall prioritize crimes such as the following, assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson, violations of the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, and major fraud against the United States.

Speaker 7 Unquote.

Speaker 7 At Trump's White House Antifa Roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City.

Speaker 24 There was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop City. Over 60 rioters were charged with domestic terrorism.

Speaker 24 These groups received money for that from both the billionaire class as well as taxpayer money. So.

Speaker 7 On May 1st, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations, Secret Service, and the acting ICE director raided a home in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone numbers of ICE agents with text in Spanish reading, careful with these faces.

Speaker 7 In April of 2023, three activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police officer connected to the killing of Tortuguita on the mailboxes in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about 40 miles from Atlanta.

Speaker 7 The activists were charged with felony intimidation and were later added to the Cop City Ricoh case.

Speaker 7 To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting of people putting up flyers, simply identifying cops or anonymous ICE agents, demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon.

Speaker 7 That's why they did the RICO charges. That's why they do the house raids.
That's why they do overt surveillance where you're getting followed around by police.

Speaker 7 But they are susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates a high level of fear.

Speaker 7 They are taking massive steps to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents.

Speaker 7 They're complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo. They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults against officers.

Speaker 7 And they are afraid enough to shoot their guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times in the past six months.

Speaker 7 They are scared, and as evil and super-soldier-y as they may seem, they are indeed afraid.

Speaker 7 To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, Unless you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop.

Speaker 7 Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some way that shatters their Ota loop, they will break free of their paralysis and they will find a way through their fear.

Speaker 7 So when that starts to happen, it's time to do something new and insane because you have to keep them afraid. Because like by every moral right, they should be.

Speaker 7 They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes. And if they are too afraid to leave their homes, then they can't go out and do their jobs.

Speaker 7 At the end of the day, that's their Ota loop right there. The scale of fear as a tool of repression is always exponentially larger than the scale of physical or legal repression.

Speaker 7 It punches well above its weight. You can look at Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can even look at some of the arrests made in response to Palestinian liberation protests.

Speaker 7 It takes blackbagging six people to paralyze 6,000. Because it's terrifying, because it's scary, like it's fucked up.
That's a bad thing to have happened to you.

Speaker 7 And like, of course, people are afraid.

Speaker 7 Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging in anti-fascist struggle, whether you're an anti-fascist, whether you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to work with it, because it won't go away and it shouldn't.

Speaker 7 Fear can also keep you safe. But we are necessitated by the political moment we are in to find a way to take extensive action in spite of that.
⁇ Unquote.

Speaker 7 2020 was a lot of people's first experience with mass protest, and some of those people then carry those experiences into Cop City.

Speaker 7 But then for other people, Stop Cop City was their first experience, and now you have an even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.

Speaker 7 But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta as this bridge gap between 2020 and 2025.

Speaker 7 The movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.

Speaker 7 As the Cop City chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people to carry on what's been learned in the contents of their struggle. Onto whatever the next volume is.

Speaker 7 Because Cop City itself is in a sequence of events that have happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved in Cop City has been alive. By generations.

Speaker 7 Cop City is not volume one, Cop City is volume like 32.

Speaker 7 But at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power and surveillance led by a wannabe right-wing strongman.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, a big lesson learned from Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit in the middle of the night than anything else.

Speaker 7 We've had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest that's not gone to trial.

Speaker 7 This is an alleged crime of one midnight sabotage action of the dozens and dozens and dozens of arsons that have happened. And this arrest happened very late into the movement.

Speaker 7 Out of the dozens and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest has been made after the fact.

Speaker 7 Unquote. Another lesson learned is the difficulty of daily counter-surveillance and how much that requires militancy as a daily practice.

Speaker 7 To again quote from an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta, quote, militant anarchism as a daily practice, understanding your adversary not just as this thing that you meet on the field for 20 minutes of action, and then you both go home and like call it, but that they are constantly pursuing you, that you are being like hunted for sport and you have to evade and maneuver constantly.

Speaker 7 That security culture is a persistent thing throughout the years. That you are going to continually keep having to be a part of it and do so in a very disciplined way.

Speaker 2 ⁇

Speaker 7 A lot of the success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a willingness to take an extremely militant approach to prefigurative infrastructure, which added longevity to the combative struggle.

Speaker 7 Both were necessitated as symbiotic elements of the same creature.

Speaker 7 Throughout the Cop City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not always able to engage in a directly combative fight, using militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects, the same way they would in a combative engagement, helps prepare for what will be necessary when things do turn combative.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, the state is this constantly churning machine. Like, it is always trying to acquire new tools and equipment and lessons.

Speaker 7 And we can't just sit still while they do this and be like, okay, well, at some point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen at the place that I live, and I'll go out there and I'll be like, I was in Atlanta, so I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.

Speaker 7 Because if you do nothing for the next four to five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Speaker 7 And all the like fucked up trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been like helpful at all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time.

Speaker 7 Unquote. Looking back at Stop Cop City won't provide all the answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in light of the end result of the movement.

Speaker 7 But it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop Cop City made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond.

Speaker 7 I think there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings.

Speaker 7 considering the fact that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

Speaker 7 But a small group of activists turned a proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was delayed by years at at least $30 million over budget.

Speaker 7 And the current facility lacks the full mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the Cop City namesake.

Speaker 7 Moving forward, both the successes and shortcomings will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to stop Cop City, as Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti-fascists, anarchists, and left-wing activists or NGOs as domestic terrorists.

Speaker 7 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, what we are seeing is the logical conclusion of our adversaries' lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale.

Speaker 7 This is the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that they are doing that.
And if they are doing that, then we should also do that.

Speaker 7 Like, there's logical conclusions and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta that it would be silly for us to not try and push those further.

Speaker 7 including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle. Unquote.
The immediate terrain for Stop Cop City was obviously the forest and now the cop city site itself.

Speaker 7 But there was also the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites, and then all the subcontractors around the country and everything that supplies them.

Speaker 7 And this same model can apply to, say, the Palestine protests.

Speaker 7 There's a network that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts.

Speaker 7 Like what we saw with Shaq, like what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect.

Speaker 7 And in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the Cop City project, as opposed to the infighting caused by a waffle house boycott.

Speaker 7 When reframing what the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what the reality of stopping these things might look like.

Speaker 7 And as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond a physical building, it becomes this Lovecraftian entity that exists everywhere.

Speaker 7 And it's unnerving to contemplate what you would be forced to do to actually realistically confront that.

Speaker 7 Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, it's important to not get trapped in the, you know, we're doing an occupation on college campus.

Speaker 7 We're just going to keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over and over again. And the cop's really good at clearing us up, but now maybe this time.

Speaker 7 And I think a part of the struggle here, though, for people is when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing starts to take on a much different vibe.

Speaker 7 It can be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're doing protest. I genuinely think at the end of the day, it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorism-y.

Speaker 7 It starts to feel too much like an insurgency. And you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start to open up a little bit, and you back off because it's scary.

Speaker 2 And that this thing will kill you.

Speaker 7 This thing will try and kill you eventually. If you push it far enough, it will try and kill you, and it might succeed.

Speaker 7 And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology. It's the reality of engaging with advanced capitalism.
That was the reality of engaging with the police state.

Speaker 7 One that is well understood in Atlanta and in many other places. That this isn't a game.

Speaker 7 You're not gonna get anywhere just kind of sitting on the same college campus green over and over again, hoping for a different result. ⁇

Speaker 7 And as we've seen this year with the State Department cracking down on pro-Palestine protests, Just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you from being blackbagged by the feds, feds, taken to a black site, and deported.

Speaker 7 To close the episode, in September 2024, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the RICO indictment.

Speaker 7 Almost a full year later, on September 9th, 2025, The defense successfully argued that the state AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute the 61 defendants under the state's RICO statute.

Speaker 7 Due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case, Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute Count 1 of the RICO indictment, the racketeering and conspiracy charges.

Speaker 7 Without the sweeping RICO charges engulfing the 61 defendants, just five defendants would be left with Count 2 of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have authority to prosecute, and Count 3, the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be thrown out on a similar technicality.

Speaker 7 The prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defense has argued that the state domestic terrorism law violates the Constitution and is far too broad and should be altered or overturned.

Speaker 7 Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon. Some of the 61 defendants could face charges individually in Fulton and DeKalb County, but that remains to be seen.

Speaker 7 The referendum case is still under appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich is still in pre-trial.

Speaker 7 Just because the Copsidi trial is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now.

Speaker 7 Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, People should be very mindful going into the trial phase that that does not mean that they are safe.

Speaker 7 There is no statute of limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a lot of radical movements, you're going to have to hold a lot of that shit forever.

Speaker 7 Rely on your support structures, rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote.

Speaker 7 As Stop Cop City becomes history, there will be an influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement, whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation, or who knows how many books are incoming.

Speaker 7 There already has been a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage, which grossly objectifies the life of Tortuguita, platforms police as more objective than movement participants, and removes autonomy from key subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public-facing individuals.

Speaker 7 To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time, quote, I think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one that we actually still have to win at, is to not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital, define the ending.

Speaker 7 That is a scope of battle that we are still engaged with and still have to win. We need to close the book on it ourselves.
We need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do that for us.

Speaker 7 It would be disastrous if they did. Unquote.

Speaker 7 This has been It Could Happen Here. See you on the other side.

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Speaker 7 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 7 Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes.
This episode, we're covering the week of November 19 to November 24th.

Speaker 2 Boy, this year's just blown by. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Fast year.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they sped up the time stream. You know what else sped up the time stream? Watching something on Twitter blow up again.

Speaker 2 We can't seem to stop talking about this fucking website, and I'm tired of it. But the big news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propaganda app is

Speaker 2 that they introduced a new feature to let you know the location of the account and also the number of like name changes, like how many username changes it's had since the account is started.

Speaker 2 I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles, the common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by this Daily Beast headline, top mega influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign trolls.

Speaker 2 No shit. Now, as is often the case, this isn't entirely accurate.
It's not to say that there's not a shitload of foreign trolls who are making money by pretending to be American MAGA influencers.

Speaker 2 There definitely are. We've known about this since well before this Twitter change.

Speaker 2 One of the most prominent prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong, is a Malaysian man who has never been to the United States and publishes nothing but MAGA content.

Speaker 2 Now, what's happened here, you can find going through, there's a bunch of threads. There's threads on Blue Sky, threads on Twitter, threads and...

Speaker 2 various articles that are basically all copies of each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts that have been busted, right?

Speaker 2 One good example would be the MAGA Nation verified account, which has almost 400,000 followers, started in 2024.

Speaker 2 It's had five name changes since October 2025, and it is based in Eastern Europe, non-EU.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's mega nation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A lot of people have taken to mean like it's Russian, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which displays as Ivanka Trump, even though it has nothing to do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio. The account was started in 2010.

Speaker 2 It has had 11 user changes since August of 2024, and it is apparently based in Nigeria. You have to see it.
You're seeing like a shitload, a shitload of stuff like this, right? And it's being taken.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, I think this is a mistake. And I hate to be like the, hey, guys, stop being happy about this, but you should because you're wrong about what's happening here.
Most people are.

Speaker 2 Like the Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like, this is total Armageddon for the online right.

Speaker 2 It's looking like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as Americans all along. Now, let me clarify a couple of things.

Speaker 2 For one thing, Nothing that Elon has done here, nothing that Twitter has revealed has proven that these accounts exist in any particular country. I'm going to explain why.

Speaker 2 A lot of people use something called a VPN. And a VPN masks the location that you're browsing and logging in from, right?

Speaker 2 And you can use a VPN to look like you're posting from almost any country on the planet. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at all.
to like deal with this, right?

Speaker 2 To like make sure that they're getting someone's actual location.

Speaker 2 A bunch of accounts, a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look, this is saying I'm from a country that I have literally never been to. Like, here's my information.
I'm very transparent.

Speaker 2 And there have also been organizations, including liberal, you know, coded organizations that have been mistakenly identified as coming from a country that they are not set up.

Speaker 2 And for example, the Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has ignited this conspiracy theory on the right that Planned Parenthood is some European fucking influence op in the United States.

Speaker 2 No, they used a VPN because they're in danger because it's Planned Parenthood, right?

Speaker 7 No, I mean, I ran into a very similar situation because I mostly use Twitter to look at Yaoi now.

Speaker 7 And when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't let me look at the Yaoi without putting in my government ID for like age verification. Sure.

Speaker 2 Ha ha. Of course.

Speaker 6 And then the nanny state hits garrison.

Speaker 7 So obviously a non-starter.

Speaker 7 I'm not giving X, the everything app, my government ID to allow me to look at Yaoi in Germany. So instead, I had to put on the VPN so I'm back in the States and then I can look at the Yaoi.

Speaker 7 So this is basically the same situation between me and Planned Parenthood here.

Speaker 2 Yes, I've said often that you and Planned Parenthood are basically identical beings.

Speaker 2 What's happening here is it is worth talking about, but it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know the truth that it's been revealed about.

Speaker 2 We don't really know anything more than we did before this change came in, right?

Speaker 7 Well, except rubber. I mean, the biggest, the biggest news is that the DHS has been a massage operation this whole time.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 7 Yes, like we've always suspected.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the Department of Homeland Security account, I think it was, got listed as having been based in Israel. This is not real.
Like it's not, this isn't even X fucking up.

Speaker 2 Somebody just edited a screenshot and there's so many of these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right?

Speaker 2 That this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood and a lot of people didn't catch it, right? And it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world, right?

Speaker 2 This is a standard story with how Twitter works now. And this is, by the way, is overall, I think, beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is that we know less every day about the world.

Speaker 2 There's more disinformation about what's happening.

Speaker 2 People are less keyed in on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions.

Speaker 2 Like, that's what the story is here, which is that this app and the way that social media in general works, particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just fogging up reality.

Speaker 2 And they're doing it in such a way as to make it so that like no one knows anything about what's going on, right?

Speaker 2 This is like the, this is the standard playbook that you've been getting out of like authoritarian regimes from forever, right?

Speaker 2 What's important is not that just their propaganda be out, it's that there's not really any way for there to be a consensus reality.

Speaker 2 Because if there isn't consensus reality, then you can't put together a large enough block of people who all believe basically the same things about reality to stop what's going on, right?

Speaker 2 That's what's happening here. And you're wrong if you're looking at this as good, if you believe that this has blown up the right and that this has done damage to them.

Speaker 2 They're saying the same things about you and about the left because a shitload of people use VPNs and you can always cherry pick a bunch of, and I'm not, again, nothing I'm saying is not saying that they're in a shitload.

Speaker 2 Like Elon has specifically incentivized foreign accounts in different countries to make money by getting into the U.S. culture war, right? That is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today.

Speaker 2 No one's denying that.

Speaker 2 What I'm saying is that you don't know any more than you did before this came out because you have no way of knowing if any of these accounts are based where X is saying they're based because of how VPNs work.

Speaker 2 That's what I'm saying. Yeah.
That's what I've got to say.

Speaker 6 It's incredibly annoying. It's incredibly annoying that we have to continue writing about X.

Speaker 6 It's really annoying that half of Blue Sky is people just virtue signaling that they're not using Twitter and I'm being mad at Twitter.

Speaker 2 You know, it's the same, honestly, this will get me flacked, but it's the same thing about like whether people are angry about Substack or fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever.

Speaker 2 Like if you're using social media, you're not doing yourself any favors. And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people.
And we use them anyway, because that's the world.

Speaker 2 Like we spend dollars anyway. And let me tell you, dollars support some bad things.
We pay taxes. And boy howdy, I don't like where a lot of those taxes go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But don't don't pretend that because you picked the right social media app, that you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to a bunch of things that aren't true. We all do it.

Speaker 2 Like, that's the problem.

Speaker 6 Yes, they're not good for humans

Speaker 2 broadly.

Speaker 6 Do you want to talk about something else that's not good for humans?

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's not talk about fucking X the Every Goddamn thing app anymore.

Speaker 6 No, unfortunately,

Speaker 6 I have something, Robert, which does relate to X. Great.
The Everything app. So let's talk about Axios.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 Are you guys familiar with Axios? It's the news outlet for people who hate paragraphs.

Speaker 2 People who love cocaine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 For people reading the news while they're having a dump. That is what Axios is for.
They shit out news for you to read while you're having a shit.

Speaker 2 Again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of the picture here.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 7 it's like the ADHD brains, like, ideal news source.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
You do a line, you have to go take a shit. You catch up on your news.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 6 That's what they call productivity. That's that's the Robert Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been off.

Speaker 2 It's really, it's really genius of fucking Axios to hit that demographic exactly. Yeah, because those people also have a lot of money because they're all day traders.

Speaker 2 Drook, Drook, yeah, yeah, they smash.

Speaker 7 I have Polymarket on one tab, Kaleechi on the other, and Axios always pulled up.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 That's split screening.

Speaker 2 You have one of those Apple, like flat glass touchscreen panels, but it's just for doing coke off of. You've just got lines cut off onto it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 It's because the metaglasses are constantly looping Axios.

Speaker 2 You don't need your screen.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Axios, a news outlet for people who are taking cocaine,

Speaker 6 has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list as a proposed USA peace plan in Ukraine. Yeah, great.
This is what happens when you do journalism at the speed of paranoia.

Speaker 6 But this has come at the same time as Trump has proclaimed via truth, via the medium of a truth on Truth Social, that Ukraine was not showing sufficient gratitude for what are we at, like 11 months of him failing to end the war.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 So this 28-point plan was first published by Axios. And it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number of senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at a

Speaker 6 security conference in Halifax, Halifax, Canada, not OG, Halifax. Shout out.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Halifax Jr. These senators pretty much immediately said that the US was not the author of the document.

Speaker 6 Rubio, quote, made it very clear to us that we are recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives, said Senator Mike Rounds.

Speaker 6 So, what they are saying is that the US didn't write this document and it was delivered to them, one can safely assume by Russia, right?

Speaker 6 Rubio, using X, the everything everything app, then attempted to deny this.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 6 what it appears has happened is that this plan was drafted by Russian special envoy Dmitriev, probably with Steve Witkoff.

Speaker 2 Sure, that sounds right.

Speaker 6 So, Witkov is Trump's what is it? I think he's a special envoy to Russia at this point.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I believe he's an envoy to Russia. Yeah, Warren Zivon wrote a song about guys like him.
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 6 He has now covered himself in glory in his time doing this. He's kind of a useful fool.
He's formerly like a real estate guy.

Speaker 2 That'll prepare you to deal with Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 2 Having sold houses during the subprime mortgage crisis. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 Like, it's pretty much what he's doing here, right?

Speaker 6 Like, like, he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of the times.

Speaker 6 In this case, it seems that it was then strategically leaked to Axios, right?

Speaker 6 When Barak Ravid, who authored the Axios article, posted it on X, the Everything website, Steve Witkoff responded saying, quote, he must have got this from K.

Speaker 6 This is very funny because we have Steve Witkoff negotiating a peace process, which affects millions of people. And he also doesn't know how to use the DM button on X, the Everything website.

Speaker 7 To be fair, X, the Everything app, just changed their DMs.

Speaker 7 And the whole user interface for the DMs is completely different now. You have to put in like a passcode, and they claim to be encrypted, and it's much uglier to look at.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 6 in defense, in defense of Steve,

Speaker 6 you can instead leak the source.

Speaker 7 That's the safer, more secure option might just be to do it all in public.

Speaker 6 To do it in public, yeah. So, so Steve, of course, using a code name there, K.

Speaker 7 We'll never know.

Speaker 6 Yeah, because we can possibly tell that Karel Dmitriev might be using K as a code name, also the first letter of his first name.

Speaker 6 So it seems very likely that either Dmitriev or someone else in Russia decided to leak this plan to Barack Ravid or Dave Lawler, knowing it would be raised at a press conference abetting that Trump, who according to Washington Post, seems to have very little detailed knowledge of the negotiations, would probably see this as a quote-unquote deal that then he could claim for himself, right?

Speaker 2 And it worked.

Speaker 6 I want to talk about how Axios' model makes that possible, right? I'm very well aware that Barack Ravid was a member of the 8200 unit in Israel. If people aren't familiar, that's like a SIGINT

Speaker 6 Israeli intelligence unit. This is widely known.
I've seen this being discussed in sort of relation to this. The thing is, he doesn't need to be nefarious for this to happen.

Speaker 6 And I think the most likely option here is that the Axios model is to do insider journalism and then rush to be the first to post it on social media and then get a bazillion clicks for your 78 word article right that like that that is how that is their entire business model speed is the name of their whole game yeah that's why they don't use paragraphs it's news for people who are like waiting for their coffee at starbucks or whatever the problem is in this case states or non-state actors right can effectively place a leak and they know that axios will rush it to press probably in minutes if not hours And with the way that the United States executive branch is right now, it seems very clear that if they can get it in front of Trump, then they're going to get a reaction one way or another.

Speaker 6 So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out. The United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of this whole process.

Speaker 6 And there's a lot of reporting about, like, I don't want to do criminal analogy for the Trump White House, particularly.

Speaker 6 But it shows how these news outlets, these news outlets that sort of don't fact-check the Russia price that do everything for social media, can effectively be used, right?

Speaker 6 In a way that the benefits, in this case, Russia, but any number of organizations could do the same thing. Yep.

Speaker 7 Robert mentioned some kind of like wartimes, war,

Speaker 2 some kind of wartime song.

Speaker 7 And I was wondering,

Speaker 7 where is the country of Zivon? You said there's like a song about war in Zivon.

Speaker 2 Jesus, Garrison.

Speaker 6 Garrison. Get out of here.

Speaker 2 Get out of here.

Speaker 6 About discrimination in the workplace.

Speaker 6 I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie thing in my next series, and Gary is just going to sail straight past Garrison.

Speaker 6 You ever listen to Johnny Cash, Garrison?

Speaker 2 I like Johnny Cash. Okay, James Cash.

Speaker 6 That's what they call me.

Speaker 7 Here's the mads.

Speaker 2 And we're back.

Speaker 7 New Doge news for the first time in who knows how long.

Speaker 7 The news being there's no more Doge. According to a report in Reuters, Doge has disbanded eight months before its scheduled expiration in July of 2027.

Speaker 7 When asked about the status of Doge earlier this month, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kapoor told Reuters, quote, that doesn't exist, adding that Doge is no longer a quote unquote centralized entity.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Kapuro has also said that the Doge-mandated hiring freeze is over and that there's quote no target around reductions, unquote, meaning that the Doge era rule of having to fire a certain number of people in order to be allowed to hire people is no longer in use as well.

Speaker 7 And this isn't really surprising. You have not really heard about many Doge-related stuff in a while.

Speaker 2 They haven't been doing anything in a while. Musk has basically been out of the center loop of things.
But also, they did the things that they were needed to do, right? They like

Speaker 2 massacred large portions of government employees and did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several hundred thousand people around the world their lives through cuts in USAID. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and like two former Doge employees, including Big Balls, now just work on web design for US government websites. and other Doge officials have moved to agencies which they administered cuts to.

Speaker 7 A former Doge team member, Zachary Terrell, is now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Jeremy Lewin, who assisted the slashing of USAID, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So those guys got jobs out of this.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 All of the people who got fired or got negatively impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to be coming out as well as Mr. Big Balls here.

Speaker 2 Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks who worked with Doge are now feeling left in the wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot of people who want these folks to be prosecuted for what they did.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There's definitely talk about that.
If there's another Democratic administration, we'll see if they would ever have the big balls to do it.

Speaker 2 But there was an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read a quote from that. Musk had not just been their visionary leader.

Speaker 2 For them, he was their protector, the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came.

Speaker 2 Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.

Speaker 2 A senior Doge figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still brothers in arms and that Musk would continue to protect them.

Speaker 2 That led to another protesting and advising, guys, seriously, get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon's great, but you need to watch your own back.
Watch your backs, guys.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 These guys would be some of the more, like, presumably very easy to prosecute and like obvious targets if we get another democratic administration.

Speaker 2 It's some really obvious crimes in terms of like protection of information, you know, like some pretty obvious rule breaking that went on. That's not being prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right.

Speaker 2 It could be prosecuted in the future.

Speaker 7 Those like first three, four months of the Trump admin, what it really was just full steam ahead on the Silicon Valley version of things, right? Like the move fast and break things. Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's such a wild time to look back on, not only just in terms of how much damage they did, but the idea that if they were going to continue at that pace for the rest of the term, the government already is fundamentally different in some ways, but like how much worse that would have been.

Speaker 7 And if Musk's ego is in part what sabotaged that from being complete and really kind of doing that more like Yarvin inspired project,

Speaker 7 Hubris

Speaker 7 kills the man once again. But there is aspects of like the Doge idea and this government efficiency thing, which aren't fully going away.

Speaker 7 Like this, this still is an aspect of the Trump administration.

Speaker 7 There still is like some of those guys at the Office of Budget and Management and the Heritage 2025 guys who have a lot of this government efficiency, quote unquote, government efficiency type stuff that they're still working on, including at the Education Department,

Speaker 7 which last week, the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department of Education.

Speaker 7 by shifting some of its duties to other federal agencies, which the admin claims will, quote, streamline federal education activities activities on the legally required programs and reduce administrative burden, unquote.

Speaker 7 That is going to be done by these six new interagency agreements which have been signed with the departments of labor, interior, health and human services, and state.

Speaker 7 The education department writing in an announcement that this will, quote, break up the federal bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the president's promise to return education to the states.

Speaker 7 So, by splitting up education department duties among four different agencies in three different interagency agreements, this is supposed to cut red tape and lighten federal bureaucracy.

Speaker 6 You have seven entities now doing what one entity did before.

Speaker 7 The elementary, high school, and post-secondary programs will now be administered by the Department of Labor. That's great.

Speaker 7 Will now oversee over $30 billion in education grants aimed at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce.

Speaker 7 The Department of the Interior will be taking over the Education Department's Indian education programs and integrating them into existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior with quote-unquote proper oversight by the Education Department.

Speaker 7 College child care programs and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen by the Health and Human Services.

Speaker 7 And the State Department will now oversee all foreign education programs, handle international education grants, and fully administer the Fulbright program.

Speaker 7 Justification for this State Department takeover of these funds specifically cited five instances of grants that were used to fund academic and medical research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated from the core mission, unquote.

Speaker 7 The announcement from the education department reads that the State Department is, quote, best positioned to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and foreign policy priorities of the United States.

Speaker 7 This partnership provides an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data collection measures, consolidate program management, and advance national security interests, unquote.

Speaker 6 That's not good.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 that doesn't seem great, huh?

Speaker 6 Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning. The U.S.
previously has done a lot of funding of education programs around the world. And to

Speaker 6 see that pretty much

Speaker 6 with this current vision of the State Department either disappear or become even more straight-up propaganda,

Speaker 6 it's really worrying.

Speaker 6 This kind of builds on that Doge stuff that you were talking about.

Speaker 6 This is the end of the State Department doing anything other than

Speaker 6 propaganda and I guess war making.

Speaker 7 Well, and specifically, like Rubio's focus on education has been to crack down on academics, Palestinian academics, academics who have protested in support of Palestine.

Speaker 7 That's specifically what Rubio has talked about in terms of universities.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So, with all the stuff in that statement about national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to see

Speaker 7 what they could be gesturing towards.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 As the announcements are currently written, a lot of the programs itself, at least in this transitionary period, remain kind of the same.

Speaker 7 They're shifting who who is like, quote-unquote, administering them. That's the word they use a lot.
But they're not cutting funds to these programs at the moment.

Speaker 7 And they do talk about them as like legally required programs.

Speaker 7 But I mean, Carolyn Levitt and Linda McMahon have said this is just one step towards fully sending education back to the states.

Speaker 6 This will also result like in

Speaker 6 massive disparities in educational outcomes state by state in the United States, right? Like, we already have that to some extent, but that's only going to be exacerbated by this, right?

Speaker 6 Talking about things happening between the states, let's talk about Gregory Buffino, a person who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States, but has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the Border Patrol.

Speaker 6 He gave an interview to the AP recently that I was just reading.

Speaker 6 They did confirm, interestingly, that like a few weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Buffino and like trying to work out if he was still

Speaker 6 chief patrol agent in El Centro.

Speaker 6 It appears that he is, but he's also a commander of this operation at large, which is their sort of the thing that has moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte, right?

Speaker 6 Like this sort of internal enforcement operation. He calls his team now quote unquote sanctuary busters.

Speaker 6 And he said that, quote, there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does build on what I spoke about in our last ED, right, when we spoke about the idea that the reason they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that CIS map, quote-unquote, sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite the passage of legislation in the state, which would have prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do.

Speaker 6 I also want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use of license plate readers. CBP has had these for like eight or nine years now.

Speaker 6 I found the 2017 piece where they wrote out their justification for using them, right? Their use has grown immensely, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah. And it has grown under both administrations.
We've, oh, I suppose the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020, Biden administration, 2020, 2024.

Speaker 6 We spoke actually in an episode that I think it was just Robert and I in that episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom. People love that episode and they send me great feedback.

Speaker 6 Because, guys, it's important that we all know that the only person standing up against Trump right now is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 6 Everything else else is pointless.

Speaker 6 But in that episode, we spoke about how many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal immigration authorities, even when California law prohibits them from doing so, right?

Speaker 6 This is kind of one of those like these things where it's a ratchet, right? Once you give that power to the state, it belongs to all of the state and you can never take it back.

Speaker 6 Automated license plate readers have been a big thing in this kind of

Speaker 6 the post-2020 tendency tendency of Democratic mayors in big cities to massively increase spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance.

Speaker 6 We have automated cameras on our lampposts here in San Diego now, right? California has prosecuted one jurisdiction that I'm aware of, which is El Cajon.

Speaker 6 People will be familiar with El Cajon from El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells' attempt to make a country music song about how schools are turning kids trans.

Speaker 6 That is,

Speaker 6 unironically, probably the

Speaker 6 most national news that El Cajon has made for a while. But Bunto has sued El Cajon for showing that data.

Speaker 6 My guess is that that is because it's El Cajon, right? Because El Cajon is a city where the mayor makes a country music song about how schools are turning children trans.

Speaker 6 Like it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution. There are many other jurisdictions doing this.

Speaker 6 What Border Patrol does with these cameras is it targets quote unquote suspicious activities and then it requests stops.

Speaker 6 Sometimes the stops are not made by Border Patrol, but are made by local police, right? On the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal before you change lanes,

Speaker 6 having a brake light out. It could be many, many things, right?

Speaker 6 The

Speaker 6 ABC piece quoted deputy Joel Babb of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the Texas traffic code is there's thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for.

Speaker 6 The idea here is not to explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right? And the fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance is what they call it, right?

Speaker 6 They're trying to highlight like suspicious patterns of vehicle motion and stop people.

Speaker 6 The piece has some that they obtained through public records requests from a court case, a WhatsApp group chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers, in which the officers shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals, and home addresses of people who they were interested in surveilling, right?

Speaker 7 It reveals

Speaker 6 a massive level of surveillance.

Speaker 6 If you're thinking of border patrol and you're still under the impression that in America the border can't come to you wherever you are, this is another example of why that's not true, right?

Speaker 6 DHS uses these all over the country to include outside of the 100-mile border enforcement zone, right? This piece seems to believe that the 100-mile zone is like a legal hard line.

Speaker 6 It's not, it's an interpretation of a quote-unquote reasonable distance. There is no hard line stopping BP from operating further from the border than that.

Speaker 6 That is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance from the border is perceived to fall. Border Patrol has these cameras at fixed points.

Speaker 6 So like there will be border patrol crossings, you know, when you enter or enter the, enter or leave the country at a port of entry. And then at checkpoints, right?

Speaker 6 People will be familiar with checkpoints. They live in a border area.
And then they also have these in mobile and covert capacities, right?

Speaker 6 And they're using them to find people who might be driving near the border or staying and then leaving at a strange time.

Speaker 6 And then they're building a profile of those people's movements and using that to request stops.

Speaker 6 It's a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying to many people.

Speaker 7 And they have access to these larger integrated.

Speaker 7 camera networks like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before, including, I think, yesterday's episode, as Flock is like an Atlanta-based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around the forest where Cop City was being constructed.

Speaker 7 Now, Flock is all over the country, and Border Patrol has access to the Flock system. Yeah.
And it's used for a whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas.

Speaker 7 I think 404 Media did a report not too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman getting an abortion, not in Texas. Right.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, I can see. Yeah, because I'd be Texas law makes it a crime to leave the state in order to get an abortion or something.

Speaker 6 right um so that would be their i guess yeah their excuse here but like i i think we can all see that that's a pretty pretty disgusting use of the surveillance state but yeah these things grew massively in the time period between 2020 and today uh and it was not just in republican jurisdictions right there's this like unabated support for state surveillance that we saw yeah

Speaker 6 all over the United States is now being turned against

Speaker 6 migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which is not great.

Speaker 6 Talking of not great, we have an obligation to pivot to ads.

Speaker 7 I'm happy. I think that's great.

Speaker 7 I love having a job.

Speaker 6 I enjoy to consume products and services.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 And we're back.

Speaker 2 How's everybody doing? Good? Yeah, banging. Pretty good.

Speaker 7 Pretty good. I just finished my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social 2024 Cup, so I feel great.

Speaker 2 That's great.

Speaker 2 That's good for you, Garrison.

Speaker 7 Really coming together. You know, politics from different sides coming together to enjoy a smoothie.
Not unlike the meeting between Zora Mamdani and Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 6 Oh, how long did you plan that for, Garrison?

Speaker 7 Like literally five seconds. It just came out.

Speaker 6 We don't do smooth transitions here like that.

Speaker 7 Well, you know, sometimes. Do you know who was smooth? It was Zorna Mamdani during that meeting.

Speaker 3 Oh, which.

Speaker 6 Like a duck's back, like a seal. That kind of smoothness.

Speaker 7 Trump seemed

Speaker 7 pretty enamored with Mr. Mamdani, mayor-elect Mamdani.
Quote, we have one thing in common. We want this city of ours to do very well, unquote.
So this was on Friday.

Speaker 7 Trump and Mamdani had a private meeting in the White House.

Speaker 7 Afterwards, a 30-minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was sitting down and Sora was kind of looming over the side of Trump the whole time, never fully smiling, always having a little bit of like a

Speaker 7 tiny, like both-sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile. He had a very different look in the White House.

Speaker 7 But as soon as the press conference started, it was clear that the meeting went very well for Mamdani. Trump was exuberant about the man.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He seemed really excited. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a little weird, but he seemed really excited.

Speaker 7 He stated that they have common ground on getting housing built, on affordability, on food, and prices coming down, saying, quote, there's no difference in party, and we're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true, unquote.

Speaker 2 Everybody's dream come true.

Speaker 6 Amazing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting.

Speaker 40 I appreciated the meeting with the president, and as he said, it was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight and a half million people who call our city their home, who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America.

Speaker 40 We spoke about rent, we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out. And I appreciated the time with the President.

Speaker 40 I appreciated the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for New Yorkers.

Speaker 6 It's one of the posture people with the green line. The green line.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I've seen that going on a couple of times.

Speaker 6 They've already, they've had that way with it.

Speaker 7 They've been on it, yeah. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 It does seem tense. The vibes in that room must have been very good.
Very, very weird. Zoron.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 No, Zoron's very tense. Trump's trying to relax him, like, badly.

Speaker 6 What is that face that you've posted on, Garrett?

Speaker 2 He is. I can only, it's like a shit-eating grin on Trump's face.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Like, he does seem genuinely happy.

Speaker 2 I'm thrilled. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's weird.

Speaker 6 He likes to be associated with winners.

Speaker 7 This is one of the big things, right? A lot of, I mean, we'll talk about this more

Speaker 7 in the takes about this. But yeah, I think it's very clear why Trump's actually having a good time here.
Zoron's like the most popular politician in the country right now.

Speaker 7 Trump likes winners. And if anything, Zoron has proven to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning.
And I think Trump does like that.

Speaker 7 And coupled with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoron was able to navigate around Trump pretty successfully.

Speaker 7 When asked about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel very confident he can do a good job. I think it's going to surprise some conservative people, actually, unquote.

Speaker 2 And you should add what he said about liberal people, because I thought that was his funniest line.

Speaker 7 Oh, and then also liberal people, but they already like him too or something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised. They'll just be happy.
Yeah, yeah. So they

Speaker 7 Because they already like him.

Speaker 2 It was very funny. It was very funny.

Speaker 7 Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters actually voted for Zoron as well, saying, quote unquote, I'm okay with that.

Speaker 7 And Zora mentioned that, yes, one in 10 Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron.

Speaker 7 And Zora mentioned the end to forever wars and the cost of living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke about as he was campaigning.

Speaker 7 Throughout this press conference, and we can assume to some degree the meeting, Zoran was very laser-focused on New York specifically.

Speaker 7 And you've even seen this in interviews that he's given to like NBC and other outlets the past few days where people are asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a whole on a national level.

Speaker 7 And Zoran repeatedly just goes back to affordability in New York. This is like the one thing that he's going to keep talking about.
He doesn't want to talk about anything else, really.

Speaker 7 And this was evident throughout this meeting, the way that Zoran would reiterate every question to being about New York.

Speaker 7 But they didn't shy away from talking about the things they disagreed on, on like an ideological sense, ICE being one of them. Here's one of their exchanges about ICE.

Speaker 41 President, you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City. You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents in New York City.
Mr. Mondani, you've called ICE a rogue government entity.

Speaker 41 I wonder how you reconcile your differences on both of those issues.

Speaker 12 Well, I think we're going to work them out. And I think that if we have known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people, you know, we want to get them out.

Speaker 12 And the mayor wants to have peace. We discussed this at great length actually, maybe more than anything else.

Speaker 12 He wants to have a safe New York. Ultimately, a safe New York is going to be a great New York.
If it's not safe, no matter how well we do with pricing and with

Speaker 12 anything else, we can talk about anything you want. If you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be a success.
So we're going to work together.

Speaker 12 We're going to make sure that if there are horrible people there, we want to get them out. I think he wants to get them out maybe more than I do.
So, we'll work together.

Speaker 7 They talked about ICE at one later point in the meeting where you get kind of a peek at what some of this conversation may have been like behind the scenes about trying to target any ICE enforcement against people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids that round up just swaths of undocumented people, like the Canal Street raid a few weeks ago.

Speaker 7 It's still not super clear what they are talking about, but there's not compromise in this point.

Speaker 7 Like, Trump's obviously going to try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's own positions on this, and I think Zoron will do the same. Before we discuss, I do want to play this

Speaker 7 second bit of their discussion because you get more of Zoron's angle.

Speaker 40 We discussed ICE and New York City, and I spoke about how the laws that we have in New York City allow for New York City government to speak to the federal administration for about 170 serious crimes.

Speaker 40 The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the five boroughs and most recently we're talking about a mother and her two children, how this has very little to do with what that is.

Speaker 40 Mr. McConnell,

Speaker 12 we discuss crime. More than ICE per se, we discuss crime.
And he doesn't want to see crime, and I don't want to see crime.

Speaker 12 And I have very little doubt that we're not going to get along along on that issue. He wants to, and he said some things that were very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction.

Speaker 12 And he wants to see houses go up. He wants to see a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, et cetera.
And, you know,

Speaker 12 we actually,

Speaker 12 people would be shocked. But I want to see the same thing.

Speaker 2 See, yeah, that worries me a little bit.

Speaker 7 What about that worries you?

Speaker 2 I can tell what Trump's trying to do, which is that he really would like to get Mom Donnie on his side.

Speaker 2 And he's, interestingly interestingly for Trump, I think he is willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally get Mom Dani to agree that ICE has a use. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like that's what he's clearly trying to do. And he's clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that.

Speaker 2 And I think that within the context of this meeting, because of how the questions were being asked, I don't think Zoran got enough of a chance to fully address that question.

Speaker 2 So I'll leave it open to see how that is, like how he deals with that in the future.

Speaker 2 But I don't think he got enough of an opportunity to push back enough on some of the things Trump was claiming here.

Speaker 2 That does concern me a little bit. Like, I think it's more a factor of how an Oval Office press conference is structured.
But I do think that it's, like, I can see what Trump's trying to do.

Speaker 7 Well, I think what Mumdani is trying to navigate for is if he can put an end to

Speaker 7 roving ice raids that just

Speaker 7 like that just round up people at whether they're at restaurants or home depots and if there's people who are who have been incarcerated who are incarcerated and if removal operations are specifically against we said like what 170 like serious crimes and if that is a i a sort of compromise i guess i don't know like he's he's he's not in office yes it's it's unclear the way that this would this would be enacted yeah but if it's a harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from happening or limiting the amount that ICE is able to operate as basically a road entity within the city.

Speaker 7 And I don't think we know enough to like actually see what that will look like yet because he's not taking office for another what, like 45 days.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 What he's talking about, what Trump talks about crime, crime is what they have always talked about. Right.
Right.

Speaker 6 When they talk about the ICE enforcement, the crimes that they are speaking about vary, right?

Speaker 6 They will always give the example of the person who's been convicted of child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence, right?

Speaker 6 But then they will also go ahead and say that crossing between ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime. And then they will use that as a justification for taking anyone, right?

Speaker 6 And specifically people who have entered within the last two years, many of whom were shipped to New York from other states.

Speaker 6 and saying, well, these people enter between ports of entry, which they did after the end of Title 42, right?

Speaker 6 When we returned to processing people under Title VIII, and they will place them in expedited to removal proceedings.

Speaker 6 That is what they have been doing for a while. When he talks about the sanctuary policies, New York right now doesn't honor detainer requests, right?

Speaker 6 In theory, sanctuary laws prevent NYC, from what I understand, from honoring detainer requests, which would be an extra 48-hour detainer.

Speaker 6 We haven't, like, as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough. to see or see what he's talking about there.
But like, I don't know if he's talking about a change to those sanctuary policies or not.

Speaker 6 But yeah, like that, that would be disappointing if he did.

Speaker 7 I don't see there's any indication that he's talking about a change to sanctuary policies.

Speaker 6 Well, when he's talking about we can call them on 170 serious crimes, right? What's he, what does he mean?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think this gets back to the fact that a press conference in the Oval Office is not going to give you a chance to adequately address an issue like this.

Speaker 2 And I see Trump trying to paper over it and move past as quickly as possible. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I understand why you'd show up for this meeting. And I think it was probably on the balance the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 But like, I am interested to see what he does next because I think Trump is going to continue trying to push for accommodations.

Speaker 2 And it is kind of, it is wild and unique to see that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff, but he's willing to move on some stuff because he thinks he can get Mom Donnie.

Speaker 2 to soften some of his stances.

Speaker 7 I mean, it stances on what, I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I don't.

Speaker 2 On ice. I mean, like, that, that's what, that's what he's trying to do here.
He's trying to build a case for that.

Speaker 7 I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to which we're using these.

Speaker 2 He's saying that this is a rogue government agency to saying that this is a government agency. That's what Trump is trying to push for.
Yeah. I'm not saying Mom Dani agreed with that.

Speaker 2 I think that the nature of this meeting did not give him enough time to push back on that.

Speaker 7 Sure, sure.

Speaker 7 You have Momdani pointing there towards like an instance of a mother and like a and a child

Speaker 7 getting affected by this and like and using it as as an example of like what they are trying to prevent and like focusing on like the this stopping ice raids from happening as as like the thing that mamdani is pushing for there and mamdani as the new york city mayor cannot abolish the entity of ice

Speaker 7 and so like the the degree to which we're framing that as like mamdani's like softening i think still i mean yeah like as as you've said there's not enough here to make a full determination yeah i just think that's that's what trump wants to get out of this.

Speaker 6 I think Trump also just wants to be associated with this guy who is currently, as Garrison said, very popular.

Speaker 2 And it is really wild to see him be so deferential to somebody. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I mean, including in this question about Trump being a fascist, which he handled in a very

Speaker 7 fascinating way.

Speaker 2 This is nuts. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?

Speaker 40 I've spoken about.

Speaker 12 That's okay. You could just say.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 It's easier.

Speaker 12 It's easier than explaining it. I don't know.

Speaker 7 Zoron did say yes during that exchange.

Speaker 2 He did people have said that he did not.

Speaker 7 He, in fact, did.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He absolutely did.
It's one of the most remarkable moments in American political history. Yeah.
By any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 6 As Trump pats him.

Speaker 7 And then pats him on the side. And I mean,

Speaker 2 it's wild.

Speaker 7 For Trump, this word doesn't mean anything, right? For Trump, like him saying

Speaker 7 it's easier than explaining.

Speaker 7 That's just indicating to Zoran that you don't have to do this little like political game for this reporter and be like, you know, we have diff, we have just, we have disagreed on policies, which blah blah blah.

Speaker 7 Like Trump's like, no, you don't have to do that. It's easier than explaining.
Just say it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Which is a sort of like a point against the media. I think that's from Trump's point of view.
It's like, you know, you don't have to do

Speaker 7 that. You have to do like the little dance for like this like New York Post reporter or whatever.
Just say that I'm a fascist. It's fine.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And because politics is for him a sort of behind closed doors boys club.
And yes, they both have to go out and then deal with the media.

Speaker 6 But like you can sort of see that in this sort of pale conviviality that Trump goes for there. I'm not saying that Mamdami is left necessarily in his boys' club.

Speaker 6 I'm just saying that that is how Trump perceives politics.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, he made other references, like when, when Trump was asked if he considers Zoron a jihadist, like

Speaker 7 someone else in the Republican Party called him. And Trump's like, no, I mean, the man standing in front of me is not a jihadist.

Speaker 7 People have to say certain things during campaigns, but the man I met with today is a very rational man. And like little lines like that, like people,

Speaker 7 when you're campaigning, you have to say things. I think that he's getting at a similar point there.

Speaker 7 But there was multiple points during this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law versus the constitution or why Zoron flew to DC instead of taking a greener train.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Silly, silly stuff. And Trump was like, Trump like dismissed these questions as like for a Zoran essentially.
I mean, like, I'll stand up for you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 something else.

Speaker 6 There are more salient criticisms that there are reasonable criticisms you can make of some stuff he's done. Those are not them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just gotcha media stuff, right? Like, which, which it's interesting how well Trump is able to call sort of their bullshit.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Always fascinating.

Speaker 7 One of the more hilarious attempts at a gotcha question is from Jack Pasovic, who was in the room, who asked this.

Speaker 6 God, he must have been having an absolute meltdown.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he can't be happy about this.

Speaker 23 Mr.

Speaker 23 President, I wanted to know one of the policies as well that Mayor Alec Madami talked a number of times about on the campaign was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what he called minority communities to white-based communities and putting more taxes on white people.

Speaker 23 I also noticed that in your acceptance speech, you

Speaker 23 didn't mention anything about America or Christians or white people in general. And so I didn't know if that was one of the policies that you guys had spoken about.

Speaker 2 Incredible.

Speaker 7 And Trump's like smiling like a proud father this whole time as Zoron's like

Speaker 3 this question.

Speaker 7 It's such an odd schizophrenic moment. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's weird how much more he seems to like Zoron than like his supporters.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I mean, a lot of his supporters are losers and Zoron's a winner.

Speaker 2 Or even his cabinet members.

Speaker 7 Yeah, because they're losers. Like, like Pete Hagseth, Elon Musk, they're losers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're all dweebs.

Speaker 3 And JD Vance, right? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Zoron's proved himself to be like an incredibly capable figure.

Speaker 7 There's a little moment as Jack's first asking the question where Trump indicates to Zoron, like, okay, you handle this guy.

Speaker 7 You can have fun with this. Yeah.
And it's very odd. And not odd and it's unexplainable.
I understand what's happening here, actually.

Speaker 7 I think this is actually very easy to understand, but it's just still, it feels odd. Yep.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And just given the adversarial politics we're so used to.

Speaker 7 Like there's a lot of moments like this. Like when Trump's asked if he's going to cut off federal funding to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's going to happen.

Speaker 7 I think we're going to help. Which is great.

Speaker 7 And this is like an indication of like what Zoron was trying to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting, specifically around raids, on National Guard deployment.

Speaker 7 and on like cutting off federal funds to the city.

Speaker 7 One of the methods I think that Zoron used to help get Trump on his side is appeal to like the real estate brain that Trump has with Mom Donny's left-wing YIMBY style of policies, talking about rent coming down by building housing and how much that surprised Trump because Trump has this conception of people, like, of people usually on these left-wing positions, are very, very NIMBY in a lot of ways.

Speaker 7 And Trump was like surprised by this. I guess he hasn't really encountered a left-wing YIMBY before.
And this

Speaker 7 is like, this caught him off guard. Yeah.
There's a good point here

Speaker 7 where Trump expresses this.

Speaker 12 Now we may disagree how we get there. The rent coming down, I think

Speaker 12 one of the things I really gleaned

Speaker 12 very much today, we'd like to see him come down ideally by building a lot of additional housing. That's the ultimate way.
He agrees with that and so do I. But if I read the newspapers and the stories,

Speaker 12 I don't hear that. But I heard him say it today, and I think that's a very positive step.
No, I don't expect, I expect to be helping him, not hurting him.

Speaker 12 A big help, because I want New York City to be great. Look, I love New York City.
It's where I come from. I spent a lot of years there.
Now I'm right here.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 7 And later, Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living in New York under Momdani and compared Momdani's popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how supporters of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa.

Speaker 7 And through Trump talking about this, you can start to kind of peek behind the curtain of like how Zoron was framing his version of populism, which was able to get Trump to be friendly towards the economic affordability sides of his policy proposals.

Speaker 7 In talking about the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump in 2016, and the crossover support between Trump 24 and Mamdani in 2025. At one point, Mamdani did also address the genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 13 To ask Mr.

Speaker 40 I've spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I've spoken about our government funding it.

Speaker 40 And I shared with the president in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their ability to afford basic dignity.

Speaker 40 And what we see right now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more than 100,000 school children being homeless in our city.

Speaker 40 And there's a a desperate need not only for the following of human rights, but also the following through on the promises we've made New Yorkers.

Speaker 40 And I appreciated the meeting we had and the work that we can do.

Speaker 13 Do you agree that President Trump did do a peace and he worked hard to make the peace? Because he worked hard to do the peace in the Middle East and everywhere.

Speaker 19 Do you agree with that?

Speaker 40 I appreciate all efforts towards peace.

Speaker 40 And I shared with President Trump that when I spoke to Trump voters on Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist that spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that pharmacy not too far from Jamaica State, that people were tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars.

Speaker 40 And I also believe that we have to follow through on the international human rights. And I know that still today, those are being violated.

Speaker 40 And that continues to be work that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of.

Speaker 7 Man,

Speaker 2 that's so complicated, so conflicting.

Speaker 6 Yeah, there's a lot going on there.

Speaker 2 On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record said in the White House that the U.S. is enabling Israel and continuing a genocide.
I'm glad that that happened. Yeah.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, the fact that it's off-roaded so quickly to now let's talk about like what we want to do for New Yorkers and it is like, yeah,

Speaker 2 it's not, I don't know, it's, it's the only way this was going to happen at all, I suppose.

Speaker 2 He is the mayor of New York.

Speaker 2 It's very, no, I agree. I agree.
But it's also a personal. It's totally awkward.

Speaker 6 Like, it's, yeah, it's, it's totally a little awkward.

Speaker 7 Especially when the topic is genocide, right?

Speaker 6 Like the vault from genocide to housing affordability, and I understand that both are serious issues. It's still a tonal shift that is jarring.

Speaker 2 And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the mayor of New York. He has no ability to influence U.S.
policy in terms of selling arms to Israel.

Speaker 2 And the fact that he brought it up at all is positive. But boy, is that a wild minute or so of

Speaker 2 talking?

Speaker 7 I think the reason why he brought it up is to talk about specifically like funds that we are sending to Israel should not be sent to Israel. No.

Speaker 7 There's funds that should be being used in the United States to do things to help people here. And that is why he brought that up as a segue.

Speaker 2 Well, and reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea that we should not be spending this much money on this, sending weapons over the world to fund wars overseas.

Speaker 2 It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela,

Speaker 2 how that all moves. But I think it's valuable to really slam that home in the White House that like, hey, you ran on getting the U.S.
out of these kind of violent entanglements overseas. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm glad someone said it, I guess. Yeah.
It's just weird. This is all a very weird meeting.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. The whole thing was jarring, I guess.

Speaker 7 There's another point there where he was talking about like local, local New York businesses. You know, Trump's father like went to this pharmacy.
And I think stuff like that is

Speaker 7 tactics that he used to get Trump to be friendly with him, as well as Trump later spoke about how, uh, in one of the rooms that they were meeting in, there was a portrait of FDR, which Trump had personally picked out of the storage vaults to hang.

Speaker 7 And Zoron, like, Zoron asked him about the portrait and asked if he could get a picture with it. And this seemed to please Trump a lot.
Trump wasn't able to talk about how he picked out the picture.

Speaker 7 And then Trump said a few really interesting things.

Speaker 7 He's like, I guess Zoron's a big fan of FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from Zoron.

Speaker 7 Classic, Classic technique to get like democratic socialist politics across to someone. Again, there's moments like that,

Speaker 7 stuff how we talked about like Bernie,

Speaker 7 some

Speaker 7 regular populist rhetoric, talking about the crossover between voters between Trump and Mamdani, just his general love of New York and FDR New Deal.

Speaker 7 You can see all these things that were used to navigate through this meeting to get to get Trump to actually cede ground on a lot of stuff with, I think, very, very minimal concessions, if any real concessions, even from Zoran, like at all.

Speaker 7 I think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically throughout this meeting and moved on like actual, like actual promises to withhold funds to invade the city with National Guard troops.

Speaker 7 I think Trump was the one who actually ceded territory in this meeting. I do not see much evidence of things that Mamdani could have personal impact on actually

Speaker 7 losing ground on those things throughout this meeting.

Speaker 6 It is also important to remember that he has a rhetorical, Mamdami Manduami II has a rhetorical role to play, right?

Speaker 6 Yes, he is mayor of New York, but he is also an extremely popular politician at the moment. And like when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza, that that has rhetorical value.

Speaker 6 I'm not saying he can go to New York City Council and stop it, but like him saying that it is a genocide at the White House is important. And like

Speaker 6 it is important that like when he has this this podium in front of the whole world at the White House that he uses it to talk about the genocide and he did.

Speaker 6 But like, I don't think we should only think about this in terms of New York. Like, it is

Speaker 6 important that someone said that. And I hope he keeps using that platform he has right now to say that as someone who is definitely looked up to nationally in like DSA circles.

Speaker 7 I mean, yeah, I think, and this, this goes into some of the, the, I guess, kind of, I mean, some of them are critiques. A lot of them aren't even really critiques of this meeting.

Speaker 7 I think a lot of them are people jumping on the opportunity to just attack Soron with no real constructive critique there.

Speaker 7 But this kind of relates relates to these two different forms of politics that people use on the left. Like politics as a form of personal expression, as a form of like posturing,

Speaker 7 as a form of maintaining moral purity, versus politics as an actual practical method of achieving

Speaker 7 systematic change. And people engage in these two different modes.
And there's a role for both of these modes of politics, actually. I think both of these have a degree of necessity.

Speaker 7 And Zoron has taken one specific path. And there's others who are very clear in having taken the other path.
And there's a bunch of critiques

Speaker 7 from this meeting, quote-unquote critiques, including from a formal Seattle city councilman who's now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashama Sawant.

Speaker 7 Quote, if I were in Mamdani's position, instead of asking Trump to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally of tens of thousands of people in New York City to protest against ICE raids, to declare that New York City will not tolerate ICE and will fight Trump every inch of the way.

Speaker 7 I would launch a mass campaign for free transit and free childcare and build a militant movement to win. ⁇ Unquote.
These are things Zoron's already participated in.

Speaker 7 These are things that have happened. Just one more, like one more protest, that's going to be more effective than actually having Trump cede some ground on the scale of enforcement.

Speaker 7 This is part of why I have this like hesitation around discussion of Zoron, because I think he's actually doing kind of strategic moves to actually limit the amount of damage that Trump's able to do in the city.

Speaker 7 And he's doing it through like rhetorical maneuvers. And some of that may feel awkward to watch in a live press conference.

Speaker 7 But I think the actual end results of that have a lot more potential than, say, a rally of 10,000 people, which effectively does nothing.

Speaker 6 I mean, we've had a bunch of those.

Speaker 6 That is politics as performance, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah. People are very attached to that mode of political engagement in the United States.

Speaker 6 The large, you know, walking around with science and shouting demonstration of political intent, it has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random people off the street. I'll just say that.

Speaker 7 And people have been like criticizing Zoron just simply for even taking this meeting because it somehow quote unquote like humanizes Trump in some way. Like Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right?

Speaker 7 Like it's like Zoron's platforming Donald Trump. He is the president of the United States.

Speaker 3 He does, he, he, he wins.

Speaker 7 He has that position. He has bought the legitimacy.
Like this, this is,

Speaker 7 I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates Trump's image in a meaningful way.

Speaker 7 I think what he's doing is trying to actually make New York a safer and more affordable place to live by doing a kind of complicated political maneuver, which I'm sure is kind of upsetting to kind of go through.

Speaker 7 But he's doing it.

Speaker 7 And the wave of criticism that it's kind of based on, based on that sort of, you know, humanizing argument or this stuff on like, why doesn't Zoran just protest instead of actually trying to like cut deals or like, not even cut deals because that that sounds so like slimy but like actually like negotiate with the president and like this criticism comes on the like tail end of like a week's worth of very reflexive criticism of zoron for his retention of new york uh police department commissioner jessica tish as well as advocating against the new york city dsa's endorsement of city councilman and new dsa member chi aussie's primary campaign against congressman hakeem jeffries some of these criticisms i get the jeffries one a little bit more but some of these criticisms i find to be a little odd, mostly considering the fact that Zoron's been open about his plan to retain Tish for literal months.

Speaker 7 For literal months. And just this week, people acted like it was this massive betrayal in his ideological purity or his stated promises, which just isn't true.

Speaker 7 He's been open about this since last summer.

Speaker 7 And on the Jeffrey side of things, I think Zoron's point of view here is that a difficult primary campaign and one that's probably going to be unsuccessful based on the Zoron 2025 general vote map.

Speaker 7 It shows that that'd be very, very challenging, but this difficult primary against referees would also inhibit Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda in the city.

Speaker 7 The New York Times quoted a leaked portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoron saying, quote, the choice before us is not whether to vote for Chai or Hageem at the ballot box.

Speaker 7 The choice is how to spend the next year. Do we want to spend it defending caricatures of our movement, or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement?

Speaker 7 ⁇ unquote. Zoran has a very specific focus right now on the New York City government and implementing the agenda for New York City.

Speaker 7 And the congressional campaign would, in his view, only put more roadblocks to that at this point in time versus keeping a left-wing ally in the New York City Council.

Speaker 6 I guess I don't see why they can't do both. Like they will be defending caricatures of their movement for the next forever, right?

Speaker 6 Until the internet internet and stupid politics stop being part of our politics, which isn't coming anytime soon.

Speaker 6 Like, I think it'd be perfectly possible to give that endorsement and still say, my job as mayor is to do the shit that I promised to do.

Speaker 6 I also endorse this person because I think they're a better person than Hakeem Jeffries, who has been very poor.

Speaker 6 Like,

Speaker 6 I don't see those things as mutually exclusive. We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.

Speaker 2 What is there to say?

Speaker 6 That Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed the acronym.

Speaker 2 Oh, good. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Marjorie Taylor Greene leaving politics.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe.

Speaker 7 Well, she's leaving the House

Speaker 7 at the end of the year.

Speaker 6 Yeah, leaving the House.

Speaker 7 See what she's announced.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 It is unclear how she will continue her career.

Speaker 6 Maybe, maybe Zoran will be taking her seat. Maybe

Speaker 6 Trump's new friends.

Speaker 7 I mean, I really don't think he has much interest in being in the House of Representatives, especially in Georgia. Who would?

Speaker 2 Jesus.

Speaker 6 He has a much more important role now. I guess like he's able to do a lot more as executive in New York than he ever would be as like a single rep.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. But yeah, no more MTG.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, great.

Speaker 6 If you want to contact us, you can reach out to us at coolzone tips at proton.me.

Speaker 7 We reported the news.

Speaker 42 We reported the news.

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Speaker 7 Grinder, I hardly

Speaker 7 this is it could happen here, where today the it is gay flirting and or harassment, and the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Speaker 7 I'm Gare, also known by my undercover alias Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be one of our on-the-ground RNC correspondents.

Speaker 7 A few weeks ago, we provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation Festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think tank ghouls, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by popular speakers at the event.

Speaker 7 We'll have some more in-depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention.

Speaker 7 But on top of our regular coverage, I also had a special assignment that I more or less assigned to myself.

Speaker 7 On this show, we often talk about right-wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people, including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment, and physical violence.

Speaker 7 As these are two of our most frequently covered topics, being at the Republican National Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between conservatism and homosexuality.

Speaker 7 For years, I've heard rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans flocking to the gay hookup app Grinder to get laid during the RNC.

Speaker 7 Whether they be 20-year-old Republican twinks from Miami or 53-year-old self-hating closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages.

Speaker 7 Curiosity has often gotten the better of me, and I needed to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grindr.

Speaker 7 In case you're unfamiliar, Grindr is technically a dating app that serves the LGBTQ community.

Speaker 7 But in actuality, it is a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers in their 40s to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures of their penis.

Speaker 7 Grindr was launched in 2009 and is arguably the largest and most popular gay dating app, especially among men.

Speaker 7 Grindr has only been around for two in-person RNCs prior to this point, 2012 and 2016, since all convention activities moved online during 2020 for the pandemic.

Speaker 7 So this July, for the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around the country could gather in one city and once their wives fell asleep, log on to Grindr.

Speaker 7 And this episode, I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience.

Speaker 7 Before traveling to the city that was about to be invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and success in my investigative endeavor.

Speaker 7 I hope you queers liked that terrible pun.

Speaker 7 Based on the massive increase in violent anti-trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew that I would be dusting off my old boy motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male.

Speaker 7 Although my ability to pass as a straight male is debatable, I can at least easily pass as a not quite straight male.

Speaker 7 My trans feminine fashion taste has been skewing more mask lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue.

Speaker 7 I packed up basically all my button-up-collared shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige London fog trench coat.

Speaker 7 Basically, the vibe I was going for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy dressed as a 1950s FBI agent. I refer to this as Dale Cooper moding.

Speaker 7 I was unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like Baron Trump meets Tilda Swinton in Constantine.

Speaker 7 I was kinda Gabriel Maxing for most of the convention.

Speaker 7 And though most attendees were unable to pick up on my dikish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did get she-heard by the Secret Service when entering the convention through a security checkpoint.

Speaker 3 They're going woke!

Speaker 7 So that was my general look for the convention. I also completely remade my grinder profile for the RNC.

Speaker 7 For simplicity's sake, I thought to emphasize my Twinkish past and removed the explicitly non-binary transgender aspects of my profile.

Speaker 7 replacing some of my more trans-coded photos with pictures of my light yagami and dale cooper cosplay.

Speaker 7 Perhaps next RNC, I can experiment with discovering how many of the RNC attendees are chasers, but for safety's sake, I went more stealth both online and in person at RNC-related events.

Speaker 7 For my main profile picture, I chose a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted.

Speaker 7 I chose the simple yet elegant username, Twink.

Speaker 7 And for my bio, wrote, Gen Z in Town for Convention, which I thought was pretty funny, and signals to people that yes, I am here for the RNC, but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious.

Speaker 7 So this was my bait. On my way to the airport, I was already dressed for the part, as I suspected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part of the whole RNC experience.

Speaker 7 I arrived at the gate and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with even whiter hair, wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range.

Speaker 7 They all kind of looked like my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were all cosplaying their favorite female Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair.

Speaker 7 There were a handful of delegates, as well as Republican super fans wearing Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention, the way a nerd would be excited to go to San Diego Comic-Con.

Speaker 7 Others at the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the Atlanta airport.

Speaker 7 But I could still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their RNC expectations, and in hushed tones asking others at the gate if they were going to the convention.

Speaker 7 And that's what everyone called it, not the Republican Convention, not the GOP Convention, or the RNC, the Convention.

Speaker 7 As I was boarding the plane, an older woman with straw-like blonde hair, sitting a few rows in front of me, waves to me and asked, young man, are you going to the convention?

Speaker 7 I gave my best, yes, ma'am, took my seat, and then heard her remark to her friend about how happy she was that more young people are attending the convention.

Speaker 7 And I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the convention and what I was doing there.

Speaker 7 Mainly trying to collect as much information about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans as I can. And you will hear more about those weird grinder RNC Republicans after the break.

Speaker 7 This episode is brought to you in part by the Top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening to as I was coming down from Adderall while writing the second half of this episode, as well as these products and sponsors.

Speaker 7 Okay, back to the grind.

Speaker 7 Most convention activities took place in the Pfizer Forum, which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce.

Speaker 7 This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my Grinder cruising, so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area.

Speaker 7 Every time I walked into the Pfizer Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up Grindr and refresh my feed to see what profiles were in my proximity.

Speaker 7 Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grindr, one of its more terrifying

Speaker 7 features is the proximity detector, telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away.

Speaker 7 Every night when I got back to the hotel, after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check Grindr to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by the airport.

Speaker 7 The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grindr, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels, roughly 1500 feet away from my bed.

Speaker 7 The Grinder proximity detector was quite useful to me in locating profiles active around the footprint of the RNC, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the RNC from out of state.

Speaker 7 Because Milwaukee is about 650 miles away from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the RNC from out of state, even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange.

Speaker 7 I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons for why their distance markers might not line up exactly, and I think I have it narrowed down pretty well.

Speaker 7 Okay, you've been very patient, and now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my grinder inbox. And I gotta say, I think I started off pretty strong.

Speaker 7 While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started, I got one of the very first messages I received from a 21-year-old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close-up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and magenta tie, already horrendous vibes.

Speaker 7 He asked me if I was quote unquote with the GOP.

Speaker 7 And I said I was attending with friends and then I got no further further response.

Speaker 7 I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then after the convention was over, he moved like 300 miles away. So I'm pretty sure he was there for the RNC.

Speaker 7 I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative, quote, but not a hardcore Republican, unquote.

Speaker 7 And he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would, quote, meet my future husband, unquote.

Speaker 7 The first chaser I encountered with the bio looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass saw through my cisgender disguise and messaged me cock? Question mark.

Speaker 7 I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be T4T who asked me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an anime convention in Green Bay.

Speaker 7 A nice local messaged me, quote, Hope you're finding what you're looking for, Smiley Face.

Speaker 7 Which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking for some other gay Republican.

Speaker 7 Another local with the name older4young sent me the message, quote, boomer who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.

Speaker 7 I asked him if the quote-unquote talk politics pickup line works very often and he replied quote less often than I would hope for. On here, zero.
unquote.

Speaker 7 He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app telling me that they have infiltrated Grinder.

Speaker 7 He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at, so that was the end of that conversation.

Speaker 7 A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely excited that the RNC was in town.

Speaker 7 They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as most were disappointed that they themselves could not attend.

Speaker 7 One such fellow who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd unquote would have liked to attend but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed quote extra staffing just in case unquote

Speaker 7 now the worst profile picture i found was an older guy wearing a baseball cap and one of those half-face skull masks like adam often used to wear He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the RNC, but to visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot.

Speaker 7 This guy's politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent.
Very baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking, You're a Republican?

Speaker 7 And I said, Not really, putting it lightly, and he never got back to me.

Speaker 7 I did find a 31-year-old chaser named Greg, who I do believe was attending the convention, and his bio read, quote, Anon, come drain me, trans-CD, that's cross-dresser, sissy, femme, to the front of the line.

Speaker 7 I asked, you like trans?

Speaker 7 And he responded, yes. We had no further conversation.

Speaker 7 I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grindr at the Heritage Foundation party.

Speaker 7 And lastly, really the only guy I saw who openly claimed to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a 32-year-old from Shreveport, Louisiana, with the username Suck Meoff.

Speaker 7 One word. He described the convention as exhausting but awesome and told me he was quote proud to support President Trump, unquote, and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing.

Speaker 7 A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump, talked about Corey Compertor, the man who was killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after Mr.

Speaker 7 Suck Meoff talked about how awesome Trump's speech was, I just replied to him, poor Corey.

Speaker 7 And he messaged me back,

Speaker 2 Corey who?

Speaker 7 And then he told me what exact hotel he was staying at.

Speaker 7 Now, part of the danger of trying to use Grinder directly in the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that Even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non-zero chance that some passerby or person sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dickpic that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages.

Speaker 7 And this is simply a non-negotiable part of the grinder experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some balding 43-year-old married man will appear in your inbox.

Speaker 7 Ordinarily, I would check the profile first to see who might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a DM.

Speaker 7 Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible.

Speaker 7 But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my DMs, this was impossible without opening up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chat log due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grindr at the RNC.

Speaker 7 About halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently, but the main glitch I had to to deal with, which has since been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile from the DMs page.

Speaker 7 I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.

Speaker 7 So there I was watching Ted Cruz's speech sitting underneath about 50 Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see who was local and who was here for the RNC, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog.

Speaker 7 But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the RNC.

Speaker 7 Around midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over a thousand users reported a Grindr outage in the Milwaukee area on the website Down Detector.

Speaker 7 The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wrote on the final day of the RNC that, quote, reports of the Grinder app crashing increased by more than 90% in the past 48 hours across the country, unquote.

Speaker 7 The Down Detector heat map showed Grindr outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hotspot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in activity.

Speaker 7 And you will hear more about that activity after this ad break.

Speaker 7 This episode of It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part part by the Challengers soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I was listening to as I wrote most of this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta.

Speaker 7 This episode is also brought to you by these products and services.

Speaker 7 We once again return to the grind. We gotta keep on grinding.
We're almost done, but we gotta grind a little more. Just one more grind.
Bro, I swear I'm not addicted. Just one more grind, bro.

Speaker 7 Just one more grind.

Speaker 7 During the influx of reports about the Grinder app breaking during the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive increase in activity.

Speaker 7 Quote, breaking. An executive of the gay dating app Grindr says the Republican National Convention is, quote, basically Grindr's Super Bowl, unquote.

Speaker 7 This This quote from a Grinder executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the internet about five different articles, and even disgraced former New York Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon.

Speaker 7 Content warning gay Republican.

Speaker 42 So, Grindr executives are calling the RNC convention the Grindr Super Bowl.

Speaker 2 Folks, look,

Speaker 42 I'm openly gay, no qualms about it, proud conservative Republican. I met my husband on Grindr, and we've been together for six years going on seven.
Married for almost three.

Speaker 42 Let me tell you something.

Speaker 34 Just come out the closet, boys. Come on.

Speaker 3 It's fun.

Speaker 42 You can be gay and conservative. But look, Grindr's already out of you anyway based on the hits.
And guess who's in town? It's all you conservatives.

Speaker 25 Bye.

Speaker 7 Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to.

Speaker 7 I also received messages containing variations of hey sexy from at least five accounts that have since been deactivated.

Speaker 7 And this does line up with a report from a Milwaukee-area Grindr user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, saying that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users.

Speaker 7 Quote, on any given day, you'll go on there and see a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source, who did not want to be named.

Speaker 7 The Grindr user said on a normal day you'll encounter maybe 10 users with no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at 50 blank profile photos.

Speaker 7 Now, we don't have any official data yet on Grindr usage near the 2024 RNC, only the down detector reports which our user submitted.

Speaker 7 But we do at least have data from the last in-person convention in Cleveland, Ohio, all the way back in 2016.

Speaker 7 A vice article by Candice Bryan spoke with sources from Grinder and wrote that, quote, Grindr usage near the Quick and Loans arena showed a 66% increase during the RNC.

Speaker 7 Other active destinations, including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach, and Trump Tower, showed no comparable increase in active users, unquote.

Speaker 7 Many of the local twinks and trans folks certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app.

Speaker 7 People would often first ask me if I was a Republican or why I was in town before trying to hit on me.

Speaker 7 One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something, but I had to check, unquote.

Speaker 7 As the week progressed, more locals told me that they had found a handful of out-and-proud patriots online, but really not many.

Speaker 7 In fact, multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who were online for the same reason I was, to see if there was an influx of closeted Republicans.

Speaker 7 Someone told me, quote, for the record, it's like three times busier here than normal. Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up to.
And the chasers have come out of the woodwork, unquote.

Speaker 7 Far from being the app's Super Bowl, according to Vice, the 2016 RNC's 66% bump in activity is less than one-half of the increase in grinder activity that was seen at the last in-person DNC, an event which was also a whole day shorter.

Speaker 7 I'll read from Vice, quote, However, from Sunday to Monday, the week week of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher, 148% increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia, unquote.

Speaker 7 It's also worth noting that of that 66% increase in activity around the 2016 RNC, only about 40% of those users were visiting Cleveland. Most were locals.

Speaker 7 Meanwhile, 60% of Grindr users active near the DNC in Philadelphia were visiting the city.

Speaker 7 Oh, and that quote quote from a Grinder executive calling the RNC Grinder's Super Bowl, as well as George Sandos' other claim about Grinder purposely outing gay conservatives, both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.

Speaker 14 It's totally made up. Pure fiction.
It's fiction. It's fiction.
We made it up. We made this one up.
It's a made-up tale. It's a total fabrication.
It never happened.

Speaker 7 It's an urban legend that never happened. So, no, the RNC is not Grinder's Super Bowl.
I got messages from over 150 different people.

Speaker 7 Over 90% of the messages I received and profiles visible online, even while inside the Pfizer Forum, were from locals completely unaffiliated with the RNC.

Speaker 7 And any boost in activity that can be attributed to people visiting for the RNC is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy festival of out-of-town gay Democrats who travel to the DNC.

Speaker 7 And like, if you think about about this logically, this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has spent the past two years screaming about how all drag queens are child groomers.

Speaker 7 And though this was the first year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to and attacks against trans people and really any display of visible queerness.

Speaker 18 Like, come on, this is the Republican Party.

Speaker 7 There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are secretly gay.

Speaker 7 And while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed homosexual preacher, this is not the norm. And all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia.

Speaker 7 It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism.

Speaker 7 And now, for people like Elon Musk and more young Republicans, a fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people, white people, aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex.

Speaker 7 Never mind the fact that queer and trans people oftentimes can and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit.

Speaker 7 So no, Grinder wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to be attending the RNC.

Speaker 7 And while there may not be as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored, basically figured out.

Speaker 7 Based on my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of local Grindr users and journalists I talked with who were online during the 2024 RNC, and considering the 2016 Grinder data, I can report that merely a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNC attendees.

Speaker 7 The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly used Grindr or were specifically curious about who might be online during the RNC.

Speaker 7 I observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone who attends the RNC are guests or delegates.

Speaker 7 A lot of people work at the convention center or work tech, and a sizable chunk of people are like myself, researchers, pollsters, or journalists who attend conventions like this for work.

Speaker 7 And lastly, the final group that fills out the bump in grinder activity, one that I, for some reason, didn't really expect to see upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense, are cops.

Speaker 7 So many cops. There were so many cops online at the RNC.
Just like delegates or reporters, they are coming to town from all around the country.

Speaker 7 There was cops or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana, and many more states, as well as U.S. Capitol Police, Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI.

Speaker 7 They were all in town as a part of the security detail. A few of the guys that messaged me, I can absolutely confirm, are 100% police or some kind of military police.

Speaker 7 A 33-year-old cop or military guy, quote, looking for sexy bottoms with the tags jog, military, discreet, and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in the gym, said in his bio that he was quote, really into slim, skinny, toned, and muscular people.

Speaker 7 He messaged me saying, hey.

Speaker 7 Now, I got a lot of haze in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grindr. You will probably mostly get hay as a message, as well as just like, you know, a picture of someone's penis.

Speaker 7 But between a penis and hay, those are probably the two most received messages you will get on Grinder.

Speaker 7 There was another guy with a username DL Military who said in his bio he was working security for the week and that Grindr messages had completely broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat.

Speaker 7 The DL in DL Military stands for download.

Speaker 7 It's a tag that only the worst people on Grindr will use, mainly like self-hating gay men who are closeted and it's down low because they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay.

Speaker 7 Just absolutely the worst. We do not fuck with DL, both literally and figuratively.
There were a bunch of other non-locals who I would describe as cop types.

Speaker 7 I can't 100% say for sure that they are cops, but they have like the look, you know? Like the look, the cop look. I don't know.

Speaker 7 They could also be like a bodyguard or working private security, but one of these cop-looking guys messaged me asking if I was a trans guy, which I always love to see.

Speaker 7 It means I'm doing gender very well. And a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages.

Speaker 7 So yeah, a lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the fact that basically half the cops in the country were at the Republican National Convention in some form or another.

Speaker 7 A few final notes.

Speaker 7 Now, this didn't really make up a sizable chunk of the Grindr population, but after saying I was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grindr, just completely unprompted, told me that they were attending the protests against the RNC.

Speaker 7 Please do not do this. That's a horrible idea for multiple reasons.

Speaker 7 You gotta stop talking about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grindr, especially at the RNC. Horrible idea.

Speaker 7 Do not do this.

Speaker 7 And despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile, a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter or the pod, but they were very nice.

Speaker 7 They gave me some recommendations for what gay bars to check out after convention hours. And one person told me this interesting anecdote that I'd like to share.

Speaker 7 Quote, I don't think Trump is going to win. I canvassed for Hillary in 2016, and at least here, it doesn't feel the same.
Unquote.

Speaker 7 I thought that was a little interesting tidbit that I received at probably around 3 a.m. on Grindr.
So there you go. Anyway, that was my RNC Grinder experience.

Speaker 7 I'm sorry to report, it is not the hotbed of closeted Republicans that we meme it to be. It's mostly local gays, a few reporters, and a few more cops.

Speaker 7 I do not think I'll be reporting on the DNC Grinder, but I am curious to see if there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to the RNC Grinder.

Speaker 7 So I guess I will maybe post about that on Twitter at Hungry Bowtie if you want updates on that. Anyway, stay safe out there.
Be careful if you're ever on Grindr, please.

Speaker 7 Especially don't tell someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests. But in general, be careful on these types of dating apps.
And I will see you on the other side.

Speaker 7 Message from Quickie.

Speaker 7 Grinder said you were super close yesterday. Wasn't stalking, I promise.
Message from birthday present emoji.

Speaker 7 I almost thought you were Josh Thomas. Message from Anonymous.
Wait, are you pro or anti-Republican?

Speaker 7 I'm not gonna lie, I mainly asked your politics because I thought you were cute, but I didn't want to hit on a Trumper.

Speaker 7 Message from older for young. Aren't all the delegates propositioning you? You're cute.
Message from Anonymous.

Speaker 7 Why establish a totalitarian state if I can't breed its dictator? Message from Suck Meoff.

Speaker 7 I'm down for anything. LOL, are you supporting Trump?

Speaker 2 Haha.

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Speaker 26 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

Speaker 29 You are the fittest of the fit.

Speaker 30 Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract worth $250,000.

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Speaker 34 Pressure is coming down.

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Speaker 11 It's the gaming event of the year, featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentlemen's Gaming.

Speaker 20 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

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Speaker 3 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers.

Speaker 3 It is your host, Mio Wong. With me is Garrison Davis.

Speaker 7 Hi.

Speaker 7 I've played a video game before.

Speaker 3 I'm not very powerful, but I too have played many, several video games.

Speaker 7 See,

Speaker 7 I wouldn't say several. I've played like a few.

Speaker 3 Many. I have played too many, simply too many video games.

Speaker 2 So, okay.

Speaker 3 This is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because, Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing.

Speaker 7 Is something going on out there?

Speaker 3 It's all really bad. And one of the people who's in making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers.

Speaker 7 The PayPal guy?

Speaker 2 The PayPal guy.

Speaker 3 The owner of X.

Speaker 7 I've been locked in

Speaker 7 my gamer cave for the past five months. I've not left.
I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah,

Speaker 3 you might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile 2 for him. We will get to that.

Speaker 7 I don't play those games. Those games are gay.

Speaker 7 I only play Nintendo,

Speaker 7 Mecha games, and Helldivers 2. Like a loser.

Speaker 3 That's reasonable. That's reasonable.

Speaker 3 Those are fine games.

Speaker 7 Oh, and Sonic. Oh, God.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Pushing aside the subject of Sonic.

Speaker 3 So, okay, I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers.

Speaker 3 And I think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in $184.3 billion industry.

Speaker 3 Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy, but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined.

Speaker 3 So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right?

Speaker 3 Something like 3 billion people play video games.

Speaker 3 It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games and it's also mostly people who are women and non-white.

Speaker 3 And yet, however, comma, when people think about like the gamer TM,

Speaker 3 you are not thinking about that.

Speaker 7 Yeah, like as a political class.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird incel right-wing dipshits who are white and suck ass.

Speaker 3 And this is in large part because Gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity.

Speaker 3 And obviously this is, you know, this is a fascist movement.

Speaker 3 Now, part of the reason this works, and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people because it's new, no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before.

Speaker 3 And it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit.

Speaker 3 or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money in them that are taken like quote unquote more seriously yeah yeah and so the the the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people and this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on the right there are a lot of like sort of political figures i don't know you're sort of like online people who who come out of gaming like like H.

Speaker 3 Bomber guy, I guess, as an example, like Hassan to some extent.

Speaker 3 There's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like

Speaker 3 become political. But on the other hand, gaming has always been like a not always, but has traditionally been an extremely right-wing space.

Speaker 3 Oh god, Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is. Have I told you the story about Kebab the German?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 2 Oh boy.

Speaker 3 Okay, so back in the dawn of time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.

Speaker 7 Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people?

Speaker 3 No, this is this is the World of Warcraft card game.

Speaker 7 Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think I think I peaked at like 2K Legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world.

Speaker 7 Digital collectible card video game. Come on.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But 2k legend NA is like fucking shitter ranks. It's bad.
I was never like good

Speaker 3 at it. I was just like okay

Speaker 3 kind of.

Speaker 3 But you know, this is this is like a thing that I did growing up.

Speaker 3 And something I remember is like all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers, and these were like really big streamers, would play music from this guy they called kebab the German.

Speaker 3 And it turns out that his actual name was Remove Kebab because he was a fucking German neo-Nazi.

Speaker 7 Well, many such cases.

Speaker 3 Yeah. For people who like are not aware of

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 mid-2010s German fascism, Remove Kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So great stuff, great stuff.

Speaker 3 This is, this was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the 2010s.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 3 this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession, these tech CEOs, like who want to be thought of as gamers.

Speaker 3 And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bankman Freed. And this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum, right?

Speaker 3 We're going to look at Sam Bank and Freed and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess.

Speaker 3 So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Freed. And, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.

Speaker 3 And I guess it is important to note, like, Sam Bankman Freed, like, is, I guess, like, he is a gamer in the sense that, like, he's, like, addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he looks the part two, no offense.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Before, before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud.

Speaker 7 Well, probably not anymore. He's probably going to get parsed.

Speaker 3 Oh, God. Maybe.
We'll see. We'll see.
I don't know.

Speaker 7 Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting block now.
All young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts. So they put all their money in crypto.

Speaker 7 So now they're going to vote for whoever makes line go up.

Speaker 3 I'm going to become the Joker.

Speaker 3 So, okay, the thing about Sam Maggie and Frieda.

Speaker 3 For people who have forgotten who SBF is, he is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it.

Speaker 3 And, you know,

Speaker 3 Robert did a behind the bastards on him. And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games.

Speaker 3 He's playing this really dog shit game called Storybook Brology Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like,

Speaker 3 as any gamer will know, person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of

Speaker 3 The Big Shorts, we're going to get to Moneyball in a second, Blindside,

Speaker 3 other books.

Speaker 7 Reparatable financial advice books is what I'm hearing.

Speaker 3 But, you know, like our very, very powerful, influential, and like wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along. And

Speaker 3 Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him, I mean, this is something that like SBF was like, you know, was like projecting, right, in order for this to be the image of him, was him as like the gamer.

Speaker 3 And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis, right? Because he just like doesn't understand someone who just

Speaker 3 has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit. So he plays video game stream beatings.
Like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean.

Speaker 3 I actually don't play video game stream meetings because it is too obvious.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 I play video games once a week.

Speaker 7 That's kind of my

Speaker 7 God.

Speaker 3 This is the one part about Sam Bakman Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
It is my anti-depression strategy, basically.

Speaker 3 Like when I need to not think for a while, there's just meo-playing. Actually, Path of Exile 2, one of the games that we're going to be fucking talking about today, something that I play a lot of.

Speaker 3 I've done so much fucking gaming. Like, God, I used to play this game called Smite.
which is like a it's like a MOBA, like League of Legends, but like third person.

Speaker 3 And I played so much Smite that there were pros showing up for my casual games.

Speaker 3 When the Zuma revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable.

Speaker 7 Like, can't argue with that. I'll inform the council.
I'll

Speaker 7 for our next spokes council meeting. I'll bring it to the table.

Speaker 2 That's reasonable.

Speaker 3 But, you know, so, so what, what, what, what happens with this sort of thing is that, is that Michael Lewis's image of SPF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things, whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant.

Speaker 3 Yeah, totally. Because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time.
And this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do

Speaker 3 this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing. And like SPF like is a gamer, right?

Speaker 3 But like why they why they make this part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have

Speaker 3 the same kind of critical culture around it. It doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies.

Speaker 7 Or like respectability in some way. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Except in like the reversed sam bakeman freedway where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius right like like like that era of like silicon valley guy yeah that's like he's he's so different right like he's he's he's not like put together and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker so it's kind of like it's kind of like a double-edged sword in like that specific way yeah well this this is all a feedback loop right because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like michael lewis right who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been, these people don't play video games.

Speaker 3 They're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists, right?

Speaker 3 And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on.

Speaker 3 And it's just really, really easily to sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like, you know, you like you show a gamer like a League of Legends addict and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book.

Speaker 3 Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person.

Speaker 3 It simply does. You just get mad all the time.
I know too many League of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but Arcane, though, right? All right.

Speaker 2 Continue.

Speaker 2 God.

Speaker 3 Okay, we're going to take an ad break. And then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis.

Speaker 7 Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.

Speaker 3 So we are back.

Speaker 3 Now, okay, obviously part of the reason this works too is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these, these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market, right?

Speaker 3 But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really, truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass.

Speaker 3 And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis, in theory, understands a lot better, which is sports.

Speaker 3 So he, Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which I'll get to in a second.

Speaker 3 And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bastards. You can go listen to that.

Speaker 2 But I want to...

Speaker 3 go in on Moneyball.

Speaker 3 Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog Ocean Athletics team invented like baseball metrics and they use saber metrics to like build this roster out of nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well and and like i'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that oakland a's team like whatever i'm not going to argue about baseball statistics what i will argue about is that one of the characters in in this book right who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses that like michael lewis loves to find right is this guy named paul podesta

Speaker 3 And he is, he is like one of the main figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach, basically.

Speaker 7 What baseball team is this?

Speaker 3 Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know.
They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called.

Speaker 7 They're called the Athletics now.

Speaker 2 No, no, they were originally called the Athletics.

Speaker 3 I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the Athletes.
Everyone just calls them the Oakland A's. Well, they've been the A's forever, but yeah,

Speaker 3 they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.

Speaker 7 Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute,

Speaker 7 didn't Las Vegas?

Speaker 3 Didn't the Raiders go there too? Yes. Yes, they stole both of them.

Speaker 7 That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so, okay, unfortunately, we're going to be talking about football here.

Speaker 3 So this guy, right, Paul Podesta, is like one of these sort of geniuses. He later goes on to be...

Speaker 3 It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched football franchise, the Cleveland Browns.

Speaker 3 Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons, going 1 in 31,

Speaker 3 which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports.

Speaker 3 I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go one in 31 into cross two seasons of football again.

Speaker 3 So again, that is a 1 in 15 season followed by an 0 in 16 season. It's the second 0-16 season ever.
Unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade.

Speaker 3 Okay, it's like, Mia, why the fuck are you talking about this? Partial this is also like these people are just evil. Um, Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator.

Speaker 3 I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly, have accused him of sexual assault.

Speaker 3 He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit.

Speaker 3 So, so that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson is that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right?

Speaker 3 He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season.

Speaker 3 And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting as like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who'd been on the Texans.

Speaker 3 And again, like,

Speaker 3 Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.

Speaker 7 Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans?

Speaker 3 It is a team from Houston, Texas.

Speaker 3 That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy.

Speaker 7 Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners.

Speaker 3 They fucking traded this guy, right? And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade. That is three is the worst trade in the history of football.
It is three first-round picks,

Speaker 3 two third-round picks, and a fourth-round pick. And they hand this guy, who again, I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right?

Speaker 3 They hand him $230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL.

Speaker 3 And so, okay, so how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who like is now laundering being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural, like being a rogue outsider, right?

Speaker 3 How does Deshaun Watson, his like greatest fucking project, do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season,

Speaker 3 in weeks one through five,

Speaker 3 out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000, to to start weeks one through five, out of again, 759 quarterbacks, he ranks 753 out of 759

Speaker 3 EPA per drop back.

Speaker 3 753 out of 759. They traded three first-round picks for this guy.

Speaker 3 He has a mind-boggling an EPA of negative 0.3, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would.

Speaker 7 How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games.

Speaker 2 Don't worry.

Speaker 3 We're almost done with the sports part of it.

Speaker 3 And I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this,

Speaker 3 which is the argument that

Speaker 3 sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 7 I understand that.

Speaker 7 I can see that. Yes.

Speaker 3 Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air, and this is the best fucking chance I'm ever going to get. So, Jesus fucking.

Speaker 7 Is this like what I talk about like movies or something?

Speaker 3 Is this yes, yes, is this what it feels like?

Speaker 7 Is this what I sound like?

Speaker 3 Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like.
So, this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback.

Speaker 3 They sign away basically the entire future of this team, hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator, $230 million.

Speaker 3 And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius.

Speaker 3 And this all comes back to, again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on like by the jock or whatever, right?

Speaker 3 That's like, that's like, that's like the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're like oppressed by this. But like, it's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way down.

Speaker 3 And you can watch like just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using, by using both of these fucking affects.

Speaker 3 So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions like specifically in the culture and, you know, why these people choose to use gaming as like,

Speaker 3 you know, as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world, I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicki Osterweil, in a piece called Game Boys.

Speaker 3 Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life. in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement.

Speaker 3 Consumer choice is a form of control, and unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety.

Speaker 3 To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one must master to live under current economic conditions, games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches.

Speaker 3 Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the the social hierarchy.

Speaker 3 They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them.

Speaker 3 But they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism.

Speaker 3 This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men.

Speaker 3 So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Samba Ben Freed and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for like what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk is that

Speaker 3 gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right-wingers, right?

Speaker 3 There are a lot of what you would call like traditionally sort of left-ling demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for work they're also a thing that people use to like escape the hell world totally And like, I mean, I know this, right?

Speaker 3 Like, I am fucking, like, I'm a Chinese trans woman who better, who's better at video games than both the people I'm going to be fucking talking about in this story, right?

Speaker 7 Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path of Exile character was actually quite advanced.

Speaker 3 Oh, we're going to, we're, we're going to talk talk about the Path of Exile character fucking next. You know, but

Speaker 3 it's worth mentioning like speedrunning, right? Which is a very, very trans genre.

Speaker 7 Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it depends a lot on the genre. Yeah, like competitive fighting games, like, yeah, melee.

Speaker 3 I'm going to briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black non-binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time, incredibly beloved,

Speaker 3 the only person in history ever to beat someone 13-0 in a first to 11. Absolute legend, right?

Speaker 3 But, but you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force.

Speaker 3 And this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life. Right now, these people are in power.
And you know who else is in power? It's the products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 2 All hail.

Speaker 7 We are back.

Speaker 3 Now, obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked a bit, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.

Speaker 3 And, you know, the thing about gaming, right, is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system.

Speaker 3 And like, I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy, Nazi, like, gamer dip shit, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's why I boot up FF7 remake to stare at Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad.

Speaker 3 But, you know, the problem with what's happening here, right, is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence in sort of different ways, but it's like this systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system.

Speaker 3 But these people's solution to it is to blame it on women, right?

Speaker 3 And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicki about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from.

Speaker 3 And like, I would compare it to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right? And deal with this violence.

Speaker 3 But like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters.

Speaker 7 Most, most, yeah. I would say that's, that's true.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 And so, and so we, we can look at the structural forces that produce these people and also just go like, fuck them. Like, eat shit.
Like, I'm sorry, you've, you've become Nazis. Like, fuck off.

Speaker 7 Skill issue in some ways, um, among other environmental factors.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 But, but also, a lot of the times these people aren't. Fucking like they're not dealing with shit at all mostly, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right? But like, also, he's the richest man in the world.

Speaker 3 He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived.

Speaker 3 And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement that powers all these people. And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right?

Speaker 3 Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now it's been shifted to this.

Speaker 2 Not anymore.

Speaker 3 Yeah, now they believe that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities, right?

Speaker 7 And it's actually, the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the Doge nerds at the top of the system now.

Speaker 7 We've had a full uno reverso.

Speaker 3 But the thing is, these people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right? But it's this affecting it.

Speaker 3 It's this feeling they have of them being the ones who are oppressed that

Speaker 3 made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate.

Speaker 3 If you're going to read one Vicki Oswald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with.

Speaker 3 Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good, but like as a medium, there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music.

Speaker 3 But if you're going to read one thing from her, read a piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out.

Speaker 3 And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being, I mean, are literally being used as like scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and this expands out to like workers more broadly. They're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game.

Speaker 3 That like when Cyberpunk 2077 came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it was, it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken, shitty game.

Speaker 3 And, you know, they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist rasping campaigns. And that's, that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life, too.

Speaker 3 And that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right? Is that they're also like signaling to their base that, like, I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Like, you should fucking support me for this shit.

Speaker 3 Now, pivoting a little bit. So, when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman Freed, because, like, many, yeah, many such cases.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like the last, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam.

Speaker 3 And it turns out, though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamer stick thing. Totally.
Like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah.
Yeah. It's fascinating.

Speaker 3 They're both fucking doing it now. And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I would say. Like, he sort of plays video games.

Speaker 7 He's a Ketamine user. He's a Twitter power user.
He is the shadow president.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the richest man in the world. The richest man who's ever lived.

Speaker 7 Yeah, also.

Speaker 3 But he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like an elite video game player in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this.

Speaker 7 He's also, I believe the term is a meme lord, if I'm reading this right.

Speaker 2 Oh, God.

Speaker 3 One of his Path of Exile 2 characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named Keccius Maximus.

Speaker 7 So like this is the level of my that is one of his favorite names. In his White House office,

Speaker 7 he has a Keccius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. Just an AI-generated image of like Pepe the Frog and like in like Roman like Caesar attire.
I hate everything.

Speaker 7 So yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oops. So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games.

Speaker 3 And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually, he's like, for a long time, been doing a like, I'm a gamer thing.

Speaker 3 So his, his his kind of problems and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're gonna get to in a second.

Speaker 3 This is something that that blue sky user Gay Dog reminded me of because I had forgotten he has so many gaming scandals. I had forgotten about this one,

Speaker 3 which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game. And he had two different shields.

Speaker 3 equipped which makes literally no sense it's like over encumbered like it's

Speaker 3 okay.

Speaker 3 Like the best explanation I've tried to I've figured out for like how bad at this game he is is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car.

Speaker 3 It's stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on.

Speaker 7 Hey, I love the Mazda Miata.

Speaker 3 Like that's that that that's like the gaming equivalent. And everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived.
This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing.

Speaker 3 He is just like, like, unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game. Like, just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit.

Speaker 3 And this was like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one, but like, especially, like, this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it.

Speaker 3 So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile are like very much the same kind of game, basically.

Speaker 3 Like you click somewhere and your character goes there and it, you click other things and it does attacks. But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of

Speaker 3 the best Path of Exile 2 players in the world. And he was doing this on his alt account, which has the handle.
It's CyberGamer 420, but all the E's are threes.

Speaker 3 So it's CYB3RGAM g a m three r 420 wait wait wait wait wait say say say that again it's at cyb3r

Speaker 7 gam three r 420 so i think i found something i think the 420 at the end is actually a a reference um to hitler's birthday uh april 20th

Speaker 2 god damn it

Speaker 3 so okay he like claims to have one of the like the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of Exile, where if you die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard.

Speaker 3 To like prove that he actually did this,

Speaker 3 he like does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like on a Twitter live stream. And it is immediately obvious that like he has no idea what he's doing.

Speaker 3 Like, it's not just obvious to people who play the game. I hadn't played Path of Exile 2 at this point, right? I had only played the original one like a decade ago, like a little bit of it.

Speaker 3 And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before. Like has no idea what he's fucking doing.
Like it was so unbelievably obvious.

Speaker 3 Like he like walked past one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just like walked past it, didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games.

Speaker 3 This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him.
And eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile 2 account.

Speaker 3 And then he claims that he never claims that it was his Path of Exile 2 account.

Speaker 3 And this,

Speaker 3 Jenny Winely, has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene.

Speaker 3 So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asmagold, who is like a, he's a very famous right-wing streamer who like sucks ass, like is like a turbo right-winger, like

Speaker 3 spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry.

Speaker 3 And fucking Asmagold is watching this video and being like, this guy is a lying piece of shit. What the fuck?

Speaker 3 And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's, it's, it's genuinely wild.
I've never actually seen people like react to this, to like, to, to Elon like this.

Speaker 3 And like, like, again, like, this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying.

Speaker 3 Now, what's interesting about

Speaker 3 this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever but his affect is still largely targeted towards non-gamers in the sense that like there's no way i mean okay i guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of little path of exile player on a stream using the someone else's account but like there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that and and a lot of the people he talks to about this stuff are people like joe rogan who aren't like gamer tm people right

Speaker 3 it's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers that he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with.

Speaker 3 And so he's really, on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist base, but on the other hand, he's trying to use this sort of like cultural cachet of gaming as like this sort of renegade right-wing phenomenon to like launder his reputation.

Speaker 3 Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like

Speaker 3 pretend to be a gamer.

Speaker 3 But the thing about gamers is that like, There is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very, very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games and cheat in records of video games.

Speaker 3 And Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right?

Speaker 7 And that means we got him, folks. Mission accomplished.
Wrap it up. We beat Elon.
We fucking got him. It's over.

Speaker 7 He's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game.

Speaker 7 He's lost all respect

Speaker 7 among the farthest reaches of the right.

Speaker 7 So, what's next?

Speaker 3 He has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.

Speaker 7 Is this about the one video game he hasn't played? Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story, in my opinion.

Speaker 3 Which one are you talking about?

Speaker 7 That's an

Speaker 7 one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play GTA 5.

Speaker 3 Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that.

Speaker 7 Because he doesn't like, quote unquote, doing crime. And GTA 5, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene, just couldn't do it, unquote.

Speaker 2 Oh, I completely forgot about that.

Speaker 7 So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God.

Speaker 7 Now, some gamers might be sick individuals acting out, you know, violence power fantasies, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GTA 5.

Speaker 7 That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know,

Speaker 7 at times, strange behavior.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like a different, like the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violence of video games is bad.

Speaker 2 Which one?

Speaker 3 Because he's trying to signal to all of his groups simultaneously. And all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass

Speaker 3 and we hate him.

Speaker 7 It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy because, again, he is the most powerful man in the world.
No. But it is mildly amusing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that like the pushback he is getting here is like I think actually kind of is significant.

Speaker 3 So the last thing I want to talk about is him pretending to have been like a quake pro, which the thing that he did. Quake pro.

Speaker 3 And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobst, who is like, his thing is like people who fake, who like fake things in video games, basically.

Speaker 3 And he is like not a leftist. He's like a center-right guy.
basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is.
But he did a video about

Speaker 3 Elon claiming to be a Quake player. And what he found, so Elon apparently did actually play in an early Quake tournament, but none of the good players were there.
And

Speaker 3 his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better Wi-Fi than everyone else.

Speaker 3 And so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good Wi-Fi and then he got destroyed. Which I just, I just think is funny, right?

Speaker 3 That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is

Speaker 3 he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran into someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.

Speaker 3 But the reason I bring this up is that like, at the end of this video, Jobstein goes on this whole thing about how, and this is, this is a, like a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press, where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie.

Speaker 3 And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know.

Speaker 3 And this is a real shift, right? I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this. And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says.

Speaker 3 This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else I've ever fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon Musk is doing.

Speaker 3 And like just the willingness to just be like, this guy is a fucking, just a serial liar. Like everything he says is a lie.
He literally calls him a con, like says his activities like a con man.

Speaker 3 He says the things that he's saying are like either either lies or delusional. There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him.

Speaker 3 There was a day that happened literally today where Ubisoft, you know, Ubisoft is a famously like not a leftist company, right? Like they've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff.

Speaker 3 So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as like a character in it.

Speaker 3 And literally the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?

Speaker 3 And like, replied, in reply to a thing about Hassan.

Speaker 3 Like, we are, we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right? This thing that had been like a really, really consistent base of support for people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him.

Speaker 3 It is sort of being polarized against him by just like

Speaker 3 the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is.

Speaker 3 And like, obviously, like, I don't think like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up or whatever.

Speaker 3 But the actual serious point to all of this, other than like looking at the ways that fascism, like why these people do this, and like gamers is like a demographic that's important to these people, is that like the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right?

Speaker 3 That doesn't happen that often. But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution.

Speaker 3 They got their opponents to allies allies to stay home. And that was enough.

Speaker 3 Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks came for Kerensky's government was enough for them to take power. And I think

Speaker 3 the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalition so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that

Speaker 3 they can be stopped.

Speaker 7 So this is at mia wong publicly calling for the start of gamergate 2 gamergate 2 is already happening damn it this is gamergate 3 this is an open call to to begin gamergate 2.5 right now on behalf of mia wong make sure you at me

Speaker 2 oh no

Speaker 7 and then hopefully it'll finally usher in the american bolshevik revolution um after we get enough gamers right to

Speaker 7 to stay home.

Speaker 7 Or even better, rise up, right?

Speaker 7 We can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it.

Speaker 3 Gamers are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not back the regime.
That's actually the February Revolution where they stood down. But, you know, same point.
Same point.

Speaker 7 Yeah, come on, Via. Jeez, fuck.

Speaker 2 Look,

Speaker 3 I am one of the biggest things of like people need to remember that Lenin did not overthrow the Tsar.

Speaker 3 He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist-y guy who was from the provisional government in between.

Speaker 3 Okay, we're done. We're done here.
We're done here. We're fucking out.
We're leaving.

Speaker 7 What games are you playing?

Speaker 3 What games am I playing? Path of Exile 2. Don't play Brotato.
It will consume your life.

Speaker 2 Okay. Play RoboQuest.

Speaker 3 RoboQuest is great.

Speaker 3 RoboQuest dares to ask the question: what if the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat?

Speaker 7 That sounds very gay. So I probably can't do that then.
But I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Core 6.

Speaker 3 Armored Core 6 rules. Love that game.
Love that game.

Speaker 7 Sonic X Shadow Generations. Final Fantasy VII.

Speaker 7 And I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for their official release now that the beta is closed. Unfortunately, the character selection is very gooner-coded.

Speaker 3 Many, many such cases.

Speaker 7 So I made sure to make the smallest. the smallest chest size available on my on my model

Speaker 7 but the gameplay is fun

Speaker 3 This has been It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 3 Good lords.

Speaker 3 They pay me for this.

Speaker 3 I had to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this.

Speaker 2 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 43 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 43 For more more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 43 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening.

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