Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 194

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Starting point is 00:00:53 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. Hello and welcome to Ickrappen here. I'm Andrew Siege Ors known as Andrewism on YouTube And I'm here with See, it's James And honestly, I shouldn't say welcome to

Starting point is 00:01:13 It could happen here I should really see welcome to It is happening here Because, I mean, just a second with you, James. How are you doing? You're safe? I'm okay. I'm, yeah, I'm safe right now.

Starting point is 00:01:24 We are living through wild times in the United States. Every day is a new hell. Indeed, indeed. And although I'm not, in the US, the flames of that hell definitely lick the rest of the world in Weaspeg and Small. Yeah, they definitely do. I was just talking to people in Syria yesterday and like the Alibis, Al-Awhite, whatever you want to call Alevis,

Starting point is 00:01:47 whatever you want to say it, are facing quite substantial persecution currently. And like one of the larger refugee accepting countries in the world just isn't doing that anymore, unless you're a white South African, of course. And like that has these massive trickle-down effects for everywhere. It's just one example of how America, so goes to the U.S., so goes the world, you know. Indeed, indeed. And not just in Syria are the feelings of conflict tearing a world apart. I think most people I now know about the situation in Palestine,

Starting point is 00:02:19 the way that Israel is carrying out to genocide there, you know, the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Civil War in Myanmar, in Sudan, the, you know, struggle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and the Kashmirahiri people who are, you know, left on the wayside, you know, the Tamil genocide, taking place in Sri Lanka. I mean, there's so many things happening across the world right now. It's really difficult to keep up.

Starting point is 00:02:51 Yeah. The friends in Myanmar would prefer the framing of revolution to civil war. They're pretty explicit about that. Okay, yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. I should be using that. terminology. Yeah, it's not appropriate everywhere, but in their case, like there has been a civil

Starting point is 00:03:07 war since 48 and it's a substantial change with the 2021 revolution. Right, right, right, right. Thank you for that correction. Yeah, yeah, of course. I think now is a really good time to have a general, almost strategic discussion on anti-war struggle. And so today I really want to look at how we can counter the propaganda around war, the actions that are possible to take against militants. at home and how we could build solidarity across oceans and borders. Yeah. So to understand how to agitate against war, we first need to agitate against militarism. And so as well to know, militarism is the belief or policy that a nation should maintain a strong military and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote its interests.

Starting point is 00:03:55 It often involves glorifying military virtues and ideals and prioritizing military strength and readiness above other aspects of society. So that's a basic Google definition. My copy of the anarchist encyclopedia is the English version, which is abridged, sadly, but the original French has the full unabridged anarchist encyclopedia. So with a bit of shaky online translation magic, I managed to pull its definition of militarism as well. Militarism is a system that consists of having and maintaining military personnel. Its essential and a valid goal is a preparation for war. The recruitment of a standing army and the organization of the cadres of a reserve army,

Starting point is 00:04:32 the accumulation, the putting in place, the maintenance in a state of service of ever more modern, more perfected war material. In short, it is the preliminary organization of war. What are the implications of that? Well, all over the world, I think we can see, you know, the consequences of statism, the might makes right pursuit of conquest, the fighting wars abroad or at home for strategic interests, ideological commitments, resource claims, whatever the case may be, the rivalries within the ruling class and how that plays out and how it's that that blows back on all of our faces, you know, the profits, the military industrial complex, which keeps this whole system churning on, you know, the blood of innocence. Of course, the longstanding consequences

Starting point is 00:05:21 and continued work of colonialism. And of course, the way is that militarism gets turned inward, with the suppression of strikes, of activism, of popular unrest, when the now militarized police aren't enough, they often bring in the military itself. And of course, with militarism, you also have the narrative component, you know, the building of patriotism that so plants the seed of fascism. And you know, states can survive without militaries, is true.

Starting point is 00:05:53 The state typically depends upon, some effort or some attempt at a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within the territory by some definitions. But states which do not have militaries often can do so because they have outsourced their military functions to another state and or because they have other systems in place to control dissent, to develop a significant degree of social conditioning and pacify the population. I was just trying to think of states that are militaries Like in my experience I guess you have like the Panama right doesn't have a military

Starting point is 00:06:31 It has the center front which are like the frontier protection I guess but essentially like a militarized border patrol And they do have Marines and stuff as well I guess So they kind of do have a military It's a kind of a renaming exercise more than anything Indeed The same thing with having a militarized police But it's not a military technically

Starting point is 00:06:49 Yeah We'll have it a militarized coast guard And it's not a military technically you know Yeah yeah You have countries like the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which just outsources its, it's militarization to the United States, right? Like the U.S., well, I think that is a distinct thing. People in the Marshall Islands have seen the horrors of war very closely,

Starting point is 00:07:11 and also the dangers of militarization, right? Like the United States nuked the Marshall Islands, a country with which it had no quarrel, with which it was not at war, just to practice in case it needed to nuke a country with which it did have a I guess. The legacy of that is very obvious and continues to this day there. But if Marshallese people wish to join a military, they can join the US military and the US guarantees their security in theory. But it's, yeah, it is a distinct. For instance, if you join the US military in the Marshall Islands, wish to access your

Starting point is 00:07:42 veterans benefits, the easiest way to do so is take a five-hour flight to Hawaii. Like they don't have any benefits for actual veterans there. So I guess in that case, like maybe it does give people a different relationship. to like state violence. Yeah. It's, I mean, obviously different places that have different histories as to how they came to those arrangements,

Starting point is 00:08:03 but you definitely see a relationship between colonialism and the outsourcing of military functions. Yeah, definitely. Now, historically, anarchists have been anti-militarist. The encyclopedias call this aspect of the anarchist struggle,

Starting point is 00:08:23 the aim to disqualify militarism to denounce its terrible and painful consequences, to combat the warlike and barrack spirit, to stigmatize and dishonor war to abolish the regime of the armies. So abolishing militarism looks like material relief from the oppression, military violence, the redirection of resources that go toward military, to ward instead things that actually benefit the lives of everyday people, you know, the reduction of pain and suffering throughout the world, the abolition of borders, which so often are the motivating force behind military exercise. And while no anarchists would deny that armed struggle is necessary for defense,

Starting point is 00:09:10 it's all the same as having an imperialistic or hierarchical ambition toward, you know, power over toward dominating populations of people. Yeah. This reminds me as a discussion that happened in, the CNT in Spain in the 1930s previous to the Civil War, and even before that, right, where there was a very profound and obvious discussion on, like, how to defend the revolution, how to defend communities, whilst maintaining anti-militarism. And that's why we didn't see, like, there was not a, like, standing army beyond,

Starting point is 00:09:50 you had affinity groups, right? And then you had, like, defense committees of six to eight people. And those people, like, took on the role of organizing for a potential violent, like, in order to defend the community, right? Like, to use violence to defend the community against violence. But even as it became clearer and clearer that Spain was, like, spiraling towards conflict, they resisted the idea of establishing. And I think more militarized than that. Yeah. And I think civil war, Spain is really good place to look at for us.

Starting point is 00:10:20 the way some experiments or efforts or ideas would have played out, strategies would have played out. And I think it's really important to take those experiments and see how we can iterate on them and build upon them. Because, I mean, what I've always admired that we've carried on this anti-militarist torch, it's very important to remember the landscape has changed from wartimes past. You know, we're not in World War times anymore. Yes. You know, the strategies and the discussions and the approaches that may have worked back then, it doesn't work this in the same way now.

Starting point is 00:10:58 You don't even have to declare war officially anymore in this day and age. You can just say that all you're doing in a special military operation, or you can just send billions of dollars of aid to a country that you want to support and even troops that countries want to support. and technically you haven't declared war yet. Yeah. And, you know, not only that, you also get to unleash generational trauma

Starting point is 00:11:26 and poison upon generations of people, but it's okay because you were going after some terrorists. You know, you just get to push money and supplies toward this camp or that, and where the U.S. is concerned, it at least used to have to seek congressional approval. But as we see, that's not really a thing now, especially post 9-11.

Starting point is 00:11:50 You know, back in the day, people thought put in pressure on the elected officials through protests would be enough. And, you know, there's a debate to be hard to the extent to which that worked for situations like the Vietnam War. But as we've seen with this song and dance again and again and again, the protests are not hitting like they used to. You know, the response to the protests has been so routine at this point. You know, you just send the police to bash some heads in, or back to get the military,

Starting point is 00:12:17 because the movers and the shakers aren't the people who can actually be reached with these protests you know and no matter how peaceful we proclaim our protests to be we're talking about moneyed interests here

Starting point is 00:12:30 you know a military industrial complex that has to have line go up you know who doesn't have to give a down about some people walking on the road you know the system has grown since the 1910s the 1940s

Starting point is 00:12:44 it has grown in such size and complexity to the point where, you know, you don't have to care necessarily about a single moving part, about a single action or protest. Yeah, and the two kind of combine and what we're seeing in the United Kingdom right now, right? Like, there's the complete dismissal of protest

Starting point is 00:13:03 and this, like, I'm thinking of a better word than imprecise. But, like, the vagueness of the definition of terrorism has allowed the government at the United Kingdom in combination with the absence of a bill of rights in the United Kingdom, right, to just be like, Palestine action and terrorists. You are the same as the Islamic

Starting point is 00:13:20 state because Palestine action undertook it in non-violent direct action, right? But it's ludicrous to suggest that that was terrorism. It doesn't be any reasonable definition of the term. But we're in a stage now where governments can declare

Starting point is 00:13:36 anyone, the enemy without any particular oversight. And that's the logical conclusion of two decades of this. Yeah, I mean, to an extent that has always been the case, I think what's different now is that they're not even really attempting to hide behind any sort of consistent principles or consistent standards, you know, because even back then, you know, the anarchists were being called terrorists and being, you know, chastised for that.

Starting point is 00:14:04 Yeah. I guess also like a class system is more entrenched than it ever has been in a sense. I'm just thinking like wars are not fought by the mass of middle class and the people who become senators for the most part. I mean in the US sometimes senators will have done military service. It can sort of boost their career opportunities. I get that. But like it is not for the most part the sons of the people who start the wars who die in the wars. Right. It's people of a different class in a way that even in a distinct way from.

Starting point is 00:14:42 the era of the world wars, right? When large numbers of people of the middle class especially, maybe not the very privileged people that did die in those wars and I think like the memory of the First World War probably did have some impact on the reticence of some politicians

Starting point is 00:15:01 to dive into the second one. But we don't really have that now. Indeed. So we criticise this particular approach of the protest And I know the inevitable question is, so what can we even do at this point? And, you know, this is why I consider it very important

Starting point is 00:15:30 to take a step back and look at what is actually keeping the system going. Right. And what's keeping the system going is, and it's always been labor, right? Yeah. Not to say that labor and labor struggles to be all and end all of our politics, but it is to say that if we want to make a significant, impact. That is what we have the greatest control over. Yeah. Our labor. And so when I talk about things we can do to affect change, I always have to take

Starting point is 00:16:02 it back to the ongoing process of social revolution. The things you do to oppose and things you do to propose, you know, on the opposing side of things that includes counter messaging, you know, even though we may not have the resources of mainstream media or government communications, we have weight of mouth, we have trust between ourselves, and we have alternative media that can be, especially in this day and age, just as powerful if sparked right, especially considering the fact that the general sentiment, the populist sentiment, has, whether you're coming from a leftist direction or a rightist direction, the general sentiment has been moving toward anti-establishment politics.

Starting point is 00:16:46 the anti-establishment sort of momentum is what's growing right now. And the issue, of course, being that sometimes that anti-establishment momentum can be hijacked, such as what Trump did, you know, to get himself elected the first time. Yeah. He rode that wave. And, you know, this whole Epstein situation, we may see that foundation of his base, potentially crumbling apart a bit. But we have to look at what.

Starting point is 00:17:16 is actually motivating people right now and how they can be reached an alternative media with an anti-establishment message is i think one of the better ways to do so yeah you know wherever you see it you need to be out there you know on social media or through other avenues calling out the ridiculous caches bellies used to manufacture consent for you know to be wary of potential force flags can be used as a justification for military action to consistently poke holes in the narratives that have allowed, you know, nationalists and xenophobic sentiments to become the force that they have become today. And of course, even engaging in that messaging, of course, try not to let campism infect

Starting point is 00:18:06 your counter messaging either. Yeah. You know, that's how you get people who are, you know, they're gone who about a free Palestine. and then they start, when you ask them about Ukraine, all of a sudden, it's actually really complicated. It's actually the fault of the US and the EU and NATO and not Russia, even though Russia is the one who actually invaded and is actively killing people and destroyed infrastructure as we speak.

Starting point is 00:18:29 Yeah. Right? I mean, there's conversation to be heard about the US and about the EU and about NATO, obviously, but it's very clear. Yeah, it's very uncomplicated. Who's actually killing people right now? you know? Yeah, there is one country which is taking children, right, like, and trying to, like,

Starting point is 00:18:49 re-educate them, give them to families in Russia, which is committing murders of civilians. Like, we don't have to, like, resort to, like, 10-year geopolitical trajectories to say that it's wrong and it should be opposed. Exactly. Exactly. And also, I want to make this point about calling to messaging, because it's a consistent gripe I've had. In fact, one of the main reasons I started my channel in the first place, with your counter messaging, whether it's in person or on the internet or wherever,

Starting point is 00:19:21 those stay perpetually on the back foot. In other words, don't just counter message. Yeah. You know, right now, and this is what irritates me so much, the right wing sets the conversation. Yeah. You know, you have people, they say, oh, we want to talk about critical race theory, and then everybody's talking about critical race theory, because they're talking about critical race theory, because they talk to it or they want to target trans people, and all of a sudden we have to scrabble to respond to all their erroneous and ridiculous claims about trans people. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:51 That counter message is important, is important, but it cannot be all that we do, right? Yeah. And this is a bit out of left field, but, you know, of course, I'm not one who is partial to electoral approaches, but you can see some of that, not just counter messaging,

Starting point is 00:20:09 but also actively messaging taking place with Zora and Mamdani strategy. Yeah. You know, when you look at how he speaks, how he addresses some of the bad faith arguments that are made against him, his rhetorical strength and popularity in part lies on his refusal

Starting point is 00:20:26 to carry on the conversation on the enemies too. Yeah. You know, so they will go at him for something and he's going to spin it right back around to talking about the things that it's usually really matters to people to set the conversation to get people to respond to that because a lot of the responses toward him

Starting point is 00:20:43 have been trying to distract from his actual messaging and his ability to stay on message as something I find really admirable despite, you know, my concerns about the investment of energy in electoral strategies. Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there are still things we can admire about these people if we don't agree with everything.

Starting point is 00:21:03 And I do think, like, in that sense, something I think about a lot with like messaging and counter messaging, especially around war. It's like, I've spent some time in the AANES and what people call Rajava. And like one of the framings that I've consistently seen, and it's mostly in like the the lip-leaning mass media, I guess, is that people went to Rajaba to fight against IS or Dash or ISIS, whatever you want to call it, right? And like, in doing, So that is how the revolution in Rajab is not understood by most people, right? And they have taken the power away from it in their framing of it because people didn't just go. Some people did go just to fight IS, right? That there they went because they saw what IS was doing. They understood it as inhumane and they wanted that to stop. And that's admirable. But people also went because they saw what people were building in Rajaba and they thought that was beautiful and they wanted to defend it. And that's admirable. too. And sometimes the messaging around specifically Roshava, Myanmar to an extent, right,

Starting point is 00:22:12 they're international volunteers there too. And of course, like folks from Myanmar who have picked up weapons who never thought they would. And they didn't just do it to oppose the hunter. They did it because like in the, despite all the horrible things about war, and then it should be avoided at all costs. In the conflict, they have built liberated spaces and they've experienced freedom and they have experienced how that feels and they've built a revolution that is beautiful in spite of the war, not because of it. And they want to defend that. And I think that's a messaging that we should consider, right? Because the messaging that everything has to be against something bad always sort of it presupposes that there can't have been something good. And in some cases,

Starting point is 00:23:03 has been something good. And like, we won't fully understand what was happening there unless we understand that. And I think we should push back on that messaging when we see it, especially in like legacy media. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that really connects to the, you know, the other aspect of the social revolution paradigm because it's not just about opposing. It's also for proposing that something different. Yeah. And that is often far more energizing than simply talking about everything that's wrong with the world. Yeah, definitely. And I think also for those who maybe have concerns about the risks of oppositional messaging,

Starting point is 00:23:48 there's another area where you can direct your energy to support the opposition without necessarily actively being involved in it. You know, because it's not enough to just oppose the system. You have to build something else. And you could be part of that building something else, you know? So when we're messaging, we want to be able to redirect people's energies to the actual frustrations and interests, you know, to resenter the conflict and the lens on the actual divisions of society, such as class, to make moneyed interests known. And, you know, even though it's never been easy to be anti-war, you know, especially in the center of empire. And in many ways, technologies that today have empowered much greater oppression.

Starting point is 00:24:28 You know, in Russia, individual and mass protests are met with surveillance. repression, massive fines, jail sentences, etc. In the U.S., you can face police brutality, censorship, even deportation. And in Israel, I haven't seen or heard anything from the Israeli populace in terms of resisting what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. But I know that those who do stand against the mandatory conscription do face jail time for their refusal. So it's not easy to be anti-war, especially in militarized and empire building territories. I get that stress and that worry.

Starting point is 00:25:10 That opposition is still necessary where there's other things that we can be doing it than just messaging. Yeah. You know, there are things that take on less risk, such as building an alternative, and there are things to take on more risk. Now, protests, even peaceful protests,

Starting point is 00:25:27 are no longer risk-free endeavors. And I know when most people hear about, you know, we need to push back. They hear, okay, if us organize a protest. Honestly, we could use a bit more imagination. In this day and age, like I said, the protest is not hitting like I used to. It's become like a pressure valve or a tool of pacification that could be tolerated for a time and then met with repression the moment it's time to

Starting point is 00:26:00 wrap it up. And there have a couple of reasons why protests are not, you know, able to do as much. You know, they have the moneyed interests. You know, they can end up being divided according to various arguments over strategy. And I'm sorry to say this, but protests as of late haven't accomplished very much besides getting people mutilated or jailed or worse in the past few years. And in fact, a lot of the resources that could be spent, you know, building alternatives are being spent instead on, you know, paying people's bonds and getting people out to jail,

Starting point is 00:26:38 prison relief, that sort of thing. Not to say those things are not necessary. You know, don't leave your comrades to to rot in jail, but I think we need to consider the free data that we've basically been giving away to the ruling class in the form of pictures, names, addresses, identifying data that they can be used to repress or disrupt or infiltrate protesters and protesting organizations down the line.

Starting point is 00:27:06 As James Herodon, it's another James. As James Herod wrote in the weakness of our politics of protest, where I've been getting some of these critiques of protests from, he says, thus instead of powerfully concentrating our mental and physical energies on solving this problem, to eliminate this obstacle to defeating capitalism, we are taking to the streets once again,

Starting point is 00:27:30 merely protested, merely engaged in what is basically mindless activism. End quote. Later, he says, it's easy to agree on what to protest against. The list of things that need to be stopped under capitalism is long. So long, in fact, we don't even need to agree. There's plenty to choose from. So just pick something that suits you.

Starting point is 00:27:48 Perhaps this is why so many activists got involved in protesting. It's not so easy, though, to figure out what we want to replace capitalism with, to work out convincing arguments about how it will plausibly work, and it set about creating such a social world, especially since so little energy has been devoted to the task. End quote. And, you know, I get why protests are popular. you know, as he says, it has a low barrier to entry.

Starting point is 00:28:12 You just have to show up. And in a society that has been so deliberately atomized, we have mass collective action has been made so difficult, protests has become pretty much a very easy avenue to get those things done. Yeah. And, you know, protests can work in certain instances for limited goals, but I think that those uses are diminishing day by day in the cost-benefit analysis. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:38 I'm just thinking about, like, there was a letter George Orwell wrote to one of his readers on the subject of anti-fascism, where Orwell was lamenting that, like, the anti-fascism that he was encountering in England, right, in between his participation in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War was always centered on hate. And, like, it's sort of an ideal, like, we get the two minutes of hate later in 1984, right? But maybe it comes from here. And like it never proposed an alternative. It just said, it pointed to something and said bad. Something I've tried not to do in my journalism, right?

Starting point is 00:29:14 Very often we do this as a journalist too. We point something and say bad. We don't look for the ways that it could become better. And so, like, protesting can become such an identity for people. Like, you see it, I'm just thinking of, like, every time I get sent a link to Instagram, right, which is a platform I don't really participate on. But I will look at things and they'll be like, oh, San Diego protest news, San Diego protester,

Starting point is 00:29:42 SoCal protester. And like, I think we should resist that being an identity because we want to build something beautiful as well as opposed what is bad. And if we don't have something beautiful to propose, what are we doing out there? Exactly, exactly. And, you know, there's room for protests.

Starting point is 00:30:02 I don't want to give off the impression that there isn't. Yeah. You know, but for all the lovely talk about peaceful protest, that works when there's an actual threat backing up those protests. You know, you don't just do the peaceful protest. You know, Gandhi didn't single-handedly win India's independence by marching peacefully. Yeah. You know, there has to be something back in itself or else it's going to be very easy to ignore and suppress.

Starting point is 00:30:25 Yeah. And I think that protests should not be our default. Right now they are our default. and I think there are better uses of our collective time, energy, and resources, even though protests are very easy compared to some of the things that are more necessary right now. But if protest is where you're dead set unfundling your energy, I would just say that you should at least learn de-rest strategies. You know, there are resources online to get some information on that on de-arrest strategies.

Starting point is 00:30:57 You can look it up. But if it's possible, if you see the situation playing out, you know, try not to sit by and let your comrades get pulled away. You know, it is very possible the numbers on your side to prevent the police from harassing, targets and taking away people. You know, there's other stuff you can do as well besides protests that I keep alluding to because, you know, sadly the media's no longer, you know, a safe space to share things in depth in some cases.

Starting point is 00:31:27 But just remember that the key is actual. You know, the media will not be with you. It will be trying to manufacture consent on everything that you do, manufacture consent against any action taken on the things that you do. And the only way to counteract that is to maintain relationships on the ground, to maintain actual local solidarity. Because once you have those local relationships and that local solidarity, there's no amount of things that the media can do.

Starting point is 00:31:53 The media could stir up that can prevent the people who see that you're on their side, who see that you're standing up for them to turn against. right what problem happens is when you don't have any relationships you don't have any networks you don't have any community building and you just doing stuff the messaging is unclear you know that's where I think the media could really pounce on that I would also say you know sabotage you know hit their pockets and the main thing the thing that I've been alluded to earlier is to strike yeah you know to organize strikes to use your labor power workers power still comes from our participation in production

Starting point is 00:32:33 and the threat of withdrawing our participation. We have to realize that in this time we're living in, even the effectiveness of strikes have come under threat. In two ways. The first way is that the permanence of employment is not what it used to be. And with the rise and spread of AI, you have to ask yourself,

Starting point is 00:32:57 how long will strikes in certain fields be effective? anymore. You know, I have my doubt that AI will ever reach a point where it can replace people, but honestly, for a lot of these companies, they don't necessarily care about whether it's capable of replacing people or not. They will still try and use it to replace people. So we have to be cognizant to the fact that this is the direction they're pushing things in, and we have to be able to stand up against that before we reach a point where between AI and you know, the nature of temporary work of the gig economy, it becomes harder and harder to organize ourselves.

Starting point is 00:33:37 Yeah. The other thing that I've noticed that has made striking so difficult and that we have to be aware of is the pacification or the domestication of unions, right? There was a time historically where unions were a powerful, influential, revolutionary even force. Such is not the case

Starting point is 00:34:02 today, unfortunately. Yeah. You know, there's been legislation put in place that many unions are terrified of crossing.

Starting point is 00:34:12 Every eye has to be dotted. Every T has to be crossed. And so the things that would actually make union action the most effective are for the things that unions nowadays

Starting point is 00:34:21 will refuse to do. Sympathy strikes. General strikes. And so what can we do if we are in an industry where the union is collaborating with management, where the union is utterly reformist, where the union refuses to actually step up

Starting point is 00:34:36 and represent the people that's supposed to represent it. And this is where, historically, wildcat, illegalist strikes have had to come into play. Strikes that do not depend upon legality, that do not sit back and waive mission, that carry far more risk, of course, that are far more difficult to organize, but are going to be necessary

Starting point is 00:35:01 if we want to liberate ourselves from this constant capitulation toward the machine. In the article, striking against the work war machine by Jeff Shantz and P.J. Lilly, they said, quote, wartime strikes and sabotage, partly because they're illegal and unsanctured nature,

Starting point is 00:35:22 bring rank and file workers together outside of union structures. Workers have to make crucial decisions about running this strike directly in face-to-face meetings or on the picket lines. Bureaucrats, who are left to their fundamental role of broken with the bosses, can be relegated to their sidelines in such situations. In Germany in 1917, illegal strikes helped to sweep the union structures right out of woodplaces. Strikes increasingly took on an anti-union as well as anti-boss character, with wildcats occurring in growing numbers throughout the armistice and beyond. So I wanted to, of course, pull on this example because this is not a unique issue, right?

Starting point is 00:36:02 Even historically, where unions have stood against the struggle of workers against war or against, you know, actually defending their class interests, the rank and file have had to organize themselves accordingly. So that's also something to keep in mind. Yeah. And last but at least, I just want to touch very briefly on the proposed side of the social revolution equation when it comes to anti-war struggle. And as usual, this is going to take solidarity materially, not just saying that,

Starting point is 00:36:33 or we stand in solidarity with such and such and such, actually sharing aid, sharing notes, supporting refugees, and going further because this, I think, is where a lot of our energy needs to be right now. Our efforts to oppose are going to be, for the most part, toothless, as long as we don't have an underlying structure that we are building upon, there'd be a seeking, to defend and to expand. You know, we are not at a position right now where we pose much of a threat yet. And we also have to consider that merely posing a threat is not going to liberate us by itself.

Starting point is 00:37:11 So I want you to consider as we, you know, wrap up this episode, what you can do to put forward that alternative to actually try to create the new social arrangements that we think should replace. Catholicist, statist, militarist order. And this is something that I talk about on my channel. Of course, I talk about building the commons, building alternative media, alternative economy, and developing our powers, our drives, and our consciousness.

Starting point is 00:37:40 And so you can check that out if you'd like. Unfortunately, this is, it is happening here. And don't forget, you can check out the YouTube, the Patreon, etc. All power to all the people. Peace.

Starting point is 00:38:11 Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a writer, analyst, and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center, Washington. Today we'll be speaking with Ushah al-Haldi, the policy lead for Oxfam. Our discussion will cover Oxfam's work in the occupied Palestinian territories and the current crisis in aid distribution. We are recording end of July, July 27th, 2025. NPR reported in May of this year that Gaza has already reached phase four of the integrated

Starting point is 00:38:46 food security phase classification, the IPC, which is coordinated out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and an organization called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. So what does this all mean? Phase four means emergency. As NPR writes in their May report, hardships deepen, food gaps widen, and people resort to really extreme forms of coping. So the famine early warning systems network does not have a presence in Gaza at the moment. This is their best guess. Phase five is when they declare a famine. We're seeing very terrible images in the media and on our phone screens about the level of

Starting point is 00:39:27 deprivation in Gaza at the moment because aid has been blocked off by the Israeli government. Writing for Al Jazeera, just a few days ago, former UN official Munzaqana accuses the UN of not declaring famine, despite overwhelming evidence, because he says officials are worried about their careers and possibly worried about antagonizing the U.S. But regardless of whether it's phase four or phase five, the situation in Gaza is dire. In July 27th, today, when we're recording, there's reporting that there might be airdrops, that the trucks on the Egyptian border are moving towards Gaza after the Israeli government has received a lot of pressure over the ongoing aid crisis. but of course that may be too late for many Gazans.

Starting point is 00:40:11 As I said, we're speaking with Bushra Khaled today, who will talk to us about her work from the vantage point of Oxfam. Bushra, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So let's begin with first describing Oxfam's work in occupied Palestinian territories. Yeah, sure. We've been here since 1956. We have offices in Ramallah and Jerusalem and Gaza,

Starting point is 00:40:32 and Al-Thastam was originally set up as an organization to fight, famine, you know, the first kind of famines that we've seen globally. That's, that's originally why Oxfam was set up. And then, so a lot of its programming is around water and sanitation, food security, livelihoods, working with farmers. A big part of our program is water and sanitation, helping, for example, farming communities, providing them with irrigation pipelines. You know, it could be agricultural inputs needed for growing their crops. It could be technical support to farmers to support them in growing, for example, vegetables. How do you grow crops of vegetables around date trees?

Starting point is 00:41:12 So it's kind of that kind of work in terms of the food security component that we have a big part of our work is with women's organizations, women's cooperatives, women's farming cooperatives as well, especially in the West Bank. And then a lot of work with kind of the relevant ministries and relevant trade unions on, for example, agricultural insurance. So getting, you know, trying to get insurance for farmers in case their crops or are ruined or sabotaged or damaged, for example, by settler violence, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:41:46 So there is kind of like a piloting kind of program where we're looking at the potential providing insurance to the farming sector here in Palestine. Other things could be, could look like, you know, small grants to start a small kind of business. Women, for example, ceramics, women's cooperatives and farming. I mean, so a lot of it worked like this, and most of our operations are actually run through partners. So we have about 90 partners kind of across the occupied Palestinian territory, and about 80 and 90 of other operations are actually completely implemented through partners.

Starting point is 00:42:24 But of course, after 7th of October, our programming really drastically kind of shifted to fully humanitarian, where, you know, we are now basically providing hygiene kits, food parcels, some agricultural inputs as well where we could, you know, set in Gaza, it looks like setting up latrines, handwashing state, like mobile stations. It can be like water trucking. I mean, it's changed, you know, depending on the access that we've had. So, for example, since March, this year, we've not been able to enter anything because of Israel's full total siege on Gaza. So nothing kind of entered. So our operations looked like psychosocial support to women, young girls in shelters,

Starting point is 00:43:09 trucking water from one area to another where we felt like these communities potentially needed water or had little access to water. It looked like a cash for work. We do a big, big, big, big part of our both now in the West Bank and in Gaza is providing cash for work. So, For example, we have daily workers that will remove solid waste with their bare hands, unfortunately, because there's no materials to remove waste in Gaza, but then they would receive like kind of daily, daily rates in order to get paid. And then there's like cash vouchers for the most vulnerable where they can, you know, have a voucher in a store and they can, you know, purchase items that we read, for example,

Starting point is 00:43:50 with a store owner that, you know, people can purchase with our kind of cards. So it's very versatile, and especially in last year's had to adapt and change, you know, very quickly and flexibly, depending on the situation, what's available in the markets. But that's kind of like what our programming looks like across the territory. Yeah, thank you for explaining that. And it brings me to, I mean, you touched on a little bit, but it brings me to a second question that I think is important for listeners to understand is how has the war and post-October 7th really impacted the restrictions that the Israeli government is imposing. So we know there's a siege in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:44:34 There is so much happening. How has that impacted Oxfam's work? It's completely restricted us. And not just us. It's all of the international kind of sector, including UN agencies. I mean, we know what they did with Inouwa. Would we maybe explain that? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:48 I mean, Israel, the government of Israel's kind of attacks or, let's say, attacks on the humanitarian and civic space, it's been a longstanding policy affairs and started well before 7th of October. It's gotten just, you know, much tighter, much more restrictive sense. But, you know, this goes back decades. I would say kind of the most notorious development in shrinking space, we call it shrinking space, is 2021 when they declared six organizations, Palestinian civil society organizations, mostly our human rights organizations. some of the most notorious and well-known human rights organization where they're designated as terrorist organizations.

Starting point is 00:45:31 So that was kind of the first big, you know, development where many of those partners, those six partners, were actually partners of international organization. So, you know, we found ourselves kind of advocating for continuing our support to these six, despite the designation by Israel, you know, and there was never, of course, evidence provided by the Israeli government as to what evidence they had, why would they deem these organizations,

Starting point is 00:45:58 terrorist organizations? But, you know, they continue to operate under very, very difficult circumstances. Their offices were raided, their assets were confiscated, but, you know, they're still operational

Starting point is 00:46:10 and we're still certainly supporting them. And of course, you know, shrinking space or the restrictions on humanitarian civic space, it translates into, you know, into so many different, restrictions. It could be, you know, restrictions on permits, restrictions on what crossings you're able to use as a humanitarian, you know, whether you can go through that crossing or another.

Starting point is 00:46:33 It can be visa restrictions. And we started seeing that visa restrictions even before the war. And after the war, of course, everything kind of changed. And now we're facing, and I'm talking more about like legal restrictions in terms of our work. And then I can talk more about like the siege and the actual blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is effectively completely restricted in our operations and has dismantled really the humanitarian sector in its entirety and has reverberating impacts to the rest of the territory. But for us, I think the first kind of sign of turmoil

Starting point is 00:47:10 was when there was already a decision, but nothing had been kind of formally communicated of a new registration process for international organizations. That started already in 2024, where the civil administration announced to our respective organizations that there will be a new registration procedures. The Israeli civil administration. The Israeli civil administration.

Starting point is 00:47:37 And so it was only kind of 10 months later that the criteria was kind of presented to us, and only a year later that the criteria actually came into effect. But in that time where they were announcing these new measures, there were lots of visa denials. Permits, of course, were completely non-existent for humanitarian. So for example, I had a permit to Gaza for six months. That, of course, stopped. All of our staff in the West Bank had permits to travel both to Gaza and in Israel, those stopped on 7th of October and same vice versa, are our colleagues in Gaza who had permits to come to Israel to travel through the Allenby Bridge

Starting point is 00:48:17 because, of course, you know, policies don't have an airport, so they have to travel through Al-NB to travel through Amman. Those also stopped. So that's one other kind of like, you know, measure that was taken against international organizations. And then when the new registration rules were made public and the criteria was made public, there's a new ministry set up called the Ministry of Diaspora and something affairs. I know diaspora affairs. I forget the full name of the ministry. But it's an interministerial committee that, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:51 it's made of basically ducks, you know. If you look at the background of some of these people that are in the committee, I mean, you know, it's, and they are now deciding of the registration of international organizations. And the criteria is onerous, it's political, it's big, and, you know, even it crosses some of our red lines in terms of organization. I mean, one of the, I think the most contentious criteria is submitting staff lists and all of the information of our staff to the Israeli authorities,

Starting point is 00:49:24 which is something we never had to do before. It's not something that is actually in any other context. It's not abnormal for an authority or a country or state to ask, you know, who is your staff working for this organization you're seeking registration from? But obviously, because of the, you know, unprecedented number of humanitarian workers that have been targeted and indiscriminately targeted as well, in Gaza, we've got more than 400 humanitarian workers killed.

Starting point is 00:49:51 At this point, we are unable to submit our staff list because of, you know, we have no guarantees of protection. Even though we have guarantees under, you know, international law, this is not applied when it comes to Gaza and in Israel's conduct in its hostilities against humanitarian workers in humanitarian space. So that's one of the criteria. But there's also other criteria where, for example, we would be revoked our registration or not re-registered

Starting point is 00:50:16 if we are seen to support some of the designated organizations that were designated early on, which most of our organizations do. So many of us are facing about to face basically being deregistered in Israel and losing our presence in Jerusalem, which has such a big implications, not because we're so desperate to have presence in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, but because it says a lot about what the future of East Jerusalem means.

Starting point is 00:50:43 Right. Because you're removing Enrawa, you're removing the INGOs, and you're moving all the program and the support that goes to organizations that are operating in Jerusalem, providing legal services to people that are losing their homes, that are getting their homes demolished on a daily basis, legal services for settler attacks that happen also in East Jerusalem and school provision of school services, educational items, educational activities, summer camps, know, I mean, etc, et cetera, the list goes on. That will be removed and that's kind of, you know, it's working now in parallel with the annexation kind of plan that Israel has been threatening

Starting point is 00:51:20 and implementing at the same time. So, you know, everything is moving towards this annexation. It also has vast implications because many of our organizations operate in Area C because the most vulnerable communities, you know, are in Area C. And so we always, you know, we as part of our programming is obviously reaching the most vulnerable Palestinians and those that need to help and support the most. And so annexing Area C and deregistering at the same time, deregistering us from Israel

Starting point is 00:51:49 means that we will also have a lot of difficulty accessing these communities and accessing Area C as we met here in organizations. We've not had visas for international staff for since the beginning of the war. And then when you look at Gaza, so this is kind of like looking at the West Bank and what is how it's evolving in the West Bank,

Starting point is 00:52:07 but then, you know, the fact that we would be deregistered would effectively mean that we cannot operate in Gaza anymore. Because you have to have an Israeli registration in order to be able to bring goods inside Gaza. And so if you're deregistered, you can't bring in goods into Gaza. This triangulation of the humanitarian and civic spaces is all encompassing. In Gaza, of course, it looks like our materials have been systematically and deliberately denied, rejected, delayed, you know, over the course of the last 20 months. but of course, adding to worse since March 2nd when Israel imposed its total siege on Gaza

Starting point is 00:52:51 and basically has completely sideline the UN, INGOs, and policies, civil society. And since then, we've not been able to enter anything in Gaza. And I doubt that we will be able to enter anything moving forward, especially that the registration kind of window ends in September, beginning of September. That's when we'll finally know who is going to be registered, who's not. But I expect for an organization like Oxfam,

Starting point is 00:53:14 as part of the registration process, It's very vague, so we don't know how they will apply it, but there's something about basically calling, again, you know, calling out or speaking out or calling for accountability of individual soldiers and members of the IDF. So what that means, I don't know, but we call for accountability every day because it's part of our mandate. We're not just an operational organization. We're a rights-based organization. And so we have a mandate to also, you know, where we witness violations of human rights or of international law, it is our mandate to speak out on it. And so there's no. no operations without that. So that's where we're at right now. It's an incredibly difficult space. It is, of course, deliberate. This is a deliberate policy of Israel that is carried out against the kind of a humanitarian civic space for years. It's also, there's another law. There's a law that's against Israeli human rights organization where it will start taxing, Israeli human rights organization that are receiving foreign funding by 50 to 80 percent or something like that. So it's just, it's, you know, it's deliberate, it's thematic. We have been the only ones

Starting point is 00:54:20 in Gaza that have been able to actually report independently on what's happening in Gaza, like the humanitarian's happened, not even a journalist, because of course, you know, I can argue that yes, Palestinian journalists are independent, but, you know, most of the world would probably disagree with that. So really, I mean, the independent kind of eyes and the neutral eyes, or let's say the impartial eyes, I won't say neutral, happen in humanitarian and UN agencies. Sidelining us means that we'll also see a reduction of quality reporting on what's actually happening in Gaza.

Starting point is 00:54:55 So it's terrifying. It's an attack on our ability to even understand the level of the problem. Absolutely. That is being left in the wake of this war, which of course is ongoing. But also, I think it's really important. I mean, the things you just described, I think it's really important for listeners to understand this. the aid question, the question of these humanitarian organizations and what's happening to them,

Starting point is 00:55:16 whether it's the registration through the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and I think combating anti-Semitism is its full name. That's it. Sorry. Should have remembered. So, yeah. I mean, there are so many problems with this ministry and it has been even internally criticized by Tel Aviv University, for example.

Starting point is 00:55:33 Or even actually members of the government itself, by the way. I think there was something about somebody in Israeli government, not. attending the interministerial committee meeting, you know, because it was not wanting to be associated to it. So, yeah, it's a very problematic committee. But I mean, if this kind of committee is responsible for registering international organizations and humanitarian organizations, then there's all the blockade of aid. All of these are parts of the same ethnic cleansing strategy. What we're seeing in Gaza, what do you want to call it, ethnic cleansing or genocide, you know, people are being eradicated.

Starting point is 00:56:10 We're seeing large-scale displacements in the West Bank. And as you mentioned, if these organizations also stop existing in Jerusalem, we'll see Jerusalem next. Not piecemeal the way that we've been seeing it, possible, absolutely, you know, more aggressive way. And so I really think it's important to kind of underscore for listeners that this is part and parcel of an annexation and ethnic cleansing plan that people from the religious Zionist party have been saying since the early 2010, Bezalelzmotrich, finance minister today,

Starting point is 00:56:42 had the decisive plan that said, you know, you either surrender or transfer. And we're at that level. They are transferring. They are making sure that that happens. And they are in the West Bank as well. I mean, you know, it's quiet and all eyes are in Gaza. But, I mean, we've seen displacement of entire communities

Starting point is 00:56:58 in the last few weeks only, let alone the largest numbers of forcefully displaced Palestinian since 1967 in the West Bank this year. And in the refugee camps that have been attacked. Exactly. So, you know, and again, I mean, you know, you can look at the history of smear campaigns against UNOWA by the Israeli authorities. I mean, that's just in itself, you know, the services that ONAWA provide, you know, we have to re-emphasize, like, education, health services.

Starting point is 00:57:28 I mean, you know, shelter. Ono-Wa provides key services that the Palestinian Authority has no ability to respond to. what is going to happen to all of these people when, you know, and already, I know what. So listeners, electricity cut off and Ramallah. This is our lives. Yeah. So we might have to restart some of that answer. That's fine.

Starting point is 00:57:52 Yeah. So did you want to pick up where you left off? I was, yeah. I mean, the point is, is that this is, you know, a longstanding policy by Israel. It's just like very much accelerated. Like every other policy affairs when it comes to, you know, forcible displacement. collective punishment, you know,

Starting point is 00:58:08 detentions. I mean, everything is at a record high and accelerating so quickly with this, you know, right wing, far right wing government

Starting point is 00:58:16 that's, you know, has zero checks and balances, zero, nobody holds them accountable to anything. And so, you know, they're able to get away

Starting point is 00:58:24 with all of this. So, I mean, my sense is that, you know, very soon, you will no longer see kind of the longstanding organizations that have been here

Starting point is 00:58:35 for decades, that have very much understood the context very well and have understood that it's impossible to do the work that we do without also bearing witness and speaking out on what we're witnessing. And I think the UN in that way, even the United Nations, where in Palestine has made sure that the state's committed to that mandate

Starting point is 00:58:58 because of how important it is to speak out on what you're seeing around you. I think like that's purely I think like, you know, we're the only ones that are able to witness and record independently what we're seeing on a day-to-day basis. And I think the UN has been incredible in keeping a record of that. I mean, I think they started recording in 2008. So it's like 18 years now almost of monitoring violations all across the territory. And if it wasn't for the work that the UN has done in that, we wouldn't be able to say that there is a genocide being carried out in

Starting point is 00:59:37 Gaza or that the risk of ethnic cleansing has risen exponentially in the West Bank. The reason why we're able to say this is because we're able to see the patterns and the data. And you know, you can contest the data. But, you know, even you were talking about the IPC, the IPC is not even reflective of what's really happening. And they say it themselves, but, you know, of course, the media, the way the media kind of focuses on what the results, because you know, you only have time for sound bites. But if we read the IPC alerts, it's clear that, one, they're always delayed. So they're always talking about a time that's already passed and we're a way beyond that. And two, it says that it doesn't have access to Gaza. But look at the testimonies, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:20 just like just reading the testimonies that some of our organization have recorded in the last week, just talking about our own colleagues and how they're facing. starvation themselves. I mean, I think the testimony speaks to themselves on what is happening in Gaza, and I don't need the IPC to tell me that there's a classification four or five. It's never going to declare a famine when it's not there. Like, there's never going to be a time where the IPC, because that's not even the role of the IPC. The role of the IPC is not to declare a famine. The role of IPC is just to collect the data and publish the data. And then it's the role of the UN or another international body to do so. So we're not going to see if I'm a climate declaration,

Starting point is 01:00:59 because we don't have access. And so, you know, we're not going to be able to say that with confidence because the IBC's never going to be able to publish that data. But I don't think it matters. I think what matters is what we're seeing on the ground, what's being reported. And, you know, I mean, it's undeniable, really, by the pictures themselves. I mean, the videos and the pictures that are coming out of Gaza just speak for themselves, really. So it's definitely unprecedented times for us.

Starting point is 01:01:25 And it's going to be a very, very interesting and frightening, terrifying. year, to be frank. Yeah. No, I mean, as I said at the beginning, there are, of course, critiques also of the limitations of the UN. Yeah. But this idea that they are wanting organizations as a condition of registering them to somehow not bear witness to what is happening

Starting point is 01:01:50 and not to write reports about what's happening, it's a way of hobbling the ability of actually creating policies Like if you want to talk about famine or if you want to talk about poverty, as Oxfam does, how could you solve it without talking about the root cause in every way, in every direction? The Israeli government is attempting to hobble the ability of international organizations, of the Palestinians themselves, to be able to solve the root causes of these problems. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it will have to be fine creative ways, just like, you know, our Palestinian civil society partners that, you know, have been also designated, have had. had to find, you know, ways to continue doing their work. But, you know, I mean, even them, you know, they've lost funding. They've had to reduce their operations. They've had to reduce

Starting point is 01:02:39 their field officers that go to the field and do this work. So, I mean, I, I, it's, it's so uncertain. But I think the fact that many of these organizations have been here for so long understand so deeply the context. I think organizations will also do whatever they can in order to ensure that they continue the important work here and find ways to continue to work. I don't know how. It's really a new time for us. Like we've never been there before. So we don't know what it looks like, how we're going to be able to continue our work. But we're committed to that. So we will find, you know, whatever, I don't want to say loophole because, you know, there are none. But we'll find whatever way to continue, to continue kind of being here and being present and remaining, remaining present.

Starting point is 01:03:28 because I think it's also part of our commitment to the work that we've been doing in OPT for decades. So, yeah. Yeah. I think maybe we should end on a discussion about the Gazi Humanitarian Foundation. I mean, I've already mentioned it in a previous episode, so I encourage listeners to look into that. But I, you know, think it's important. We discuss what is this foundation and what is the impact it has had? on people in Gaza and on international organizations that are already doing this work.

Starting point is 01:04:03 Yeah. Okay, the GHF or Gaza Convention Foundation slash GHF, I don't like talking about it as such because it's the issue, of course, that's one of the issues, but GHF is part of many actors, okay? And it's not GHF. GHF is a facade for many actors that, you know, the U.S. and Israelis, it's in Israeli plan. And I don't think we need to, we cannot, you know,

Starting point is 01:04:28 I know there's U.S. military actors and GHF at, you know, the border and shooting at people, but this is an Israeli plan, okay? And we have to dub it as such. This plan actually came into, we started hearing about this plan a year and a half ago. It was maybe May last year, we saw the General Islands plan on what they wanted to do in the north when they started the ethnic cleansing campaign in the north of Gaza, where they deceased the north and tried to force everybody's the idea then was already, they had already, we were already hearing about something called humanitarian bubbles. And the bubbles are the sites of what, it's what's become the sites, right? But this idea, what has been floating around for, for more than 18 months, it's just that

Starting point is 01:05:13 nothing kind of transpired until May, I guess that's when May the operation started. So it's really launched this as an authorization mechanism. This is how it was originally kind of, and that would expand basically Israeli military control over how aid enters, moves within, and is distributed inside Gaza. And of course, I mean, that and on its own is a clear attempt to instrumentalize humanitarian aid. So, you know, and I think it's very important to clarify. You know, our organizations, we operate under extremely rigorous standards and mechanisms where we ensure that aid is not diverted. And I think aid diversion, you know, it's been talked about like Hamas, a diversion.

Starting point is 01:06:00 A diversion exists everywhere. It exists in every crisis we work in. Like, it's something that is part of, you know, crisis mode. Like, this is where when there's a crisis, when there's chaos, that's where there's space for informal actors to start popping up. So it's a symptom of every crisis around the world. And so, you know, it's not just a Gaza thing. So we have protocols on how we can ensure,

Starting point is 01:06:25 that aid diversion doesn't happen in operations. And of course, as humanitarian, we would never accept military or profit-driven intermediaries overriding what we call principled aid delivery. Because it basically means that you're expanding military control over aid operations by an actual party to the conflict, you know, which of course risks that aid will never reach the most vulnerable, you know, of course at a time when it was most needed. So, From our perspective, there is no scenario where we would accept any attempts to militarize or privatize humanitarian aid, whether it's in Gaza or anywhere else, because such actions actually violate international humanitarian law. But also, they undermine the core principles of humanitarian law,

Starting point is 01:07:14 which are impartiality, independence, and humanity. These are principles that guide all of our work. And of course, what is the most dangerous about this model is not only the, The massacres that have occurred near daily at these food distribution sites run by the GHF and other actors, it sets such a dangerous precedent where occupying powers around the world will now be able to dictate the terms of aid based on their political agendas and their military goals. That is what effectively now happened, is that if it's happened and Gaza, why can it not happen in Uganda and DRC and Sudan? And I want to also take it a little back. Let's talk about the pier. The pier last year is exactly the same.

Starting point is 01:08:10 It's the same thing. It's an international company called Fogbo run by former U.S. military veterans and soldiers and others, other actors, that, you know, spent $320 million on a floating pier that brought virtually nothing in. And in fact, was used for one. and rescue mission, rescue operation by special forces, where they entered, I think it was the way that camp, the refugee camp at the time, and were able to obviously, yeah, rescue hostages,

Starting point is 01:08:44 but kill, I mean, you know, a dozen in that operation using the pier. And hence why we're like, we would distance ourselves and from the beginning distance ourselves from the pier. There's no difference with the distribution sites. It's the same kind of idea that with logistics, we can address a political issue. The issue of Gaza is not an issue of logistics. The UN or INGOs don't know how to do the work,

Starting point is 01:09:10 Palestinians, so the policies of society has been responding to the civilian needs in Gaza from before the war. Right. You know, 80% of the Gaza population was dependent on humanitarian assistance before the war. So, I mean, you know, but it's not that we didn't know how to do it. It's that we were prevented from doing it. Right.

Starting point is 01:09:28 We were deliberately prevented from doing it. So it's a political decision. It's not a logistical decision that prevents us from doing our work in Gaza. And so granting Israel control over who receives the aid, where they receive the aid, and from who has basically turned what is relief, what should be relief to the civilian population, is actually a tool of coercion because what we saw is massacres, people being shot indiscriminately at. I mean, we heard Dr. Nick Maynard yesterday. Yesterday, he came back from Gaza a week ago where we've heard of children being shot in the

Starting point is 01:10:04 testicles at these distribution sites. And not one. He mentioned on the same day, he saw a half a dozen boys with the same injury. Sniper shots. Sniper shots in the testicles at food distribution sites. So what's happened now is that what Israel has done is that it blurred the line between what humanitarian assistance is, what a military object. is, and of course, putting the civilian, Palestinians, and aid workers as well, because

Starting point is 01:10:33 aid workers, we know of some of our colleagues in different organizations, but even themselves have had to go to these food distribution sites because there's nothing, and we're unable to even support our own staff at risk. And of course, I mean, this entire system has eroded any protections that are guaranteed to aid workers and humanitarian responses under international law and under the Geneva Convention. So it's not only that it killed people, and that it's harmed Palestinians, but it actually, it's also a complete disregard for international law,

Starting point is 01:11:06 complete disregard of international law. And at the same time, I think what people fail to remember is that at the same time as this plan of the distribution sites was Senate being set up in the South, at the same time, Israel every two days was evacuating,

Starting point is 01:11:23 forcibly displacing, basically the population towards the South, right? And in less than two months, we've got almost a thousand Palestinians that were killed, but also an immense movement of the population towards the South, because that's the only place that they had food, right? So, you know, this is not protection. This is complete coercion.

Starting point is 01:11:43 You know, when you move aid into fence, supervised spaces under military, is really military control, frankly, and what we saw from the pictures, recall some of the darkest chapters of humanitarian failure of our history. It's not protection, it's coercion, and, you know, no countries, nobody should ever support a model that is basically treating civilians as prisoners. And that's not what humanitarian aid is about. Humanitarian responses have to be guided by international law. It has to remain voluntary. It has to be grounded in the dignity of the people.

Starting point is 01:12:19 And it has to be delivered impartially, not shaped by Israel's occupation or Israel's siege or Israel's military control. So not only has this scheme reinforced military control over the Gaza's ship, it has completely dehumanized Palestinians by design. Like, Palestinians are only worth a box of food. That's what basically essentially what has happened is that we have reduced a humanitarian response that addresses hospitals, medical care, water, sanitation, wastewater, shelter. It goes right to dignity to a box of flour, you know? that you can get killed getting. Or you get killed. And not only that, it's a first come first serve.

Starting point is 01:13:02 You know, it's whoever's the strongest. It's the survival of the fittest. That's not what humanitarian aid is about. We're supposed to meet the most vulnerable. We need to reach the pregnant moms, the people with disabilities, the record number of amputees in Gaza, the record number of disabled people in Gaza right now. Children.

Starting point is 01:13:22 Half of Gaza are children. They are part of some of the most vulnerable sections of society. Age should be going to them. They don't have, they shouldn't have to come to us walk for, you know, I mean, some people have said 20 kilometers they've had to walk to go to these distribution sites in the middle of the night, in sand dunes, they have to duck because otherwise they might get shot by sniper shot. And then when the gates of hell open of these, you know, fence zones, whatever you want to call them, I don't even like calling them distribution sites because they're not distributions. It implies that there's some sort of like system to it. There's no system.

Starting point is 01:13:57 It's literally the gates to hell and then everybody flows into the, you know, floods. And we've heard of people carrying knives to protect themselves because they're getting looted because it's not enough of force food. And then there are gangs that are being weaponized by the top. And so and actually what I, what I was saying to people is that actually what GHF has created is create the perfect, it's the perfect recipe for armed gangs and aid diversions occur. Like it's actually like

Starting point is 01:14:27 providing the perfect environment for these informal actors, gangs, criminals to prosper. So, you know, this is, this is, you're creating that kind of environment. Because let's just be very directed. This is not about aid. No, of course not. This, no. You've got coercion.

Starting point is 01:14:44 It's about coercion. I mean, as you mentioned, from the very beginning, it was about sequestering Palestinians. Yeah. And they said it. Actually, and by the way, they said it. These really war cabinet has said that, you know, and it's like, we have to take things at face value sometimes. They said it.

Starting point is 01:15:00 They've been saying it for the last year. We just waited until it happened on the ground to be able to now say it and confirm it. But this was their plan from the beginning and there was nothing implied. It was very explicit. Right. No, I mean, very, very clear. And it really frustrates

Starting point is 01:15:15 me personally because yeah, you know, Arab media, Palestinian journalists, Palestinians on the ground, testimonies would say we're being arrested at these sites. They're using facial recognition. They're very much politicizing aid. And it took forever

Starting point is 01:15:32 for us to even be able to say it, to even be able to report on it until Western media source is confirmed. Yesterday, a number of children were released from being arrested at these aid sites. And I couldn't mention that in things that I wrote. because they didn't believe Palestinian testing. I mean, the GHF contractor themselves, themselves have admitted to what is happening

Starting point is 01:15:57 and everything that we've been seeing and saying and, you know, and warning. I mean, you know, I'd like to say as well, like, I mean, I want to underscore. Actually, humanitarian have been underlining this very, very explicitly to everybody since before they were even set. So, you know, I can sleep with a clear conscience that we did what we needed and we could, you know, what we could do. And we did warn that this would happen and this would be the result. And now here we are.

Starting point is 01:16:23 Right. No, I mean, it's absolutely important. For calling. So I want to mention to listeners that I will put in the show notes a lot of, you know, these citations, the UN reporting that close to a thousand people have died at these sites. Yeah. The doctor Nick Maynard speaking to Channel 4 News in Britain about what he saw. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:43 I also want to point listeners to a volume that was released called Suppressing Descent, edited by Zaha Hassan and H.A. Hellier, because full disclosure, I do have a chapter in that book, but it's about the shrinking civic space prior to October 7 and the dynamics that we have seen, you know, basically playing out at this point. Thank you so much, Bushra, for coming and speaking with us under such severe circumstances and explaining. I think really succinctly. The dangers of this moment because what is happening in Gaza will change the world. It will change everywhere. And it already is.

Starting point is 01:17:26 I think, you know, I would tell listeners, go look at AP's article on Fogbo in Uganda and Sudan. We're already seeing it. It's not even that it will change the world. We're already seeing the precedent that Gaza has set

Starting point is 01:17:37 for other humanitarian crises and for these military actors and private contractors to profit from from misery. Like that's essentially what is happening. It's happening. So, you know, I would also direct you to that article from AP

Starting point is 01:17:51 that came out a couple weeks ago about the same companies operating in Gaza and, you know, being complicit in the atrocities that we're seeing unfolded, Gaza, now operating in other contexts and crises, humanitarian crises. Really? Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

Starting point is 01:18:08 And thanks, Dana. Thank you. And hopefully see you soon and talk to you soon. and so take care. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Bryce from No More Deaths. And what we're going to talk about today is this really excellent piece of data visualization and research that depicts a very sad topic, which is the deaths of migrants entering the United States. And Bryce, I know, has done a lot of work on this.

Starting point is 01:18:53 So welcome to the show, Bryce. All right, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I guess maybe we can start off. I'm looking at this data visualization on a map right now, and we'll have links in the show notes for other people who want to look at it. Can you explain what this data set is? Yeah, so we collected through a bunch of different sources, medical examiners,

Starting point is 01:19:17 Justices of the Peace, Sheriff's Department, CBP's own data, just a bunch of data on individual migrant deaths along the US, Mexico, border. And so this is different data through each source, but generally we tried to get a lot of demographic data, location data, cause of death, and at least some form of the incident narrative to kind of get a little bit of the context of how each of these people guide. Yeah. If people are looking at the map, they can see various colored dots, right? And they can click on that dot and that will give them the fiscal year, the Board of Troll sector. In some cases, you'll see like the type of death, maybe a gender and age, things like that.

Starting point is 01:19:58 I don't know, looking at it, like, it's one of those things that maybe is more emotionally difficult to view if you're more familiar. Like, I can look at these dots and I can think of places I've been. I can even think of the day I was there. And it's quite, I don't know, it's impactful to see that all these people have died in places I know so well. perhaps we can explain, like, the scale of this is huge, right? Do you know exactly how many data points there are on here?

Starting point is 01:20:27 I think there's something like 12,000 or 13,000. Yeah, it's vast. Which overall is, like, not a great sort of, like, indicator of how many people have actually died or even though how many people could be reported to have died just because the Texas state is so wonky. Yeah. Let's get into that, then.

Starting point is 01:20:46 Let's talk about maybe the sources, for this data and then maybe perhaps how your estimates are much high, even with some of the emissions, like the data that you have tends to show underreporting. So, like, can you explain first, like, where does this data come from and how did, how did you get it? You were saying the Texas numbers are lower, but can you explain how, like, there are these multiple jurisdictions and how, you can't just, like, ask someone for this information? Yeah, there's a few people who are able to just ask for it. Well, generally, it all comes for. from formal public records requests.

Starting point is 01:21:21 From medical examiners, when we're lucky, because medical examiners usually have really good, easily shapeable data. So that's what we did for San Diego County. Yeah, February, good. Pima County, the state of New Mexico, El Paso. Other places have a coroner that are associated with for sheriff department. And that's usually a little dice here.

Starting point is 01:21:41 They're a little more reluctant to give up records. That would be Imperial County or Yuma County. and then Texas, it's just like a medical legal nightmare. So there's, if smaller counties don't have our medical examiners, they just had justices of abuse, which are part of like the courts, and they'll go out and investigate deaths, and if an autopsy is needed, they'll send it off to another county to get an autopsy. There's a huge amount of counties in Texas like this.

Starting point is 01:22:09 So that data all came from this researcher, Stephanie Loiter, from the University of Texas, Austin, who is working on a different project, but was gracious enough to share everything that she had collected. But that was like just a huge amount of legwork of physically going to each of these counties, looking at paper records from justices of the peace, writing down all that data. There's some that comes from like sheriff's department, some that comes from various other sources. So the Texas data, and some, for example, Webb County, medical examiner,

Starting point is 01:22:42 they don't give up their data to anybody. and there's a lot of issues with then potentially not having actually performed autopsies on a lot of migrants and there's some potential bookcases about that going on. But yes, so Texas is really messing and a lot of it, you'll notice

Starting point is 01:23:00 Texas has a lot of the purple dots. The purple dots under location data from Border Patrol's database. Yeah. And so that ends in 2018. So we have data past 2018 in Border Patrol, or not location data. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:15 And so a lot of Texas onset being this just the Border Patrol data unless we had low-specific access to that place is justice to the peace data. So the Texas data is pretty limited for that reason. Yeah, you can see as sort of very few red dots, which are your other data sources like in Texas. Aside from it, it looks like maybe Brooks County,

Starting point is 01:23:41 you're able to get justice to the peace data there because the density is profound. Yeah, it's just the Brooks County Sheriff's Department that actually puts together that data. They're really keen on the whole thing. Okay. And partially it's because the data exists, but partially it really wills just reach

Starting point is 01:23:59 cluster of depth in that area because of a checkpoint south of the area where people will get dropped off south of the checkpoint, hike around, and it's just like massive, massive open graveyard in Brooks County. Jeez. Yeah, I don't think I've spent much time in that part of Texas, but certainly like some of these other ones I'm much more familiar with. Let's talk about the CBP data, right? You mentioned it there. One of the things that you've found was that CBP has a systemic issue with

Starting point is 01:24:30 undercounting deaths, right? Yeah. So where does that come from? So I've heard from, I guess, for years, Humane Borders and Puma County Medical Examiner has been documenting this. since at least 2014, the major undercount on Border Patrol's data. But something I hear a lot is just that it's cases where Border Patrol wasn't personally involved in the search and that they had, like, changed their counting system to only be counting cases where they were involved. And I think that may account for some of it. But in order to compare these deaths, Border Patrol's data is just really gnarly and messy and that. There's typos, there's misspelling, states are wrong, ages are wrong,

Starting point is 01:25:13 genders are long. So you really, in order to compare them, you really have to go person by person, go down the list, find the desk and then's Border Patrol database, looking at the medical examiner data on the time to matches, person by person.

Starting point is 01:25:26 So because we have so much of the incident narratives from the medical examiners, we can actually tell when Border Patrol was involved. And so we marked when Border Patrol's involved, when they're not involved, and then when that case doesn't actually get counted by Border Patrol.

Starting point is 01:25:40 Okay. And it doesn't actually really line up. there's not a huge correlation there. I mean, there is some correlation, like older skeletal remains, things like that, often won't get counted. But generally, there are a lot of cases where they directly involved where even they were the first responders on the scene to a distress call or any number of things where that person won't end up in Border Patrol's database.

Starting point is 01:26:02 And then other cases where it seems like they had no involvement, that person ends up in Border Patrol's database. So, I mean, they've been in trouble with the GAO multiple times for undercounting or improperly counting or reporting these deaths. And so they have access to medical examiner data, medical examiner send them the data. They just don't lose it. We often also notice that the causes of death really don't match up

Starting point is 01:26:28 in a lot of really specific cases. For Walpole, for instance, was the most notable one. There will be a huge amount of cases that medical examiner will say one force trauma. And then Border Patrol's data will say, medical examiner on the tournament or exposure or any number of other things which like

Starting point is 01:26:48 for the most part causes the deaths seem to line up so the fact that these wallfold deaths it happens to not line up is like I don't want to assume they have bad intent although obviously border patrols bad intent but it seems like it happens regularly enough that it's hard to feel like it's not

Starting point is 01:27:06 somewhat intentional that the cases that they're kind of choosing to change the causes of death for it Right. So like it obfuscates the lethality of the border war rate, it's the amount of people who it kills. Yeah, I mean, to a huge degree too. I mean, the fact that border patrols data is kind of our only source of data for migrant deaths and then specifically for deaths caused by Border Patrol or like wallfall deaths

Starting point is 01:27:28 means that the amount of deaths that we need the public has access to, like wallhole deaths, for instance, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what's actually happening. So all of the research and reporting and all the stuff that happens around these seem to related deaths is drawing off of just like truly false numbers. Yeah, yeah. And that leads to people drawing like bad conclusions, right? Yeah. The other thing that you found is that like there seems to be an underreporting of

Starting point is 01:28:07 in custody deaths, right? Or an undercounting of people who die in custody. So can you explain how you were able to ascertain that difference between the in custody death recorded by the Office of Professional Responsibility versus the ones that you found, right? Right. So the opposite professional responsibility is part of CBP, and they're supposed to be recording

Starting point is 01:28:29 all of, all CBP related deaths, including, according to the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, like 2013 or whatever it was. I mean, deaths in custody, there's a very specific definition of what in custody means, and so we tried to follow pretty strictly

Starting point is 01:28:45 what that definition was to kind of make our own assessments using the incident narratives. Yeah. I'm curious, what does it mean? Like, I'm thinking about door detention, right? Like, does that count as in custody? Yeah, so any only time, if a person is in the process of being apprehended,

Starting point is 01:29:02 if a person has been apprehended, if the person has been detained, is a person who is physically in custody border patrol, in a border patrol vehicle, in a CUD facility, all those things would count as in custody. Okay. It's just important because in at least one of the cases, the Border Patrol agent involved said,

Starting point is 01:29:19 the person wasn't in custody, he was just detained, which for the purposes of reporting, there's actually no difference. Right, yeah. But he said that clearly to not have it be labeled as in custody death. Right. And what it seems like that ended up not being labeled as a in custody death. So it's definitely, I think they're aware the fact that these are being reported and kind of trying not to have that due to case.

Starting point is 01:29:42 That don't have too many of them like appear. Another interesting data, interesting is your wrong word, but another data point here was the amount of death caused by pursuit, right, or in pursuit? I guess maybe you should just explain, like, what pursuit is to people if they're not aware. Yeah, so there's two kinds of pursuit. We list them at the same gear on the database you can see. The difference of there's chases in a motor vehicle and there's chases on foot. So, for example, a person's getting chased through the desert and collapses and dies.

Starting point is 01:30:16 that will be considered a death either pursuit or if a person is like in El Paso or San Diego or Imperial County Moore is chased and ends up falling in a canal or jumping into a canal to escape and drowns. The idea would chase on foot. And then motor vehicle pursuits are, yes, with a person who is being chased by Border Patrol and the glaring crashes and people are killed. Use of force cases also include some of these chases through opiolice. standards and CBP standards. If spike strips are deployed or if a vehicle is ran by a Border Patrol vehicle, that's considered use of force. So that's where a person died due to that.

Starting point is 01:30:59 We would call that a use of force death. Yeah. So I guess those are the two to three different times. And so, like, yeah, those are, as you say, they're broken down in the database, right? But in the spreadsheet, they are combined. what does this data show us about like I guess if we look at the last half decade or so let's go back to like 2016 right border policy like what does it show us about like title eight title 42 we're like a little too too close to the Biden asylum ban to have

Starting point is 01:31:35 I guess like good data on that yet but do you see a clear pattern in like the border rhetoric and border quote unquote enforcement and the amount of death or the type of deaths? Oh, definitely. Yeah, it's immediately clear. I mean, even Biden's asylum ban, I think there was an

Starting point is 01:31:57 immediate effect. I mean, even just as a No More Death Volunteer, we started seeing people crossing the border, crossing the desert. That just never would have made the attempt previously, you know, and then started to see those people reported in the death data too. So I think all of that is pretty clear.

Starting point is 01:32:15 So with Trump's restrictions on asylum, I think the biggest thing, honestly, was all the metering policies, rather than just Title 42 or like protection protocols or any of that. It was just the fact that people weren't allowed to access the border country. Yeah. And it ended up kind of like going around to enter like other places in the desert, the border to the pick them up, that all this started happening.

Starting point is 01:32:38 Yeah. And so it's kind of like a trickle in 2019, 2020, a little bit more in 2021. And then 2022, you suddenly see just huge amounts of people from countries other than Mexico, Central America, starting to show up in the data. And then also, like, people who clearly were trying to see the asylum showing up in this data all the way up until it slowed down after, you know, the end of 2023. and then definitely continued through

Starting point is 01:33:09 front of time for it. Yeah, definitely. Like speaking from my own experience on the border here, we saw the same thing, right? Like people crossing, he wouldn't have seen

Starting point is 01:33:20 making that crossing in places and times that they wouldn't have crossed, you know, before the Biden asylum ban. Like, that definitely resulted in. I mean,

Starting point is 01:33:31 there was a weekend in September where I think five people died, September 2020. We had a heat wave and like, yeah, it immediately resulted in multiple fatalities that like wouldn't have been the case previously. I wonder, like, what is this data set in terms of like recommendations, right? In terms of like how we can use this data set. Obviously, we're at a time when I, when I guess the Trump administration, like, had its complete asylum ban stayed. But we're back at like, people can't in good faith, like, turn up to a port of entry anymore and just be like, hey,

Starting point is 01:34:06 like to claim asylum and really, really hope for the best. Like, what does this data set tell us in terms of, like, what policies kill more people? And, like, I guess, like, what recommendations arise from the data in terms. Obviously, I guess the recommendation is to have laws that allow people to fucking enter this country and claim asylum without walking across the desert. But that seems like it's too much to ask. So, like, what do we learn in terms of, like, specific policies that are particularly fatal? and like the ways that that could be mitigated

Starting point is 01:34:37 and if it's not already by like water drops and such. Yeah, that's a hard question just because talking to, you know, the older people and Montmore debts who've been around since like kind of the early years of prevention deterrence. Yeah. They thought about sort of feeling like, you know, when they were first out there, being like, man, this is really unsustainable. You can't be out here all the time like this.

Starting point is 01:35:00 Maybe like a few more years. we could probably handle, and then hopefully this prevention through deterrence thing will have like kind of stopped. They'll see like this is unsustainable, and then here we are all these years later, and it's worse than it's up again. And the original prevention through deterrence policy is like

Starting point is 01:35:15 this strategy of essentially killing people in the hopes, I know, people will stop trying to cross the border or something. And it just is the original thing that it's really hard to get away from. And the fact that we're now applying the same The same strategy of death and suffering to asylum seekers is really horrifying.

Starting point is 01:35:35 So I think number one, open up courts of entries will allow asylum secret to seek asylum, bring back even the sort of minimum asylum projections that we had back then. Other things like how people are dying really matters. So for example, in the El Paso sector, there was very, very few deaths in 2014. The last couple of years, it's been the deadliest single, small area in the entire. entire border. And a lot of that was just because the border has just become so militarized that even this like urban area where, you know, people are dying a mile from town. People are dying in town. I was part of the recovery where we, this person was on a road, had been there

Starting point is 01:36:16 for about three days dead. It was about 40 feet from the busiest, the busiest road in the entire town. Jesus, yeah. And that's just not something that really fits in with the ordinary narrative, like prevention through deterrence, people are getting pushed out to these more remote areas. And I think just the level of militarization is just up to the level that it really is just deadly kind of. I mean, even, yeah, all these deaths in San Diego, as you know. Yeah. Also, so like all these wall tall deaths are pretty much all since like 2017 or even more recently. So the construction of all this new border wall, you can point very directly to a huge amount of deaths just caused by wallfalls.

Starting point is 01:36:55 There's the canals in Imperial County and El Paso that kill a huge amount of people. There's El Paso right now is in the process of redamping their whole canal system. It would be a great opportunity to add some sort of like safety systems in place so that people don't die. There is all the pursuit deaths, which now are not just being caused at Border Patrol,

Starting point is 01:37:18 but also like the Texas Department of Public Safety, now that Operation Lone Star has popped up. There's all these things where the kinds of deaths and the kinds of people dying and all that stuff has changed and increased really drastically in the last few years. And you can kind of point to a lot of them. But also it's like, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to really have any smart thoughts on it besides just like border patrols unperformable and just needs to be disbanded entirely. Yeah. And like this whole border regime, right?

Starting point is 01:37:50 the whole idea of like an iron border that we enforce in a physical space, the point of it is to kill people. The point of it is to deter people by having perfectly innocent people who you'd be happy to have as your neighbor die in the desert. Like that's, that is, that is the policy goal. Like I'm just looking at, like, I'm looking at Pinto Canyon, which San Diego people will know. It's like, it's pretty, like, don't, if you're listening to this, don't go to Pinto Canyon, you might die.

Starting point is 01:38:19 It's not a place to just go looking around. if you're not experienced traveling out in the desert. But even Pinto Canyon is gnarly. But looking along the wall, the wall kills way more people than this rugged and difficult piece of terrain in the middle of nowhere. It's things that we have paid a lot of money for that kill the most people.

Starting point is 01:38:40 And that's pretty brutal to confront. One of the other things that you guys were able to determine was that a number of United States' residents had died, right, in this data set. Yeah. Can you explain that for people? Totally. So, yeah, like you said, there's people you'd love to have as your neighbor dying in all these places.

Starting point is 01:39:12 And not just that, but your actual neighbor. The amount of people whose main residents listed was just in San Diego County, in Oceanside, in Bakersfield and Indianapolis, places that we've all been to. Yeah. We were able to record for San Diego County. and a few other counties. A lot of where people actually lived and some of the circumstances

Starting point is 01:39:36 for why they were crossing through the desert in the first place, a lot of it is people who are very recently deported or who just traveled to Mexico because they had to get some paperwork done or wanted to visit family. But things like this just had entire lives in the United States

Starting point is 01:39:52 and then passed away on the way back into the country. Yeah. Yeah, including, I mean, it's really heartbreaking to you, And see, there's a lot of cases where the person who actually finds the body or recovers the body is that person's family members or their spouse or their children even, which only happens because, you know, bored of control is generally not that interested in recovering bodies or in looking for people who are lost. So often, yeah, how often it'll be, yeah, somebody's spouse who comes and is actually the first person on the CIA. Yeah, it's very common. for volunteers to be alerted via like, you know,

Starting point is 01:40:35 I know some of the search and rescue groups are alerted by like Instagram, for instance, that like someone is missing, right? It's not like there is, like, despite this being massively overfunded, you can't just call and they won't just send out an ambulance. Like a lot of, a lot of times it is either the family members or like a bunch of volunteers just driving out there in their trucks at last night. Like I can remember in running into some. migrants in like 2023 and then being like, hey, there are some other people down there.

Starting point is 01:41:04 And I was like, where, how'd you know? And they'd found them on a Snapchat map. And like that that was, you know, the only thing that maybe saved those people's lives. And yeah, it's pretty brutal to think that like that there's still really, there's no one, well, there are people you can call come help you, but it's not the people who are getting billions of dollars. Let's talk very briefly before we finish up about deaths outside of the United States. I see you have some data.

Starting point is 01:41:28 like obviously my familiarity is with the daddy and gap which I could like getting I don't think that data exists but like I see you have a number of data points within Mexico can you explain like how you came across those and to what extent that data is if at all like representative or complete yeah so it's not at all representative or complete it all comes from the National Institute of Immigration the I&M in Mexico yeah to I guess she's border work and the group of POS Peta are there like the sort of like

Starting point is 01:42:03 quote unquote humanitarian aid group for migrants instituted by the government in Mexico in Mexico and so we

Starting point is 01:42:13 through the Mexican a group of the FOIA you're able to get data from the group of Peta which throughout the years

Starting point is 01:42:21 there's been kind of like changing locations of offices so the the data we have just from where their offices are. So it's usually just sort of like a member of deaths

Starting point is 01:42:32 for that particular office for that particular year. It's very, very limited. And there's many, many, many deaths that we then have other data to show that doesn't exist here. So it's really just kind of like, yeah, shouldn't be taken as any kind of like representative sample. It's purely just the one piece of Mexican data that we were able to quickly put on a map.

Starting point is 01:42:58 Yeah. We did get other data from, like, specific states in Mexico, but we, because of time and capacity and just the data itself, we're unable to turn that into a map. Just yet, but we would do something with that. Yeah, and I think it still remains true that, like, the single deadliest mile of this journey is the United States border, like, at least from this state.

Starting point is 01:43:26 that you're seeing. Would you say this data still supports that? Probably. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, probably. I just don't want to say because the data is just so bad in so many places, especially in Mexico. Yeah, I'm thinking of like the Dadean, right? Like it's very deadly. I have seen people die there. Like it's obviously a very, very difficult and rugged place, but I think comparatively probably more people die at the US border just because, A, they're more of them and because people come. Like people are,

Starting point is 01:44:00 not everyone has to cross the area and like people can fly to Mexico or somewhere further south, right? And then come up that way. Where if people want to find this data or perhaps there's someone who's like a ninja with data and data visualization, and they want to offer to help? Like, where can people find this and how can they reach out to No More Desk if they'd like to help in some way?

Starting point is 01:44:21 Yeah, so just on the No More Desk website, we can see the report and the map and all that stuff. And in there, there's a link to the media outreach email, which in the next couple months is my email. And just feel free to send an email there. And yeah, happy to give greater access. And right now, the data is pretty anonymized for privacy and safety. And there's a lot of the fields that we've kind of talked about that don't appear in the public database. So happy to share that with your searcher.

Starting point is 01:44:56 activists, advocacy people, journalists, things like that, and also we desperately would have lot to help. So interested in looking at some spreadsheets. Yeah, just taking it. Cool, great. Thank you so much your time and for all the work on this.

Starting point is 01:45:10 I know this was a lot of work getting those records, and I think it, I don't know, it gives us something to point to show how many people this border shit is killing. Oh, great. This is It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart.

Starting point is 01:45:40 I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news. Oh, no. Which is, frankly, one of the best ways to start this episode. And one of the best ways to start this show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called, let's see, at Hill Hitler. And I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist.

Starting point is 01:46:07 Oh, wow. I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communicates. And I have uncovered a secret, a secret Nazi code. Oh, wow. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hailed Hitler. He has posted some pictures in like, what I would assume, is some kind of military uniform that looks like, I don't know, it's some kind of like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there are some runes on this uniform that look very similar to the Odle Run.

Starting point is 01:46:36 So I'm thinking, because of the run, this guy might be a Nazi. Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have determined this. That's right. You can find me at Ocent Defender online. No, no, don't send people to Ossent Defender. That does it for us today, and it could happen here. Now, so this episode, we're going to talk about something that's been slowly frustrating me the past few weeks, and that is the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right into it. people have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the DHSGov

Starting point is 01:47:18 online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app. But this extends outside of X, the Everything app. This extends outside of Blue Sky, the Internet in general. This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti-fascist education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So bear with me, this is going to be kind of an odd episode, but I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same traps that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's start by talking about some communications posted on the internet by at DHSGov.

Starting point is 01:48:08 A picture of a painting titled American Progress by John Gast captioned, a heritage to be proud of, comma, a homeland worth defending. So, on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting, or at the very least, a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people, specifically with a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth the tide of quote-unquote progress

Starting point is 01:48:48 as indigenous people are forced to flee from the edge of the painting. It's fun because this is a painting we literally, when they had to explain manifest destiny, like colonialism, This is the painting that was in my textbook in high school history class. It is like the er, the colonialism, colonialism, good, genocide good painting. Genocide good. That's what the painting is. But what I have found through some hashtag research, there might be a hidden code in this, in this communication from the DHS.

Starting point is 01:49:25 Already an agency that only has the best interests of really all people who strive for human rights. the DHS. So if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet, Mia? 15? No, so close. So close. 14 words in this tweet, which may remind you of the 14 words, the Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric. But the 14 words, we must secure the existence

Starting point is 01:50:07 of our people and a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past, I would say, 10, 15 years, usually by implanting 14s, and usually 1488s

Starting point is 01:50:26 with 88, meaning how Hitler, because H is the 8,000. letter of the alphabet. This became a common Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti. You see this embedded into posts. See this in like Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet. This is actually a 1488 because two of the H's in this post are capitalized unusually. And that means howl Hitler. Wow. Because H's the eighth letter. Oh, but wait, actually, looking at this post again,

Starting point is 01:51:04 there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized, but don't worry, don't worry. This is still a dog whistle, because those other words that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers, are one and four.

Starting point is 01:51:20 So it's actually another 14. Oh, wow, we're doing numerology. We're doing Jamatria. We've become Q&I. We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing? What are we doing here? We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters to get a 1488. It's literally gibbet. And then also counting the total words in the whole tweet while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for a number.

Starting point is 01:52:00 another 14. What do we doing? How is this the piece of evidence that sinks, sinks the Trump administration, and finally proves that they're fascist? You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting instead of doing numerology on tweets. People are thinking, ha ha ha ha, ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with A-H-H-D-18-14. Nice try, groipers. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post. You can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide of manifest destiny,

Starting point is 01:52:45 while the administration, the DHS, is currently furthering ethno-nationalist policies. They are doing this. This is Homeland Security, right? I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland Security, but like, this is the agency that is literally rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have camps in multiple countries now. When I say they're being round up and sent to camps, it's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.

Starting point is 01:53:12 Zikot in El Salvador. Yeah. I mean, I think people have now escaped, so I can't technically call the Honduras one of death camp. But like, again, they're sending people to South Sudan. They're like, they're just doing this. Like, what are we doing here? So this episode, I want to focus on how people are misusing anti-fascist education, or I would argue they're misusing anti-fascist education, and kind of missing the forest for a cardboard cutout of trees.

Starting point is 01:53:41 Yeah. Not even trees, kind of something that could be a tree if you look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a real tree. And you don't need to sound like a Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious. Like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and furthermore, doing it. Doing things. What purpose does a dog whistle have? What are we doing here?

Starting point is 01:54:11 And this is something that we're going to discuss. I'm not just saying this and closing the episode. We are going to get into these. Yeah. And I think part of what's happening here, everybody is so cooked by the charinoid style of American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has a total victory. Q&N does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018, that the Q&N cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular

Starting point is 01:54:47 cultish project is kind of no more. But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on MAGA. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the internet. And this is what, what, like, everything is. And like the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 election in like a massive fraction from reality. in which they think that election was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading up to that,

Starting point is 01:55:29 which contributed to this. And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because that door was opened, now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as Blue and On conspiracy theories,

Starting point is 01:55:48 which is kind of a nonsense term. But it gets the point across. And I'm going to do a whole piece on Blue and on very soon I've been collecting Blune on conspiracy theories for a while. But I wanted to do something specifically about this 1488 and like secret codes thing. Because it's it's so evocative of like, you know, Q drops. And it's evocative of, you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing for generations.

Starting point is 01:56:15 And we're to talk about that more and read a little bit of an essay on that topic after this ad break. and I will let you know. There's going to be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode. So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the code.

Starting point is 01:56:43 Okay, we are back. Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here. This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard Verver, Vhrer,

Starting point is 01:57:00 her, Hofstetter, Hofstetter, Richard Hofstetter, one of the first, like, modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna, I have three paragraphs here that I, that I selected as, as being relevant to the current, the current

Starting point is 01:57:18 topic at hand. Quote, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evoked the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity

Starting point is 01:57:49 of their content, unquote. And I like that section specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle. We can see this used. There's aspects of people who are trying to. to search for this and trying to search for patterns in the communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I find sympathetic. Like I can understand because, yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote. Quote, the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.

Starting point is 01:58:33 Like religious millinerianists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days, and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as-of-yet-uneroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic. goals. And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid sense of frustration, unquote. Hofstetter is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before, how everyone in America wants to have

Starting point is 01:59:19 access to secret information. Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything. And like having having that like, informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, right, of a vortex of like meaningless noise. It's such a romantic idea that I alone have the info or the clue to piece this together, and it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very romantic notion. And it's also one that is exactly perfectly anti-suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just a moment where everything that is happening is just so clear. stunningly literal.

Starting point is 02:00:02 Like, it's all out of the open. Like, what is happening with the Trump administration? Okay, in 2020, there is a massive uprising to attempt to fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States to deal with its fucking class inequalities to deal with the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of people. pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right? And they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward. Like if this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because

Starting point is 02:00:56 it's just there. There's no subtlety to it. They're just saying. it, they just want to do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy in it. And it's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying. Yeah. You can argue that we have a Groyper occupied government, not because of counting words in posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS, as of today, which I'm recording this on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night,

Starting point is 02:01:25 are copying like Patriot Front-style tactics of loading up. up ICE agents in U-Haul-style rentable trucks to hunt down people to assault and kidnap. Like, they're just copying the Patriot Front playbook here. The ICE director said that he wants an Amazon-like mass deportation system, calling it, quote-unquote, Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this. You can listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the paranoid style of American politics.

Starting point is 02:01:59 essay, quote, a final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates quote-unquote evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished

Starting point is 02:02:45 convictions from it, unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this Nazi code hunting. It's actually a form of like self-coping. looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating. And this is a self-preservation mechanism. Someone on blue sky that I was talking to about this was arguing, like, ICE doesn't need to dog whistle. They have no reason to. Like, dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily get racists or fascists into power while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are like one of them, right? But these guys are already in power. Yeah. And the base already knows that they're in power. And the base already

Starting point is 02:03:26 knows that they're in power. There's no point in dog whistling. They're just using ice to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit ethno state rhetoric in a post from this morning, which has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten words. Not fourteen, ten words. Wow. DHS said, quote, serve your country. Defend your culture. No undergraduate degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants. It's about defense. a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest. No.

Starting point is 02:04:06 And I want to return to something else that the Hofsitter said in that second paragraph that you read about how, like, one of the central conceits is that, like, you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American public doesn't know anything about it. And like, yeah, you can, you know, it is distressing to a large extent, the extent to which people just don't know what the government is doing. So, like, if you look at any polling at all about anything that people are doing, everyone hates it. There isn't, like, a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're, that all these people are Nazis because, like, that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already. Like, trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, hi, I'm your neighbor.

Starting point is 02:04:51 You also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking, like, do this your people are doing in LA and, like, follow these fucking. ice fans around, right? That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge. So people do it less, even though it's less effective. In my discussion of this like online on various cursed social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics. and what I see as a sort of like abuse of anti-fascist education, right? Because people like, you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know, Molly Conger spent the past

Starting point is 02:05:34 eight years trying to actually, you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right? And as an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention. of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd

Starting point is 02:06:02 to see things that we've argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense. And it's kind of like trying to tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me

Starting point is 02:06:17 because, I mean, one person who I was lightly arguing about this online was saying, like this is not numerology and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric and like first of all

Starting point is 02:06:33 like codes aren't rhetoric codes or codes and the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric what they're actually like saying which has like proto-fascist or fascistic aspects that is the rhetoric

Starting point is 02:06:47 and they're doing it is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS as an agency, has fascistic underpinnings, via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalized letters into numbers,

Starting point is 02:07:04 it makes a secret Nazi message. Is there one person? No. It's going to become convinced to this. No. That's not the purpose. So trying to conceptualize this as like, we have to, we have to make sure

Starting point is 02:07:15 we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric. That doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about. Yeah. Also, like, I think, you know, like, I think we've sort of kind of just, to some extent, we've just failed on the normalization front. Because again, like, it's the president of the United States. Yeah. This is, this is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security. It has already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique. It's to, like, actually oppose them. But that's scary. That's scary. Do you know what's easy? Hosting on X the Everything app. Yeah, this is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state, because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all-powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants, right?

Starting point is 02:08:07 This is why it can stage things. This is why I can rig elections. This is why it can, like, I don't know, like, it can just, like, magically, like, disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone. It can stage any protest movement it wants to, right? and I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where I see people who are genuinely well-meaning leftists

Starting point is 02:08:26 who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state you will immediately be killed because the American state is all-powerful and irresistible and that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to the panoptic off. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure

Starting point is 02:08:41 of conspiracy and because the state is dangerous and can hurt you it's very, very easy to accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right? Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking, like, hiding people in like fucking U-Hauls to jump out and grab people? It's because when they tried to fucking mass, we stomp them, right? And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window.

Starting point is 02:09:13 Yeah, everyone follows them. People can follow them around and alert their community members on where ICE is. Like, again, motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit are, like, screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people. Like, yeah, that's the actual condition we're in. And, like, regular people. And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self-described as, like, anti-fascists or self-described as, as leftists, almost falling into this trap, like, more so than others. And it's a little bit evident of something that, like, I've described as, like, the forever 2016. how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016,

Starting point is 02:09:48 2017, 2018 era, and we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This is a different situation. This is 2025. And one other, like, defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote,

Starting point is 02:10:08 Nazis love playing games like this. So it's important that we call it out. and another person saying, quote, this is a fun, a little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote. And like, first of all,

Starting point is 02:10:20 this is not a game. This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And I think that view of like, anti-fascist education risks repeating like the okay symbol debacle,

Starting point is 02:10:37 right, where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter egg anti-fascism. It's kind of like the Barbara Streisand effect, where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology, I think, as Ratlimit put it, one of one of my favorite posters.

Starting point is 02:11:03 And like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it, to recap the OK symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and then having the media trying to convince regular people that anyone who uses like the OK hand symbol is secretly a fascist.

Starting point is 02:11:25 And this scheme worked. And eventually the OK symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was like invented as like a joke online.

Starting point is 02:11:42 And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the 14 words dog whistle, with an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far-right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS Gov account and their heritage to be proud of homeland worth defending American progress like ethno-nationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one way. or another if that American progress post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside. I can't tell you that. And the point I'm trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that sometimes

Starting point is 02:12:32 this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want. But you know what I do want right now? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? Another ad break. That's right. Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads. All right, we are back. To briefly take a small tangent here, I think there is something very important about like the fact the role stuck in 2016, which was sort of like the peak of irony, right,

Starting point is 02:13:20 as a social affect, has left us really unprepared for now where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're just doing it and saying it, right? Yeah. And it's not this sort of like irony-pilled in liability shit. They just do it. And people are just not prepared for that. They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts.

Starting point is 02:13:39 And I think they are still pushing this. I'm going to quote from a friend of the pod, rat limit, one of my favorite mutes. Quote, prediction, the Nazi salute will become common within two years. Right-wingers will half-ass it for plausible deniability, memeify the backlash, and then start fully doing it, quote-unquote, as a joke to quote-unquote troll the libs for being hysterical enough to think that

Starting point is 02:14:04 they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact this cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what Rett Limit predicted. There's this current trend on X the Everything app where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi-style salutes and trying to memeify the backlash with several posts going viral of these like aspiring influencers, either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having your arm in a Elon Musk,

Starting point is 02:14:46 my heart goes out to you, Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah. And I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense, right? He's like an actual person affiliated with the government.

Starting point is 02:14:57 But making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls, maybe not so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if a random, like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their instapot.

Starting point is 02:15:18 I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Nazi salute and about the ways that everyone, you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is that everyone has been trained to experience the world and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things. That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah. Yeah, let's do this. Let's do this. Yeah. Go for, go for it. No, I think part of this focus. on like these hidden codes and even just like these like messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:15:54 It's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing. And that's, I think, what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military. planes, those are aesthetic differences. And those differences may be important. And they're bad, right? I'm not saying these things are good. Those things are still bad. But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this like this neoliberal. Yeah, the

Starting point is 02:16:35 society of the spectacle. Exactly. Right. Let's like in June, I arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations. In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations. Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations of month. The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013, under Obama, averaging 36,000 a month. The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000. When the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice. That triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow U.S. military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country.

Starting point is 02:17:23 Colombia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later caved as Trump threatened punitive tariffs. And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this, like, image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher. That's kind of all I have left. Yeah, I mean, it is very fitting of our styles of politics

Starting point is 02:17:47 that you're going to Fisher here and I'm going to Benjamin. Benjamin is quoted in these sections that Fisher is pulling from as well. Yep, yep. I'm going to the source. I'm not going through the fucking CRU bullshit. Like, Bob Marxist, bourgeois running dog. But, no, but like, you know, like one of the things that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read, he's one of the great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died

Starting point is 02:18:18 trying to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that, you know, one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics, right? That aesthetics would allow you to, you know, feel representation instead of do the action. And this is, this is, this is, this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through a whole bunch of different analyses of how capitalism functions, right? This is, this is one of the three lines of the society of spectacle. And it's this real issue that we're dealing with now, because again, kind of, in a sense, what has happened to everything, right? And you can argue to some extent that, like, our channel being called cool zone media is sort of this, is that all politics from every side

Starting point is 02:19:03 has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetic. allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through this sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah. And it also is doing the same thing to us, but the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't. Right. And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic of sort of like of fucking living in images, right? and, you know, go do the actual shit that the board is talking about

Starting point is 02:19:36 in the society of spectacle where you want all your friends form workers' councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of the people who are taking it from you, you're just going to live in the fascist nightmare forever. I mean, you could look at the Union resistance

Starting point is 02:19:48 to ICE deportations specifically in L.A. with Russian workers. That's literally doing that. And, like, I would argue, like, now, it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics, but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you can even see that insofar as, it focuses on, you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like blood and soil.

Starting point is 02:20:08 That's why they're posting American progress, driving out the indigenous people with the Aryan white lady carrying the torch of progress. It is an asceticized politics on like a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, uh, the anti goat. Quote, Mark Fisher in Catholicism, quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible. Internament camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist resists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space, but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. Unquote. This is very similar to something that me and Mia

Starting point is 02:20:54 talked about right as Trump got elected in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile. Yeah, although I see, again, I disagree with officials here because the neoliberals understood what they were doing to begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away. That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses. Like, sure, I mean, that's what, contrary to their official hopes. Yeah, yeah, and it's like, you know. Quote, such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless, only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religious. religion, the first resort to the helpless, proliferate. Unquote. This is part of what I conceptualize as this code hunting is almost a form of this

Starting point is 02:21:39 hopeless superstition. To continue, quote, the catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows? Its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present, as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being, a negative miracle, a melodation which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism, unquote. And yeah, that's what Mia is talking about with Gita Bore and society of the spectacle. That's

Starting point is 02:22:24 the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's argued that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism. That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alon Badoo, quote, to justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful.

Starting point is 02:22:51 So instead, they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky, that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust,

Starting point is 02:23:08 but it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lemosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated.

Starting point is 02:23:26 Oh, yeah, no, because we're doing this shit now. But this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions people die, right? One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through aesthetics of racist, nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do. Yeah. And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane, that we should not allow at all. Yeah, I see the logic of this all the fucking time talking to people where we'll be like, okay, like, no deportations. And then you get a whole bunch of people being like, well, but what about criminals? It's like... Some deportation. What are you... This is the structural logic of the original, like, deportation blitz from Trump. Creating a class of undesirable that you can then always add to and press the border on, like what Carl Schmitt talks about.

Starting point is 02:24:18 This is the structural logic of fascism. But everyone thinks about deportations this way now. And they're mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But, but... But until people actually break through the sort of pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here. And this is, I think, one of the limits of using anti-fascism as this like aesthetic code hunting is because a few days ago, the THS posted a Woody Guthrie song, his song, America the Beautiful, with DHS posting, the promise of America is worth protecting

Starting point is 02:24:57 the future of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this video is all white people, which this sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words, except it has 15 words. So therefore, not a Nazi dog whistle.

Starting point is 02:25:12 We're safe, guys, we're good. I counted the words. There's 15 of them, so you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is like the prime contradiction. in which I am growing increasingly frustrated.

Starting point is 02:25:27 So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you have any final wise notes? The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed. It is now time to end the episode right here. That's right, it is. We're late for a meeting. Oh, and if you were able to decode the hidden message in the ad break,

Starting point is 02:25:58 send the contents of the message via email to your local congressman to redeem your prize. Bye-bye. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you, I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Tote, and Robert Evans. We're covering the week of July 30th, August 7th. Robert, what is Texas? So the original root word of the state's name is Tejas, which means friendship, a thing that no one in Texas has ever known, because it's the angriest state in the country.

Starting point is 02:26:53 That's, that's Texas, Garrison. Up for some stiff competition these days. Up for some stiff competition. But it's still holding out, isn't it? Everything's bigger in Texas, Garrison. It's famed as being the second or third worst state that borders New Mexico. So, you know, rarefied company. Really, it can compete with all of the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado.

Starting point is 02:27:15 But the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado are Oklahoma and Arizona and Texas. So not high bars. Texas has some of the finest bed and breakfasts that I've ever stayed in. That's right. Including one with a deeply disturbing basement. Okay, just because they had one torture basement, James. So we're talking about Texas right now because a bunch of the Democratic state legislators just fled the state for Illinois, I believe is how the name of the state is pronounced. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:27:45 It's French. It's French. Fact check from a real Illinois and wrong. This post fact checks by real Illinois. So when you've got a legislature of pretty much any type, at least in the U.S. I'm sure there's other countries that don't do it this way. But you need what's called a quorum in order to actually do anything, which means of the total number of elected members of the legislature, you need a certain number of them. Otherwise, you can't like do anything because there's not enough people there in order to actually have it be a valid vote. And I probably don't have to explain the reasonings why there's some pretty obvious reasons why you'd want it to work this way. But there are, however, some downsides to it. You know, potentially, you can be, depending on whether or not

Starting point is 02:28:29 your side is doing it, it's a downside or an upside, right? Which is that if you have a side that is the minority in the government, and they don't want a vote to go through. They can just bounce. And if they bounce at the right time before the legislature has been called and like no one's there, then you can't get a quorum and nothing can get done. And this is big news right now, because in order to stop a redistricting vote, a bunch of Democratic legislators have fled. But this is a thing that has been going on for well over a century. And it is a thing that both sides of the aisle have engaged in with substantial regularity. I'm not an expert on any of this. The earliest example I can find of anyone doing this is in Texas. I'm not saying that means it's

Starting point is 02:29:17 the earliest example of anyone in the U.S. doing this, but the earliest example I found in my research was from 1870. So there's an article on this in that by the Texas State Historical Association called Understanding the Rump Senate of the 12th Texas legislature. And the Rump Senate is a term applied to the 15 radical Republican members of the 12th Texas legislature who fled in 1870 to stop a vote on a militia bill. And this bill gave the governor power to declare martial law. It gave him the power to establish a state police force. It increased the appointive power of the governor. A bunch of stuff that's not all that interesting to us today because governors, like every state does this today, right? Like there's state police everywhere. Every state

Starting point is 02:30:02 governor has the power to call a militia, you know, a National Guard or whatever. Like, this is not controversial today, but it was back then. And it's important that I note that while it was 15 radical Republicans who fled in 1870, those were conservatives, right? Like, the radical Republicans were conservatives in 1870, right? So this is, this is kind of a reverse. If you're just sort of looking at things from a liberal or conservative point of view, this is kind of a reversal of what's happening right now in Texas, although it's happened a lot of other types. since, right? So this is 1870, and I should note it didn't succeed, right? This is, however, one of the fairly rare times, when this kind of thing happens, if it goes on long enough,

Starting point is 02:30:42 every time the governor basically will declare an arrest warrant for the legislators who have left, and as a general rule, this does nothing, right? Like, the governor has the ability to find them a certain amount per day, and it has the ability to call out an arrest warrant, but it's not like a real arrest warrant. Like, if you murder a guy and then lead to another state, an arrest warrant will be issued that law enforcement in that state has to abide by it, right? Because you murdered somebody. This is not a real crime. Basically, if you flee back, if you wind up back in the state that you left, you can be taken

Starting point is 02:31:16 into custody by law enforcement in the state, but they can't leave the state to get you. And almost, I would say, like, 90% of the time when something like this happens, nobody actually gets arrested. However, in 1870, several conservative members were held under arrest for like three weeks. until the Senate could pass the legislation. So as is usually the case, whenever stuff like this happens, it only succeeded in kind of delaying the inevitable. It didn't succeed in actually stopping things. And this has happened a number of times in Texas. Most recently, Texas Democratic lawmakers broke quorum in 2021. And I want to quote here from an article in ABC News, quote,

Starting point is 02:31:56 Texas state lawmakers less broke quorum in 2021 when Democratic House representatives fled Texas to prevent measures restricting voting options. The measures eventually passed after internal Democratic fissures led to enough representatives returning to form a quorum. And this is the kind of thing where Governor Abbott allowed the sergeant of arms or commanded the sergeant of arms to arrest the members within Texas. Weirdly enough, a couple of them did return. The first was Philip Cortez, who like briefly came back to Austin to handle personal business. And there was a civil arrest warrant signed, but then he fled the state again before he could be arrested. There were warrant sign for the 52 remaining absent legislators, but law enforcement didn't arrest or detain anybody. Eventually, enough Democratic legislators came back

Starting point is 02:32:42 into the state for personal reasons. Some of them had like shit to handle, like in their own life. Some of them had other things they wanted to push through in terms of like legislature and so they were like, I guess I'll come back and let this happen. And eventually the House reached quorum. And this past, Democrats did not face the $500 a day fine that they'd been threatened by the governor, and nobody was arrested. Now, I've been talking about Texas here, but this happens all over the place. In fact, when this story first broke, the immediate thing I thought back on was what happened very recently in the state of Oregon and has happened a couple of times in the state of Oregon. It was mine, too. They do this all the time. They do this a lot. It's like for four months.

Starting point is 02:33:23 Yes. This is a common thing in Oregon. It has started, and this is, Both parties have done this, I should note, right? Both Democrats and Republicans in Oregon, as in Texas, have done walkouts. They don't even have to leave the state. They don't even have to leave the state. Although they have recently. This seems to have started in Oregon, I think, in the 1970s. There's actually a really good article that's like an overview of a bunch of different states' history of doing this in Central Oregon Daily News, although it's an AP Press article.

Starting point is 02:33:56 So I guess Central Oregon Daily just is licensing this thing. Anyway, in Oregon, the most recent case of this happening was in 2023. After Republicans staged a six-week boycott, which is the longest so far in Oregon legislature history, over a law the Democratic Party was pushing to protect abortion rights and the right to gender-affirming care for transgender people. This, again, did not succeed. This was passed in the legislature. And there were actually some consequences, although it hasn't been enough time to see how serious there will be, because there was a different GOP walkout over climate change legislation, which also failed in 2022.

Starting point is 02:34:35 And as a result of that 2022 walkout, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution in Oregon, which barred lawmakers from getting reelected if they had more than 10 unexcused absences in a single annual legislative session. And as a result of the walkout the next year over abortion rights and gender affirming care, 10 Oregon Republican lawmakers were barred from seeking re-election. again, as I stated, this is something that very rarely actually does anything. There's a 2021 case in New Hampshire where Democrats walked out in protest of an anti-abortion bill. The Republican House Speaker locked the doors to maintain a quorum. I'm going to quote from that Central Orkin-Taley article,

Starting point is 02:35:15 I'm locking the doors right now so that everybody in the chamber will stay in the chamber, shouted House Speaker Sherman Packard, who later refused to let Democrats back in to vote on the bill. It's just fucking, like, representative politics. It's just school children shouting at each other. I want them to fight with Keynes. They should be fighting with Keyes. Agreed. Give them nerves. Give them, give them all a nerve. Let them fight it out.

Starting point is 02:35:37 I would say 90% of the time, nothing is at least from the reading I've done, nothing is achieved except for a delay, which is not to say that that's nothing. And also I do believe, like in the case of the Democratic Party, I don't think what the Texas Democrats are doing will stop the redistricting. Like, the Republicans are going to win this fight.

Starting point is 02:35:55 It's worth fighting. Yeah. I'm glad they're fighting it. However, very rarely is the actual law stopped or is anything but a delay achieved. One of the rare cases in which something more was achieved is in 2011 in Wisconsin. Democratic State senators fled to Illinois as a protest against Governor Scott Walker. He was attempting to strip public workers of their union rights. Yeah. And this, you know, this walkout was staged at the same time as a mass pro-union demonstration at the Capitol. And after several weeks, they won a part of victory, Republicans weakened the legislation, which is like significant, right? Like the fact that

Starting point is 02:36:32 they actually got concessions over this. And sometimes the delay can be significant. The same year that that all went down in Wisconsin, Indiana Democrats also left for, for whatever reason, Illinois is where you go if you're doing this. No one wants to come get you. No one's to go to Illinois. No one's going to Illinois. Fuck that. It's just not worth it. I've been to, fuck Illinois. Sorry, Illinois is the hero of this story. We love you, Illinois. Chicago's fine. Chicago's fine. For whatever reason, this is the state you go to if you're a Democrat doing this in the modern era. If you're in Wisconsin, it's not that far away, I guess.

Starting point is 02:37:05 Well, this is Indiana, too. And also, I mean, yeah. That's also not very far away. Yeah, it's also not far. Yeah, they couldn't make it to California, you know. It's further now that Texans are doing it. Yeah. But Indiana Democrats left in 2011 to prevent Republican law that would have stopped unions from levying mandatory fees on union members, which would kind of make, could potentially make it impossible to do a union. Because nobody wants to pay for a union, but everyone wants one, right? Yeah. Every worker does. You want the union protecting you. You don't want to have to give up your money.

Starting point is 02:37:36 So it's the kind of thing you could, I think the Republican plan was use the natural greed that people have in order to hamstring unionizing efforts. Many such cases. And the Democrats left, which left the House short of its quorum and threatened to stay in the other state until, they were promised that the bills would not be called. Republicans successfully passed the bill, but they had to wait until the next year. So again, every now and then, you eke a win out here or the site doing this eeks out of win,

Starting point is 02:38:07 and everyone does it. And everyone has been doing it for more than 150 years. Nothing about this is new, with the exception of the fact that they actually look to be pushing some serious legal consequences. The most I've been able to find in the history of this is what happened in 1870, where a number of people were arrested and held in custody for a few weeks.

Starting point is 02:38:27 Usually no one is arrested and usually the fines aren't even actually levied, right? Now, this does cost money. The last Texas walkout, Texas Democrats were spending like 10 grand a day on, you know, food and bored, you know, paying for their hotels or whatever, which was, I think, Beto O'Rourke raised most of the money through his pack, which is what covered it. A few hundred grand. Yeah, like $600,000. So, you know, this does cost money to do. because you've got to put these people up. But generally, you're not really hiding them.

Starting point is 02:38:56 And generally, the legal consequences are more of a threat than a reality, right? And that might not be true in this most recent case. Yes. Yes. And we're going to throw to you, Garrison. But first, you know who does force serious, life-changing legal consequences on people? Jay Pritzker? Yes. And the products and services that support this podcast, which are entirely,

Starting point is 02:39:20 we're actually backed entirely by J.B. Pritzker. From your mouth to God's ears, Robert. Not like knowingly. I stole his debit card. And boy, that guy has a high daily spending limit. Let me tell you. Well, he has a lot of shadow companies. Anyway, thanks, J.B. Please don't change your password to your online bank. Garrison. Hi, we're back.

Starting point is 02:39:54 So, as Robert said, Republicans in the Texas legislature are trying to gerrymandered Texas to increase their total power over the state, proposing a redistricting map that would add five more Republican seats. And in an effort to prevent or delay this, this past Sunday, 62 Texas Democrats fled to Illinois to deny quorum in the Texas House. And only 12 need to return in order for the redistricting to go through with the main goal right now being trying to stay out of the state until November. In terms of consequences, new House rules adopted back in 2023 after the 2021 quorum can impose a $500 fine per day for missing lawmakers, not just from the governor. Now, on Monday, the Texas House Republicans voted to issue civil arrest warrants for the lawmakers,

Starting point is 02:40:46 empowering the Sergeant of Arms and the Texas state troopers to locate, apprehend, and transport the rogue legislators back to the capital. Governor Greg Abbott announced, and mobilize the Texas Department of Public Safety to return the Democrats to the chamber. Now, these warrants really only apply within state lines. These are civil warrants. They're not facing criminal charges. Though, back in

Starting point is 02:41:07 2003, during a similar quorum break due to gerrymandering efforts, federal resources were used to track planes with suspected rogue Democrat lawmakers. And Abbott has already proposed trying to declare their house seats vacant if they do not return,

Starting point is 02:41:23 a tactic which would probably prompt some lengthy legal battles and require new special elections to take place to fill the seats. So that still would like delay this process. That's not a quick solution. But there has been some breaking news as of this morning, recording Thursday. On Thursday morning, Texas Senator John Corby announced that the FBI would now be investigating and working to locate the Texas House Democrats, saying in a press release, quote, I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable for fleeing Texas. We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities, unquote.

Starting point is 02:42:11 So the extent of the FBI's involvement in tracking down, locating, or apprehending the Democrats is currently unknown. The FBI has declined to comment, but this is something that's going to develop in the next week. Which they always do on ongoing cases. Yeah. Sure. If you email or whatever, the FBI about any ongoing case, this is what they do, period. It's been their policy for forever. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:42:35 So it doesn't tell you anything. Just saying that in terms of like, we do not know what the extent of their involvement is going to be at this point. Right. Yeah. And they might not even know either. Yeah. This could just be a cash Patel TikTok. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:42:48 There's a good chance they're internally scrambling to like, what are we going to do? This would be unprecedented, sending a federal, like, law enforcement arm to physically apprehend and return lawmakers. That is certainly an escalation from using, like, federal resources to track planes like they did in 2003. This would be a whole new ballgame. Yeah, as I noted, it's uncommon for them to be arrested inside the state by the sergeant at arms. Sure. I mean, like, arrest just means, you know, you'd, like, accompany them back to the Capitol or force them to return to the Capitol. You're staying here.

Starting point is 02:43:22 you're not going to leave to the state. Yeah, you've got a guy called Sajun Arms involved. It's not serious. But even that's pretty uncommon. Yeah. No, I mean, like most quorum breaks fail because legislators just choose to return, whether to do personal business, whether to do political business. It takes a lot of discipline to not return to your home for a period of like three to six months. Yeah, you got stuff to do.

Starting point is 02:43:46 Most people's, a lot of people have what are called famil, familize, famarleys, something like that. Familiates. I don't know what that means. I think it's a new concept. Yeah, we're still working at Cool Zone to get a handle on it. We'll have a report on whatever that is soon. Don't worry. Yeah. They've got to get back to the pollicule or whatever. But they haven't violated a federal law. Right. No. So federal. They even violated a Texas law. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a law violation. It is literally the governor saying, I'm sending guys for you. Yeah. This is some old-timey. parliamentarian shit. Yeah. And like, you know, as I was saying, it's like,

Starting point is 02:44:25 again, it isn't, this could just be a cashmettel TikTok op, but also... God, I hate the way

Starting point is 02:44:31 that sounds. What a fucking way to describe our federal law enforcement. Oh, it's on Hidge! This is genuinely, okay,

Starting point is 02:44:37 I'm going to take a very, very slight detour, which I said this before, but also like, the thing that gives me the most hope about all of this is that like,

Starting point is 02:44:44 look, they found the right winger to put in charge of the American Secret Police and he doesn't want to do his job because he just wants to be a podcaster. Hey, understand.

Starting point is 02:44:53 Look, you make me director the FBI, and I promise to be more or less the same. Yeah, but, you know, if this is actually a thing, right? And federal agents are suddenly grabbing lawmakers out of Illinois, that is... That's a big deal. Yeah, that's a massive escalation.

Starting point is 02:45:11 And that's why, as people fully supported by Pritzker's private militia, we will be on the front lines defending the Texas lawmakers. That's right. Yeah. Saluting this show. Chicago flag. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 02:45:21 Yes. As Governor Pritzker recently stated, Blood for the Blood God, Skoles for the Skull throne. Classic Pritzker. I do you need to do some Pritzker, not even slander here, some just fuck you,

Starting point is 02:45:33 tiny bit of fuck-you-pritsker news, which I was going to talk about a little bit anyways later. But Pritzker has basically allowed a bunch of hospitals in Chicago to stop covering gender affirming care for minors, even though it's, like,

Starting point is 02:45:47 illegal under Illinois state law. So fuck him for that. Eat shit. Yeah. We will unfortunately oppose the connie to the Great Plains. And what's the reasoning there? Has he given any? He was just like, oh, well, they're going to lose funding.

Starting point is 02:46:03 Oh, no, it is over. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's over the state funding. Yeah, it is over the threats. But like a number of states have been something similar is brewing in Oregon right now. Yeah. Yeah, we've, yeah, this has been happening in Oregon. We just had an episode about people resisting this.

Starting point is 02:46:18 in Pennsylvania. This will be a continuing ongoing struggle, but I, fuck you, Pritzker, eat shit. Like, I do have two science stories for this middle segment here. First one, I'm going to call on everyone's,

Starting point is 02:46:36 I don't know, probably my least favorite Kennedy, RFRFK Jr. Wow. Controversial. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of bad Kennedys. Yeah. After reviewing the science

Starting point is 02:46:47 and consulting topics, experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that MRNA technology poses more risks and benefits for these respiratory viruses. That's why after extensive review, Barta has begun the process of terminating these 22 contracts totaling just under $500 million. To replace the troubled MRI programs, we're prioritizing the development of the safer, broader vaccine strategies. Sure.

Starting point is 02:47:18 Sure. Sure thing, Mr. Kennedy. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, that sounds true and not like we're throwing away a holy grail of medical miracles. Literally won the Nobel Prize! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:47:31 So this is some devastating news where he is removing 22 contracts from researchers and universities that are developing new RNA vaccine technology. And earlier in that video, which I'm not going to play, because it's just him basically lying. But he was lying

Starting point is 02:47:48 about how MRNA technology has been ineffective against upper respiratory infections because it only targets a single protein, which not only becomes obsolete due to mutations, but actually accelerates the mutation process and prolongs pandemics. This is not true. You can- No, no, it's not true. This is not true. And one of the most unique aspects of MRNA technology is that the vaccines can

Starting point is 02:48:10 be developed at a much faster pace to be deployed against mutations. And even if a vaccine does not what, 100% prevent an infection, that doesn't mean they still won't, like, decrease the severity of symptoms. He is trying to coat his decades, decades long, like, anti-vaccine advocacy in this, like, scientific language while actually just, like, stripping away all of the funding and removing access to vaccines. And this is stuff that he promised not to do in his confirmation hearings. He said that he would not take away vaccines, and he would not change who's on the vaccine advisory panels. He has done both of those things so far.

Starting point is 02:48:49 Yeah, yeah. Two months ago, he fired all 17 members of the advisory panel. I talked with Kaveh about this, and he replaced them with eight anti-vaxers. And not only did he remove a multi-million dollar contract from Derna to continue mRNA vaccine research, he now canceled these 22 other contracts totaling $500 million of technology. People are going to die and get sick because of these changes. Yes. Yeah. Which doesn't just affect like COVID and the flu. It also affects all of the other ways that mRNA technology can be utilized. A lot of these research projects are about expanding

Starting point is 02:49:23 the possible use of this technology beyond upper respiratory infections. So this sucks. Yeah, this is real bad. I am very nervous about the development of the HIV vaccine and cancer vaccines, things that we were getting so close to now being put into jeopardy

Starting point is 02:49:41 because this fucking clown is in charge of health and human services. A ton of this work done at the Solk Institute in San Diego, actually. It was reported earlier this week that some Republicans and Trump himself might actually not be happy about this, and Trump has a meeting scheduled with RFK Jr. today to discuss these cancellations. So we'll see where that goes. In some other science news, Sean Duffy, interim NASA administrator, who also is the Secretary of Transportation, who directed his employees to priority.

Starting point is 02:50:15 ties funding and grants towards demographics with high marriage rates. He announced that he was expediting plans to launch and operate a 100-kilawatt nuclear reactor for the moon. Great. Look, there's a lot of people living on the moon, and power outages have been a constant problem there, Garrison, if this science fiction novel from the 1960s is accurate. I talk with a friend of mine who is an anonymous NASA contractor, she gave a quote, quote, I need a cigarette, unquote. Great, because he just got fucked.

Starting point is 02:50:54 It's also worth noting that all of this is coming in the context of the largest, really, like the largest cuts in the history of American science across the board to anything that's actually like, even remotely doing science. Like, yeah, sorry. I just want to go on it.

Starting point is 02:51:09 Especially space science. Like, Duffy is trying to manufacture this new space race and prioritized like manned moon missions all while cutting by at least 50% all NASA science missions and and just like absolutely crippling NASA's capacity to actually develop technology. Now Duffy said at a press conference announcing this new directive on Tuesday, quote, we are in a race to the moon. A race with China to the moon. And to have a base on the moon, we need energy. Unquote. Is that fucking 1950? What do you talk? What? What are you talking about?

Starting point is 02:51:43 That is the time when the greatness happened, Gariffin. They want to go back to that. The NASA contractor I spoke with said, quote, NASA is already down at least 20% of its workforce and behind on its previously announced to lunar missions and objectives. See the Lunar Gateway and Artemis 3. I just don't immediately see a world where NASA does this successfully.

Starting point is 02:52:04 Even if they go the route of contracting it out, if the success, specifically the lack thereof, of the commercial lunar payload services program and the commercial LEO destinations program has any indication for how this will go, it will be mirrored in failure and many years behind schedule at best, unquote. This new NASA directive

Starting point is 02:52:24 from Shandafi calls for a fission surface power program executive to be named by the end of August, who will then implement and oversee... Yes. Yes, who will then implement and oversee the project while reporting directly to the NASA administrator. The directive reads, quote, since March 24, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort

Starting point is 02:52:46 to place a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s. The first country to do so could potentially declare a keepout zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence, if not there first, unquote. And this is, I think, a big part of why Duffy is wanting to do this. And the contractor I spoke to said, quote, if they're able to extend some, quote, quote, exclusion zone around a reactor on the surface where other countries aren't allowed to land, it's not difficult to imagine that they may try to use this to de facto claim areas of the moon

Starting point is 02:53:21 for the United States, unquote. Hell yeah, we have colonized the moon. And there's even more troubling use cases. Part of the directive reads that this would, quote, encourage dual use, civil and defense operational architectures. Yes. deployed fission surface power systems in coordination with interagency partners. Moon base. Unquote. Space Force finally getting its moment in the sun on the moon, I guess. This really is just like the pure unspeakable tragedy as unspeakable farce version of colonialism

Starting point is 02:53:57 because it's like the moon is the one place that is actually terra nullus and there's nothing there and there's nothing to gain from being there. there's just nothing but you know we gotta we gotta colonize it yeah well the sun never set on the American Empire if you got the moon on it as well

Starting point is 02:54:16 so you got that going for you it's just just the peer drive of colonialism detached from its actual like material motives having failed to gain Greenland we will pivot and take the moon instead I mean you know the moon and Greenland are both similarly habitable territories

Starting point is 02:54:35 so it's true But you can't do backflips in Greenland. So this is the plot of despicable me. Like, that's what we're doing here. We're doing the plot of despicable me. Yeah, many science fiction movies have predicted this. Please send them all to us. Yes, as was noted by Robert Heinlein,

Starting point is 02:54:55 The Moon is indeed a harsh mistress. Wait, what is that I hear? Is that the tariff songs? Oh, God. Every time. Every time it's good. Let's talk turf tariffs. There are so many of them.

Starting point is 02:55:25 The tariffs have gone into effect. So, we're going to do a full episode about this on Monday because there is so much tariff bullshit that it, quite frankly, needs its own actual episode, in which we're going to be talking about shit like. For example, the U.S. has maybe on accident, maybe on purpose, recognized the Junta. Myanmar is a legitimate government. Do the tariff stuff. We're talking about that on Monday because we don't have time for that shit.

Starting point is 02:55:50 Yeah. What we instead have time for is the just massive array of tariffs on a list of country so long that we just genuinely can't read them all. Okay, this is a very, very confusing raft of tariffs in a lot of ways. It's simpler than the other ones, but, okay, so percy and N, if the U.S. runs a trade deficit with you and you're not also in one of the other special categories where we have imposed a really high tariff on you, it's like 15%. if we have a trade surplus with the country, we imposed a 10% tariff. This doesn't make any sense. Sure. Okay.

Starting point is 02:56:26 So in terms of the stated motives of the tariffs, it doesn't make any sense except in terms of raising money, which these raise very little actual money relative to like the amount of money the U.S. spends. I mean, right-wing commentators have stated that the end goal of this massive tariff program is to abolish income tax because we can fund the government through tariffs, actually. Great. Yeah. And just, no, you can't.

Starting point is 02:56:51 Like, I, this, no. This is just. Yeah, at the same time, it's driving the deficit into the fucking sky. Like. Yeah. And we've talked about the sort of risks that this has caused with like the sort of true believer deficit hawks versus these just completely unhinged, fund the government with tariff weirdos.

Starting point is 02:57:11 But comma, there had been a huge number of countries that now we have 15% tariffs on. We've also gotten a formal, like, announcement of the 100% tariffs on semiconductors unless you invest. Do some kind of significant investment in the U.S. It's deeply unclear what the fuck that means. Apple has pledged to invest $100 billion in the U.S. There's this very, very weird thing on the right where like they just, they think that you can make iPhones here.

Starting point is 02:57:41 You can't. You just simply cannot. We do not have the labor force. We do not have the technology. Yeah, but Tim Cook did just bribe. Trump with a nice plate. A gold and an iPhone. An orb.

Starting point is 02:57:53 Inget of gold. I thought it was a gold iPhone. There was some glass involved as well. No, it was, it was a plate that was on like a gold like brick base. I love that. Yeah, that's the way we do it now. Like, really subtly we slide it under the radar. I'm scared to give gold of gold.

Starting point is 02:58:09 You have to bribe the Supreme ruler by giving gifts of gold to grand good favor. Oh, God. It is It's like fucking smorg Whatever Like he has this pile of gold That he's going to be sitting on Oh man

Starting point is 02:58:24 He's gonna be Scrooge McDucking In that shit By the end of four years Oh don't get us started on duck tails Oh no No No No

Starting point is 02:58:31 No All right Cutting that here Yeah That'll really inflate the length of this episode That's what they call a layup In sports ball

Starting point is 02:58:38 Yeah What's the terrace up to They're calling me The fucking Wembeniob I'm fucking A fucking Inflation shot blocking

Starting point is 02:58:46 fuck this. We're talking about ship infrastructure. People have been trying to develop, like the infrastructure developed ships for a long time now. The Biden administration did this. The Chinese government isn't pouring a bunch of money into it and it's basically impossible to actually develop domestic ship infrastructure other than the kinds of infrastructure the U.S. already has because the really short version of it is that it's not just a technological problem and it is. It's really hard to actually develop this technology. This is why almost all of the direct productions are they're trying to replicate basically. which just happens in Taiwan. It's not just a problem of the technology is really hard. It's a problem of the machines to make the machines that you need to make these things exist in like one place in the world in Switzerland. Right. So in order to actually scale up production of this, which is in theory what these 100% imported semiconductor tariffs are supposed to do, right?

Starting point is 02:59:38 You have to go up three layers of the supply chain. You have to make the machines to make the machines that make the machines that make the semiconductors, right? That's like the simplest way to explain it. We can't fucking do that. Like, Apple can throw a fucking hundred billion dollars. They don't do shit, right? So they're chasing just a ghost, but, you know, our entire sort of like trade policy is just being run by the just weird, fascist, measmic phantoms of all of these trade policy people. Now, it's also worth noting that there's been, you know, another, I guess, kind of tariff that's been enacted other than hilariously, the countries that tried to negotiate with Trump got worse rates than the ones

Starting point is 03:00:21 who just waited until he imposed 15% rate generally. That's good. But also, so Trump has been threatening anyone who buys oil from Russia and also, I think Venezuela, although it's been less press on that, with 50% tariffs right now. He's threatening India with 50% tariffs. because India has been buying oil from Russia that India's tariffs are currently at 25%. He has also just straight up

Starting point is 03:00:47 imposed a 50% tariff on Brazil for refusing to release Bolsonaro. There's been some updates on that front where Lula is just straight up refusing to do direct talks to the U.S. Lula had an exclusive interview with Reuters where he said, quote, we had already pardoned the U.S. interventions

Starting point is 03:01:04 in the 1964 coup, said Lula, who got his political story. I understand it, blah. Listen to the Lula episodes we did. They're very good. more Lula quote. But this is now not a small intervention. It's the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable. It's worth noting that this is actually a pretty massive change for Lula's specifically relations with the U.S.

Starting point is 03:01:26 Lula actually had very good relations with George Bush, but he is writing a massive tide of Brazilian anti-American nationalism. And he's attempting to spread this tide elsewhere, right? He's been specifically saying that he's calling on organized resistance from particularly India and China, but the rest of Bricks, which is a, well, okay, Bricks was originally a category of assets that's now kind of vaguely a political alliance whose main members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It's unclear if this will happen. I kind of, I don't know, but Lula's the first person really, really seriously trying to organize resistance to this outside of the EU. the EU is also under threat of 30% tariffs

Starting point is 03:02:10 if they don't just sort of like see the Trump's demands but like you know again India also negotiate a deal with the US and then immediately got their tariffs like he's now being threatened with 50% tariffs so you can't negotiate with him to escape this so I don't know Lula maybe this

Starting point is 03:02:24 the beginning of sort of organized like large scale organized tariff resistance to the US being framed in this sort of like collective struggle versus the US thing that's an interesting political trend that we'll be following as all of this continues Okay, and the rest of the unhinged amount of tariff news we're going to be covering Monday. I will make a brief note that the Yale Budget Lab is estimating like a $2,400 increase for the average family,

Starting point is 03:02:52 just in terms of like inflation prices for this, especially on things like clothing. They're specifically, I think there's a CNN article about, they're specifically talking about running shorts and shoes and anything, any goods from South Asia, massively increasing in price. They're talking 30% increases very quickly. So, yeah. Now, obviously all of this news is, I don't know, the stock market has kind of like accustomed itself to tariff news.

Starting point is 03:03:20 Yeah. But, comma, we got a really, really bad jobs report last month. And... Well, actually, well, well, I don't know if that's true. I think the jobs report could be completely faked. Yeah, who can say... Oh, Jesus. If the president says it, it has to be true.

Starting point is 03:03:34 It's a Biden. Did you know a Biden appointee? Oh, that's right. Crazy. The auto pen is issued this job's report. So, yeah, Trump has fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing this report. We are just, we are just truly fully into the deep end of shit now. I mean, the report just showed that we didn't have very positive job growth.

Starting point is 03:04:02 And like, like, anyone who's trying to get a job right now. can confirm that. It's like a nightmare. Yeah. And we're just like, we're just like fully going to be in like, you know, it's unclear exactly how fast American data collection capacity is going to degrade. It is worth noting this is the thing that kind of happens at the end of detainterships when they really start going to shit is that they lose the ability to trust their own statistical apparatus. Yeah. I mean, like anything that happens that Trump just doesn't like, you can claim it's fake and rigged. Whether that's losing an election, whether that's his, his good, his good close

Starting point is 03:04:34 personal friend, Jeffrey Epstein, or if that's a Bureau of Labor Statistics job report. It's all rigged. It's all a hope. Yeah. But to tie this back to Lula for a second, I think it's actually a really interesting historical parallel that's worth noting that Lula's rise to political prominence came off of a series of strikes that was held because a bunch of economists that were working with inside the Brazilian labor unions figured out that the military dictatorship of Brazil had been

Starting point is 03:05:01 faking their inflation numbers. And like, this is one of the things that call. cause the end of the dictatorship. So, you know, you can only lie about the inflation rate for so long before, like, someone goes like, hey, you've been lying about this the whole time. And I don't know, this has brought down military dictators just before. And that's why we have to hold archive of our own accountable for faking those inflation numbers.

Starting point is 03:05:23 I agree with you entirely, Garrison. I don't get paid enough for this. You've lost me. Not following. And, yeah, that has been tariff talk. You know what? We'll continue to be available to our listeners at an excellent price despite tariffs. The products and services that support this podcast?

Starting point is 03:05:42 That's absolutely correct, Garrison. Well done. All right, we're back. So back. And also back is the United Kingdom, where a poll shows that more than half of Britons think there are more migrants in the UK illegally than legally. This isn't true. No, but feelings matter way more.

Starting point is 03:06:13 and facts, James. Failings matter. Yes, they do. The actual data, even at the highest estimate of undocumented people, shows it's around 10 times more foreign people who are in the UK with documents. This is indicative of a broader issue, right, that the discussions are having around immigration are nearly all based on massive amounts of misinformation. Misinformation by omission was extremely common in legacy media until very recently, right?

Starting point is 03:06:43 Like, there was simply not people covering immigration in a serious fashion. Like, even in the Biden administration, the reporting that was done was atrocious. This comes as a Labor government's disapproval rating in the UK hits 67% in a UGov poll, which I think is very indicative. Like, what Labor did, right, was tried to adopt right-wing culture war positions to get people to vote for them. And it does not work, and it is not working for them. You can look at their policies towards trans people, right? They're atrocious.

Starting point is 03:07:16 And it's not buying them in a favor that they wanted to. Moving back to the United States, Yon Su Goh, she's called Sue by her friends. It's been released by ICE after being detained at a routine hearing. The 20-year-old young woman is a Korean national, South Korean, evidently, right, and the daughter of a priest. So she's here on a visa as a dependent of a religious worker. there are religious work of visas and she's here as a dependent.

Starting point is 03:07:44 She is, I believe, in a process of transitioning to a student visa. She had another, at the hearing, her case wasn't, like, dismissed or revoked. She had another hearing set for October. I claim that she overstayed her visa. Her lawyer says that claim is not true. I'm particularly interested in this case because of the intervention of the diocese, the Episcopalian Diocese of New York. And so it was the Episcopalian Diocese.

Starting point is 03:08:11 Diocese's New York's legal team who fought for her release. She was very quickly moved to Louisiana. We know that ICE likes to do this, right? It likes to move people to places where it feels like it has a favorable circuit court. The Diocese legal team was able to secure her release, but they are still working on the release of a 59-year-old Peruvian asylum seeker who has been detained after having her court date moved up. So in her case, they said, hey, we've got a hearing that's opened up.

Starting point is 03:08:36 Why don't you come in on Thursday and then detained her? which is just just reprehensible. It is really good, I think, that these big religious organizations are getting involved directly in these cases, and they're taking on responsibility. They're using their pulpits as a place to oppose this. I think that's good. I think regardless of your stance are organized religion, you should be happy about that. These are institutions that have power in this country.

Starting point is 03:09:04 Talking of institutions that have power, detainees in Florida's alligator, Contraise are being denied their right to file court documents because federal courts are claiming they're not under federal jurisdiction. State courts are claiming they're not under state jurisdiction, which is fairly reasonable given that they have not been charged with or accused of in many cases any crimes in the state of Florida, right? They're not being held. They were not detained by, well, sometimes they were detained by Florida law enforcement, I guess, but only in their capacity to enforce federal immigration law. Yes. With the special like deputized. Yes. It's, yeah, deputists, which we're about to talk about,

Starting point is 03:09:40 there have been some very funny outcomes of that. This isn't it, like, I've seen it reported as a loophole. It's not a loophole. It's extremely fucking clear that they were detained by the federal government for immigration reasons, and they have every right to representation in immigration court, right? This is not a loophole. They're just denying people their rights.

Starting point is 03:10:03 And I think reporting it as a loophole is entirely ridiculous. A judge has ordered the document. showing who is contracted by whom the facility be produced as part of a civil rights lawsuit. So what that will do would obviously document that the federal government is paying. For some of this, I know Rick DeSantis had wanted to use FEMA money for some of this. Breaking news. So a federal judge, Kathleen Williams, has ordered that construction, new construction, halt.

Starting point is 03:10:31 They won't be allowed to do any new filling, paving or infrastructure building for the next 14 days, temporary pause. they can still continue to hold people. This is not going to stop those people being denied their rights, which is what's at stake here. So we talked a little bit about those Florida deputies, right, who have been, I guess, seconded to ICE or they've been cross-sworn to do ICE work.

Starting point is 03:10:55 ICE is recruiting very heavily right now. It's offering $50,000 sign-on bonuses. It has reduced a minimum age, and it seems to have no maximum age. cap, from what I can tell. This, like, Border Patrol has been issuing all kinds of waivers for years, right, for all kinds of things that it's supposed to have as, like, standard for its recruiting. So this isn't particularly new.

Starting point is 03:11:17 ICE has been known for a while as kind of, if you want to be a Fed and go around and carry a gun and you can't get hired to do gun stuff for the fed to other agencies, ICE is probably the place you're going to end up, right? Like, their standards are lower than other agencies. And now they're like specifically selecting for the most like online unhinged right wing frees to join their agency as like a national police force. And that's like what they're doing in their messaging online. And also some news this week, Dean Kane has has joined ICE. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:53 It's most likely in like a promotional capacity, but still worth noting. Yeah, you might get chased by middle age Superman. So let's talk about what ICE is doing. recruit. First of all, it is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on big trucks. We know Donald Trump himself. It's a fan of big trucks. Many pictures of him enjoying big trucks over the years. ICE has spent $196,000 on Ford Raptors for recruiting purposes. The Raptor, for those you not familiar, is like a tricked out F-150. They were issuing Raptors to field agents for a while. They're not the best vehicles. Like I've heard plenty of agents complain about the Raptors.

Starting point is 03:12:32 Yeah, they're not good. Yeah, they're not. And BP had a special, like, lowest possible trim of the Raptor. Like, they're popular now because people will buy them used as government surplus and make them good. But they, yeah, the Raptors they had didn't work too well. They also bought a GMC Yukon for $101,000, which is a very expensive GMC Yukon. I have also noted that ICE is recruiting from the police who have been cross-sworn into, to doing ICE enforcement. This has resulted in some very funny beefs between agencies, including

Starting point is 03:13:08 can I share this video? Can I screen share? Yeah. Yeah, let's ask what's a video. And then what has happened is ICE has sent emails to, I don't know, how many agencies, by no, several agencies. I've talked to several sheriffs that their deputies have received this request. And basically, it's a recruiting tactic. It's, hey, we got your email now. You got certified and it's something like dear colleague, you've shown an interest in this and that, we won't let you know that we are offering a $50,000

Starting point is 03:13:38 bonus paid $10,000 at a time and it's for five years, obviously. Man, is that not bite and a hand to feed you? We went through all of that took our time utilizing our local resource, not ours yet, but local resources, and then

Starting point is 03:13:54 they try to recruit you right out from Monday using the very emails that we give you. Finally, they found something bad ice is done. This is a new low even for ice. Yeah. Sheriff Chip Simmons, they're calling ice out for their poor form. Sheriff Chip finally found something that shows the true depravity. The compromised heart of ice. Yeah. Yeah. Where will they stop? Well, let's talk about where they will stop or at least start spending. Ice has been spending some money this week. Some of this, I think, like some of the sort of reporting on NFC isn't hugely responsible. So like, I just signed a sole source contract

Starting point is 03:14:36 with B.I2 technologies, for example, for, quote, licenses for the inmate identification of recognition system and the mobile offender recognition information system. They call these Iris and Morris based on their initials, right? These are for ERO, so that's their enforcement and removal operations brands. B2 pitches to iris is being able to identify people with no physical contact based on the tears in their iris. This technology has been used by police for a while. So you'll notice it was called the inmate identification. So the way they would obtain these Irish scans would be scanning people who were detained, right? CBP will also have Irish scans. So will USCIS, right? This is one of the pieces of biometric data that's sometimes collected from migrants

Starting point is 03:15:22 as part of their process of moving into the United States and getting their documents, etc. What Morris will do is allow them to search a registry of previous offenders. In 2024, Niagara County Sheriff's Office were the first Sheriff's Office to add Iris to their vehicles. But Athena reported as this is, as the CBP office or ICE officers are going to be scanning people's irises with their phones.

Starting point is 03:15:47 I don't see any evidence of that technology existing, either in the contract that the government has or on the website for the company that makes it. And guessing what this will do is if they have somebody who, for instance, has previously been detained, somebody who has done time and come out, then they would use this as a way of identifying them, right, when, after they've detained them before they take them to wherever. The big issue here, right, is that B.I.2 owns this database of scans. So this database includes Morris, right, which is previous. people who have previous offenders.

Starting point is 03:16:22 They have a sex offender registry within it. They also have databases of seniors who are at risk for going missing. So I think that's people with dementia that people can voluntarily sign up to. And they have a database of missing children as well. B.A.2, interesting company. They offer a bunch of services for detention companies. They previously partnered with the Support Our Sheriff's Foundation to provide lower cost prescriptions to sheriffs and deputies.

Starting point is 03:16:47 and they're pretty embedded in this law enforcement world. Other contracts I saw for ICE, new tech solutions for fingerprint scanners. Again, fingerprint information is routinely taken from migrants. People getting green cards, people getting visas, people getting citizenship. Yes, anyone who has in any capacity and really engaged with USCIS,

Starting point is 03:17:09 like all those categories you mentioned Garrison will have already done this. They did also purchase Grey Key, which is more concerning, which is for breaking a, into cell phones, locked cell phones. Yes, it's for trying to get around the lock on your cell phone. I've written about Greaky before for Input Magazine.

Starting point is 03:17:26 Generally, the way they do this is that they try and make a copy of the cell phone and work on a copy so they don't get locked out of your cell phone. But Greaky is an extremely nefarious piece of technology for breaking into people's phones, which you otherwise wouldn't be able to access. So, yeah, that is what I have for Isis' spending spree this week. For our last story, I'd like to also talk about technology, but technology in the news, some AI incidents that have broken into people's news gathering process. Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has shared a fake AI video of AOC, giving a speech in Congress, calling out the Sydney, sweetie American Eagle ad as racist. God damn it.

Starting point is 03:18:13 I got to see this. Why does it have to all be so stupid? I was tweeting today and saw a clip of AOC saying that Sidney-Sweeney ad was racist. And so I replied to it and I said, why do you care about this and ignore what matters most? Why in all the times that you've called on Israel to stop? Why have you never told Hamas to stop, told Hamas to surrender? Why would you ignore the St. Louis attack on that Jewish guy who had his car bombed? AOC tweeted back and said,

Starting point is 03:18:43 dude, that's a deep fake that Sidney's sweetie and you suck in so many words and she was right they got me she was right I suck he has been owned that's not bad that's pretty good

Starting point is 03:19:00 that's funny yeah I chose to cut off the clip there as I think it gets the point across yeah that's the right place for it to go but no on this AI video of AOC it is clearly like like embossed into the video itself. This is an AI video from from chat GPT memes plus AI

Starting point is 03:19:21 art on Instagram. Oh, what a fucking car. This guy is being elevated as a fucking journalist. Jesus, wept. He later said on News Nation, on his show, they got me. AI, it was really good and it did seem like something she would say. I'm going to now play.

Starting point is 03:19:40 The AI video in question to see. to see if you think this is something that AOC would say. Sidney Sweeney looks like an Aryan goddess. And the American Eagle jeans campaign is blatant Nazi propaganda. I mean, fuck. Watching that sultry little temptress squeeze into a Canadian tuxedo, three-sized and too small, with her bouncy little fun bags on the screen staring at you.

Starting point is 03:20:06 Okay, that's enough. It's not. Oh, my God. No, no more, no more. End the episode. Fuck that. That's what I'm going to see, no. That's what trick.

Starting point is 03:20:19 This guy got me. They got me. A.I. Oh, man. What a, one of our greatest journalists. You know, AI really has to be, you know, we've hit AGI if it can, if it can crack a mind as keen as Chris Cuomo. It was really good, and it did seem like something she would say. Oh, God.

Starting point is 03:20:42 It's not even how her voice sounds. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Some of the most unhinged things I've ever seen. Just to watch that and then wonder why she hasn't commented on her mask in the same breath. It's truly an indication on where her country's at. That AI video is 80 seconds long. It gets so much crazier, but we don't need to say anymore.

Starting point is 03:21:08 The other incident of AI in the news, former CNN chief whiteout's correspondent, Jim Acosta interviewed an AI avatar impersonating a school shooting victim. Oh, no. Oh, my God. Is this one of those things that like every town or someone was doing? Yeah, yeah, yes, I caught this when it happened. Here's a video. I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence.

Starting point is 03:21:34 Great question. I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations. and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think about that? I think that's a great idea, Joaquin. That's not even an answer.

Starting point is 03:21:53 That's not an answer. This is one of the closest things I've ever seen. Create a culture of kindness and understanding. Yeah, that'll fix it. Thanks. Incredible human evil. Not a person. That's someone's child.

Starting point is 03:22:06 That's not someone's child. All right. Jim Mcosta wrote him. It's just generic. Well, no, it's like it's not a person. This isn't a human being. Yeah, but they've attempted to reanimate through cringe AI someone's kid and they look like a character and it's a small world. Yes.

Starting point is 03:22:20 The parents are involved in this process. Jim McChosta wrote on Blue Sky at 4 p.m. I'll have a one-of-a-kind interview with Hakeem Oliver. He died in the Parkland School shooting, but his parents have created an AI version of their son for a powerful message on gun violence. Unquote, you did not interview Joachim Oliver. That's not, that's not him. You did not interview that person. No, you did not.

Starting point is 03:22:43 You didn't interview anybody. You have helped to spread a fake puppet of someone without their knowledge and consent, just as gross is doing it for, like, movie actors, right, who have died. This is, and, you know, more gross. Actually, like, significantly more gross. Yeah. It didn't even suggest, like, it wasn't even, like, willing to be, like, ban AR-15s or whatever.

Starting point is 03:23:08 Yeah. Like, there was no, nothing suggested here. Like, I can't believe how milk toast for a dead person who was killed by an AR-15, it wasn't even willing to say, it was just, like, vaguely new gun control and also a culture of kindness. But, like, can't even be specific, this ghoul that you've made? You're putting fake words in someone else's, like, death mask mouth. Yes, yes. It's so, it's so unethical.

Starting point is 03:23:33 Like, I don't even know what to say. He doesn't work at CNN anymore. But, my God, like. This is not journalism in any way, shape, or form. No. I don't want to, like, punch down on the, I don't understand. Like, I know parents who have lost children right through my work. I've talked to lots of them more than I'd like to.

Starting point is 03:23:52 And I understand the desire to get your kid back in some form. Sure. Whoever the fuck came to them and said, we're going to make an AI of your child so it can argue with journalists about gun control is a fucking ghoul. Pure evil. No, the default here is on the people promoting technology. Yeah. And in effect, that's what.

Starting point is 03:24:08 Jim Acosta is doing here as well. Yeah, totally. No, because the journalist is totally irresponsible. And profiting off of it. It's so gross. So anyway, that was our AI news to close the episode. Sorry we couldn't end on the AOC ad instead had to end on a bit of a more sour note. Yeah. I genuinely wanted to know where that AOC ad goes. I'm going to watch it. Oh, I'll send it to you, James. Yeah. Okay. We reported the news. Yeah, I guess. 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,

Starting point is 03:24:54 visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio 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 23 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight, so why did it take

Starting point is 03:25:24 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.

Starting point is 03:25:41 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 194

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