Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 200

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  - Charlie Kirk's Assassination: Sorting Fact from Fiction - DC Police Takeover Update feat. Bridget Todd - Thi'sl, The Nipsey Hussle of St. Louis, On What It Really Takes to Make Our Hoods Better feat. Prop - Years of Lead Paint - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #34 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: Years of Lead Paint https://www.cawshinythings.com/i-was-promised-a-more-aesthetically-pleasing-cyberpunk-dystopia/ https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/italian-neofascism-and-years-lead-closer-look  https://libcom.org/article/giuseppe-pinelli-death-anarchist  https://libcom.org/article/analysis-autonomia-interview-sergio-bologna  https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/terrorism2ed/chpt/ordine-nuovo  https://www.britannica.com/event/Bologna-train-station-bombing-of-1980 https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy/Terrorism#ref929858 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/16/us/tyler-robinson-charges.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU8.jooL.UUL_fH4KQcdy https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-terrorists-are-most-often-right-wing/  Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #34  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists, and activists

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Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bridget Armstrong, host of the new podcast, The Curse of America's Next Top Model. I've been investigating the real story behind that iconic show. I ended up having anorexia issues, bulimia issues, by talking to the models, the producers, and the people who profited from it all.

We basically sold our souls, and they got rich. If you were so rooting for her and saw her drowning, what? you help her? Listen to the curse of America's next top model on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Gemma Spag, host of the psychology of your 20s. This September at the psychology of your 20s, we're breaking down the very interesting ways psychology applies to real life, like why we crave external validation. I find it so interesting that we are so quick to believe others' judgments of us and not our own judgment of ourselves. So according to the study, not being liked actually creates similar pain levels

as real life physical pain. I'll learn more about the psychology of everyday life and of course, your 20s this September. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know

this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long. long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. It, in this case,

being an incredibly political shooting. And the thing that's happening, Garrison and I waiting through a river of disinformation and fever dreams to try and pull out some degree. of truth in what is a very truth light environment right now. Garrison, how are you doing? Truth fluid, certainly. Truth fluid, yeah, that's a better way to phrase it. I have a growing headache that I think grows larger

by the second. Yeah, just will not cease. I guess you should first discuss how the shooter has been identified and arrested. Yes. We are recording this Friday evening for context.

Yes. early evening, there will be more information on the shooter and on the shooting. By the time you listen to this, we may include an update at the end, but we will be talking about stuff that is timeless, as in things that we know are false or true at the moment and just generally our ethics on when do we feel confident saying a shooting or other kind of attack was left wing or right wing or something else? Like, when do we feel confident making those judgments and why? Because those are really relevant topics. And a lot of people just kind of go with what seems right based on the flow of info they're hearing, which is how disinformation spreads. So the last time we would

have talked about this would be the ED episode that came out, what was that, Friday Garrison? Yeah, Thursday night, Friday morning. And basically, right after we covered that early in the morning on Friday, President Trump was doing a media appearance on Fox News, and he was the person who announced that they had a suspect in custody, who they were pretty sure was it. Obviously, since the FBI had given the wrong, accused the wrong person, at least twice of doing this, people weren't sure if that meant anything. But it did come out very soon after that, that a young man had essentially confessed to his father who negotiated him turning himself into the authorities.

This young man is Tyler Robinson. He was born and raised in Utah, I think as far as we know. I woke up in the middle of the night, right as his name came out. I don't know why. It was weird. And so I just immediately started looking at the social media for his family because I was able to find his like mom and his dad's Facebook. The Lord works in mysterious ways. So I can tell you, and this is something you'll find in the reporting. He came from a pretty normal Utah family, politically conservative. That's based on articles I've seen, interviewing people who know the family and just based on publicly available information. Grunt style T-shirt wearing father. Right. He dressed as Donald Trump. It's seemingly in a positive fashion for Halloween one year. His family were of a very normal Utah family. I found posts where they took pictures of them camping with their RVs, going out hunting. He was hunting from a young age.

He had access to firearms from a young age, including like assault-style weapons from a young age. Again, very common for Utah. And, yeah, his family hunted and fished. And he seems to have been a very normal kid in that regard. Kind of the thing that I found when I was doing my first dive into this that I thought was worthwhile. And the one thing that I really pulled out of that

to share with people was in 2018 he dressed as a meme for Halloween. And the specific meme was, this meme that is not inherently political, but is one that this group of far right people who follow a guy named Nick Fuentes called the Groyper's like, which doesn't mean that he was signaling to that. Because again, like all of this stuff, it's not just the Groypers who like this squatting Slav guy meme. That's what he dressed as. If you've seen this like meme of like the squatting Slavit guy and

a track suit with a cigarette and a beer. He dressed like that for Halloween. There's a Groyper version of that squatting Slav guy. Well, no, there's a Pepe version. You're right, you're right. I need to be precise. There's a pepe version, and it is a meme that you can find shared in Groyper spaces, which, again, does not mean it's a Groyper meme.

And I've seen that mistake. I mean, really tried to push back on this does not mean he definitely was. But it does mean that he was a very online kid, and he traveled in spaces where he would have had access and would have been aware of Groyper's. That would have been one chunk of the online fever swamps that he would have been connected to and he would have had access to. We don't yet know at the time we're recording this what he believed or what his motivation was.

The thing I thought was relevant to publish of this is that like, okay, we are dealing with an extremely online weirdo, right? And immediately after that, it came out exactly what was carved onto the bullets that he had shot. And this was relevant in part because yesterday, the first. first day of news that we had about the bullets, the immediate claim that was leaked to Stephen Crowder through a source of his in the ATF was that transgender symbols had been carved onto the bullets. That was not accurate. If you want some levity from this whole scene, listening to the

sheriff, giving the press conference, read the things he carved onto these bullets. We should just include some of those clips here. We'll put it in here. Inscriptions on a, a Fired casing read, notices, bulges, capital O-W-O, what's this question mark? Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read, hey, fascist, exclamation point, catch, exclamation point. Up arrow symbol, right arrow, and three down arrow symbols. A second, unfired casing read, O Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, and a third on-fired casing red. If you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O. Just absolutely outstanding stuff. I mean, hearing a law enforcement officer say that is beautiful.

It reminds me of having to explain Bitcoin to all of the elderly detectives in West L.A. When I got a death threat against me. But this is, like, extremely online gamer nonsense, right? Yeah. Average white male overly online gamer. At this point, that's what it looks like. It could have developed in a far-right direction, could be developed in a far-left direction, could be an ironic centrist, it could be any number of things. There's no single, clear indication. Could be someone who doesn't map easily onto any of these traditional political compasses. Like, we don't know at this point.

And what's kind of important that, and the reason what I thought was really important to get out to people is that there will always be terrorist attacks from a whiter. It's never, even if you want it to just be right-wingers, it's never just right-wingers who do domestic terrorism. that's never been the case, and it never will be the case. And one of the things that we're seeing, and we will increasingly see, is that even while there will be varying political motivations behind different attacks, the language that people who are carrying out attacks like this use is all kind of coming to a point together, right? They all have more in common with the way they message. The Christchurch shooter and this kid both found the need to put memes,

onto the weapons they were using. Inscribe the Internet onto... Exactly. Onto tools of killing. Mechanisms of death. Literally inscribing the Internet onto tools of death. That is a thing both of them did.

Maybe for wildly different reasons. Maybe this guy was coming from a left-wing perspective, right? We just don't know. But this is where it's all coalescing around. And I think that is really important to note, right? The way that that happens. Now, again, we wanted to talk about the thing

that we can definitely say is disinformation. And one of the first counters to the whole transgender symbols carved onto bullets that came out was people putting up pictures of there's a Turkish manufacturer called Tehran and they make bullets and their logo like on the back of a bullet if you're not a gun person every bullet has the logo of the manufacturer and the name of the caliber stamped onto the back right I mean just for basic safety reasons right or nearly every bullet 22 is a little too small but like if you've got like around a 9mm or around a 556 or around a 30 at 6 which

is the caliber he used apparently on the back of it you'll see the name of the the manufacturer and then the caliber stamped in there, right? And so on the back of Tehran bullets is stamped TRN. And so people started posting online, this must be why they thought what they thought was transgender, that like they saw a Tehran bullet and assumed it was trans. And we know that wasn't the case because this was a 30 out six and Tehran does not make 30 out six ammunition. We also know this was the case because they have now come out and said what was written on the bullets and what was mistaken for transgender arrows. And the thing that was mistaken for transgender arrows was a reference to the video game hell divers. A fucking hell divers means. Yes. Again, very

gamer online kid. Side note, it's not completely clear which bullet casing was attributed to transgender ideology. It could be an interpretation of the arrows, or it could be the notices bulge, oh, whoa, casing. And on that note, notices bulge, oh, whoa, is not a Groyper meme. It's a meme making fun of furry sex role-playing, which predates the existence of Groyper's by years. And as a meme has since been reclaimed by furries and trans shit posters online, or trans only fans creators, or just trans people in general in the internet, many of which are also furries. But now we have various types of opposing or overlapping groups of people who use this meme online. It's not a right-wing meme, just making fun of furries. It is

also a meme used by people on the left and furries on the left and probably furries on the right too and non-furries. It's just a general internet meme. It's a Reddit tier joke now. I will say the Helldivers meme also gives us kind of our, not a clear look, but a look at a possible political motivation. Now it could be ironic in use. It could be just referential in use. But the full helldivers referenced bullet reads, hey, fascist catch, followed by the Hell D-Pad input for the 500-kilogram bomb. Right. Which is the arrows.

Yeah, it's the down arrows. I think up arrow, side arrow, down, down, down arrow. Which some ATF agent or someone initially thought could have been a reference to the transgender symbol or the three arrows symbol coupled with the hay fascist section of that reference. Right. The Helldivers video game does use fascist as a term, but this also could be a more general. political reference, either ironic or sincere, by referring to Charlie Kirk as a fascist, we do

not know the actual intentionality behind this reference yet. One thing that is possibly tied to anti-fascism is that another bullet reads Bella Chow, Bella Chow, misspelling Bella Chow, which is a popular anti-fascist anthem, though the song has more recently also been used

by Groypers. Right. And fans of Hearts of Iron 4. A diverse political bunch, one could say. We have talked about Bella Chow on this show before. In fact, we've used Bella Chow on multiple Cool Zone Media shows. It was originally an Italian anti-fascist song that has since been adopted by anarchists and anti-fascists all around the globe. I've heard Bella Chow get played on loudspeakers countless times at anti-fascist events on the West Coast, as well as anarchist events on the East Coast.

though the song has since gained a whole other life through pop culture popularization with EDM and like dub step style remixes going viral. Most Normies probably first heard it on the Netflix show Money Heist and has been adopted into gamer culture via its use in Far Cry 6 and Hearts of Iron 4. So again, could be an anti-fascist reference,

could be video game shit, could be griper shit. There's just not enough to say at this point. Or it could be a centrist, apolitical hodgepodge that has resulted in this nihilistic outburst of violence similar to some of these like TCC school shootings.

Yeah. We don't know. But there's currently a lot of people on the right who thinks it's an Antifa super soldier leftist. A lot of people on the left who think this is a Nick Fuentes Pilled Groyper. Yeah. And either of those could be true,

but neither could be true. It could be a much, weirder third option. We don't have direct evidence to support a full reading of either of those things yet. And this is when I have seen people get kind of heated about being corrected on, particularly the bullet thing. And I think the reason why is that it seems like such a smoking gotcha. Of course they'd be this stupid. You really want it to be true. And it's when you feel like that about a case like this, about an attack like this, that like, oh, I really want this to be true. it would be really satisfying if this was the thing that had happened,

that you need to be most hesitant to embrace that, right? I think that's what I'd say. Absolutely. If it's too good to be sure, it feels too convenient, you should introspect greatly. Yeah. Robert and Garrison will be right back, but first, here's some ads. And we're back.

There's been other things that is kind of influencing this political uncertainty. A reporter for the young Turks, only the most reputable news outlet, has claimed on Twitter on Friday afternoon, quote, according to Utah officials and police interviews with his family, Tyler Robinson hated Charlie Kirk because Kirk wasn't conservative enough. Robinson reportedly admired Nick Fuentes. GOPers are now scrubbing ex-posts about Dems faster than DOJ erases Trump's name from In Epstein Files, unquote. Yeah.

This claim from David Schuster, the reporter for the Young Turks, unsubstantiated. Yes. But it is being spread as exact fact, and it seems like this claim is most likely misquoting and editorializing from a statement a family member gave to police, which has been described by the governor as a family member. and the shooter discussing Charlie Kirk's upcoming visit to UVU campus. They talked about why they didn't like him and viewpoints he held. The family member also stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, unquote. So that has been altered and shifted and interpreted in a lot of different ways to say that the shooter stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate,

even though that's not what this interview segment necessarily means. just that, quote unquote, they, meaning the family member and the shooter, didn't like Kirk. And that's really all you can extrapolate from that piece of this police statement. But it's been spread and editorialized to mean a wild collection of different things. Yeah. Including by people on the right who are interpreting this statement as evidence that the shooter has said that Kirk was spreading hate, even though that's not actually clear from this interview either. No.

It says that the family member stated. Charlie Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate not the shooter. And likewise, one of the things I'm seeing spread a lot is a claimed voter registration for Robinson. A. Tyler Robinson in Utah. Yeah. Again, there's a lot of them. A lot of Tyler Robinson's in Utah. The one that is spreading the most has a voter registration date of 01-01, 2001,

which he just simply couldn't have. Now, that said people pointed out that Utah's voter registration shit is bad and this does seem like a placeholder that someone put in, but also the county he's not right because he didn't live in Lehigh, Utah, and that's where this is listed for. I'm not saying this guy definitely wasn't, he may have been a registered Republican, but it looks like we don't have the information to say that yet. Likewise, there's an article that was published recently in The Guardian, where they talked to someone who was a friend of his in high school who said that he was like the only leftist

in a family of Republicans and was angry about it. The exact quote was that Robinson was, quote, pretty left on everything, the only member of his family that was really leftist. The rest of his family was very hard Republican. And the Robinson would, quote, always just be ranting and arguing about them, unquote. And it does look CNN is saying that they have found Tyler Robinson's actual voter registration data

and CNN says he's registered as unaffiliated with a political party and is listed as an active, which means he has not voted in either of the two last general elections. Sure. So again, there's just nothing. nothing clear we could say, right? Yeah, it's hard to take both of this young Turks reporter and a high school friend from four years ago. Not great sources for someone's current political outlook. Absolutely not. And contradictory. So it's really, really unclear. Also,

this is just one friend. You would want more than one source to substantiate this claim. And perhaps by Sunday night when this airs, there will be more information. Quick update on this, literally minutes after Robert and I recording. The Guardian retracted those quotes from the shooter's alleged high school classmate, which described the shooter as a leftist. The source contacted the Guardian again and said that they could not accurately remember the details of their relationship in high school. So the Guardian has pulled those quotes. But certainly right now, the way people have latched on to narratives to satisfy the current emotional turmoil that people are in, because of the

hyper reality around this shooting and the possible consequences it could mean for the fate of this whole country. I understand why people are quick to really hook their version of reality onto these claims. Yes. But currently, there is no clear version of reality. Yeah. And I, I just want to caution people if you care about knowing reality yourself. And there's two different questions here, right? What is useful? What is valuable? What protects people? And then what gets us closer to the truth, right? Part of why, as soon as I found that photo of him dressed as a meme for Halloween and recognized the implications of it, I put it up there is because I thought it was relevant that it said something about his background. But also, it got discussion and just people

bringing up how complicated this guy's background is did a positive thing, which was a gut discussion away from absolutely baseless allegations that this was a transgender terrorist attack. And also it's all the kind of shit that had been spreading on their right, right? And that was valuable. However, I've been really careful about not saying this guy is a grope berth, even though that sure would be convenient because, again, at the time we're recording this, there's just not that evidence. Every new fact that comes out about this guy right now is wavering in this gray area where, you know, like one of the other things when I posted correcting the voter registration card, somebody posted like, okay, but he donated to Trump's campaign. No, he did not. A different guy with

his name donated to Donald Trump. The Tyler Robinson, who is currently in custody for shooting Charlie Kirk, has no record of federal election donations per CNN, right? These are very convincing when you see them just sort of sliding across your newsfeed. And if you're not checking up on every new thing you see, it feels like obviously this guy's a right winger, obviously he's a groyper. I've seen so many pieces of evidence when you actually haven't seen any evidence at all. And even those two things can get conflated, right? Saying he's a groyper is different than saying he's a right winger. Like a Groyper is a very specific branch of alt-right slash far-right community slash ideology

revolving around the America first streamer Nick Fuentes and the collection of memes associated with his movement, which have historically beefed with Charlie Kirk for not being sufficiently to the right as some more openly white supremacist neo-Nazis have been. This beef between Fuentes and Kirk was largely dissolved after Kirk started adopting more and more far I believes and adopted the great replacement theory, which settled down the quote-unquote Groyper war, which many people are assuming that this shooting is a part of, with some Groyper, Nick Fuentes fan, killing Charlie Kirk, possibly as a legitimate part of the quote-unquote Groyper war, but also maybe just has like an ironic memetic act. So when you say Groyper,

that should refer to a very specific thing, not necessarily just this guy used right-wing memes or these memes aren't even right-wing, but like... No, they could be, but they're not. inherently. Yeah. This man could be, but they're not inherently. Nor are they really the main use of this. Saying, ha ha, if you read this, you are gay.

Could just be an average overly online male gamer on the internet. A lot of people talk like that. A lot of gay people talk like that. A lot of fascist people talk about that. Is this homophobia or a 20-year-old? Right? It could be either or. Yeah.

And we don't need to just jump to one specific thing to build a singular narrative. when a fluid situation is still rapidly unfolding. Yeah. Not if, again, you want to feel like, and you want to really be better than the other side, who don't give a shit about the truth, who just care about what's convenient and how many people they can get to believe a convenient fact, right? If you don't want to be that kind of person, if you think that's bad, and I do, and you do, and we all do here at Cool Zone, that you do kind of owe it to yourself to care about stuff like this, even if it's, less convenient. By the way, if you're not an investigator, you don't have to be delving into all

this. It's enough to just know the fact that I saw something that looked like evidence this guy donated to a campaign. Do I know that that's him? Do I absolutely know that's him? Because it's possible multiple people have the same name. And some of them may have made a donation or not, right? Don't just pass your eyes over stuff like this and be like, all right, I've done all I need to do. But do purchase from these advertisers. And we're back. One other aspect that people's reaction to the shooting is demonstrating. And we've seen this with other major events, major political events, violent political events, the past few years,

is how this shows a new fracturing of reality. Because what eventually gets proven about the shooter will probably be insignificant to the narratives that people have already latched onto and have baked on to. into reality so far. And this conceptual splitting of reality is going to fall squarely along some partisan and political lines, right? Conservatives will have a conception of the shooting, which differs heavily from the conception of the shooting held by people on the left.

Many people on the left are going to believe that this shooter was a gropeer forever. No matter what comes out in the next few weeks to months, they will have in their version of reality the idea that this guy was a groiper. Similarly, people on the right are going to believe to the fullest and truest extent to their hearts that this guy was Antifa. Yeah. The actual reality is going to matter very little compared to these two beliefs. And the killing of Charlie Kirk has memetic potential for several large, discrete and overlapping online groups. Many different online communities or groups could have encouraged or influenced this killing.

Anti-fascists certainly could have. leftists. The Groyper right could have. The 4chan right could have. Terrorgram could have. All different and possibly overlapping communities. In-cell culture. Irony poisoned centrists. J. Reg. Nialists. Accelerationists.

A normal garden variety Trumpist Republican who got angry over Epstein stuff could have done this. There's no evidence of that. I'm not saying, but I'm just saying like we literally like it could be so many things at this point. And as satisfying as it is to just collapse this guy down to Antifa or

Groyper, it's very likely it could just be a third weirder option. It could be the weirder option, right? Especially if you look at the nihilist trend of violence that we've covered on this show from TCC with ties to other extremist groups, the multiple school shootings that have used nostalgia and online references and references to previous shootings, this could also line up with that framework. As Robert said, the inscription of memes onto tools of death is a commonality across many of these gruesome acts of violence, from Christchurch to the Minneapolis school shooting just a month ago to this assassination in September. Yeah. Now, I think it is worth

talking about how Groypers and how Nick Fintes himself has responded to this, because that is telling, right? Totally. Whether or not this guy is a Gropier, a lot of Groyper's. have publicly speculated that he is their guy. Or people on 4chan have speculated that he is a griper. Not your average 4chan user necessarily is a groiper. I think this distinction is also important. That is valid, yes. But yeah, you have seen a lot of people on the right.

Suspect that this guy could be a groiper. Certainly some groopers have themselves as well as 4chan users. And Nick Fuentes does seem a little bit nervous, but he could be nervous for a lot of reasons. He put out a video. I watched the entire Nick Fuentes stream last night. Oh, good. Thank God.

He was acting a little bizarre, talking very philosophical, almost as if he was, like, doing ketamine beforehand. Like, he was talking about how the structure of society and like a spiritual structure as well will influence society to cause events to happen, which kind of stress test and demonstrate the direction of society going. And he basically talked about the assassination as one of these events of society unfolding itself

to determine what, path is going to get taken. Are things going to get more violent and more divisive? Or will this event alter reality's course in a more positive direction? It was very interesting. He was talking about how he feels some responsibility for the arc that this country has gone on, how he's made a lot of mistakes when he's younger. You could interpret this as trying to pick up new supporters and try to fill in the Charlie Kirk-sized hole in the American right. But it's unclear. He was talking quite emotionally about what the past few years of his life have been. And again, making that comment that, like, I want all of my fans to stand down, et cetera,

it's noteworthy of where Fuentes' head is, right? Yeah. And of the media environment he must exist in terms of, like, personally, what comes to him. And I'm very curious. If I could somehow know everything Nick Fuentes has been texted and been texting over the last 72 hours, God, that would be fascinating. He said the people on the left were telling him it's his responsibility to try to turn things down, and he was kind of upset about that.

And during the stream, Fuentes was not discussing the shooter as if the shooter was a groper or even suspecting the shooter was a groiper. Nick telling his audience or whoever listening to put down your arms and not jump to quick emotional violence was in reference to retaliatory violence against the left for their killing of charge. Carly Kerr. That was the way Fuentes was talking about the shooting through the course of this hour-long stream. It did not seem to me that he was trying to cover his bases in case the shooter was a grope. That wasn't how he was discussing it. He certainly laid a lot of blame on the left. And he seemed very scared about the direction of the country. Someone showed up with a weapon to his

house less than a year ago. And I think some of his fear is absolutely genuine. It's not just trying to cover his ass in case this guy turns out to be a groiper. No, he's in danger because of the things he did. He invited the danger into his life by being Nick Fuentes, but he is in danger. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was

a very odd stream. I tune into Nick Fuentes every once in a while just to keep track of what he was doing. Like a healthy person. It's my job. I know. I woke up at 4 a.m. to stalk a murderer's family on Facebook here. So it was in the first 15 minutes of the stream where Nick discussed these more theoretical

elements, how spiritual or societal forces kind of use people as puppets, not in a fully NPC way, but as an evolutionary method of charting the path of society. Nick then went to go on to discuss Charlie Kirk, how he's beefed with Charlie in the past, how they've disagreed on nearly everything, but goes on to say some nice things. is about Charlie for the first time and then calls for everyone to lay down their arms. Now it was not the time to jump to quick action. We should reflect,

et cetera, et cetera. But in those first 15 minutes, he talks about what this shooting means for American culture. And I've been watching some of his other recent streams where he's kind of been going after some of his fans for just being completely like brain dead,

just repeating racist tropes with no real thought, just talking about Hitler in this meme-fied way. And it feels like he's sort of reflecting on both what he's done with his life ever since he's been a teenager and the world that he has helped bring into being. He talks about never having much of a actual

sincere participation in politics, how it's always been so bombastic and memetic. And it appears as if he's kind of stuck doing this bit forever. Like he decided that this is what his life was going to be as a teenager, and now he's in his mid-20s. and from these other recent streams

it feels like he's kind of fed up with how his audience is just appearing completely mindless, very larpy, endlessly repeating Hitler references, reflexive racism, and how he's trapped himself in this political game. A quote he said is that this is not a game.

This is life and death. And as we've just seen, like this is literally life and death. This is not just online memes anymore. We can't treat politics as an online meme game anymore because these real-life characters are getting killed. He framed a lot of this in very spiritual warfare language. Like, they killed Charlie for being Christian for talking about Jesus.

Though, stressing to his listeners like Jesus, do not actually pick up arms and fight. And people should calm down and reflect because how the country handles this event will be heavily deterministic in what the country looks like going forward. And that's what he was expressing. Right. Yeah, and I think that that's a really important point for people to get across,

that, like, there's the immediate battle in front of us, right? Which is why it's so tempting sometimes to take the easy. Oh, this guy was one of theirs. That means we don't have to keep thinking about it. Or it means that we can kind of just, like, move forward with this as another right-wing attack. And there's a degree to which, you know, it's good just for the Wright's narrative machine to get upset by the fact that even if it turns out this guy at a left-wing movement,

He's weirder and more confusing than they want him to be. And he's not, you know, the transgender terrorist they were hoping he would be. Certainly not trans. Right. To give them permission to do all the fucked up shit they wanted to do, you know? If they need permission. I mean, they seem to feel like they need an excuse, I do think. Trump creates permission.

Some of his followers might appreciate permission, I guess. Yeah. One thing that is undeniable is there was an extreme desire from a lot of these guys for this to be tied in with their ongoing attacks on trans people. the left. Totally. Right. And so I understand even even the argument that like anything that disrupts their narrative train there, even if it winds up not being accurate, there's a value in it. I do understand that argument. But on a larger thing, if we just care about terrorism and like why people get radicalized to do things and how and understanding these phenomena. Like actually

understanding how our country is unfolding. Right. That influence all of our lives, right? And usually what happens is not a single guy getting shot for a specific reason, usually a bunch of people who had nothing to do with the grievances expressed getting shot, right? That's usually when somebody decides to pick up a gun and go into public because they got radicalized, usually a bunch of random innocent people die, which is, again, why it's just really important to try to understand the underlying dynamics, even in a specific case like this, and why I actually do care about the truth here, even though that that's not as convenient maybe as we'd like it to be.

I don't know. What else do we want to talk about here? No, I mean, like, I think this event will be extremely important. Yeah. Something that Fuentes talked about is how even if you've never met Kirk, if whether you hate Kirk or whether you love Kirk, Kirk has been a parasocial force in probably everyone who's listening to this. Yeah.

Their lives for years. and watching him bleed out gruesomely is massively affecting. I think the reason why people are reacting to this so much more strongly than the murder of a state senator and her husband is that we did not have a personal relationship with that state senator, nor was there a video of them gruesomely bleeding out. And people's emotions affect how they understand reality, and the Charlie Kirk murder has been emotionally affecting for a lot of people, both positively and negatively. And it was very graphic, and it's spread around, like watching someone who you know, whether personally or parasycially, die on video through the medium in which they gained their fame

is going to be a very large, use of really bad pun, a turning point for the USA. And I think that's part of why everyone's so volatile around this issue, because I think everyone realizes how important this moment will be, despite the deaths of Palestinian children, vastly, vastly outnumbering the deaths of one conservative commentator. Yeah, and you know, like, logically, we could all say that that's wrong and fucked up, but, like, you just, you know, that's how people work, right? It's how people work. We all know that's how people work.

I'm not saying that's okay. I just, you know. No, but it's, it's, it's the way, it's the way things work. Yeah. And I don't know, like, because again, we, again, still cannot say at this point, there was just a Vanity Fair article came out that's kind of repeating some of the Groyper stuff, but I looked in my, my post is, their source on that. So they don't have anything new on the Groyper front. So no, they're just

thinking that the Squatting Slav meme is evidence tied to the Pepe version of the meme, which is then linked to Groyper, which is a specific type of Pepe, not the skinny Pepe. I'm so tired, Robert. I'm really tired. I don't know if this guy liked Nick Fuentes. I will say he probably had an opinion about Nick Fuentes. He was aware of the dude, right? Like, he was that level of online for sure. Yeah, I mean, which 22-year-old gamer male doesn't? And that's the thing. Right, exactly. Again, it's like I was talking about before we knew who it was, when we just had the video, because I did accurately anticipate that it was someone who learned how to shoot through hunting with a bolt-action rifle. That's just what the shot looked like to me when I saw it. Yeah. Which wound up being

accurate. And there were a lot of people who were like questioning that on the grounds of like, well, though, this had to be like a trained sniper or something like that. And it's like, this looks like Professional hit to me, Robert, or a Mossad agent, either or. Yeah, like, no, literally all we knew is that it was somebody who was able to, like, competent with a firearm. That's all you could say. And probably it was not a semi-automatic because people in stressful situations, if they can, usually keep shooting, right? They would have fired more than one shot most likely. Yeah, that's all we could say, which narrowed it down to everyone in Utah.

Like, that's what I try to emphasize is that, like, what I can say from this is that anyone in Utah could have shot, Charlott. Kirk at that point. And sure enough, it turned out being almost like average 22-year-old utonian. Yeah. If you're going to composite a normal Utah kid. That's what this guy looks like so far. Yeah. And there's a lot of like semi-racist or semi-misogynist gamers out there. They're not necessarily gropeers. Right. And we don't even know how racist this guy was. There's no indication one way or another. He certainly had an awareness of online culture, but everyone who makes a hell diver's two reference is going to have

a pretty large awareness of online culture and that does not indicate what his quote unquote beliefs are just an awareness and existence within that culture yep well I can't think of anything else to say at the moment about this

it's unclear to me the degree to which this has shifted the national discourse on it I have seen it looks like the way in which the conservatives are talking about this guy in the shooting it looks like they have changed. At least some of them. Just because it's less clear, at least a number of people, right?

We're seeing... The Groyper counter narrative has introduced doubt, which will influence some conservative's understanding of the shooting. Others will keep hitting that leftist

Antifa line. I have seen certain people claim that the Groyper narrative is even changing the way Trump talks about the shooting because Trump is not referencing Charlie Kirk as much or is avoiding questions

about how he's feeling in regards to Kirk's death. Yeah. Trump has never cared about Charlie Kirk. No. Vance certainly has. He's closer to like Vance's orbit. But Donald Trump doesn't give a single fuck about Charlie Kirk.

Absolutely not. This little, this little puny man. Like, no, Trump does not care. It makes sense that one asked how Trump feels about Charlie Kirk's death. And if he's feeling okay, he's like, yeah, I feel fine. What I'm really excited about is that we're constructing the new White House ballroom. It's the Rose Garden. Yeah. Like, that's not indication that Trump's been told that this guy's actually a rightist and now has to not talk about how the left is ruining the country. No, it's that Trump does not care about Charlie Kirk that much and it's been a few days. So yeah, he's going to move on.

Yeah. And that's, you know, if you're wanting to game theory this out of the ethics of just muddying the waters to disrupt their momentum, well, there's an argument to be made there. I can see the utility in that. My utility is, I would say, at the very least, equal to that. Right. That's having an accurate understanding of these events to predict future trends and like understand the trajectory of political violence in the United States. Yeah. And that's what my interest in stressing evidentiary standards.

Yeah. For understanding the motivations behind this attack and the online communities and cultures that this attack has emerged from. Right. And I would say if you're looking in your own life, How can I tell which side of things I'm on? Just imagine everything was reversed in the case where, like, you think this is really clear evidence that this person was motivated by whoever you hate the most and that whatever

ideology you hate is why they did it. If it were the opposite and the same level of evidence was being used to accuse someone who was on your side of things, would you consider the evidence presented enough, right? And that's what I'm looking at is I have not seen enough evidence to buy into either side fully yet. I can make a case in my head that he's a groiper and there's some pieces of evidence that fit with that. And I can make a case in my head that he's a guy who hates Charlie Kirk and there's quotes from some interviews that would back that up. But neither of them is a solid, at the moment that we're recording this is a solid hypothesis to me. Or just a vaguely

right-wing board gamer. Right. Or just a right-wing board. Who has zoomer angst and it manifested this way, as many other people have manifested their zoomer angst through an act of political violence. Yeah. Like, Groyper, a very specific term means a specific thing. It doesn't just mean a Gen Z conservative. Yep. No, it does not. And I think that's where

we're going to have to leave you for the day. We may have appended an update to this, depending on what else is out. I do think that most of what we're talking about is pretty even though there will be more information at the time you listen to it, pretty timeless in terms of how you should think about shit like this. How you react to whatever

the next assassination is going to be, because this is an increasing trend in American politics. Look, if you care, and if your stance, if your principled stance with all the evidence is, I don't care, all that matters is defeating the right. So all I care about is what's convenient in terms of disrupting their narratives, then go on and live your life. But that's not the way we're going to do things here when we look at these attacks. We are going to try to figure out what happened, even if it's inconvenient. And it may be. We don't know what this guy yet. Touch some fucking grass. Before you touch grass, I'm recording one more update Sunday morning.

Yesterday, right-wing outlets and then Axios and now even more mainstream outlets started reporting that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, had a transgender roommate, and that investigators believe the two had some sort of romantic relationship. Some information from law enforcement officials about this investigation has been shown to be dubious at best, but it is true that the shooter had a roommate who does appear to be transgender. The roommate's TikTok can be traced to a Reddit account where they post about being trans, and post on R-slash trans, R-Slas trans-DIY, as well as R-slash-4-Tran, and also posts on R-slash-Green Text and R-S-Focham. Also active in a variety of video game subredits,

Magic the Gathering, memes subredits, R-slash distressing memes, R-slash Reddit moment, R-slash unpopular opinion, R-slash Lord of the Rings memes, R-slash prehistoric memes, R-slash-dank meme, R-slash nothing ever happens. Also post on R-slash-by-IRL, R-S-anarch capitalism, R-Gordon Peterson, as well as the 4chan themed subredits. I should also note that scrolling these subredits is not necessarily indicative of someone's political orientation. I myself scroll many of these subredits, as do largely apolitical friends of mine who

check out these subredits regularly just for shits and giggles. This is politics as meme. Subredits like Political Compass and T.P. USA are popular political subredits with explicitly comedic purpose, including making fun of Charlie Kirk in a meme-fied fashion. And I don't know if the roommate visited those two specific subredits, but I'm just using them as an example. Utah Governor Spencer Cox says that the roommate did not have any knowledge of Tyler Robinson's planned attack and has been incredibly cooperative throughout the course of the investigation. Sources have told Axios that investigators initially wanted

information about the roommate's gender identity to not be publicly reported. The right is certainly eager to make any sort of transgender connection to this shooting. The New York Post is referred to this shooting as another shooting by trans people and their advocates. The actual motivation of the shooter is still currently unknown. Governor Cox has described his ideology as leftist, while also noting, quote, there was a lot of gaming going on. Friends have confirmed that there was that deep, dark internet, Reddit culture, and other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep. You saw that on the casings.

I didn't have any idea what those inscriptions meant, but they are certainly the memeification that is happening in our society today. Unquote. That's pretty much all we know so far. Now go touch some grass. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one.

We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose. lose the faith, but there's an institution that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in. To bring you depth and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the

country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back everyone. Let's go next! And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky,

this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Abistown. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back.

This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash, at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.

Yeah. But the whole pretending and, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Think back to the early 2000s. You're flipping through TV channels, and then you hear this. I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. How dare you?

Learn something from this. But looking back, 20 years. later, that iconic show so many of us love, it's horrified. Robin, first of all, is too old to be starting model. She's huge. I talked to cast, crew, and producers who were there for some of the show's most shocking moments. If you were so rooting for her, what did you help her? With never-before-heard interviews, the curse of America's next top model examines why this show was so popular and where it all went wrong.

We basically sold our souls and they got rich. Listen to the curse of America's Next Top Model on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here, the last time that you and I spoke was about 12 hours after Trump announced the takeover of D.C.'s police force. It had really just happened, so I didn't really have a ton of clarity about how things we're going to be taking shape and what resistance or pushback would look like. Now, today that we're speaking, Friday, September 12th, it's been a little over about 30 days since all of this went down. And I feel like we're due for an update from my hometown,

the District of Columbia. What do you say? Absolutely. We're at the deadline. So now Trump can no longer do anything. The city's back. God, I wish. You're free once again. Oh my God, from your lips to God's ears. So I did want to set the stage a little bit up top. You know, I'm a journalist, but I am also an advocate for DC statehood. First and foremost, I feel like I need to make sure something is super clear, which is that how entwined all of this is to DC's lack of statehood. After the last time that you and I spoke, Gere, a listener said, oh, why is she making this whole thing about statehood? How would DC being a state change anything? how would two more Democratic senators change anything? Why are you making it about that? And I thought, oops, I did not do a good enough job of making clear why the takeover in D.C. could happen at all. And the ways that D.C.'s lack of statehood is at the heart of that issue. This is just sort of the soup that I swim in all day, every day. So I forget that's not true for everybody. For some of you, this might be a refresher, and you might know this already. But the reason why Trump started all of this in D.C. is because D.C. is not a state.

you know, as president, Trump has a lot more authority over D.C. than he has over any other place in the country. So while Trump talking about sending the National Guard into other cities is awful. He wants to do it to Chicago so bad. So bad. But he doesn't have the ability to. And he's really upset about that so much so that he's probably going to cancel a degree of the plans for National Guard deployment to Chicago instead going to cooperate with Louisiana because the governor is okay with working with Trump on that in Louisiana. Yes, exactly, exactly. Did you see, this is like a non-securter, but the tweet that he put out, like the

AI generated tweet that's, they're going to find out why we call it the Department of War. Then it was like, oh, we were just kidding and just, just, just delete that tweet. No, that was just a joke. Which isn't to like downplay, like, the amount of federal resources currently in Chicago. ICE and DHS have been very busy in Chicago. and I believe Friday morning, the day that we recorded this, ICE killed somebody in Chicago during an enforcement action. So this isn't to say, you know, Chicago's freed from Trump's

federal forces, ICE is still operating in Chicago as they have been. But at least the National Guard deployment, like mass military-style occupation, is unlikely in the near future. Yes, that is great context. And I think it also illustrates why what's happening in D.C. is so unique and could not happen anywhere else in the country. So while Trump is talking about wanting to send the National Guard to other cities, he does not have the broad authority to take over local police forces in those cities the way that he did in D.C. And even if he did, let's say, exercise what authority he could have over local police in other cities, say, like in an emergency situation, it still wouldn't be the attempt to take over the police force like we saw in D.C.

Like when this first happened, Pam Bondi was literally trying to replace D.C.'s chief of police briefly successfully until D.C.'s attorney general, Brian Schwab, sued, right? And so Trump does not have the authority to oust local leaders in other cities and states. Even if Trump sent the National Guard to Memphis, Memphis still has a mayor. Tennessee has a governor. They're senators. It's congressional representation. Because D.C. is not a state. Trump, working with Congress, could take over our city, oust our mayor and our city council. He has been talking about doing that as recently as this morning. I want to play a quick clip. He does lie in this clip because technically he doesn't have the authority. It has to go through Congress. But, you know, I don't see our Congress really standing up to whatever Trump wants anytime soon.

And so if Congress were to revoke D.C.'s home rule, then Trump would be able to appoint whoever he wanted to run D.C. So I want to play a clip of him talking about this. weirdly in oppressor about the Charlie Kirk murder. Here's what he had to say. Well, the mayor's asked us to say. You know, we have a Democrat mayor. He was asked us today. And D.C. is a little bit different because I could federalize it if I want.

You know, D.C. is a little bit different. So we have a lot of, a lot. We have actually more power in D.C. Because it's, you know, I can change the mayor if I want. I can do whatever I want. I haven't had to. We've had a great relationship with the mayor. We've had a great relationship.

Everybody's happy. And the mayor was not in favor of it. At first, we, you know, forced, and then she saw the results. And everyone's going up and thank you, Neur. We have no crime anymore. Oh, okay. I got to stop it because I can't even, I can't even listen to him, blow V8 on that. But, again, he's kind of lying here, but there is a reality where Trump single-handedly is in control of D.C.

So it would have to take Congress overturning D.C.'s home rule, but I don't think that would be terribly difficult for him to achieve. And if that does happen, he is right. he could appoint whoever he wanted to be in control of D.C. And so the GOP has already introduced legislation that would revoke D.C.'s home rule entirely something that Trump says that he wants to do. To be super clear, this would mean that all of the little things that you rely on and probably take for granted about your day-to-day local life, your social services, your trash pickup, how

your streets are run, your public transport, Trump would be in charge of literally all of that for me, it's important to me that people understand how bad of a situation that would be. Yeah, that would be unprecedented. So just to put a pin in that, even though Trump is talking about sending the National Guard to other cities, D.C.'s lack of statehood really makes what's happening here, unlike any other place in the country. D.C. is uniquely vulnerable. In addition to all of the, like, racial equity and democracy implications for statehood, the reality is everyday lives of more than a half a million people who live here, like me, are made more vulnerable by D.C.'s lack of statehood. So when I am like on my

statehood soapbox, that is why, because the lack of statehood in D.C. just makes us very vulnerable to having somebody like Trump really exercise an unprecedented amount of control that we will not see anywhere else in the United States. So just wanted to make that clear. Okay, so now I have some updates about the situation. As you said, Garrison, the crime emergency in D.C., which sort of kicked all of this off, has come to an end. Free! That's over. Mission accomplished.

We did it. Mission accomplished. So it lasted 30 days, and it's come to an end. However, there is no guarantee that Trump couldn't just declare another one. The optics of that would be a little weird because he's been talking, as we just heard in that clip, he's been talking about how crime is down

to zero in D.C., except for domestic violence, which everybody knows isn't really a crime, right? Like, he made it very clear that he feels like crime has gone to zero, so it'll be pretty weird to then institute another crime emergency in D.C. He kind of got what he wanted to with the mayor agreeing to cooperate with him somewhat. Exactly. So to be super clear, even with the crime emergency in D.C. ending, that in no way means an end to things like the National Guard in our streets or checkpoints, which have just been horrifying, and the surge that we're seeing in federal law enforcement, because those are two distinct

things. And in the last few weeks of this, what's really become just abundantly clear is that this whole thing was about immigration. Even after all the talk of crime in D.C., it became very clear that this is less about crime and more about enforcing Trump's immigration agenda. As you sort of alluded to early on, before she really changed her tune, about two weeks into the takeover, our mayor, Muriel Bowser, held a press conference where she said, well, if Trump's goal was to deport migrants and bring in ice. You know, he didn't have to take over MPD to do that. He should have just outright said that's what he wanted to do instead of making it this whole thing about crime. Don't ask her to repeat that sentiment now because I don't think that she would.

She's really, really changed her tune, which we'll talk about in a moment. And so one of the things that makes it complicated is that when you're talking about immigration detention versus other kinds of arrests, it just becomes a lot harder to have transparency into what's going on. But the Associated Press reported that data from the federal operation, analyzed by the AP, shows that more than 40% of the arrests made over the month-long operation were related to immigration. They spoke to Austin Rose, a managing attorney for the Amicus Center for Immigate Rights, who said, the federal takeover has been a cover to do federal immigration enforcement. It became pretty clear early on that this was a major campaign of immigration enforcement. And that's just, it's really hard to deny that this was just another increasing plank of the president's agenda on immigration. Yeah, and I think you can certainly look at the anti-crime narratives getting a lot of traction on the right with that pretty gruesome murder in North Carolina last week as well. And like, absolutely the crime angle is part of the rhetorical strategy Trump is using. And yeah, a right-wing populist president is doing a crime crackdown. Oh, this is unheard of. This is unprecedented. No, like, of course they're going to use that angle. But yeah, the under-discussed element of this is how much this has just been a cover to do a rapid increase in the number of,

immigration actions around D.C. Well, like you said, that was like 40%. So still another 60% of arrests is just affecting the other D.C. residents. And a lot of that is tying to this national crime wave narrative that these people are also pushing. I think these things work together. They're not necessarily like oppositional analyses of what's going on. But the immigration angle has been very like under discussed in the D.C. occupation. I agree. It's hard to discuss because I think we have to really have some honest conversations. It is true that D.C. experienced a surge in violent crime in 2023. That surge, thankfully, went down.

But I think that crime is just one of those issues where people who otherwise are invested in telling nuanced, thoughtful stories about complex issues. I see a lot of that nuance and thoughtfulness go right out the window when we're talking about crime. And I think that we really let the right dominate the conversation about crime in our cities. And in some ways, hijacked that conversation. And I do think that dynamic is part and parcel to how we got here now. I have a bee in my bonnet about some of the sloppy journalism, like local journalism, people who really should know better about crime.

You know, we had a wave of businesses shut and they would say, oh, we're shutting because of crime. And it's like, you actually look and you actually look and you. you're thinking, oh, well, this is a cashless business. What kind of crime were you experiencing? Yeah, there's no way. Using crime as his excuse in post-COVID economic decline has been extremely convenient for a lot of corporations. And yeah, I guess like the degree to which we've ceded territory on that same way, you know, we ceded territory on like the border on immigration, but specifically seating territory on discussion of crime allowed operating space for Trump to deploy this narrative, which then was used to hurt a lot of immigrants. Exactly. And in D.C., we saw

much tighter coordination with immigration officials with our local police force, especially at checkpoints where police would work with ICE, even if someone was not otherwise detained or in custody. I did an interview with Washington Post, Tayu Armas, who covers immigrant communities here in D.C. And he told me that this whole thing was essentially an attack on the policies that make a city like D.C. what is commonly thought of as a sanctuary city. I don't love the phrase sanctuary city, but you know what I mean, you know, laws that do not require police departments

to coordinate with immigration officials, really that it was an attack on those. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, and I think that it's important that we call that out for what it is, and this is difficult for me personally, but not get lost in debating what Trump is laying out about crime.

Because when you understand that it's not really about crime, then you don't have to do that debating, Right? And it's like, well, it's not really about crime. So let's not waste time debating what we both can plainly see this is not really about. Yeah, yeah. Because D.C. is just faking all its crime stats anyway, right, Bridget? Oh, gosh. Don't even get me started, Gare. And so something that Tayu told me in our interview that I found very troubling is that, again,

when someone is detained because of a suspected immigration-related issue, we just have a lot less information and transparency than if they were being arrested for another kind of crime. He described it as a black box that is difficult to penetrate, which is obviously heightened when you have masked agents pulling people out of cars at checkpoints and doing things like literally hitting delivery drivers with vehicles, right? Like, it becomes very difficult to really even understand what's going on, and that's by design. It's hard to find them in the system because these people often aren't even charged with a crime remaining in the country past the expiration of a visa isn't a crime. Exactly. So though these people are branded as quote-unquote

criminal migrants, that often is factually incorrect. If factually incorrect even matters anymore, which it increasingly does not, it seems. Yeah. And I mean, as you said, we know that immigrant communities are not committing more crime than the rest of the population. And so estimates would show less actually because they don't want to get deported. And, you know, Again, I feel myself getting pulled back into Trump's. He gets me go, like, circling the drain with this, where it's like, well, if you really cared about crime, you would want immigrant communities to feel comfortable talking to police with the understanding that they weren't going to be deported, if they reported a crime,

or if they witnessed a crime, or if they saw a crime. But again, it's not really about crime. So I don't have to, I don't have to get myself pulled into that. No, because it's entirely racialized. That's like the big common denominator here, even with the anti-crime narrative and the immigration stuff, is that it's all racialized violence. Yes. And I mean, I'm glad that you brought that up, just as a personal note, I live in Columbia Heights, which is a heavily black and brown neighborhood, a very thriving Latino population. And it really just has been awful, right? I live on a very busy street that runs right through the city and like checkpoints on either side of my street. And I was listening to, I think it was a Kara Swisher podcast. And she also lives in D.C. And she was saying, oh, well, I haven't really noticed any.

big changes. And I'm thinking, Kara. Yeah, yeah, I bet. I bet you aren't noticing many changes. Yeah, I bet you haven't noticed any changes. And yeah, I've lived in D.C. most of my whole life, I've never seen checkpoints where people are physically dragged out of cars in this way. So, I mean, if you don't live in a neighborhood like this, you might be able to get away with saying, oh, I haven't seen any big changes or nothing's really changed. Or maybe I had to see the National Guard when I leave my house, but in neighborhoods like mine, the change is very real. I'll put it that way. So you brought up the mayor, which I did want to briefly touch on.

I have been called out on this very podcast for being too sympathetic to our mayor, which is actually funny to me because on my other podcast, all we do is call her out. But the point that I have tried to make, and I think this is the nature of that of that critique, is that I do think it is important that people understand that our lack of statehood in D.C. does put our mayor in a position where her authority is just realistically a lot more limited than other elected officials. But even in that situation with realistically limited authority, her play here has been cozying up to Trump. And that is 100% a choice. Yeah. That is not something that other elected officials in D.C. have done. That is 100% a choice.

And it's a choice in an attempt in some ways to diffuse the situation, to not have Trump escalate to not go into an even more like legally uncharted territory, right? To not accelerate the conflict. And I think a lot of people who are critiquing this move actually would be very interested in this point, in accelerating this conflict, seeing what Trump will actually do stress test even more of our democracy. And a lot of people are interested in watching the results of that happen. And I can see how someone like Bowser doesn't want to do that. but that opens her up for a lot of critique.

And I'm interested in what you said about, like, other city officials. That's not something I've heard as much about. Is her kind of cooperating with Trump compared to the stance of other city officials? Yeah, I mean, look at D.C.'s Attorney General Brian Schwab, who has been out here suing the Trump administration somewhat successfully and has been a much more obvious fighter for D.C., right? So, like, he is certainly not playing nice. he's like, oh, we're going to fight this in the courts. If you want to try to take over our city, we will see you in court.

I'm so curious what the conversations are like between Bowser and Schwab, but it just reveals to me that capitulating and cozying up, I'm not going to say it's not a strategy, but it's certainly a choice. And to your point earlier, there are definitely people who say, hey, she's playing nice with Trump. D.C. still has home rule. D.C. still has a mayor. And the crime emergency has ended.

Those are all good things. And being a resident of D.C., I will happily say, I don't want to see how far Trump will go on this. I want this to end. I'm not, I'm not someone who was like, yeah, like, let the chips fall where they may. I want my trash picked up. I want my, you know, my neighbor's kids to be able to go to school, all of that. I'm not, I'm not. That's understandable, yeah.

Yeah. It's the complex thing. I do think that, you know, early on in this, Bowser was talking about how. Crime in D.C. was down. And then Trump said on social media, oh, Bowser better get her story straight on the crime numbers or things are going to get worse. And days later, she was thinking a very different tune. She did a press conference where she thanked the federal government. She did stop short of thanking Trump specifically, but thanking the federal government for helping D.C. with the crime issue. And I guess as somebody who's been following Bowser for as long as I have, it wasn't terribly surprising in an episode I did of it could happen here, I think, back in January, we talked about how her stance with Trump this time around was like concession after concession after concession. So it wasn't surprising. This falls in line with that, I guess. Correct. And I do think that people need to understand that in a lot of ways, Bowser, and I don't mean this in the way that it's going to sound, but like, I do think that there is

alignment between Bowser and Trump on a lot of issues, crime potentially being one of them, right? When we were talking about how Trump wanted Bowser to dismantle encampments in D.C., it wasn't like Bowser as some friend to the homeless. No, no, no, no. Yeah, like the specific encampment in question, she already had plans to demolish just later on on a slower timeline. There is a class alignment among people in the political, quote unquote, elite, right? You can look at Gavin Newsom's extreme anti-homeless policies.

And compare that to Trump's extreme. anti-homeless policies. And yeah, they have class alignment on that issue, even if Gavin might be against Trump on some other issues, though. He has his own fair share of concessions to Trump. Oh, you said it, friend. Also, I like that I'm on a first name basis with Gavin. I know, Gab. Podcast for Solidarity. And as we've seen the past week, podcaster solidarity, most important thing. Oh, yes. Also, fellow I heart podcaster, I believe. For Gavin, yeah. And I hope he joins the union. Yeah, same.

And I guess I should say to your point about the complexities about, you know, the way that Bowser, our mayor is playing this. It's true that it's good that the crime emergency has ended, that D.C. still has home rule. We still have a mayor. We still have a city council as of today. And even if you would say, like, well, that's, you know, the mayor co-seeing up with Trump. Like, you have that to thank. That's why that's happening. our mayor is really making no friends with other black mayors in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, I have to assume, when she does press conferences where she talks about how having federal troops in D.C. has been good for this city, how crime has gone down, when you have these other cities that are currently trying to fend off federal takeovers from Trump. So even if her cozying up with Trump has led to D.C. specifically being able to enjoy home rule for another day, at what cost if it enables Trump's actions in other cities, you know?

me putting on my skull mask as I bring out my chessboard depicting the accelerationist collapse of D.C. and how that affects a larger political situation in the United States. Yes. How much of D.C. am I willing to sacrifice to see how far Trump will go. Yeah. It's tough. It's complicated because obviously as a D.C. resident, I want to have a safe and peaceful existence for myself here in D.C. But it's not happening in a vacuum.

So I also have to think about, you know, the national implications for other cities. And, you know, I don't envy our mayor, I guess. I don't envy many mayors. Oh, I am firmly believe if you want to become the mayor of a city like D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, something has to be wrong with you. And Bridget Todd has come out against Zoran Mamdani, officially on the It Could Happen Here podcast. No, no, no, no, no. I'm just saying, I mean, yeah, I'll say it.

Who wants a job like that? No, it sounds like a nightmare. I had a friend who was, like, vying to be the head of comms for the Baltimore Police Department, and I was like, wow, you are a massacre. That's even a weirder. That's even a weirder. That's like the, I can't imagine to never know peace and not get into heaven. No.

He's probably listening and thinking, oh, why should talk and shit about me. And so it is complicated, and I do think it's important, as important as much as I want DC to be a safe place where I can walk outside and not see people getting dragged out of cars and federal checkpoints and all of that. We do need to think about the larger picture here. And people that I've talked to with regards to the mayor, they tell me that, oh, it seems like she is just not interested in the, like, the polling of these decisions. Because the conversations that I am having, people are not happy with her in the spaces I am in the conversation is like, how do we recall this mayor? Like, even though we might have these sort of things that you consider

victories, D.C. enjoying home rule, still having a mayor, a city council, all of that. People are really, really, really not happy with our mayor. Yeah. So looking ahead at what's coming up next, even though the crime emergency is ending, this whole thing is very far from over. The fight for the self-determination of D.C. as far from over, in ways that have, in a lot of ways, nothing to do with Trump. There are 13 bills in the House aimed at directly taking action at D.C.

Many of them are direct assaults on D.C.'s home rules. There are provisions that would make it easier for Congress to overturn D.C. Home Rule. There are provisions that lower the age of when you can be tried as an adult for crimes from 16 to 14. There is a provision that would give Congress longer time to review D.C.'s Right now, it's 30 days. They would change it to 60 days. All of D.C.'s laws have to go through Congress. It is a nightmare.

Like, it is a whole thing. The biggest of these bills in the House right now is, of course, wanting to overturn D.C.'s ability for district residents to elect our own attorney general instead of having an attorney general appointed by Trump. If that bill were to become law, it would mean that our current attorney general, the person who, I would argue, has sort of emerged as the, if there were. was a single person that you could look at and be like, oh, this person is trying to fight for D.C.'s home rule and authority, Brian Schwab, he would be fired immediately and Trump would be able

to replace him with whoever he chose, not somebody that district residents elected or voted for or campaign for, just whoever Trump wanted. And that term would run concurrent with the president of the United States. So obviously, you know, some of these pieces are not overturning home rule entirely, but they are clearly attacks on D.C.'s ability to govern itself and the self-determination of folks here in the district. Are you going to discuss what's going to happen with the Safe and Beautiful Task Force? Oh, no, but I can. Has been passed the expiration of the order, Bowser's establishment of the task force to continue federal cooperation. Yes. I guess it's like one of the most immediate, like, continuing aspects of this story. And it's like

unclear, how much this heightened federal presence will last past the expiration of the order. So in a press conference, I have to say Bowser was pretty tight-lipped when asked directly about all of that. And so a lot of it sounds like wait and see. Like, she really did not give clear answers. And so I walked away from that presser being just as confused as you probably are, just as confused as listeners are. I do think in part that speaks to the unprecedented nature of the way that Trump is is dealing with D.C. right now of like they might genuinely not know. But the fact of the way that she has been so tight-lipped, I hate giving this answer, but I think it's a wait-and-see kind of situation. Yeah, fair.

Hi, this is future Bridget coming in on Monday night to say that we actually got more clarity on the question of whether or not police in D.C. would continue working with federal immigration officials after D.C.'s crime emergency ended. D.C.'s mayor, Muriel Bowser, was still being pretty tight-lipped about this when Gare and I were speaking about it on Friday. But on Monday, September 15th, it was reported that Bowser had announced that D.C.'s police department, MPD, would no longer be assisting immigration officials with immigration enforcement the way they had been during the crime emergency. Bowser said, immigration enforcement is not what MPD does, and with the end of the emergency, it won't be what MPD does. Trump did not like this,

and on Monday, Trump renewed threats to federalize D.C. cease police again if the department does not cooperate with ICE, saying, quote, under pressure from the radical left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent criminal takeover of our capital for years, has informed the federal government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens. If I allowed this to happen, all caps crime would come roaring back. To the people and Businesses of Washington, D.C., all caps, don't worry, I am with you and won't allow this to happen. I'll call a national emergency and federalize, if necessary, three exclamation points.

And so I guess one of the big questions that I've been wrestling with is what does all of this mean for the future of D.C. There was a time where it felt like lawmakers had D.C.'s back, but it's really become clear that the days of D.C. being able to count on the Senate and Congress are over. I did an interview with a long-time journalist here in D.C. Mark Seagraves, and he reminded me that D.C. has really been the most reliable jurisdiction in the country. There is, for Democrats, there is no other place that has given more electoral votes for president to Democrats every single election. It's extremely consistent.

Extremely. I mean, have you seen that map where it's the election for Reagan and it's a whole big splotch of red and only, I think, Minnesota and D.C. are the only splotch of blue. Like, nobody backs Democrats like D.C. backs Democrats every single time. California can't say that. Massachusetts can't say that. And in return, the party has essentially abandoned us. They circulated messaging nationally telling Democrats to tread carefully about how to talk about what is clearly an attempt at a fascist takeover of our city. D.C. has given Democrats this unwavering support since we had the ability to vote in presidential elections, which

hasn't been that long, only since the 60s, but still, right? Like, and this is how they do us. And we have known for years that Republicans like Mike Lee and others have had their eye on D.C. They want to overturn D.C. rules, overturn D.C. laws. Even things that have nothing to do with crime and public safety, things like abortion, it is so clearly about control. They have been eyeing control of D.C. for many, many, many, many years. And now we have this big, wide open, breezy window allowing them to do that. Is D.C. spiritually Midwestern? Because like, it's, sorry, that's an insane

question. Tell me more about what you mean by this. Because, like, in some ways, you know, it is like a coastal elite place. And it's like, you know, the heart of political power. But D.C. to me, it always has kind of had Midwest vibes. I don't, I don't know how to express it any other way. They've been to so many people from the Midwest moved to D.C. to do politics work, but I'm sure people from all over

moved to D.C. to do politics work. But, like, D.C. and, like, Minneapolis feel like very similar cities to me in some ways. I have said this before. See? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I have said this before. Like, I think there is something to this

where, and in that interview I did with Mark C. Graves, he kind of gets at it a little bit. But I do think that D.C. is the kind of place where you can just sort of take for granted that I will always live in this sort of progressive city. I will always sort of live in this city.

Like, I think it's easy to take things like home rule in D.C. for granted. And I think D.C., the nature of D.C. is a little bit weird that, as you kind of alluded to, it's a very transient city. And so there are people living in D.C. who have only known one mayor, Bowser, because she's been mayor for like 10 years, right? They don't know Mayor Gray. They don't know Mayor Fenty. They don't know how kind of tenuous a lot of what holds

D.C. together actually is. And it can be really easy when you're living in a city that historically has enjoyed low unemployment, has been pretty moneyed, is pretty progressive. The kinds of fights that we were having in D.C. before all this started, they seem so quaint now. Bike lanes, tipped minimum wage, like all of these, you know, it is, it is sort of like Minneapolis in a kind of way. You're not, you're not wrong. Well, I'm glad I'm glad my vibes meter is still accurately attuned. Yes. And I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about the protests and pushback that we've seen because D.C. is not taken this quietly. There was a massive protest in March that I will say I'm a little sad that it didn't get more national coverage. Weirdly, it got a lot

of international coverage, but not a ton of national coverage, which is sort of part and parcel for D.C. So many national outlets only think about D.C. when it comes to federal implications and When it comes to what's happening locally in our streets and at Malcolm X. Park and all of that, they're like, D.C., who, we don't know her. So, like, that protest was quite moving. We also have local groups like Harriet's Wildest Dreams and Free D.C., who are great resources. Free D.C., a lot of their work has been at the community level, leading things like cop-watching trainings or, like, training residents to film enforcement stops, which, when you consider what Teu Armas told me from the Washington Post about how these immigration,

detentions and arrests are often just a black box. Like, we've seen video where a resident is being detained by immigration officials and they're speaking to the person recording, like, please record this, please record this. You know, and so I do think, like, things like that are super important when you're dealing with, you know, this black box dynamic of immigration detentions and arrests. We also have things like educating residents on their legal rights. And this is like a weird saying in D.C. D.C. has a ton of parks, actually more parks than any other part of the country where consistently voted the number one city in the country for parks. And so because D.C. is just a wonky place. Sometimes you don't know if you're on federal versus city property. So you can find yourself in a park that's just a tiny little triangle of grass. Oh, no, you're actually on federal property. So if you get arrested there, you're actually in a federal jurisdiction, even though you're miles from the White House and you thought like,

oh, I'm just hanging on in a public park. So we have seen local activist groups and organizing groups really try to educate folks on their rights and some of those distinctions of like, hey, if you commit a crime here, you're technically on federal property and you should understand that. And I wanted to mention this because I do think it's easier to think of resistance as this big, loud, visible thing happening in the streets. And as moving and powerful as that big protest was, so far, I think a lot of the powerful resistance has been community-oriented, right? It's not as exciting as, you know, being out on the streets necessarily, but it is no less important. Yeah, the non-flashy stuff often goes under-recognized. Yeah. And I will also say that folks might know D.C. has its own style of music

called Go-Go, which is sort of a city, local, artistic expression of music here. And I've even seen groups like Harriet's Wildest Dreams trying to organize joyful go-go jams in public spaces, just to remind folks that joy is also part of resistance, just so that the only thing that we're talking about is not defending our cities and being on the defense, but also reconnecting to the things that make our cities joyful and exciting and lovely places to be. And I think it has been important to me when you're sick to death of reporting about all of this, also getting to remember that joy is part of it. That's like why we're doing this so that we can experience joy in our cities.

Yes, I agree. We will allow a little bit of joy, I suppose, in this semi-unjoyful time. Yeah, a tiny bit. I will, speaking of joy, I wanted to end on one last teeny tiny little tidbit about resistance, which is that when we were talking last time, Gare, I told you, I think this was like the day that the takeover was announced. there was that guy who threw a sandwich at the federal agent. Yes.

Well, they popped this dude on felony charges, but D.C.'s grand jury failed to indict, and now he's down to a misdemeanor. So he pled not guilty, I think, just a couple days ago, to just a misdemeanor. So, yeah, I mean, grand juries, they used to say, like, oh, you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. I guess not if it's thrown out of federal officer. You can't. Not in D.C.

This is, like, the only good piece of, of grand jury news I have kind of ever heard in my life. Whenever I hear news about a grand jury, it's always like terrible. Like, oh, no, that sounds awful. Yeah. This is the first, the first based grand jury I've ever seen. Yes, yes. I mean, if you're listening in D.C.

and you're on a grand jury, you know what to do. I'll just say, I'll just put it that way. But yeah, that's all I have, really. I would just say, you know, if you happen to be listening in a place that is not the district, We really need your voice. You know, when stuff happens, there's not really anybody I can call. We have a congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton. She has been a lifelong fighter for D.C. and D.C.'s self-determination and civil rights.

She is also, I think, the second oldest person in Congress. And I'll just say it's showing. I think, you know, we don't really have a lot of people who are. fighting for us and being a voice for us. And so, yeah, stay checked in to D.C. even if Trump moves to, you know, deploy national guards in other places, other kinds of takeovers, what's happening in D.C. is unique. It cannot happen in any other place in the country. And we're so often overlooked and ignored. And so if there are bills moving through Congress, call your Congress people and please advocate for the self-determination of D.C. residents because we have no one to

advocate for on our behalf. So please be our voice. Thank you for talking about D.C. Once again, Bridget, where can people find you online and your other shows? You can check me out on my podcast. There are no girls on the internet on IHeart Radio. A co-host a podcast called CityCast, D.C. about local happenings and politics and news in D.C. You can check that out. I'm on Instagram at Bridget Marie in D.C. I'm on TikTok at Bridgett, in D.C. and I'm on YouTube, but there are no girls on the internet. Yeah, that's right. Okay, cool. I'm glad we figured

that out. I know. I just, YouTube is like a cesspool. I'm doing my best out there. So true. I'm Jorge Ramos. I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching the moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one.

We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose the faith, but there's an institution that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in. To bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and

Paola Ramos as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Afghanistan. sound? You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back everyone! He's going to next! And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction

podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Abistown. Hello, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start.

We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season.

of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Think back to the early 2000s. You're flipping through TV channels, and then you hear this. I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. How dare you! Learn something from this! But looking back 20 years later, that iconic show so many of us loved, is horrified. Robin, first of all, is too old to be starting a model. She's huge. I talked to cast, crew, and producers who were there for some of the show's most shocking moments.

If you were so rooting for her, what did you help her? With never-before-heard interviews, the curse of America's Next Top Model examines why this show was so popular and where it all went wrong. We basically sold our souls and they got rich. Listen to the curse of America's Next Top Model on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up? It can happen here. It's your favorite cousin prop. Y'all already know what it is. I'm about to black this mug up because y'all don't be blacking it up enough.

Anyway, all over our country, there's this sort of narrative around, crime, which is verifiably false, but we also understand that a lot of times the feeling of crime and safety is a lot of times a vibe. Like, it's kind of how it feels. You could tell me the crime rates is down across America, but in my city, if I still feel like, you know what I'm saying, not safe or safe, you know, your perception of that. Anyway, point I'm trying to make is there are truly verifiable data-driven ways to actually create safety and reach. do's harm in a city and a lot of that is around trust and services so what i decided to do y'all is to bring y'all who i lovingly called the nifty hustle of st louis ladies and gentlemen can i

introduce you to the home boy thistle with the red shirt on well look man you already flamed up i wasn't going to bring up the flame of it all with the wrist hey i'm like got to throw the red shirt off a prop. Oh, man. Happy to be here, though. Yeah. Man, we're happy to have you, bro. That was the one, that's funny,

because that's the one asterisk next of your name with me, is all that red you be wear. Hey, man. It'd be like this as I was little. Yeah, I know. You got to be who you are. I would not respect you were you to not be flying your wolf. You know what I'm saying?

So I appreciate you. I'm retired. I'm retired. He said, look, look, that's what I love to here. We're going to get into it. So we're going to get into it. So this is, like I said, the Nipsey House of St. Louis, when we first met, I had no idea people out there really actually said, thar.

Yes. I thought that was a joke. I thought y'all was doing too much. And then I met this and he was like, oh, it's over there right there. I was like, wait, y'all really say that. No joke at all. That's really y'all slag. None.

That's really how we talk. We really talk. And the crazy thing is I slow down talking. You know what I'm saying? Sometimes it'll be like here and there. But if I just get the going, be like, her, darn, her, darn, there, her. Yo, yo, yo, yeah, call switch.

All right, perfect. So, first of all, let's tell them what you do now. So kind of give me a brief introduction, who you are, what you're doing, and then we'll go to the origin story. So, like he said, my name, Thistle, Travis Tyler, that's what my mama named me, from St. Louis, Missouri.

I am, man, I'd be trying to figure out what am I sometimes. Like, for real, even when I was doing music, music, I never felt like I was a rapper. Yeah. I felt like I was an artist. Yeah. You know, and I still feel like I'm an artist in the sense of the word now, because I create things.

Yeah. From inspiration, you know, alchemy. I create from the mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not what you would consider an activist. I'm not a politician. Mm-hmm. But, like, I'm always in the middle of something that's happening.

Yeah. And that's how I've always been. And I have a passion for the youth of urban community, especially black youth. I have a passion for black men, especially black men that are either trying to escape the reality of street life or black men that are being re-entered into society from prison. I have a passion for the rebuilding of the black community. So my whole life, that's pretty much been my thing. No matter what space I've landed in has always been.

my thing when it comes to community. And so that's it, man. Like, I'm wearing the shirt is actually Flight 100 from my mentor program. I mentor in the city youth, ages 10 to 17. Yeah. Not just setting up some of the mentor them,

but creating the rights of passage. Like creating a pathway, like I think a lot of time with inner city youth, well, I didn't go say inner city youth, especially with fatherless young men, Whether wherever they're in the world, whether it's the suburban neighborhood or the inner city or rural or third world country, with fatherless young men, they tend to lack some of us a passage way of, oh, this is who you can become. This is what you need to do to become it because there's no one to earth to really guide them. So with our mentor program, that's my goal, not just the mentor young men and send them home.

and try to keep them out of trouble, but help them identify who they are and who they were born to be and helped them get to that place. Yeah. And you still got that group home joint, right? Yeah, so the group home, it's funny, we're going to interview now.

I just stepped down from her Friday. Okay. But it was a good thing. It wasn't a negative. So I ran it for like a year and a half, helped rebuild the program, brought it up to the modern age, staffed it,

created new things for the boys, learned a lot myself in the process and now I'm going for a throttle into shaping out my Flight 100 program. Yeah. Because the end goal like one of my end goals is to build a school. Yeah.

Flight 100 Academy. All boys. Keep the same boys from kindergarten to 12th grade. Wow. That's my mission. Yeah. What I truly enjoyed about what you're doing is, at least with the group and the mentoring thing is the trust factor

in the sense that, you know, when you get involved, especially in the juvenile system, like, they tell you that your record sealed. They say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? But, like, in practice, it's not the thing. So, like, I think oftentimes if there's a step between getting into juvie or into central, you know what I'm saying?

If there's an in between step, if somebody could come in the middle of that and stay, look, let a little homie stay with us. You know what I'm saying? Or, you know, let's say you could. caught a case, and then every once in a while, like, obviously both of us can say this from my personal experience. Every once in a while, you might score a judge on a good day. You know, you score a judge on a good day, and they say, I'll tell you what, I heard of this program over on the other side of town. You could either do this. Yeah. You know, say it, or you could go to

Camp Rocky. You know, out here, that's what it was. Like, you can go to Rocky or you can go to this program. And, like, 10 out of 10, I'm going to be like, let's go to this program. But. Yeah. Sometimes that program be just as bad. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But if it's ran by somebody who has been through the system, who understands it and knows that like, here are the traps,

here's are the ways for which I know I was taking advantage of. I was abused and this is what we're not going to do here. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. The goal is for you to never come back to this. You make a valid point. One of the reasons I believe God allowed me to go back into the space with the group home was, bro, honestly,

you will be surprised how I'm trying to word this in a good way, but I don't think it is one. Can you say however you won't? You would be surprised how messed up the foster care system is. Yeah, yeah. A lot of these kids get pulled out of their homes. So the group home that I was at, mostly all of our boys, they came from environments where they have been taken from their parents. Yeah. And so I was running the transition to live a group home.

So my objective, my daily task was to teach a group of young men how to transition into manhood, how to go out on their own, pay their bills, live on their own, all of this. You'll be surprised, though, these kids get pulled from their homes and their parents. And they're saying to them, oh, we're going to send you somewhere better. Better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the places that they send them to do more harm to them. than their home.

Yep. Like they're sitting in them with people that are worse than their parents. Yeah. And one, they don't have a voice

to advocate for them. So here I am right now. It's crazy a few months back. I was like, I'm going to talk about this every chance I get, which is crazy. They don't have nobody

to advocate for them because I'm sure there are people that have been through the foster care system, but for some reason people see that stigma. There are probably celebrities

that been through foster care. Yeah. But they see it as a stigma. Yeah. Like, oh, they don't want to talk about that point. Oh, my parent.

gave me up. I don't know who my prayer it is. I was in, you know, whatever the case is. They don't have nobody to advocate. Yeah. These kids, a lot of these kids are treated so poorly. Yeah. In these places that the law should step in. People tend to not understand why they act the way they act. Yeah. But you got to think, ultimately, you are walking into a child's home and you're kidnapping them. That's what you're doing, really. Yeah. Yeah. So if I come to your house at eight, nine o'clock at night, When I was 14, me, my cousins, my brother, a bunch of my siblings were taken from my mom and my aunt, right? I watched it from across the street because I was over my friend's house. Holy swooped up. Social workers swooped up. It's nighttime. You go into somebody's house.

You take their child. They don't know where you're taking their child to. The child doesn't know where they're going. And then they get to the residential or the group home And they act in a fool And you got a bunch of unqualified, untrained staff members there They don't know how to deal with them neither That's just looking for a job Yeah

And when they get there They talk about why they're acting like this Come on, fan If somebody just came to your house And took you from your parent You would be acting the same way And if you weren't you saw Like let's just be real

Yeah Yeah, you just saw them You're gonna sit there and talk all night These kids, they're acting out Because they've been abducted Basically in their mind And even Pat, way beyond that point, I know most people have seen, if you had in the movie, DoSit, where they talk about the Shacklin family and how they basically make dope things out of the whole West Virginia with oxycodone. You know, oxycodone, how do you want to pronounce it?

And they show in the movie how these doctors were getting these kickbacks for introducing the drugs to the patients in West Virginia. bro, who better to practice with drugs than children. Yeah. We ain't got no parents. That nobody cares about. Yeah. Bro, they take these kids and they put them into the system three, four, five years old. Dang. And they start doping them from day one.

Man. Five dose dope over and over and over. Switch them out. Put them on something else. Let me see how this is going to work. Switch them out, put them on something else. By the time they got to me at 18 years old, they're like, bro, fried. Yeah.

Fried. Uh-huh. And then you got, you got caseworkers. They don't care about the kids. They don't call. They don't come see them. They don't pick them up. They don't do none of these things.

And the kids in there feeling like they don't got nobody in nowhere. Yeah. So my main space that I function in right now, especially for them, is to be an advocate. Yeah. Every chance that I get, I'm going to talk about it. So people can put eyes on it. But also, that's one of the reasons that I'm building the things that I'm building. so that we can have a space where it's like,

no, you don't have to go to because there are a lot of people I heard that have the good ideas. They have it. There are some good programs. Yeah. Like there are good programs, program that I was at.

It's been around 468 years. It's a decent program. So there are good programs that are out here, but the whole system as a whole, it needs to overall. So when I had an opportunity to peep behind the veil, I was like, you know, you know me, I go and get to talking.

Yeah. I think obviously you're talking, that talk but like one of the things that you know in the humanitarian space that i like i serve in they have a saying that says peace works at the speed of trust yeah you know so like even with all these good programs in different places it's like if these kids don't trust you yeah you you brought up being removed from your family's house you brought up being removed from your family's house when you was real young, I'd love to talk a little bit about the origin story because obviously you wasn't always talking like this. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I don't know. And I think that that like legitimacy, you know, or that realness that I'm sure no matter how doped up or how painful them kids are, like they can look behind your eyes and say, okay, but he knows. Yeah. Yeah. So give me a little bit of that. Get a little bit of the retired whooping, all that. Oh, it's funny. I got this video on my past. that I posted it. I started off saying, ain't nobody coming to save you. Yeah.

And at the end of it, I go through this story about being in the group home and all that. And I say, have y'all ever seen the Marvel movies where they like, this is your origin story? I'm like,

that's my origin story. Yeah. So for me, that part of the group home was significant in my life. Real, real, real significant. So before I went to the group home, I was already outside.

Yeah. Like, there are a lot of things that I've experienced in this world that when I look back I just be like, man, that's crazy. Bro, when I was 14 years old, me and my girlfriend were living together. Crazy, yeah.

Bro, no, I slept in the bed. Yeah, 14. Every night. Yeah. With my girlfriend at 14. Like, we basically lived together. Me and her in the room, her mom in the next room.

And so I was, because of my mom's issues, like I've been, at this point, I've been my soul, about her, you know, minus a short period of time her and her where it was like, I went to live with my daddy and he sent me back or with my grandma for a short period of time, my grandfather. All those were short periods of time, but since I was like 12, I've been taking care of myself. So I was outside early, like hustling, making money so I could provide for myself. Yeah. 14, like I said, I was living with my girlfriend.

We were sleeping in the same bed. When I went to the group home, my mom, the caseworker, and the police came and got me from her house. And put me in the car, drove me two hours out of St. Louis to a ranch little house out in the woods. Yeah. Town full of white people. Like, I was a hood kid. Like, when they got me true story, I had on Dickie overalls, like the zip-ups, the brown boy. Yeah. And some boots. Like, where they had a baby. Yeah, the St. Louis, like, like, y'all don't know. like the influence of like West Coast culture

and it was very big out there so he was like yo I'm zipped up with the beanie and the dickies it's like you would think you was in South Central yeah yeah so I had on a beanie to zip up dicky boy like yeah so they took me out to the woods and man I got there and when I got there

it was the first time of my life I think I felt that level of desperation yeah and hopelessness because I was supposed to stay there until I was 18 or 20 those were their words. Based off my behavior, I'm 14. So I'm in my head, like, I'm going to be here six years.

Like, yeah. So I'm meeting all these kids. They're like, I've been here since I was this age, and I've been in the system since I was this, and they moved me here. And they, so I'm hearing all these different stories from different people. And I'm just like, dang, it's crazy, you know. Yeah.

And then one day, it was right after Christmas. I'm sitting in their hindsight. I got a different perspective of it. Now I was this kid. I never forget him. was Roger. When I first met him, the very first day that I came, he sat down beside me, and he said, man, and if my granddaddy was her, he wouldn't want me talking to you. And I was like, why? He said, because he didn't like black people. So I turned right to him and said,

why did you feel the need to tell me that? Right. Why you tell me that? Yeah. Like, I was like, you could have kept that to yourself. He's like, I don't got nothing against black people. I'm just saying my grandfather don't like black people. So I'm like, whatever, okay, cool. Yeah. It's like right after Christmas, Christmas Day, I was sitting in a group home, nobody called. Like, I'm watching all the other kids. They're getting gifts. They're opening their presence. Yeah. Depending on their programs, some of them, they get to go home. Like, so I'm sitting there. I ain't nobody called me. I don't got no gifts. I don't got nothing. And I'm just sitting in a church, like, just pissed all the day, basically. Yeah. And one of my workers came in later

that day. I seen her. She was talking to the lady. The other lady that was about to get off. They was behind me. And I heard her talking. She said, he just sitting there all day. She was like, yeah and she like did anybody call them or anything she was like nah she's like nobody so i'm and it's crazy now that i've been back in that space more than once yeah i've experienced that with kids yeah cnm in her and i know what to do like oh i got you you know what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah and so i'm sitting there at that point she's like no he just sitting there all day and so she went came out she like oh what you're doing this lady played a significant role in my life i wish i could remember her name bro yeah

Like, so she was like, what you're doing? I'm like, nothing. She was like, you want to go to the store? I'm like, to do what? She's like, her, I've got something for you. So the state gave each kid a $100 Walmart gift card. Wow. So she's like, you got a gift card to Walmart for $100 where I had never been to

Walmart before. I ain't know what Walmart was. So I'm like, all right, man, let's go. We go to Walmart. I'm walking around. He ain't never been to Walmart. I had never been to Walmart. I had never been to Walmart, but I'm walking around.

I'm looking around. a store. I got this hunting. Oh, guess what I buy? No lie. True story. White t-shirted some dickens. Yes, yes, yes. White t-shirted some dickies out of Walmart in the country. You're... I love it.

So I grab these Dickies, White T, go back to the group home. I'm still mad because ain't nobody called me. Nobody came to see me. You know, none of that. And so the next few days, man, me and and dude, we always ended up in the living room at the same time. And I'm

I'm mad. Yeah. So 14, you gotta think when I was 14, bro, I was like probably six, six foot, six one. Yeah. Like 180, 200 pounds when I was 14. Yeah. And so while I'm there, they had some little weights. I had started lifting weights and things.

Oh, man, you start programming. I'm a big old kid. Yeah. So do you get to talk of crazy to me. We sit in a living room. He's like, man, what you doing, boy? So my conversation goes back to the first time, like, he racist. Yeah, yeah, now I know.

And now I know, I'm like, what's you mean, boy? He's like, you heard me, boy, I'm like, boy as in kid or boy as it racist. Yeah. He like, boy, you heard me. Now we're fighting. I said, hey, bro, I'm going to tell you this one more time. Don't call me a boy again. Yeah.

He said, what you don't do, boy? Let that fool up. Yup. Yop. I'm talking about how you're on the floor, MLMA style. Locked in, Bing. Hey, night night, yep. Lock in on it

So by the time they come in I got them by the back of the net Yeah And I'm rubbing his face Across the carpet Yeah I'm like what you call me again He's steady saying though

He's like boy you're early boy So now high sight though When I look back I had to think and say Yeah Damn Me and he was sitting there At the same time

I thought back and said Oh he ain't had no visitors On Christmas neither Yeah Oh he's mad like me He just as hurt as you. He was hurt. He didn't even know how the process.

You're the craziest storyteller ever. Like, because I'm like, they can get to the point. And I see it right there. Now, I know, like, he ain't know how to process. So I russ him up, whatever. So when the people come in and they see me, you know, they like grab me up because I'm six foot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a young kid from the city.

Yeah. You know everybody record and story that come in there. So they know, like, he's a gang member. He did, see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm aggressive. They snatch me. up, throw me in the room.

They put me in this room called an isolation room. This room was like an 8 by 10. All the walls were metal. Yeah. The door was like this thick wood with a little bitty one doing the thing on it.

No way out unless they let you out. Thin carpet on the floor. Bro, when they shut that door, I just lost it. Yeah. My brain said, you're gonna die in her. Ain't no way out. Yeah.

And I got the kick in the door. I got the yelling. And I'm talking about, bro, I just was whaling in there. But they just, they paid me no mind. They didn't even come to the door. It don't make no difference until you calm down. They're like, he can't get out.

And so this girl that I knew there, she came and sat down by the bottom of the door and talked under the thing. And she was like, hey, you got to calm down. She's like, come down her. So I lay down on the floor. I'm breathing through the crack. Like, I'm breathing under the door. She like, you got to calm down. Like, they never going to let you out of her.

They scurred. She's like, I'm out of her. Like, you got to, so I'm just laying out of regulating, and I go to sleep. Wow. And I wake up in the middle of the night, I knock on the door. They let me out to use the bath on the dude. Like, it was a big white dude used to be overnight. He was like, if I let you out, or are you going to get the trip?

And I said, no, man, I just got to use the bath on. I already didn't use it there at once. I'm like, I just want to go to the toilet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, all right, come on. He let me out. I went back in. He locked the door.

When I went back in there, bro, I said to myself, this was my, one of my origins. I said to myself, I said, when they let me out of her, 14 years old, I said, I'm going to be different. Yeah. I'm being in control. I'm going to show the world who I am. Yeah. When they let me out, I play the game after that every sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I went to another group home. I stayed there. I was supposed to be there for a while. And I got to that group home, and I asked the people, I said, how do the program work as soon as I got there? Yeah. They said, well, if you do this and then you go to level this and you go to this level,

I said, how long do it take? They said probably like 90 days. I said, I'm going to do it at 60. I love it. They said, okay. And show enough. 60 days later, bro. Less than 60, I was done.

Yeah. They called my mama. My case had been dropped because my mom was doing what she's supposed to do. And they're like, you can go home. Yeah. So now I go home two days before I'm turning 15. I get back home though my mom was on the same mission. And I've been outside ever since.

Beautiful, man. And one thing after another just shape me into who I am. The hero. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say that that authenticity of like even having the wherewithal to know that like, you know, at the end of the day, little homie was scared, right? yeah he was hurt too like he was just hurting so when you have that sort of like level of empathy and you know when you were outside like the reasons for which you were outside you know what I'm saying and having those connections it's so clear to me how that fuels the direction you're in and it proves to me the cornerstone premise of my whole movement here which is like yo if you

understand the hood you understand politics yeah you walked in there and said what's the game what's the play okay what's the game what's the play how does this work this okay now I know how to work it here's a way to make it better I know how it I know how I felt in it so if somebody else has to be in there this the way it needs to be done because I know I would have succeeded had this this and this happen yeah let me let me let me let me push you forward to now and then to more like sort of the bigger like national conversation now so like the national conversation all of us we live through you know in the time that you were there and the time was going on at LA too, like just this hyper policing where, you know, for us, probably the same

for y'all, the cops were just another gang to us. You know what I'm saying? Like, y'all just as violent as bad and as dangerous as everybody else in these streets. Like, you ain't make no difference to us. Yeah. And sure, yeah, like in the same way that, you know, if you were having a rodent infestation at your house, I mean, sure, you could bomb the house. Right? And yes, the rodents are gone. You know what I'm saying? But you've killed everything. You know what I'm saying?

But then you get to say like, you know, as a metaphor, it's like, oh, look, we were tough on crime. We ended crime. You know what I'm saying? Well, yeah, but that's because you locked us all up. Like it didn't, this didn't really help us. But, you know, we're seeing sort of across the country despite all of these efforts and proof that like the streets are different. And it's not because of any invading force.

It's because of people like you, people like J.B. and okay C letter like truly from the city who really care and move at the speed of trust like I said moving at the speed of trust and like and are saying look it's one kid at a time it's one program at a time it's it's one advocate at a time that like says incremental slow door knock

build trust one kid you know I'm saying that's like it's not a movie yeah it ain't sexy yeah it ain't sexy bro you gotta be outside you know yeah yeah I'm going to breeze through when you caught one to the leg. Yeah. But like even in the process of doing the good you were doing, there was a moment where

like I knew of like you're like, you were in neighborhoods like, you know, doing backpack drives and back to school things, you know what I'm saying? But these are like in, these are in active areas. Like you, you know, everybody can't just walk in to this park and be like, I'm going to do a fundraiser. It's like, like, no, we robbing all of you. You know what I'm saying? So like after years of doing this, you know, one little Y-N didn't know who he was dealing with.

You know what I'm saying? Caught you slip in. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? You had to rebuild. And I've seen even health journey from that moment sort of change to bring you into the position you're in sort of now, which is like, obviously it's somebody we can deeply admire. Can you talk a little bit about, obviously, without getting personal, without sharing anybody's like personal information, but some of the sort of, like, things that you've seen with some of the young

homies who've been able to maybe, like, calm some stuff down. You know what I'm saying? Like, maybe actually, like, this working, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So I think, um, you nailed it as a whole. It takes a person that people trust to bring a level of calm. So even when I got shot, when I got shot, bro, I had dudes in my inbox.

Where he at? Yeah. That'd be outside. Ready to slide. Huh? Ready to, they ready to slide. Yeah. That's like, hey.

Who got you? You know him? Let's go. Yeah. And I'm like, no, I'm cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and so sometimes when things like that happen, people take things into their own hands.

Yeah. That you don't know nothing about. Yeah. And so after that, they were like, do you want to do this news? interview. I was still broke up. I couldn't get out to bed. I'm like, yeah. You know, but my reasoning for doing a news interview was so people could hurt my heart. Yeah. And you have a dizzle in every neighborhood around America. Yeah. So here's the thing about police. Police are reactive. Yeah. When by the time police are aware of things, a crime has happened. Yeah. The murder has

already taking place. The shooting has already happened. The robbery has already happened. The person that's stopping the crime is Ms. Kathy that live on the block. Yes. They say, hey, come her. Yeah.

Where are you going? I can tell you frustrated. Uh-huh. We had this lady in our neighborhood. The name was Ms. A. Ms. Alexander. How many times as a kid, I would be walking past her house on my way to do something stupid?

Yeah. And she'll say, come her. Yep. and you go sit down on the porch and talk for like 15 minutes. Respect. You have to respect her, yeah. And you're done.

Or the dude that used to be in the street, it's a dude her in St. Louis. I don't really know him like personally, personally, but his name, he goes by the name, Yo Banga. Uh-huh. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Extreme dude, everybody love him. You heard me? Yeah, yeah. Bro be outside, like, politics, running programs, you know, doing stuff like that. So those are the people that cause change in every community. Let me tell you a place while we're on this subject where I think we fail it, especially with organizations. Organizations that typically come into our neighborhood,

they come for agenda. Yeah. And politics. And what they don't understand is what you're saying. If you understand the hood, you understand politics. Yeah. So when they pull up on us in the hood and they got this big organization with all this money and they're like this is what we want to do no this you're telling me that because you're trying to build an army of people to fight for your cause yeah and what they do is they come into our spaces and they don't empower those people right there yeah i've said this to people a hundred times if you really really really want to see impact and see change you need to go to the community and see the people that are already leading it there you go the people that you're talking about.

Yeah. The reason I'm able to go in the park in that neighborhood is because I'm a leader over there. At one point, I was one of the leaders actively. Yeah. So people that know me, they respect me. They understand my journey and my transition. And that report is what get the work done. Police are reactive, bro.

By the side of the police come, somebody dead. It's already done. Yeah. Yeah. It's people like me on the phone when bro called like, man, bro, bro, I'm about the snap. It's like, no, bro, where are you at? Yeah, yep, yeah. Like, you know, what we're doing.

And so I think those people need to be empowered more. See. For any organization that's listening, yeah. Or possibly here it is, we don't need you to come to our community and build a hub. Yeah. We don't need you to put an office there and I'm just going to be candid

and bring a whole lot of white people. Facts. Yeah. And gentrify a program. We don't need that. What is needed is if you have resources, you have money, you have things.

You can bring structure, you can bring system, but bring it to empower the person that's already in that space. It's going to take you 30 years to get the kind of respect that person, get over there already. And you know why they can't be fully involved? Because they still got to work. They still got to do things. You still, yes. You still, yes, man. So if you want to really empower the community, take that 40, 50, 60, 70,000, 100,000 that you're about to run on this smear campaign against all.

whoever else you don't like. Yeah. And take some of that money, take about 75K of that and give it to somebody like yo bang. Yo bang, a Miss A. Yeah.

For us it was Alex Carrasco. Yeah. Give it to people like that. Yup, because we lived in a Mexican hood. You know, he had his three puntos. Like,

we already knew he was like what he was. Here's the people like that. You give it to him. You know what I'm saying? He'd look, that man took me camping for the first time with Alex Carosco. You know what I'm saying?

And believe it or not, believe it or not, part of the reason that you turned out the way you did is because of siege that people like him planning it. Yep. No, facts. It was the difference between you

and the other dudes on the block that didn't go. That's exactly it. Like, exposure, bro, is key. Mm-hmm. What you're exposed to, right now, one of my missions I'm working on over the next couple years

where I'm gonna take a group of kids from the hood to Africa. They have to see it, bro. That's one of my missions. They have to, yes. Yeah, I'm gonna take a bunch of kids from the hood to Africa. Like, so they can get over there

and see what it really looked like. Yeah. But also just taking them other places. They could also go to, like, Denver. Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. I took a group of kids to KAA a few years back, like inner city kids.

Yeah. And they were blown away. Yeah. Like you said, going camping, you get to see water and boats. When I used to teach, I taught in, but it's a city called Pomona. It's in the Inland Empire. His kids from L.A. I've never seen the beach. Yeah.

Like, you've never seen the ocean, and you're from Los Angeles. You know what I'm saying? And so, like, yeah, that exposure changes everything. Have you set up some sort of, like, fundraising things so we can see if we could get our listeners to maybe, like, fund this Africa trip? So if you go to my page, just Flight100Foundation.org. Flight 100Foundation.org, okay. Yeah, it's a donation tab. It'll go to the Give Butter page.

Okay, we will link to that. Yes. See, that's all I needed. Yeah. Listen, bro, I want to thank you for your time, man. some of y'all know like i've known this man for a long time we've we've ran ran into many of cities and many of shows and always appreciated you too yes sir man i think there was a little bit of like we've been sitting in green rooms that both of us know good and well that we just why are we

here like we have no reason to be in this room yeah but we are and just has very much a very much a real recognized real with somebody like this man and like you said bro like there's thisles in every city man and i appreciate the fact that like and that's part of what makes you what you are is that like it's the things that happen that when there's no cameras on yeah that for us that we're mostly proud of it's not the stuff that like everybody sees it's what's happened like you said it's when it's the phone calls you have to have yeah you know the meetings you have to set up you know what I'm saying and like the like those things are are are the things that really keep a city safe I want to say this before we go we talked about something before you start recording okay yeah yeah

yeah and uh I want to point it out because I think it's important too yeah we were talking about how resources prevent violence yeah so everybody know where there's no hope there's violence there it's desperate right yes so yeah right now in St. Louis we we have have been informed that the senator, who's a Republican senator, he's linked up with DJT. Okay, okay. And they are, they're building the FBI baser and they're bringing in more FBI agents to divert violence.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. One, again, law enforcement is a reaction to crime. Yeah. They don't prevent it. Yeah. There's a reality that everybody that has a blunt.

to think should be aware of it. I don't care how many FBI you bring, how many police you hire, there are not enough law enforcement to govern the earth. Yes, yes, period. It's too many, yeah. There's not. There's too many of us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't govern the earth. Yeah. Like, that's a no-go, right? Yeah. Most cases, when I see people make these arguments about this, I'm a person I like to use facts.

I get straight to the facts. Like, we get the points. So in St. Louis, right, from 2020 to 24, the murder rate in St. Louis has dropped by 113. Come on, fam. Yeah. 113, bro. That's a lot of lives. Yeah.

So in 2020, the number of homicides in St. Louis was 263. Mm-hmm. The number in 2024 were 150. See. There are certain things that I'm not going to say they are the exclusive reason, but there are certain things that I know have contributed to that, and it's not law enforcement because our police force is short right now. They don't do too much or nothing.

There are a few things I know they have contributed to that. The main thing is resources and compassion. But they are fueled through a certain few things that I want to shout out. One of them is an organization called FCC. Okay. Freedom Center, St. Louis. My homie, Mike Milder. Okay.

The other one is Action St. Louis. Mm-hmm. The other one is Mission St. Louis. The other one is We Power, St. Louis. We Power, STL. They fund early childhood development. Word. Like, crucially important for our community.

Wow. You got FCC, Action St. Louis, Mrs. St. Louis, Black Men Deal, We Power, STL, just to name a few. People like Yo Bangor, these are the people that have been actively in the community for the past four years, the past mayor to Sharma Jones. She probably got a lot of things wrong in people eyes, but she was directing certain things and empowering people in a certain way. These organizations have thrived over the past four years. And as a result, you see the number of. of homicides in the city decrease.

So why do we need to bring more FBI agents? What is there for? Show. Shouldn't we be throwing more money into these organizations? If they are out heard deterring crime, they got, FCC has data. Yeah. They have data of, of reconciliation.

I'm talking about my boy, Mike Milton, he's stepping into roles with one case in particular. A young man was driving in the court with another. young man. He was drunk. The young man died. He reconciled him with the mother. The mother in return went to the judge and was like, he don't need to go to jail. He needed to

treatment. Wow. Like, why is he going to prison? Wow. Damn, man. And then when they get when they get released, Restorative justice, yeah. Restorative justice. When they get released from prison, they

go to FCC and they spend time with them and they learn restorative justice. They take accountability. Wow. Wow. So if we go, if we need anything in St. Louis, in D.C., in Chicago, if we need anything in these cities, what we need are people to be realistic about what's happening. And if you want to do something, send some of that funds you're going to use to hire more law enforcement into these places where you know people are already doing things.

Because let me tell you something else. It's 2026 almost. It's 2025. ain't nobody scared of the police like they used to be. This ain't 1962, bro. Sir. Don't nobody seem to police and be like, oh my gosh, you're going to police.

These dogs are grown men, just like another grown man. Ain't nobody scared of police no more. That ain't a thing. Bleed like the rest of us. That's not a thing. Yeah, you bleed like the rest of us. Yeah, mum will square up with the police, bro.

They're dangerous. Like right now. Straight squire up. That's what I'm trying to say, bro. Look, we can talk about this, because that's the way we are with these ice agents.

It's like, I'm scared of you, bro? You think I'm scared of you, homie? Yeah. Anyway, thank you, Thist. Thank you for it, for, like, bringing it back to the data and shone in the light on, like, people actually doing the work. You can follow you on Instagram. It's I am Thizzle, right? It's T-H-I-S-L. Thistle. Yeah. T-H-I-S-L. Black100Foundation.org is the website. Social media, you'll find all that stuff there. You'll find all that. All right. It can happen here. Cool Zone Media. We're I appreciate you, bro. Yes, sir. I'm Jorge Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one.

We sit down with politicians. would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose the faith, but there's an institution that doesn't lose faith, and that's what I believe in. To bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective.

There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other, sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos as part of the My Cultura podcast network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged

Entire families have been consumed You know how Waking up from a dream A familiar place can look Completely alien Get back everyone He's going to next And if you see the devil

Walking around inside of another man You must cut out the very heart of him Burn his body And scatter the ashes In the furthest corner of this town As a warning From IHeart Podcasts And Grimm and Mild

from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back.

This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, With raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Think back to the early 2000s. You're flipping through TV channels, and then you hear this. I was rooting for you.

We were all rooting for you. How dare you! Learn something from this! But looking back 20 years later, that iconic show so many of us loved, is horrified. Robin, first of all, is too old to be starting a model. She's huge. I talked to cast, crew, and prehist. producers who were there for some of the show's most shocking moments.

If you were so rooting for her, what did you help her? With never before heard interviews, the curse of America's Next Top Model examines why this show was so popular and where it all went wrong. We basically sold our souls and they got rich. Listen to the curse of America's Next Top Model on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to start this episode with a horrible noise. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart with me today.

Mia Wong, James Stout, I'm Garrison Davis. We have never, as a society, been this years of lead paint as we are now. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's not great. Speaking of things falling apart, the lead paint in my room is crumbling and it's probably doing things to my brain. Wonderful, love this, love this.

So, okay, a lot of this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk assassination and everyone's reaction to it and everyone's sort of losing their minds. But I think that the place that we want to start is with a little bit about the concept of the years of lead paint, which was developed by friend of the show

Vicki Osterwald to explain something. I feel like almost everyone's forgotten about, which was right after Trump got elected, there was that car bomb outside of a Trump hotel that was like a Tesla that was a right winger who was trying to get everyone to, like, do the purge. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The cyber truck, uh, former Green Beret guy.

Yeah. And this is the kind of thing that you would have seen during the original years of lead. Yeah. So people who don't know what the original years of lead was, because this is becoming a thing that people are using to understand what's going on now, and I think there are problems with that that we'll get to. But the original years of lead are this period from, I mean, that there's, you know, you can, you can start it in a couple different places, but like roughly sort of like the 60s to the 80s, like early mid 80s in Italy, that are this period of really, it really

intensifies in the 70s, this really, really intense period of political violence in Italy. It is largely a right-wing reaction to this massive series of uprisings in Italy. I mean, the whole 60s in Italy are a time of incredible sort of turmoil and left-wing uprising. There's, I mean, I think there's first-factor occupations are like 65, but there's the massive factory occupations in 1968, which are sort of a global phenomenon. But then also the next year, there is an advanced called, and I, this is literally the term for it, the hot autumn of 69, which I'm not even gonna really, I am. Nice. Great. Yeah, which was this massive, like a second series of like, you know, workers taking over factories and starting like factory councils and like, there are so

many communist factions that like, the communist faction that's doing this stuff, they have mutated to a point where they're almost effectively anarchists. This is this is what's called the autonomous, and this becomes like a major influence on like American anarchism later, and in response to the fact that these people very nearly, on multiple occasions, like very nearly take Italy, a combination of right-wing fascist groups and organizations inside of, and sort of parallel to the Italian government, develop this thing called the strategy of tension, which, and I think this will to some extent sound familiar in terms of what's happening right now, which is this strategy, of using terrorist attacks and using political violence to sow this, like, fear and panic and chaos that would cause people to turn to the state for safety and cause people to turn specifically to, like, a stronger, like, more fascist and then eventually just a straight-off fascist state that would permanently destroy the left and, you know, like, restore the power of the Nazis, etc., etc., well, I mean, don't think, recently these people.

Italian fascists. The OG fascists. Well, and also neo-fascist, too, because they're, these people are very weird. Italians. Yeah, these people are Italian. Yeah, many such cases. One of the big opening things is that the Piazza Fontana bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills 19 people,

injures an unbelievable number of people, and it is immediately blamed on anarchists. There's an anarchist named Guseppe Pennelli, who he's among like 80 anarchists who arrested almost immediately. He, like, somehow falls out of a four-story window of a police building while he was being interrogated. Yeah. the Italian state

which will go on to admit a lot of the shit that it did maintains to this day that he just got tired and fell out the window himself I'm gonna let you draw your own conclusions about how you think this guy died I mean a lot of anarchists are lazy I can see that happening yeah there is a good

a play that I took part in during high school called Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Foe yeah which you can enjoy this is the most like James Backstory moment you've ever seen before? This is wild. Whoa.

Someone update the I-C-H-H-Wiki page. Don't do that. No, James Backstory. This is great. Yeah, in my theater era. Who did you play? I can't remember. It was 20 years ago.

You should have remembered. I know. It was very fun. We had a good soundtrack. It was very enjoyable. for me and my friends. And I'm sure all eight people who watched it

also had a wonderful time. So in less fun times, so this bombing was actually carried out by a group called Ordine Nouveau, which is literally new order. Fascist groups only have four names. And this is a group that was aided by a combination

of Italian intelligence and this thing called Gladiow, which was this American network, sort of stay behind network in case of Soviet invasion. that had all of these weapons caches placed around the country that's eventually sort of repurposed

into these fascist terror cells and they do a lot of these, right? They do a lot of bombings and they mostly blame the left for them. Probably the most famous one is the balloon train bombing, which killed like 80 people injured, a huge number of other people which was done by a kind of like

another fascist group, right? This is also a period where like there is a real left wing violence, right? The left is doing like but one of the things they did they kidnap bosses and have, like, show trials of bosses all the time. They love doing this. Yeah.

Factory bosses. Just like in The Dark Night Rises by Marxist historian Christopher Nolan. Oh, God. See, I thought you were going to say just like cancel culture, but... Just like what the rights doing right now for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk. Yeah. But there was also stuff like, like, for example, Lota Continua, which is a leftist group of staggering complexity

I'd like killed the police officer who was interrogating Giuseppe Penelli so you know like there are left wing assassinations a group called the Red Brigades kidnaps the former Prime Minister of Italy Aldo Morrow see every other episode where I've yelled about this

they had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being manipulated by a number of intelligence organizations that if I started listing them right now you would think I was insane but the important thing about this period right and this eventually works. It does destroy the left. But the important thing about the structure of this in the actual years of lead is that these are concrete groups, right? They are shifting. They

are flowing. People move between them. But actual organized factions in a legitimate armed struggle. I mean, the Red Brigades are literally organized in a military fashion, right, with like units and command structure. But this is also true of like, this is also true of the fascists, right? Yeah, you're very very much. And it's also true of group. I mean, you know, like obviously like autonomy and the sort of like anarchist e communist factions are looser but like they're still they still are like organized and they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles and the strategy of tension is being deliberately managed by by italian intelligence and by american intelligence and by a bunch of other sort of like state groups and this is not at all what we're dealing with right now not even class yeah the The Charlie Kirk assassination is neither a guy who was part of, like, some Marxist group, nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent or something. It's just a guy.

It's a guy who goes on Discord. Reddit Gamer Discord, political violence. Yeah. These are decentralized acts being fueled by sort of radicalization, but they're not like active intelligence operations. I mean, some of them aren't even fueled by radicalization here is sometimes a mis-over. this one in particular is like not that really a degree it seems like a degree of like personal motivation based on his relationship with his roommate as well as this general like gen z sort of nihilism yeah that allows you to do a pretty wild act like this i i think specifically

in this case you know it's like existential violence manifesting in an incredibly political action from someone who otherwise isn't, like, overtly political. Yeah. This guy's not a leftist. He's definitely not a gropeer, as I've been trying to argue for days now. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, what he did certainly is political, even though he's not, you know, card-carrying, you know, communist

or, you know, an anti-imperialist, like the guy who assassinated the two Israeli embassy staffers was, right? Which is kind of the only, arguably, like, left-wing assassin we've, like, seen in the past, I don't know, 10 years in the United States. is the guy who killed those two Israeli embassy staffers every other assassin or attempted assassin would not accurately be described

as like left wing in orientation including someone like Luigi Mangione who is basically a teapot gray tribe libertarian yeah and it's also worth noting that like from the state end these like this is not something that was

like deliberately unleashed by the state except in the sense of like well some people would argue otherwise right yeah but they're wrong right that's the issue you know and like like if like the last time we saw something that you could argue even sort of look like that is like there is genuinely something kind of suspicious about the way that a whole bunch of the most famous black lives matter activists who weren't the ones in the NGOs suddenly turned up dead that's the closest thing right and that's not even a like we know they did this that's a like there's that was and that was over a

decade ago yeah right this is this is a long time ago and you know and and and i and i would argue it's important in that it's part of the same series of uprisings that like all of this fascist stuff is a response to, right? In the sense it's a response to Ferguson, it's a response to 2020. But like that structure, which is the structure that a lot of people are using to analyze this of just purely in American years of lead doesn't really work because we're dealing with something way weirder and way less concrete. Which is why we're calling it something else.

The years of lead paint. Because these people are just like... Because it is not the result of this large-scale, like, deep state orchestration, nor these legitimate organized fashions. Everyone is simply brain-rodded. Yeah. Yeah. To contrast, right, in the 20th century, the prevailing concept of how the left would change the world

was through the violent capture of state institutions, or in the case of the anarchist, I guess, less so. But, you know, if we look at, like, this communist idea of revolution. Yeah, how's that anarchist revolution going, buddy? Well, I mean, these guys are 30 years after the Spanish Revolution, right? Like, some of them have seen anarchists hold whole cities and hold off the country's army. It's not out of the, out of the realm of possibility for them. That concept of revolution, I mean, it does exist.

It exists. It exists with people with, like, anime, Twitter, avatar still. But, like, for the most part, that concept of revolution, is not that relevant in 21st century leftist political organizing. And so, like, it cannot be the same because the nature of the thing that the struggle, it's not the same on the left. There isn't even a legitimate left in the United States, like, in any meaningful sense. Yeah, I mean, there exists, like, I guess it's like, I don't want to call it incoherent, but like a lot of the left exists, the people going hardest on the left are going

hardest on the internet, I guess this is what I want to say. This is nothing like post-68 Italy. We've seen a nice, nice, like, resurgence of like union organizing, and that's like the most realistic manifestation of the left. And mutual aid organizing. I will also say we did have, the span from 2011 to 2020 was like a really massive period of like really large-scale street movement in a way that really terrified these people. Like 2014, specifically Ferguson and 2020 really truly rattled the psychology

of all of the people who are like currently running this country in that it demonstrated that like oh damn there could be a world we're like we're not automatically the superior race and we're not like treated like that because it's fucking bullshit and people were willing to fight for that

But also, like, yeah, no, like, we don't have the kind of, like, organizational, logistical capacity that, like, any of these things had. And it's not clear to me that you, like, you won't yet things that look like that anymore. Yeah, like, as much as, like, the right-wing YouTube podcast sphere wants to make it the case, first of all, there was not, like, an organized revolutionary left in the U.S., not a serious one. No. And secondly, like, the organized revolutionary left that existed in 20th century relied on a network that was international and that sometimes and not always had its roots in Soviet, I guess, foreign policy, right? That also does not like, as much as a YouTube world wished it to be the case. China is not sending people little yellow hard hats to go out in Portland and get mad at the feds being there. Like, that's just not the case. here's an advert for hard hats

which you have to buy in your own because China is not sending them to you We're back talking lead paint Speaking of lead paint And in some ways The conspiratorial elements of the years of lead There is no shortage of conspiratorial thought

permeating across the entire spectrum of American politics in ways that I've never really seen at this scale before, which isn't saying much because, you know, I'm not however old James is. But I have been aware of it. Jesus is the fucking grace. Oh, fuck me. But I have been monitoring extremist politics for a 15 minutes. A decent section of time, mainly the past like seven years. the past like five or so years professionally. We're going to have to watch another video because of this whole second of the podcast, Garrison. I'm actually multiple months late for my workplace arrestment training.

I can see why. Oh my God. But it's pretty bad. Just the total rejection of reality and the separation of truth and reality as coherent concepts. And we've seen this and some of people's responses across the political spectrum.

To the release of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment that dropped on Monday, which shows the alleged shooter explaining to their roommate what they did and how they did it and in part why. We'll talk more about this in executive disorder, these actual messages and what they contain, but people's reaction to them, both on the left and right, have been pretty wild. Matt Walsh is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate and the shooter as a way to absolve the transgender roommate. Referring to this strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad. What? It's a breaking bad is a television show. An American television show released around 2008.

I'm not going to explain Breaking Bad. Garrison, do you remember that? Oh my God, you were like Matt Walsh's Matt Walsh is comparing this to something that Walter White did during during Breaking Bad saying that this feels like a strategy

that these two people cooked up by watching too much TV which in fact it just shows that it is Matt Walsh who watches too much TV by the fact that this is the first thing he thinks of but it's not just Walsh communists, anti-imperialists people on the left are spreading a

completely unfounded assertion that this text exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter was quote unquote obviously written by an FBI agent. Posts like this are receiving tens of thousands of likes across platforms. Yeah. It's such a misunderstanding

of how state craft works. Yeah. And how like the legal system works that people, communists really think that the state of Utah could could orchestrate and convincingly convincingly orchestrate completely fake text

exchanges. Like that's just simply not how our legal system works. And you have people, like, Hassan, spreading, spreading this sort of stuff. Quote, half of the right thinks the messages are fake because it doesn't implicate the trans person. The other half thinks the shooter is a patsy because it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk. I will say the text messages are too perfectly plugging holes for the investigators. Unnatural. Like, come on.

Yeah. Come on. Come on, guys. This is... Yeah. Like, I don't even know what to, like, argue. with, like, there's no way to argue against people who believe in this in any kind of real way. Yeah, right. Like, how do you, someone who has rejected facts? Like, how do you, how do you bring

them back? They have to argue in court that the alleged shooter actually did the shooting, right? That's what they're trying to establish. Yeah. This is the evidence that will be agreed upon as as evidence. To introduce the text messages in court, the DA will have to prove their authenticity through chain of custody and metadata. The reason why they were released now, is because they were included in the indictment laying out the charges against Tyler Robinson. Robinson might use some odd words, but he was raised Mormon,

and all of this just tracks at a face level to me. He's explaining his actions to the person that he loves and instructs them to delete the messages. He doesn't think that these are going to come back to hurt him. And this isn't just Patel's FBI saying this. This is the work of local police and state of Utah police in the state of Utah court. And this rejection of evidence, not what the evidence argues, just the base evidence itself

follows a week of debate regarding this shooter's political orientation, which me and Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week. And I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it in this years-of-led concept, right, of the right using this to majorly crack down on trans people and on the left, which, yeah, they're going to try to do, but trying to argue at this point that he's a gropeer is just so faulty and trying to argue that these text messages are faked somehow similarly is just so faulty and is so detached from how this situation actually happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic of political violence in the United States. On that topic, a few days ago, Fox News's The Five, was debating if they

needed more information to definitively say that the shooter was on quote-unquote the left. Greg Gutfield went on about how high-profile liberal and left-wing figures aren't being assassinated by people on the right and wrote off the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband. We don't need more information. Really? Yes, we don't need it. What is interesting here is why is only this happening on the left and not the right?

That's all we need to know. There's absolutely no cognitive... What about Melissa Hartman? You want to talk about? Melissa Horstman? Did you know her name before it happened? None of us did. None of us were spending every single day

talking about Mrs. Hortman. I never heard of her until after she died. Don't play that bullshit with me. You know what I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about that woman before she died. It was a specific crime against her by somebody who knew her.

The same thing. Now, you could bring up Josh Shapiro, but then you will not bring up, for example, that that was a pro-Palestine person. So don't use your, what about this? The fact of the matter is the both-sides argument not only doesn't fly, we don't care. We don't care about your both-sides argument. That shit is dead. For one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our side. On your side, your beliefs do not match reality. So you're coming up with these rationalizations, like, what about this or what about that? We're not doing that because we saw it happen. We saw a young, bright man assassinated, and we know who did it. So if you look at like left-wing violence or violence targeting right-wing figures,

even just like the past two years, right? There's the two attempted Trump assassinations, which the right frames as left-wing violence. though the first Trump shooter did not have left-wing politics. They had more of the psychological profile of a school shooter who was looking to do something to get into history books and came from a conservative upbringing. This person was not a leftist, right? But this is still targeting a right-wing figure,

so it's framed in this same conversation. The United Healthcare assassination, similarly, right? This wasn't a left-wing person who did this, but targeting a CEO on a healthcare topic, associates it with the left or with progressive stances around health care. There's the arson against Josh Shapiro's home. The guy who did this had a mixture of like a pro-Trump background, but with pro-Palestine motivations.

The most clear example would be the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk. With the health care stuff, like we should probably point out that Trump also ran on like medicine is too expensive, right? Like it costs too much to get the pills you need to stay alive. that has been a cornerstone of his platform to... It can be framed as like a populist sentiment.

It's a populist stance, yeah. Yes. Not necessarily a leftist one. So that's the political background that these people on the right are like coming from, right? Like that's how they see, see this. That's like this spike in left wing violence

that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts. Now, for media has reported that a few days after Charlie Kirk's assassination, the Department of Justice removed from their website, a National Institute of Justice research study showing white supremacist and far-right violence far outweighs any other type of terrorism or domestic violent extremism. Quote, since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events

that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. So this study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in line with Trump and the rights general talking points about this spike in left-wing violence. I think in part, the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo-Nazi linked violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative or even some like far-right violence. They don't understand the linkage from, you know, explicit white supremacist mass shootings and, you know, make America great again, right? That's something that they would like reject as as a legitimate coupling. In Congress today, Cash Patel claimed to have no

idea who did then Brouf was, for example. Correct. And like what he was about. A lot of them just aren't aware of this stuff. And it's not just this National Institute of Justice study. These findings are incredibly consistent across multiple studies. The notably not left wing Kato Institute found very similar results. In their analysis of 620 politically motivated murders since 1975, excluding 9-11, most political violence comes from the right. They counted 391 murders from the right, and 65 from the left. I can link that below to get a better look at their actual methodology

and what they count as right-wing, what they count as left-wing violence. But these stats simply don't matter to the right in a lot of cases. Many average rightists will just reject these results altogether, say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology. But others might frame it as, even if this data is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating left-wing violence, specifically targeted left-wing violence, not just mass shootings. Here's another clip from Fox's The Five. I understand why people are saying, what about this and what about this? Because if you have to face the underlying fact of this, your life is going to fall apart. Because you're going to realize you're not the good guys.

If you sat around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not the good guys. If you sat 600, 700 cases of harassment against Republicans, and you said, but what about this? What about this? And then you see this murder after calling somebody a fashion. You, fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy. That is a hell of a realization to deal with. So therefore, therefore, you have to grasp at rationalizations. You don't have to do that, Jessica.

They do. I don't believe you're part of that group, but why the hell do you have to mimic and echo that crap to us? He was a patsy. That guy was a patsy. He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct-to-consumer nihilism, the trans cult. And you know that. If you can decide that biology is false, you can agree that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable. how you cannot see that alone and see that for what the evil it is without having to attach

all of these other things is beyond me his explicit claim that we should just like flag is that it's not he's not necessarily talking about leftists as a whole he's specifically talking about people who accept that trans people are people a bit of being and like that the existence of trans people leads to this nihilism, I guess. Well, yeah, I mean, they see the existence of trans people as, like, a result of this nihilist culture, right? Yeah. Well, he seemed to put the causal hour the other way, though, in that.

He seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes from accepting trans people. I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's saying it. I think they view it as it's both causal, but also a symptom. I think they play it kind of both ways and showing how it's more so just like, the result of this like breakdown in in like a moral fabric right which is then breaking down moral decline this like notion of reality which is why you know transness is such an existential threat to the right wing world view in like many senses but that's that's another topic I I do find it interesting how quick these people are to completely discount

right wing mass shootings right and I think one one key difference in talking about you know left wing violence versus right wing violence it seems in almost all their examples here, they're talking about assassinations, targeted against specific people. Most right-wing violence in these statistics from like Cato and the National Institute of Justice are mass shootings, right? The number of individual people might not be that different, but the kill count for right-wing and specifically like white supremacist attacks are so much higher. I don't think it's the actual numbers that matter to these people. It's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence that really freaks them out. For these commentators, the likelihood of

them being in a black church when a white supremacist mass shooting happens is slim to not, right? Like, that's never going to happen to these people. But being the victim of targeted violence against a high profile figure is to them, it seems like an increasing possibility. And that really freaks them out. Like, obviously. This type of attack directly affects their political class in a way that a far-right mass shooting does not. I think that is influencing the way that they're talking about this, you know, quote-unquote spike in left-wing violence. We're going to go on an ad break

and then return to talk about J.D. Vance's temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk Show and how his rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence. Okay, we are back. On Monday, September 15th, Vice President J.D. Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk show from his office in the White House complex. The vice president sitting down, hosting a private citizens radio talk show.

The show's intro has clips from Charlie's studio. with signs that read, big gov sucks. Warning, does not play well with liberals. To introduce the show, J.D. Vance says that, quote, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years. We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, unquote.

His first guest was Stephen Miller. Van said he wanted to talk to Miller about, quote, all the ways we're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you can see. see from the far left becoming even more and more mainstream. We have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech. And we're going to go after the NGO network that Fomence, facilitates, and engages in violence.

That's not okay. Violence is not okay in our system. And we want to make it less likely that that happens. Walk me through at a high level, like what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness. Yes, so it's an excellent question. I said this before, but it bears repeating. The last message that Charlie sent me was, I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-ling organizations

that are promoting violence in this country. And I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out. The NGO network. Yep. Yeah, this is, this has been a thing with them for a while. It has. There was supposed to be a series of executive orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs.

It was reported that Trump was about to sign, and then they kind of disappeared. This was around like April to May, and this has been something that they obviously have been wanting to do, but for one reason or another, haven't followed through on yet, but now are talking about this as an impending policy that the Trump administration is going to enact. I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from the Trump administration's first term when NGOs were very successful in bringing suits

that delayed or prevented some of the policies that the Miller faction of the Trump administration would have liked to implement. Yeah, and then I think the other angle of this is just the pure anti-Semitism angle that partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean NGOs, and partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean Jews.

And it's great. It's... I mean, very often, the specific focus was on Heas, right? Highest Hebrew immigrant aid society. I mean, we see this in the tree of life shooting, for instance, in 2018, right? This has been with us for some time on the right.

I'm going to play another, clip where they outline more strategies for clamping down on left-wing violence. And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. So let me explain a bit of what that means. So I've got 30 seconds. So be quick, Stephen. The organized docks and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence,

the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging this design to trigger inside violence. And the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God is my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name. So in their discussion of taking down this big doxing network, they also inadvertently and ironically describe the doxing campaign that the right is currently doing at a far larger scale and with way more institutional backing than any antif or left being doxing has looked like targeting people making posts in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination. With a doxing website listing thousands of quote unquote Charlie's murderers, which are actually just people who have made posts about the death of Charlie Kirk. This is building off the Canary Mission Strategy used against pro-Palestinian

activists, which has been adopted by the State Department for Immigration Enforcement and Judging Visa Applications. This is the actual like organized state-backed, institutionally backed doxing campaign that exists right now in this country. It's not your average Torch Antifa chapter doing this at scale. Now it's the right, with the mechanism of state encouraging them, backing them, and tons of money being funneled into an organized operation to actually impact, like, state policy on who gets allowed in the country. On that note, Mark Rubio has talked about denying visa applications for people who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. We are not in the business of inviting people to visit our country who are going to be involved in negative and

destructive behavior, okay? So why should, if I invite someone, if we invite someone to visit the United States of America as a student, as a tourist, as whatever, then they have a different, the standard they should be held to is very high. We shouldn't be bringing people into this country. We should not be giving visas to people who are going to come to the United States and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the assassination of a political figure. We should not, and if they're already here, we should be revoking their visa. So now there's an organized campaign to not only try to deport and revoke visas or deny visas to people, quote-unquote,

celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, but also get citizens here, fired from their jobs and disrupt their life. Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, if you were unfairly treated by your employer, due to posting or liking something on this platform, Twitter, we will fund your legal bill.

No limit. Please let us know. Unquote. What's different about the rights use of these tactics is the merger of, like, the right-wing non-government organization, like activist apparatus with the ruling conservative government. Like, the Dems in the left have never done this before. There's never been this coordination

between, like, the actual Democratic establishment and, like, the far left. That's never happened. Like, Palestine crackdowns started under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many 2020-George Floyd uprising cases. Federal assistance in the domestic terrorism investigation into Cop City started under Biden. As for, quote-unquote, organized riots and street violence, right-wing street violence has been

encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration, stand back and stand by the stop-the-steel protests leading to January 6th, which Trump played a large part in making happen, and then Trump pardoned all the participants. Yeah, like, it's pretty clear. The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on the same level as Trump pardoning all the January 6, quote unquote, insurrectionists. At the end of Vance's two-hour long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and harassment campaigns

and political violence. Here's another clip. I wrote a story in the Nation magazine about my dear friend, Charlie Kirk. Now, the Nation isn't a fringe blog. It's a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros' Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation, and many other wealthy titans of the American Progressive Movement.

The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize, he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words. He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy. He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual. He never said anything about black women as a group. He made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits. The very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer, shows that she lied about a dead man. And yet, she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it,

it made it through the editors, and of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack. Now, of course, even if Charlie had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that he deserved his fate, but consider the level of propaganda at work. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so was to justify his murder. This is soulless and evil. But I was struck not just by the dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a young husband's and young father's death. Quote, she says, he was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist. The Nation wrote, who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses.

There's a lot to break down there. First of all, the president of the nation, not the country, the magazine, the Nation magazine, has stated that they, in fact, do not receive money from George Soros or the Open Society Foundation. Vance's gesturing to left-wing billionaires carries three parentheses around that term. Second of all, let's play that. actual clip of Charlie talking about brain processing power. Joy Reed and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks. We would have been called the racist.

But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. So he just happens to be talking about three black women and state that they do not have the brain processing power to do their jobs, and then they stole a white man's spot to get in the position they are in now.

And opinion writer for The Washington Post was fired this week for sharing this quote on Twitter, which replaced the names of the three women he's talking about with just black women. Did she share it, like in between quotation marks if it was a direct quotation? She did share it as if it was a direct quotation. All right. Okay. I see. So I'm going to read this from the email that they sent to this writer firing her. This writer is a black woman. Among other requirements, the company-wide social media policy mandates that all employees' social media postings be respectful and prohibits posting that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics.

The policy also reminds employees that everything they post is reflective of the company and should not affect the integrity of the post journalism. You're posting some blue sky, which identify you as a post columnist, about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, do not comply with our policy. For example, you posted, refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face and performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is not the same thing as violence, and part of what keeps America violent is the insistence that people performant. care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espoused hatred and violence. So this is explicitly a they think that reverse racism is real

and that saying that and talking about white people as a class of people in the U.S. that are responsible for things is in fact racism. That is, that is the argument that the post, the Washington Post is making in the email where they

fire her, which is like that reverse racism shit. Even like three years ago was like a pretty fringe right wing like that was a not originally like a Nazi thing right and this is now being used by like

the Washington Post to fire their own writers for writing really incredibly reasonable things about Charlie Kirk to close Charlie Kirk's episode and to close our episode J.D. Vance talked about before we can have any national unity

we must like Charlie Tell the truth. Unity, real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth. And there are difficult truths we must confront in our country. One truth is that 24% of self-described, quote, very liberals, believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent, while only 3% of self-described very conservative. agree 3% is too many, of course. Another truth is that 26% of young liberals believe political

violence is sometimes justified. And only 7% of young conservatives say the same, again, too high a number. In a country of 330 million people, you can of course find one person of a given political persuasion justifying this or that or almost anything. But the data is clear. on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. This is not a both sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told. So these stats are from a recent U-gov survey, where 24% of very liberals say it's okay to be happy with the murder of a political opponent, and 26% of young liberals say sometimes political violence is justified

3 to 7% of young conservatives. This study also found that Democrats and Republicans are more likely to say that political violence is a big problem after attacks on members of their own party. Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced by whatever recent events just happened. That's going to change people's stated opinion on these questions.

Yeah. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, 67% of Republicans said that political violence is a very big problem. 58% of Democrats agreed. After the assassination of Melissa Hortman, 56% of Democrats said it's a very big problem. Only 44% of Republicans agreed. After the assassination attempt on Josh Shapiro,

44% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans. Wait, Josh Shapiro wasn't assassinated, right? They tried to burn his house. Well, yeah, they're counting that as an attempted assassination. Oh, okay, I see. After the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, 51% of Republicans said political balance is a very big problem.

problem, 46% of Democrats. And after the attacks on Paul Pelosi, 53% of Democrats said political violence is a very big problem compared to 31% of Republicans. These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed depending on whatever current events were current at the time, whatever just happened. We're going to talk about this more in a bit, but I think the way that we frame cheering on political violence also massively varies based on what you count as political violence? Does the police killing count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly affect the way we think about this question. Here's Vance, again, talking about Trump's assassination and the pyramid that supports political violence. Now any political movement,

violent or not violent, is a collection of forces. It's like a pyramid that stacks on top, one support on top of the other. That pyramid's got a foundation of donors, of actions, of activists, of journalists, now of social media influencers, and of course, of politicians. Not every member of that pyramid would commit a murder. In fact, over 99% I'm sure would not. But by celebrating that murder, apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn't like, even to the point of lying about what he actually said, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.

Benson goes on to talk about how people yelled at him and his family when he visited Disneyland and discusses how after Charlie's death, one of his friends in a senior White House staffer had left-leaning operatives in his neighborhood, passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and where he lived and, quote, encouraging neighbors to harass him or, God forbid, do worse. While he was mourning his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry about the political terrorists drawing a big target on his home, he shares with his own children. Are these people violent? I hope not. But are they guilty of encouraging violence?

You damn well better believe it. We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes. And I do, while acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left, unquote. Vance goes on to state that he seeks no unity with the far left. There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.

There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terror. as sympathizers who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree. Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer, and And how do they reward us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years?

On September 13th, Fox News Morning host Brian Kilmead endorsed euthanizing homeless people with, quote, involuntary lethal injection or something just kill them. Billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population, a lot of them don't want to take the programs, a lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary. You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now. Or involuntary lethal injection or something. I just kill them.

Brian, why did it have to get to this point? Right. I would say this, we're not voting for the right people. In North Carolina, wake up. Just kill them. Jesus. A Fox News host advocating the killing of homeless people. And he didn't get fired from this.

He apologized a few days later, but he's not getting fired from me. job for this. Open, openly advocating the death of homeless people. Yeah. Murder. And I think it's worth noting whatever we're having a discussion about political violence that two days after Charlie Kirk was shot, ICE just killed a guy in Chicago who was driving away from their attempt to detain him. He was driving away pretty slowly and there's video of it now. They pulled out their guns and they killed him. And, you know, all of these people who are the people who ordered ICE into this city, right, who are directly responsible for the deaths of this man who was also a

single father, actually, well, no, Kirk was not a single father, but this guy was and was just murdered in cold blood by ice, right? This is not considered political violence by sort of either liberals or conservatives, right? Because they don't think that political violence can be done by the state. And this is also part of how you get to the situation now where you can be like, well, the state should just murder homeless people. And that's not considered political violence because it's the state doing it and because they don't think homeless people are people. Yeah. I mean, to broaden that statement slightly or take a different angle on it, right, like there is a complete bipartisan and consensus that we should kill hundreds of people a year

crossing our southern border because that supposedly serves as a deterrent from other people coming, which it doesn't, but that's not seen as political violence. No, they just murdered three more people on a boat, like leaving Venezuela a few days ago. Yeah. Yeah. As Vance ended the Charlie Kirk show episode, he advocated that listeners find and call the employers of people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a TPUSA chapter or to run for office. But I promise you that we will explore every option to bring

real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don't like what they say. But you have a role too. Civil society, Charlie understood this well, is not just something that flows from the government. It flows from each and every one of us. It flows from all of us. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination. The idea of the fusion of the state with civil society is really notable there. Like, that's not what civil society is, right? That is a concept that is inherently totalitarian, that the civil society should flow downstream from the

state and the movement. It's this fusion between the two that the right has deployed so successfully, which has increased their ability to actually, like, rule. Yeah, I mean, that's what fascism does, right? Like, that's Franco, that's Hitler, like, that is textbook. That's, like, the point of the brown shirts. Yeah, or like the women's movement in Spain, right, to give a more civil society example. They're not like a state police agency. They're a civil society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.

So to return to the years of lead paint idea that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now across the political ocean is this flattening of tactics. As I've discussed on the show before in the Bluon episodes, the right Trojan hoarsed political conspiracism into acceptable political discourse

which the left is now embracing liberals and the left. And you can see this with people's reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the left is embracing conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the right is adopting and accelerating political

political cancel culture style doxing. The key difference here is on the right, these actions have state backing and coordination or serve to maintain state power. For example, there's types of political violence that get cheered on by the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of police after officer-involved shootings. Back the blue keeps alignment with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging violence against BLM protesters that support. the state structure. And advocating or celebrating the deaths of protesters gets viewed very differently than the targeted assassinations that have happened the past year. And now of the past few days, Trump has discussed, once again, designating Antifa and other groups as domestic

terror organizations and bringing RICO charges against Code Pink activists who screamed at him at a restaurant in D.C. a few weeks ago. Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization? Well, it's something I would do, yeah. If I have support from the people back here, I think we'd start with Pam, I think. But I would, if you give me, I would do that 100%, and others also, by the way. But Antifa is terrible. Are there other groups that you can make up?

There are other groups, yeah, there are other groups. We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder. And also, I've been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the people that you've been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation. These are protests. These are crimes, what they're doing, where they're throwing bricks at cars of ICE and Border Patrol. I want to close by, you know, we've seen the sort of repercussions that people have had, not even for, like, celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for, like, being like, wait, this guy fucking sucks. and this whole, you know, this whole argument about civility and, I mean, that, I mean, the vice president of the United States is making, right? I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh, as you're recording this, this is from Tuesday, September 16th.

This was left-wing LGBT terrorism. There was never much doubt. Now there is none at all. All left-wing terror networks must be crushed. All of the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested, prosecuted, and put to death. So, and there have been absolutely zero consequences for, again, Matt Walsh calling for this whole network of people that he imagines exists being executed. That's their endgame, right? It is to destroy the concept of free speech in order to preserve quote unquote free speech, right? In order to sort of

quote unquote end political violence, they want to carry out, you know, mass political killings of their opponents. Coordinated at a state level with state resources. Yeah, yeah. And the state involvement makes it okay. That makes it a moral action, not the actions of some like unhinged terrorist. Yeah. And this is a really significant problem for the way that we think about political violence, because this is something that's true for both liberals and conservatives that they think that the state is the appropriate arbiter for this kind of political violence, which is how Obama can do a drone strike on a 16-year-old American citizen and kill him in cold blood because Obama had political disagreements with his father, right? And how.

how this isn't treated as something that's fine by a huge portion of liberals. And this is one of the things that's going to allow if these people are successful, and I don't know that they will be, but if they can be, that's going to be why. Well, that is how we at the show understand the years of lead paint, or the current 2025 September era of the years of lead paint. There's phantoms everywhere, there's conspiracies everywhere and nowhere, and the specter of political violence is around every corner. I'm Jorge Ramos.

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This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. Yep. This episode, we're covering the week of September 11 to September 18th. Normally a week in history when very little happens. The most normal week of American politics. Yeah, yeah.

Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days as ever mattered in American history. We should schedule our calendar just to block out this whole section of the year each time. I already have it written down in my calendar as the week to forget. So I just spend it drinking. Robert, do you want to introduce our first topic? Yes. I mean, our first topic, as we talked about last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk, particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote unquote left, different NGOs and other organizations that are being accused of being part of a vast. And let's say unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do with what's actually

been discovered about Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk's killer, but nonetheless, it's being used that way. And kind of the first thing to probably talk about is what's come out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised, Gare, when we recorded on Friday, I had expected us to need to do an update before Monday in order to like catch up.

And really there wasn't much that came out. No, I did a brief update confirming that he was living with a trans person, but that was really all we knew at the time. That could be confirmed. That was pretty evergreen as we suspected it might be. And I will say

frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear, but we do have some more concrete details about his like online background and a few others like like ancillary pieces which is included in the charging document as well as reporting on his discord logs yeah so i i think we should talk first about the whole trans roommate thing of it all because obviously first off this is one of the most massive reaches i've i've seen like they're always desperate to have

a trans connection anytime there's a shooting they were trying to establish this literally like seconds after it happened and that's been the with, like, the last year and a half or two worth of mass shootings, or at least a sizable number of them. Yeah. There was a meme, right, for a while. It's like a 4-chan thing to suggest that any mass shooter was trans, and now it's just become reality. Yeah. And in this case, the allegations started coming out from the police that his roommate was transgender. This was before the Discord logs had leaked. So I want you to talk a little

bit, Gary, you found the Reddit profile of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah. So first question, question is, do we know if they actually were trans? And do we know if they actually were in some sort of a relationship? What is the actual evidence that exists to suggest that based on what we have so far? They did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and public facing posts. And they referred to having a boyfriend, BF, that was helping them cope with the results of the 2024 election. But that's really all we can tell from this at the time, the public Reddit profile for the roommate of Tyler Robinson who had, again, some sort of romantic relationship

with the, like, nitty, gritty, you know, arc of their whole relationship is, like, not explicitly clear, but certainly have had a romantic relationship. Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should be obvious to anyone who has, like, a third of a brain cell to rub together against the inside of their skull.

There's not any evidence that this roommate was tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes and in fact, the Eggston evidence. The state is arguing this, that the roommate had no prior knowledge and has been fully cooperative, the roommate is not involved. Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in. In part, or produced evidence that was now used in the charging document. Tyler turned himself in with his father, like officially, but there was certainly conversations

happening. Yeah, and it's one of those things. You can come down morally on that, however you want. want, it's just a matter of, there's absolutely no evidence as people like Matt Walsh are saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy. Their roommates seemed horrified to have been, and, you know, understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act, like massively famous act of murder, right?

Like, that's a scary thing to come to like get a discord message realizing, oh, fuck, now I'm potentially implicated in this. So I do have some understanding for what a shocking moment that is. Like, it's hard to imagine dealing with that in any way, shape, or form. That's just a wild thing to have happened in the middle of your fucking day. Presumably, while you're at work or some shit, this would have been around noon, so I'm guessing they were on the job when they got these messages. Just a horrible, horrible thing to deal with.

Yeah. Let's go over some of the text exchanges included in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah. It's a placeholder for that. Yeah. but it's referred to as like a charging information document that they included some text messages because it was the clearest evidence to lay out to charge them with the crime,

though not the only evidence, as we will soon discuss. And these text logs are core to people like Walsh's current argument that the trans roommate must have actually been involved because they think that the messages that I'm going to read here were like scripted between the roommate and the shooter specifically to exonerate the roommate. and that's the conspiracy that people like Walsh are spreading. Let's go over this section of this document. Quote, the police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological male, who was involved in a romantic relationship with Robinson.

The roommate told police that the roommate received messages from Robinson about the shooting and provided those messages to police. On September 10th, 2025, the roommate received a sex message from Robinson, which said, drop what you are doing, look under my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard and found a note that stated, I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it. Unquote. Police found a photograph of this note. The following text exchange then took place. After reading the note, the roommate responded, what? With many question marks. You're joking,

right? Robinson, I am still okay, my love, but I am stuck in Orm for a little while longer yet. Shouldn't be long until I can come home, but I got to grab my rifle still. to be honest i'd hope to keep this secret till i died of old age i'm sorry to involve you roommate you you weren't the one who did it right many question marks robinson i am sorry roommate i thought they caught the person robinson no they grabbed some crazy old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing i had planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after but most of that side of town got locked down. It's quiet, almost enough to get out. There's one vehicle lingering. Roommate. Why? Robinson. Why did I do it? Roommate. Yeah. Robinson.

I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. If I'm able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again. Hopefully they have moved on. I haven't seen anything about them finding it. Roommate. How long have you been planning this? Robinson. A bit over a week, I believe. I can get close to it, but there's a squad car parked right by it. I think they already swept that spot, but I don't want to chance it. Robinson. I'm wishing I'd circled back and grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle.

I'm worried what my old man would do if I didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle. I don't know if it had a serial number, but it wouldn't trace to me. I worry about Prince I had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits. I didn't have the ability or time to bring it with. I might have to abandon it and hope they don't find Prince. How the fuck will I explain losing it to my old man? Only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel. Remember how I was engraving bullets?

The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see Notices Bulge O-W on Fox News, I might have a stroke. Oh, God. All right, I'm going to have to leave it. That really fucking sucks. Judging from today, I'd say Grandpa's gun does just fine, IDK. I think that was a $2,000. scope. Robinson. Delete this exchange. Robinson. My dad wants photos of the rifle. He says

Grandpa wants to know who has what. The feds released a photo of the rifle and it is very unique. He's calling me, R.N. Not answering. Robinson. Since Trump got into office, my dad has been pretty diehard mega. I'm going to turn myself in willingly. One of my neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff. You are all I worry about love. Roommate. I am much more worried about you, Robinson, don't talk to the media, please. Don't take any interviews or make any comments. If police ask you questions, ask for a lawyer, and stay silent. That's the end of the exchange. Yep. It seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging with, uh, yeah, there's not a good response to give to that. No, there's not. Yeah. And discord, again, one of the, one thing I would

hope this would bust is the this has to have been a professional hitman assassin of some sort which is a job that i mean it technically exists like there are guys who are for the fucking crips or the bloods or you could call them professional hitman and that they kill people for money but they're not like the people you see in movies like they're there are guys who walk up with a 38 and gut shoot somebody and run the fuck off like they're they're not we're not talking about like smooth operators those people almost don't exist as a profession and certainly not as a standard thing in the United States. And that, that, like, the fact that he was having this kind of conversation on discord.

This is, I believe, regular text. Oh, these are regular, sorry, regular tech. This is straight up, yeah, SMS, right? Like, yeah. He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a note under his keyboard and drop the rifle in the woods. Like, this is all about what you'd expect from a 22-year-old kid who's a reasonably good shot with a rifle and had no real

other skills. Like, it's what it looked like. Yes. This doesn't even seem like someone who spent a great deal of time planning, right? Yeah. Like, learning about that. They said they'd been planning about it for about a week. Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right? Like, like... Yeah. And

they seem almost surprised. Yeah. I got this weird feeling reading it. Like, Tyler almost is shocked that they did it. Like, there's this almost sense of being pulled by history. Yeah. It's seemingly confused by his own actions in a sense. Yeah, like watching himself almost.

Yes. And like I inscribe, like, one of the things it sounds like, and this is a little unclear, but it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up, but he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing he did for shit.

For shits and giggles. People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well, obviously, the roommate knew something was up. If the roommate was aware that Robinson was carving bullets, that's, for well, that's not a crime. No. People just do weird shit sometimes,

especially if someone goes to the range often, maybe they're going to fucking scribble on a bullet. Like, that's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning, frankly. Yeah. It's indication, again, that this guy was very online at a gamer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's it. So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals, people on the left have taken to, to suspecting that these could have been written by an quote-unquote FBI agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter. And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage, like calling his dad his old man, and referring to, quote-unquote, like, law enforcement type language, like interrogate.

And to me, this is not very confusing. He talks like this because he's raised Mormon. and plays a lot of tactical video games. Thousands of hours. I have his Steam profile. Huge, huge gamer. And he might talk a little odd because he just did a fucking crazy thing.

I don't even think it's that odd. Like, my love. People call someone they're in love with my love. That's a thing that happens in the world. Like, that's not like a strange thing. What are we doing here? Why are we questioning this part of the story? Yeah.

But, and again, like, these texts were handed over to local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot of other evidence, DNA, ballistic evidence, the friend group Discord chat, where he also admitted to the crime right before he turned himself in.

Like, these text logs don't even, like, make him out to be a crazy leftist. He talks, like, very vaguely about Kirk, like, spreading hatred. Yeah. He says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll talk about, about, because there's some evidence here suggesting that both Tyler and their roommate, like, their politics were mixed from what little we can glean about them, right?

Or a very minor part of their lives in a sense. Yeah, they're not talking about redistribution of wealth. They're not talking about overthrowing the government. No, no, they're not talking about politics in that way. This seems more like personal to him. Yes, he's in love with a trans person and he didn't like what Charlie Kirk said about trans people. Yeah.

And, like, if the government's going to fake messages, why would they do so in a way that exonerates the trans roommate, the real ideological target here? Yeah. Especially, look at what the government is doing right now, right? They're going after, quote unquote, Antifa. They're going after the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left-wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not have referenced one of those organizations? Yeah. Would there not be a fucking black and red flag somewhere in there?

Yeah, like, it would be sort of. so easy. If you're going to implicate someone, you could implicate them in text messages really easily. Like, it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this. Yeah. Why would you fake that? Why would you fake it that way? Baffling. Incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case. There's plenty of other evidence. And this isn't the same thing as like cops planting evidence or like a district attorney making subjective claims about intent. Like you don't need to overestimate state intelligence here? No, we don't even need her what we have. There was no need for them to have done anything at all because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of the rifle were posted

online by police, his dad fucking called him. His family knew because it is a unique gun. Yeah. It is, it is an antique mouser that was sporterized and rebarreled presumably personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his dad seemed to have recognized it immediately. Yeah. There was no getting away with it once the rifle was found. This is totally different from like the MS-13 tattoo thing where the Trump administration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped letters to draw a parallel between what they think the tattoos meant and their interpretation of it as letters and numbers, which Trump, in all of his genius,

mistook for being actual tattoos and then they just ran with it because no one has the capacity to tell the president you're wrong. This is completely different than faking all these text messages. There's metadata. There's cell phone records. It's probably still on the roommate's own phone, like physical, a physical evidence. And like subjectively saying that you don't know any Gen Z that talks like this, that's not valid evidence.

22-year-olds know how to use punctuation. Yeah, let me tell you, as someone who grades hundreds of papers every year from people who are largely, but not all, between 18 and 25, yeah, young people can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of forensic fucking literary analysis required. And the information obtained in these chat logs and through interviews with his parents, match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who got leaked messages from the shooter on Discord. Very, very similar. Like, lots of lives and people on the left are saying this is fake because they want the shooter

to be conservative. and they think that these texts damage the narrative that they have chosen. I think that's why we're seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not about actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right? Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family. His dad's pretty mega. Robinson figured out he was bisexual and started to move a little bit to the left on like gender and sexuality issues.

And even like a lot of Gen Z straight guys kind of have this political profile, right? They're like pro-gun, but their life revolves around like gaming, discord and Reddit more than like the political and they're probably often pro-capitalist they're just not bigoted against queer people yeah yeah yeah yeah not as common anymore these aren't political partisans yeah they're not even on r slash bread tube like yeah that's that's not what's happening he played he played he played furry sex games on steam when he was younger one of his steam names was donald trump because yeah he's 22 years old trump was inaugurated when he was like 13 or whatever like God.

Yeah, that's crazy. We fucked the kids up so bad. It's largely a political. And like this, what he did is, is existential violence manifesting a political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political, right? Because shooting Charlie Kirk, incredibly political action, even if that's not the way that the shooter maybe conceived it. Yeah, like this person happened, or it happened across a queer person who they,

are very fond of, right? They have queer people in their lives. That is not indicative of any politics other than they have a queer person in their life. If this person stand of the Soviet Union, we would fucking know about it. Oh, yeah. Because they would be running with that.

They'd have found a Mosin-the-gun. Yeah, they would have used a Mozen for one thing, so they would have missed. I'm just going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little bit of Mosin slander for you today to break up the horrors. Yeah. Speaking of crackdowns,

crackdown on your wallet by buying these products and services beautiful lovely and we're back yeah first amendment crackdown massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of the administration about going after the left, about dismantling, particularly organizations like the Open Society Foundation, going after George Soros and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and using the death penalty even on folks who are quote-unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially just about anybody. This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs,

Yep. Legal support NGOs. Like, it's really unclear the exact form that this is going to take, but this is stuff that the administration has pined about doing

for a while. Yeah. And it's unclear, you know, it's one of the big pieces of news that's happened within 24 hours of us recording this episode,

which we recorded on Thursday, the 18th, is that Trump has designated Antifa, a domestic terrorist organization. Kind of. That's not, he said,

what I'm saying is he said that he's doing that. He said a major. he has said. Those are words that he has said. Words that he has said before, including in 2020. For the letter of the law, for one thing, there's a wild difference between what you could do legally to an international, a foreign terrorist organization. Yeah. And domestic terrorist organization. Yeah. Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally in terms of what is written law. The president can't just declare a group of people to be a domestic

terrorist organization. It's usually an enhancement charge. Yes. And then just go after people who have spoken out or donated money to legal charities that are randomly declared to be in support of that. That's not legal, which doesn't mean it won't happen. Let me be really clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not what the law is about. And they've tried to do that in Atlanta with Stop Cop City and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and going after the bail fund and people who had donated money to like the Forest Defense Fund. Right. And this Trump is similarly actually to Atlanta is also talked about using RICO charges to get people in trouble who are, you know, funding these quote-unquote domestic terror organizations.

And on, yeah, September 17th, Trump trothed, I am pleased to inform our many USA patriots that I'm designating Antifa, a sick, dangerous, radical left disaster as a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Yeah, I mean, if it used to word major, right, which doesn't, like, there's a domestic terrorism is a concept. It's nebulous. FTO, foreign terrorist organization is an extremely clear legal definition. He didn't use either of those. This is, yeah, this is a thing that, like, Ted Cruz, and I think he enjoyed it, I'm sure there were other people involved, but Ted Cruz, and before 2020, 2019, tried to introduce a resolution in the Senate, condemning Antifa. Like, this has been a thing.

Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation, which went nowhere, or talking. about introducing legislation. I don't even know if she actually introduced it. Like this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's been, it's been something like Andy Noe has been advocating for for years. It's a really important point that they have attempted and failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't let them. And this is something that if you have been in the, right, reporting on public shootings business, as long as I have been. Jesus Christ. One thing I can tell you is that in the wake of something like this, it was the same with Christchurch, in the immediate wake of Christchurch, there was this really shocking moment

where a bunch of conservative, I talked to these people because I published the defining article on that shooting, a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants. Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should, like those people were talking about that, people who you would not expect it. Now, they didn't keep talking that way. They got over it pretty quick. But what you have in a moment like this is there's a limited period of time where people's shock and horror and surprise at what has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who have an agenda and who have a clear plan for what to push to push the Overton envelope in their direction, right?

This is not a period of time that lasts forever. and the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this. And they are making the best use of this period of time that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean there aren't long-term consequences. Doesn't mean that they can't make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech. It doesn't mean we're not in massive danger because we are in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not. 100%.

I'm telling you these spaces of possibility don't last forever, in part because the public moves on. And in part because there is always a backlash to the backlash. And you're seeing pieces of that already, right? We are seeing pieces of that. You see fucking Carl Rove of all motherfucking people wrote an article about how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists for the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came out and made it. statement that like if the government is able to go after you for this, they'll come after

conservatives at some point. And he's not wrong about, I don't credit him doing that because of a serious moral thing. I credit him to be a relatively intelligent guy who is like, no, no, no, if they're able to do this to, you know, whatever milk toast liberals, eventually it'll happen to me, right? And specifically like Pam Bondi, the attorney general made some statements a few days ago about them going after quote unquote hate speech. Yeah. Which spawned a whole bunch of conservative commentators, Stephen Crater, Tucker Carlson, as well as Matt Walsh, and under no circumstances, do you have to hand up to Matt Walsh? But this prompted them to be like, no, actually, we don't believe in hate speech as a legitimate legal category. There should be social consequences for

people who celebrate the murder of an innocent man, but there should not be legal consequences for hate speech, right? We're fine with the government helping us, like, docks you and get you fired from your job. But prosecuting hate speech as a category is something that we do not agree with and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been like that small reaction which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no, when I say hate speech, what I really mean is like threats and assightment to violence and like,

okay. Fighting words, I think it's a legal term, right? Like incitements to violence. Yeah. And you know, there's some stuff that's always been illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives, I've been dealing with this for years, threatened to kill and rape activists

and show up outside of their houses and harass them as a general rule, the police don't do anything if those activists are on the left, right? Even though that crosses the boundary into fighting words. However, they have legally could. They choose not to, right? But if someone is out there saying in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people to kill this person, that is illegal. You're not allowed to say, I want to incite people to murder this person. That is a crime. If you're posting and saying that, you have broken the law. They won't go after a conservative for doing that, but they'll go after you.

Right. Like, that is how things work, you know? Yeah. However, we have seen people who have been attacked for speech that absolutely is not crossing the line into fighting words, right? One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech. You've had variants of this happened at a couple of colleges all around the country. There's specifically at Texas Tech, which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premier state schools. There was a video of an incident on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed, where a student seen jumping up and down, yelling profanity at a vigil in a free speech zone outside of a student union building on the campus, saying, y'all home me dead, making fun of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At one point, she touched a guy's hat.

The video of her went viral. Governor Greg Abbott called for her to be arrested and expelled. She was expelled immediately. She was arrested and charged with assault shortly thereafter. Her family has not made a statement very wisely. There's really nothing they could say that would be great at this point. There has been some pushback from student organizations in the state because this is blatantly illegal. Calling what she did assault is nonsense, in my opinion, from watching the video.

She was at a free speech zone. Laughing y'all homely dead when someone is killed is not fighting words. That is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff like that under the letter of the law. Does this mean this person won't get convicted of a crime? It's Texas. And she's a black woman. She might.

And this is very chilling. This is deeply concerning, right? This is not the only case. There's a smaller university outside of Austin where, again, a student was videotaped celebrating at a vigil for Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well. There have been a number of teachers fired. obviously stuff like this has been happening all over the country, right? And this is deeply worrying. And even if, even if the space of possibility closes on these people faster than they're expecting, if the crackdown on the open society foundation doesn't happen, if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further than the last time they've talked about going after Antifa, stuff like this is going to continue to happen. And it will only accelerate over the next couple of years, right? And that is a massive problem.

part of this culture shift can be seen in what some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life, which is on Wednesday evening ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show on hold quote-unquote indefinitely following pressure from the FCC and affiliate stations owned by NextStar. Before ABC's announcement, NextStar released a statement, quote, NextStars owned and partner television stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt Jimmy Kimmel live for the foreseeable future, beginning with tonight's show. Next, our strongly objects to the recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.

Unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to the Kirk family and donate to the Kirk family as well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show, quote, it's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out. And we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content. That ends up being

a pattern of news distortion, unquote. Carr then made vague threats towards like direct FCC involvement. Quote, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead, unquote. The FCC controls broadcast licenses for local TV channels, and Next Star is planning a merger with Tegna, which requires FCC approval. And this is obviously a coerced attack on free speech. And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot getting polled, and people speaking out getting in trouble because their companies are trying to do a merger, right? That's not new. Yes, this has happened with ABC already. This happened with CBS and

Paramount. I think some people, including people on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of the firing or the being put on hold, as well as what, like, Kimmel said. Like, Kimmel wasn't joking about or celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly like falsely insinuate that the shooter was maggel. when evidence at the time pointed otherwise. Kimmel said, quote, we hit some new lows over the weekend with the mega gang desperately trying to characterize

the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it, unquote. He then went on to tell a joke about how Trump did not seem very sad in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind. That was the way the joke was framed. Oh, yeah.

So that's what Kimmel actually said. you can interpret that either way, whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to make it look like he's not one of them and scoring political points, or you can interpret it as Kimmel kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly meant by that. But the Rolling Stone reported that sources told them, quote, senior executives at ABC, its owner, Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage. Multiple execs. felt Kimmel had not actually said anything

over the line, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed, unquote. Yeah, and this is, again, this is chilling. Absolutely chilling speech. The things he said were not in line with the best available evidence

at the time that he said them, but they weren't hate speech. They were not incitement to violence. There was nothing illegal about them. And again, you had a fucking right-wing figure on television urging for homeless people to be executed.

The involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis quote, just kill them. He's not getting fired. No, he had to make a half-assed apology, but that's it. Yeah, like he had to pretend to be sorry. If I had a nickel for every time

someone on Fox News said that like any mass shooter at all was linked to a trans person like none of my trans friends would ever be homeless again, like they say this shit all the time and nothing happens, even though it is I mean, literally just, it is straight up defamatory.

Yep. And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens. And this is just a really pure, I mean, example of just blatant political suppression of speech. And also this sort of, like we talked about this with the mergers, the structural problem with the way that like the American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured, which is that they're all for profit companies. And because of that, all you need to do. was just buy out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall in line

and that's what we've been watching with news outlet after news outlet after news outlet like firing anyone who said anything mean about Kirk. Yep. I think with that that concludes our

Charlie Kirk assassination aftermath discussion for now. But there is in fact other news this week happening. James, do you have stuff?

Yeah, unfortunately. I'm like bracing myself because I know that James's news is never that good either. Yeah. So that's good news these days. No, really? The passport thing was killed, right? The Marco Rubio. Yeah, yeah, there is some good news, actually. There was a Senate bill, a writer on a bill that was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio the power to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political speech and the guise of speech protecting, you know, quote unquote terrorists.

That failed, like that was polled by the sponsor, which is good. There was. a backlash to it. And again, when there's backlashes, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's so annoying to have to, like, we all know that, like, pointing out the hypocrisy doesn't work as, like, a real strategy. But, like, uh, yeah, there's, if there's a way besides that to, like, actually channel resistance to these authoritarian and, like, speech chilling measures, besides just smugly going like, ha, ha, the party of free speech strikes again. which I understand how that's emotionally compelling. But no one cares.

It's not going to stop them from taking away your free speech. No. Yeah. Speaking of free speech, here's some free ads. Yeah. We are back. Don't worry, folks. It is all downhill from here, I'm afraid, because things have not.

not being good outside of the coverage and repercussions to the Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us to talk about Ghana. This is one of those stories that unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but it shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass-through to send people back to other countries in West Africa. In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent to a place and you send them back via another place that is called chain refoulement, right?

One could probably also pronounce that, as if it were, a French word, but I have decided not to. In this instance, they're sending people to Ghana when their home countries have been deemed to be too dangerous by United States Corps, or they are unable to send them back to that country for some other reason, right? People in this part of the world don't need visas to travel, so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring, like, that Ghana can. can just bust them back, right? It doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a court has

ordered the United States that there was an attempt, right, to secure protections for these people via them into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the time the case was filed, right? So to prevent them being sent from Ghana to places where they may face, as we are about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the worst shit that can happen to people. So the court did all. order the United States to produce a document which details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that. Ghanaian sources have repeatedly suggested that one exists, right, and in Ghanaian government press conferences

and internal Ghanaian news reporting. The case was bought by both Gambian and Nigerian citizens, right, so people who don't want to be returned to those countries and their attempt to obtain a straining order. In one instance, one of the people who bought the case fled after torture by the police and military and was explicitly told that if he came back, they would kill him. And what the U.S. is doing here is using Ghana as a pass-through to send him back, right? Yeah, some of them also detailed in the case their transport. They said they were in straight jackets for 16 hours on the flight. The U.S., right, the government, the United States government in this instance, has once again claimed that these people,

are out of its hands and it has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from sending them back to these other countries. This is an argument that is attempted to make in several other instances. And I do just want to flag that like this use of third party countries for deportation has much increased under the Trump administration, but it was the Biden administration who began funding Panamanian deportations, right? Way before Donald Trump was even elected. And I have documented that extensively in my series on the Darien Gap. The court determined in this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction to grant the plaintiff's relief, right? So that means that they're not able to get a restraining

order. One of the people had actually already been returned to the place where they had a convention against torture protection from and was in hiding at the time at the court case, right? The judge said that the government's actions were part of a quoting here, pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly. We are recording this on the 18th of September. It's a Thursday and about 15 minutes ago, another United States flight just landed in Ghana. So this practice appears to be outgoing. Secondly, what I want to talk about is sadly another shooting. The killing of Silverio Villegas Gonzales in Chicago.

Jegas Gonzalez was a 38-year-old father, a Mexican national, and he was shot by either one or two ice agents while driving away from them. An ice statement claimed that he drove towards him and ended up dragging an agent a significant distance. Surveillance camera footage at the scene shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzalez in his vehicle. We then see the vehicle reverse away from them and then move around them. to the left when it sees a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have placed their vehicle,

which is an SUV in front of his vehicle, sort of cramping it into the curve, right? So he has to reverse backwards and then move forward into the left in order to try and drive away, which is what he's trying to do, right? We can only see one of the officers in the footage. We see the other officer later in other footage. The officer in the footage does not appear to be dragged, but he appears to draw his weapon. In bystander, We then see two officers pull Villegas Gonzalez from the vehicle, and they begin administering first aid. We're just rewatching the footage now, and you can see the other agent on the other side of

the vehicle. This sounds very similar to the time that Ice shot at the car driving away just a few weeks ago. Sure. And San Bernardino, absolutely, yeah. Generally, I've no idea of what rules ICE are operating under. It's not considered best practice to open fire at a vehicle that is moving. away from you unless it's actively endangering someone else's life, right? In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life, a handgun will not stop a car.

Yeah. Maybe you hit the driver, but the odds are just as good, if not much better, that it goes through a window and remains lethal going past the car and endangering people's lives. Yeah. And also, it's worth mentioning on the other side of the car from the officer who we see draw his gun is the other agent. Yes. Yeah. So if you're shooting at the car, you're shooting at your other agents. Guns don't stop cars generally, unless you've got like a 50 caliber anti-material rifle.

Guns don't stop cars. Yeah. But they do stop people. But they keep, bullets keep going when they miss. It's just bad. It's a bad thing to do. It's irresponsible. It's normal cop shit.

Yeah. So what we see is at least two shots. fired and then we begin to see that then they leave the uh the the screen of the surveillance camera right so we don't see exactly like we're unable to see i guess where those bullets impact the bystander 40s then shows his vehicle crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck right and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could also have been fatal right like the way that he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the car goes underneath,

so it would be the driver who would take the main impact because the trailer is higher off the ground, right? Hopefully that's making sense to people. Totally. He's traveled about 100 feet in this time period. Unravel Press have a pretty good account of this. They've cobbled together, I think most of the open source video

and also the surveillance video. There don't appear in those videos to be any other agent's press. present. And when we see the agents rendering aid, none of them appears to be in the state someone would be had they been dragged by a fast moving car. Also, again, with reference to shooting at a moving vehicle, if the moving vehicle is dragging your colleague, you're shooting also at your colleague if you shoot at the vehicle. So, unfortunately, none of this changes the fact that this guy is now dead, right? The Mexican consulate has confirmed his age. They said he was

working as a cook as his profession and that he was from Micho Khan. The consulate has been in touch with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar with this instance and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican consulate will help with returning the remains of Mexican nationals to their families in Mexico. That's most of what I have on his death. It seems to have moved like very quickly through the news cycle, which is unfortunate because obviously you have children who have lost a father here like this is a tragedy too yeah no this is tragic yeah yeah yeah you know and i i'm sitting here haunted by the fact that they killed this guy two days after the charlie kirk shooting i think most of the people who are listening to the show right now don't know this happened yeah

these agents aren't going to get prosecuted into court of law for this the same way that the charlie kirk assassin will yeah generally like local there have been some cases but i'm not really aware of any filed against border patrol agents, generally DHS has an agency which investigates like use of force incidents, right? And it is, I will say it is extremely, there have been times when agents have been charged. They are rare. I mean, and Stephen Miller's DHS, that seems very unlikely. Yeah, like I'm aware of some charges, for instance, in San Diego for like agents who have allowed drugs to cross the board, right? Sure. It is pretty rare.

Yeah, so let's talk about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been like. Yeah. I kind of want to start with something that's been very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like not deploying the National Guard there has been about, oh, if you resist Trump, it will, like, you know, you can defeat him. And like, that's true. But also, ICE and Border Patrol are on the ground. in Chicago as we're listening to this right now dragged people from their homes. The raids have gone

to a significant extent the way that we expected them to. They have been largely very, very fast lightning raids. A lot of them have been an outlying part of Chicago land which has been making it difficult to both track them and determine numbers

because a lot of these parts of these massive Chicago suburbs We're going to talk about one later called Elgin. There has 100,000 people in it, but also doesn't have the kind of, I mean, they have, like, local journalists, but they don't have, like, the kind of press corps that, like, the city of Chicago proper has. And so documentation is a much harder, which is part of why they've been striking out there. It's largely been ice, but Border Patrol has shown up, and part of the Border Patrol appearing has been that this has also been a giant PR blitz for Trump administration officials

as the people at Unravelled have pointed out and we'll be talking to them more next week about what things have been like on the ground a senior border patrol official Gregory Bovino has claimed to we don't actually have like photograph algorithms there but he was posting on

acts that he was he went to Franklin Park which is where ice shot that guy a couple of days after the shooting okay he has been releasing an entire stream of TikTok and X posts to sort of advertise his presence in the city and doing this whole, we did this in L.A. We're doing this here now thing. James, you don't talk a little bit

about who he is? Yeah, I do. So Bovino was at least until recently, he's supposed to be, as you say, working in Chicago now. His Twitter now reads, Commander Op at Large, CA, Gregory K. Bovino, he was a chief patrol agent in the El Centro sector. When we saw Operation Return to Sender, operation return to December was December of 2024. This happened under the Biden administration. This was the first of these Border Patrol roving stops way north of the border, right? Up into

Central Valley, stopping people in home depots, stopping people who appeared to be Latino, Latino, Latina, on the street. I would say that CalMatters has had a really good coverage of that, and I can link it in the show notes.

We also saw the deployment of Border Patrol to LA, right? that was the El Centro. So people aren't familiar with El Centro, east of San Diego along the border, right? It's sort of mostly away to Arizona if you're driving from San Diego. He is really, like I would say a man of the moment in terms of Trump's Border Patrol, right? Like Border Patrol is an agency that's changed a lot over the years. There was a time when Border Patrol recruited from the Peace Corps. Now is not that time. One thing that Bovino has been very good at in the sense of like doing what the administration

once from a Border Patrol agent right now is his use of social media. My understanding is that they have a whole team dedicated to this in the El Centro sector, right? That they have videographers and photographers and such to make social media for the Border Patrol. And Bovino really seems to have been stepping up in importance. Like he has this sort of, he also can cuts a very distinctive figure with this kind of cropped side haircut.

Like, you can find a picture of his haircut online. I don't know how to describe it. his Twitter picture shows him holding an AR with a low-powered variable optic. Like, he's this new, like, tactical, aggressive, very aggressive social media presence border patrol officer, right? And we've seen El Centro Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a lot of these operations, as I said, even going back to the Biden era. If you're wondering, Border Patrol sectors are not just around the cities that then

name for, right? They can go a long way north. So it's the San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why you would have seen them operating as far north as Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors. I haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine that there is a Border Patrol sector that pertains to the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps Bovino is now doing some kind of operational command for these urban things rather than working in that sector. I'm not entirely sure. But yeah, that's who he is. Yeah. And he's been, you know, he's been making an enormous deal of, like, of showing up

in Chicago. And this has been something that's increasingly, this is part of what it means for, for ICE and Border Patrol to show up in a city is you get these fucking, just absolutely hideous PR ops. On Tuesday, Percy Nome, last scene shooting a dog. joined a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty far-flung suburb of Chicago with about 100,000 people in it. And she showed up to do basically a PR junket at this raid at 5 in the morning in Elgin, where ICE arrived with helicopters, they blew up someone's door, and they grabbed a bunch of people, and then they were forced to release two of the seven people they grabbed because they immediately turned out to be U.S. citizens.

Kirst has denied that they detained them and said that, oh, no, actually we just separated them for their protection while we did the operation. And like that doesn't seem to be true from everything that we've heard from witnesses to the scene. But yeah, this is, you know, these are the way that these enforcement operations, the way that these raids have gone is at the beginning of a major. operation cycles turned into these press circuits for people like Kirstie Knoam. Yeah. Nome's been on a few raids. Like this has been a consistent thing, right? These raids are a content creation exercise as much as

a law enforcement one. Yes. And it's used to dress up, all that good stuff. Yeah. And, you know, it's this, it's this like reveling both in this, you know, in this sort of like constructed like I'm holding an AR-15 look how tough I am image and also just in the cruelty and the suffering in the same way that the alligator Alcatraz stuff was, but it's worth noting that most of the raids have not looked like this. This was a raid where, like, you know, people were woken up in this, basically this random suburb at 5 in the morning because, like, they heard an explosion and ice had blocked off all of their streets and their armored vehicles and helicopters.

Most of what they've been are not like that. They've been following the pattern established in L.A. of very, very rapid raids to avoid rep response networks. targeting a combination of houses, job sites, and, you know, places like Home Depot. And, you know, when we talked about this beginning a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how these people are being deployed largely from this naval base that is hours out from the city, right? And that's part of why a lot of these raids, although they have been going to the south side, which is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids have been in places like Elgin that are further north

and are more outlying because they are closer to this naval base than the core of the city of Chicago and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance. There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin. They took a student from a community college. They've just been dragging people from their homes and workplaces. There was a very, very well-publicized raid in Naperville,

which is another sort of outlying suburb where they grabbed people who were like fixing someone's roof. Was that the one where people remained on the roof? Yeah. For some time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Really horrible scene. People are extremely pissed off. There's another story that has gotten very, very little coverage that was horrifying in displains, which is a suburb just north of O'Hare, where ice agents and masks did a very, very standard thing. This is, I mean, a kind of standard ice tactic where they wait for people to get back into a truck and then they block the truck off with their trucks. to prevent it from leaving. Yeah. And I'm going to read a CBS report of what happened next because I think it's important to understand

what it's actually like for these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who was in the car, said that when the agent originally came to the passenger door, he tried holding the door closed, preventing him from opening it. He said at the time that he and his family had no idea who was at the vehicle and everyone was scared. When the agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was tased in the face

That's when he told everyone in the truck To run for their lives Despite being a U.S. citizen They ran out of fear So what's happening here is There's these two brothers and their dad Who is undocumented, the two brothers We're born in Chicago

And they block off this car They show up in masks The people in the car have absolutely no idea Who they are And when they try to not get their car broken into they tase this guy who was an American citizen in the face. He has to go to the hospital because they

tased him in the face. Right. Yeah. And this, there are stories like this is a particularly bad one, but there are stories like the rest of the raids that we've been talking about every single day in Chicago that do not break containment at all in a country that is literally entirely

just talking about Charlie Kirk. There are people being dragged from their homes. There are people being dragged from their homes. There are people being dragged from their fucking places of work. They're being dragged from their schools. And, you know, this is, this is just what the U.S. is right now. Now, as fucking unbelievably bleak as this is, right, and people are terrified, but they're also angry and people are also organizing. And as we saw in L.A., people are forming rapid response networks and they're showing up in places that I

never would have thought. I mean, maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing things in places. wouldn't have thought possible. I want to close this by. There was a report on Thursday by Sean Mulcaix, who's the news editor at the Reader, which is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So ICE tried the same tactic

of blockading someone's truck and grabbing them in a suburb called Wheaton, Illinois. And a bunch of people, when they tried to do the smash and grab of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people showed up and confronted them

and screamed at them and recorded them and this caused the ice people to take off and run away without detaining the person. And this is a stunning development if you know anything about either Chicago land or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, which is like,

it's one of like the three big right wing Christian universities alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty. This is wild. This was one of the home basis of power of the Bush era moral majority, right? Like Wheaton College is a school where dancing was at least. legal until 2003, like they banned dancing for 143 years. And if people in Wheaton are showing

up to do direct actions against ice, these people, they're cooked, right? They will be able to do a significant amount of damage. They have been doing significant amounts of damage. We've just been talking about the amount of damage they've been doing. But if this is what is happening in places that used to be moral majority strongholds, right, like places that produce some of the most famous, like, Christian right-wingers who shaped an entire half century of American politics. If people there are showing up and doing direct actions against Eisen winning, things are fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly. And despite everything that's been happening, despite all of the Kirk stuff, Trump's polling keeps getting worse and worse. And I think this is a good

reminder that, like, these people, part of the reason they're moving so fast and so hard right now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular and they have to get their crack down and they have to build a political legal power right now before it gets even worse for them. And they're terrified that, you know, if there are a thousand wheatens. What a wild phrase. If enough people resist them, they don't have the capacity to stop them because everybody fucking hates these people and they hate what they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock troopers showing up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people they love away from them. And it's going to be a really, really long and hard battle.

But the fact that people are fighting in places where that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago is, I think, at least a small sign of hope in the darkness. Yeah. And that's probably where we ought to end is a small sign of hope in the darkness. If you would like to contact us, you can do so by using our, Proton mail email address, CoolZone Tips at Proton.me. It's encrypted if you use an encrypted email address to send. We reported the news.

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