Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 182

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  The Irish Far Right/Neo-Nazi Movement Trans Fiction, Trans Sports The Refugees Fleeing South Africa's "White Genocide" The Gang Reviews Andor Season 2, Ep. 7-9 Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #16 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: Trans Fiction, Trans Sports https://victoria.monster/  https://thepointmag.com/criticism/entering-history/  The Refugees Fleeing South Africa's "White Genocide" https://support.iraplegalinfo.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057039031-What-is-the-U-S-refugee-resettlement-process  https://welcome.us/explainers/us-refugee-admissions-program-suspended-until-further-notice-welcome-corps-terminated  https://www.rescue.org/press-release/irc-responds-termination-state-department-grants-refugee-resettlement-program  https://2021-2025.state.gov/refugee-admissions/  https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/  https://www.nytimes.com/article/afrikaner-refugees-trump-south-africa.html  https://za.usembassy.gov/refugee-admissions-program-for-south-africans/  https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/letter-from-presiding-bishop-sean-rowe-on-episcopal-migration-ministries/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #16 https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/waltham-mass-ice-arrest-boy-left-alone/ https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-highlights-floridas-leadership-immigration-enforcement  https://support.iraplegalinfo.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057039031-What-is-the-U-S-refugee-resettlement-process https://welcome.us/explainers/us-refugee-admissions-program-suspended-until-further-notice-welcome-corps-terminated https://www.rescue.org/press-release/irc-responds-termination-state-department-grants-refugee-resettlement-program https://2021-2025.state.gov/refugee-admissions/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/ https://www.nytimes.com/article/afrikaner-refugees-trump-south-africa.html https://za.usembassy.gov/refugee-admissions-program-for-south-africans/ https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/letter-from-presiding-bishop-sean-rowe-on-episcopal-migration-ministries/ https://www.aclufl.org/en/press-releases/new-report-reveals-alarming-conditions-florida-ice-detention-centers https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-04-01/inhumane-conditions-and-death-at-miamis-krome-migrant-detention-center.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York,

since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So 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. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast about it happening here, which is normally focused on the United States because that's where we all live. However, we do like to cover the rest of the world and the ongoing struggle against the global far right movement.

And today we're going to talk about a place that we don't cover often on this show, Ireland. And it's not because Ireland doesn't have a problem with the far right. because as our guest today is going to talk to us about, it most certainly does. And so I would like to welcome to the program, a great guy, Padrego Rourke, author of Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and the Far Right in Ireland. Thank you so much for being on the show.

No problem. delighted to be here. Thanks very much, Robert. Yeah, you know, there's this attitude. And I think, as you noted in some notes you said along, there's a degree to which it's true, that Ireland has some resistance to the far-refer. right that has led to maybe it growing slower or taking a little longer to get off the ground to

the same extent that it has in the UK or the US as a result of kind of the history of Irish republicanism, that that's not comprehensively true across the island and that that's, you know, certainly has not stopped it from having some pretty significant problems, which we're going to talk about today. Yeah. Sadly, as long as fascism has existed since Mussolini's march on Rome and his political rise. We have had fascist groups here of one sort or another. Yeah. We've had fascist groups in Ireland that were pro-British and politics, fascist groups in Ireland that were pro-Irish or Irish independence. You know, obviously we were neutral during World War II. We weren't occupied by Nazi Germany or anything like that. We did have one very big fascist group here in the 1930s, the blue

shirts, who were extremely violent and got 68 members of Parliament elected. They were the main political opposition. They were kind of the largest non-governing fascist organization in the world per capita. But as you said, Irish republicanism has kind of inoculated us against a lot of the far-right stuff we'd have seen in Britain and Germany and France in the 90s. Because, you know, while the conflict was going on in the north of Ireland, basically if you were an angry young man with very strong patriotic feelings who was given towards political violence, you would probably end up in the provisional IRA and their politics were very

left-wing and internationalist. I mean, I remember going into their political wing Sinn Féin's bookshop in Dublin in the 1990s and it was all pictures of, you know, yes, our artifact and it was pictures of Nelson Mandela and like the Zapatistas and

you know, it was very much about Irish independence being an anti-colonial struggle. Yeah. You do, of course, get like on the opposite side of that on kind of the Loyalist pro-British side in the north, you did get as kind of reaction to that pro-British paramilitaries, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDA,

Ulster Defense Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF. They would have linked up with neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 in England to get guns, to get finances, to get their hands on explosives and things, which were easier to get in England than in the north of Ireland. But really, we never had a party here either in the north or in the south. that was as successful as groups like the Front National in France or the British National Party in England. But sadly, in recent years, certainly in the last 10 years, the far right, are kind of back. They're alive and kicking and they're taking to the streets.

And to what do you credit that? I mean, it seems like there's a mix of things. First off, you suddenly do have people immigrating into Ireland from elsewhere in the world in significant numbers for, you know, the first time and, you know, quite a while. And then on the other head, it sounds like there's also the kind of, as we see everywhere in the world, the conscious exporting of far right figures and ideas into the country. Yeah, well, Ireland's greatest export was always people. And, you know, we huge Irish American communities in, you know, Chicago, New York, you know, all over. You've Irish people in Australia,

in Canada and England all over the continent. So in the early, you know, 2010s, we start, like, there had always been a trickle of migration and people coming back and forward. Like, we had some, you know, Vietnamese refugees here. We had, you know, historically, we had Russian Jews coming here and, and so on, escaping pogroms in Zaris, Russia. But really, the first time that we had very large numbers of people coming was in the 20 teens. And it was things like the Mediterranean migrant crisis. It was people fleeing climate change in Africa, the Syrian civil war, Taliban and Afghanistan, and more recently, of course, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And the far right had always been these tiny little fringe parties and figures.

There was a very active anti-fascist group here called Anti-Fascist Action, Ireland. And any time these groups tried to organize or take to the streets, they were challenged and they were run off. But really, what brought them all together, Ireland's kind of attempt to unite the right was the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we had one of the strictest COVID lockdowns in Europe. you're talking about originally you weren't allowed to travel more than two kilometers from your home. That's one and a quarter miles for you Americans. And basically you could go to the store, but other than that, you couldn't travel very far. And of course, everyone was locked at home with their internet and started going down the rabbit hole.

And what we saw was the anti-vaxxer COVID conspiracy movement took to the streets in Ireland very quickly. and that brought together all of the disparate tiny far-rights and neo-fascist factions. The closet neo-Nazis, the anti-vaxxers, the fundamentalist Catholics, like the Society of St. Pius, the 10th, the sovereign citizen types, you know, the people who were on about 5G conspiracies and chem trails all got onto the streets, all got active. On the Irish left and the anti-fascist side, we kind of dropped the ball because we were following the healthcare advice. and the cops were quite happy to ignore the far right mobilizing on the street, but there were striking workers like Debenhams and Cleary's who'd been striking before COVID struck, and the cops were going up and moving these trade unionists on saying, you know, you're breaking the pandemic. So it wasn't released evenly. And, you know,

suddenly for the first time during the pandemic, you were starting to see groups of three, 400 far right in Dublin, which doesn't sound like much. But I mean, last weekend there was a march in Dublin City, and they had probably around 5,000, maybe up to 10,000 people marching, and that's something we haven't seen here since the 1930s. Yeah, and that's such, I think, an important point, the degree to which, because this is a global issue, the degree to which everyone else attempting to abide by public safety measures during COVID-19 strengthened the far right because they were out in the streets, this kind of organizing equivalent of getting to steal a march on the enemy, it makes sense.

sense to me that it was, because in the US, that was interrupted, at least by the George Floyd uprisings. But in Ireland, you know, it seems like there was a much more significant period of time where these folks were essentially acting and organizing unopposed. And the police were, when they chose to act at all, acting against folks on the opposite side of things who were organizing during COVID. Yeah, it was like kind of rumble on to the police. The cops didn't really start taking action on any of this stuff until, I would say it was an early November 2023 when they had this rally called, I think it was called to the doll or maybe slightly earlier than that in September 2020. The doll is the Gaelic word for our parliament. And basically,

the dregs of the COVID movement kind of came together again. You had all these tiny far right and fascist parties popping up. And the best thing about them is they all get into fewer fights. They all start arguing with each other about who's going to be the leader and they haven't united. but they took to the streets in the autumn in the fall of 2023. And there was one really violent and disgusting riot outside the parliament where the far right were throwing bottles of urine at politicians trying to get in, were shouting racial abuse at anybody who wasn't white, who was working in the building as a cleaner or a parliamentary assistant or anything,

any opposition politicians they could see they were screaming at them. In imitation of you guys and January the 6th, they had built a mock deuce and they were using it to hang effigies of politicians. And you also had police cops being attacked for the first time by the far right, really. There'd be one or two other incidents, but it's only when cops started getting attacked by them and politicians were being directly. Their safety was being threatened. Then the cops started to act maybe in the last 18 months or so. But it was really closing the stable door. about five years after the violent far-right horse had already bolted.

Yeah. And, you know, so I'm kind of thinking here, this is part of why you've started to see, you know, guys like, we started this conversation before we were being recording, talked about Tucker Carlson coming over to talk to Connor McGregor, who's becoming an increasingly large part of this. And I wonder if it's maybe these different kind of international, folks in the international movement sort of sniffing that, you know, they're hoping the cancer,

his metastasize, so to speak. I mean, is that kind of how you see it? Well, they definitely have an influence here. I mean, the politics, the talking points, the buzzwords that the far right use in Ireland have all been learned from the likes of Alec Jones, have all been learned from watching, you know, crazy stuff on Twitter. And it's all American and British far right talking points that are being replayed here, stuff about the clergy plan, stuff about the great replacement and so on.

I mean, 100 years ago it was the protocols of the elders of Zion, and now they're just spinning the same conspiracies, same talking points again. Like, for example, one of the things we had here was we had a party called the Irish People's Party and some of our campaigners were really fundamentalist, Latin Mass, set of a cantus Catholics, and they were going down and protesting about drag queen story time at Irish libraries. We don't even have drag queen story time.

These guys have been so inspired by what was happening in America. They just went in and started taking books off the shelves, you know,

and anything to do with any LGBT plus theme. Even basic sex education guides for kids, stuff that's pretty mild and perfectly happy to give my own, my own kids,

and I'm not the most woke guy, but they'd start ripping them up. They'd start taking them out in the library, filming themselves, burning books at home. It was really crazy stuff. And at that stage, again, you did get anti-anti-fascist organising. But what you kind of get is figures like Connor McGregor being amplified by the likes of Elon Musk, being amplified by, you know, Tucker Carlson coming over,

interviewing him or Donald Trump, of course, inviting him to the White House. I mean, the Prime Minister of Ireland, as we'd say in Gaelic, the Taoiseach, Mihal Martin, he was invited to the White House on the 12th of March. But the guy that Trump chose to actually have there on Patrick's Day itself was, of course, Connor McGregor. And McGregor has links to, I wouldn't say far right

figures, but certainly very populous figures. And McGregor has kind of started, he's become god-pilled and he started rambling on about, you know, rosary beads and the power of Christ and all this kind of stuff. And he doesn't strike me as a particularly religious man. And now with the help

of Tucker Carlson, And he, you know, and Elon Musk and others, he says he's going to run for president. We have a presidential election coming up here in six months. Did you watch the interview, Robert? No, no, I haven't yet. I caught some clips of it on social media, but I haven't gotten to sit through the whole thing. It's wild. There's absolutely no resemblance.

Like what Connor puts across bears no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland. Like he starts ranting about how the police are so corrupt. Elman to that's true. But he starts talking about how the traffic. the road cops who give you like speeding tickets and stuff. They're the most violent and repressive and all this kind of stuff. And it just so happens that Connor McGregor has a string of speeding violations in these sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson chips in and says,

oh my God, you've got these armed cops and they're repressing the Irish people, but they're letting these immigrants do whatever. My dad was a cop here for 30 years. My dad was on the border in the 1970s with the IRA shooting at him, and he didn't even get a gun. Our cops aren't armed. But Carlson is just throwing this stuff out, being educated about it. And he says at the very end of the interview, McGregor says,

oh, there's been a government kind of hit job on me. They're planning to bring me down. And what he's referring to is a civil trial, now not a criminal trial, a civil trial that Connor McGregor lost when he was brought to court for alleged rape and sexual assault. And the jury believed he's a accuser, a woman called a hairdresser called a hairdresser called Nikita Hand, and Connor McGregor was forced to pay damages of a quarter of a million euro to her, plus costs in the Irish High Court, which are about one and a half million euro.

Now, to you or me, that would be a huge sum of money to Connor McGregor, that's nothing. And I have to say, for legal reasons, he is, he is appealing it. But the reality is that standing in the way of any political ambitions, Connor McGregor has. And we just had here in the last six, last year we had a local election for like local councils, a general election, a European parliamentary election, any one of those, all he needed to do was put up 150 quid and he could have stood, he would be on the ballot. In fact, under Irish electoral law, he could have stood in every single constituency in the country and he didn't stand for election. And now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the Irish presidential race.

And he's not, it's just, it's an exceptionally difficult ballot to get on. you can't just stump up the money in America and become a third party candidate or a writing candidate or whatever. That doesn't work here. You need the support of a large number of democratically elected politicians to get there. So I think McGregor's real aim is not to get into the presidency because really he can't. He's not even going to be on the ballot. But I think he wants to be Ireland's answer to Tommy Robinson. And I suppose if Tommy Robinson is the answer, what the hell was the question? Yeah. We'll get into that more in a second. I do want to throw to ads here really quickly, and then we'll continue to talk about Connor for a moment.

We're back. So you say he wants to be the Irish answer to Tommy Robinson, which is such a, like, aim a hire, man? Like, it's odd to me. Like, I had kind of, I had kind of been worried, because we've had so many cases of guys in the United States who start out as these absolute jokes on the far right. and then you just see them pick up more and more attention over time. And that was kind of my worry with Connor. But you're saying you're kind of concerned more that he's going to continue to be like an organizing presence on the far right rather than someone who has much of a chance of picking up actual

like political office. Yeah, I think with Connor it's all about his ego, which is probably what you'd expect from an MMA star. You know, there's going to be an element of, you know, ego and showboating and KFAB and so on. I mean, it's interesting, and he's interview with Tucker Carlson, he was giving out that the minister of education, you know, isn't a teacher. They're unqualified for the job. And the Irish government's minister for health isn't a doctor. And it's like, well, what qualifies you to be president, Connor? You're a former plumber turned MMA fighter, you know. Yeah, getting hit in the face. Yeah. We've, we've had ministers of education who were teachers and ministers of health who are doctors who happen to be totally awful. The reality is like we have a PR system. We've, you know, a very democratic. and fair process, and we have more than a two-party system here. But I think, like, as emerged during the, during that civil rape trial, which McGregor lost, you know, he had to admit to his cocaine use during it.

He has been sending out kind of fevered, I would imagine cocaine fever trip, tweets saying, as president of Ireland, I have the power to. And it's like, man, the election hasn't even happened yet. He's way ahead of himself. He's not going to get in the ballot. He knows that. wants to present it. And I mean, the fact that he's even talking about getting on the ballot shows he doesn't understand the constitutional system here, which it's not like Britain. We have

a written constitution. It's not that complex, if you know, the basics of the law. He's never going to get into ballot, but he wants to present it that he's being denied the opportunity to stand. And unfortunately, what we have around the country is an increasingly violent anti-immigrant street movement that whenever these, what we call a mere IPAS, international, protection applicant services, these IPAS or refugee centres, basically. When these are picked as places of accommodation by the government while these people's applications for refugee status, they have to stay somewhere while these are being examined. You tend to get large protests in towns, villages, cities all over Ireland.

Sometimes these turn quite violent. Sometimes there have been more than party arson attacks on these centres. And I think what Connor McGregor ultimately wants is he, he wants to be able to tour the country attending these protests and having everyone queuing up to take selfies with him and telling him what a great hero he is and I think that's his ultimate aim. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And he's obviously, he's going to grift off the back of it. The guy has money already, but it was so funny, this multi-multimillionaire being interviewed by Tucker Carlson saying, we're going to start fundraising for my campaign. It's like, you've more money than you could ever spend on political posters and flyers and adverts, you know? So it almost sounds like this is like a retirement plan for him, right? Like he's clearly past his prime in terms of the getting hit in the face thing for money.

And now he's sort of moving on to like grifting off of these far right events and probably traveling just ahead of a series of riots. You know, like that's seems like what's in his future. Yeah. And I mean, we've had some, you know, at the time of an outbreak of rioting in Dublin anti-immigrant violence, which caused 20 million euros worth. the damage and, you know, trashed the city center in November of 2023, Conner, and I'm not seeing he directly caused it, but he was tweeting at the same time, Ireland is at war. And around the

same time, he was tweeting like any property that's been taken over by foreigners evaporated. I think really his plan is to kind of, if he can represent himself as a political martyr figure, he's hoping that it will overshadow his loss in the rape case. And he is, of course, appealing that and claiming he has new evidence and everything, but I think really that's what it's about. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the way far-right violence has looked in Ireland, like when these protests have really kicked off, because it seems like there's been this kind of fairly significant acceleration in the last three or four years in terms of particularly arson attacks. And one thing that I was kind of struck by in your notes was the degree to

which no one's been arrested for any of these yet? No. What happens, these started around 2018, so maybe just before COVID, you had one or two of them. And my book went to print in December, 2024. So I stopped counting in December. And by then, I had over 30 arson attacks. And there hasn't been a single conviction for any of them. So it's when usually former hotels that have been closed down with years are that the government moves in or some local. person moves in to renovate them and use them as one of these centres, they'll just go up and smoke in the middle of the night. And I mean, we have already a very significant homeless problem here. I mean, there's more than 10,000 people homeless in Dublin, both Irish and refugee. And I mean,

that probably sounds small to someone listening in a big American city. We thought we had a housing crisis when we had 2,000 people homeless and we got more than 10, almost 15,000 people homeless now. And some of these anti-immigrants, protesters have actually burnt down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people in the mistake and belief that it was going to be used for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to the housing crisis. You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes. Sometimes it's just pickets, sometimes it's graffiti.

In the case of Martin Kenny, who's an opposition TD, he'd be from Sinn Féin party. Most of your listeners would probably have heard of an Irish Republican kind of left-wing Irish Republican Party. Oh, yes. There was a refugee centre planned for where he lived in Lethram. And in fairness to him, he spoke out against it. And he condemned what he called, quote, the far right ideology that has been peddled in this country about asylum seekers.

A week later, he was sleeping in his house with his wife and kids. And his car in the driveway was petrol bond, was firebond. And they came back a few months later and did it again. And he was forced to move house. So arson attacks and politicians homes is. something we haven't seen here since the original fascists were around in the 30s as well. And this violence, again, like as I said, there hasn't been a single arrest. And I give you a perfect example.

The title for the book, Burned Em Out, is from an event that happened in February 2023. A guy stood up in front of a Garda police station here in Fingles, which would be a big suburb of Dublin. And there was a huge crowd of anti-immigrant protesters around. One of them was waving a swastika flag. And this guy stood up in front of them with a mega-examination. the phone in front of their police station said,

there is no point standing here outside a Garda station. The only way to deal with refugees is to burn them out. Go where they are fucking staying and burn them fucking cunts out. That's a direct quote. And of course, had he been threatening that violence against the guardee, had he been threatening that

violence against a private business or a politician, I have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away. But this, you know, masked guy threatening violence and arson was just allowed to walk off. So, there you go, they're certainly not on the ball. And we've even had, during the COVID pandemic, when there was a cop nearly killed that had a firework shot at him during one of these riots, the police

commissioner in the south of Ireland, who's formerly a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a very controversial pro-British police force that used to be in the north. This guy's our new police commissioner down south, and he tried to blame Republicans and the IRA for the violence and left-wing extremists for the violence that was happening. And it was so clear. that, you know, Republicans, Irish Republicans, have been on the streets opposing these people and their marches for years. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. Like the actual organizing of the anti-fascist movement in Ireland, how is it kind of responded to the explosion, in some cases, a literal explosion in far right violence on the street? Like, are you seeing it kind of reach like new heights? Or does it kind of seem like it's unprepared for, the moment that we're hitting because like, I mean, in the United States, it's kind of hard to tell because things have changed so much since 2020, right?

Like a lot of the, the fascist violence that we're seeing is now explicitly from the state. And so there's, there's just not a lot of on the ground, there's not the same kind of on the ground response to it that you were seeing when it was groups like the proud boys. And I'm wondering kind of how things have changed since 2018 in that regard in Ireland. I suppose, like if you think back as far as 20, 15, Tommy Robinson, a friend of the pod, attempted to organise he's anti-Islamic, he's Islamophobic, Pigida movement, tried to launch a branch of it in Dublin.

And they couldn't even get to their rallying point because there were 5,000 anti-fascists on the street there against them. Irish Republicans, Irish language activists, Muslim community from Dublin were there, LGBT activists,

and they couldn't even get to have their event. So up until COVID, certainly the anti-fascists and groups like anti-fascists, Action Ireland were excellent at closing down small groups. You have a lot of people who are doing online research and exposing these people's sorted histories and their international connections. So that's one thing we're pretty good at.

And what it turns out is that a lot of these guys, like one of the main proponents of the Q&on conspiracy theory here, was a guy called Rowan Croft, who just happened to be a former British Army soldier. So that doesn't fly too well in Ireland when somebody standing up saying, I'm a great Irish patriot and I'm going to stop the foreigners. Like, well, hang out a minute. When you chose to fight in the military, you chose to serve the queen of England. So you have big national groups like anti-fascist action.

You have groups like anti-imperialist action, Ireland. Thankfully, as these protests have sprung up around the country, these far-rights anti-immigrant protests, they have always been countered. And I'm thinking of in Cork City when the library was being attacked. And it would actually have to be closed down for a purestance. and it was the first time that the Cork Library had closed since the British burnt it down during our revolution in the 1920s. And, you know, you had a crowd of maybe 100 far right. And people on the opposite side, the anti-fascist scene kept building and building until by the end.

And I was there for somebody's protests. We had four or five hundred against them. And eventually we decided, right, we're going to stand and protect the library. And that happened in other places like Limerick and it happened in Dublin. And eventually the far right said, well, we can't even get near the library to have our library. protest anymore and they dissipated. One thing that's very interesting here is the optics and sometimes on the lefts and on the anti-fascist side, we're not as good at the imagery and the using new technology and stuff.

And one thing you'll always see is, you know, when anti-fascists are mobilizing in Ireland, you know, they'll have often red flags, they'll have the Palestinian flag, they'll have Irish left-wing Republican flags like the plow and the stars. But often we don't carry our national flag, the tricolour as much. and of course the far right love fetishizing flags and they have the green, white and orange Irish tricolor everywhere.

Often, of course, these people are so ignorant they fly it the wrong way around and it's the orange, white and green. So it's like Vive la Cote d'Ivoire. It's the ivory coast flag if you have it the wrong way.

But it's interesting in some of the clashes, you'll have anti-fascists with the Irish flag and fascists with the Irish flag. But I think just in terms of optics, it sometimes looks very bad when the far right

are able to clip out a section of the opposing crowd and say, look, they have Palestinian flags, they have all other LGBT pride flags, but they're not proud to be Irish. They don't have Irish flags. And there could be some Irish flags clipped off at the side. So these people in the far right are very good at using the history of Irish politics and resistance to Britain and using the imagery of that struggle and co-opting it. And I think it's very important that we on the anti-fascist side don't surrender any of that to them. And I mean, the Irish flag, what it stands for the green bit is for Catholics who wanted independence. The orange bit is for Protestants who wanted to be linked with

Britain and the white was for peace and unity. So it's a flag that at its very essence, you know, talks about respecting a religious minority and people from a colonial or immigrant background who arrived here as strangers. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to continue this discussion and then close things out. But first, we've got one more ad break to do. And we're back. So yeah, I kind of wanted to end this by looking into a little like, what are you kind of looking for in the future, like in the, in the kind of the next year or two in Ireland? Like, what are you, what are you expecting? What are you, what are you worried to see? Like, yeah, what do you kind of see coming forward here? I think what's tending to happen now is genius out of the bottle and far right message is spreading.

And you had this big far right rally of, you know, 10,000, five to 10,000 people at its maximum that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main street in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards, but it is worrying. I think we're going to see that grow. And I think on the left sometimes, and particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea that, oh, this is a flash in the pan and we'll organise a few big rallies and they'll go away. They won't. This is like the National Front in Britain.

These people are going to be around haunting Irish politics for at least a decade. And then they're never going to fully go away. they'll pop back up again. I think we're going to continue to see the regional protests. And I think as well, we have started seeing the Irish government, which is a coalition of two centre-right parties, kind of tighten up their own language on immigration. We're starting to see an increasing number of deportations as well.

The police really still aren't fully on the ball. They are, of course, being given new policing powers by the government to deal with violent protests. they're being issued with things like, you know, new non-lethal technologies, you know, pepper spray and extra equipment and body cameras that they wouldn't have had before. But of course, the classic thing is that these will always be used as much, if not more so, against the left and the anti-fascist side than they will be against the racists. Thankfully, these groups, you know, they're all infighting with each other. They have tried to do like electoral acts and to plan out political strategies. But thankfully, they're all so fixated and wanting to be the fewer that never really works. But what I was going to say a minute ago is that that 10,000 people, if there were that money on the street, not everyone in that is far right.

You know, some of the people are from working class communities that have been betrayed by the government and have been abandoned. And they are starting, they've just fallen down the rabbit hole. And I can think of an incident. I was in the gym a couple of months back and just sitting there and there were a few guys didn't know them. They were around chatting. Obviously, we were in the gym.

none of us are in the sauna. None of us have many clothes on. And none of these guys had like questionable far right tattoos or anything like that. But the conversation suddenly started about immigrants and how they were bringing crime and how they were bringing disease and all this kind of stuff. And I listened to it for a minute or two and I just stood up and said, lads, everything you are saying about immigrants in Ireland now is what was said about Irish people in America in the 19th century and in England in like the 70s and the 80s. So I think it's important that even in our workplace is on public transport when we hear this kind of talk, we call it out if it's a friend of ours who's fallen down the rabbit hole

into these conspiracies because that's how their message is spreading now. Often when you see people involved in some of this anti-immigrant rioting, they have no history of involvement in far-right groups, but it's that message has spread beyond those groups thanks to our friends in the nerd Reich. And I think if we have a work colleague or a brother, or somebody who falls into that, but we don't abandon them.

We don't immediately start calling them a Nazi and whatever that we try to talk, talk them around to it. But look, I suppose the thing is, there is hope, and everywhere these people have organized there have been anti-fascists there to meet them.

I think we need to get better of planning that in a national scale. Of course, on the left, you always get this factionalism and infighting. I'm not standing beside him. He's a Trotskis. Well, I don't like his views on the north,

whatever. We need to kind of say, as long as we're fighting with each other, the fascists are winning. Thankfully, none of these people have ever gotten more than 2% in an election. They have nobody elected in our national parliament. They only have four or five, maybe six counselors elected in the entire of the southern part of the country. And that's out of 949 counselors. But we can't just laugh at them. We can't worry this isn't a threat. Because when the Nazis stood for election the first time, I think they only got 2% of the vote as well. And look how

that turned out. Well, yeah, and as we've seen in the U.S., like what starts as this tiny, tiny number of freaks and weirdos can wind up being a mass movement if it's not, you know, cauterized, right? Like that's, and that's, that's kind of the challenge in front of Irish anti-fascists right now is ensuring that that cauterization happens. Absolutely. And, I mean, look, if you think of this, you know, Elon Musk has tipped McGregor for president, and we're all laughing at it now.

But, you know, it wouldn't be the first time that Elon Musk has tipped reality TV star with a questionable sexual and criminal history for high office and they got there. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Do you want to have anything you want to plug here at the end of the episode?

I mean, your book, obviously. Yeah. Well, obviously, I'm not on X Twitter, anything like that. I don't have a substack or anything. So just the main thing I want to plug is my book, Burned Em Out, a history of fascism and the far right in Ireland. It is published by Bloomsbury, Head of Zeus. So it should be available in any to order.

via any bookshop. Obviously, if you are going to support a bookshop, support a small independent one rather than Barnes and Noble. And if you are buying it online, obviously, buy it from, direct from the publishers, Bloomsbury. Don't buy it off Amazon if you can, because God knows Jeff Bassus has enough money.

Yeah. It's certainly bloody. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, that's our episode, everybody. Come back tomorrow when we'll have another one. Welcome to Dick It Happened here, a podcast, and I forgot to write an introduction for, I'm your host, Mia Wong. And we are, well, okay, we're not taking a break from the horrors

because this is also still a podcast about the horrors and what you can do about it. But, you know, I am transgender. One of the ways that we have been, like, depersonified via transgender is through a, you know, a massive attack on trans women in sports. And this has led to, you know, like the acceleration of like the broad scale attack on all of us being able to exist as people. And with me to talk about this is someone who has written a book that is about this

and also kind of not about this in a lot of ways. And that is Victoria Zeller, who is a writer, author, writes about the Buffalo Bills for our friends over at Defector sometimes. And is the author of a new book, One of the Boys, Out Today, when you're listening to this? Wow. Crazy. Wild. Yeah, it has synced up like this completely on purpose. We were 100% planning this from the beginning. Hello, thank you for having.

having me. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So you would think that the question that your book, one of the boys, asks is what if a trans school played football? But the actual and more important question it asked is, what if a poster could write fiction? And the answer is that it fucking rips. Thank you. Um, as this, this book rules. I genuinely, I think this is, this is the best written group chats I've ever read in a book. It rips. It's so good. I am very passionate about group chats, you know? I mean, like, posting is writing. Hello, audience. If you don't know me, my name's Victoria. I'm online. You may know my Twitter or Blue Sky accounts at DirtBag Queer. I'm, like, largely posting about football when football is in season. I kind of just

post about random shit these days. But, uh, yeah, I've allegedly written a book. Uh, the weird thing about writing a book is that I feel like I've just totally blacked out actually writing it. And I'm like, that's crazy. Who did that? Couldn't be me. But yeah, in terms of, like, how I would, like, very quickly pitch one of the boys, high school senior named Grace comes back to her high school football team. She quit over the summer because she came out as trans, because her teammates want to make a push for a state title.

And it's, like, trans coming of age, Friday Night Lights, handshake meme. But also, when I was, like, big picture thinking about what I wanted to do with this. I wanted to tell kind of a like traditional high school sports story, but through an outsider lens. Like, if you think about the average, like, high school football story, you think like, well, what we're going to do is we're going to win state, we're going to get the scholarship, and we're going to get the girl. And I wanted to sort of like deconstruct those three things by making the protagonist trans and making the protagonist a kicker instead of like a linebacker or a quarterback or whatever.

And that is who I am. Yeah, and this book rips. That sounds like a fun thing going on where it basically has like the football iceberg where like you can come into this knowing zero ball and you will get stuff out of it and you can come into this where I am knowing like a sum ball and you will get some out of this. And then like the unhinged people who have like 16 different PFF tabs like pinned their bookmarks will be like, holy shit, the world building. Yeah.

Yeah, that was, it is hard writing fiction about sports if you're writing young adult fiction you know, which is what one of the boys is. Don't be weird about that if you're an adult. Teenage girls are like, you don't have to hate the things they like. You can calm down a little bit. But, yeah, writing about football for an audience of teenagers is, like, fascinating because you have to assume that the audience knows very little, and you have to figure out how much you want to give them so that they get it without, like, overwhelming them, which is like really just not at all what I wanted to do.

But also, if you're a sicko like me, you can be like, ooh, I'm really into what this offense is doing, or I'm really into this like onside kick play design. So I tried to like do, I tried to do a little bit of both. And also, again, this is a transcoming of age story. So, uh, yeah. It's also dealing with, you know, the horrors. So, yep.

Ball plus fours is what we're working with here. Yeah, so I think, okay, we're going to get more into the politics of this in a second. But first, I want to ask one ball question since I have now, I have now introduced my audience to the fact that I talk about football by managing to get a rant about Deshaun Watson on here for like 10 minutes. The Sean Watson trade. But, okay, my one ball question for this was, how happy did it make you when he figured out a way to write a football team that does not use the forward pass? Oh, man. Uh, it's, um, without, without spoiling what happens at the end of the act one turn, circumstances occur so that this high school football team, um, has to move a player who is,

who is not a quarterback to quarterback, at which point passing just goes away and we are just running the ball, baby. We are, we are pounding the rock. It's so sick. It is. Kind of, sort of like loosely what I base this on was the year that the University of Kentucky football team, like all, like every single quarterback got hurt. And they were like, okay, Lynn Bowden, you are our best wide receiver. We're just going to put you a quarterback and,

you know, we're just going to see what happens. And that's like, that was the fun of writing fictional football is that I can make my fictional football team do whatever I want. And I don't want to ever see conservative trickery that is the forward pass. Get it out of here. Yeah, it's just one of the things I love about your writing is that you are very much just like an old school like traditionalist football pound the rock like none of this like none of none of this fucking RPO bullshit person which is also I don't know. It's just very funny that you have like you have like the football personality

of like an extremely cranky like 75 year old like coach from like the 70. Yep, and I'm a trans woman. Yeah, it rules. Which, like, again, I tried down to do too much of it in this book. Like, part of the reason that I made my main character a kicker, which we will also talk about other reasons later. But part of the reason is that kicking is this sort of, like, own separate silo-off thing. So I really only have to, like, get the audience to understand kicking and what happens when Grace is on the field. I don't have to get into, like, what a football team that, like, never.

passes the ball, like, is doing on a technical level. We don't have to do all that. I give you just enough that if you are a sicko, you're like, yeah, baby. This is the sickest offense of all time. But also, yeah. But also, like,

you know, trying to help the queer kiddos understand that, like, running the ball is the official football position of the working class of the proletariat, you know. Okay, we're going to get more into the class dynamics of football a second,

but the place I kind of want to start in terms of like, you know, talking about the parts of this at Arge's ball is, so in a lot of ways, this is a book about scriptlessness, which is something that I think, I don't know, like we've been seeing a sort of resurgence of trans, or not resurgence, but kind of like surgen's, Emergence? Is that the word word? There we go.

There we go. There we go. Yeah, of trans literature. And I think this is a very interesting angle to take on it. And it's, you know, when I say scriptlessness, it's about the ways in which trans women in particular don't have, you know, sort of examples and paths to, like, follow, right? There's not like a, you're supposed to go from A to B to C.

This is like what you're doing with your life. And you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're you and you just have to, you know, there's no rails. There's no guides. You just have to do it. I think the Zapatista line about it. it is the road is made by walking. Can you talk about how, like, having to just figure this shit out influence the way that you write Grace and the way that you sort of write this book?

Yeah. So this is something that Grace struggles with a lot. I mean, like, specific to her, it's because she's a trans woman who's playing football, something that if, and hopefully trans woman has ever openly played, like, American football, there is not a lot of documentation of that online. So, like, so, like, you know, Grace, she is, like, walking a path that has, like, never existed before. But I think, like, more broadly and more, like, thematically there, is that, like, Grace is also frequently, I call her stupid, and I don't think that she's stupid, but, comma, but Grace struggles a lot to, like, express herself, I would say.

And, like, I wanted her to, like, challenge what a reader might expect from a trans girl in young adult fiction, specifically. We're like, I think she's, like, frequently kind of, like, grading, or at least I find her grading. She is not traditionally feminine. I don't think she's unfeminine, but she, like, struggles a lot with, like, feeling okay enough to, like, express that about herself.

Yeah. And, like, I feel like a lot of stories about trans kids have this view of being a, like, younger trans person of, like, well, it was always easy for me, and I took to femininity like a fish in water, and, like, this was, like, natural to me. I wanted to write a character for whom it is not necessarily natural for Grace to be this person.

And I wanted her past and the way she is now to sort of, like, challenge a, like, cis reader, specifically. But also, in terms of scriptlessness, in a more, like, macro way, there's not a lot of YA contemporary fiction about trans girl characters, like, at all. There is now, thankfully,

a good amount of trans male representation in the genre. But there are a few authors who are out here writing trans femme contemporary, but, like, not a lot. So, like, figuring out, like, where I wanted to, like, slot in to this, like, genre that is kind of, like, struggling to be born.

Yeah. You know, not a lot of trans femme, like, 17-year-old protagonists who are, like, going to, like, parties and drinking beer and worrying about whether or not they want to go to college, which is all, is all stuff I wanted to, like, touch here. Yeah, and I think there's a bunch of levels that this stuff sort of operates on, and I think it's very, like, I don't know, like, a lot of being trans and I always say there's a lot of, least for me, I don't know, like, maybe maybe this is different for other people. It's just like, having no idea what the fuck you're doing and just, you know, waking up one day and realizing, like, shit. Wait, what the fuck do you mean? I'm doing this. And it's like, you know, I can think about this like doing this job. It's like, wait, what the fuck? I'm a trans podcaster. Like, what? Like, how? Like, I can't even do my makeup well. Like, what the fuck are we doing here?

Yeah. I think that, like, another thing that I've talked about this a lot in the, show is, but it's also just like, how kind of like normal the trans girls who just like suddenly something blows up and they're like internet famous or whatever the fuck are, that they're just like some kid until like, yeah, you know, there's just like an explosion and everyone is suddenly interested in every intimate detail of your life and is trying to deconstruct it in order to destroy you. Yeah. Grace is, um, again, I don't really want to like spoil act act three stuff. here, but later on in the story, Grace achieves some amount of, like, internet notoriety for

what she's doing. And, yeah, Grace is, like, an extremely typical kid. She has, like, typical kid problems. But then this, like, microscope gets put on her, and she's, she is sort of, like, forced to, like, become this, like, different thing that, like, if she wants to be that thing, someday, it's not now. Yeah, yeah. I think in a lot of ways, my book is about how we ask teenagers to, like, do too much and be too much. But, like, especially trans kids, when you transition at any age, you are building the plane

of your personality while you are flying it, baby. Yep, yep, yep. And, like, that's so much pressure to put on anyone, but, like, especially anyone who is a kid is just, like, is a lot of pressure. And I wanted to, I wanted to, like, juxtapose the parts of Grace's experience that, like, a, like, cis boy or girl could read and be like, yep, I also don't know where I want to go to college, but also, like, sort of, like, show, like, well, because she is like this, she is facing this, like, unreal level of scrutiny that is, like, not normal, deeply unnatural and, like, fucked up and, like, unfair. Yeah. Now, speaking of unfair, we have to go to ads. When we come back, that's one of my better pivots. I'm proud of that one. When we come back, we're going to talk about masculinity.

We are back. So, one of the boys is weirdly the second football-involved book about a trans woman that I've read in the last year. And I think it's fascinating because in the, like, pure archetypal sense from like anthropol, like structuralist anthropology. It is like a pure structural inversion of Alison Greaves is how to fly, because how to fly is, this is also a good book, but how to fly is about a girl getting force femed to escape masculine violence by becoming a cheerleader. And one of the boys is about a trans woman going back into like into a hypermasculine space to become a football player. It's like, they're just literally perfect structural versions of each other.

And so I wanted to ask you about how, how, how, What were you thinking about doing this thing, right? Which is going back into these hyper-masculine spaces that a lot of people come out of pre-transition, you know, when you were sort of writing this. Because this is not a thing that people tended to write when they're writing about transfemms. Totally. And sort of the like irregularity of Grace's path this way is like one of the reasons, I was drawn to like writing a a sports story about like a a trans girl playing football specifically is because like I probably have a like more I don't know if complicated is the

word but I have like a very like interesting relationship with masculinity and as much as I'm fascinated by it like I think it is like endlessly interesting to see the ways that like men construct the like various kinds of masculinity that they live in and and the, like, various outcomes that men can end up finding via their weird, distinct masculities. For instance, for me, personally, I'm still in my, like, old high school, like, boys group chat, like, that we, like, started, like, a decade ago. And, like, I've never once had a problem fitting in there.

When they all found out I was trans, it was like, oh, shit, cool, whatever. we're going to keep talking about like the Knicks you know and like again Grace's journey with masculinity is different from mine but kind of

like her I have like some amount of like difficulty in like very masculine sports spaces when I was a kid but then like once you adapt and once you like learn how to like perform this thing like I never had a problem

existing in these worlds. And like, something that Grace is really annoyed by is that people are always like, I just can't believe that, like, you would be trans. And what is hidden in there is, like, you were kind of a dick. You were, like, kind of a douchebag. Yeah, yeah.

So, like, I very much wanted to write a trans protagonist who has a relationship with, like, her past self and with her male friends that was like a little more complicated where like she has a like very good solid group of like male friends who are not like perfect but are still like that's my friend so like I think for my friends and for a lot of trans women's male friends they're like well I was friends with you before so like you're still like you know you're still you I'm still going to be cool with you so I guess That means that I have to think about, like, I have to like, okay, now I have to, like, think about how, like, trans people are, like, treated by society more broadly. And it's, like, interesting seeing men in my life, like, suddenly become, like, cognizant of, like, trans issues. And it's all, like, personal. It's all, like, well, I know this person. And therefore, I'm going to show compassion to this person that I like. And then, you know,

politics starting at the personal and sort of like growing out from there. So I want to ask a bit more just digging into sort of the masculinity aspect specifically because one of the things I think is, I don't know, there's a part of being a trans femme that isn't super well understood outside of it, which is sort of a lot of trans women have a phase where you really try to be a man, right? where you get like really into like hyper masculinity in order to try to like try to make yourself do it like I had

Gamer Mia phase which was a fiasco not even Gamer Mia phase I'm still sort of Gamer Mia but I had like you know I had I had like top point 25% heartstone player like Mia who was a wreck a disaster was substantively a worse person

yeah and and you know so like that's a thing that has a lot of complicated social ripples were like this, this process of like doing this, you know, sometimes it's like your final sometimes it's just, it's just what you're doing to try to get by. It's like trying to force yourself to be a man and like do this masculinity in a way that's like really shit because you're trying to like reconcile it with yourself. Yes. So this is like a thing that a lot of like Transfam's experience. I think it's written interestingly in this book. I was I was wondering,

I don't know, like the like the way you talk about being in this, fitting into these spaces is as like, okay, well, I figured out how to, like, do the performance okay, and then it was sort of fine. So I'm wondering, like, this is almost universally seen as like, this is like a form of structural violence has been enacted on you, that you sort of have to, like, do this. But there's also a kind of, I don't know, a kind of complicated dynamic of, like, these people are still, like, your friends and you like them. I guess I want to know sort of how you've been thinking about, like, that specific. angle and like this sort of process of fitting and becoming and also just this is the sort of unbecoming you have to do to like become yourself yeah so my book has flashback sequences that are written in second person this is mostly a book that's written in first person but i tried to like really lean into this like phenomenon of like closeted trans women like butching up at like certain moments in their lives in order to like pass and cram down this like feeling that is like really fucking scary at first. Yeah. So like I want the second person Grace flashbacks to her like

starting fights and being a like asshole to to to her girlfriend. I want them to feel like jarring and I want them to feel like Grace is being a bastard in a lot of these flashbacks, but like, I also wanted to show, like, how she gets there in terms of, like, various moments earlier in her life where she was sort of, like, shunted into this more, like, masculine path in order to, like, pass and, like, not be, um, bullied or, like, other eyes. And, like, it definitely is, it's tough and I think that I personally have a like complicated relationship with like yeah like I hated football when I played it and I did it because like I like the sport obviously because I'm a fan

and because I wrote this book about it and because I write about football sometimes and I boast about it a lot but like playing it may be miserable but like I also be friends on that team who I still talk to so it's like I definitely wanted to feel like violent and imposed, but also, like, it isn't something that can be, like, erased.

It's something that you have to deal with. Yeah. It's something that, like, as you grow up and as you continue to self-actualize, you have to, like, decide what parts of that version of yourself are worth keeping and what parts aren't. And that's, like, something that I wanted to show, like, Grace struggle through kind of in real time. is she's like very early in her transition and she doesn't know how she wants to present

and she doesn't know how much of of like her old life and the people in her old life that just want to associate with her or does existing on this football team drag her back towards something that she doesn't want to be anymore

it's all stuff that I wanted to play with and is not like overtly political but is like subtextually political you know? Yeah. Well it's It's political in the sense that like, you know, that we were talking about

sort of scriptlessness earlier, right? And I think one of the, one of the sort of alienating factors about being trans is that like, especially if you're like kind of alone and you're like, you know, like you're like the only trans femme that you're spending time with, right?

This is just true for like a lot of things. Like a lot of how sort of oppression functions and a lot of how violence functions is by convincing you that this is the only, you're the only person's ever gone through this. And there are always going to be unique aspects of it. But like, you know, one of the ways that alienation is maintained is by convincing you that no one else

can understand the thing that's happening to you and that because no one else has ever done it. And it turns out like, no, actually, this is something that like all of us have gone through. And when you sort of start to realize this and the kind of solidarity that it can be built based on this collective well of experience we've all gone through and how it can be, you know, changed by actual actions of a bunch of people working together, it changes things. So I think it is in a lot of ways political in the sense. that like in order to have politics, you have to have sort of like collective assemblages of people who fucking understand each other and who understand that they're not alone and that they can do

things. Totally. And this is part of how you get to that. Yeah. We can talk a little bit more about the like very start of something that could be seen as a political awakening that Grace has in this book. But like, yeah, part of the reason that she isn't perfect is because she doesn't know any other, like, there are no other

transome characters in this book, and that was very deliberate. Grace is, like, on our own. She is, like, figuring this shit out as she goes. Yep. And I wanted it to feel rough and, like, ad hoc. Yeah. Because, like, that's how it is for a lot of people. That's how it was, like, you'll do it by walking. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, I guess I want to kind of move into the more directly political realm. One of the things that's interesting about this book is that, like,

grace, and this is something that, like, I, my brain has been so melted by having been like de politics kids since I was like 15 because I was like my high school was like interrupted in the middle of it by me trying to overthrow the Turkish government and so like my brain is so melted we'll get aired one one day we already can't go there for our coverage of Kurdish

guerrilla movements. Very good stuff you'll find many such things I think but like one of the interesting parts of this is that grace is like not political right and most of the people in this aren't and there's kind of a divide between the politics knowers who are like the more uh you know who are like okay yeah like we are we are like the queer kids we are like the activist kids and then like the you know like the ballplayers and then grace sort of fits more into the like not even more into like grace isn't like a politics person grace is like hey like transphobia's

bad we shouldn't do that but also like just wants to fucking go kick a go kick a rock in between two posts. So yeah, can you talk about like how you sort of decided to make her just be like kid who doesn't follow politics? Yeah, so like that was like not any kind of like statement about how like politics is

bad, you know? That was like Grace's 17 and most 17 year olds if they have politics at all have like completely incoherent politics. Yeah, because I was like holy shit. Yeah. So like Grace has the like

barest outlines of, like, ideology, and those were, like, put on her by people in her life. We know that her dad is a union man, and from a small age, she has internalized that unions are good. Does she know why? Probably not. But, or also, we know that her friend, Tab, who is, Bory has been, like, educating her on, like, Puerto Rican independence, which was, like, which was a, like, That was a very funny line too, right? Because, because Grace is this like dumb as shit white kid from the suburbs. But so like,

inasmuch as she's like piecing together the person she is bit by bit, she's also kind of like piecing what she thinks about the world together along with that. In terms of like most of the straight white players on the football team, like, like basically don't have politics, there's a scene where one of my minor characters is like, yo, I just figured out that like transphobia is bad. Yeah. I loved, I fucking loved writing that scene.

But like, I imagine that up until recently, Grace was exactly like this. And just like, yep, I'm a middle, lower middle class, white, straight boy, uh, air, on all of that. She never had any kind of, like, thought about that. That does not reflect what was going on in my life when I was a teenager because I was a very annoying, like,

me and a friend of mine, Chavon, got in trouble for putting a Bernie Sanders 2016 sticker on her locker because that's the kind of shit we were doing in high school in 2015. so like I was like very much had sort of like vacant liberal middle class kid politics but like Grace Grace is um I imagine that like later in her life she kind of has more political thoughts in her head but I also kind of imagine that her brain works like I don't know if you've played disco

Elysium, but I kind of imagine I kind of imagine Grace has a like thought cabinet and it's like she has like she has like two slots in it. She just like cannot hold

that many ideas in her brain at once. So she's she is in all aspects of her life trying her vest and trying to get better. And yeah, I want like I feel like a lot of contemporary

YA that comes out these days a lot of the kids have like overly coherent politics. I was like, nah, nah. I wanted to write a kid who has like good intentions but has no idea what he's doing. God, my brain's doing the Trump line in many cases have no idea what they're doing.

Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ, my brains are broken. Okay, speaking of things being broken, the products and services to support this podcast, unrelated statements. We are back. Okay, so having now gotten like many far into this interview without directly being like here's the football politics. Let's let's talk about politics of football because one of the things I think is fascinating

about the way that you're sort of talking about this and the way that Grace like runs into this and the way that this is just like a thing that happens in the U.S., which is that like giant portions of the entire U.S. economy and like structural elements of the U.S. education system from like the ground up and like all. all of these sort of contracting services and like, like massive portions of like how every single part of the education system from like fucking like middle school through college are all bent around this game.

Yep. And, and I think one of the things that happens there is that like, the kind of like default ambient politics, it is very conservative. And I think in ways that, you know, are very easy to understand and that when people tend to talk about this, they immediately go like, well, yeah.

So like, you know, like the left. just talking about football, it's like, you're talking about the militarism, which is like, yeah, I mean, they're fucking flying jets over games. Like, we're not even in wars anymore in terms of, like, US ground troops deployed, like, why the fuck are their troops showing up on the field? There's like the cult of masculinity stuff.

There's, you know, I mean, like, there's, there's been some engagement now with the racial politics of it, with Capernick. People realize, like, holy shit, wait, there's been, like, stuff happening here for ages. And, you know, and you get sort of the masculinity politics. But there's, I think a lot of stuff here that we don't talk about

on the left in terms of like the class dynamics of this and the way that football I mean just like functions in a lot of very very weird ways in terms of like sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of like non-white working class kids and like

I don't know fucking see if I knew ball I could I could pull an example off top of my head of like some quarterback prospect he'd spent his family and spent like $2 million on like personal trainers for him. Absolutely. Yeah.

I grew up sort of like middle, lower middle class and like playing football specifically. And I grew up playing mostly like soccer and baseball, a little bit of basketball. But I sort of like, I sort of ended up playing football when I was like a teenager because I was large and that's how that works. Yep, yep.

And like in terms of like connecting with people who weren't white and of my exact class status or higher, like football's how it happened, man. Like, most of my, like, earliest friendships with black kids, with Hispanic kids was, like, all through football. And, like, it is a, like, very interesting sort of, like, class and racial melting pot, at least at, like, I went to a, like, pretty big suburban middle and high school,

but like lots of lots of very different kinds of people ended up at my school and lots of very different kinds of people ended up playing football and like you're gonna get a more diverse slice of that student population on a football team than you will on the fucking yearbook

committee or in like school band class government whatever all of that came very naturally to me in terms of writing this book where, like, I've ended up with a book that's, like, quite diverse, but I didn't really do that on purpose. I just kind of

like, who are the kinds of kids who end up playing football? And it's like everyone. You have, like, poorish kids like Grace, and then you have, like, richish kids like Ahmed or Dre in my book, who, like, I very much wanted to, like, show that, like, maybe one of the reasons that Grace

is going to end up having a more coherent in politics is because, like, she has friends of different backgrounds that she might not. If she had not ended up playing this, this, like, fucked up evil, violent game, to be clear. Yeah. I mean, I think any football fan who is honest with themselves and has its politics that are not evil has a very complicated relationship to the game for a, like, variety of reasons because it will, like, choose up people's brains.

And there's that, but there's also, like, implies. conservative politics. There's also a big factor here is that high school football, even at a public school like mine, the religion is all over it, baby. Like, all over it. Yeah, that's a huge part of it. Jason Kirk of the shutdown fullcast

is working on a book about the like history of Christianity and college football called church and state. I'm very fucking excited for that book. Hell yeah. Yeah, that sounds awesome. But it's this, like, really interesting political space because of how diverse it is and because of how, like, homogenous a lot of the, like, religion and politics of it are, I guess if that makes sense. Yeah. And it's also weird because, like, you know, so, like, I don't know.

I refuse to watch college football. Like, I draw the line there. Like, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. They can't make me watch, like, fucking Colorado state or whatever the fuck. But, like, one of the things that you get in the NFL, too, is, is it. it's like, on the one hand, like, you have all of this really, really conservative shit, right? Like, every fucking, everything is God.

Like, every single time someone holds a thing in front of a player, there's, like, at least three lines of, like, all of this is possible because of God. And, like, someone's, like, it's like the only place you see people regularly saying Christ is king where they're not also, like, holding an AR to, like, a non-white person's head. you know so there's all of this like really really conservative religious shit but then also there's like a union yes that everyone's in and it's like a large like I mean it's not that

powerful and there's there's weirdness there too because you yeah you get to see all of the really interesting dynamics of unions you don't really get outside of kind of like I mean like I guess like sag kind of has this but it's this union in this place where one, the owners have like an unbelievable amount of control, which is a hideous amount of power.

And they can churn through people really quickly. They have, you know, these are some of the richest people in the world. And then also, secondly, there's this like marketization force that's happening where, you know, you get to see in miniature the way that capitalism has like moved to sort of deal with unions, deal with sort of the class movements of the 20th century, which is that like, they're also trying to. trying to turn all of these kids into entrepreneurs?

Mm-hmm. I think in the NFL, I think it's more coherent because there is a players association, not a union, a players association. Yeah. Also,

shout out to the PA for backing our, for backing a unionization attempt here. Thanks for that. I don't know if it mattered, but that's a lot to me. Yeah. Also, like,

sports players unions are fascinating because these are people who are, are part of a union who are like at least some of them millionaires so it's a very interesting sort of like class dynamic happening there but like call it like the college game right now is just chartel house um i mean like it is better now that players are being paid like unambiguous good that players can profit off of their name image and likeness but again it makes like i remember um Like, I'm not on Twitter much anymore, but, like, in the, like, early Elon days, you started

getting Twitter ads, and these were 16 and 17-year-old high school football players. Yeah. The post is, like, huddle highlights and, like, a, like, quick recruiting profile of, like, hey, class of 2027, defensive back, wide receiver out of Palo Alto, and just, like, blasting that onto, like, Twitter timelines everywhere. just like, please, God, somebody see my, like, somebody see these fucking huddle highlights. The feudalism stage of high school and college ball has, like, ended, and now we are in the, no regulations baby, just like completely unfettered capitalism stage.

Can we explain, like, just how, like, very briefly, with people who do not know any football, like what name image likenesses and how this is different from, like, a system that would be normal, which is you pay the players. Yeah. So for like 70 years, the precedent with college football in the United States of America is that all these players are amateurs and they cannot be compensated in any way. They cannot profit off of their name and image likeness, so that means that they can't like sell autographs. The school isn't going to sell jerseys that have their name on them. You are meant to make exactly $0 from your time as an amateur college athlete.

And this was the like ironclad system for like 70 years. And then it kind of got like destroyed overnight. Yeah. When the NCAA finally legalizes players profiting off of their name image and likeness. So that means that they could sign like endorsement deals. And when this was first made a thing in 2021, it mostly manifested in like the coldest Crawford for the Nebraska football team. is filming a ad for a local air conditioning company

because his name is DeColdest. And it was sort of like very like quaint and cute at first. But then NIL collectives got going, which are these, I don't even know how to like, describe what an NIL collective is. These are like investment groups that operate independently of universities that pool resources and then pay players

for like extremely scant public appearances so that they can say that they're just profiting off of name, image, and likeness. But in reality, they exist as a way to pay college football players without paying them via schools. Now, there is the house settlement happening right now, which colleges will soon be able, probably,

maybe, God, who knows, will soon be able to directly pay college athletes a certain amount of money. Lord knows where that's going. like this stuff is all changing at like lightnings at like yeah yeah so like we have just straight up gone from like nobody gets paid for anything to like we are in fucking like gilded age robber barren shit we're like yeah because none of this shit is regulated schools or nill collectives will go back on agreements and everything's negotiated every year they're like like it's it's a

fucking mess. Yeah. In the college game right now. So, I mean, all that makes the, like, NFL having a kind of shitty union look a lot better. Yeah. Well, and I just think I was thinking about the kind of, like, this is my way of kind of bringing back to transgender.

But, like, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of, I mean, just like what I do, right? And, but also just, like, the way that capitalism has been moving in the last, like, few decades is it's increasingly about you know because like okay so capitalism's fundamental basis has always been like you sell your labor

right but now it's it's it's been increasingly transforming into like you're selling like the image of yourself you're selling your identity you're selling like yeah you're selling your personality you're selling as much of life

and this is what name image likeness is right it's like we're not going to pay you for like your labor which is like you playing football we're going to pay you for like this nebulous image of yourself. So you get all these people who are, you know, you're forced to turn all of yourself

into an object for consumption. And like, I think that's the thing with like, fucking I don't know, that's what I'm doing on this show, right, to a large extent. Like, I am like, the Asian transgender. And like, yeah, obviously, like, all of this is like research, but it's also, you know, this is what like brand and identity is. And this has had these, like, seismic impacts

on the entire global economy. Like I, I talked about this an episode on, when I talked about Tamu, but like, Tamu is literally the product of this happening with Chinese farmers? We're like Chinese farmers were doing this like farm social media thing and so one was like, holy shit,

what if we like, they'd become these things where they were selling food, but they were also just selling the identity brand of like themselves as farmers. And Temu was like, well, PDD, which is the Chinese company was like, what if we just brought all of these things together in one spot so you could just do direct

to like consumer sales through it? And now that's like the entire fucking economy is just this morass of like selling every single part of yourself. And I don't know. I'm wondering how much of yourself did you have to, do you have to, like, leave in a book like this? And how much of it can you, like, kind of like,

keep away from the market? Oh, boy. I'm so sorry. You're good. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Everything is, uh, everything is personal brands now, you know? There's a lot of pressure as an author to,

to use all your social medias in a very particular way. You're supposed to, you're, you're supposed to make your cute little Canva graphics, uh, and like, talk about your characters and engage with, like, prompt posts on Instagram and, you know, whatever. Social media,

uh, and like, my personal experience is a little irregular because I do have, have some amount of like sports Twitter niche microcelebrity from posting. So like,

I'm not out here making promotional TikToks for one of the boys. That was like, something that was very important to me was like I'm not going to be doing that. Thank God. Fuck that shit. I hate TikTok.

Yeah. The way that authors have to promote themselves and turn themselves into brands is like a whole other can of worms that like sucks. So like, thankfully, I think I've managed to avoid the most alienating, uh, like forms of that. But I did have a few not too long ago very confidently state that this book was loosely based on my life story, which was news to me.

I was like, word. I didn't know that. So like, I think it's. especially if you write fiction as a person of any marginalized identity, if you're, if you're black, if you're gay, if you're trans,

whatever, people are going to assume that you're writing, like, auto fiction because I think a lot of people react to women's fiction this way, because I think a lot of people subconsciously have a hard time believing that, like, women have interior lives and can, like,

imagine things, you know? Like, I think a lot of people, assume that authors are always writing about themselves and writing about the people in their lives and I mean, I'm

writing about experiences that I have had similar ones to, but like, nah, dog. That is not how this works. Yeah. There's a really great essay about this by a friend of mine Rosemary Ho, who's an absolutely

brilliant writer, who wrote about the... She's writing about Zadie Smith. And one of the things she talks about is like the way that people just assume that Zadis that like Zadis best politics are just like didactically coming out of the mouth of a character and it's like well no that's not how any of this shit works like yeah yeah it is uh it's frustrating and i think like a lot of authors have their own experiences with this so uh yeah yeah i mean i like you have to turn yourself into some kind of brand that's why i'm going on podcasts you know um so that's

all, you know, that's fun, but I'm trying not to like, you know, completely give myself over to the fucking torment nexus. You know. There's like, I don't know, this is also just like, this is a way you can just completely lose your mind.

I don't know if I've ever actually talked about this on this show. Really, one of the people whose career trajectory is the most similar to mine is this Asian American writer named Wesley Yang, who was like this guy who got brought in to write about like, I think it was Columbine. It's like some mass shooting that was like a Korean kid did and his friends were like, hey, you're Asian right about this.

Oh, God. And he, you know, for a bit, he was like, he was like, duh, like, he was like the guy who was like the big, like Asian American. Like, this is like the literary thinker. He was like interviewing Aaron Schwartz. He was doing like profiles of a bunch of like interesting people. And then he just became this like incredibly boring bog standard reactionary. And he became what is a very common kind of person who you experience on the right is like. like someone who's

experience, who's, who's, like, understanding of race comes from, like, watching sports, where they're,

like, there are black players in basketball, and there's a bunch of them. And because of that, this means that, like, actually black people are,

like, overrepresented. And, like, as a class, they're, like, privileged or whatever the fuck because there's just,

like, a bunch of black basketball players. Mm-hmm. And I don't know. I think it's, like, there's, like,

the way that people understand politics as just, like, politics are just, like the thing that I see on my screen when I'm watching football. And how we have to sort of like just deal with that shit

and deal with the sort of micro-identity formation that is real but also isn't like a depiction of what the world is. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So one of the interesting things in this book is that like the right wing media, like right-wing football media

kind of isn't in it that much, really, which I think is fascinating. And I wonder part of how much of this is just that like this was kind of a book that was originally being written before like Aaron Rogers was going up at Macafee's show in front of like half a million people every single day and like screaming about trans people. Mm-hmm. So this book has excerpts of like articles and outside media and like social media, et cetera. Originally it had like a lot more. I had to cut a lot in order to make this book like legible as a book. This book is already, like, pushing the edges of what you can really communicate in YA in terms of, like, I have a lot of characters.

I have a lot of shit going on. So, like, part of it is just that, like, I had to, like, you know, trim, et cetera. But, like, um... Yeah, that makes sense. Originally, it had a lot more of that stuff, and there were, like, interstitial snippets from a fictional sort of, like, football podcaster guy who was, like, Pat McAfee and all of... the like barstool former athlete podcasters. Yeah, yeah. In a blender.

And he, like, he was this, like, really pathetic former, like, special teamer. Oh, home. Linebacker who just, like, keeps reliving the fucking glory days. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Eventually, I just had to, like, refocus and, like, bring that conflict closer to home with, like, school administration's kind of shitty. Yeah.

And, like, there are plenty of dudes on the football team who also suck. So I kind of, like, left it in via some, like, shitty tweets that you see. Or you get a lot of it, like, indirectly. You can imagine what is happening on the fucking Pac-McCathie show. Oh, my fucking God, yeah. But, like, also part of it is what you said, that the weird timeline of publishing means that I started writing this book in February 2021, one, wrote the majority in 2020 and edited it in 23 and 24, and, like, kind of this, like, very

organized anti-trans reaction was not as prevalent in 2021 at all. Like, I kind of had to, like, track it as it started to, like, really, like, form up in real time. This is not the world that I thought I was going to write my stupid little football book. And, like, have it emerge into a lot of people are say that this book is very timely and I'm like dog this is a Biden administration book for him through. So one final ball question on behalf of my beloved in a curse Seattle Seahawks. Okay. So the thing about Sam Darnold, who's now our quarterback after they traded my beloved Gito

Smith for a fucking third round pick. Oh, brother. Okay. So like, is the thing that's going to happen this season not just by week five, Abe Lucas goes down for the 12 millionth time? whatever child they dragged out of a kindergarten to try to block the Neil Hunter gets liquefied in 10 milliseconds and Sam Darnold just like start seeing the ghosts of men who haven't been born yet.

Like isn't this exact? Isn't this just what's going to fucking happen? Why did they build this team like this? Can I attempt to give you a small amount of Seattle Seahawks optimism? I thought they were going to win 11 games last season. They should have. So we lost to the fucking giants. So I've, I,

I really like some of what the Seahawks did. They drafted a lot of players that I really like. It's true. They finally took a interior offensive line player in the first round. Congratulations. Yay. Gray's able is a good player. He's also MAGA as shit, which is what you want on your offensive line.

Oh, God. God. Oh, God. It's true. It's true, but also like, God, fucking damn it. So you guys. at Gray's able, you got Jalen Milro, who, um, Jalen Milro isn't good at football right now,

but a sports media friend named Derek Classen put it that he's, he's the kind of player you want to bet on and then be wrong about. Just, just because he's fun, because he's a, like, legit actual, like, special athlete, special with the ball in his hand. He's cool. I really like Jailen Milrow. But you also drafted, later on, you took Tori Horton and Ricky White, who are two of my favorite sort of like small school wide receivers in the draft.

Hell yeah, oh yeah. You took Damien Martinez, who is a running back, who I think could end up being a lot better than someone who's drafted in the seventh round would indicate. And also, you took a fullback. You took Robbie Oates. That's great. His name is Robbie Oates. Great name, great name.

All name, all name. All name team. He is a, he's, like the squarest football player I've ever seen. Love, love Robbie Oates. However,

the Sam Darnold situation is tough. It's tough. I have a hard time seeing it happen. He would literally, if you had put it behind last year Seahawks offensive line,

he literally would have died by about week eight. Like, he just, like, straight up would have died on the field. Oh, God. Yeah. And like, it's a bit better this year because you have praise Abel, but you still have A. Blucus, you know, you still have Abe Lucas. We'll have Ableau. We'll have Ableucus for three weeks, and then we won't have Ableucus. And also, like, Sam Darnold was in, like, the perfect spot for him. And now he's going to be throwing the ball to, I mean, you know, you got Cooper Cup, you got, you know. For four weeks. We got JSN, but you also have Marquez Valdez Scal. Is he going to, is he going to get? Is he going to get? load-bearing snaps? Like, is that really

what you want? My cope last year was that, was that JSN, Metcalf, and Lockett was the most underrated receiver trio in the league. Yep. And this year, it's like, all right, we get six games

of Cooper Cup, and then we get fifth rounders. Yeah. It's tough out here. Yeah, I don't expect Sam Darnold to work here, just like straight up.

Like, I, I have been a, Sam Darnold truther for years, but it is the classic thing of, like, I think Sam Donald's better than most people think. And then a lot of people are like, $130 million, Sam Darnold. And it's like, what? Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I didn't think he was that good. I didn't think he was traded, Gino Smith good. No. Oh, God. So that's unfortunate. Yeah, so this has been the football section of this, of this podcast. Yeah, so, Victoria, do you have anything else that you want to say before we head out and where should people buy your book from?

Not Amazon. That's like really all I have to say about that. Yeah, one of the boys, my name is Victoria Zeller. And you just buy that from bookshop, buy it from your local indie. You can buy it from Barnes & Noble because we don't hate them as much as we hate Amazon. But like, I would say buy it from your local indie bookstore is like ideal for me. I make the, same amount of money wherever you buy it. So it doesn't... But if you want to sign copy, you can also order it from my home bookstore. So there's that. Hell yeah. But yeah, my website is at victoria.monster, and all my links are there. Yeah, okay. I realize I had an actual final question that I wanted to ask that I forgot to do before this, we started the atro, so I apologize. So the odds here are much, much higher than they are in most places that there's going to be

some queer kids who fucking play ball to some extent listening to it and I wanted to I'm throwing something from your book at you which is... I know. What would you say to the kiddos who are going through it? This is so mean. Okay.

Okay. I'm going to be real with you right now, guys. Do what's best for you. Yeah. Fight if you have it in you to fight. But like you got to be a kid first and foremost. And like...

Yeah. Trans kids, queer kids, deserve the chance to be fucking kids. They deserve the chance to make mistakes and listen to music too loudly in their friends' shitty car, and they deserve to play sports if that's what they want to do. I think in a lot of ways, my book is about how we ask teenagers to be braver than they should be, And I think that's bullshit. So I'm not going to put it on you. Have as much fun as you can.

Like, ball if you can. But do what makes you happy and what feels safe to you. It's like, really all I've got. Like, just have fun while you're able to as a child. It's like, yeah. No, and it's like, yeah, it's not, if you were like a little-ass kid. A, I am so sorry for how much I swear on the show. be like it is not up to you right now to save the world that is the job of fucking everyone else who listen to this show like if you if you want there to be more queer athletes if you if you want trans kids be able to be kids that shit's on you yeah all of the rest of you who listen to the show if you are also like the fucking one bazillion trans people listen to the show this is like a bit less on you than it is on fucking everyone else but yeah but the best time to i started organizing was like five years ago the second best time is right now and the best time after that is tomorrow so go go fucking build you

the world where trans kids can be kids and fall out. Let kids like me hoop. Let them hoop. Let them hit dingers. Let them ball. Hell yeah. My people need rings. My people need titles.

They need trophies. They need championships. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. Today we are talking about white genocide. And when I think of genocide, there is only one name that comes to mind and it's Molly Konger. Oh no. Well, I just, I wanted you to be here as we talked about the genocide of the white race.

I mean, who better to talk about it than two pasty fellows like us? Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. I'm sure we're like soon for the shopping block here. Molly, what's happening? Why are we? Well, I will explain a little bit of what's happening and you can tell me how on earth we got here.

The United States terminated its refugee admissions program. in January of this year, right, when Donald Trump became the president and signed a ton of executive orders. So since then, the United States has not admitted any refugees. In February, it also stopped. The United States terminated its cooperative agreement with refugee resettlement agencies, which meant that even refugees who had arrived weren't getting the assistance that they previously got. However, on the 12th of May, the United States admitted 59 Afrikanah refugees from South Africa. And concurrently, Donald Trump told the press that what's happening was a genocide of the white people. He said it wasn't because they're white. He said if it was black people,

he would do the same thing. I mean, there are several genocides impacting black people right now, and they are not getting refugee admissions to the United States. Apparently, these people are being genocided. So Molly, can you explain what's going on here? How are the white genocide happened? Sure. I mean, the short answer to that question is it is not happening. It is not real.

It is not a thing that is happening or, in my opinion, really could meaningfully happen under the conditions that they're talking about. So again, like you said, they have terminated all refugee resettlement programs. So people coming from active war zones, active ongoing genocides, people fleeing political persecution all over the world. They don't deserve our help. They don't need our help anymore. Right. But these people, these people from South Africa are uniquely experiencing the worst thing that can happen to a person, I guess, which is white genocide. So white genocide, I think, is often sort of used interchangeably with great replacement theory. So the white genocide conspiracy theory and the great replacement theory, I think they're they're hand in hand. They're very similar. There's a lot of overlap and they're used interchangeably. But white genocide is much more specific. and its more recent iteration on the theme. It comes from a mid-90s book

written in prison by a neo-Nazi terrorist named David Lane. David Lane notably coined the 14 words. We know, you know the 14. We don't need to say them. He had a lot of anxiety that if we don't do something, white people will become extinct.

We'll be pushed out of existence by immigrants who are outbreeding us. You know, there's sort of concurrent belief that pornography, which is, you know, in their mind, something that is a Jewish tool of oppression of the white race. It is, you know, it's causing us to do interbreeding. It's diluting our bloodlines. So, you know, all of these things together are going to push white people out of existence, which, again, not happening, not true, not a real thing that can happen. But it's something they're very anxious about.

But when you spend a lot of time talking about how white people are being pushed out of existence, you've got to be able to point to something. You have to point to something. You have to point a place where a white person has been meaningfully harmed and they can't really do that. So the talking point that they fall back on most often when you're talking about white genocide, you know, if you're really wringing your hands about this and you have to be able to point to something, they point to the South African farm murders. It is this idea that white farmers in South Africa are being targeted for murder and mass. That is this massive ongoing campaign of violence, which again is not happening and is.

not true. There is a more violent crime in the country of South Africa than in other similarly positioned nations. They do have a little bit more violent crime than we do here, for instance. But if you break down the numbers and they have, they have conducted a multi-year study of this hypothetical phenomenon, white farmers are not being targeted for murder. They're not being murdered in larger numbers than any other demographic. It's just not a thing that's happening. Yeah, I know. It's almost like a laughable claim, or like, except that it's also terribly sad when like, Israel is just kind of babe ruthing a genocide in Gaza now. They're not even trying to pretend anymore. They're like, no, we're going to kill everyone by starving them. That's what we would like to do. And obviously, those people cannot enter the United States as refugees. But these folks from South Africa can. How did it go from a Nazi in prison to the brain of the president of the United States? I mean, that idea sort of filtered into American right-wing think space over the last, I guess, 30 years since Lane wrote that manifesto from prison slowly and through multiple origin points. But I have argued repeatedly over the last several months that we can point to exactly the moment that Donald Trump heard about this.

There is a specific moment in time in August of 2018 when Donald Trump first found out about. the plight of the white South African, and I have the date somewhere in my notes, but it was. It was one evening in August of 2018 when he was watching Tucker Carlson. Shocking. He was watching an episode of Tucker's show

back when it was still on TV, and he had some policy analysts from the Heritage Foundation on to talk about this terrible thing that's happening. And about 45 minutes after that segment aired, Donald Trump tweeted the word Africa for the first time. Really?

He has tweeted thousands and thousands and thousands of times about a lot about Robert Pattinson's relationship with Kristen Stewart, you know, things about Diet Coke, things about vaccines. He's tweeted a lot of things, but he tweeted about Africa for the first time 45 minutes after the segment on Tucker Carlson. And he had bought into this idea that these people are being uniquely persecuted. God. Yeah. Carlson has mainstreamed a lot of these like white nationalist talking points. But yeah, this one, and you have a really good series on this on your show, right? Like, if people want to, people want to learn more about the plight of the Africana.

You can explain that over several hours. Yes, I spent three months sort of tracing this story in painstaking detail, if you're interested in checking that over on weird little guys. And you should. It's great. It's great. Good podcast. I highly recommend.

So, like, we've seen that this thing gradually gained momentum, I guess. And then at some point, obviously someone got into Trump's here in the last month. and he made an executive order, right? He shared his executive order. I'm just going to read from it now, quote, refugee resettlement and other humanitarian considerations. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take appropriate steps, consistent with law,

to prioritize, yeah, we're going to get to that. To prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program for Afrikaners in South Africa, were victims of unjust racial discrimination. Such plan should be submitted to the president through the assistant to the president and Homeland Security Advisor. So, like, he's asking them to develop a plan basically for resettling these white South Africans in the United States, right? Right. So when he says that it's not about race now, and he's pushed on that

now and he says, oh, it's not about race. It's not because they're white. The word Afrikaners appears in the executive order. And that doesn't just mean South, that's not a demographic term for people from South Africa. It is a racial term for the descendants of Dutch settlers. Those people are white. Yeah, no, by definition, right, they are white South Africans. They are, like, therefore, definitely the group that benefited from the apartheid era. Very much so.

As if this wasn't clear enough, Christopher Landau appeared at a press conference meeting these refugees, wearing a orange, white, and blue tie. It's quite a unique tie. I actually googled orange white and blue tie. I couldn't find one. For people who are not familiar, that is the apartheidera flag of the Republic of South Africa.

That is a deep cut. The decision to use that particular color scheme when you're greeting these boer refugees is very intentional and very odd. Yeah, it's got to be a choice, right? Like, no one has a striped orange, white, and navy blue tie, like, lying around. And the sort of dedication

to reviving that as a symbol is not without precedent. So with Dylan Roof, the Charleston church murderer, had on patches, he had the flag of Rhodesia, obviously, they love Rhodesia. But he had the apartheid era,

orange, white, and blue, South African flag. And that was strange and unique enough as a symbol that an American would dig up and identify with that the South African press noted it at the time

of the Charleston church shooting. Yeah, it was not in the mainstream. That is a troubling sartorial choice. Yeah, yeah, it is worrying. Like you say, there's a line from the Afrikanus through Dillon Roof to this horrific ideology, right? Do you know what? What probably doesn't have a direct line to a part? We can't be sure of that, I guess.

But hopefully that these products and services do not have a direct through line from apartheid. Well, hopefully it's not the Washington State Patrol again. All right, we're back. hopefully that was something nice. I want to talk a little bit about the US refugee admissions program. So I think people sometimes misunderstand the program, what it means, where it comes from, who it's for. So to begin with, like, I want to distinguish between asylum seekers and refugees, because I think in the popular lexicon, these two words are used interchangeably.

A refugee is outside of the United States and makes an application through the US refugee admissions program, and that application is processed and approved or rejected or delayed or, you know, left for years and years and years while they are outside the United States. An asylum seeker is someone who is either inside the United States or presenting at the border of the United States from requesting asylum. So they're different categories, right? Generally, to be a refugee, one has to register with the United Nations High Commission on refugees, and thus one has to have fled one's home country. It's somewhat notable that this

flight came from Johannesburg, right? Like, these people were in South Africa. But apparently DHS set up office space in Pretoria, and they were conducting these interviews in Pretoria. Right, which again is unusual, right? So you have to normally go to a resettlement support center, right? And I want to talk about the process of background checks. in a minute because surprise, surprise, it didn't happen here, at least not as far as I'm aware. Like, if it did, it's the most expedited version of this process that we've ever seen. So these refugees have been admitted as P1 refugees. And people talk about P1, like it's a visa category.

It's not actually, it's a priority category. There are four priority categories for people getting refugee visas. P1 cases, the highest priority, are normally referred by embassies, the United Nations High Commission's on refugees or non-governmental organizations. If people have heard of this at all, it's probably with reference to Afghan folks who worked with the United States who are not being admitted

under the United States Refugee emission program right now. Some of them are stuck in third countries, even at airports, if they don't have a visa for that third country, waiting to work out, like, what the US is going to do this time after lying to them for decades and letting them down again.

And unlike these real estate agents from Johannesburg, they can't just go back home. Yeah, right. Like, they actually have fear of persecution if they do, which is not the case for these South African folks. P2 are people, like, there are special groups designated for humanitarian concern. Like some Congolese people living in Rwanda,

in the past, some Burmese groups living in Thailand have been P2. P3, a family reunification cases. So you can, you know, if one person has refugee status to come to the United States, so they can bring the rest of their family. And then P4 are people who have sponsors to something called the Welcome Corps.

Familiar with the Welcome Corps, Molly? I am not. No, it sounds like the coolest branch of the military, you know, like you've got the Marines and then the Welcome Corps next door. The Welcome Corps was set up in 2023 by the Biden administration to allow five U.S. citizens, I think a minimum of five,

to get together to sponsor someone for refugee admission for the United States and basically take responsibility for their health and for like reorienting them in the US community, right, getting their kids enrolled in school, helping them find a job, all that kind of stuff. It was a cool program. It lasted less than two years that Donald Trump rolled that up in January of 2025. So we don't really have P4 cases anymore.

So all admissions were halted in January. In February, the government, others said, cut all cooperative agreements with resettlement agencies. So let's talk about what the normal process looks like for refugees. Generally, they require several years of background checks and interviews. For many, it's not possible in their countries for most, right? For instance, there is not a resettlement support center in Afghanistan, so people have to leave. That's how you see them in Pakistan, right?

What you're seeing now, actually, is Afghan people who are in Pakistan have timed out on their visas in Pakistan. So they're now facing, like, immigration enforcement. there because they haven't been able to get resettled in the US before their Pakistan visa expires. They go through medical and biometric checks. There are at least two interviews. There are security checks. When they do their first interview, they have to give in things like they're identifying documents,

work history, declare all their family relationships, all that kind of stuff. Then they have an interview with US citizenship and immigration services after that. Then, if they are admitted, they take cultural orientation classes before travel, that's when you learn how to be an American, right? I don't know what involves, but they have to take those before they come. And then the US government works with the IOM for travel, right? And that travel is funded through a zero-interest loan to the refugee. So, like, in every other case, you pay for your flight.

You have to pay it back starting six months for when you get to the United States. That has not been the case for our Afrikaner refugee friends, right? It appears that the United States government. chartered a flight on their behalf. Once the refugees arrive, they are referred to a resettlement agency. Some of the names people might be familiar with are like HIAS, their Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, who have literally been resettling refugees since the refugee in asylum seeker category was created as a response to the Holocaust. Maybe IRC is another one people are familiar with. Which interestingly, HIAS was the target of Iyer of a great replacement theory,

motivated mass shooter here in America. Yes. Robert Robert Bowers posted a lot about highest in the days and weeks before he carried out that mass shooting. Yeah, the Tree of Life Synagogue, right? People aren't familiar. Yeah, and that was at the time of the quote, unquote, migrant caravan fall of 2018, would it? Yes, that would be that time period.

Yeah, that was a pretty bleak time. I was in Tijuana a lot at that time with seeing the migrant caravan folks, interviewing folks trying to help. Yeah, coming back to that was, I remember thinking, like, what a fucked up world. So those people didn't get refugee emissions, right? Those people were here seeking asylum. The system right now is suspended, right? And as many as 12,000 people who have been approved are waiting for travel authorization

come to the United States. So they're completely in limbo, right? You're in limbo and at great personal risk. Yeah, yeah. I mean, people spend 20. years in refugee camps waiting to be admitted to the United States. And like, it's hard for me to describe, I try to do my Darien Gap series, right, how desperately sad refugee camps are as places, right? And I think people think of refugee camps. It's like, oh, you go there for a few weeks and you

sleep under a big white tan. No, children are born and raised there. Yeah. People live their whole lives in refugee camps. You know, they're the ones that they, the Thai Burmese border, have been there since in 1940s. But they live their whole lives often without even basic essential services, right? I did see, for instance, Hayas had a little school in La Hasblancas, which is one of these UN refugee camps in Panama. The reason they have a little school is because children spend so long there that they miss out on their education if they don't have a little school for them. And so that's just like insult to injury in this whole process, right? It's not only is he shutting off this avenue for refugees status for everyone else and giving it to these people who

you know, I think it's fair to say don't deserve it. Yeah. But he's made this process so simple and so easy and so painless and that not only they're not fleeing persecution, but they're getting this fast track, this easy pass. Yeah. And like, we're paying for it. I mean, I remember recently some friends and I were helping someone who had been admitted to the US, not as a refugee actually on a different visa category, but like they were really

having a hard time navigating the basics and funding that so, like, we were able to help them out. I mean, obviously, international immigration is a difficult process. It wouldn't be easy. I mean, you've immigrated internationally, right? It's not a simple process. No. But looking at the people who have taken Trump up on this offer of refugee resettlement, these appear to be people who could have simply immigrated had they chosen to. Yeah, it seems that way.

They could have just moved. Yeah, they could have, I mean, come here on like a B-1 visa or like, I mean, Pathways to citizenship are relatively rare. If you just like say you want to move to the US, right? Like you just want to become an American unless you have a bunch of money. So like these guys will have a pathway to citizenship. It's not quite clear how Trump said that they will have one. What does that mean?

I know. Normally if you're admitted as a refugee, you can file for permanent residency in a year. And then after a number of years, you can file to be a citizen. Just notice as we're talking, so, you know, I'm not familiar with how the process normally works. That's your wheelhouse. That's something you're very familiar with. So maybe this is normal. It just looks strange to me. So I've been on vacation the last week. So I'm just back today. And so I just opened up the embassy's website because, you know, as I was writing this story and sort of tracking this as it developed, there wasn't good guidance from the consulate on what this process would look like. So I'm just looking at it again today. And they have updated it as of yesterday. This is the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in South Africa. Yeah. New update yesterday. There is a form you can fill out. James, it's a Google Doc. It is a Google form.

The U.S. Embassy website has a link to a Google form that you can fill out if you want to become. Great. I'm sure it's highly secure. Yeah. A Google Doc. Wow. It's funny, I was on that website earlier today as well. That is, oh dear.

That is sad. I mean, yeah, I don't think a Google Doc can possibly be as secure as it would need to be. have the amount of information the government gets on you when you become a refugee is all the information. Just to outline the criteria to be eligible for U.S. resettlement consideration, individuals must meet the following criteria. It must be of South African nationality and must be of African ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa. I thought it wasn't about race. Yeah. I thought it wasn't about race, tubes. Yeah, it seems, and then they must be able to articulate a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.

What they don't mention here is that, like, normally there are protected categories into which refugees and asylum seekers have to fit, right? Those are race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. I mean, I guess, I guess you could argue that, like, the Afrikanas are not per se a race, right? Like there are, there can be, it's conceivable that one could be white kind of South African nationality, but not be Africana. Oh, very much so, very much so. I mean, there's a, Afrikaner is a very specific sort of genealogical lineage. Yeah, and like, which is why, I think they have been careful here to say, or a member

of a racial minority, because there's saying like, look, we're not going to do the genealogy. We don't, we don't care if your great-grandfather was Dutch. We just need you to be white. We just need you to be white. Yeah. When you arrive, you can do a 23-M-Me test. and then they do your percentage and then they put you back on the plane.

No, they just got the Pantone color scale. They're just going to hold up the peach-colored paint chip. Yeah. They get you at what's it called? Fucking the paint shop there where you go in and they mix it for you. So yeah, but they don't mention these protected categories here. The U.S. State Department has said

has received 8,000 inquiries from people seeking information about the refugee program. That's a lot of people. That is a large number of people. the Episcopal Church here in the United States, right? Not like a notably woke organization, I would say. Episcopal migration ministries do good work. You won't find me shit talking them.

They do good things for people who need help. It has ended its partnership with the United States government. So I'm going to read a little bit here from presiding bishop Sean Rowe. First time for me, quoting a bishop on the podcast. Since January, the previously bipartisan U.S. refugee admissions program in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived. Hundreds of staff and resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. Then, just over two weeks ago, the federal government

informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa, whom the US government has classified as refugees. In light of our church's steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of South Africa, we're not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the US federal government. Skipping a bit, then it has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, received preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee

camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States of brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now faced danger at home because of their service to our country. They also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months. Good for them, honestly. Yeah, like, because I think maybe people don't think about this or don't realize that a lot of these programs, like this is a grant-funded federal program through a partnership with the Episcopal Church. So in the early days of Doge, they were saying, like, oh, we found all this wasteful spending, all this, you know, suspicious payments to these religious organizations.

Those are social programs. We have outsourced all of these government functions to these church-based social programs, you know, for better or worse, say about that what you will. But that is, in fact, how many of these things function. Yeah, like, when I think about, like, you know, I've spent a decent amount of time in refugee camps, the majority of the services that are provided by faith-based programs. highest. There's Bethel World Ministries, I think it's called. It's Catholic Charity. It's Episcopalian Migration Ministries. There's Calsa Aid, the Sikh group, right? I don't think they receive any federal. Maybe they've, I don't think they receive federal funding. But I think for the Episcopal Church as a massive organization to come out and say,

Yeah. We won't dirty our hands with this. That's incredible. No, it's great. And like more organizations should. I think they're being resettled in Virginia. for the most part. Oh, good. That's where I live, James. Oh, good. Yeah, great. Well, you know, you could take one in. Molly, you could have a little Afrikaner come live with you. So Charlottesville, where I live,

oh, you'll get some. It's home to a large number of Afghan refugee families. It's like, I know people who work with our new Afghan neighbors and, like, helping them get settled in our community and helping women get driver's license and get them sewing machines so they can sew their traditional garments at home. And, like, it's a beautiful community. effort to welcome these people into our town, but I just can't imagine the worst people on earth

coming here. Yeah, well, you can help with sewing machine rent. You could help us sew up a little pre-rainbo nation, South Africa flag for them. But yeah, it is like, I've helped people arriving here on refugee visas. And like, it's actually a really, really affirming and wonderful thing to do in your community. And like, now it's a time when you can still do that. All the people who were resettled here before January, the funding that was supposed to help their kids enroll in school, that was supposed to help, especially women, learn to drive, right, that was supposed to help people orient themselves in the US, find education, find work, right? As a person who moved to America, it is a very confusing place. You have like 75 different layers of government. None of them really want

to help you. There's a lot of forms to fill in. The rent is insane, right? And in, then you add people drive like fucking maniacs. And we don't have health care here, James. I'm sure that was a culture shock for you. But like when I was poking around in some of these Facebook groups for these for these South Africans who were sort of interested in maybe seeking this opportunity and they were talking about sort of the pros and cons and whether they would go and how the process was going to work. And the one fear that I saw come up over and over again is like, well, I heard the health care is pretty bad there. Like, yeah, dude, it is. Damn, yeah, damn.

Don't come here. Yeah, yeah. In some states, right, there are state-funded, like, safety net programs. I don't know about Virginia. Oh, and I'm sure, I'm sure as America's special and only refugees, they will be afforded access to all available programs. Yeah, I'll put them on TRICARE after we've kicked the trans folks off. That's how we're making up for the gap.

Yeah, it's pretty bleak, honestly. I would really encourage folks, like, if you are listening to this and thinking, Oh, it fucking sucks. So those people have not been granted refugee status. Like, I'm thinking of, like, I met a woman from Zimbabwe when I was in Daryingap, who had come with her daughter, right? She had faced persecution at home in Zimbabwe, a country that is not Rhodesia anymore, we're keeping score.

A country that was never Rhodesia. Rhodesia never existed. Yeah, right. She went to South Africa, right, to attempt to be safe. And persecution followed her there. So then she took this journey. all across the Americas, carrying her kid through the jungles and over the mountains and through the rivers. And it's where I met them. And we've stayed in touch, right? She's in the United

States now. She's working on her asylum process. And it is expensive and it is by no means secure. And this is like a woman who has faced, who fits multiple categories, right, in the protected, they've protected categories here, right? It's going to be very hard and very expensive for her. really genuinely fucking breaks my heart to see someone who, like, would be such an asset to any community who was such a ray of light, even in some of the hardest places I've ever been. She might not get to stay here. And these folks will. And that really makes me sad. But yeah, if you have a chance in your community, like, almost the way I sometimes find out about refugees arriving or being settled is like on next door. And realize next door is mostly a site for aging

racist, but like sometimes people would be like, hey, there's an Afghan family here. And they don't, like, one of the things in California is that you can rent a house and they don't have to give you a fridge. Yeah, a fridge is like a luxury. It's not, it's not for the pores. So like trying to help people find a fridge before Ramadan, right? Like, I have a truck. I'm a bigger guy. I can lift a fridge into the back of my truck. If someone has a fridge they don't want. So like, that's a thing I can do to help. And it makes me happy to do that. Then like, I can carry a fridge upstairs. Like, That's not something you can do. There are a million other things you can do, right?

Including just like having people over for dinner, cooking food for them, offering to take them out on a walk and show them your neighborhood. Like there are so many ways that you can welcome people. And like while people aren't newly arriving, there are people who are still recently arrived who really could do with some help. The government isn't paying for it anymore. We can't stop the government paying for flights for Afrikaners. But like you can do something.

You can do something positive. will maybe make you feel better about the fact that, you know, your taxpayer dollars are bringing the poor downtrodden africanas from South Africa to neighborhoods near Mali. And it's just such an ugly intersection, right? This is not just like our addled-brained president falling victim to a racist conspiracy theory that he saw in Tucker Carlson, right? Like, that's how the idea got into his mind. But I think this resurgence of his alleged interest in the plight of the white South African is this terrible intersection

of personal grievance and financial interest. Right? That, you know, it's no coincidence that the text of the executive order it's not just about like, you know, whites are being persecuted, but there's a pot shot on the side

in the first section of the executive order that like, well, and South Africa has been very unfair to Israel. Right? That South Africa being a leading voice in the international community on the genocide in Gaza is part of this. That they need to be punished

for their advocacy against the genocide. When their ambassador was expelled, it was not a coincidence that he is a Muslim South African who has been very vocal about the genocide in Gaza and that he appears in public

in a Kufia, that he was, when he returned to South Africa after being expelled from the United States, he was talking about Palestine when he got home. And that's not a coincidence.

And it's also not a coincidence that Elon Musk is currently fighting to launch Starlink in South Africa. Yeah. And so this is sort of a longer explanation, just sort of in brief, since apartheid ended in 1994, they have racial equality laws,

that if you have a national level company, something like Starlink, something you're going to provide a national telecommunications contract that serves the whole country, there has to be some black ownership of the country. They're not saying like there can be no white executives. They're not saying, you know,

white people aren't allowed to do business, but there has to be some black ownership stake in the company. And large corporations around the world manage this by establishing a local subsidiary that is owned locally by a majority of black shareholders. Microsoft does it. Like every big company does it. Companies operate in South Africa. Yeah. International corporations operate in South Africa and they do it every day and they do it easily. But Elon Musk refuses to do that. He refuses to have any black ownership stake in his company or a local subsidiary. So he's not allowed to have Starlink there. Yeah. And so for the last couple of months, he's,

been, you know, walking out of meetings. He's been, you know, yelling at the president of South Africa about how he's racist against white people. And so, like, this is personal. It's financial. And it is a racist conspiracy theory. And now we're, we're all having to live it. Yeah. It's also not a coincidence. So, like, Musk has started interacting with some of these, like, white farmer accounts on his racism app, right? Let that. I think that one, I think it's, and maybe its screen name is just bore. Oh, yes. A South African news site recently unmasked that a particular individual. Oh, cool. Yeah, I haven't read the article yet. Like I said, I've been on vacation, but they're, they're on the case. Yeah, great, good.

And the thing about these, you know, white identity, South African nationalist kinds of guys is apartheid wasn't that long ago. Yeah. 30 years ago, right? So anybody 50 year older who's talking a lot about white identity in South Africa, I would just like to ask you, what were you doing in 1990? Yeah. Just tell me who you were hanging out with in 1990 because I have questions. Yeah. Like, I remember the end of apartheid, very, like, that's, It's one of my earlier political memories. I remember Nelson Mandela coming out at the Rugby World Cup in 1995. And that being a big...

People, like, I guess, maybe our listeners, a lot of our listeners are younger than me. But, like, South Africa was something of a pariah state under apartheid, right? Like, people wouldn't even play sports with them. They didn't even go to the IOC Olympic Games. And the IOC, not an anti-racist organization, an organization which famously sent the Olympic games to Adolf Hitler's Germany. But yeah, they were a complete global pariah and to have gone from that to like the US has to intervene in the plight of the persecuted Afrikaner within my lifetime. It's pretty fucking bleak. It's a quick turnaround and an ugly one. But like I said,

the average white South African who is very vocal about white rights may have a very close connection to a very recent act of terrorism, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah. They're not just talk. It was very violent in the early 90s. Yes. Yeah. Molly's done some good stuff on the violence of white South Africans. And I guess, yeah, what folks in the U.S. who are inspired by them. Molly, do you have anything you want to plug? Otherwise, um, country's way, I guess is what you want to plug, right? Yeah, I'm keeping an eye on their treason case against Afroforum.

I mean, it's just political talk, but it's fun. We'll see. Apparently the investigation is ongoing. But now if you are interested in more about how this happened, I did an eight-parts series about political violence at the end of apartheid and its connections to American neo-Nazis. You can check that on on weird little guys. It's a good time, I think. There's a really fun episode about a Dolph Lundgren movie from the late 80s

that was secretly funded by South African military intelligence. Yeah, it's a good time. And we live in hell. Oh, my God. It could happen here? It is, and it's talking about it happening here. You know, about what we're, you know, what's happening in a galaxy far, far away.

These are the Andor episodes. We're talking about episodes, Jesus, what is it? Seven through nine. Seven through nine. Seven through nine of Andor season two. When this is done, we'll be three quarters of the way over with, I mean, one of the best seasons of television ever made. So, you know, save for it, folks.

Enjoy it and enjoy these podcasts. Yeah, arg. Argue. Eleg? Ehrlich, Garrison. Thank you. Thank you. Arg me hearties. Raise the Hondo Anaka flag, and let's watch some Andor.

This is episode three of our Star Wars Andor Politics Review podcast. The person grumbling in the intro is Robert Evans. I'm Garrison Davis. We are also joined by Mia Wong. Let's start with episode seven. I think this arc in general might be my favorite arc of the whole show, frankly. They did some really fun stuff. Oh, yeah.

And Seven's mostly set up. This is episode seven titled Messenger. I'll do a quick overview, and then we can discuss some of the setup to the Gorman Massacre. So rebel militias are forming an army on the fourth moon of Yavin. Wilman returns from the planet Gorman, with a special mission for Cassian. Luzin once ISB agent Dedra Miro assassinated to protect the Axis network. The empires failed to secure an alternative to the Gorman Mineral Calcite, and ISB command tells Dedra that an imperial fleet will be sent to Gorman in two days

and to prepare for a declaration of martial domain. Yeah, I want to note at the start of this kind of what we see, because we're watching one-year jumps between these. This is the first time where it's been made really clear the rebellion has moved, on from scattered insurgent groups to a functional army. Oh, yeah. Like, when we're introduced to Yavin, there's a transport landing. A group of soldiers are getting off.

And they're being told like, okay, your ration cards are here. And like, you need to report in here and here. This is where you're billeted. It's very, like, standard professional military stuff. So we are now at the point where the rebellion that Andor has been portraying previously is not around anymore. The rebellion has moved on. largely. And those old networks still exist to some extent, but that is not the heart of it anymore.

Yeah, and that's a big part of what the episode is starting to set up. Now, on Gorman, imperial presence on the planet has already increased dramatically in the past year. A new imperial headquarters, the towers above the capital city of Palmo. Security forces are stationed throughout the city with checkpoints and a mandatory curfew. The past few weeks, there's been stories of insurgent attacks against the empire, most recently the bombing of a naval depot. Imperial News reports that, quote-unquote, inexplicable gorman terrorists. Their hate for imperial norms are getting help from, quote, unquote, outside agitators. Which is not untrue, actually.

For once. But also not like the core of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's part of the point, right? Like, that's part of what Luthan's going for is. he wants to keep them sort of obsessed with this side of things. In part, because Luton knows that it's moved on, right? Like, Luton knows that the rebellion is in Yavin now.

You know, he is, he's not entirely a sideshow, but he's no longer the heart of it. And every resource they waste looking at his network is a time they're not spent looking at Yavin. Yeah, and Luton's still trying, I mean, like the outside agitators here is probably mostly, like, Luthin's guys who have been trying to build up the insurgency on Gorman, simply to make some sort of political crisis and then, you know,

also help the people who have already committed to resisting the empire, help them actually, like, do that beyond what the Gorman front's been, like, parading around and doing, you know, little protests in front of the memorial for the past few years. Luton was like, if these guys want to do this seriously, let's, let's see what happens when we do it seriously. And that's kind of what we've resulted to here. The empire has sent a, quote, unquote, crisis specialist and a riot team to assist Dedra in managing any civil unrest. Cyril Karn starts questioning what the empire wants with Gorman and what he's really been doing these past two years.

Yeah. Dedra tells him to pack his things as they'll soon be leaving together for Corrassant. Back on Yavin IV, Bix takes a skeptical Cassian to a force healer to help with a stubborn blaster burn. Though Cassian resists, the healer can sense that Cassian is somehow important. He has main character energy. Cassian is split between Lutheran and the growing organized rebellion, but decides to take a rebel U-wing starfighter to Gorman and undercover as a journalist, Cassian checks into the hotel at Palmo Square and sets his sights on ISB agent Dedra. So yeah, a lot of this episode is like showing how the rebels are actually like growing an army before they've really put together the formal rebel alliance.

Like they're getting much closer to that. But at this point, it's like a whole bunch of little like militias that are operating under the same base and are starting to set up like rules and guidelines. And like Cassian butts up against some of those rules a little bit here. Because he can't go and come as he pleases anymore, right? Like it gets him in trouble with General Dr. even, yeah. It's not just rebel cells that are operating independently.

Now they are trying out working together and that has some growing pains. Yeah. Well, and it's not just working together too. Like, it's, it's the command structure and the organization structure is becoming increasingly centralized in a way that it hasn't been,

well, it's, the previous to this has been like, the centralizing thing has been like Luthen kind of being an asshole to everyone, but like moving stuff between them. And now it's like... Or Sa Guerrera, right? Where he operates as like a cult of personality type thing with his own militia.

Yeah, yeah, right. Well, no, but I mean, like, between all of the different networks, the central figure has been Luther. And now it's like, no, we have this place where we're developing a chain of command and we're developing a sort of like... Totally. What are going to become increasingly rigid, like, hierarchies in this whole thing. Lusin's becoming a somewhat controversial figure and is kind of getting pushed out of the actual organized rebellion because he's a little bit difficult to work with. Yeah. Because he's an asshole.

Like, it's like... Yeah. Yeah, well, he's doing what he has to do. I mean, I'm Luthan's last defender. If he's only got one fan, it's me. And Luton is doing, is handling this exactly how he, like, has to. There's no room to be nice. And there's no room for anybody's feelings in this.

But that, you know, what we do see is people choosing now, I want to be involved in this kind of bigger and more structured thing where the way I am treated is less dependent. upon the whims of this guy at the spoke where I don't get to know anything, where there is a command structure, where there is, there is a degree to which it's more like predictable how things will be day to day, right? A lot of people do prefer that. And also at this stage of the rebellion, if you're going to take on a military like this, you need a formalized force. You need more of a command structure. You need a chain of command and people need to know who is calling shots in what

situations because you simply can't function effectively in a large scale in combat without it. Yeah, we'll talk more about kind of Luthin's situation in episode nine. Yeah, the Luthin of it all. Yeah. Because that kind of gets more into like what his current place is in the rebellion. But like really like the role that he occupied is is frankly no longer needed. Like like like, and he's even acknowledging this. Like they're going beyond the sort of like, you know, like small scale like intel network,

arms deals, like, all this type of, like, covert, you know, the Yaldani raid. They're growing beyond what Luthan really specialized in, and now they're doing a full-on military, and Luton's always been operating kind of like a DIY, like, spy agency. And now they're doing a whole military, and that kind of butts up against how Lutthin, like, wants to operate and, like, what he's, like, frankly just capable of doing. Like, he understands the importance of Yovin, but he's also okay with not, being there in person. Well,

I don't think he thinks he fits there, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like his whole thing is such an idiosyncratic organization that's just based around him and Clea, you know, this young woman that he works with. Like there's no place for him in a military command structure.

That's not his thing. The other thing this episode really focuses on is like, you know, news propaganda and like the idea of like terrorism outside agitators. And using those things as justifications for state crackdowns. The senator from Gorman talks with Mon Mothma about how he believes that the empire is lying about what's happening on Gorman. And these bombings must be like a false flag attack. So you get to see a whole bunch of different people's perspectives on like validity of the

actions that are happening on Gorman. Like there's questions over like who's doing this. Is the state just making these things up so that they have a justification to crack down on us? Are these things genuine? are they being done by people on Gorman who are like aligned with the resistance, but maybe are getting like outside help?

You have all those sorts of questions and then the news media is like manufacturing consent for an imperial crackdown like what was discussed in like the very first episode. It's very, it's very 70s Italy, like because there's these bombings happening, because there's all this weird shit, because nobody knows exactly

who's doing what everyone is like kind of become conspiracy-brained and like Half the conspiracies are true, but not the ones people think are the ones that are true. And it's just like the information space has become so messy when you're dealing with such a combination of like of like of these attacks and of these like different kinds of above and below ground organizations where nobody knows exactly. No one's exactly talking to each other. And yeah, it just gets so messy so quickly. Even the Gorman front itself is like debating this.

Like they had this whole meeting where they discuss like tactics like the role of the role of violence. And like as these big arguments erupt, they. they start to reflect on how the empire is actually like set them up for infighting. And the more time they spend doing this, the less time they're actually doing anything helpful on Gorman or like doing anything that actually can like secure their own like liberation or their own like, you know, combat against this oppressive force. There's a good part in that scene where they're debating it where the guy who gets, who kind of stumbles upon them doing the robbery.

Yeah, in the last one. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. has a speech where he's basically like, look, man, everyone's like, whatever they're doing, whatever their attitude about the right way to resist, they're all gormons to me. And so they're all on my side. Yeah.

Right. And I like the way that he expressed that. Because it very much, as we're going to talk about next episode, it comports with who that guy is as a resistor, right? There's like national identity is a big concept in these episodes, but not in like a fascistic nationalist sense. No, as in a we're all in this, we're all going to hang together, is what I think he's saying. But like, like, national solidarity.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like 1820s, kind of like. Or even like Ireland, right? Like, yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I can give a speech here about where this is going and about how Sinn Fain's like Charity gets immigrants and trans people. But it's also like, that's just like that what's happening right now. This is like 1820, not like 1920. The last thing I want to talk about in this arc before we go on break is this force healer.

that Cassian reluctantly visits in the Yavinfor Messhall. Yeah. This was a super interesting scene to me. And this is the first time we have seen any mention of the force, really. Yeah, this is like the big, like, spiritual moment in this series and or has kind of veered away from, like, the mystical side of Star Wars in favor of the more, like, materialist politics. The Star War. Mm-hmm. The way that they included this here, I thought, was really interesting and really well done.

And the reason why I like it so much is that like throughout the Rebel Alliance they always like agreed each other and like say goodbye by saying may the Force be with you which is a little bit odd because the Rebel Alliance isn't like a Jedi revivalist cult. They're not like a force cult in the way that so many other groups and you know Star Wars TMR

and the fact that you have people who engage with the Force in this more like regular manner more similar to like kind of like hippie spiritualist stuff that props up in radical spaces I find really interesting and obviously in Star Wars that has more of like a legitimate backing

because we all recognize the force is real in Star Wars the force is fake, it's a sci-off it's just the alien god thing in the black holes force truth in part what I love about Andrew is how big it makes the universe seem because

Cassian Cassian isn't like he doesn't have like the you know there's that line in a the, in a new hope where basically Han's like, I don't know, like, Han's clearly heard of the Jedi, but he's like, I don't need, like, I don't, I don't give a shit about this. I don't need hokey religions or

special weapons. Yeah. It's like somebody talking about, yeah, like, like, Wicca, right? Like, if you're just like a dude who's a fucking drug dealer, you're like, I don't need to hear about that, man, I got, I got fucking heroin to move. Like, yeah, it's very, it's very much like, it's very much like faith

healer coded, it's like, oh God, no, I'm not going to see the faith healer. come on. And he talks about how him and his, like, his mom had like a bad experience with a horse with a horse healer like 10 years ago. And you're like, this is a whole like scam operation as well, like fake force healers. And beyond that, the thing that's unsaid is what we know about Cassian is he was raised on a planet completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

His childhood was as a hunter gatherer in the deep jungle. And he was presumably, as all peoples in that situation, always have, raised with a set of beliefs about the universe and spirituality that were completely shattered when his entire planet was annihilated by the empire, right? Was it by the Republic? Well, it was, it was in that transitional period. The fuzzy period of between the Republic and the empire, yeah. Yes.

But of course he doesn't believe in anything, right? Like, he had some sort of set of beliefs and the entire cosmology of his planet was annihilated. Like, why would he believe in anything? I just like what this does for like the alliance itself. and it shows that the force is like a regular part of these people's lives. And like specifically the way the force healer talks is more about like the force as this, as this like operator of like fate and destiny.

And it can sense that Cassie and Andor is a main character in Rogue one, a Star Wars story and is important for the story of Star Wars. And she can feel that this is important and so can bix. And Andor is also freaked out by that like feeling. And I do like that version of the force a lot. I think that's a much more interesting way to do it than just like, you know, force cults in like a forever religious war with each other

for thousands of years. Yeah, if you pay us an unbelievably large amount of money, Garrison and I will have our six-hour argument we have every time about the force in Star Wars. We will debate the force. I do also like that it's not a hundred percent clear

of that this person is even force sensitive. She can, like, feel through the force, but like everyone can with some degree of training. Yeah, but it's, but it's also like not clear that it's like, like, he's just a girl. Yeah, yeah, but it's not a hundred. His back seems to feel better.

Yeah, no, yeah, totally. Yeah, but also like, that's a thing, like, it's not, it's not like a thing like, okay, this is like a Jedi, right? They're using the force, and you could tell of using the force. This is a lot more kind of, like, nebulous, and it's not 100% clear if it's happening or if it's everyone is, like, think,

just thinks that it's happening or like what's, you know, it's very, no, yeah. That's why I like, it. Like, it's not a Jedi. It's just, it's just someone and everyone in this universe can have a connection with the force because that's how this universe works. And some people don't want to or think it's fake and other people get really into it. Some people get way too into it. And then they do genocides in the name of their religious order. But for a lot of people like this, who aren't like a Jedi or aren't like a Sith or, you know, a whatever, a guardian of the wills.

It's just a thing you can like connect with and you can like feel your way through like fate and destiny. Well, and I really like that they must have, there must have been a discussion, should we have her say she used to be like a Padawan, right, who somehow escaped border 66. That must have been, they're- And thank God she's not. And thank God they just didn't, we don't know what she is. You don't care. They don't need to tell us.

Because no one in the situation would give a shit. Yeah. Right. Cassian's not going to be like, so yeah, tell me about like your fucking he doesn't give a fuck. There's so much else going on in his head at that moment. It's so much better that she's just a random person. Yeah. And we never know. We never know. All right. Let's go on a break and come back to talk about the Gorman Massacre.

Yay. Okay, we are back. Andor, season two, episode eight. Who are you? Yeah. I just, I will talk a lot about the name of this episode. Oh, yeah, baby. Because I love it.

Because it's just some of the best writing that this show or any show has ever had. Yeah. Yeah. Please, go ahead and give us the over there. Let's do a quick rundown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As mining equipment lands across Gorman, troops barricade the imperial headquarters in Palmo Square

as they prepare for a mass protest. The Gorman Front prepares to retake the town square, distributing weapons and rallying just regular Gorman citizens to march on the town center. The old leader of the front realizes too late that this protest is probably an imperial trap and is powerless to stop this unfolding spectacle. He encounters Cyril Kern on his way to the Imperial HQ

and confronts Cyril about misleading the Gorman resistance and why the empire is mining on Gorman. And this scene is the guy who plays riot, there's so many great monologues in this, the Doodoo plays Rylens, who is the old, rich guy who's kind of the organizing center of the Gorman front. The original one, yeah. Has a beautiful speech here,

where he's just, how can you say these things? What kind of being are you? What kind of being are you? What kind of being? Being are you? Yeah. It's excellent. It's perfect.

It's devastating. Yeah. Cyril breaks free and makes his way through the chanting crowd that's filled as square. After arriving at the barricaded Imperial Tower, Cyril sneaks into Dedra's office

to demand to know what the empire wants on Gorman. He chokes Dejra as she confesses that this has all been for the Emperor's new energy program, and she promises that they will soon return to Corrassant as heroes. We'll get everything we want.

The empire will reward us for our loyalty. This is it. This is the last fucked up thing we have to do. And then we can live happily ever after. Yeah. Didn't you want this promotion? Yeah. Yeah. She says that this might be the previous episode or this one.

But like when Cyril like kind of like protests, Dejadra's like, yeah, but you weren't complaining when you got promoted into this job. But Cyril wishes Dejadra good luck. And he leaves to join the crows. outside. Cassian is stationed on the outskirts of the crowd trying to line up a shot to take out DEDRA. But stormtroopers soon kettled the crowd and imperial riot cops are sent into the square to jumpstart a flashpoint. Protestors throw rocks and bottles, but it's an imperial

sniper who is ordered to shoot their own riot cops that starts the Gorman massacre. And they make a beautiful point. The kettling is done by stormtroopers, who are the elite, right? these are their very best infantry. The riot cops, from the moment they're introduced, because we see these guys land with their kit bags, their sergeant clearly has a lot more experience and is like these guys don't know what the fuck they're doing. We cannot put them in any kind of dangerous.

They have no idea. And that's the point, baby. And that's the point. That's why they're there. These men were handpicked to be the worst of the empire because they're expendable, right? And because you can count on them to panic, and that's what's needed.

They're cater fodder. Yeah. They're sacrificial lambs. Yeah. Now, Cyril watches the chaos unfold as the Gorman Front tries to defend against the imperial slaughter, and KX security droids are sent into the town square. But when Cyril sees Cassian, he suddenly lunges at him, and the two get into a brutal brawl. Cyril gets the upper hand, but is shocked when Cassian does not remember who he is.

While frozen, pointing his blaster at Cassian, Cyril gets shot dead by the old leader of the Gorman Front. There's Rylens. It's an incredible moment. Yeah. While trying to exfiltrate, Cassian meets up with Willem, who decides to stay and help the resistance in the aftermath of the massacre. The Gorman Front broadcast the final message about the imperial siege, claiming there are thousands dead in the streets. Cyril's mother is in tears watching news reports coming out of Gorman that frame the imperial troopers killed as fallen here.

heroes. Yeah. Oh, boy, what an episode. Maybe the best episode of the series. Just phenomenal. It's phenomenal. I don't know which I'd pick as the best. It's tough.

I think it's the Prison Break One still. Prison Break One's very good. I'm going to go on a little rant about the name of this episode. Who are you? Because that moment between Cassian and Cyril is one that Tony Gilroy has said in interviews, he had to fight for. Everyone was like, just crazy. And Diego Luna said it was one of the hardest lines for me to deliver because Luna

likes the show and is a fan of the character Cyril and his acting. And he knows very, and it has the degree of sympathy that you almost have to have for Cyril at this point. Totally. And so it was such a difficult challenge for him to be like to really sell, who the wait, who the fuck are you? Shatter Cyril's self-perception.

And it's not, it's not even, I'll even push against a little bit that because I don't think it's entirely that. I think what else is, like about Cyril's journey, and what I like about this episode is that who are you is not just about that line. It is about every character that we see in this. We are learning who they all are, and they are learning who they all are. Rylans, in the beginning, right, this guy who had been

so gung-ho about the Gorman resistance, who had been the, that when he realizes what's happening, that they're all going to be massacred, his family and his culture are going to be wiped out as a result of this active resistance that he's helped to organize. He tries to stop it. He says, we have to pull back. And he learns he's not a rebel, right? He's not a rebel. And there's always been hints of that. He's not a rebel.

He's always, you know, the emperor can't know about this, right? We've seen hints of this for Rylans. He learns that about himself. And then a little later in the episode when it's become, because we watch his kids get massacred. Yeah. He doesn't see them, but he knows they're dead. He hears the gunfire.

He understands no one's making it out of there. He's not a dumb man. And when he comes in and shoots Cyril in the head, he learns again who he is. And now he wasn't before, but now he is, because they've taken everything from him, right? Yeah, the quote from earlier when he's like arguing with people in the streets,

he's like, the only path forward is silent resistance. Yeah. And by the end of the episode, he is a little beyond that. And I love for him that he gets a chance to learn who he is and be wrong and then learn again and be right, right? which is not a chance Cyril is going to get. Cyril does. And all,

Cyril is, we see a lot of characters in this who could only have been themselves in a fascist state. Dedra's one of them, right? Dedra could not have been the person she is outside of the empire. Totally.

I think Partigas probably is too. Could never have been himself fully outside of certainly. Well, I think if you put Partagos in the CIA, he is mostly the same guy. I think he must have been in the Republic's CIA. Yeah, he feels very like republic transitioned into the empire, like guy. Yeah, and I think Krenick, obviously, is one of our best exactly.

Krenick is only his whole self. Krenick is an empire guy. Cyril is not an ideological fascist. Cyril never really embraces fascism as a belief system. He never understands the empire that way. He just understands the empire is law and order. Law and order. If you look at it from Cyril standpoint, he gets brought into this.

not because he wants to cramp down on the evil rebels and he loves Palpatine and wants to kill freedom. It's because two guys are murdered that he considers colleagues and he thinks it's wrong, right? He has a sense of like justice. And he believes he's following that. And he believes that his girlfriend is invested in that. And he truly believes he doesn't want to hurt the people of Gorman. He wants to find the outside agitators who are driving them to disaster, right?

And the moment when he learns that that's all a lie, he beats the shit. shit out of his girlfriend. Very violent. I had an argument with someone online about like, is this domestic violence? And I'm like, in a literal sense, these people are in a domestic partnership and he is doing violence to her. In a moral sense, if you find out that your significant other has been hiding a genocide from you, I think it's okay.

And you've been made complicit in it. It's such a fucked up, it's such of, it's such, like everyone is, everyone's fucked and everyone's evil, everyone's complicit. Yes. And they're all, like, calling their own commitment to, like, the state and what they view as justice and law and order into question. And, like, for Cyril, like, he is, he is just committed to this idea, like, justice and what he sees as law and order.

And the empire is the physical manifestation of law and order. So, therefore, the empire must be good. Right. And that's his view. Yeah. And when he realizes, maybe the empire actually doesn't really care about law and order. No, they just, like, it shatters him. confused. Like he he he doesn't know how to orient himself in the world. He doesn't know where a sense of morals can be derived from.

No. If the state is not the represent is not like the lawful good representation of like justice. And we've seen from Cyril previously that he has physical courage, right? He's not afraid of violence. He's not afraid of putting himself in physical danger, right? Like he's not a Cassian and or level comfortable with it, right? Because he just doesn't have that kind of experience. But he's he's not he's not physically a coward. But he's a a moral coward, the whole series. And that changes. And again, going back to who are you, he learns one thing about himself, which is that he is not a genocide committer, right? He is not someone who will consciously participate in the annihilation of a race, right? When he learns that those are the stakes, he chokes Deidre and he fucking runs. He doesn't know anything else about himself at that point. And my interpretation of his reaction to that line from Cassian isn't

just, because I think what I love about the scene when he chooses to attack him, it's not him making a decision to go back to the empire. He's not trying to fight Cassian because he wants to get back in good. It's just the only thing that makes sense. He's referring to his like child's self.

Yes. Yes. It's crazy. And it's animal. The way that he goes after him is like a rabid dog, charging, you know? Like this whole situation on Gorman calls under question how he sees the empire and therefore how he sees himself as he realizes that he's just been a pawn in the Empire's larger game.

And, like, in a way, Gorman's the first time that Cyril's been part of, like, a real community, maybe since he was, like, a corpo cop. Like, there's no, like, solidarity in community,

like, on Corrassant. There's not in the Bureau of Standards. Yeah. Like, Gorman's the first time he's actually kind of been a part of a community. And, like, this happens with, like,

with, like, FBI double agents infiltrating radical organizations sometimes. It's, it's very odd. So, like, when he decides, like, join the crowd, this is, like, he's aligning with them. But then when he sees Cassian,

all of this psychological progress and questioning that he's done just gets immediately rolled back because then he sees the guy who he thinks kind of like ruined his life who like who altered the trajectory of what Cyril's life was supposed to be and therefore he just

yeah he he like turns into an animal he undoes all of all of this psychological progress and attacks the guy that he views ruined his life and then in his final moments is is in part confronted with the idea that like the guy that he's been obsessing over for years doesn't even remember who he is.

And, like, Cassian's been living rent-free in his head this whole time. And, like, he didn't need to. Like, Cyril could have moved on. Cyril didn't need to do this. And he's been obsessing over someone who doesn't even remember him. So I think the other thing

that's really important about Cyril's character is, like, if you remember him in, like, the very beginning of season one, right? He has, like, when it, like, goes home. Like, he has, like, a storm. He has, like, stormtrooper, like, figurine. Clone trooper, like, action figures. And he has, and, you know,

And he's he's like tailoring his own uniform because he has this conception of himself as this like, you know, as like this like this brave cop as this like sort of like like this is a very specific kind of like fascist bureaucrat with a gun. It's like platonic figure. Yeah. And the thing is, Dedra Miro is that actual person. And this is a tension that that is kind of worked out or of course season one of like Dejomero is a character who in a conventional show is a hero. right? Like she is she is she is like the cop that's willing to work outside of the restrictions of the thing in order to get the job done. Yeah. And you get to see what that actually is in real life, which is she's just fucking torturing people. And, you know, she's torturing people and she's going and when she gets offered a chance to do the genocide in order to do her investment, she gets that. And I think part of what's going on with Cyril is like, Cyril's whole thing is that he has been trying to be this cop. And then he has this moment where he's like, oh, she's. shit, none of that's, like, real. The actual thing that it means to be this cop isn't just this, isn't this, like, I dress

up in my, in my clangles clothes. And he gets this in a sudden in season one, too, where he, like, actually goes into the field, and it's just, like, everyone's fucking dying around him, and he's shell-shocked and things are exploding. And it's, like, he's getting that here again where it's, like, his, like, thing where he's been cultivating this, like, intelligence person. And then he, he, he sees it. And it just, like, it just sort of, it, it rips away the facade that's, like, that is

the facade of how, like, on a kind of macro level, like, how we, how film and television and how American media thinks about, like, spies and thinks about cops. Sure. And you see that the actual brutal reality of it, which is, like, through the eyes of this person who, who, like, through, through this sort of, like, media stuff has always wanted to become this person. And it's like, oh, you're just doing a genocide. The one part of being a cop that I can do is, is, like, choking, is, like, choking my

partner? Mm-hmm. So my interpretation of kind of his ending moments is that, number one, I don't really feel it is necessarily that he undoes all the progress. I think that there's this animal moment when he sees Cassian that just overrides that, because nothing else about his life has made sense anymore. He's completely lost any sense of sanity. Sure.

And Cassian makes sense. Fighting him makes sense. And so he does it. And we do see he has a. chance to shoot him and he hesitates and he lowers the gun just a bit and then he's immediately shot and in that moment number one one of the themes of this is that like everyone has their own rebellion there's an argument you can make that him not doing that was was his last little act of that there's an argument that like maybe he would have you know tried to engage him in conversation

or like you know monologued or whatever but he didn't get the chance we just don't know we'll never know and he's he's kind of contrasted with rylins and that rylans does get the chance to see who he is and have it be not enough and then become enough. Cyril gets the chance to see who he is and he does do one, he gets one win and it is a win to realize there's a genocide going on

and I refuse to be a part of it, right? That's not nothing that he makes that choice. We don't know where he would have gone from here. There's a version of Cyril that could have been a part of the rebel that could have if he had just left Cassian helped some Gorman's escape on a ship, used his imperial credentials, gotten them out of there

becomes something else. We'll never know because he doesn't get the chance. And I see in that last moment, not just him being like, you don't know who I am, oh, that shatters me, but him being asked,

who are you? And realizing I have no answer to that question. Yeah. And he just doesn't get the chance ever to do that. It is a very like Greek tragedy, like,

Movent here. Yeah. Phenomenal screenwriting. I will argue it's going to get paid off a lot in the next three episodes, but this idea that does run through the series that even if you are someone working within this machinery of death, within this evil empire, you're not unredeemable or unsavable, but you don't have unlimited time, right?

Yeah. You can be something else. You have that chance, but you don't have infinite days to make that choice. This is like the entire message of Star Wars. This is like Luke and Vader in the throne room. This is like what this whole series is about. It's like is this moment. Yeah.

Yep. I do have a few other things I want to talk about in terms of like the massacre. I really like that we see a return of like imperial military police, not just stormtroopers. I think putting a face on the riot cops is really good for the audience because stormtroopers are backpacks and t-shirts and little fun toys and riot cops or riot cops. I really like that Willman is sleeping with a French militant, many such cases. Whomst among us? Hardagraz, in like a phone call with Dedra is talking about how like, yeah, like, you know, propaganda news media has been useful and like spreading like rumors and like, you know, like

co-intel pro, that's for stuff, it's been useful. But now the only, the quote is like, now the only story is Gorman aggression. Yeah. Like this is all that we can focus on. There's no more of this like outside agitators thing. no more of this long-term slow planning. We just have to focus on how, like, savage these Gormons are. And meanwhile, like, Fox, like, Space Fox News is outside, stoking divisions on Gorman,

talking about how there's rumors of a, quote-unquote, general strike. How the empire is negotiating for, like, a peaceful demonstration. Yeah. Even though the leaders are obviously, you know, making people agitated in this growing insurrection. The chance got me. I have heard way too many the whole world is watching chance. So as soon as they started going, we are the gore. The galaxy is watching.

I started like sweating. I started having like a panic attack. No, no, that gave me a little breakdown too. It's my least favorite chance. I was like, oh, no, it's happening again. No, no. The galaxy isn't watching. No, it's not.

It's not. Oh, God. I hate that chant. I hate that fucking chant. Retire it. But it's very real. It's very real. right? Like, these are these guys, right? Yes.

We get, we get like a real proper riot set up, right? Like, the last riot in Andor was on pharic. And like that was like a funeral riots, right? It's almost like some of the writers have seen kettles. It's crazy. And like this time, like this is not like a morning ritual like it was unfair. Like this is, this is a protest riot. There's signs. There's banners. There's fireworks.

There's smoke. There's space Molotovs. There's state affiliated. news crews. There's Thai fighters flying overhead, like police copters and police drones. It's excellent. I got a little flashback of being buzzed by a police helicopter. It's standing

rocks so close that it knocked my car off the road. That's what happened with a tie fighter. It was so good. And it's like, like, I mean, like, right down to like, just like the micro dynamics of like how the crowd is interacting with the riot shields. It's like, oh,

shit. And I got the same knot in my stomach when I can tell that shit's about to go down. I get the same knot in my stomach watching this. Like, they really nailed it. What's great, too, is just in the face acting, but with Cassian and with Wilman, you can see they know, they know, they know too.

They've been in this. They know Wilman is bad. Like, okay, okay, okay, I know what's happening. I also really like that, okay, so, okay, so the challenge that Gilroy has here is we have to introduce the concept of cettling to the average Star Wars watcher. And with the average Star Wars Watcher, you can't be like, okay, the police are going to form a wall.

You have to physically make walls come in around the thing. Some people have said that the Gorman massacre is very clearly inspired by what's happened in Palestine. These episodes, I'm sure, were informed by other massacres in Palestine, but these were written prior to the most current outbreak of really intense genocidal violence. In like 2021, 2021, probably. Again, there were other similar massacres that occurred in Palestine, but also, like, this is very clearly patterned off of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. This is very clearly patterned off of, I would argue, my suspicion, the Armad Tsar massacre in India by the British government as well. Like, I think that there are pieces of all of that in here. There's also elements that I heard friend of the show Emmy, who's great, talking about like the Tlatelotoko Massacre, which is like that massacre in 1960.

68 in a square in the middle of Mexico City, which is a massacre where there's like these giant student, the 68 student protest are happening, and they just like put snipers on the room and shoot everyone. And I think, so when I saw this, like, I thought it was going to be a lot more of just like a straight massacre, everyone dies. And it kind of turns into a shootout.

And I wasn't sure how that was going to play. Although I think it is also worth remembering that like also a lot of the sort of famous historical massacres aren't, like, some people do shoot back. Yes. Like, is the thing at Tiananmen. Like, some of the students, like, take workers from soldiers that they fought and, like, shoot, well, yeah, this is more than workers. By the time they get into the square with the students, like, those people don't have

gone. Some of the workers, like, try to fight back and just get massacred. But it seems to have been really effective. Yeah. And just, like, conveying that, like, yeah, this shit happens constantly. It happened in Maidan, too, right? Where you have, you know, both you have Burkut. snipers shooting and killing

protesters and you have protesters firing back from behind the barricades. Yeah. I really like the singing the Gorman National Anthem as a way to like stop the chanting which is like calling towards you know like we're safe because the galaxy's watching

us and like the guy who starts the song realizes like that maybe that's not true and instead the song like unites people in like national solidarity to prepare them for what's about to happen instead of like a gesture outwards at like this, at like, you know, those, those off planet watching this and that ensures our safety. Like, no, our safety is from, like, each other. And the fact that, yeah,

so many of them do fire back. And, like, it is, they do not, like, lose their agency. And that doesn't, like, make this less of a massacre. Yeah, there's another example of this is, like, the Red Summer, which was, like, a whole bunch of, like, anti-black race riots in the U.S. And it's, it's another one of these things. It's like, yeah, it's remembered as, like, a bunch of white supremacists just murdered a bunch of black people. And that's true, but also people fought back. Like, you know, you. People had guns. People fought back. People resisted them. And, you know, a lot of people fucking died. And also people in these situations fight back. And it's good. The last thing I want to discuss in this last section is the based hotel porter who throws that bomb. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. And again, yeah, we are learning. He already knows, clearly. He knows who he is. He never has any question about that, but we don't know who he is. Cassian doesn't fully until he's like, yeah, I wiped you from the system, bro.

get out of here. That's what I want to talk about. Yeah. Is this, is this base hotel porter and also that the way, the way Cassian works as a spy is different from the way that other, like, Lutheran operatives do. Like, Cassian gets to know this guy in the previous arc of episodes when he's, when he's, like, going

to, like, survey the Gorman Front, like, a year ago. And he gets into a conversation with this hotel porter who was at, like, the Tarcan massacre and was, like, was there when there was, like, five hundred people died. And, like, and his dad died. And his dad died. Protecting him. Yeah, like, watch his dad die. And they were, like, conversing. with him in his

hotel room to learn about the local people and to learn about the actual history from like a regular guy who experienced it. And this isn't something that like Val and Sinto really do. This isn't something that Luton really does.

Like, Andor has a connection or like, andor values making connections with just like the regular people in wherever he's operating. And this always like turns out to help Andor in the long run, even if he doesn't really know it

in like the immediate. Because when Endor comes back a year later, under a different name with a different job, the hotel porter recognizes him, and it's like, I got you, buddy. Yeah, I'll take care of you. I know that you're up to something and

I will protect you. We are in this together. Like, I recognize you and I value you. And that is what, like, helps Andor, like, in this episode and then also the grenades that he throws is, you know, cool.

And there's a beautiful, Andor's last line to this kid is, I hope things work out for you. And the last thing we see that kid do is detonate a bomb to kill himself and a bunch of other people. Rebellions are built on hope.

Yeah. Yeah. And he tells him, rebellions are built on hope, which is where we get that line from Rogue One. I like that Sam, the guy with two M's who killed Sinta.

Lastark is still in the fight and is killing Imperials. He is killing them in the name of Sinta. He is showing up. He is real. And he again, he learns who he is in this episode, right? Like he's not just a fuck up. He rams a truck into that K2 unit and saves Andor.

Saves Cassian. Saves the whole day. And yes. He learns who he is. He learns who he is. I do like that everything good that happens to Cassian, all the people who do it are like, in part like responsible for the destruction of the Death Star, which shows how like the butterfly effect works in a really fun way.

Yeah. And like a good luthan operative, Castigan takes K2 to get reprogrammed. But this episode like ends on this on this Gorman cry for help, this like final broadcast done by Wilman's French GF. And I was legitimately tearing up at this. It got to me. Andor starts tearing up.

But like it's it really got to me. And then like we zoom out of Gorman and you can see like how unnatural the imperial like tower is above like the regular palmo skyline with let's like you know historical architecture that you have this like just just like hideous like imperial like citadel like casting a dark shadow over the town and then we we cut to cyril's mom crying watching fox news where they're talking about how outside rebel assistants helped the gorman front and they question what's the price will pay for our own safety and that's how the episode ends What a sowed.

What a sode. All right. We'll go on a break and then come back to briefly discuss this last episode, which is also quite good. Okay, we are back. Episode 9, welcome to the rebellion. Clone Wars heads are feasting, so much Senate. Very fun. So on Corosant, fake news spreads about what has happened on Gorman, and the Gorman senator is arrested with no warrant and no charges.

Mad Mothma plans to make a final. speech in the Senate and then leave Corrassant with Bail Organa to lead the Rebel Alliance on Yavin. But Senator O'Gona doesn't want to leave yet. He wants to stay and buy time for Yavin to get fully up and running. But he advises Mon to go through with the speech and offers an extraction team to help her get off Corrassant. While writing her speech, Mon Mothma's Senate aide Erskine finds an ISB listening device in her office. She goes outside to practice the speech while Erskine continues to search for more bugs. Waiting outside for Mon is Luthan,

who tells her that Erskine's been secretly working for him for two years, and that Bail's extraction team is somehow corrupted. Mon grows upset at Luthin's deceptions and secrets, and is unsure of who to trust. But Luton says that he is sending a highly trusted operative as an alternative extraction plan. Cassian, still undercover as a conflict journalist, agrees to escort Ma'Mathma as his last job for the rebellion.

Other senators mourn the imperial martyrs slain by the savage Gormans before Bail Organa invokes a Senate article to hand the Florida of Mon Mothma, where she gives her speech calling what's happened on Gorman a genocide and labels Emperor Palpatine a monster that, empowered by the Senate, has hijacked the truth and reality. The ISB orders to shut down the Senate feed and detaines, Senator Mothma, but as Mon exits the Senate chamber, Cassian is waiting outside. As loose and suspected, one of Bail's extraction team members is an ISB double agent and kills another

one of Bail's operatives once they're found out. The undercover ISB agent tries to arrest Mon, but is killed by Erskine and Cassian. Mon helps navigate through the Senate building as it's put into lockdown, eventually reaching her vehicle outside where Cassian kills her driver Cloris, who is also an ISB plant. Well, was, maybe. We'll talk about. We'll talk about. talk about that. Yeah. Cassian takes Wilman to Yavin for medical attention, while Gold Squadron finishes Mon's escort to the rebel base.

Back on base, Bix breaks up with Cassian via Snapchat message and leaves Yavin to fight for the rebellion elsewhere and to keep Cassian on Yavin. And later that day, Rebel engineers reprogram the salvaged KX droid. Okay. This episode has a lot of politics, a lot of politics, a lot of politicking, a lot of capital senate stuff. I want to read a little bit from Mon Mothma's speech here.

Sure. What I think is kind of the nut of it here, I believe we are in a crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away,

when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite, of whatever monster screams the loudest. Uh, boy. It's a little orange man bad, but hey, the orange man is bad. The orange man, it's not just orange man. It's making a broader, more historical point that. Totally, yes.

The reason, all of this works by destroying any kind of shared concept of reality. You can get people to, if you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities, right? I mean, this is, this is what, like, the Nazis understood as well. Yes. And I love that speech. I think it's really one of my favorite bits of this is that it continues to show the degree to which, as in Nimick's manifesto, tiny spontaneous individual acts of rebellion are constantly occurring and are a key part of the movement even when they're not organized. Mothma only gets through her speech and maybe only lives because a team of door repair guys who do not appear to be anyone's secret agents just fuck up purposefully at their job. And they're like, we can't get in. I don't know. man, we can't get into the fucking thing. Like, you're going to have to wait. We're still working on this.

And it's kind of inferred that, like, it's weaponized incompetence, right? And I really appreciate that bit. We have a showdown with her and her driver because she becomes aware before her speech that her driver, who she's been taking in as a confidant in the last couple episodes. Well, no, no, no, no.

She's known her driver, Chloris has been, like, ISB for, like, two seasons. This is a different driver, I think, than first season. No, this is the same driver. Because she's been talking to Chloris a couple of times. She makes a comment about that. This one hurts. She's been talking to, like, Erskine.

Like... Oh, shit. Yeah. She's been getting closer to, like, her Senate aide. Cloris has always been, like, a dipshit who they've kept around because he's, like, kind of bad at his job. He is bad at being an ISB, like, paid informant. So they, like, keep him around, even though they know he's reporting to ISB. There's a little bit of an insinuation with him looking at his gun and listening to her.

that maybe he's rethinking things. But again, we never get the chance to see that because Cassian just shoots. I think he's like thinking about if he's going to have to like arrest or shoot her. Yeah, that was my read on it. I think he's making up his mind about what he's going to do. And I don't think we actually see that. But I mean, I think it's open to interpretation. Yeah, because Cassian domes his little thumbhead.

Because Cassian does not take chances like that. He does not take chances. And also Cassian employs great tactics in asking Mon what his name is first to engage him in conversation to distract him enough to like totally surprise him. Yeah. Very good. I also, I like the one of the kind of, it's not stated directly, but like Lonnie, the imperial deep cover agent within the ISB is, is the guy who put these people there, particularly

the incompetent ISB agent who Cassian first shoots the lady. The person who's infiltrated Maun's team, or Bail's team, yeah. The reason why Luton knows that there's something wrong with Bail's team is because the agent that has that has infiltrated like Bail's like network is one of Lonnie's agents. So Lonnie was able to get word to Luthin that there could be a problem

with with Bail's extraction team and that's what that's what helps get Monty Yavin safely. Yeah and it's just kind of more confirmation of the value of Lonnie. Yeah. Having him there and how he how much he was worth the sacrifice of Ando Krieger and his

rebels in season one. No, Lonnie Lonnie is MVP. a lot of this episode is kind of showing how much Luthin's accelerationist project has kind of succeeded like how much he's in somewhat set up Gorman or at least like fed the fire of Gorman slightly to create this political crisis

to further his like accelerationist goal of creating this like big conflict and like we see some of that start to work out even though Luton himself is like having a much harder time and the kind of the house of cards he's built is starting to crumble and he's probably not going to be able to work with many people

for very much longer. Yeah, and that's like the other thing I want to mention about this episode about the way Luthin operates is that because the way Luthan operates is by fucking not telling anyone anything and by manipulating people and by spying on them

and by like having this whole network of double agents and like people who doesn't, like the problem with operating like that and this is the problem that he's running into here is like, Mon Mothma does not fucking trust him because the thing that she learned when Luthing comes to tell her like, hey, you can't go with Bail's team.

Yeah, Bail's team is going to kill you. She's like, you fucking this you've had my own aides spying on me for two years my own assistant yeah yeah like it's like this this is like a persistent problem with the like and you start to see this i have have we sorry have we seen vell like not working with him anymore i think we have in these episodes uh vell does not seem to be working with him anymore she's more or less completely gone in on the actual like military part of the alliance vell's on yeah yeah well and this and this is the this is the thing about this is like you get to watch everyone.

People are walking away from Luther. Yeah, you get to watch everyone who Lutheran had worked. Everyone walks away with him because they're like, this guy keeps being an asshole, and he keeps hiding things to people, and he keeps manipulating everyone. And it's like, it's like, he's doing,

and this is like also, this is a kind of person also that you run into where it's like they're doing really important work, and also interpersonally they're impossible to fucking work with. And like, and you can watch it. Even Cassie is dealing with this. Having like real political ramifications.

Yeah. Whereas just like, no, this guy has been just like, jerking our chain around and like lying to us and manipulating us for so long that all of the relationships that he needs are breaking down. And it's no longer a position where because he's the guy with the money and the arms and the coordination, everyone has to work with him. They now have a choice to like go do literally anything else. And everyone keeps walking away. And it like almost gets Mon Mothma killed because she's so pissed at him that he's been like having her spite on. But it also saves her. Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

It's a double-edged thing. It does seem distrust with Mon, but it also is what got hurt. Because it is, it is him who gets Mom out. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's like, it's just this, like, really messy. That's what makes them a good character, is that he is both like... He understands who he is. He's, like, fucked up and morally compromised, and is obviously hashtag problematic,

but is also completely necessary within the plot that they've created. Yeah. And, like, somewhat defensible. And, like, he knows that he's, like, fucked. Like he says like there's no Yavin for me. I'm not going to Yavin. I'm not going to Yavin. I'm never going to see the sunrise. Like that's not what my role is.

I have to be the asshole here. And yeah, it sucks. And we start to see like his fake Luthen like gallery persona starting to collapse here too. Like this whole episode, he's not in his like wig. He's not in his like fancy clothes. He is like insurgent Luthen. Like this this rule that he's cultivated these past few years is no longer needed. And it does have negative consequences.

Yeah, Mon is not trusting him. in this moment where she kind of really has to. Like, Mon thinks that Luthan might just be trying to, like, protect himself, that Luton might not actually care about Mon's own safety. Cassian is tired of always being a tool for someone else and is dealing with trauma and burnout, and Erskins just caught in the middle of this whole, this whole shitstorm. And, yeah, this is what makes it compelling.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's just good character writing. We've all been bent by secrecy, is what he says. Yeah, and by God he has. And there's a couple of really good moments in this that I don't want to skip over. There's the next year in Yavin moment between Mon Mothma and Baal Argana, which I saw someone on Twitter decree to be Zionist propaganda. Sorry, that is definitely based on next year in Jerusalem, a term that has been in use for way more than half of a millennia that is. has nothing to do with Zionism. You're just being racist. I'm sorry. And it's a nice, like, it's a, I think a nice nod to the travails of like,

what we are seeing is like a diaspora, right? As people have to flee their homes to participate in the rebellion, right? I think it's an appropriate kind of callback to real world history there. And the line where I think that moment between her and bail works really effectively. And the thing that he's doing works really effectively. This interaction between her and bail also shows the difference between how bail operates and Luthor operates because

like Mon asks bail if he trusts his people like if he trusts his extraction team and he says like of course but he but he has to admit that he doesn't actually know them personally for for quote unquote safety and like this is this is where it shows like

the difference between someone like bail who's maybe less manipulative than Luthan maybe a little bit less morally compromised than Luton but also in in moments like this, like in specific moments like this, comes up a little bit short compared to Luthyn's like, you know, semi-semi-destructive and like bridge-burning tactics, which she openly describes as bridge-burning. I think, I think this episode, like, are there any bridges

you haven't burned yet? Well, we're going to deal with that soon. Yeah, we will be dealing with that soon. I would like to call out Monmothma's face acting in both the scenes where Cassie and just immediately domes a motherfucker. Her soy jack face? Oh my God. Incredible stuff. Yeah, she's like, holy shit. She's known intellectually, and it's even hit her, because she had a friend of

her's kill, right? A former lover, she didn't order it, but it was done and she knew it was happening. So she's not. She had to cope with it. Totally naive. But the rebellions, I would argue, not fully real to her until she sees a man shot through the brains. It's funny because she, like, minutes earlier has a line where she, where she,

where she's like, like, hiding in the Senate this whole time will have been the hardest thing we've ever done. And then it's immediately faced with, like, the lethal consequences for her actions. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know if I could do this. Much worse. And it's also like, it's things too, because it's like the second person she's seen shot in this episode, right? Because, like, there's also like the, the first ISB agent who they have shot, but it's like.

She doesn't know the person. Yeah, exactly. She knows, right? No, it's just like some cop. She's known Cloris for years. Yeah. Yeah. And she just watched her just like, yep, nope.

And the way and or just instantly is like, yeah, no, fuck dead. Immediate. Yeah. And she's like, holy shit, what have I gotten myself into? Luton's strongest soldiers kill two undercover ISB this episode. Give him a hand, folks. Yeah. No, this is a really, a really sleek episode.

I do like that, that, like, Bail's, like, infiltrator has, like, a real ISB look to her face. As soon as I saw that actress, I'm like, that one has got to be the under. cover ISB, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She just got that fed look. She has that ISB jaw. Very good. There's one thing I'd like to bring up at the end of these episodes that's kind of a callback

to the very first episode of the show is the first time we see our boy Cyril, he's just convinced that something is, and people, I've seen people point out, Cyril's actually really good at his job. He points this out that, like, I solved a murder in two days, right? He figured out who had killed these officers very quickly. my favorite little undercutting of Cyril points is that his boss solves it even faster. Like in that first conversation, because his boss is an older guy, he's a corporate cop. He clearly has been doing whatever he's been doing since probably before the Clone Wars, right?

He's been near the end of his career than the beginning. And he doesn't like the empire, right? He's not even that much of a law and order guy. He's more of a get through the day and do my fucking job guy. When Cyril brings up Cassie and killing these cops, he's like, yeah, man, they're at a brothel. I know their salaries. They can't afford that. They were shaking people down. They shake the wrong guy down and they got killed. Best to ignore it. You don't want the empire over here. And every aspect of Cyril's life would have been better if he'd listen to this guy,

who I'm sure spends the rest of the empire sitting on like, barely notices the end of things. You know, he's probably retired by then. Just a shout out to the smartest, the smartest guy in security services we meet over the course of these entire series. that old dude at the desk who's like, not worth it, not getting into it. Yeah, I wouldn't ask anybody anything. Oh. Poor Cyril.

What a little weasel. Yeah, no, he fucked up. He fucked up bad. I love, I always love being in the Senate. She does call the Gorene Massacre Genocide. Performs the whole speech. Very, very solid acting as usual. Genevieve O'Reilly,

fantastic work as Ma'an this entire season. Everyone's great. God damn. Oh, we should also talk a little bit about Deirdre's breakdown after the Gorman Massacre. Yeah, in episode eight, yeah. Yeah, yeah, which also does fit into the whole Who Are You thing, where we see that she's not like a complete sociopath, right? She's not absolutely devoid of horror over what she's doing. She's just willing to accept the horror in order to get what she wants out of life, which I think it's just like a much more realistic portrayal

of human evil than we tend to get. Yeah. She finds ways to cope and justify. Yeah. And like, you know, Lonnie is having to find ways to cope and justify, but he's doing that through being a double agent and feeding and feeding Luthan, like very, very important intel as we see in this episode and

the next. Let's see. Yeah, I think this is most of what I had on on this episode. Oh yeah, I mean, Bix, Bix breaks up with Cassian to force Cassian to stay in the alliance, even though he's probably not going to be working with Luton again. I'll have more to say about Bix next week, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot to say about this, but I think we'll wait until last episode to fully discuss Bix. I think that's probably best. Yeah. But this batch specifically, I think, is some real solid. Real solid so is, wow. Star Wars. The stars have never been more wars, Garrison.

the stars have never been more wars. You can all agree on that. I will get way too mad if I talk about the DNC anymore in this preamble. 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, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. That's right, everybody. This episode, we are covering the week of May 8th through May 15th.

Trump gets bribed by Qatar. Stephen Miller wants to suspend habeas corpus and a Twitch streamer gets interrogated at the border. How are we doing, fellas? Uh, I don't know, bad. Like every time we do this. I'm not talking to border patrol willingly. That's what I'm doing.

That I'm not doing. I'm staying the fuck away from the border, although it's also impossible to stay the fuck away from the border because, like, 90% of the country lives technically within the border patrols from it. Yeah, but if you are happening to go to the border and you do get stopped by law enforcement, you should not talk to them. You should say that you're staying silent and will only speak with a lawyer. You have certain things that you have to say, right? If they decide to talk to you about something

other than, you know, here's my passport, et cetera, do I have anything to declare, which you do have to answer? If they attempt to engage you in other conversation about, say, your political beliefs, all you have to say is, am I being detained? And if they, They say yes, you say, I plead the fifth and I demand to speak to a lawyer and then nothing else. There's nothing else you say. That's how you should handle this situation. Yeah. You definitely do not need to debate your politics.

Not required. With the Border Patrol. Tell them how you feel about Palestine. That's, yeah, not going to end well. No, not necessary. And, yeah, like, it's one of those things. I have no desire to, like, get into an, an. online beef with the fellow who got stopped.

He is a big boy and able to make his own choices. But I do not recommend you make those same choices because there's no actual benefit to you in doing that, right? Yeah. Yeah, don't talk to cops. It's very easy to not talk to cops. I'm doing it right now. Uh-huh.

That's what you think. Trivially easy. Yeah. It's simple and unnecessary. And it's just, like, largely the problem is that, and this is even something that he talked about where like, well, the guy seemed really nice. and he in apologetic and like he didn't want to have to do this. And if you're having a conversation like that with them,

then they're getting what they want out of it, which is for you to feel like that, right? For you to feel like, oh, okay, this guy's, this guy's nice. I can chat with him for a little while. You feel safe enough to talk. Yes, that's their entire job. That's what they're trying to get you to do. Yeah, yeah.

And again, like this is specifically if you are like a U.S. citizen coming to reenter the country, there's different rules and different different suggestions which you should talk with an immigration lawyer about if you are not a US citizen. Yes, this is not advice for people who are coming here and not citizens. Yeah, none of this is legal advice.

But yeah, you really, really do not need to get into a debate with the border guard about your politics when you're trying to enter the country. Or any other time, really, just don't do it. Or really any time, frankly. Yeah, there's no point in time in which that's useful to you or anyone else.

You ain't changing their mind. Maybe there's more to politics than debate. No. Speaking of more to politics, the PKK. Yeah. What's going on with the PKK, fellas? We should give a brief overview of who the PKK is. The PKK is the Kurdish Workers Party, and it is originally a Maoist and now not that terrorist

group. That's legally how it's defined by the United States and by most Western countries that was started in southern Turkey, like in the late 70s, close to 50 years ago. And it started out as a rather different kind of organization than it is. It's one of its founders. And generally the guy referred to as his founders, a dude named Adla Ajalon or Apo, who got captioned Kenya a few decades back and has been in a Turkish prison ever since. But it does continue to, like, right stuff that informs, because there's kind of this strong Maoist core at the heart of the foundation of the party continues to have a lot of influence over it. And this is the root of kind

of the different organizations that sprung out and became what we call Rojava, is this group that kind of came in during ISIS's invasion and, you know, had changed significantly from its Maoist roots at that point. And kind of from the PKK, we, get the YPG and the YPJ and, you know, these different social and militant movements in northeast Syria. Anyway. Yeah. They would dispute the from the PKK.

They sure would. Yes. But Roberts, no wrong. For a good legal reason. Yes. But they're all inspired by the political thought of Ojoland, right? Like, we can say that safely. Yeah.

And Ojolan, I guess, addressed by video the 12th Congress of the PKK, which occurred earlier this month, at which. which they voted to disband themselves and lay down their arms. So that's the, they had a meeting, right? They get together. Obviously, it seems that Turkey decided not to airstrike that meeting. Turkey has been carrying out airstrikes against a PKK in three different countries for decades and sort of small arms engagements as well, an artillery and the whole nine yards.

So yeah, at that conference, they decided to lay down their arms and begin disbanding themselves. and return to they're still pursuing their struggle, I guess, for freedom for Kurdistan, but this time through the democratic process. Yeah. We're going to cover this subject in more detail on Tuesday, next Tuesday.

But suffice it to say, like, this does not mean that, like, the PKK is, like that all of the kind of different movements that came out of and were inspired by the PKK are like folding up and setting up shop, this is more of a pragmatic decision made as the result of the changes of situations on the ground and the progress that a number of these other movements have made.

And yeah, this is worthy of deeper discussion. We'll give a deeper discussion. But this is something that's going to hopefully at least mean that Turkey spends less time bombing northern Iraq, although that, it may be foolish to hope too much for that. Yeah, do you love to bomb northern Iraq? I guess they're calling it their like Good Friday moment, so people who are familiar. earlier with the Irish situation. Yeah. When the IRA was like, maybe we've done enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And significantly when there were releases of people who were incarcerated. Right, right. And the British government did make some significant concessions too. Yes. So we will learn more if there were concessions involved in this process or if it was a kind of unilateral thing. Yeah, there's a lot of rumors, again, just to go briefly, that the, the Turkish government essentially needs, that Erdogan essentially needs some of the support of,

the Kurdish parties in order to maintain, keep doing Erdogan shit. So, again, we'll see on all that. Yeah. Speaking of not blowing each other up, India and Pakistan. Well, yeah. Slightly blowing, lightly blowing each other up. Can we say that without minimizing it? Yeah, there's been some blowing up.

Yeah, so let's talk about this. We are thankfully no longer on nuclear war watch. Yeah. Which is great. Nook watch. Put on pause. It's all cool. It's groovy.

Everything's fine. I was talking with a friend last night about whenever this sort of confrontation happens, one of the nice things about a globalist world order is that if the rest of the world goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, fellas, guys, go down. Come on now. It kind of works. Pull him back. Pull him back.

Hold me back, bro. China got a hand on Pakistan's chest. Call him down. It's not worth it, mate. It's not worth it. They're not worth it. They're not worth it. That's the role of the United Nations.

Jady Vance, like massaging India's shoulders. I know, man, I know, but it's cool. Whatever things get really spicy between two equal powers, if one of their buddies just can go, hey, hey, dude, whoa, whoa. It kind of works, which is a little bit silly, but yeah. Yeah, just remind everyone in charge, do you know how rich you are? Come on. You don't want this.

You've got hot tubs in your mansion. It ain't worth it. Yeah. Foreign politics, so much of it is just so unbelievably stupid. Like, it is just like weird nationalist masculinity bullshit where it's like, okay, so we killed some of your people, and then you're going to kill some of our people. And then we can both agree that we, like, retaliated, neither of us back down. And then we'll do a ceasefire. So the good news here is that we did actually get a ceasefire.

The ceasefire was holding and has continued to hold. this is not like a kind of like Israel-Palestan ceasefire where the Israelis immediately just start like shooting everyone an instant later. This is actually holding. It's good. It will probably continue to hold. We got some more details from Reuters who talked to a bunch of officials from different camps. But we know now, we're going to do a longer episode about this next week.

Tuesday. Yeah. All the wars on Tuesday. Probably Tuesday, unless like, I don't know, like some other shit happens. knows. I don't want to ever promise an episode going out of a day because Tuesday or Wednesday. It's like we can wake up and like Trump has like, Trump has like declared that like his meme coin is now the official currency of the United States or something. Like who knows? Tuesday or Wednesday, we'll say. Yeah. Yeah. So what seems to have happened that really escalated everything is that India fired on a critical Pakistani airbase. And Pakistan was like, all right, got to go fucking sick of mode. now. And so they do their retaliation. India appears to not have understood exactly how pissed off

Pakistan was going to be about them hitting this air base, which also like you would, I don't know what their military planning is like. You would assume countries normally love it when you hit their air bases. Like whenever one Nerudo ran at Area 51. Yeah, like, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? But the thing that does seem to have worked is that Marco Rubio seems to have actually been like able to kind of pass information along between them. Vance was also sort of involved. It seemed mostly like Rubio was able to pass a thing

to the Pakistani government being like, hey, the Indians are going to stop. And the Pakistani government was like, yeah. Yeah, right. Right. But fuck this. This is ridiculous. We did our retaliatory attacks. Like we've been fucked up a bunch of expensive jets.

Like, yeah. That is key is that everybody can sort of, this didn't go on so far that everyone has a lot to avenge and it went on enough that everybody can claim some wins. Pakistan could be like, we

really did some damage to India's best chunk of their Air Force. And India can be like, we blew up some stuff, you know? Everybody's got a... If you don't have enough information to know that nobody really won, you can pretend you did, right? And that's what

both of them are doing. Yeah, and I think this was, this was we were talking about this last week. Like the best case scenario for this is actually, I kind of better than the best case scenario I was thinking of. I mean, not this is like a, none of this is a good outcome, but the outcome here of like,

it's like a very abbreviated version of like an Israel or Iran thing where they shoot each other a few times and then stop. Hopefully this will continue to hold and hopefully both sides will not take this. This is something that they were talking about. One of the experts that Rogers was talking to was talking about was like, hopefully both sides don't see this as a like, oh, we can have conflict between two nuclear arms. powers, it'll be okay. Hopefully both

sides are going to be like this was very dumb but right now it seems to be over. The ceasefire is holding. Hopefully more people don't die. Yep. Yeah, the dissolved stock price though. That took a fat owl after all those rough files got shot down. That was kind of funny.

You know what else is funny? Hopefully these ads, yeah. Support this podcast. Nice one, yeah. That's why they pay me the mediocre bucks. Oh, yeah. Welcome back to something, E.D. If you have E.D., please consider Hymns. Hymns. Yeah. Cutter, I hardly, okay. No, no, Garrison, I'm so proud of you, buddy. That was the right thing to say. That was the right thing to say.

What a beautiful moment. Ahead of Trump's planned trip to the Middle East, Qatar has offered a gift to President Trump, a $400 million, Boeing 7478 luxury. jet known as a palace in the sky, which Trump does plan to accept. It's a stupid fucking plane. You got to look up a picture of this thing. It is absurd. And I got to say, honestly, my primary thoughts, I know they should be like offense and anger, but they're mostly, ah, cutter, you know the assignment.

You knew exactly how to, this man can't turn down a luxury palace plane. Of course not. Someone should offer him the fucking snowpiercer. You know it's all gold up in there. It is. It is all gold up in there, actually. You can look it up. It's hideous.

It's nuts. Yeah, yeah, no. I don't need to, Garrison. In my mind palace, I've already seen the palace in the sky. Oh, my God. Okay. No one needs to see it. All right.

Hit me with the link. Why didn't we allow this to be constructed? Because it's one of those things. This is not, this, like, again, should it not be legal for? Trump to do this? Is it not legal for Trump to do this? Of course. Is it physically possible for the man Donald Trump to say no to this plane? Now, that never was in the cards. This is a temple to the defeat of the international workers movement. It's so funny. Oh, I want to see pictures of this plane. Someone send me pitches to this plane. Oh, man. Oh, good Lord. Oh, good Lord. Okay, I'm putting it in the chat.

I mean, it's exactly the plane you'd think it was. Okay. It's the most. It's the most thing you could ever imagine. Yeah. It's so funny. I'm so angry. It's great. It's just Trump Tower in the sky. No, it's actually, what I will say about that here is a Trump Tower in the sky is like a shit built to look fancy to like tasteless Americans.

The Qatari version actually is extremely nice. Yes. The Emirate of Qatar knows what they're fucking doing when it comes to interior design for fucking evil rich people. This, you could have had this, if you replace the walls that are clearly a plane, this could have been like a set

on Andor from like a high level croissant, like Richard Rosen's house. Like that's what we're talking. Especially that like room with the elevator in the middle. Like that's a set where Mon Mothma yells at her husband. Like it's beautiful.

So this plane would be used as a new Air Force One. Sure, buddy. And after his term, Trump would retain owner through his presidential library foundation. Of course. That's normal.

There is so many issues with this from like national security to like a very clear bribe of on Monday, Trump told reporters, quote, I could be a stupid person and say, no, we don't want a free very expensive airplane. I thought it was a great gesture, unquote. Of course. Of course. Owned. Someone made a comment that like we received the.

Statue of Liberty is a gift? It's not really the same thing. Yeah, that's not really the same thing, guys. Sure. If, like, I don't know who his president when it arrived, but if the president was living inside the Statue of Liberty. Was it Chester? I think it was Chester A.R.

Yeah. Okay. I don't remember exactly. I do also love that Trump is making the same argument that, like, the old, that Clinton supporters used to, which is like, well, you can take money from a thing without being influenced by it. And, like, the New York Times is making this argument. They're like, well, just be.

Because people are spending $1 million to have dinner at a crypto thing with Trump doesn't mean that he's actually being influenced by the money so you can't call it bribery. And I was like, this is great society. We love this. We love this. Just give him, give the president the fancy. Quid pro, what? Yeah.

To be fair, Trump does have something of a history of entering into a financial contract with people and then totally abandoning his end of it. So, you could make that argument. Yeah. It's so bad. Trump did get into an argument with, With ABC anchors when they asked him if he thought this could be seen as a bribe, I'll play a short clip here. What do you say to people who view that luxury jet as a personal gift to you, why not leave it behind?

You're ABC fake news, right? It's only ABC. Well, a few of you would. Let me tell you, you should be embarrassed to ask you that question. They're giving us a free jet. I could say, no, no, no, don't give us. I want to pay you a billion or 400 million or whatever it is. Or I could say, thank you very much.

You know, there was an old golfer named Sam Sney. Did you ever hear him? He won 82 tournaments. It was a great golfer. After that, he goes on to talk about golf for a whole minute, building an analogy based on making an easy putt on a golf course. I'm going to quote from BBC, quote, Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly investigated the legality of the deal

and determined that because there are no explicit conditions attached, it would not amount to a bribe. Conservatives and others were quick to point out that Bondi was registered as a lobbyist for Cutter prior to joining Trump's cabinet at some point earning up to $15,000 a month for her work for the Qatari government. Yeah, no one's going to be, like, influenced by a mere $114,000 a month. You couldn't, for example, pay me that much money and get me to say everyone should buy a Chevy truck. The new ram, that's the vehicle of the pro. Volatariat. Ram. We know that this is fake, because Robert would never knowingly endorse a Chevy product.

Harrison, for $114,000 a month, you think I wouldn't sell Chevys? But this is the most, like, corrupt administration we've ever seen before. It's absurd. Like, just completely, like, flying it in your face. Even Ted Cruz said that this gift could impose, quote, significant espionage and surveillance problems, unquote. Because, yeah. Sweeping that plane is going to be so fun for the secretion. Oh my God.

It's just a bug. The whole plane. It's just a bug. It's a flying bug for the it's so funny. For the guitar government, they're going to listen in to every Air Force one meeting.

Not only are they going to listen into it, the guy whose job that is, like they've already been paying almost as much as the plane cost for him to get preemptive therapy to sit and listen to that many Trump inner circle conversation. The fucking emir himself is putting a hand.

I know, man. I know it's going to be hard. Like, we're all behind you. Everyone from, like, Ben Shapiro to Laura Lumer have opposed this de facto bribe as, quote, quote, sleazy, while also pointing to Qatar as a terrorist-aligned state. Who did you think your guy was? Come on. Yeah, you're like to Donald Trump. You believe he's going to take a golden palace in the sky?

Come on, man. Didn't they also wheel out a mobile McDonald? famed in Costa so he could... Yeah, no, that was in Saudi Arabia. That was in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, that was in Saudi Arabia. They're also planning to possibly construct a new Trump Tower in Dubai.

Sure. There you go. Honestly, both Dubai and Trump deserve that kind of like shade. Yeah. Sure, they belong together. Yeah. The people that Trump is negotiating with here just really know how to like get wins out of him. They're like, yeah, you can build a Trump

tower. Here's a mobile McDonald's. Here's a 400 million dollar free jet. They really have him on lock. It's tragic because the mobile McDonald's and Burger Kings used to be a sign of American, like, logistical dominance. I was wondering if it had invaded Iraq. Like, fuck our ability to, like, airstrike anyone anywhere. We can put a fully operational McDonald's anywhere on the planet in about 16 hours. Like, no one else can do that.

Yeah, we invaded Iraq with Burger King trailers in 2003. Yes, and to see it turned against our values so much is just deeply, no, I mean, I'm joking here, but it is funny. Speaking of foreign trade, what is that I hear? Is that the, is that the lucid melody of tariff? Tariff, Garrison. We're all thinking about the best way we ever spent our company money. every penny of that $114,000 a month, Chevy gives us for telling people to buy the new Rams. It went to a good place. If we could just get one more automotive industry sponsor, then I can finally rewrite

White Riot to be about white genocide in South Africa. That's right. We're courting shell right now, so don't worry, James. We're going to get that cover, but I'm glad to hear it. So I heard all the tariffs are gone, basically. I heard we're back to normal. Nothing ever happens. I can go back to buying TEMU all day long.

I can't stop playing those TV gambling ads. And everything's normal, right, Mia? Okay, so let's, let's, where are we at with the turf tariffs? So there were actual negotiations between the U.S. and China, and so they agreed to a 90-day pause on the 145% tariff and the 120% tariff, the China had imposed retaliation. However, comma, there's still 30% blanket tariffs. on all Chinese goods, which is in and of itself alone enough to cause a recession.

I just want to everyone's used to forgotten this. China's is back down to 10% across the board on all U.S. goods. Now, again, this is a 90-day pause, which has been like, this is just the way that all this functions now, is nothing ever ends. It just gets kicked off, like, down the road for 90 days. So we'll be back here in 90-day. Well, okay, we'll be back in the crisis zone a bit before that, because we're still on the other 90-day countdown, which the, the liberal Day turf tariff one for every single country on earth. Honestly, I don't think these countdowns are real.

And I know this is like, this is like different from the way like other commentators will talk about how these tariffs aren't real. Like I'm not saying these tariffs aren't real. I don't know if there's someone in the White House who is literally counting down each day here like this. No, I think there is. I think it's Navarro. Because Navarro actually wants all of these tariffs.

And that's the, that's the driving thing behind this. Is Trump kind of wants these tariffs? but there's not enough of him there psychologically to like push it unless Navarro is doing it but the reason these are taking the form of pauses is because Trump like actually wants them until he can like negotiate his big shiny deal or whatever the fuck that like can't happen structurally

for reasons we'll get into but like I'm just remembering the Canada Mexico tariffs that Trump put on a 90 day pause and then we completely forgot about and instead it did the Liberation Day tariffs which then got another 90 day pause no but there was also the but also like the auto tariffs got paused and then those came off

and like went into effect. So some of these like have happened and like and I think I really think it the actual thing it comes down to is like will Navarro be the last person in the room with Trump or will it be one of his other cabinet people who don't support this stuff and I think it's just a coin flip basically

as to like who rap fucks the other one successfully as to whether like all this stuff happens and there's still like more tariffs that are like floating in the air that we haven't heard anything about from last week. Wild, wild tariffs. frolicing in the woods. Yeah. Like sourdough. They can just float in.

I want to actually explain what the fuck is going on with the Chinese tariffs, though, because the reporting on it has been really bad, and no one has any idea what the fuck is going on. So, okay, on the one hand, there is still the 30% across the board on all Chinese goods. However, the fee for small packages, right, which is the stuff that was in the de minimis exemption that we talked about getting reduced.

So that tariff is at 54%, or a $100 flat fee for the package. What qualifies as a small package? Value. I think it's like sub-800. Okay. Roughly. So, yeah.

And they also still have to go through like actual full customs, which the packages from de minimis weren't going through, right? Okay. So this is still lethal to like Tamu and Chian and like all of the companies that have been relying on this stuff.

It's still lethal to like vast quantities of like parts of the supply chain that we haven't even seen yet, that we're getting, like, the one kind of screw that they need in cheap Chinese packages, because you could just do that. And so that's what's still in effect right now,

and as best I can tell, there hasn't actually been any negotiation. It's also unclear whether the Chinese government, like, knew that those were going to go back into effect, because Trump did this whole thing. Like, ah, the tariffs are over, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I ignore the 30% tariff on all goods. And then the next day, he was like,

oh, yeah, no, but the small package one's still there. And that rates also changed. So it's also possible. by tomorrow the rates are different because this is the dominant feature of all of this structurally is just complete chaos like it's it's just chaos nobody has any idea what the fuck is happening and this is just a complete fiasco for literally everyone because the shifts and tariff rates that are happening on a day by day basis are shifts large enough to shift the entire structure of the global economy and they're just happening every day and that's and that's the thing that's

like fucking the economy almost as much as like the actual tariffs is just the chaos and the uncertainty and the inability to do any kind of like even the short-term planning that businesses usually do. It's also worth noting that like there's no actual trade deal, right? Like there isn't actually a U.S.-China trade deal. There's just they both agreed to like back off for a while while they do negotiations. There's also no structural way to actually like resolve the problem that Trump sees here, which is that like Trump and Navarro and the hardliners don't want there to be a U.S. trade deficit with China and that's not a thing that could be solved. That's never going to happen. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, and this has been playing out in other negotiations too.

The U.S. has been in negotiations with India. Trump just like came out and straight up lied and said that India had agreed to get rid of all their tariffs. And India was like, no, we didn't. What the fuck are you talking about? Art of the deal. Yeah. So, you know, this is all turned into just an utter fiasco. Meanwhile, we're starting to see signs that, yeah, the price increases that we all knew we're coming. We're coming. Walmart is doing massive price increases. A bunch of other companies are considering them. They're probably going to start very soon. I want to read this quote from an economist named Marcus Nolan that NBC talked to, who was a senior institute for the Pearson Institute for International Economics. He said, quote, I think we're in for a lot more turbulence and a lot more back

and forth than the market seems to grasp, which I'm glad someone else is finally fucking saying this because like, yeah, no shit. And part of what's going on here too is the market is just incredibly easy to manipulate because people running the markets are very stupid. And the moment they realize, like, you can just very, very easily make an unhinged amount of money by being, like, the terrorists are going to go into a fact and then batting against the market. There's been so much, like, insider stories of, like, insider trading from this stuff. And I don't think that's, like, the major thing going on, but it's also like, it's just such an easy grift to pull if you know what's going to happen. Like, I could have made a bunch of money if I'd been willing to be like,

hey, friends, give me a bunch of money to put into the stock market and let me short a bunch of shit the day before the Liberation Day Terrace or whatever. And that's a plug for our new weekend show where Mia does Jim Kramer. We're gonna start doing stock portfolio suggestions. It's called Markets with Mia. Markets with Mia. Thank you, James. Yeah.

Well, I will, I will fucking, I will throw darts at a dartboard and then throw the dartboard at a larger dartboard, and I will outperform Jim Kramer. Yeah, we're calling this the do whatever the opposite of Jim Kramer says power hour. We've literally just reversed his audio. It's such a powerful investment strategy. Never been defeated.

Okay, so the one less thing I want to talk about, which is not quite tariff, but is econ related, is that there are, per the financial times, there is a plan in the Trump administration to roll back a bunch of the rules about leverage ratios that were imposed on banks after 2008. And so, okay, Mia, what the fuck is a leverage ratio? Thank you. But the very short version of this. It's really put a lever underneath the bank.

If you want to tip it over, you have to be quite a long way. away from it, actually, and then you pivot on the other end. I think this is a very funny joke, but no one else is laughing on the call. No, I would try to figure out how to write part two of it, but then you just brought up Archimedes. I was trying to remember Archimedes' name, and I couldn't do it. So, okay, so basically, basically what this is, is that, so banks have just like a bunch of unbelievably risky assets, and this is a requirement that they actually have assets that are safe. Yeah.

So they have the assets that are risky go under, they don't get fucking nukes like everyone did in 2008. Now, this is worth noting because one of the other kind of stories that's kind of flown under the radar is that in the past couple of years, a bunch of banks and a bunch of investment firms have been getting back to literally the exact types of extremely risky mortgage-back securities that caused the 2008 financial collapse. It's literally the same people. They're bringing them back to do the same thing again. They've also been doing it with auto loans, which is great.

And in the middle of this, the Trump administration wants to roll back a bunch of the protections that have been maintaining this very, very precarious balance of the banking system has been in to not really collapse for the past decade and a half. So that's going to be fun. The rumor is this is going to happen over the summer. If he does this over the summer, right as everything kicks off,

it's going to be a trip. Do you know what else is a trip? These products and services that support this podcast. Woo! All right, we are back. We're going to close this episode with me and James talking about a whole bunch of really bad him stuff that has happened again, which I feel like is kind of an evergreen for us.

Same thing with tariff talk. We always have some bad immigration news. And this week is no different. On Friday, May 9th, Stephen Miller announced that the administration is, quote, actively looking at suspending habeas corpus. James, do you want to give a very brief definition of what habeas corpus is? Yeah, it's a foundation of like most legal systems in the world, which drawer, I guess, on English common law means bring me the body, right? Like, the idea is you have to present some evidence before just incarcerating.

If you're going to say this guy killed somebody, there better be a corpse, right? It needs to be, like, reason and due process for detention. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just lock someone up because you wanted to. Yeah. Actually, you can, but you shouldn't.

You sometimes can, and this does predate the United States, and the United States itself has suspended, habeas corpus a few times, usually in specific states. For instance, following the Pearl Harbor attack, habeas corpus was suspended in Hawaii to detain Japanese civilians. President Grant and Congress worked together to suspend habeas corpus in South Carolina during reconstruction, amidst terrorist attacks from the KKK, which is kind of crazy to think about in retrospect. And the very first time habeas corpus was suspended was in the lead up to the civil war when President Lincoln called for its suspension in the state of Maryland. Now, that unilateral action was later

deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And now it's widely recognized that only Congress has the right to suspend habeas corpus. This is in the case of rebellion or invasion. Now, this is something that Stephen Miller is talking about. It should be incredibly worrying. Obviously, they've kind of tried to make this happen just already without, like, explicitly saying so, which is also what, like, FDR tried to do during World War II, where they don't formally, like, call for the suspension, like, nationwide.

but they start instituting policies that definitely, like, do that. Yeah, exactly, which is why we're seeing so many habeas petitions being filed across the state when people have been detained unlawfully. Homeland Security Secretary Christine Nome said on Wednesday in a congressional hearing that the level of border crossings under Joe Biden provides sufficient legal justification to suspend habeas corpus following Trump's declaration of invasion. Yeah. So this is something to watch out for as they start.

trying to basically codify all of the actions that they're currently doing, which can be construed as illegal or certainly legally questionable, they're going to try to find ways to make them more explicitly legal. So probably the most notable immigration happening this week is one that we already covered on the show, and it is the reopening of the United States Refugee Admissions Program. We're taking refugees again. We did it. We did it, Joe. Yep. Unfortunately, we're only taking the persecuted Afrikaners of South Africa. Wait, what? Yeah, the survivors of the white genocide, those who made it through.

Quote unquote, white genocide. The white genocide that even Grock doesn't agree exists. Elon Musk can't make his digital child believe in. No, let me actually quote from a Grock doing a Jarger-Banks impression. We don't have to do this, Garrison. Misa Grock, oopsie, you're asking about the replies, but Misa Tiggs you, meaning the big talk about South Africa, yeah. white genocide talk, much controversial.

I'm sorry, I can't do the rest. That's not even good jar jar. I'm sorry. And he speaks Spanish. I think it's chucking all the racial stereotype. How do they make it more racist? Why do they make it more racist? Some of the white farmers getting attacked too much, like 214 attacks a year.

And political words like kill to four making it worse. No more. But court to say in 2025. to this. It's too bad. I'm not getting hazard pay for exposure to this. It does go on for like four more sentences. There's so much more. I love how you said like it's a fucking dubstep record or something. If only we can cut in the song, I've never met a nice South African right here.

Yep. I think we can. We'll just do the first first. We just discussed it. We'll find the copyright. Yeah, yeah. I'll throw that in here. Yep. It's even got a reference to Myanmar, so we're fine. We've covered it before. It's a central to be. It's a worldly song. Mesa says no thank you. Stop. Here's said no.

I've gone. Sophie's giving a double thumbs down. Everyone is very upset right now, apart from Garrison, who's laughing like a little imp. Having introduced Jarja Binks to the call. Right. Back to the Afrikaners. The 59 Afrikaners who were brought to the United States came after the United States halted all refugee admissions in January. Thousands of people, including Afghans and Iraqis, who worked for the United States, remain stranded. Some of them are stuck at airports.

Most of them are in third countries where they only have limited visas and they're looking at timing out their visas in those third countries. as a direct result of the Trump administration's fuckery with the white genocide stuff, the Episcopalian Church, not the most work of organizations, has suspended its contracts, its resettlement contracts with the government. Critical support? Yeah, I mean, I read the letter from one of their bishops on our show about this, and, like, he was very forthright. And, like, I generally genuinely do have critical support for the faith-based organizations

who help refugees. It's a good thing to do, and I'm glad that they are doing it. Especially if they're not trying to turn it into a weird missionary operation like evangelicals do. For sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, what's it called? The fucking Glenn Beck one doesn't. It's not a resalement agency, luckily. So in Worcester, Massachusetts, a place that I didn't know there was a Worcester in America, actually.

Yes. Oh, yeah, baby. So how is it then that as a nation, Americans are incapable of saying Worcestershire? Oh, boy. Yeah. It says that's just one state. and it's not a good one. Also, that's the sauce, right?

It's also the place I was born, Garrison. Well, well. Yeah, Worcestershire. For those of you wondering, there it is. People, yeah, again, we do have to call it Worcester, because that's what it's called in this country. I care a lot about accurate pronunciations of places and names, so it is Worcester.

Yeah, Worcester's a city, and Worcestershire is the county in England, too. Hmm. So, you don't have the county where you have Massachusetts. So Worcester, Massachusetts, it's, I threatened to arrest a 21-year-old woman named Augusta Clara, and they told her that they'd have to take her three-month-old baby as well because they couldn't leave it with her 17-year-old sister on account of the younger woman being a minor.

As it turned out, this was a ploy to lure out her mother. Clara called her mother, who came out to take the baby, and they arrested her mother, which was who they'd been wanting to arrest the whole time, right? This arrest came the day after they had arrested the baby's father in what Clara says was a response to him honking his horn at an undercover ice agent. Neighbors tried to intervene in the scene, which resulted in the Worcester, Massachusetts Police Department responding. The cops proceeded to body slam a 17-year-old girl, arrest her, and arrest a local woman for what they claimed was pushing them. Locals have been protesting since. The city council has moved its meetings online, citing public safety concerns.

and in another bungled raid in the same state, ICE agents left a 12-year-old child alone on the sidewalk and drove their vehicle aggressively towards a city councilor who was trying to document a situation. Meanwhile, in Florida, Desantis has sworn in 100 Florida Highway Patrol deputies as special US Marshals, and they're claiming this allows them to conduct immigration enforcement operations of their own outside of cooperation with ICE or CBP.

That adds to the 2000 ATF and DEA agents, the Trump administration, has requested to join ICE teams. So when you're watching videos, sometimes you'll see when there are these ice snatch squads, right? There are ATF agents with them. And what they're generally there to do is to provide additional security on the team while the ICE agents do the actual apprehensions. DeSantis has also offered, quote, new detention facilities. I haven't seen much reporting on this, but in the same, statement on his website where he talked about cross-wearing the highway patrol guys. He also talked about these, quote, new detention facilities. And I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the

existing detention facilities in Florida because they are the worst in a system of horrific detention facilities. The ACLU has documented, quote, persistent emotional, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff of these facilities. Detainees are reportedly being punished, for simply seeking medical care, being denied medical attention just by having pre-existing conditions. The report also found ample evidence of gendered and racialized mistreatment. The Chrome Detention Center, that's K-R-O-M-E, is in particular horrific. Migrants there in one instance were held in chains on buses for 16 hours and told to use the bathroom where they were sitting on the buses.

A migrant named Osiris as a hell Vasquez Martinez somehow kept his phone inside the Chrome Detention Center and was able to live stream or at least post videos that showed horrific overcrowding. Some sources claim there are as many as 4,000 people in the detention center, which has a capacity of 500, and two people that we know of has died there since January. Florida looking to add more detention centers,

not great. That's about all I got. Garrison, talk to us about Project Homecoming. Who's coming home? Yeah, and again, we will actually close on some good news, so it's not all horrible stuff this entire time. But we do need to mention Project Homecoming. So this was a proclamation issued by Trump on May 9th, entitled Establishing Project Homecoming, which aims to curb a quote-unquote full-scale invasion. It claims to devout more federal resources to assist self-deportation via the CBP Home app, including paying for flights for those who are, quote, voluntarily and permanently departing the United States, unquote. It says, quote, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall create a concierge service whereby any alien illegally present in the United States may arrive at

an airport with or without appropriate travel documents, book air travel to permanently relocate to a different country. So they are really strengthening these self-deportation mechanisms. Section 2 promises to provide financial incentives in the form of a quote-unquote exit bonus for each illegal alien who voluntarily and permanently departs the United States. Yeah. So a couple of really weird things there just off the bat.

Yes. A, like permanently departs. It seems to suggest that you would be permanently barred from ever entering the United States acquiring a visa again. Secondly, if you don't have travel documents, the country that you're traveling to or through has no reason to admit you, right? That the U.S. government cannot force other countries to admit people without travel documents. There are things called refugee travel documents which allow people who have had their passports,

et cetera, stolen to travel. I don't think that's what's going to happen here. Yeah, it does mention something about trying to like negotiate with other countries to allow people without documentation to arrive there. But like, well, they actually do that? Probably not. like they've claimed to not have to need to do that before. So like, yeah, that's not like a solid promise. Now, those who choose to remain will face, quote, sweeping consequences, including removal, prosecution, incarceration, and fines as consistent with applicable law for immigration related crimes, the garnishment of wages and the confiscation of savings and personal property, including homes and vehicles, unquote. So they're threatening to steal all of your things.

This proclamation follows this like propaganda video shared by Cristino and the Department of Homeland Security. This video was released a few weeks ago and it contains some similar rhetoric regarding self-deportation and fines being imposed for those who stay in the country. An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS-13 gang member from El Salvador accused of murdering a Texas man. A Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography. in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J. Trump's leadership. I'm Christy Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. Under President Trump, attempted illegal border crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded.

And over 100,000 illegal aliens have been arrested. If you are here illegally, you're next. You will be fined nearly $1,000 a day, imprisoned and deported. You will not. you will never return. But if you register using our CBP home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally. Do what's right. Leave now. Under President Trump,

America's laws, border, and families will be protected. The whole style of this video is very bizarre. Yeah. It's like a Marvel trailer. It's like a Marvel trailer with like the aesthetics of like mid-2000s like dystopian sci-fi.

Yeah. Again, talks about being able to return legally, which is in contrast to the language in a project homecoming, which says that people would be leaving the United States permanently. Finally, the proclamation directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to within 60 days supplement existing law enforcement and removal operations by deputizing and contracting state and local police, former feds and, quote, other individuals to increase the enforcement and removal operations force of the Department of Homeland Security by no less than 20,000

officers in order to conduct an intensive campaign to remove illegal aliens, unquote. And now, as of this morning, May 15th, the DHS has requested to mobilize over 20,000 National Guard troops from the Department of Defense to comply with Trump's order to expand its immigration crackdown. And on Wednesday, the FBI ordered agents to deprioritize white-collar crime investigations for the remainder of 2025 to instead focus on immigration enforcement. field offices notified their agents that now one-third of their time must go towards assisting Trump's immigration policies. I'm going to quote from Reuters, quote, the orders came on the same day that Matthew Gayliotti, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division,

issued new guidance to prosecutors that scales back to the scope of white-collar cases historically pursued by the department and orders prosecutors to, quote, minimize the length and collateral impact of such investigations. Jeez. Again, the most corrupt administration ever, ever before seen. Yeah. And now for the good news to close the episode, the Tufts University student, Rzmae Oz Turk, who was black-bagged on the streets of Massachusetts

for co-authoring a pro-Palestine op-ed, has been released on bail as of May 9th after spending six weeks in ICE detention. The judge said that Ms. Osirks' claims of her First Amendment and due process rights being violated are quote-unquote very substantial. And then on Wednesday, May 14th, the Georgetown University researcher from India, named to Bitar Khan Suri, was released from immigration detention as he continues to fight two deportation

cases brought against him by the Trump administration for his support of Palestine. So this is now the third or fourth person that has been released from ICE custody following like political prosecutions based on their activism. Yeah. And that's a good thing. Now, these cases are still going to be continuing in courts, but the fact that these people have been released from ICE detention is good news. And at most cases, they were released on their own recognizance, right,

without, like, GPS tagging or any, like... Yeah, they're free to move throughout the country because most of them have cases in, like, multiple states. ICE is trying to move them around to many different locations. And I know that Surrey and Ossaric are able to go back to, like, their homes. Yeah. So, like, it's good. It shows that the courts are still able to stop some of this stuff at this time.

Yes, and that the actually... actual ability of a lawyer to intervene when you were treated illegally by the state is not no. Yeah. Yet. Yeah. Good point. Positive developments here. But like, as we'll see with with Miller's goal of getting rid of habeas corpus and accelerating law enforcement operations with these 20,000 new National Guard troops, this is, this is something that's still going to be a very, a very hot issue for quite a while.

And we will continue to report on it as it develops. Well, everybody, until next time, remember something. We said, reported the news. To fuck sake. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.

Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

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