Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 175

Starting point is 00:00:00 Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison. Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey you're listening to on purpose with Jay Shetty and today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco What I felt for Benny it was everything about him was honest

Starting point is 00:00:44 He'll tell me anything that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime Podcast history. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay?

Starting point is 00:01:06 Okay Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime Podcast history. Well John, that's because it's dump of week. And this user writes, last week we had an attempted break-in. I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change the locks, but his mom told me he wasn't with her.

Starting point is 00:01:18 And it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Did she leave him? Well, to find out how this story ends, follow the OK Storytime Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of

Starting point is 00:01:38 killing her. It was shocking. It was very shocking. Like that could have been my daughter. Like, you never know. I'm Jen Swan. I'm the host of a new podcast called My Friend Daisy. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down

Starting point is 00:01:53 their friend's killer. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. And I wanted to to let you know this is a compilation episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about the world falling apart. And we're mostly just about that at the minute. But we do sometimes talk about how to put it back together as well. Joining me today is Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Hello. Hi, and we're on the falling apart theme. And I think we've been on that one quite a lot the last few weeks, but today we are specifically talking about the, what I'm going to call the rendition of non-U.S. nationals by the Trump administration over the last week. The reason I'm calling it, I guess, rendition and not deportation is because these people

Starting point is 00:03:03 aren't being sent back to the countries they're from. They're being sent to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place called Secod. So the Trump administration has attempted to send 300 people who it accuses of being members of a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how they get there under the Alien Enemies Act to a prison in El Salvador where they will be detained for a year at the expense of the United States. We're going to break down exactly how we got there over the course of this episode.

Starting point is 00:03:39 So the Trump administration has accused these people of being members of two different gangs. The majority of them, there's 238 people, are accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a foreign terrorist organization. Another 23 it's accusing of being members of MS-13, which is a Salvadorian gang. The Trump administration used something called the Alien Enemies Act to remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act, we actually spoke about it in November of last year when we were looking at provisions of US law that the Trump administration could use for its mass deportation agenda. This is one we spoke about. The Trump administration in the past has been quite good at finding obscure provisions

Starting point is 00:04:31 of the United States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole series about Title 42 on that. That's kind of the paramount example. The Alien Enemies Act is a 226-year-old piece of legislation. The last time it was used was to inter Japanese people during the Second World War. So that's a pretty shameful part of United States history. And it's great that we're going back there. So who are the enemies in this case? It's generally, I should probably point out the Alien Enemies Act is intended for like, the people you're at war with, right? So if the United States is at war with, let's say, Canada, and there are Canadian citizens

Starting point is 00:05:12 in the United States, or people who have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people are individuals within that group are suspected to be spies, or suspected to be like, serving the interests of Canada, not the United States, then they could be excluded or detained under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country, as is the case here. And as we saw in this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal, right? This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have even a hearing, right? These people were rounded up and booted out the country in very short order. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:51 And like with or without due process, like we should not be black making people and sending them to the like El Salvador labor prison, right? Like, this is like just doing this at all. Even with due process would already be horrifying. Yeah. The fact that they're just doing it like without even any like court process entirely and like trying to like bypass that just adds like another level to an already like horrifying and, you know, evil and shameful action. Yeah, it's terrible. I want to define some of the categories here.

Starting point is 00:06:24 I want to start with T tren de Aragua. Spanish understanders will notice the word tren, meaning train. That's because they came out of construction unions who were building trains as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs. Tren Delllano is the other one that springs to mind, which also come from the same place and does have similar names, but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf of the Venezuelan state, but in 2024 Maduro blamed them for the protests after his election.

Starting point is 00:07:02 People remember that that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I covered that in my series on the Darien Gap, if people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics of migration to the United States. In 2024, Biden named Tren Daragua a transnational criminal organization, and then Trump named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled several cartels as FTOs as well. At the time there's a lot of speculation about why was it to allow for like drone strikes or operations. I think we're now seeing that this was part of this large ploy of deportation. Yeah, because like, quote unquote, terrorists have even less, quote unquote, rights than quote unquote, criminals.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Yes. Right? Like it's like, it's like the, it's like the triangle of like which, which deplorable class has the least amount of rights, terrorists are always like the ones with the least. Yeah. And we've been doing that for 20 odd years now with Guantanamo Bay and renditions to Egypt and Syria and other places. In this case, people are being sent to Secot, which is this prison in El Salvador.

Starting point is 00:08:04 It's sometimes referred- Can you spell that? Yeah, C-E-C-O-T. SECOT. Yeah, SECOT, I guess. It stands for Terrorism Confignment, Terrorism Detention Center. It is largely referred to as a super prison, right? It was built in El Salvador by Bukele as part of his iron fist, would be the way you translate it, it's iron fist policy against gangs and against crime.

Starting point is 00:08:30 It has been widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into cells with more than 100 people, but there are fewer bunks than there are prisoners. They can't even all lie down at the same time. The bunks don't have bedding, they're just flat metal sheets. They're four high, so you have to climb over other people to sleep. For more than 100 prisoners, there are two open toilets. That's the only access to a bathroom that you have. They might be allowed out for half an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave their heads, and they all wear white. The lights are left on all day.

Starting point is 00:09:10 As I said, they're provided with no bedding, no contact with the outside world, very little access to anything other than studying in their cell. There's two Bibles in each cell. It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Yeah. This is completely inhumane. Right? It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Yeah, this is completely inhumane. It's horrific. And for a couple of years now, Bukele has been doing these media tours of the Secot,

Starting point is 00:09:35 using it to generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote, what will happen to you if you're quote unquote in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs. And as we saw when these people were sent to El Salvador, this tendency to use, I don't know what you would call it, incarceration as a way of making content was very much the case here, right?

Starting point is 00:10:04 Yeah. We're going to break for ads when we come back. We will be consuming content that is people being stripped of their human rights. And we are back. Garrison, do you want to go ahead and play this? So the tweet in question, the zit in question, is by Naib Bukele, president of El Salvador, right? Should I read it out? Yeah, I think you should. I think it's worth noting that this style of propaganda closely mirrors a lot of what DHS and the Trump administration is doing on their official accounts.

Starting point is 00:10:42 A lot of the memified content creation format, like aesthetics being used to just display like torture and deportations and human rights abuses is very common among government accounts in the States right now. It's pretty horrifying to look at and this kind of follows the suit and is possibly even more bleak.

Starting point is 00:11:05 Yeah. But yeah, we should read this whole message and then we'll probably skip around on the video and talk about what we're seeing. Yeah. So I'll just read it. Obviously, you don't understand it. I'm quoting it here directly from him. Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to Secult, the terrorism confinement center, for a period of one year, parentheses renewable. The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labour

Starting point is 00:11:45 under the Zero Idleness Programme will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year. On this occasion, the US has sent us 23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvatore and Justice, including two ringleaders. One of them is a member of the criminal organisation's highest structure. This will help us finalise intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators and sponsors. As always, we will continue advancing in a fight against organised crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place, all in a single action.

Starting point is 00:12:28 May God bless El Salvador, and may God bless the United States. I should probably just add that the US sent $3 million to pay for these $6 million, I'm sorry, to pay for the 300 prisoners it intended to send. The Zero Idleness program is like one of the most sinister things I've like read recently. Yeah, I mean, you could pull out of a George Orwell or like a Aldous Huxley or something, right? And it wouldn't sound out of place. I mean, it's it's even even like, you know, it's almost cliche now to point like German work camps, but like, come on. Yeah, I mean, come on. Yeah, yeah, we're doing it again.

Starting point is 00:13:05 So yeah, we'll probably play a clip of the music and then I'm gonna skip around on the video. We can just talk about what we're seeing here. Mm-hmm. [♪ music playing, sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by, and sound of planes flying by an airport with three different planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in single file. It has like this like action movie type music, lines of soldiers. So as the people getting loaded on the plane they're getting like forced down. There's like people with like guns, police, military, like manhandling people, pushing their heads down, there's people with guns, police, military, manhandling people, pushing their heads down, physically removing clothing. They're showing their tattoos there, right? That's when they're pulling up his shirt.

Starting point is 00:13:53 But even the way that they just walk around with these people, forcing their heads almost to their concrete as they make them shuffle along the ground, Just like basic dehumanization. It shows them getting transported onto buses. So they said they're arriving at Secord now. It's sort of bright white, very sterile facility. Now they're being forced onto their knees and shaved. Getting their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while being forced onto their knees on the ground. Then the cops doing this are all wearing, I guess balaclavas, I would describe them as, face masks and hats. Yeah, all of the military and police officials are trying to hide their identity as they, you as they publicly display the actions that

Starting point is 00:14:45 they're doing when they're shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera. Yeah. So it's a lot of that kind of stuff. You see them pushing people all in matching white clothes in single file into cells. Yeah, and this is the cell, so we spoke about before. We'll include this link in the sources. It's basically just three minutes of torture porn. That's what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:15:17 Yeah, it's pretty bleak, honestly. I don't know what else to say about it, besides it's just channeling pure evil. There's nothing else to say about it besides like it's just it's just like channeling pure evil like I like it's it's I There's nothing else to say. Yeah, there's I mean that this I don't know how anyone could watch that and think good So we should talk about how they're identifying these people and we should talk about the process by which they were sent there Ice policy says a person can be deemed a gang member if they offer some notes to quote gang membership identification criteria. One of the criteria that they seem to be using in this instance is their tattoos. So there are some gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang, right?

Starting point is 00:15:58 MS-13, Mara Selva Strucha, it's what the MS stands for, being one of them. These like Maras, Central American gangs have tended to use that in the past. This isn't really something that happens with Tren de Agua as far as I'm aware of. Some people, they've pointed to tattoos of trains. In a document the Gaia found from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they're pointing to stars as evidence that people were part of Tren de Agua. So I remember where Tren de Agua does not have a policy of tattooing people, specifically because this is a thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members, right? Like it would be silly to keep doing that once it's become so clear that the state uses

Starting point is 00:16:43 that. So the one sort of case that I've seen legal documents on of these people, the one name we have, one of these people who's been sent is a man named Hercires Barrios. He was a footballer, professional footballer in Venezuela who protested against the Maduro regime and was tortured and detained as a result. I've spoken to probably, I would imagine, thousands of Venezuelan migrants've spoken to probably, I would imagine thousands of Venezuelan migrants, right? Again, I would like you to listen to my series

Starting point is 00:17:09 on the Italian Gap. If you haven't, I put a lot into it. All of these people have stories of watching people be shot, the brutal repression of protest, state violence, economic collapse, persecution for supporting the opposition in the country, right? And this is one of those stories. The criteria that they used to identify him were a tattoo, which had a football

Starting point is 00:17:32 with a crown over the top and then the word Dios, God in English underneath. Reis Barrios' lawyer says that this is an homage to the logo of Real Madrid, his favorite football club. They have claimed that it's evidence of gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The other criteria that they used is a picture of him throwing up the horns, I guess, which I believe it means I love you in sign language. I'm not sure if that's like an urban legend or if that's the case.

Starting point is 00:18:00 And there are obviously different sign languages, but this is a hand gesture that's especially common in the Spanish-speaking world. If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled up as if I was making a fist. Almost like a Spider-Man hand symbol, I guess. Sure, I'm not familiar, but if you say so. To visually reference for people. If you were making a little cow, like a bull with your hands,

Starting point is 00:18:25 that's what you would be doing in your shadow puppeting. It's very common. Yes, it's a very typical hand symbol. It's a thing that people do when they're taking photos. I've even seen it, like, if I'm working with a photographer and they're just snapping photos of large groups of people, people just do it, just like people do the peace sign. It's a thing to do with your hands.

Starting point is 00:18:44 Those are two criteria they use. So I should point out that none of these people have been accused or convicted of a crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador, right? Even if they had been accused of a crime, even convicted of a crime in the United States, it's very unclear what legal basis there would be to then detain them in El Salvador, right? Like the United States doesn't have a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies. At the time of writing, this has of course been challenged in court, right? A district court judge attempted to block it. A district court judge did block these removals. Now, he actually blocked them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However, despite this, the planes didn't turn around.

Starting point is 00:19:29 And I'm just going to quote directly from what the judge said here. Quote, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. That's a little another quote later. This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately. This didn't happen, right? The planes went from the US to Honduras, Honduras to El Salvador. They didn't stop even when the judge had given this order for them to stop. Now, normally in illegal proceedings such

Starting point is 00:19:57 as this, right, the government or one of the parties may not agree with the findings of the judge and they may choose to appeal it, right? That's very normal. You still agree with the findings of the judge and they may choose to appeal it, right? That's very normal. You still comply with the order, then appeal it, right? You don't just keep doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think the judge was right. Like that's in theory not how this works. Now in practice, what means does a judge have to force the executive to listen to him? I don't know. We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute. The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling. One of them, Press Secretary

Starting point is 00:20:33 Caroline Leavitt claimed that there was quote, no lawful basis for the ruling. Go back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal order is not the same as a written one, that's not something that's generally understood to be the case, and that because the flights were over international water the order did not apply. This was then part of the foreign policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is particularly worrying. You effectively don't have your rights in international waters, or humans don't have rights in international waters. Yeah, it's just allowing the US government,

Starting point is 00:21:13 or the US government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever it wants, if the action's being taken or not, like immediately on US soil or other foreign soil. Yeah. So we're going to take take another break and when we come back, we will talk about their response to this judge's ruling. Alright, and we are back. So, Trump's response to this Judge Boasberg's ruling was, I'm just going to read this as a true social post, aka a truth, quote, This radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator, who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected president. M- elected president. I'm not going to say what is capitalized, just understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that Trump likes to do. He didn't win the popular vote, parentheses by a lot, exclamation mark, comma. He didn't win all

Starting point is 00:22:18 seven swing states. He didn't win 2750 to 525 counties. He didn't win anything. I won, for many reasons, in an overwhelming mandate but fightling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason for this historic victory. I'm just doing what the voters wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached. We don't want vicious, violent and demented criminals, many of them deranged murderers in our country. Make America great again. Tom Homan, the border czar, also told Fox News, I don't care what the judges think. We made a promise to American people. The president Trump has made a promise to American people. We're going to make this country safe again. I wake up every

Starting point is 00:23:02 morning loving my job because I worked for the greatest president in the history of my life and we're gonna make this country safe again. I'm proud to be a part of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming. I just love seeing you going through these protesters just crunching on the apple as

Starting point is 00:23:21 their liberal tears just just flew out the hallway. Tom Holman, thanks so much for joining the program. This is open defiance of the courts, right? Like, I don't really know. It's what we've been talking about the past month on executive disorder, how we are just continually like ramping up this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch. The congressional branch has already basically given up all of their power. And yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis. Very few people are taking this as seriously as what it should be. And even the courts seem a little bit tepid to like actually enforce their own power or like try to.

Starting point is 00:24:00 Yeah. I mean, Boasberg mentioned contempt once from what I can find on PESA, but like, obviously these judges, I think, are somewhat concerned that if they find the government in contempt for court, then what happens? Because if you play your Trump card and no one cares and you have no cards left to play. It's kind of odd how the judges themselves are seemingly afraid of pushing this constitutional crisis into like explicit territory, right? To be like, what if we do the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else? Like, oh, we have no power. Like, we actually have like, like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch.

Starting point is 00:24:41 Yeah. It's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this like very obvious accelerationist push of like, no, we need to actually test test this out. Yeah, because we need to know where we're at. Like, and they're scared to because they're scared. What if what if that testing causes like the Trump side to win? Yeah, but they're already winning in the way in the absence of the testing. Exactly. And the problem is, is that in absence of that, you are just giving up and letting Trump win. After Trump called to impeach the, quote unquote, radical leftist lunatic of a judge who tried to temporarily halt the deportation of these 300 Venezuelan immigrants, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for rulings that don't align with political agendas. And that's as far as they're going right now. They're making rare public statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile, Musk complains on Twitter.com about a quote-unquote judicial coup and mistakenly calls for 60 senators to impeach leftist judges.

Starting point is 00:25:45 Now, of course, the Senate does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate requires 67 votes to convict and remove someone from office once impeached. So, haha, we got you. We got you, Elon. You made a mistake. We win. Community notes.

Starting point is 00:25:59 Co-thefted. Yeah, it's... Where we're at right now with this case, we're recording this on Thursday. Boatspear gave them a 24-hour extension to provide details about the flights. The government has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets, despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights, including in the video that we discussed. Yeah, they're turning these into fucking like TikTok, Instagram, real hype videos. They're not state secrets.

Starting point is 00:26:27 It's propaganda. You're publicly displaying these to show that these people are not human. Yeah. Like you're trying to scare everyone into saying, we decide if you are a person or not. And if you're not a person, this is what we can do to you. We can do whatever we want to. Yeah. It should be noted as well, there is actually a process in US law through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing

Starting point is 00:26:51 classified information publicly. In fact, Boesberg was chief judge on that court for five years. Jesus Christ. But we are not using that process, we're using the Alien Enemies Act instead. So yeah, this is a new exciting territory in on Monday. So that's the day that you're hearing this a panel of judges from the district court in DC will hear an appeal by the United States government against Boasberg's attentive restraining order, the one that it didn't obey anyway. So we will have more on this and we will keep updating you on this.

Starting point is 00:27:28 And suffice it to say that I guess again, this is a constitutional crisis. Like this is what it looks like. I don't, I don't know if people expect like fireworks to go off or like some confetti to drop and it to be like separation of powers is gone. But if the government can ignore the courts, then that is what is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime, these people, many of whom, one of them was a musician, one of them was a football player, right?

Starting point is 00:27:58 Like I've interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of fence-wearing migrants, and most of them, it will shock you to hear, are just people who don't want to live with the state on their neck, people who want to make a decent living for their families. For what it's worth, none of the Venezuelan migrants I met in the Tarrién Gap are in the United States or have come to the United States for my knowledge, just for people who are wondering how those stories resolve. They resolve with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions, either working for very little or unable to work at all

Starting point is 00:28:30 and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty bleak for them. It's pretty bleak for us too, if this is the direction that things are going. I don't know if I have much more to say. No, I don't know what else there is to say about them just bypassing the courts to do a complete authoritarian over grab so that they can send hundreds of people to essentially a labor camp black site in a different country for an unknown period of time without any

Starting point is 00:29:00 legal process. And to be clear, not all of these people even entered the United States between ports of entry, which has been charged as a misdemeanor, but generally isn't charged. Some of them came with the CBP-1, the fucking app, the thing you're supposed to do. These are not proven criminals. Like these are just people, some of whom who immigrated legally and have been detained by ICE and are now shipped off to a like torture labor prison in a different country where they're gonna stay for at least a year in Parenthesis renewable so like indefinitely like it's like they can be forced to labor for the rest of their lives a thing

Starting point is 00:29:44 That has happened before in human history. No, like if you're like history, understanders should look at what's happening, be like, oh, we're doing that again, huh? And the only way that this ends is with people getting angry enough to start doing something about it. And I feel like we are we're so like everyone's become so complacent that it's even hard to get people to like care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening. Yeah. And you don't have to be like care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening. Yeah. And you don't have to be like, I want to phrase this in radical terms, but you don't have to be like anywhere on the left to understand that like this is an assault on basic human

Starting point is 00:30:15 rights. It's assault on the foundational principles of the United States government. And everyone should be concerned about this. You shouldn't be a left right issue. This should be like a right wrong issue. So hopefully you can all have some talks with your family this week. I don't know. Like I think it's really important to push back on the idea that these people have done

Starting point is 00:30:37 any crimes because they have not that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable degree of evidence to be members of gangs like Trem de Aragua. And even if they have been convicted, they should not be sent to the Al Salvador Torture Labor Camp. But the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just random, in some cases, like random Venezuelan men who have been rounded up. For the crime of having tattoos, for the most part. Fucking horrifying.

Starting point is 00:31:02 It is petrifying. Yeah. It's happening. It is fucking horrifying. It is petrifying. It's happening. It is happening here. Every day we're getting closer to the cool zone as more and more people start taking this situation seriously. Yeah. So yeah, take it seriously. Advocate for these people. Best of luck. And if you want to email us, you can do at coolzone tips at proton.me. That's an encrypted email address, but it's only encrypted end to end. If you also send from an encrypted email address, do your due diligence and yeah,

Starting point is 00:31:34 send us send us tips if you have tips, ideas, if you have ideas. And we will be back tomorrow with more things that are happening here. Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty. And today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco. I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story, about their relationship like you've never heard it before. I wanna go back to the first time you ever met.

Starting point is 00:32:18 Whoa. Thank you so much for this. Benny. One of the greatest. Thank you. I'm Selena, but we're watching Dizzy Kidd. When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up

Starting point is 00:32:32 all these walls before, and then the first second, you like disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger,

Starting point is 00:32:51 it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun.

Starting point is 00:33:14 I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often- We have quite a similar- There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like- No! Have we? No. here. Not like... No!

Starting point is 00:33:25 Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never. I cannot wait for all you girls, gays and theys to join me on this extremely special pink confection of a podcast. There is so much darkness in this world and what I think we could all use more of is a

Starting point is 00:33:38 little joy. Listen to the Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Love ya! Prohibition. It's no secret that banning alcohol didn't stop people from living it up in the 1920s. When we're five years into Prohibition, the government is starting to go, okay, this isn't working.

Starting point is 00:33:59 In fact, you might even say it backfired spectacularly. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, we're taking you back to the 1920s and the tale of Formula 6. Because what you probably don't know about Prohibition is that American citizens were dying in massive numbers due to poisoned liquor, and all along, an unlikely duo was trying desperately

Starting point is 00:34:22 to stop the corruption behind it. They were like superhero crusaders turning the page on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair, and was corrupt. So how did prohibitions' war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.

Starting point is 00:34:59 Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle

Starting point is 00:35:22 against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law, and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.

Starting point is 00:35:47 Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Get Up and Hear, a podcast about bad things. Usually, I don't know, this is mostly a bad things episode. I am your host Mia Wong and one of the kind of things we've emphasized on the show a lot is that a lot of the structure of the kind of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that was put in place under liberal administrations and its practices that are carried out by Democrats and one of the biggest ones of those and this is something that I think you can trace the violence here and you can trace the politics that inspired directly to how we got to Trump being in power is

Starting point is 00:36:35 the just continuous crisis in the US of governments doing sweeps of encampments of unhoused people and Talk about really one of the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does advocacy work for unhoused and disabled people in Alameda County and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when, yeah, this fucking unhinged shit happens. So both of you two, welcome to the show. Emma Cooke Hi. Emma Cooke Thanks for having us. Satya Pichai Yeah, thank you.

Starting point is 00:37:02 Emma Cooke Appreciate the chance to talk with you. Yeah. I always want to say that I'm excited and like it is true. However, I wish I read a podcast that was about like good things so that I could talk to people. It wasn't like it wasn't me being like, yeah, I'm excited to talk about like the worst thing that's happened. So I think a place to start on this is when we talk about what a sweep actually is on a physical level of what happens, because I think people really don't have a sense of that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:36 Yeah, I think Sotya, maybe you want to take this one? Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. Yeah, thank you. I feel like, first of all, before I even go into it, yes, I think a lot of people who have never experienced a sweep or don't have loved ones who have been swept, I think a lot of people have no idea what a sweep actually consists of, even if in a general sense they feel that it's a bad thing

Starting point is 00:37:58 or a wrong thing. And I think part of that is deliberate. Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland they're conducted by the Department of Public Works. They're city employees. They work nine to five. So except in cases where they work overtime or when the city uses loopholes to get around posting notice and ends up doing a sweep on the weekend, they're usually happening when

Starting point is 00:38:24 a lot of middle-class housed folks are at work and not out and about seeing what's going on. So a sweep, and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California, but I think it's safe to assume that these operate in similar ways around the country. Generally what'll happen is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a sweep has been posted in Oakland, there is policy that states that you're supposed to have received at least a week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice so you might not even know that it's happening. You might wake up at around 9 a.m. to a bunch of heavy machinery, pulling up

Starting point is 00:39:01 dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of sort of like heavy equipment. And then you'll have somebody from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know, making noise at your tent or your car or wherever you're staying saying, hey, this encampment is being closed down, you have to be out of here. They're usually a representatives of the city's contracted outreach organization called Operation Dignity. They're supposed to be there. Very rarely do they actually have a referral for somewhere to go. They'll basically just be like, hey, do you want services? They won't usually

Starting point is 00:39:39 specify what the services are. They'll just show up and be like, hey, do you want services? what the services are, they'll just show up and be like, hey, do you want services? If you say yes or have questions about what services are available, they may give you a sort of very vague rundown of whatever might be available that day, because they don't usually even find out what openings are available until 10 a.m. on any given day. So at the time that they roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet. So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every sweep is a little different,

Starting point is 00:40:09 but the commonality between all of them is that what the city is there to do is essentially to erase all sign that anybody ever lived there. So either you are able to pack as much stuff as you can and get it out of the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends up in the back of a dump truck.

Starting point is 00:40:29 There are other sort of specific pieces of policy and operational things that can vary from time to time, like for example, they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which means that they're expected to store up to a cubic yard of somebody's belongings for 90 days at a storage location in East Oakland. They rarely do this unless hounded to do so. And most of the time, the actual process of going back and reclaiming your belongings from that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages to do it. Yes. So just make this clear. The thing that they're doing is they show up and they fucking destroy all your property. Yeah. Like the thing that it most closely resembles is like,

Starting point is 00:41:11 we're doing our own miniature ethnic cleansing. Like that's just like what that is. Yep. Yes. And every sweep, there are at least several police, you know, depending on the size of the suite, they can be even more. And so there is a very real threat of police violence, like underlying every single encampment suite. And so the suite that Oakland,

Starting point is 00:41:40 the suite practices that Oakland has set up are like very kind of odd and they are associated with different like lawsuits that have occurred in the past couple of actually since the 70s. But so there are certain requirements that the city of Oakland is obligated to follow in certain provisions and offers that homeless people are technically supposed to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons rarely ever are. For instance, the back-and-tag policy that Satya was just discussing, Dave, recently somebody did a PRA request to see whether or not to sit. He was actually following faithfully following that policy. And I think in like over a year, there were, I believe eight bag in tags that were registered

Starting point is 00:42:39 in the city system. And that was in that same period, there were like well over 100 sweeps, you know, I don't have the exact number on me, but are yet actually 537, close to instances of storing property. So, you know, that's people's, their whole lives, all their possessions, like precious items that they're able to hang onto are just, yeah, destroyed and they never see them again. And I would also add to the piece around like the quote, like offer of services, like that's also something written

Starting point is 00:43:24 into their policy that they're supposed to be connecting people to housing ahead of sweeps. And that's what they use to continually justify the way that they operate is that in, for example, city council meetings and homelessness commission meetings where city admin is questioned on their procedures because they get complaints, like the homeless commission gets complaints constantly of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting referred on their procedures because they get complaints. Like the Homeless Commission gets complaints constantly of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting referred to housing and so forth.

Starting point is 00:43:51 And the justification that's constantly used is like, well, we're offering people services every time and they just refuse them. And I think that that is pretty much the number one mythology that is continuing to spur a lot of the like pro sweep discourse in Oakland specifically and I'm sure in other parts of the country as well and people are not like to be clear most of the time people are not actually being offered

Starting point is 00:44:16 services it's just not happening yeah yeah this is a national discourse you should assault I mean you know I think a lot of it kind of is concentrated in the most unhinged tech sectors in the Bay, but you hear, like, officially, Elon Musk has talked about, like, oh, there's a homeless industrial complex, and all of these people are just like, they want to live on the street, and they're turning down houses all the time. And it's just like, it's so completely unmoored from reality but what's funny is i've actually used the term homeless industrial complex myself i didn't know that was there is that's hilarious there is a homeless industrial complex it's just that the

Starting point is 00:44:56 people making money off of it are the people who are perpetrating the sweeps the reason that they're not actually putting forth real solutions that will get people into safe shelter and housing is because they're the ones benefiting from the perpetuation of these economic conditions. Yeah, there's so many things that I want to take up on, but I guess just on that point specifically, there was an audit into California's spending on homelessness. I believe it was over a period of seven years, and it showed that there was $24 billion spent on grants to nonprofits or cities to provide people with different services that are designed around homelessness and providing housing or legal

Starting point is 00:45:47 services. Like there's a whole range of things that's out there, but a lot of the time, like these are the only options that are available to people and they tend to produce less than stellar results. So out of the $24 billion that was allocated to help homeless people in that same period of time, homelessness in California just like skyrocketed, right? So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting pumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of like landlords and developers it is an issue that people on every like side of the political compass like they like to to use this point to their own like ends, right, so Elon Musk talks about it and Like people on the left will talk about it

Starting point is 00:46:44 talks about it and like people on the left will talk about it. But I think like the experience that people on the street have is, is very different than any of these narratives that you tend to hear. And the media. Yeah. So unfortunately we need to take an ad break. I don't, I don't have a good transition here. I don't know. We'll move from one set of horrors to a slightly different set of horrors and come back to

Starting point is 00:47:05 the first set of horrors. All of this money is being dedicated to these programs and homelessness is only rising. I think like one thing that I've heard before that's a kind of useful way to think about this kind of government spending is if homeless people would be better off, if you just gave them the money directly, you know, then that kind of way, it's really hard to justify these programs when that can't be said of them, you know?

Starting point is 00:47:46 And I think the thing that you pointed out, Emma, about the fact that we have huge amounts of money allegedly being spent on like homelessness abatement or homeless services at the same time that homelessness is skyrocketing is really not an accident because what that money is really being spent on is to fuel exactly what is it like the homeless industrial complex. There's a reason that most of that money is going into the pockets of landlords and developers and then sort of like these sort of large, like nonprofit, almost like conglomerates of like service providers. And it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it exists in this country is not to get homeless people into housing, it's to line the pockets of the people that are making the most money off of

Starting point is 00:48:32 the real estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness like escalating at the same time. It's because this is the feedback loop. The way that our economic priorities in this country are structured are such that those two things are going to feed into each other because that money doesn't actually exist to serve the populations that they say that they're using it to serve. What they do get to do is by claiming that that money is going into homelessness abatement, when clearly it isn't, they then get to spin a narrative where they say, oh, we've spent all this money, but the problem is just getting worse. That must mean that it is the

Starting point is 00:49:14 fault of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly the services must exist to get them off the street. In reality, that's not the case at all. Yeah, I think also it's super important for people to understand that these programs, housing programs, shelter programs, they are out there, but they are decoupled from the sweep operations that are occurring, right? So the city of Oakland, they are contracted with a non-profit, Safdieh mentioned earlier called Operation Dignity. They are required to check in with

Starting point is 00:49:54 different encampments that are scheduled to be closed at least a week before the sweep. The purpose of that is to notify people that it's happening. The city of Oakland is required, per the terms of this lawsuit back in, I believe, 2019, the Morales lawsuit. And there was a settlement that resulted in the city being required to provide clear notices whenever they're going to close like a site. So yeah, this nonprofit provider is supposed to notify people and try to get them connected with services. However, the services for the most part, like housing for people who are unhoused is largely funded through the federal government and through this very complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry.

Starting point is 00:50:55 The coordinated entry system is not something that the city of Oakland or Operation Dignity Lake, that is not something that they're providing people with during the suite. When the city of Oakland, for instance, in one of the commission on homelessness meetings, the city administrator, Harold Duffy, he presented actually in response to a question about somebody's wheelchair being destroyed by public works. Yeah. He gave this really like roundabout deflecting like answer where he said basically that everyone who is at an encampment at the time of the sweep has

Starting point is 00:51:48 like expressly refused services like shelter or housing or whatever and that they kind of presumes that the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with which is just not the case. The coordinated entry system, it is a program that is first of all, like, only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent supportive housing through the program, but also it is in such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're in, that the waitlist is like thousands of people long, and it can take well over a year before someone can get housing through that

Starting point is 00:52:41 system. So it's just like, it's not true. They do offer people what are called community cabins, which are tough sheds. They're not even offering people that they're full. They're full. Yeah, that's what they say they offer. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I feel strongly about this. So I think it's also worth saying, like in terms of, I feel like that's a really, a really useful layout, Emma, in terms of like the way that the system is actually structured for people not to be able to access services. I feel like it's also worth pointing out that, just day to day on the ground, I feel like, I feel like I get to see a lot of sort of like,

Starting point is 00:53:22 minute details and changes in the way that they're operating in response to what their like internal systems actually look like and what we have seen over the last six months to a year is not only this pattern that I'm I was talking about of like They're like people are consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused of refusing services Just due to the conditions that they're living under. But also, everything that Oakland has that approaches like livable transitional housing, which is kind of laughable in this case because we can also go into like the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in Oakland, which are abysmal, But everything that they have that approaches livable transitional housing is full. I very rarely, every few weeks maybe, I see one or two

Starting point is 00:54:10 people get referred to one of those programs. And far more often, I'll be in a situation, for example, I was at a sweep over near 23rd and Northgate a couple weeks ago. And I was there when Operation Dignity rolled up and I heard what they were saying when they were talking to people and this one dude was going around talking to folks and he kind of he wasn't even approaching talking about services he was approaching being like hey I'm just here to let you know that this area is gonna be closed down like there's a sweep that's gonna be happening so you guys have to be out of here so that was what they led with and then I prompted him because I was there chatting with one of the guys that he

Starting point is 00:54:43 was talking to so I prompted him I like, do you have any services to offer? And then he was like, Oh, you can go over to St. Vincent de Paul, which is a congregate shelter in West Oakland with about 40 beds. And nobody is guaranteed a spot. It's just a room full of cots. A lot of people refuse to go there because the conditions are so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping in a room full of a bunch of strangers with no kind of security, no guarantee of being able to hold on to their stuff, people are only allowed to bring in like a backpack's worth of stuff, I'm pretty sure. And you also have to, it's first come first serve, so you have to line up outside every

Starting point is 00:55:18 single day and you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even if you line up outside. So what we have is a situation where the availability of services varies from day to day. I cannot think of a single sweep in the last year that I have been to, and I'm at usually multiple sleeps a week, where there were enough guaranteed spots available for every person being swept. So the implicit assumption at every single sweep, and the Operation Dignity people know this too, like they know this.

Starting point is 00:55:47 The implicit assumption when they roll up and the assumption that colors even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're having with people is that the majority of people are just gonna have to figure out how to pack their shit up and fight another place to camp. It's the assumption. And it's gotten to the point where like OD employees

Starting point is 00:56:04 will roll up, and like I said, they won't even necessarily lead with an offer of services. They'll lead almost in the hopes that the majority of people already have a place to relocate. They'll ask, do you have a place to go? Before they offer services or ask if people are interested in services, they'll ask, like, do you have another spot to move this stuff first? Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many people as possible

Starting point is 00:56:24 from their list of people that they feel obligated to offer services to because they know they don't fucking have anything. Yeah, I think it's super important to just emphasize that point. The city is telling the media, they're telling like businesses, anyone that comes to them with problems related to to homelessness or concerns, they're telling them that everyone is being offered shelter and housing. And it's just not true. And that is reflective in the city's own publicly available data. So they actually publish a list of all of the encampment suites that they do throughout the year.

Starting point is 00:57:09 And in the Commission on Homelessness meetings, they'll report back to the commission about service enrollments that they've done through a certain period of time and like from May to September, they had enrolled, I believe it was 60 people into services, like non-specified services. And during that period, there was approximately 80 sweeps. And if you assume there's at least five to 10 people at every encampment when they do a sweep, and usually it's more, that is like 9%, 4.5% of people getting enrolled into services. And like of those maybe a smaller fraction getting into shelter. And when they get into shelter, they just languish there, right? They aren't connected with caseworkers who helped them get through this really convoluted

Starting point is 00:58:19 coordinated entry process and like lengthy coordinated entry process. And so within a few months, they're just right back on the street, you know, it's just ridiculous. And unfortunately, because homeless people have very little like, I guess you could call it social capital, you know, the city can get away with a lot of this stuff. They do like blatantly illegal things that are against even their own policies. And nothing happens. And I guess like maybe we should back up a little bit and discuss the city's policy. From second outbreak. And then we will come back more ads.

Starting point is 00:59:05 I don't know by the question mark. We are back. Yeah. So, yeah, let's talk about, I think, what what the city's policies are supposed to be versus like what they're actually doing on the ground. Yeah, I mean, their policy is their cover your ass technique, right? Their policy is what they refer back to whenever they want to sort of like, like Emma said, if they're interfacing with businesses or house people, you know, and we have a whole range of house people calling 311,

Starting point is 00:59:47 which is basically their tip line for like, oh, you see a homeless person that you don't want to be seeing. But there's a whole range of people, there's people that are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going out doing vigilante shit and like destroying homeless people's stuff on their own, and then you also have people that are well- well intentioned and really think the city is offering services. So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy. That's the purpose their policy serves is not to inform their actions but to inform their PR. So I think it would be helpful, Emma, how do you feel about if you want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's policy and then I can kind of give a breakdown into what that translates into on the ground. Yeah, so this is like it's kind of a complicated situation but the city has what's what they call their encampment management policy and it was initially passed in I believe, but it's gone through several evolutions over the past 10 years or so. And

Starting point is 01:00:50 it is related to different Supreme Court cases and the settlement that I mentioned earlier. This policy, it provides certain very limited protections for people who are homeless in the city limits. The city is required by this policy to offer shelter. I believe it's a week for any person who's like subject to one of their encampment closures. And also we mentioned the bag and tag policy. So if somebody, you know, they are evicted and they move somewhere outside with a tent, they bring all of their possessions with them. They are provided with a, sessions with them. They are provided with a, I believe, three foot by three foot like storage space and this facility that is super inaccessible and kind of like, like I don't even know if it's actually real, to be honest, because it's just like nobody ever, I've never

Starting point is 01:02:01 heard of anybody actually like getting their stuff stored and getting back. But technically that is a possibility. However, the city will only hold onto it for so long before they throw it away. And then the last protection or provision is the city was until recently supposed to provide people with shelter. So a few different Supreme Court cases are behind that provision specifically.

Starting point is 01:02:29 And I think a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy framework that they were following until the grants passed ruling. And I guess maybe we don't need to get into that too much. But basically, the whole idea of that policy was if somebody is living outside and the city sweeps them, they have to provide them with some kind of alternative accommodation.

Starting point is 01:03:01 Because according to the district court, it was considered like cruel and unusual punishment to penalize somebody for being homeless without offering them some kind of temporary accommodations. And so that was more or less the city's nominal framework for several years basically and the degree to which they actually followed these policies, you know, they really didn't except for in certain situations where there are like, for instance, legal advocates who will file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep on the basis of failure to provide

Starting point is 01:03:53 an alternative accommodation. And typically, those arise when there is a very large encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue. A lot of the time, for instance, there'll be people staying on city or like California state land and the city will like force them to move because of some development project that they're planning to do. And so in those situations when the media has kind of narrowed their focus and began discussing some of this stuff in the local press, then something like that became possible. But after the grants passed ruling this past year, the city was no longer obligated under federal law

Starting point is 01:04:50 to follow those policies. And in September of last year, the late Mayor Shengtao, she issued an executive order that more or less like just totally like rendered that policy framework irrelevant. So she put forth a new framework that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered system of what are called emergency suites. So if, for instance, the encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then it is a hazard to the public, quote unquote. Or if somebody has a tent that is up against a building of some sort, it's a

Starting point is 01:05:46 fire hazard. And so in this tiered system, there's like different levels of safety hazards that they're doing now. And basically what that looks like is like a fire marshal and the city administrator will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody that's staying outside by their business. And with the fire hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without any prior notice. Whereas the other two, there is some like level of notice that they're technically required

Starting point is 01:06:22 to provide. But yeah, so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it, they're technically required to provide. But yeah, so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it, they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own city resolution. But there is this provision that like if, for instance, they issue somebody a one-hour notice to leave because of a fire hazard, and advocates can't make it there because they don't really know, nobody knows it's happening, then the city can just do that and not offer people anything.

Starting point is 01:07:01 So these policies have the effect of disempowering our ability to respond to a scheduled operation. Then the city can really just do whatever they want, because nobody's watching what they're doing. And I guess we can take this here towards something I think would probably be good to start closing on, which is like, what can people actually do about this?

Starting point is 01:07:28 First of all, I think listening to all of this, it can be really easy to feel disempowered and to feel like, you know, the walls are closing in and there's nothing that we can do. And that remains not the case, you know, I think people should feel empowered to be able to physically intervene, because the most effective way of physically intervening with this kind of violence is to commit to relationship building. Something that I've talked about a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks that are kind of involved in like sweeps response and crisis response in Oakland is that the one thing that the city cannot take away from us

Starting point is 01:08:06 that we have an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are so inefficient and so, you know, seemingly bad at their jobs is not just the fact that they don't have anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street knows they're full of shit,

Starting point is 01:08:21 because they never show up with anything real. And addressing house people in particular, right? Like one of the things to get out of is sort of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh, like I don't have any housing to offer, therefore I can't do anything. Like I can't fix the problem,

Starting point is 01:08:36 I can't fix the roots, so I can't do anything. In reality, all you really need to do is to learn to set that mentality aside and show up and like start meeting folks where they're at, start meeting your neighbors where they're at, start building relationships. You need to know like if you live in a particular neighborhood, think to yourself, I need to know that if any unhoused person within a mile radius of my home was disappeared, I would need to I would need to know. You

Starting point is 01:09:03 know what I mean? Like I would wanna know if that happened. So if you go out with that understanding that you're starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are living outside in your neighborhood, ideally a lot of other people in your neighborhood too. You know what I mean? But like what they're banking on is right now, while they're still trying to use a PR cover

Starting point is 01:09:23 for what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses, people not finding out about the violations, people not being there, and people not having relationships that will remain strong even as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what you can do to start is start investing in those relationships. Make sure you know what people's names are. Make sure you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted. Hey, that guy used to be on that corner, you know, every couple days of the week,

Starting point is 01:09:55 and now I never see him anymore. What happened to him? And I think you can start there, and there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean, one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up at this point is direct on the ground sweeps response. So we're still able to keep track currently of what their schedule is on a weekly basis, more or less. Like there's definitely operations we don't find out about until after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations we do still know about ahead of time. And so we'll show up, we'll make sure we get there before the city does.

Starting point is 01:10:21 So like by 8am, ideally, right? Like we show up, talk to people, be like, what do you need? Do you need physical help moving your belongings out of the eviction zone? Do you need to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody who said they were going to come help you? Do you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number of things really, but just like being willing to show up and ask questions without necessarily knowing what answers you're going to get and being down to follow up and like do aftercare with people and check in on folks and like keep building those relationships. I think that those are the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to need to be doing in the

Starting point is 01:10:52 future because you know what the city is counting on is that they're going to be able to successfully create a scapegoat, right? They want to create like a faceless nameless mass of people that they can pin all their problems on and then incarcerate and the best thing that we can do is of people that they can pin all their problems on and then incarcerate and The best thing that we can do is make sure that they can't successfully do that because we all have relationships to each other. Yeah, I Really appreciate those sentiments up. Yeah, and I think like the Oakland like advocates Doing like eviction and defense for people who are living outside it's thrown in size and

Starting point is 01:11:27 capacity quite a bit in the past year. The city has noticed that. They've actually passed various resolutions. Honestly, a lot of their practices and their policies, like their encampment management team, they seem to be responding to the increasing effectiveness of this response, this network of community defense. And so I think that all of those things are so important, especially as the Trump regime starts to eliminate

Starting point is 01:12:11 the very modest social safety net that there was. And before we end this conversation, I just want to emphasize that in Oakland, like a majority of the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence, they are non-white, mostly black, and are homeless in neighborhoods where they used to be housed. And so the gentrification that has happened, particularly in like West Oakland and the influx of high income tech workers that displaced them and moved into their like family homes. They are the same people who are calling 3-1-1 to like push the city to displace them again but from a tent or a car this time. And I think it's

Starting point is 01:13:14 it's just so so important that particularly like housed people try to tap into the networks of community defense that exist in their areas. I'm sure that most cities probably have something comparable to Oakland. But with the measures that we're seeing cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is about 30 minutes south of Oakland, where they basically banned or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can get $1,000 fine or up to six months in jail

Starting point is 01:13:59 for dating and abetting a homeless person and you know it's an extremely vague law. So like giving someone a blanket could fall under this. So you could be fined or put in jail for giving an unhoused person a blanket in Fremont currently. So it's very important that people try to be aware of their city government, how they're maybe passing anti-homeless measures in their cities and trying to mobilize against that from happening. I also have one more thing to add to that I'm so sorry. Specifically, for anybody thinking about getting involved or organizing strategically around community defense, sweep defense, whatever that looks like in your particular area, I would say,

Starting point is 01:14:51 first of all, especially if you're a house person in this case, invest valuable time into getting to know people on an interpersonal level and getting to know people's needs first instead of falling into the trap of imposing what you might have learned through like other sort of direct action organizing because this is not that, you know? Like I think yeah, first of all, just making sure that you're being, you're organizing as being led by the needs of, you know, homeless residents that are expressing what they need to you. But also on top of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves of legislation that are being passed around like anti-homeless laws and stuff, don't preemptively obey. You know what I mean? If you live in Fremont,

Starting point is 01:15:30 don't preemptively say, ah, fuck, I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen in Oakland with the particular iterations of anti-homeless legislation that they've passed here is that just because they've passed legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet. And what you need to do really is step up real hard and show them you can't enforce this the way that you want to. And they're gonna push back. There's gonna be this back and forth interplay that we've seen, you know, for example, in Oakland with the Safe Works Unordinance, which we can probably get into another time because it's way too much to get into right now, I think, at this point in the episode. But it's a two-way street.

Starting point is 01:16:05 It's this fight that you have to play to show them just because you've passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in a particular way. You have to give them something to fight against, you know what I mean? So that's just the other piece. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and the rest of their policy is absolutely 100% evidence that if the state doesn't want to follow the law, it isn't real. But that also means that like if they can't enforce a law, like it also effectively ceases to exist. That's just the sort of balance of forces here. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:32 Yeah. Yeah. And there is a lawsuit currently against that. And it sounds like, you know, the city of Fremont is probably going to be removing that aiding and abetting clause from the resolution, but because that specific provision is actually like in the city's municipal code as a general provision. So, you know, even if they do remove it, charges could still be brought against somebody. So like really the entire ordinance needs to be eliminated altogether. Yeah, I guess do you have anything else that you want to make sure that you get in before we close

Starting point is 01:17:13 this out? I don't think so. Not nothing that comes to mind. But yeah, again, super appreciate you having us on to talk about this. Yeah, you know, shit is rough right now. I think for me personally, it's been really helpful to direct my energy towards things in my social network in a way that's like constructive and helpful to others. So I would definitely like suggest if you're feeling like any despair,

Starting point is 01:17:47 or like worried about becoming like blackpilled or whatever, like yeah, just try to tap in and focus on things that are happening in your community. It's good for you and it's good for the people in your community. Yeah, just seconding that, I think, like being able to tap in specifically with like the types of unhoused organizing and underground economies that exist wherever unhoused people exist and like being able to like tap into that and like, you know, again, like speaking from the perspective of a house person, like really humble yourself and learn from that. Like you're're gonna learn a Whole lot more relevant life skills

Starting point is 01:18:28 Just hanging out in social settings with people in the street than you are in any other area of your life So just go balls to the wall just start hanging out just like spend all your time loitering like just that's that's where we need To be right now is loitering in the street. That's where the organizing is happening. Yeah, it's reclaiming the space. Hell yeah. This has been Naked Append Here. Go loiter on street corners and make the state's life miserable until it cannot do the things it is doing right now. Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty and today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.

Starting point is 01:19:20 I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story about their relationship like you've never heard it before I want to go back to the first time you ever met Europe pop star like she is and you're a huge entity and people set up all these walls before and then the first second you like disarmed everybody. By the way congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:20:13 Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often...

Starting point is 01:20:32 We have quite a similar... There's some cross pollination happening in here. Not like... No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never. I cannot wait for all you girls, gays, and theys to join me on this extremely special

Starting point is 01:20:45 pink confection of a podcast. There is so much darkness in this world and what I think we could all use more of is a little joy. Listen to the Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Love ya! Prohibition. It's no secret that banning alcohol didn't stop people from living it up in the 1920s.

Starting point is 01:21:04 When we're five years into Prohibition, the government is starting to go, okay, this isn't working. In fact, you might even say it backfired spectacularly. I'm Ed Helms and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, we're taking you back to the 1920s and the tale of Formula 6. Because what you probably don't know about Prohibition is that American citizens were dying in massive numbers due to poisoned liquor,

Starting point is 01:21:31 and all along an unlikely duo was trying desperately to stop the corruption behind it. They were like superhero crusaders turning the page on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair, and was corrupt. So how did Prohibition's war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:22:02 In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

Starting point is 01:22:25 It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting this series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law

Starting point is 01:22:43 and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:23:04 Hi Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how it's happened here and it continues to happen here. Sorry about that, but we're not changing the name of the podcast. You know, cause we're not. Anyway, I got James Stout with me. I got Garrison Davis with me. Woot woot. Huzzah. So, the past few weeks, myself as well as probably everyone else on this call,

Starting point is 01:23:35 has been getting a lot of questions from listeners via the various social media apps that we damage ourselves by logging into on a much more than needed frequent basis. But one question that's been kind of on a lot of people's minds and something that we've been discussing as like a group is the idea of should you flee the country? Is the party over? Do we need to use the time we have now to get out? The Trump administration is cracking down on a whole bunch of groups of already marginalized people, people with fewer resources, immigrants, people who are here for asylum, trans people, queer people in general. It's getting pretty scary out there and the thought crosses your mind maybe there's somewhere else that's better. And this has always been a tough question

Starting point is 01:24:33 for us to kind of think about because we don't want to like inspire panic. That's not the purpose of what we do here. You should try to spread calm when times are bad if you can. But the situation politically in the country and in many parts of the world right now is extremely fraught and it does feel closer towards like the bad nightmare scenario than kind of I've ever thought it has before. So it's a really tough question. And I think what we're going to be doing this episode is just kind of talking about this question

Starting point is 01:25:09 and our thoughts around, you know, various responses to this line of thought. And I guess Robert kind of has a baseline, like kind of quasi-answer that I think we can use as a jumping off point. You know, if you're someone who is being targeted, or in a community of people who are being targeted, you're a naturalized citizen, you're hair on a green card, you're trans, any of the many different groups of people that are being targeted right now, and you have the opportunity to leave and

Starting point is 01:25:45 you think that that's the right thing for you, then you should do it. You shouldn't feel bad about it. If you've got a job that is in demand in other countries and you know the process and can start the process to get residency somewhere else and work somewhere else and make your life work that way, then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that if that's what you decide is the right thing for you. That said, it's not, it's just simply not going to be a realistic possibility for most people.

Starting point is 01:26:16 What is more realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving from states where the risk is higher to states where maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long the risk will be lower, you know? But I certainly, that's more achievable for a lot of people than getting set up in a foreign country as James will talk about. If your hope is just, I'm going to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever as an asylum seeker, as again, James will go into more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers.

Starting point is 01:26:43 And that's not really, again, it may not be nearly as much of an option as you think that it is right now. I, you know, had to go through kind of my own process after the election of like, well, am I going to like, you know, get my finances in order and move to another country and basically try to like, Pay my way into getting a visa somewhere, like in Spain, which is an option for, for someone like me. And I came to the conclusion that like, nah, you know, if the worst case thing happens, I'd rather like die here or, or whatever, it's just not worth it, you

Starting point is 01:27:15 know, to try to get out. So I'm committing to trying to like, hold the line here with everybody basically that I love in the world, because like, what else are you going to do? You know? Yeah. Like, I will just say that. Cause like, what else are you going to do? You know? Yeah. Like I will just say that, you know, I probably have met more asylum seekers than most people, you know, and it is one of the more miserable fates available to a human.

Starting point is 01:27:36 It will, if large numbers of people start leaving the U S only get worse. If you're someone who's a U US citizen, you have probably not experienced much in the way of like strict immigration enforcement if you have traveled around the world, right? You have one of the more high value passports in the world. You can, you can go almost anywhere with a visa or in many cases without a visa. Seeking asylum is an extremely different process. If you think you're just going to get on a flight and leave and stay somewhere, like understand that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas with the United States soon if we continue our current sort of pathway

Starting point is 01:28:16 with a more isolationist immigration policy and you'll have to get that visa and then, you know, if you overstay, you will be subject to enforcement. and you'll have to get that visa and then you know if you overstay you will be subject to enforcement. The sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be something you enjoy again and that's just if you're able to fly somewhere and then say you try and overstay a visa or you try and apply for asylum. I have people I've met in every facet of my life like I know guys who I met as a bike racer who have applied for asylum guys. I met a bike racer was staying on that barge in the UK. It is, it is a miserable fate.

Starting point is 01:28:52 And I think that's that I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying that you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and it's trip you of all dignity and in some places it strips people of like their lives right people die migrating it's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that migrants do because that everyone is trying to make a buck off them right i was just talking on another podcast about how the the journey that people took up through the darien gap who tried to come to united states it would have cost them way less just to fly, but they couldn't because they couldn't get the visas, right? That doesn't mean like if you have a historical right to citizenship through various, you

Starting point is 01:29:32 know, certain people have rights to Spanish citizenship or German citizenship or Irish is one that many people have access to. Yeah. Yeah. Why not, why not, you know, if you have the financial resources, why not try and see where that will go? Why not begin pursuing that? Totally.

Starting point is 01:29:47 Yeah, sure. I think becoming a dual citizen, if you have the capability to, is a fantastic idea that I will like never dissuade someone from. No, I would go so far as to say, even if you plan to stay here, if you have the ability to get dual citizenship, you should be pursuing that right now. Absolutely. Like, is it something that you should do? It's often not hideously expensive. And it's something that might be, yeah, you have options, and options are good.

Starting point is 01:30:16 Yeah, I am very hesitant to like, openly call for like, now is the time to leave the country. I do not feel comfortable saying that for a number of reasons. Like some of them are more political, as in like I don't really subscribe to a politics of escape. Even the idea of like fleeing states I feel a little bit iffy about. Now there's certainly, you know, a lot of cases where families are trying to move, you know, outside states that have more restricted access to trans health care for minors towards more friendly states, which I totally understand. But I have greatly enjoyed getting to know a whole bunch of trans people in the South and a whole bunch of trans people here are not willing to leave their home.

Starting point is 01:31:00 This is their home and it always will be and they're going to stay and fight for it even as things get harder. And I don't think you should write these people off. I don't think you should write these places off. These places are still a terrain of battle and they're going to be places where trans people can still live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And that is worth acknowledging, that's worth putting effort into. To the point that like after the election, I was already considering maybe trying to travel around the country some more.

Starting point is 01:31:31 And after this last election, my line of thought was way more on the side of, I would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia as possible. I would actually want to stay in the South for as much as I can because this is like not a place that I think people should be walking away from. And in some ways that does come from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons. As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport as well as an American passport, that is, you know, something that I like to have as a back pocket option. But that's something I'm not considering at all.

Starting point is 01:32:05 I do not want to move to Canada. All my friends are here. My life is here. There are certain scenarios where things get much, much, much worse, even though things are getting quite bad. But there are certain scenarios where, yes, that passport will come in handy. And that's why I do encourage, no matter what, you should see if you have any options to become a citizen

Starting point is 01:32:25 in more than one country. It is a great thing to be. It's good to not be just tied down to one place. But the process of trying to, you know, immigrate somewhere where you do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging. And we will probably discuss some more of this later, because I think there's also a sort of like onion of threat of people when you're thinking about this question, like which people will be or are currently being targeted the most, and how that kind of affects the options in terms

Starting point is 01:32:55 of relocation to places view it as safer havens. And I would like to jumpstart that Onion of Protection discussion after these messages. [♪ Music playing. We're back and we're talking about onions, which you need to wear around your neck to protect you from evil spirits. Garrison, that's what you were getting at, right? Yes. Let's wrap this one up, that's done. Move on to the next topic.

Starting point is 01:33:28 Where five different onions to drive away the various secret police forces trying to hunt down individuals. Yes. Speaking of, I guess, like the big thing I'm thinking about right now, or one of the big things, is there's different levels of scrutiny being placed on individuals currently in the United States.

Starting point is 01:33:47 One you have like people who are completely undocumented, right? You have people who are who are currently here on like valid asylum claims who are about to get those rights like stripped away. I'm trying to think of like the list of refugees that were allowed under Biden that are now like imminently going to get their stuff stripped away from the Trump administration. I know Venezuelan immigrants are one. Haitian immigrants are another. But groups that have that have been able to come here the past few years that are going to be now seen as like quote unquote illegal by the White House and immigration customs enforcement. You then have student visa holders, which are already currently under threat, getting

Starting point is 01:34:28 visas taken away. You have people on work visas, you have green card holders, and you even have naturalized citizens. And among just regular citizens, unnatural-esque, I guess, people that were born here, you have other factors that could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or based on gender and sexuality. And that's kind of like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of. So as much as it's like dangerous to be like, you know, like a trans anarchist, right, in the United States, I think that is that is fairly different than a Haitian immigrant

Starting point is 01:35:02 who's about to get like literally hunted down by ice, right? And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options for how they're going to handle this question and handle the decision of preemptively choosing to relocate somewhere else. James, do you have any thoughts on this onion, I guess? Yeah, I mean, I think you described it well, right? Like, I think a lot of folks are for the first time finding themselves in that onion at all, right? And certainly with respect to, like, immigration enforcement or potentially being forced to leave this country. And I think it would be good maybe to look at folks who have been there for a long time and look at how they've done, right? Because there have been people whose existence

Starting point is 01:35:47 was precarious in this country for decades, right? Maybe we go back to 1994, an Operation Gatekeeper, maybe we go back further, whatever, I don't care. Maybe we go back to the operation whose name is also a slur in the 1930s, and I'm not gonna say. I mean, and indigenous people here, like for all of America's history, been people

Starting point is 01:36:08 that exist in a wildly different reality than most US citizens, right? Yeah, where, yes, this country is predicated on the genocide of indigenous people. Well, and even in the ways that they continue to live here, it's like a different world from... Yeah, like that genocide is ongoing. Like it's not a thing that stopped. It's not a historical thing. It's the thing that exists as long as this country exists. I would look to those people, right? Like you said, Garrison, indigenous communities, indigenous people continue to exist in this country despite the best efforts of this country to eradicate them. Undocumented communities, right? Migrant communities of mixed status have

Starting point is 01:36:46 continued to exist for a very long time. And like, the way that they have got through this is together. And that's the way that we will get through this too. When there have been threats to migrant communities, migrant communities have shown up for each other, right? They're doing that right now. You see groups like Union del Barrio in San Diego, right? Like, going around announcing when there are ice presence of ice offices in the neighborhood, the way that they have gone through it, it's through other people in positions of

Starting point is 01:37:14 precarity showing up for one another and taking care of one another. And if that is a new position for you, if finding yourself like further along the intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you, then like it's scary. I do understand that that precarity is petrifying, but understand that communities and people have been here for a long time and look at how they've got through it. I mean queer communities too to a degree have been persecuted in this country for a very long time and has developed ways of not just like existing but also like continuing to center joy and experience joy and not just like live in fear because I think if you live in fear like you've kind of given up to a

Starting point is 01:37:57 degree or you've let them win to agree I should say like I do understand that being new to this is petrifying for people and like I don't want to just say like, oh, you shouldn't be scared or, you know, you should look at how migrant communities have taken care of one another. But like now is the time to begin establishing solidarity as well. So like those communities, which have been precarious for some time, they're not closed spaces, right? Like you can be in solidarity with them and you can learn from them. And I think that now is the time to do that.

Starting point is 01:38:26 Like now is the time to build stronger links. If you're really worried about things being really bad in this country and you have good reason to be right. Like, oh yeah. Shit's fucked up and bullshit. Yeah. It's really fucking bad. It's all really bad.

Starting point is 01:38:40 Yeah. Like, you know, we're sending people to labor camps. If you're scared panicking, thinking I got gotta get out of here, I getcha. Yeah. No, I mean, I think the thing that you should be doing, regardless of who you are, is you should be giving yourself options. You should be increasing the amount of options that you have. And like, that is something that is never a bad idea.

Starting point is 01:39:03 That is something that you can never do too early. It's something that you should have already been doing, frankly. I've been advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport, because that does make it easier to leave the country. You should be getting that. And it's gonna be harder, especially if you're trans now,

Starting point is 01:39:19 to get a passport that matches what you look like, right? But this is still something I think is worth doing because it gives you an option and you should be increasingly amount of options you have. Yeah. I think, yeah, it's never a bad thing. And like that community structure is an option to let people showing up for you and you showing up for them. That is one of your options.

Starting point is 01:39:41 Don't forget that. And like, that will also bring you joy and you will feel safer. When you like we're supposed to live in communities and like I, you know, I've seen a lot of people in very difficult circumstances. And one of the Kurdish guys once said to me in the desert, he was like, whatever we do, we do together. And I thought that was very profound because they were at that time, like dancing around a fire in the midst of what was like an open air concentration camp, you know.

Starting point is 01:40:09 But if you can find a community and you can find a way to continue to experience joy, then I promise that things won't be as bad as they seem right now. Yep. Within the Kurdish freedom movement, there's a phrase that is commonly used, a slogan you could say, I guess. In Kurdish you would say Beshwadan Jiane means resistance is life. And we should remember that for whole groups of people, many of whom we featured here, if they had all just left, they would no longer exist in the way that they exist now. Kurdish people have been oppressed by various states for centuries, right? Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian. They've been subjected to genocidal violence and they've still remained there, right? And they've continued to fight against that state oppression and they've created something beautiful today as a result that we can see in Rojava. The same is true of

Starting point is 01:41:01 the Karen and Karenian people we've spoken to in Myanmar, right? They decided to remain rather than to leave and in doing so that they created a culture that was based on resistance and that resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly on violence and to determine their outcomes. And I think we should look to those examples as we consider, like, what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here? Now, something that, like, I think Robert said in our work group chat, which thankfully has not been turned into an Atlantic article.

Starting point is 01:41:35 I did invite Pete Hegseth, so we'll see if he hops in, you know. He's rejected us multiple times. That'll be good. Yeah. We've been trying to add the Atlantic editor-in-chief for years. No, he is not welcome. He's absolutely not welcome That'll be good. Yeah. We've been trying to add the Atlantic editor in chief for years. No, he is not welcome. He's absolutely not welcome. Fuck that guy.

Starting point is 01:41:49 We just need him to manufacture consent for bombing another country in the Middle East on our podcast. It's so funny because it is like, that is like the dream of every journalist that you just get added to the entire government's war planning chat and he just uses it to dunk on the Trump admin. Like not to Get more info unlike anything and then he like homers back into the house. Yeah, it's it's it's fucking hysterical Yeah, they could have had four years. I may be not maybe only one off chat No, they would have they would have accidentally invited a different journalist. It was gonna happen eventually, but yeah

Starting point is 01:42:21 I'm if but something Robert said in our chat, is that like, if you already had like plans or the ability to move to a different country of your choosing, then yeah, why not? Right? Like, if you already were thinking about moving to Germany, which is very funny to say now, right? But if you already had plans and you had the ability to do that, then sure, that's something that you should consider. If you do not already have pre-existing plans and means, maybe it's not something to put all

Starting point is 01:42:56 of your effort into doing right now. Because that is such a massive undertaking in general, and not everyone has that option, and there's going to be people stuck here. And you know, part of like my thinking on this is, is like, I'm in a relatively privileged position, I would rather use the sort of benefits and stability that I have to help other people that are going to be living in this country. So I'm going to stay here to do that. And that's part of kind of my thought process on a personal level. Do I, you know, one day maybe want to live off the continent? Yeah. But that's like for personal

Starting point is 01:43:32 reasons, not for political reasons. That's because I think Glasgow looks pretty. And if you also think Glasgow is pretty, and you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess like the politics of escape, I do find a little bit troubling in some ways. And I guess I would like to talk about that a little bit more after this ad break. All right, we're back. James made a horrible face when I complimented Scotland. What was up with that? It was when you said Glasgow.

Starting point is 01:44:10 Oh, okay. Where, where? It's just brutal. Also, Glasgow, not a city that's traditionally aesthetically prized, I guess. Okay, well, that's your opinion, I guess. Edinburgh is where, if I was going to go to Scotland, I'd probably aim at... I'm not gonna live in the Harry Potter town, are you kidding me? Oh, it existed before those books. Yeah, that is rude, Garrison.

Starting point is 01:44:35 Don't take that away from Edinburgh, don't give her that. All the coffee shops are like fucking wizard-themed now, absolutely not. You haven't been to Edinburgh, don't tell me that shit. I've seen your travel pictures, Robert. fucking wizard themes now, absolutely not. You haven't been to Edinburgh, don't tell me that shit. I've seen your travel pictures, Robert. They were mostly hard liquor themed. Okay, that's fair. Yes, Edinburgh is a nice city, Glasgow's a nice city.

Starting point is 01:44:57 You can enjoy it, but stop by Carlisle on your way down where my family are from. My favorite Glasgow fact is that there's a beverage called Buckfast, that is 20% alcohol mineral wine made by monks that has as much coffee as a Red Bull. And in Glasgow, Scotland, for a significant period of time, roughly 1% of all violent crimes were committed with the bottle. Yeah, Bucky is, it's a whole subculture. Buckfast gets you fucked fast, that's is, it's a whole subculture. Buck fast gets you fucked fast.

Starting point is 01:45:25 That's right, folks. So a term I've used for like the past few years to like discuss this, to discuss this question of like, can you like outrun American fascism is the politics of escape. And for a while, I really was vocally opposed to this sort of politics because it felt like the entire world was going through a global far right power grab. And no matter where you run, you can't really get away from it. And now kind of curiously, you know, some of that some of this is still happening, right? You can look at the AFD in Germany. But but some of what's happened with this Trump administration has almost

Starting point is 01:46:06 weakened a degree of this global far-right power grab. For a long time, it looked like the Conservative Party of Canada was about to just completely take control over the whole country due to pent-up frustration over Justin Trudeau's liberal party. And now, due to the actions of the Trump administration, the liberals have retaken a significant portion of like popular support and are probably going to do a big sweep in the general election that's going to happen, I'm guessing next month, with the new prime minister like about to call one. Which makes sense because he should call one at the peak of support

Starting point is 01:46:46 for the Liberal Party after the Conservatives have taken a 12 to 17 point dip, depending which pool you use. So for a while I was like, it doesn't even really make sense to flee to Canada because Canada is right on the coattails of America. Canadian politics are kind of, historically, like 10 years delayed from American politics. And now the new Trump administration has kind of thrown a curveball in this. British politics are always really hard for me to diagnose because all of their parties there are pretty wacky in my mind. Oh yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:20 Like you know what the Tories have been doing has been extremely worrying. Like the NHS, like trans stuff is pretty bad. Now that the, you know, a labor party is in, it's hard for me to figure out kind of where the country is going because this labor party is a pretty conservative labor party, but like this idea of like being able to outrun American fascism is still something I find like unconvincing, I guess. Like you can't fully run away from all of these problems. And there may be certain people that it still like makes sense to start making these moves,

Starting point is 01:47:55 to start planning for that option, right? I am pro options. Even if this idea of like total escape, I still find troubling. Yeah. I don't know, is anyone else having any thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, like as goes to US goes to the world, right? And I know that is changing. But like, maybe I think if it gets to the point where large numbers of people are fleeing the US, we might see some of that same anti-migrant rhetoric that we've seen

Starting point is 01:48:26 in the US in even relatively liberal Canada, the United Kingdom, other Anglophone countries, right? Like it's already very hard to immigrate to Australia. So not the easiest to immigrate to Canada, frankly. Yeah, I'm not as familiar with the Canadian one. Especially as like an American, unless you have like a job that you need to do in Canada and you're the only one who can do that job. Or you get a Canadian girlfriend and that makes it slightly easier, but still not like completely easier, frankly. Yeah, that is a, I guess that's the alternative.

Starting point is 01:49:00 Yeah, I think like, I know, like a lot of people who listen to this, listen to this because they have a fairly radical politics, right? Or left politics and like- Or you're a journalist or you're a federal worker. Uh huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're looking to steal our stories. Fuck off, if I may say so. But like, yeah, we've all grown up on the stories of people who stood up for what they believed in, right? And then Margaret makes a whole podcast about it and Robert does on Christmases. And like, there's a reason why they did that. Like, you know, they, I know that the idea of running away and being safe could be tempting,

Starting point is 01:49:37 but like, if this country gets as bad as it needs to be for people to run away in large numbers, then like the world gets markedly less safe. Oh, yeah. You're gonna be running for the rest of your life. Just look at how much food the US produces, how much medicine. 70% of all of the blood used in every single country's medical system around the world

Starting point is 01:50:00 is exported from the United States. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Yep. Yeah. Do's crazy. Yeah. Doooom. And like, particularly for like US citizens, right? Looking differently, the people who are gonna be able

Starting point is 01:50:14 to pull it off are people with pretty extraordinary means in most cases. I'm not saying all cases, but like, if you have the capacity to move from the United States to Germany, you're probably not living on the poverty line, right? Like this is this is this because this takes a considerable financial investment so instead part of what my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a whole bunch of like the Like most at-risk people. Yeah a part of this even extends out to like moving from state to state I'm obviously in support of free movement.

Starting point is 01:50:45 I've traveled around. I'm going to continue to travel around. I want to see as much as the country and the world as I can. Yeah. But like another facet of this politics of escape is that something I hear very consistently from my friends in Atlanta, and this is something I can attest to like personally, the most amount of like vocal transphobia from people like on the street that they have faced has not been in Atlanta where they live. It's been when

Starting point is 01:51:09 they're visiting people in Seattle or Portland. Like you actually get a lot more like weird anti queer harassment in Seattle, which is just like on like the street level. It's bizarre. Like cities all have different kind have different modes of operation. People have different informal manners in terms of how you behave on the street. And this is something I've definitely experienced. There's a lot more openness towards certain types of anti-trans harassment in these liberal safe havens,

Starting point is 01:51:44 like quote unquote. Yeah. I've been called slurs on the street way more in Portland, Oregon than I have in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is another interesting aspect, which I'm not saying Atlanta is a quote unquote safer city than Seattle if you're trans. I'm not saying the vice versa either,

Starting point is 01:52:02 but this is just an aspect of like the politics of escape like Especially in the in the United States like they're there like is really no like real escape like there there is no mythical safe haven where you can live your your free life and Frolicks through the park and never have to face any kind of hardship or like political Disenfranchisement if you still want to relocate somewhere, that's something that you should consider. And again, create options. But I also do not want to abandon my friends here

Starting point is 01:52:33 because I just have a more stable job. Like I want to be here for them and help them. And not in like a patronizing way, but in like a solidarity way. That's really important to me. And I think people who are thinking about these same things and kind of running these same questions of if they want to commit to staying in the United States, I think should also make those considerations of is like, you know, which one of your friends is not going to be able to make the same calculation?

Starting point is 01:53:00 Yep. And frankly, I feel like better as a person, and like my mental health feels better, knowing I'm gonna be here with them, rather than going to a Berlin nightclub, which does sound fun, and I still might on vacation. Oh, you definitely need to go to Bergen, Gare. Oh, yeah, I have planned this year. You need to spend three days

Starting point is 01:53:17 that feel like about four hours in Bergen. I'm excited. I am, for the first time, planning to leave the continent this year, which is a little bit scary Because re-entering the United States is a pretty tricky right now, which should also play into your considerations Yeah, yeah the general safety of air travel at the general safety air travel Now that we don't have a gay man running the planes. Yeah, it turns out he was actually all right at that We don't have a gay man running the planes. Yeah, it turns out he was actually alright at that

Starting point is 01:53:49 Woke was keeping those planes in the air, you know Kudos to him turns out he was okay at that job But but yes, I don't know what I was saying, but I'm sure it was really important and well thought through About not abandoning people who maybe don't have the same resources that you do. Yeah. To your point about like coming back to the US, I think understand that like one of the things that migrants deal with, even if they get to a place and they have some degree of permanence and they feel safe there, is that they will never be able to go back to where

Starting point is 01:54:23 they're from in most cases, right? That'd be when someone in their family passes away, they can't be there for the funeral. That means that when they have a grandchild, they have a niece or a nephew, something happens in their community and they want to be there to help. It's a natural disaster. They are just stuck. And that's not something to like to discount as something that's not important.

Starting point is 01:54:46 Like that is really hard. And if you have a community now, especially for trans folks, right? Like I just think that like there are so many places where like, like you say, guys, and what bigotry against trans folks is being more and more normalized. So like if you have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every day with the people you're around, like leaving that should be something that you really Think hard about because that can be hard to find. Yeah. Yeah, especially in Edinburgh because they're all they're all terfs with their in the cafes It's not true

Starting point is 01:55:20 Just to be clear. Yeah, I mean this is kind of this discussion I wanted to have Just to be clear. Yeah, I mean this is kind of this discussion. I wanted to have I'm sure we all have more thoughts on this that we will we will express very eloquently as soon as we close this recording session That's how we do it, but But I know this is this type of stuff that we've been thinking about I know I know listeners have been too because you're asking us these questions It's certainly annoying that we don't have a concise yes or no answer, but there isn't a concise yes or no answer. I think the most concise one I have is that you should be giving yourself as many options

Starting point is 01:55:51 as you can. If that includes applying for Irish citizenship because your grandfather is Irish, then hey, why not? Go for it, right? Ireland's great. Nice country. You'll like it. But I am trepidatious, I guess, about public calls to flee the country at this point and kind of the underlying politics and ideology of that, let alone the logistical aspects of trying to relocate to a different country where you are not a citizen.

Starting point is 01:56:22 And frankly, I think there'll be a lot of countries that are not super eager to take American immigrants. I think Canada is typically kind of low-key been one of these places. Especially if we're going to go to war with Canada to make it the 51st state, then it might also create some tricky aspects. Yeah, it could make it harder. But I don't know, if anyone else has any other thoughts, air them now or forever be beholden to angry Reddit comments. Hmm. Yeah, I don't know, please don't burn each other down on Reddit.

Starting point is 01:56:56 Like, now is the time to give people a little grace and be kind to other people. Don't flee to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs. I had a nice time in Belgium. What do you have against Belgium? I have a friend to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs. I had a nice time in Belgium. What do you have against Belgium? I have a friend in Belgium. As an Italian, I think we need to go to war with them again. You know, it's what made Caesar great. It could make us great again. That's my stance on Belgium. It's Italian territory.

Starting point is 01:57:17 I stand with the Belgian people. Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty and today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco. I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story, about their relationship, like you've never heard it before. I want to go back to the first time you ever met. Well, thank you so much for this. Benny! One of the greatest. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:58:02 I'm Selena, but we're watching Dancing Q. When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up all these walls before, and then the first second, you disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest.

Starting point is 01:58:21 He'll tell me anything that he's feeling, and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is this a good time?

Starting point is 01:58:40 It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often- We have quite a similar-

Starting point is 01:58:59 There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like- No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never. happening in here. Not like... No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never.

Starting point is 01:59:08 I cannot wait for all you girls, gays, and theys to join me on this extremely special pink confection of a podcast. There is so much darkness in this world and what I think we could all use more of is a little joy. Listen to the Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Love ya! Prohibition.

Starting point is 01:59:25 It's no secret that banning alcohol didn't stop people from living it up in the 1920s. When we're five years into Prohibition, the government is starting to go, okay, this isn't working. In fact, you might even say it backfired spectacularly. I'm Ed Helms and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, we're taking you back to the 1920s and the tale of Formula 6. Because what you probably don't know about Prohibition is that American citizens were

Starting point is 01:59:53 dying in massive numbers due to poisoned liquor and all along an unlikely duo was trying desperately to stop the corruption behind it. They were like superhero crusaders turning the page on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair, and was corrupt. So how did prohibitions' war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:00:28 In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

Starting point is 02:00:51 It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law, and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.

Starting point is 02:01:13 I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Welcome to You Can Appen 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. It is your host, me along with me is Garrison Davis. Hi, I've played a video game before. I'm not very powerful, but- I too have played many several video games.

Starting point is 02:01:52 See, I wouldn't say several. I've played like a few. Many. I have played too many, simply too many video games. So, okay. This is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there? It's all really bad. And one of the people who's been making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers. The PayPal guy?

Starting point is 02:02:19 The PayPal guy. The owner of X. I've been locked in my In my gamer cave for the past like five months. I'm not left. I'm just hearing about this now Yeah, you might you might 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 see I don't play those games. Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo aha Mecca games andivers 2, like a loser. That's that's reasonable. That's reasonable. Those are fine games.

Starting point is 02:02:51 Oh, and Sonic. Oh god. Okay. Pushing aside the subject of Sonic! 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 and I think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in a hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry Todd Harris who is extremely annoying guy, but is also right points out that this is more money than TV, movies and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right? So like three billion people play video games. 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

Starting point is 02:03:51 and yet, however, comma, when people think about like the gamer TM, you are not thinking about that. Yeah, like as a political class. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like when people say the word gamer gamer yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird incel right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass and This is in large part because gamer gate was sort of the first like truly effective political

Starting point is 02:04:18 Mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity and obviously this is you know, this is a fascist movement Now part of the reason this works and we're gonna 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 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, or they want it to be sports.

Starting point is 02:04:51 Because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money and then that are taken like quote-unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And so 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 come out of gaming, like the H bomber guy, I guess as an example, like Hassan to some extent, there's just there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like

Starting point is 02:05:27 Become political but on the other hand gaming has always been like a not always but is traditionally been an extremely right-wing Space. Oh god garrison. I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is Have I told you the story about kebab the Germans? No. Oh boy. 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 is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people no this is this is the world of Warcraft card game okay that's that's even more embarrassing yeah really bad really bad I think I think I peeked at like 2k legend North America which

Starting point is 02:06:04 like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world. Digital collectible card video game? Come on. Oh yeah. Yeah. But 2K Legend NA is like fucking shitter ranked. It's bad. I was never like good, good at it. I was just like, okay, kind of. But you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is like all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers and these are like, like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kabob the German. And it turns out that his actual name was removed Kabob because he was a fucking German neo Nazi. Well, many such cases. Yeah, for people who are not aware of mid 2010s German fascism, remove kebab is a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany.

Starting point is 02:06:55 So great stuff, great stuff. This was just sort of the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the 2010s. Now, 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. And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bank and Freed. And this is this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum. Right. We're going to look at Sam Bank and Freed, this is this is really technically on both sides of political spectrum, right? We're gonna look at Sam Bankman freed and we're gonna look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess. So we're gonna start with Sam

Starting point is 02:07:32 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. And I guess it is important to know like Sam Bakman Fried 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. Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah, before before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud. Well, probably not anymore.

Starting point is 02:07:59 He's probably gonna get part of God and maybe we'll see. We'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting block now all young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts They put all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote for whoever makes line to go up. I'm gonna become the Joker So, okay then think about Sam Makin Fried for people who have forgotten who SPF 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

Starting point is 02:08:28 took everyone's money, embedded it on the stock market, and lost it. And you know, 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, he's playing this really dogshit game called Storybook Parology meetings, He is a League of Legends addict, which is like, as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed. And one of the things that that SPF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of The Big Short, of the big shorts. We're going to get the money ball in a second. Blindside, other books, reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing.

Starting point is 02:09:12 Mm hmm. But you know, like a very, very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along. And Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him, I mean, this is something that like, ISBF was like, you know Was like projecting right in order for this to be the image of him was him as like the gamer and this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right because he just like doesn't understand someone who just

Starting point is 02:09:37 Has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit So you play video games meetings like no one has ever ever been like this I have no idea what you mean I actually don't play video games your meetings because it is too obvious But I I play I play video games once a week that's that's that's kind of my god This is the one part about Sam Baker free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games It is my like anti-depression strategy basically like when I need to not think for a while There's just me oh playing actually path of exile to one of the games that we're gonna be fucking talking about today something I'm on I I've done so much fucking gaming like

Starting point is 02:10:12 God, I used to play this game called smite which is like it's like a MOBA like League of Legends But like third person and I played so much smite that there were pros showing up my casual games When the zoom revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me, I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that. I'll inform the council. I'll- Can't argue with it.

Starting point is 02:10:32 For our next folks council meeting, I'll bring it to the table. That's reasonable. But you know, so what happens with this sort of thing 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. Yeah, totally.

Starting point is 02:10:48 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 this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing. And like SPF like is a gamer, right? But like why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry,

Starting point is 02:11:09 it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around it, it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies. Or like respectability in some way. Yeah. Except in like the reversed Sam Beckman-Friede way, where like, the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius, right?

Starting point is 02:11:32 Like that era of Silicon Valley guy. Yeah. That's like, he's so different, right? He's not like put together, and this shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker. So it's kind of like a double edged sword in like that specific way. Yeah. Well, 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.

Starting point is 02:11:56 These people don't play video games. 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. And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on. And it's just really, really easily just sort of like bamboozled them by just doing something that any gamer like, you know, 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. Also by the way, gaming addiction is like kind of a fake thing.. I'm mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does.

Starting point is 02:12:29 You just get mad all the time. I know too many League of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game. Yeah, but arcane though, right? All right, continue. Oh God. Okay, we're gonna take an ad break. And then when I come back,

Starting point is 02:12:42 I'm gonna explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence. So we are back 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? But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case

Starting point is 02:13:16 because he is really truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass. 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. 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 gonna be talking about, which we'll get to in a second. And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that like they talk about on Behind the Bastards, you can go listen to that. But I want to go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog Oakland Athletics team invented baseball metrics, and they used

Starting point is 02:13:50 Saber Metrics to build this roster out of nothing that went to the playoffs and did really well. And I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, whatever. I'm not going to argue about baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in in this fucking 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? Can he is he is like one of the main figures in this book?

Starting point is 02:14:18 He's like he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically. What baseball team is this? Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics Or now the Las Vegas? Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called the athletics now No, no, they are originally called the athletics. I don't know what they're called now They've always been the only thing that just calls them the Oakland A's They've been the A's forever. But yeah, they've also been stolen Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland. Oh, see I was thinking of the football team Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las Vegas. Did the Raiders go there too? Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 02:14:50 They stole both of them. That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head. But yeah, so OK, unfortunately, we're going to talk about football here. So this guy, right, Paul Podesta is like one of these sort of geniuses. He later goes on to be, it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. 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

Starting point is 02:15:21 how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons going 1-31, which is a feat of like, just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go 1-31 in two cross two seasons of football again. So again, that is a one in 15 season followed by an oh in 16 season. The second oh in 16 season ever. unclear how responsible for for this he is. But what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade. Okay, it's like me, why the fuck are you

Starting point is 02:15:56 talking about this? Part of this is also like these people are just evil. The Sean Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women specifically massage therapists Mostly have accused him of sexual assault. 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 so that that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson's that he is just Really fucking like morally reprehensible, right? he is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season.

Starting point is 02:16:28 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 the Sean Watson who've been on the Texans. And again, like, Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds Mia do you

Starting point is 02:16:50 expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans it is a team from Houston Texas that's that's all you need to know about this and they traded this guy hey at least it's not Austin no offense to our Austin listeners they they fucking traded this guy, right? And all Podesta orchestrates this trade that is three is the it is the worst trade in the history of football It is three first round picks two thirds two third round picks in a fourth round pick and they hand this guy who again I kind of emphasize isn't enough is a serial sexual predator, right? They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL.

Starting point is 02:17:27 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? 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, in weeks one through five, out of out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000, just to start weeks one through five out of again, 759 quarterbacks, he ranks 753 out of 759 EPA for drop back. 753 out of 759. They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get point three less points than an

Starting point is 02:18:23 average team would. How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games. Don't worry. We're almost done. We're almost done with the sports part of it. And I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is which is the argument that's that that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right yeah of course Yes, I I understand that I can I can see that yes

Starting point is 02:18:50 Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air And this is this is the best fucking chance of ever gonna get so Jesus fucking Christ like what I talk about like movies or something Is this yes? like is this what I sound like Yes, it is it is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of this team, hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator $230 million,

Starting point is 02:19:14 and this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to, again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on like by the jock or whatever, right? 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. 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. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically

Starting point is 02:19:57 in in the culture and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil in a piece called Game Boys. 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. Consumer choice is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety. To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one must master to live under current economic conditions.

Starting point is 02:20:36 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. Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them. But they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space

Starting point is 02:21:15 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. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Sanbeipen Fried 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 gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right?

Starting point is 02:21:44 There are a lot of what you would call to like traditionally sort of left-leaning 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 fucking work They're also a thing that people use know you use for fucking work there also a Thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world Totally and like I mean I know this right like I am Fucking like I'm a Chinese chan somebody better. He's better at video games and both the people I've gonna be fucking talking about in this story right like well

Starting point is 02:22:20 I I heard I heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced But we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path of Exile character fucking next. But I mean, it's worth mentioning like speedrunning, right? Which is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games... Yeah, it depends a lot on the genre. Like, competitive fighting games, like... Yeah, melee... I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox,

Starting point is 02:22:43 who is a black non-binary furry, who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time? incredibly beloved I The only person history ever to beat someone 13 to 0 and a first to 11 Absolute legends, right? But but you know These are the people that 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 and this

Starting point is 02:23:04 Functions both in gaming and also also fucking in real life right now these people are in power and you know who else is in power it's a products and services to support this podcast all hail we are back now obviously the other part of this, you know, we've talked about, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's, there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. 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. And and like I am also doing this as much as

Starting point is 02:23:47 The fucking weird white guy Nazi like gamer dipshit, right? Yeah That's why I boot up ff7 remake to stare at cloud strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad. Mm-hmm But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right? Is that like the right they could we were experiencing violence in sort of different ways But it's like this systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system But these people solution to is to blame it on women, right? and this is you know I had a conversation with Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and

Starting point is 02:24:19 Like I would compare it to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation Right and deal with this violence, but like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right, and deal with this violence. But like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters. Most most. Yeah, I would say that's that's true. Yeah, right. And so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like, fuck them.

Starting point is 02:24:38 Like eat shit. Like I'm sorry, you've become Nazis, like fuck off. Skill issue in some ways, among other environmental factors but yeah yeah but but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit at all mostly right 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 so it's powerful man alive he's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived and he still has the same sense of like a grieve meant

Starting point is 02:25:07 That powers all these people and this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos right is that these people? Constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever and now it's been shifted to this not anymore Yeah, now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities Right, and it's actually the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds Now they believe that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities. Right. 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. It's, we've had a full UNO reverse-o. But the thing is these people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right?

Starting point is 02:25:38 And like, but it's this affect. It's this feeling they have of them being the ones who are oppressed that like, you know, made them into the shock who are oppressed that like, you know Made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate If you're gonna read one Vicky Osterwal 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 like I mean, there's been a lot 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

Starting point is 02:26:06 been with like film or music but if you're gonna 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 and one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being I mean literally being used like scabs and Pinkertons against people who make video games 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 that like When cyberpunk 2077 came out it was literally giving people seizures

Starting point is 02:26:38 Because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit it they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken shitty game and strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken shitty game. And, you know, they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist rasping campaigns and that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too. 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, etc. etc. like you should fucking support me for this shit

Starting point is 02:27:09 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 Fried because like many yeah many such cases yeah like the last the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam and it turns out though I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamers stick thing totally like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. 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 and Elon Musk is like not really a gamer I would say like he sort of plays video games. He's a ketamine user He's a Twitter power user. He is the shadow president

Starting point is 02:27:56 Yeah, the man of the world's richest man who has ever lived. Yeah He is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like, you like, he's an elite video game player in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this. He's also, I believe the term is a meme lord, if I'm reading this right. Oh God, one of his Path of Exile two characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're gonna talk about,

Starting point is 02:28:17 but one of his characters in that game was named Keckius Maximus. So like this is the level of mind. That is one of his favorite names in his White House office He has a he has a kekis Maximus portrait hanging behind his death There's an AI generated image of like Pepe the Frog and like and like Roman like like Caesar attire I hate everything so yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now. Yeah oops so Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games and

Starting point is 02:28:45 The preface to everything we're going to get to you is that he has actually he's like for a long time been Doing a like I'm a gamer thing so 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 This is something that that blue sky user gay dog reminded me of, because I forgot he has so many gaming scandals I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game.

Starting point is 02:29:16 And he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered. Like it's... Okay, like the best explanation I've tried to figure out for like how bad at this game he is, is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalence of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen.

Starting point is 02:29:39 And then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on. Hey, I love the Mazda Miata. Like that's that that that's like the game equivalent that 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. He is just like, like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game. Like just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit.

Starting point is 02:30:06 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 on to the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it. 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. 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, like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.

Starting point is 02:30:35 But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the 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 cybergamer420, but all the E's are threes. So it's C-Y-B-3-R-G-A-M-3-R-4-20. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again?

Starting point is 02:31:01 It's at C-Y-B-3-R- 420. So I think I found something. I think the 420 at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday, April 20th. 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. It's like, prove that he actually did this. He like does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like on a Twitter live stream.

Starting point is 02:31:42 And it is immediately obvious that like he has no idea what he's doing. Like, it's not just obvious 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. 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. But it was so unbelievably obvious, like he like walk past

Starting point is 02:32:03 one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just like walk past it, didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games. 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 and then he claims that he never claims that it was his Path of Exile 2 account.

Starting point is 02:32:24 And this genuinely has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asmogold who was like a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is like a turbo right-winger like 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. And fucking Asmogold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit what the fuck? And like everyone fucking reacts like this.

Starting point is 02:33:02 It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen People like react to this to like to Elon like this 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 No, what's interesting about about 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 the path of exile player on a stream using someone else's account. But like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that.

Starting point is 02:33:45 And a lot of people he talks to about this stuff are people like Joe Rogan, who aren't like gamer TM people. Right. It's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with. 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 cache of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right-wing phenomena to like launder his reputation except he fucked up because he he you know spent all of this time trying to like Pretend to be a gamer But the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very very popular

Starting point is 02:34:23 That is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games And cheated record to video games and Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right? And that means we got him folks mission accomplished wrap it up. We beat Elon Musk We fucking got him. It's over. He's he's been cast out of civil society with a high crime of pretending to play a video game. He's lost all respect among the farthest reaches of the right. So what's next?

Starting point is 02:34:55 We have one, he has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about. Is this about the one video game he hasn't played? Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story in my opinion. Which one are you talking about? That's an interesting one. The one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play GTA V. Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that. Because he doesn't like, quote unquote, doing crime and GTA V, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene.

Starting point is 02:35:25 Just couldn't do it. Unquote. Oh, I completely forgot about that. So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God. 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 V. That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times strange behavior. Yeah, that's also like that's also him signaling to like a different like the weird Christian part of the base.

Starting point is 02:36:00 That's like, oh, violence in video games is bad. 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, and we hate him. 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. Yeah, but so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that like,

Starting point is 02:36:24 the pushback He is getting here is like I think actually kind of is significant So the last thing I want to talk about is is him pretending to have been like a quake pro It's the thing that he did quake And there's a very interesting video about this by the youtuber Carl jobs Who is like his thing is like people who fake who like fake things in video games basically, and he is like not a leftist He's like like a center-right guy basically. I mean there's arguments about exactly how far right he is but he did a video about

Starting point is 02:36:53 About Elon claiming to be a quick player and what he found So is Elon like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament But none of the good players were there and he came his team came in second But they came in second because they had better wi-fi than everyone else 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 that's like a classic elan musk story which is he 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. But the reason I bring

Starting point is 02:37:28 this up is that like, at the end of this video, jobs is like 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. 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. 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. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the

Starting point is 02:38:11 left about what Elon Musk is doing 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. He says the things that he's saying are like either lies or delusional There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him There's the happen 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

Starting point is 02:38:42 So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a man as like a character in it And and the literally the official Assassin's Creed accounts replied to one of his tweets Saying is that what the guy playing your path of exile to account told you in like replied in reply to a thing about Hassan 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 with people like Elon Like we are we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right? this thing that had been like a really really consistent basis support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him is sort of being polarized against him by just like The fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is

Starting point is 02:39:46 And like obviously like I don't think like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these people do this, 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? That doesn't happen that often. But the one of the 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. They got their opponents to allies to stay home. And that was enough enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines. When the Bolsheviks like came for currency government was enough for them to take power. And I think 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 coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters

Starting point is 02:40:19 who just fucking stay home that they can be stopped. 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 begin Gamergate 2.5 right now on behalf of Mia Wong. Make sure you at Mia. Oh no.

Starting point is 02:40:41 of Miao Wang, make sure you at Miao. Oh no. And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we get enough gamers to stay home or even better, rise up, right? We can we can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it. 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. Yeah, come on Mia. Geez, fuck.

Starting point is 02:41:13 Look, I am one of the biggest things of like people need to remember that Lenin did not overthrow the Tsar, he overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist-y guy who was from the provisional government in between the first... Okay, we done we're done here we're done here we're fucking out we're leaving. What games are you playing? What games am I playing? Path of Exile 2, uh don't play Brotato it will consume your life. Play RoboQuest.

Starting point is 02:41:36 RoboQuest is great. RoboQuest dares to ask the question, what if like the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice But also you're doing a rogue like with like dooms combat that sounds very gay So I probably can't do that then I do hell divers to nearly every Monday armored course six over six rules love that game what that game Sonic X shadow generations Final Fantasy 7 and I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for their official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character selection is very Gooner-coded.

Starting point is 02:42:14 Many, many such cases. So I made sure to make the smallest chest size available on my model. Pshhhhhh. But the gameplay is fun. This has been a Kadaffin here. Good Lord. They pay me for this. I had to watch so many videos about Deshawn Watson and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this. Oh! Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty. And today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.

Starting point is 02:43:09 I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story, about their relationship like you've never heard it before. I want to go back to the first time you ever met. Whoa. Selena Gomez! Thank you so much for this. Benny! One of the greatest.

Starting point is 02:43:24 Thank you. I'm Selena, One of the greatest. Thank you. I'm Selena, but we're watching Disney too. When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up all these walls before, and then the first second you like disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same.

Starting point is 02:43:49 If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is this a good time? It's me, Dilla Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man.

Starting point is 02:44:16 You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often- We have quite a similar- There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like- No! Have weination happening in here. Not like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Love ya! Prohibition.

Starting point is 02:44:47 It's no secret that banning alcohol didn't stop people from living it up in the 1920s. When we're five years into Prohibition, the government is starting to go, okay, this isn't working. In fact, you might even say it backfired spectacularly. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, we're taking you back to the 1920s and the tale of Formula 6. Because what you probably don't know about Prohibition

Starting point is 02:45:14 is that American citizens were dying in massive numbers due to poisoned liquor, and all along, an unlikely duo was trying desperately to stop the corruption behind it. They were like superhero crusaders turning the page on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair, and was corrupt. So how did Prohibition's war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:45:48 In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet

Starting point is 02:46:20 and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to LeverTown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:46:59 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. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yeah, you are. This week we are covering the week of March 20 to March 26. Short week because we did a late recording last week. Yep. We did.

Starting point is 02:47:23 So it's minus one day day if my math is correct. It's been a hard week for many of us because we all really care about group chats and group chat security is super important. Oh yeah. To kind of anyone involved in politics and whenever we see a breach of this magnitude it's really a warning and like a threat to all of us. So it has it has been it has been a tough week. Yeah like a threat to one is a threat to all. So like the way I see it, any group chat that gets compromised. First they came for who's the PC small group. That's right.

Starting point is 02:47:54 Next they're gonna come. Could be any of us. Jeffrey Goldberg could be lurking in your small group. That's you and your girlfriend talking about what kind of pizza to order. He could be there Reporting for the Atlantic you wouldn't know unless you like looked at who was in there and saw his name Then you would know yeah, which is true of all of the people in the who the PC small group

Starting point is 02:48:16 I guess it is actually pretty easy You know, maybe maybe Jeffrey Goldberg signal name is like Like CIA super spy or something and and everyone just assumed he belonged there. I'm gonna start at the beginning, because I do assume that actually, like as impossible as it sounds to those of us who like wake up and imbibe fucking social media in the morning, like an addict takes their first hit

Starting point is 02:48:38 of crack cocaine, but in a way that's less healthy for both our hearts and our brains. A decent number of people who listen to this podcast have just kind of like heard vaguely like some bits about this. Yeah, they're wondering what the fuck we're talking about. What are you doing? What are you guys doing this? So we're going to talk about this group chat. So first off, couple of basics.

Starting point is 02:48:56 So Signal is an app that is end-to-end encrypted. That means that if you have Signal and your buddy has Signal and you're messaging each other, it's encrypted. And it is very hard at this point, unless one of your phones is directly compromised by a non-state actor or an ex who's really good with computers, no one else can see what you're messaging each other.

Starting point is 02:49:18 So if you and a friend are like planning what to order on fucking Grubhub tonight when you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can keep that secret. Or if you and a friend are planning what to order on fucking GrubHub tonight when you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can keep that secret. Or if you and a friend are planning what substances to buy that the government might not want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if you and your friend simply don't want various media companies taking every detail and phone carriers, taking every detail of your life's conversations and turning that into analytics data, you can stop them from doing that.

Starting point is 02:49:46 And if maybe one day you might be engaged in speech that the government might not like, you can continue to engage in that speech privately without danger. Or with less danger. Yeah. Or with as little danger as it is possible to do. Especially if your messages automatically explode

Starting point is 02:50:01 after anywhere between five seconds to one week. Right. Which is a feature Signal has. Yes, you can automatically set it to delete stuff over a period of time. You want to, if you're going to use it, turn off the thing where it pushes messages so that you can see on your locked phone. Visible notifications. Yeah, turn them off because that'll fuck shit up.

Starting point is 02:50:20 Because then your operating system can read the messages without the encryption. Yeah. Similarly, never open a QR code. This is really the only way that Signal can get compromised on scale right now, beyond physical infiltration, right? Like what accidentally happened with HuthyPCSmallGroup. But the main other way that Signal can get compromised is through malicious QR codes and unknown links. So really be careful about links as always on the internet, and especially be skeptical of QR codes.

Starting point is 02:50:51 Yeah, there's a quote from Herman Gering. I think it was from Herman Gering. When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver. And I have adapted that Gering quote to the modern era. When I hear QR code, I reach for my clock 19. That's right. Do not do not use QR codes. Yeah, the work of Satan. Let's explain what who these PC small group is for the people.

Starting point is 02:51:13 I'm getting to it. So you've got you've got this app, which is normally used by and has been used for a long time by like protesters and dissidents and journalists to communicate with sources because it's very secure. The Trump administration takes office. One thing that they are annoyed about is that when you are government employees, even if you're doing top secret shit, especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of meetings about national security planning for like military actions that you are supposed

Starting point is 02:51:38 to only have in something called a skiff. And a skiff is basically a room in, you know, the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right? I'm not a hundred percent sure where all the skiffs are, but it's like a room that is incredibly secure and it is the only place that you are supposed to have certain kinds of conversations. And in fact, if you are having one of those kinds

Starting point is 02:51:59 of conversations in a skiff, no one, not even the president or the vice president, is allowed to have a phone in there. It is a very strict rule. You don't take phones into the skiff because none of them are fucking secure. Now, the problem is, all these communications, all of this stuff is documented and potentially foyerable.

Starting point is 02:52:19 Maybe not immediately, because there's always security concerns. They have the ability to redact stuff. But in 20 years, perhaps. But at some point. Yeah, it might be archived, even if it's notifiable. People who are in charge of our military now didn't like that, and were like, hey, what if we all just did it through a single group? And they did to plan for an attack that started March 15th against the Houthis.

Starting point is 02:52:41 Now, you will remember the Houthis from the episode James and I did. I mean, from other stuff too, because they're all over the news. From, you know against the Houthis. Now you will remember the Houthis from the episode James and I did. I mean, from other stuff too, because they're all over the news. From, you know, the Houthis. The Houthis stuff. James and I did an episode recently about a regular naval warfare, and you check it out. That's all still pretty relevant.

Starting point is 02:52:55 Better known for their other work. Yeah, better known for their other work. The Biden administration was like, we can probably take care of these guys with airstrikes, and it didn't really work. And the Trump administration was like, we can do take care of these guys with airstrikes, and it didn't really work. And the Trump administration was like, we can do a better job of taking these guys out with airstrikes. And at this point, it's too early to say if it worked or not,

Starting point is 02:53:13 but I'm going to guess, probably didn't. Probably not. Just generally given the history, maybe. They say they killed a lot more high-value targets and top missile guys. Main missile guy, quote. I don't know. I'm not priv I don't know. I'm not privy to the information they're working off of

Starting point is 02:53:28 or how much it matters at this point, right? So we'll see. You're not in that signal chat, Robert. I'm not in that signal chat. They have not accidentally added me. I'm in too many signal chats, frankly. Yeah, yeah, I could be and I might not know. We all are in too many.

Starting point is 02:53:43 I might be in several government ones and be totally unaware of it because there's too many notifications on my phone. That shit's muted. I'm not know. Yeah. We all are in too many. I might be in several government ones and be totally unaware of it because there's too many notifications on my phone. That shit's muted. I'm not seeing that. Yeah. So they decide, we're going to plan an attack on some Houthis. We're going to be hitting them with stuff and we should probably all get, we need to

Starting point is 02:53:56 get all of these different kind of people from different chunks of the, you know, the government together. So we got to have JD Vance and his, because usually Vance is too busy to respond. And we gotta have the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his representative. We gotta have the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, her representative. We gotta have the head of the CIA, his represent, you know, that kind of thing.

Starting point is 02:54:17 There's a few more people in there. Mark Rubio. Mark Rubio, right, sex estate, you know, and his representative, right. Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller. I don't know that Miller had his representative. Right? Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller. I don't know that Miller had a representative. He feels like he handles a lot of this stuff on his own,

Starting point is 02:54:28 but on his phone too much, Stephen Miller. Yeah. Chronically online, Stephen Miller. Yeah, and you have the head of, I think, Cintcom was in there. Anyway, you got all these people in there. And while they're setting this up, all the invites are going out,

Starting point is 02:54:44 because the way you do it with Signal is you click a button that says, like, start a new group, you name the new group, in this case, they named the group, Huthie PC Small Group, right? And, shit, what does PC stand for in this? Politically correct, which honestly, I thought that we were over. Yeah, you'd think so, huh? Don't say any slurs in the group chat. That's just a reminder. Yeah, yeah. No slurs in the small group chat. Planning committee, I'm guessing. Yeah, planning committee. Who thinks planning committee is a small group?

Starting point is 02:55:10 Sorry, I had that written down somewhere. So they make this group chat and they invite a bunch of people. And here's the way, one of the ways Signal works is that like, if you're just importing your contacts into Signal, it'll find the guys who have Signal and it'll just like show you based on whatever your name you have, it'll find the guys who have Signal, and it'll just show you based on whatever name you have for them in their phone, right? That they're on Signal, and you can just invite them. Otherwise, you can set what your Signal name is going to be.

Starting point is 02:55:33 And so when people type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that. Or if you send them an invite, that's the name they'll see. And this brings us, I got to take an aside, to talk about a guy who is not a member of the Trump administration, and who is not a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg born in 1965.

Starting point is 02:55:50 He is currently the co-editor of the Atlantic prior to this. He had a, what some people would call an illustrious career. He grew up in Malvern on Long Island. Surely Malvern. And I'm Malvern. Yeah. I'm looking at his Wiki here, which just has the line that he, his neighborhood was mainly Catholic

Starting point is 02:56:07 and he described it as a wasteland of Irish pogromists. Oh, Jesus. I bet he had a fun childhood. So, okay, interesting, interesting, Jeffrey. Fascinating stuff there. Interesting. So after college or kind of while he's in college, he leaves and he goes to Israel because he wants to serve in the IDF

Starting point is 02:56:27 During the intifada the first one as a prison guard Jesus Christ, which is where Palestinian participants in the intifada were being held and Yeah, he he had like a an interesting conversation with this PLO leader Who is also like a math teacher who I I guess they were able to like discuss their Zionism or whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy, not a, I bring this up to be like, not a left-wing radical. Not one of quote unquote to our guys, right?

Starting point is 02:56:57 Not one of our guys, not a guy who's probably broadly opposed to most of, and in fact, to most of what the Trump administration is doing over the years. Especially who the airstrikes frankly. Yes. Now he has pissed off. It's fair to say he has really pissed off Trump a number of times, right?

Starting point is 02:57:13 Because he wrote some articles. He wrote that 2020 article in the Atlantic about when Trump said, got caught saying that Americans who died in wars are losers and suckers. Yes. Which is based on sourcing that he had. So he's also attracted their ire, but he's again, generally I would say like more on the bootlickery side of things.

Starting point is 02:57:31 Like he's just kind of like a NatSec cheerleader, right? That would be a fair way to describe Jeffrey. Totally. I don't know that he would entirely disagree with that description of himself, you know? Yeah, like a neolimped guy. That said, he's not so much of one that he's unwilling to report critical stuff, which

Starting point is 02:57:46 is what happens here. So he gets an invite on his phone that just takes him into this PC-Huthie small group. And people have done the work. There's another guy in the Trump administration whose initials are J.C. John Greenbrier, I believe. Yeah, I think it was John Greenbrier. And the person who, because there was some debate initially about like who invited him Because after this came out there were allegations that he snuck his way in or whatever

Starting point is 02:58:11 We now know based on the evidence that he was inadvertently invited by national security advisor Michael waltz, right? Yeah as evidenced by the signal screenshots. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's lots of screenshots Jeffrey did his you know the job of document eventually, right? Yes. Well, yes, there's lots of screenshots. Jeffrey did his, you know, the job of documenting it. Eventually, right. Yes. Well, he documented it right away. Yes. So now here's the thing, from the beginning here,

Starting point is 02:58:31 Jeffrey is having the natural reaction. I will say this for all my critiques of him, he has the reaction, I think any minimally competent journalist would have, someone's fucking with me. Yeah, yeah. This is like something to like get me, yeah. You don't get invited into a chat with the sec def in the head of the CIA planning a military strike, right? That just doesn't happen. I've been a journalist for a while. That's not occurred to me. Yeah, it's not does not really go down

Starting point is 02:58:54 So he's like trying to figure out what the fuck's going on like what's happening and he's like he's making a note He's documenting stuff is there and they're talking about like weapons packages. Like these are the kind of weapons This is where they're striking and then as the strikes go and they're being like this guy headed into his girlfriend's house we're hitting it house blew up he's dead right like the exchange was very funny because the way he phrased it was like it completely baffled JD Vance yes let me pull this up because it was it was pretty funny no please please Michael Waltz, VP, full stop. Building collapsed, full stop.

Starting point is 02:59:27 Had multiple positive ID, full stop. Pete, Karilla, the IC, amazing job. JD Vance replies, what? Michael Waltz, typing too fast, full stop. The first target, M-Dash, their top missile guy, M-Dash. We have positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed. And then JD Rebounds replies, excellent. At this point, Michael Waltz responds with the fist emoji, American flag emoji, flame emoji.

Starting point is 02:59:55 Yeah, so it's great. And once it becomes very clear what's happening, number one, rather than stay in the group, see if maybe he could get invited to other groups, just kind of like keep track of what was going on. Again, being a guy who's like primary concern and I really do think Goldberg's primary concern here was the security of US soldiers like national security of the United States.

Starting point is 03:00:18 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. As opposed to like, is any of this legal? Are they like what like his is just like these people are not being secure like with I Mean like this this could if the wrong person got invited to a group like this it could potentially Endanger the lives of airmen and stuff as on my primary concern with all this right, but that is his you know Yeah, and so he hops out of the group he leaves

Starting point is 03:00:41 And he puts out this article and he redacts most other than the what's happened, which is a story in and of itself, he like goes out of his way like there's people who are like in intelligence that are in this that he has their names and he's like I am not naming them because they're serving intelligence officers and that's a no-no. He doesn't like specifically give up other than that this is happening anything that's like Particularly dangerous right? But this is the kind of thing as soon as it comes out obviously It's it's a furor and it's unlike most of the time when everybody gets like pissed

Starting point is 03:01:15 It seems to like it might have some legs because it's just such a what the fuck moment, right? And it's so contrary to like so much of the messaging coming from from the Trump administration regarding you know like digital security, Hillary's emails, prosecuting individual soldiers for any like like you're losing a night vision goggle right? It's kind of a classic one. Leaking information, how this administration is gonna crack down on all information leaks, you know that sort of stuff. At one point Hexess says we are clear are clear for OBSSEC, which I thought was pretty funny. The funniest message in this signal group is that we're all good on OBSSEC, that he says in a group chat with a journalist.

Starting point is 03:01:54 Yeah, it's super funny. Everything that's happening here is very funny. I basically want to move on to like, what's going to happen next, which is they are going to try to nuke Jeffrey Goldberg like they're going to try to send him to a prison if not a literal like El Salvadorian work camp right like that that is going to be their next goal here. Yeah he embarrassed these people like yes to an extent that it's I mean anyone in uniform would have been court-martialed for this kind of security fuck-up. Oh yeah yeah I mean in times of war in the past, if the version of this had happened

Starting point is 03:02:27 in World War II, they would have just executed whatever soldier did this. You don't have to be a spy if you're incompetent enough to just bumble into shit. It's the same result. I did want to address really quickly a couple of things. One, I saw this USA Today article that was like, oh, it's so relatable that they made this mistake of adding someone to the group chat. That was not the mistake. The mistake was coordinating things that should be classified, things that should be quote unquote high side on personal devices using Signal as opposed to a State Department or government issued device which doesn't have your personal contacts to avoid all this, like a device which is not hackable,

Starting point is 03:03:03 a device which has not been exposed to QR codes, for example Yeah, make sure that in your contacts. There's not two guys named JG. Yeah, you might add the wrong JG to your Yemen bombing chat Yeah, haven't we all added the wrong person to a group chat and it's like, I mean, yeah, but I've never like bombed Yemen Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, it's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as a birthday party. Yeah, like I have two friends named John

Starting point is 03:03:32 and I added the wrong one to a group about like planning a mutual friend's birthday party. But like, again, minimal damage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no service people's lives are put at risk. I did also want to point out this. At one point, Waltz says, or Michael Waltz, who's a national security advisor. Yeah, not the other one. Yeah, that would be pretty funny if they'd have him as well.

Starting point is 03:03:52 If he was just in there, they'd be like, Hey, seems cool, put him in the group, fuck it. What, a dude likes to shoot pheasants in Paris? He seems to be friends with JD Vans, wouldn't be surprising. So, one of the things Walt says which is bizarre is that like European navies are incapable of defeating Houthi weapon systems. It just isn't true. Like there was a coalition of 20 different states running operations in the Red Sea last year. And again, like France has a navy. Like they've got nuclear submarines. They could end the world. To cite one example,

Starting point is 03:04:24 HMS Diamond, which is a British ship, shot down a Houthi missile last year. The UK also air struck Houthi targets last year. I've watched the UK carry out air strikes. I feel like... They're very capable. What the Houthis have is Iranian.358s to just get really nerdy for a second, which are not really a threat to modern fighter aircraft.

Starting point is 03:04:46 It's like a loitering munition. Maybe a drone, but no aircraft, not a manned or personed aircraft. The primary point of how the Houthis are conducting their strikes is not, we're going to knock all of these ships out of the sea. It will create an unsustainable insurance situation for a lot of merchants. If there's just always kind of missiles, even if we never really, or almost never hit anybody, that doesn't really matter. You got to deal with the insurance thing.

Starting point is 03:05:15 Yeah. It's they're going to make that much more expensive and that, that, that particular part of global trade much more difficult to conduct. So far the Trump administration has doubled down on its response This is pretty funny Carolyn Levitt on Twitter X I guess called Goldberg She's the White House press secretary. I believe press that's correct. Yeah, where has press secretary She called Goldberg a quote Trump hater and also claimed the story was a quote hoax and a quote sensationalist spin

Starting point is 03:05:42 They are also right now claiming that quote war plans and quote attack plans are different things. The information they leaked was too specific to constitute a war plan. Both of these things are kind of ludicrous claims, right? Like very clearly this is stuff that should be classified very clearly. It's stuff that put those people's lives at risk in the event that the Houthis had any means to respond to like F-18s, which I don't think they do really. Like I don't know. But you know, Iran, who absolutely is a state backer of the Houthis, does have the ability, at least in theory,

Starting point is 03:06:15 they've kind of shown their ass a bit in the last year or two with Israeli strikes in Iran. Yeah, it's not the ability to like easily interdict these kinds of strikes, but certainly the ability to interdict, and more importantly, kind of the ability to survive them to mitigate the damage that they can do. Sure, sure, to go underground or go somewhere else. And those planes are vulnerable when there's certain points in their trajectory, I think. It's generally very poor to broadcast exactly what you're doing when, where, and how. It's kind of just a basic of like military stuff

Starting point is 03:06:46 that you really don't want people to know exactly when you're sending dudes in to do what. Yeah, there was a very funny meme going around which basically had like imagined if the same discussion had been had about D-Day in 1944. And yeah, that wouldn't have gone so well if they had broadcast. There's been a lot of great posts. I'm looking at one by Katie Nautopoulos, uh, on Twitter right now.

Starting point is 03:07:10 Having read through the full HuthyPC small group blogs, I've come to the sad realization that I am the JD Vance of my group chats. Overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up. Continually derails plans with late objections. That's so good! Oh, that's so good. It is that is that is really funny.

Starting point is 03:07:30 That is brutal. Yeah. It is interesting to see their dynamics. It's interesting to see kind of Stephen Miller seems to have the decisive word on like, let's go ahead with this Miller. Oh yeah. Speaking directly for the president. That's it. What's interesting is no one ever says the president has approved this.

Starting point is 03:07:46 The president has said, do this. Like Miller says something along the lines of like, we're going forward with this. Or I've been told we're going forward with this, which is again, not in terms of like, it's a very Hitler way of doing things. Right. Yeah. Right. Like there's this, I talk about this in the show, there's this decades long

Starting point is 03:08:00 debate about like, did Hitler literally order the Holocaust or did he just kind of like? Keep making it clear to people that if they kept moving in a more holocausty direction that would like endear them to him Yeah, yeah intentionality Aspects of both are true. But like yeah, this is definitely kind of eggs and sample that latter thing where Trump is probably like You know somebody should probably fuck up those hooties. Yeah, and Stephen Miller goes like yeah Trump said, you know, we're good. Keep moving forward. But he's also Miller's not dumb.

Starting point is 03:08:28 He's not going to say Trump said to do this. He's going to say he's been delegating so much more than his first term to the point where his presidency is just projecting a certain vibe that then other people have to carry out all of the details for. Yeah, this is very similar to the Hitler regime. Yeah. Yeah. There is a term for this at the time in the Third Reich. It's called working towards the future. OK, right. Where you're not going to get direct guidelines. You're supposed to figure out what he wants and move closer to it.

Starting point is 03:08:54 Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. No, that's kind of been his his new governing style. It's a lot smarter in terms of like just like, you know, getting documents to sign and then projects certain certain like slogans or vibes That then everyone who works under him which is at this point It's maybe like roughly 200 people tops have to all like figure out to like how to enact this thing that they think he wants Yeah, like even to the extent that he himself was saying he didn't sign the evocation of the alien enemies act that Rubio did. His signature's on it in the federal record, but clearly it's kind of a Rubio or it seems

Starting point is 03:09:29 from that that it's a Rubio concoction that he just greenlit. Just a quote from Miller in case anyone's wondering exactly what he said. As I heard it, the president was clear, colon, green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. So yeah, he never specifically says the president has okayed this. But, yeah, that's obviously people in Europe really pissed. I've seen some statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom, like the sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers

Starting point is 03:10:00 is obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing people off, should we pivot to advertisements? We should, which does not piss me off. It makes me really happy to consume. Garrison personally consumes all the products and services that support this show. Yeah, that's definitely not true. It's the only thing that Garrison consumes. That's also not true.

Starting point is 03:10:17 Which is why they have Pellegrra. I don't know what that is, but sure. Here's the ads. All right, we are so bad. Yeah, what's rending my additions? James. Yeah, okay. I'll just start. So, very amusingly, that's probably concerningly for him, Judge Boesberg, the same person who issued a tentative restraining order against the Trump

Starting point is 03:10:54 administration for the rendition of people to Venezuela, has also been assigned a signal lawsuit, American oversight versus hegemonic death. So that guy, the one who Trump already called for his impeachment, has another crucial case in front of him. What the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoke the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic, they're talking about state secrets now, having just added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what they have done. You can go back last week to understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from.

Starting point is 03:11:29 If you didn't listen to last week's. Yeah, we did a whole episode on it last week. It's also continuing to claim that it didn't quote unquote remove migrants after the tentative restraining order was issued because they'd already been removed. The removal happened when they were loaded onto the plane. Is this argument concurrent with this as a panel hearing? So that's a panel of three judges, right, at which the government is appealing the tentative restraining order. During this hearing, so-called Judge Patricia Millett said, quote, the Nazis received better treatment under

Starting point is 03:11:58 the Alien Enemies Act than these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings in the 1930s. They didn't just get loaded onto playing the central work camp. Not a great reflection on where we're at. The Trump administration is trying to challenge the jurisdiction of Boesberg, saying that he should have filed the same claim in Texas. Meanwhile, Venezuelan government attorneys are filing a legal claim in El Salvador to liberate their citizens from secot. It's worth noting, of course, that these people, some of them have been tortured by the Venezuelan

Starting point is 03:12:29 government and chose to flee at no small risk to their lives. If people haven't listened to some of our older stuff, like I've been to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to my episodes about that if you want to know more about why people are leaving Venezuela. We have a little more information on some of the people detained. One of them is a makeup artist who's a gay man who was beaten by guards as a U.S. photojournalist. Watch. Another one, the Miami Herald is reporting, had been granted legal refugee status. So it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed Venezuelans.

Starting point is 03:13:06 Some of these people have been through background checks already, right, at which they will have disclosed their tattoos. That's one of the things that they'll be asked about. And they would have disclosed those. So whether they control EFTIT or how quite how they came across these people is still a little bit unclear.

Starting point is 03:13:22 A couple of other things regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across my radar, but probably don't matter a whole episode. It's been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement to hand over the tax records of undocumented people. It is claimed for decades that it won't do this. This is why most undocumented people pay taxes, right? Yeah, which is something that the conservatives just don't believe. They're like, all these undocumented immigrants aren't paying taxes like the rest of us. No, actually they are.

Starting point is 03:13:48 What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes. Yeah, and yes. And this is a great way to have people want to pay less taxes if they're going to get their information sent over to the Gestapo. Yeah, exactly. The whole point was to not provide a distance. It's similar to why California gives drivers licenses to undocumented people and allows them to insure vehicles.

Starting point is 03:14:11 Right. Because you don't want to provide a disincentive to have a driver's license. You don't want to provide a disincentive to have insurance. We have now provided a disincentive to pay your taxes for undocumented people. So yeah, but that will have consequences and it will have consequences, especially in industries, right, like agriculture and construction, where large numbers of people tend to be undocumented.

Starting point is 03:14:30 Talking of undocumented migration, the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, reports that he said this on the All In podcast, he has claimed to have already sold 1000 gold cards. So gold cards, if you didn't listen to our previous reporting on that. Oh, I feel like I'm getting dizzy. I'm just like... Yeah, I'm ill.

Starting point is 03:14:50 Yeah, yeah. There is no process for applying for receiving a gold card yet. So it's extremely unclear what this means in immigration law terms. So he just got like a thousand texts from millionaires being like, yeah, I'll buy one maybe. Well, multi-millionaires, five million each, right? Like, so, yeah, apparently not quite clear, like, and like he claims that he sold them. Like, is he going around shopping these around? Is this how we're going to replace the tax revenue from undocumented people? Like, oh, my God, no one knows.

Starting point is 03:15:18 No, no one knows what this means. Who do you pay? Like, very unclear. So, yeah, that's great. That is the current situation with immigration. I also wanted to add that at least three people who were rare have died in San Diego County on the 14th of March in a storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived was found next to the remains of her father who died of exposure in a winter storm out here. So yeah, the border continues to be doing violence to some of the most marginalized people alive, which is great.

Starting point is 03:15:55 We should pop in here. A story just dropped. Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, who invited Jeffrey to that group chat. Journalists have found his public Venmo Quote unquote it's full of journalists I'm just gonna read a quote from an article on prospect org Yeah, unsurprisingly Fox News holds the highest headcount for reporters in Mike Waltz's phone. Griff Jenkins, whose Fox.com bio lists him as a Washington-based national correspondent for Fox, is joined in the list by Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox and Friends.

Starting point is 03:16:33 Porter Barry, president and editor of Fox Digital, also made the cut. But right-wing reporters are not the only ones represented in Waltz's Venmo list, which appears to be less than clean on ObSec,, as Secretary of Defense Hickseth wrote. Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as is Brianna Keeler, an American journalist who currently serves as co-anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central. Lauren Pykoff, an executive producer at MSNBC, is also in Walz's contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network, wow, Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon.

Starting point is 03:17:06 But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name stands out from the crowd, Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from the New York Times after it was revealed that her reporting on the Iraq War was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close to an administration set on war.

Starting point is 03:17:27 It's just like, okay. We don't we don't check any of this. We haven't locked anything down. Good. Having your public Venmo itself is crazy. The fact that he's like, the fact that he's like getting like dinner with journalists and be like, I'll send you a Venmo request for this sushi. Oh man, they've downloaded his entire friends list and you can just scroll it. Yeah, I know, you can see everybody. Oh my god. Oh wow.

Starting point is 03:17:50 He said they get like a $15 Venmo request from Brian Kilmeade for getting drinks at a bar. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Yeah, also, yeah, how well that these people make hundreds of thousands, if not billions of dollars. They're makes so much money. 15 bucks. Just get the money. It's just one drink in DC. It's so funny. Oh my god.

Starting point is 03:18:11 Now, I think it's time folks that we take' the Casbah, Rockin' the Casbah. Terry, if you don't like it, Rockin' the Casbah, Rockin' the Casbah. Oh my God, I love playin' that song. I love playin' that song. We don't actually have anything to say about tariffs. Mia's not here. I will note there's a graph going around

Starting point is 03:18:44 about the potential cost of Guinness under Trump's tax plan, which is usually around seven dollars per pint in the US and will now be 22 to 27 dollars after Trump's, you know, new new new tariffs for imported alcohol. That reflects its true value because it's also a meal. Yes, yes, absolutely. Anyway, we're done. That's all I have to say on tariffs. As long as the twisted tea pressing doesn't get affected, I'll be fine then. That's good.

Starting point is 03:19:10 It's good. Uh-huh. I'm not going to comment. Now, in some more upsetting news, another student at Columbia has been forced into hiding as ICE targets her for deportation. Yoon-Sow Chung is a 21-year-old permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from Korea

Starting point is 03:19:29 with her family when she was seven. On March 9th, she received a text message from Homeland Security Investigations, reading, hi Yoon-Sow, this is Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward. When are you available for a phone call?

Starting point is 03:19:49 So this message was allegedly in reference to being arrested, among others, at a recent sit-in protest at Bernard College at Columbia. She was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction. So after receiving that sketchy text, something that you should never respond to, you should immediately send to your lawyer, but after receiving this text, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading, quote, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest.

Starting point is 03:20:25 Consistent with the university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you. If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS. Now that same day, ICE agents showed up at the home of Chung's parents and Chung's lawyer called quote unquote Audrey from the, who revealed she was actually an ICE agent and stated that there was an administrative warrant for her arrest and that the State Department can revoke Ms. Chung's residency status. We're going to talk more about what's happened with Ms. Chung after this ad break. All right, we're back. So when ICE failed to locate this Columbia University student, they started to enlist

Starting point is 03:21:17 the help of federal prosecutors. I'm going to quote from the New York Times who broke this story. Quote, on March 10th, Perry Carbone, a high ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office told Ms. Ahmad, Ms. Chung's attorney, that the secretary of state, Mark Rubio, had revoked Ms. Chung's visa. Ms. Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Carbone responded that Mr. Rubio had quote,

Starting point is 03:21:45 revoked that as well, unquote. So this similar to like Mahmoud Khalil demonstrates that they have no idea of the actual residency status of the people that they're going after. They are just going after non-citizens and may eventually start going after citizens too. Like they are just going after people that they assume have like the least amount of protections whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on a student visa or

Starting point is 03:22:10 a work visa. They don't really know going in. They're just going after people. Then on March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants citing a statute for harboring non-citizens. The Trump administration is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda. One 21-year-old student who was the valedictorian at her high school is hindering their foreign

Starting point is 03:22:37 policy agenda for attending a sit-in protest. Her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means like a movement leader. She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyers write, quote, Miss Chung has not made any public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests. She was rather one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns." Chung herself had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung was not in violation of any university policy. So, in response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to try to locate and deport

Starting point is 03:23:20 her, Chung went into hiding. Her whereabouts are still unknown as of the time of recording, and her lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional. The lawsuit reads, Officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung's speech. ICE's shocking actions against Ms. Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity

Starting point is 03:23:50 and other forms of speech." Now, this past Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The judge said that there is, quote, nothing in the record indicating that Chung is a danger to the community or a quote, unquote, foreign policy risk, or that she is communicated with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there would be quote, no trips to Louisiana here,

Starting point is 03:24:17 unquote, referring to the movement of Khalil to ICE detention in Louisiana. A DHS statement said that ICE is going to quote, investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, unquote. The statement also claimed that Chung would have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge, which is like contrary to incidents of ICE just deporting people before their legally required hearings, even in defiance of extra court orders mandating those hearings. ICE is just lying here. And I think it's worth pointing out what types of people they are going after, right?

Starting point is 03:24:56 One type of person that ICE is going after is non-citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of what they actually did, right? This can be anything from standing in the street to doing a sit-in protest, to just being arrested on campus and removed by campus police or NYPD, right? Just any arrest on record that shows you at one of these protests. The other, in the case of Khalil, he was never arrested. He was the subject of a mass doxxing campaign by other students at Columbia professors and other You know quote-unquote anti-semitism organizations which target high-profile activists to create like public pressure against them

Starting point is 03:25:35 And and those same lists are now being used by the Trump administration to target students Mm-hmm. Yeah, he tar had one right better the Ultra Zionist people who are going around attempting to fucking present people with pages. I think they were one of the groups that had created a quote-unquote deportation list. So we should just mention that a Tuft student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was essentially abducted on her way to university, right? There's video which we'll link in the show notes here. Very, very frightening video of her just standing on the sidewalk,

Starting point is 03:26:06 as first one man approaches her in like a Navy hoodie. Hood up, mask on his face. Approaches her, stops her, and then as soon as they start engaging in conversation, she gets surrounded by like five other people, all wearing like what I would describe as like a gray man block essentially. Yeah. That they then like pull out badges and they like detainer.

Starting point is 03:26:26 And it's interesting, like as they approach, most these people are unmasked. And then as soon as people realize what's happening, like like people in the neighborhood realize what's happening, they all start pulling up like a like half face mask, like gators, gators. Yeah. Yeah. And they looked to me more than anything, the way Proud Boys dressed a lot in like 2019, 2020. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:47 It's, yeah, like... It's extremely concerning, like, when you start seeing these people, masked people, snatching people off the street, right? She asked if we can, she asked if she can call the cops, and they say we are the police. It looks like her phone falls out of her hand at some point, they take her bag. We know this because it seems like somebody was filming from a building just above and you can hear that people say like why are You covering your that person say why are you wearing my why are you covering your faces? Yeah, the guy the guy filming is like doing about what he could given the fact that you have to assume he had no real Idea what was happening initially other than like something visibly fucked up.

Starting point is 03:27:25 Like I'm glad he said the things that he said, but yeah. So yeah, she's a Turkish citizen who is in the States on a student visa in Boston, Massachusetts or outside Boston, Massachusetts. Yeah. She's on an F1 visa. So just a couple of days to a few days before she was seized, her name was published by Canary Mission. Canary Mission is a Zionist group that has been doxing pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide

Starting point is 03:27:54 people for several years now. She had co-edited an op-ed in the Tufts Daily last year, that seems to be how they were able to identify her. But as Garrison said, in terms of how they're picking their targets right now, it seems to be heavily tied to these vigilante Zionist far-right groups. I did see that a judge has already ruled that she shouldn't be left, she shouldn't be removed from Massachusetts without further consultation with that judge. And we don't know if she has been or not already.

Starting point is 03:28:23 But this is continuing to happen, right? We talked about this last week. I'm going to do a whole episode next week about this, about about this issue. She is in Louisiana. Sorry. Update. She has already been moved to Louisiana. Yeah. So I'm just reading a truth out piece here. Officials initially did not specify where else Turk had been taken. Kanaabi, her lawyer, was unable to reach her. Later on Wednesday, Kanaabi said in a motion that she was informed by a senator's office

Starting point is 03:28:46 that the student was already transferred to Louisiana. It's like in a matter of hours, they worked to get her like outside of her like home state where she probably has more legal protections. Yeah, it's not something that's super uncommon. I've seen them do this with what they called lateral transfers under Title 42, where they would move people, under Title 42, where they would move people.

Starting point is 03:29:05 Under Title 42, they could immediately return people to Mexico, right? And what they would do is laterally transfer them along the border and return them to another location in Mexico, which obviously led to them being completely dislocated when they were dropped in Mexico. Something else that I want to note is the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant. One problem that ICE can run into often is that people can choose just to not answer the door. ICE usually likes to rely on people that have already been arrested or already detained

Starting point is 03:29:31 by police. That makes it much easier for immigration officials to find people. Without that, locating people can be a little bit harder with the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant that shows there's trying to create this precedent for being able to actually break into more people's homes Even though you know she had a permanent resident status This is just like in terms of the tactics being used similar to like you know Just all these like gray man block people approaching you on the street one by one

Starting point is 03:29:57 That's like a tactic to take note of the use of this type of warrant is also something to take note of We are already at that point where people are like going into hiding, right? This is like very, very like dystopian YA coded stuff where you're like, you are literally, as a 21 year old like junior being forced to go into hiding because federal agents are after you, because you sat down.

Starting point is 03:30:26 You sat down in front of a building in protest of a genocide. You're not even a movement leader and this sort of thing shouldn't even happen to quote unquote movement leaders, right? Yeah, there's a the very first amendment protects your right to do that. Exactly. But like, regardless of whether or not you're involved in like the planning, the organization, whether or not you're making statements to press, whether or not you're giving speeches, if you just attend these sorts of things, you are a target by what is very obviously

Starting point is 03:30:54 a modern version of Gestapo-like actions. Yeah. I think it's also quite revealing that she's somewhat successfully gone into hiding, right? Like it suggests that their intelligent operation is not so advanced that they were able to immediately find her. Well, no, because again, the resources to do stuff like trace somebody down by their shoes

Starting point is 03:31:13 from like surveillance camera footage exists. We saw it used on those lawyers who lit a police vehicle on fire back in 2020. But like, there's not really much in the way at crimes going on here. And there's so many of these people, like the idea that you would pull all of the footage that you would need to track every one of these, it's just not feasible. And I think they'll just go after someone else, right, to get the headline. But I'll be following this one with interest because it's sort of an alternative outcome to the other ones that we've seen so far.

Starting point is 03:31:45 So it'll just be revelatory to see how it goes. Yeah. So if you want to contact us about any of this, maybe if you're seeing things happening on your campus, if you have anything you'd like to share or things that you think we've missed, you can do so. The email address is coolzontips at proton.me. ProtonMail is an encrypted email service. It's only end-to-end encrypted, like Signal, if you send it from a ProtonMail address. Don't copy any Atlantic journalists on your email, and you should be good to go.

Starting point is 03:32:21 Thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages. It does take time for us to go through all of them. Not all of them will have a response, but we are reading them. Thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages. It does take time for us to go through all of them. Not all of them will have a response, but we are reading them. Thank you. I am still working on a piece on the Lavender Scare. There's a lot of stuff happening regarding suppressing and going after trans people in the military. This takes time, but we are working on that slowly but surely, as well as stuff regarding ice targeting students and what's going on in Colombia. So we appreciate that

Starting point is 03:32:50 The last thing I want to talk about is This past Monday the IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate airstrikes Mohammed Mansour who works for Palestine today was killed quote in his house in southern Gaza alongside his wife and his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeera. Later that day, the IDF killed 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassam Shabbat in a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in northern Gaza. I want to read the statement from Hassam. If you're reading this, it means I have been killed, most likely targeted, by the Israeli occupation forces. When all this began I was only 21 years old, a college student with dreams like anyone else. For

Starting point is 03:33:32 the past 18 months I've dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements in schools, in tents, anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I slept on pavements in schools, in tents, anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people's side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest, something I haven't known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land

Starting point is 03:34:05 is ours and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now, do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting. Keep telling our stories until Palestine is free. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. Until Palestine is free. or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening! wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison. Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:35:18 Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty, and today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling, and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Starting point is 03:35:46 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history. Well John, that's because it's dump of week,

Starting point is 03:36:00 and this user writes, last week we had an attempted break-in. I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change the locks, but his mom told me he wasn't with her. And it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Did you leave him?

Starting point is 03:36:13 Well, to find out how this story ends, follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. It was shocking. It was very shocking.

Starting point is 03:36:30 Like that could have been my daughter. Like you never know. I'm Jen Swan. I'm the host of a new podcast called My Friend Daisy. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

Starting point is 03:36:49 podcasts.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 175

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