Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 210

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Starting point is 00:02:28 is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. State-of-the-art organized and well-funded activists and criminals. On April 29, 29, 2025, after almost exactly four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the construction of a state-of-the-art police training facility, dubbed Cop City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially opened atop of the South River Forest in DeKalb County, Georgia.

Starting point is 00:03:26 One, two, three, cut. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open, a handshake between Governor Brian Kemp and a relieved Atlanta mayor, Andre Dickens. Getting here has not been an easy journey. The opening of the $118 million complex for police, fire, and E911 personnel, which includes academic leadership and simulation centers, came after not months, but years of public pushback. Stop Cop City! This is It Could Happen here, I'm Garrison Davis. I've been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop City movement on this show since 2021.

Starting point is 00:04:11 I first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from inside of the protest encampments in spring of 2022, and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story more in depth in 23. My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement, as well as my ability as a reporter. But this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other report or mini-series I've done on Stop Cup City was written while the movement was still ongoing, and the final outcome had yet to be fully determined. Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti-police, anarchist,

Starting point is 00:04:59 or leftist struggles. I believe that we will win, and Cop City will never be built, where common turns of phrase, and not just repeat and mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now, six months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement, based on interviews and conversations have had with organizers, anarchists, and force defenders, analyzing the movement's rise and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge between the 2020 protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity, and increased state repression against, quote-unquote, radical left terrorists. We don't have enough time to retread a complete,

Starting point is 00:05:47 in-depth play-by-play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to break down the movement into a series of discrete phases. After organizers learned about the plans to build Cop City in April of 2021, the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest first took form with an opening attack phase

Starting point is 00:06:08 throughout the entire summer of 2021. With tree spiking and sabotage, targeting construction equipment on the East side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in partnership with local government. To quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy. Just absolute, this is what we're doing. This is what we're about. This is the goal. If you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be a part of this. That was just what we

Starting point is 00:06:43 were doing, unquote. In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the land lease ordinance authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city-owned land in the South River Forest to build Cop City. After this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eschewed, and soon after, the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest and the start of the pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project. To again, quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, persistent encampment occupation, lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing what to do at all.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Small incursions would get made, but they just had not figured out what to do about it yet. There was just kind of like free reign, unquote. For the first half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and DeKalb sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of parade. not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shaq, showed early promise in getting some contractors like Reeves Young Construction and material suppliers to drop out of the Cop City project. But after this stream of steady success from fall of 2021 to May of 2022,

Starting point is 00:08:08 the police were forced to up the ante and started conducting large-scale raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, May of 2022 is the end of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids. Where the paralysis phase is broken, you're getting your multi-agency large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in a lot of work. That really leads up to January of 2023, so where tort got killed, unquote. Prior to the police killing of Tort during a forest encampment raid on January 18, 2023, the occupation phase proved highly effective

Starting point is 00:08:51 in preventing pre-construction. But the Kaliantortigita essentially marked the end of the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high-octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting in Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time,

Starting point is 00:09:12 and things are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March 5th, unquote. During the South River Music Festival on March 5th, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site. The crowd repelled police, and construction equipment was set on fire. The cops retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units in Atlanta,

Starting point is 00:09:36 kettled the festival and eventually arrested 23 people, charging them with domestic terrorism. After the events of March 5th, the movement entered an odd limbo phase with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City Coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions. During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted. Following this denial of operating space, the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear-cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.

Starting point is 00:10:16 About a month later, the bail fund and legal defense non-profit, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Just a few days after the raid, the city council approved a $67 million cop city funding package. The next day, organizers announced referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the cop city land lease ordinance on the upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before.

Starting point is 00:10:51 There was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement. Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized week of action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country or even the world, who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions, and protests against Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and contractors hired to build the facility. The summer of 2023 saw the sixth organized week of action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase. And without the forest as an operating zone, the week of action struggled to find its purpose, despite the surge in movement participation around the City Hall budget vote earlier that June.

Starting point is 00:11:33 The next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really sits in around August of 2023, with the RICO indictment charging 61 people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism. State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to the current trial phase. Quote, an Atlanta anarchist,

Starting point is 00:12:01 quote, I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long-term prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the one to close the book by doing this, because you don't want to let them define the narrative of this forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of the trial and calling it. Otherwise, the movement gets stuck in this permanent, like, zombie phase where we're still saying stop cop city is this thing that's happening

Starting point is 00:12:30 when it's built, it's built, it's right there, right? Like, it doesn't mean that we all just go home, but it means that you're like a veteran of this battle now, and there's new shit to do, new stuff to work on, unquote. Even in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame to a specific factor in why the fight to stop Cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal. But we can track a decline in momentum, which allowed the state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years, state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against the Cop City Project. Forced raids, arrests, and criminal charges made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a repression tactic started back in December of 2022, following an encampment raid, resulting in six people being charged with domestic terrorism. This was the first time

Starting point is 00:13:28 that charge has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in 2017, in response to the Westpromisist mass shooting by Dylan Roof. Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed, Tortugita was killed by police in another forest raid. But this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the movement to fight Cop City, which then only grew. Similarly, the clear-cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build on the momentum of a widely publicized

Starting point is 00:14:03 direct action, like March 5th, provided the state an opening while the movement was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects leading to March 5th. But as the energy tapered down, the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then dealt a pretty significant blow with the RICO indictment. The RICO charges in August of 2023, followed by the series of house raids in February of 24, were a pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum to almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, a lot of people will argue their opinions about what was the stifling thing. I think some of the more electorally or mass movement, big tent-minded people would argue that March 5th takes a lot of the wind out of the sails.

Starting point is 00:14:57 I think a lot of people would disagree with that, just because, like, you can build on the momentum of a March 5th. you can build on, like, a triumphant battlefield victory. It's a lot harder to build on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning. It's hard to build on that, unquote. Despite the RICO charges, acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough to propel the movement. after the referendum campaign was effectively nullified by the state in fall of

Starting point is 00:15:35 2023, there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials. Something multiple activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies and adapt after the forest occupation became impossible to maintain, especially considering just how much weight people had put into that strategy, but then did not come up with a clear next step

Starting point is 00:16:10 after the police were able to suppress that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their own strategies. The ODA loop is a four-step military decision-making model used across a large variety professional fields, including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information, as possible. Then orient, synthesize information with background knowledge. Decide on the next course of action using that newly synthesized information and finally act. And the results of your actions should then send you back to step one. Failure to act at all or too slowly often ends in

Starting point is 00:16:49 defeat. To quote, an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, you need contingency lines, right? Either things that you're willing to escalate in the current line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable, or a complete change in strategy. It can be changed in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those are valid options. Doing both of them in the same time can be extremely effective, but at the end of the day, you have to, when the cops start to break out of paralysis. An example from any eco-defense or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it, has to escalate in some way to prevent them from feeling safe coming in or trying to.

Starting point is 00:17:35 Or the physical space of action has to change. Because now they need to recalibrate to, oh shit, like not only is the occupation less assailable than we thought, because there's been a change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit going on everywhere else. and that significantly impedes their ability to have an Oda Loop to do battle with. You can even look at the ice pickups that got a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not expecting that men people

Starting point is 00:18:06 just to show up. You can see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass of rage and getting really close to those guys that they fucking panic. They freak out, like it's very clear even just in the small amount of their faces and their movements

Starting point is 00:18:22 that you can see that they were panicking. Unquote. Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland. And I've seen this before with Bortak during the 2020 protests in Portland. I think anyone who has watched the cop's retreat has seen this before. But the more the same thing happens, the more you get used to it, the more you experiment and find ways to adapt and overcome. Quoting in Atlanta Anarchist, quote,

Starting point is 00:18:50 cops panic and you can see it in the way they walk like they weren't ready for that and next time they might be which means you have to add something new a new spice has to get thrown in a new flavor profile they'll get used to pushing through crowds like that until someone hits them at the end of the day and whether you're like confronting them on the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to knock people's doors to get them out eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy, and eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you are using." To orient back to Atlanta, all these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of March 5th, the seeming

Starting point is 00:19:37 impossibility of continued forest encampments, or the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum. In these moments, the police and the state were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally so, during the quote-unquote block cop city protest in October of 2023, where police easily repelled a protest march from even reaching the road to the cop city construction site. And the state continued to push their lines forward, with the joint FBI ATF raids on activist houses in February 2024, which furthered. stifled the movement and was coupled with months to years-long persistent surveillance and intimidation, denoted by cops, parked outside of homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance,

Starting point is 00:20:24 and hidden cameras placed in front of activist's homes, and a local community center. One of the more frightening incidents came in May of 2024, where a resident of one of the homes raided that February woke up in the middle of the night to a bright light outside of the bedroom window, only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps on fire. One of the things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the way people talked about fear as a tool. Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a common refrain. to overcome the fear that this state used as a weapon.

Starting point is 00:21:15 But the first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to the state using fear. It was in early 2022 when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam-style booby traps demonstrated that the cops are not impervious super-soldiers. instilling fear is a major aspect of police training. They're susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us.

Starting point is 00:21:46 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, but while we understand our own fear, I think people often fall into the trap of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them. Because the state feels like this monolithic, machine-like, this unassailable entity, that it is not. It's made up of people. with flaws and emotions who have the same cortisol response

Starting point is 00:22:11 to being threatened that you or I do. A big part of the lessons learned from Atlanta has to be a willingness to engage with them in a way that is personally endangering. That is the single way out. They're human and they get scared. The fear that I think had them so tight until May of 2022

Starting point is 00:22:31 was a fear that manifested itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is a normal human emotion to danger. So whether you're the most hardened SWAT team guy going up against the craziest eco-freak in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that. But what really had them so tight was fear as a matter of them being paralyzed by it, that they could not find out how to move.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And once they did find out around May of 2022, we really start to see things change. and like they were scared enough in the woods to shoot someone to death. Like they were still afraid. We were able to instill an immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the very nimble, small, green team insurgency side of things.

Starting point is 00:23:22 You have to make your enemy afraid of the dark. But also you have your defensive strategy against fear. You would hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you and through you mantra. That was a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because you have to find a way to move through that paralysis, unquote. Eventually, and with the help of a multi-agency task force,

Starting point is 00:23:49 the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed by it. In contrast, the pseudo-parallysis affecting stuff, Stop Cop City, only set in very late into the movement as a cumulative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics. As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this sort of unalive zombie

Starting point is 00:24:24 state, where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is at this point a burgeoning police state and right-wing power block. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, internalizing not just in terms of lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms

Starting point is 00:25:11 of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot of the way that ICE operations are currently happening, that necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing, at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it. And it is probably like unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop Cop City is doing a rally here. Like when it's built, it's there. And now we need to move on to other things. We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's still a police state to engage with here. You don't need the

Starting point is 00:26:01 container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police, unquote. And there are other things happening in Atlanta. There's ice rates happening in Atlanta in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is actively being inactive. And if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are, which are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony of the movement was that, though Cop City was conceived as a training ground for police, first it became a training ground for anarchists. As Top Cop City became the first mass movement following the 2020 George Floyd protests,

Starting point is 00:26:44 whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from the 2020 uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might. look like. Atlanta Police Chief Darren Shearbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training Center grand opening. Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to rally

Starting point is 00:27:07 here in this spot and on Peachtree Street from across the nation and literally the globe, we were up against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta Police Department. And we ourselves put out the call for help. And no sheriff said no, no police chief said no.

Starting point is 00:27:23 The Georgia State Patrol, the Department natural resources should stye by side for this department, as did the FBI and the ATF. Because we all knew that that playbook was successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across this country, and public safety would be stymied wherever we go. While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response, the state also used the movement to test out strategies for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics. well before the Cop City facility was finished being built. And now, with this specific localized struggle at completion,

Starting point is 00:28:02 both organizers and the state are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power, deploys National Guard, increases ICE operations, and continues repression against organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote, in Atlanta anarchist, quote, I think it's a matter of reimagining the struggle that you're a part of.

Starting point is 00:28:21 insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one. And if you were part of this thing here, you are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta. This thing, like this specific thing that was Defend the Atlanta Force, Stop Cop City, is something to be learned from and valued and also moved on from. And to move on from while taking lessons learned,

Starting point is 00:28:45 experience gained, and connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion, such that the state has as well. They have taken lessons learned from here and followed them through to their nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well. That doesn't mean you have given up.

Starting point is 00:29:04 It just means that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to reimagine yourself not as just, we're in Atlanta, we're doing Stop Cop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide anti-fascist struggle against like a fascist police state. unquote. This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City. One of the movement's key

Starting point is 00:29:27 slogans was Cop City is everywhere. Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in weeks of action. The physical fight Stop Cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta, with solidarity attacks and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also happened on the side of the state, with similar police training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities, and the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a national level.

Starting point is 00:30:08 Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and the strategies of repression, both militantly on the ground, and legally, and even their propaganda, messaging has gone outwards from here. And so too then must our lessons learned, both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also how we make connections to the rest of the country. People who came here are now back home and will make connections to the people around them. The cops in different cities, they have big conferences, they talk to each other, they learn from each other, there's no reason that we shouldn't be. You know, doing so with caution and

Starting point is 00:30:46 security culture, don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on, but we have things to learn from each other. And if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially teach people. Even if that was just like, here's how we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like 400 people in a day, or here's how we sneak around in the middle of the night. Unquote. This is a representative of the fire ant movement defense at a cop city trial press conference from September The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents now stalk communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed, snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens and churches. Who can argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless expansion of police power?

Starting point is 00:31:36 Now that Trump commands them, now that they are his police, the very people who helped lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his. orders, his camps, his federal troop deployments, but they built the logistics. They funded the training centers. They expanded the surveillance. Liberal governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent of our country into autocracy. As Marlon Kratz of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote, what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future. This is a test run of a repressive playbook that authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover what they can get away with.

Starting point is 00:32:21 Unquote. Let's look at some examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and the strategies for counterinsurgency that are spreading in the era of Trump 2.0. In January of this year, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled Deeming Certain Conduct of Members of Antifa as Domestic Terrorism and designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with domestic terrorism.

Starting point is 00:33:00 The Atlanta-based surveillance company Flock Safety gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated Cop City construction site in the South River Forest. forest, which protesters repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years, with over 80,000, quote-unquote, AI-powered cameras in 49 states. These cameras complete over 20 billion scans per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread all around the country and are used by all manners of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs who have used the nationwide camera

Starting point is 00:33:39 Network to track pregnant women seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local flock camera network to make over 3,200 searches from January to November 2025. In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled, Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens. This order calls to, quote, unleash high-impact local police forces protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials and surge resources to officers in need, unquote. It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense to police officers who, quote,

Starting point is 00:34:24 unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law, unquote. This tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm. The order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to, quote, seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security and incapacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution, and uniformity of crime

Starting point is 00:35:03 data across jurisdictions, unquote. The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense in consultation with Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies, as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdiction. to assist state and local law enforcement and shall determine how military and national security assets training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime, unquote. As the police become further militarized, the military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington, D.C., contains a section directing the Secretary of Defense to, quote, designate an appropriate number of each state's

Starting point is 00:36:08 trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that, quote, a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment, unquote. Later in October of 2025, the Department of Defense sent out memos to each state's National Guard, mandating that each state have their own quick reaction forces operational by January 1st, 2026. With crowd control equipment and two full-time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit.

Starting point is 00:36:51 The units contain, on average, 500 troops per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within 8 to 24 hours. The initial portion of the Bureau training courses cover how to, quote, form squad-sized riot control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a riot control formation, how to supervise a riot slash crowd control operation, crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training, unquote. On September 22nd, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump signed the national. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 on countering domestic terrorism and organized political

Starting point is 00:37:36 violence, which calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to, quote, investigate all participants of these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts, unquote. The memo orders local joint terrorism task. forces to, quote, investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights, unquote, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders, including

Starting point is 00:38:18 employees of organizations which are, quote, responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct, unquote. as previously described. The Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to, quote, identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence and shall deploy investigative tools

Starting point is 00:38:40 to examine financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. The memo also instructs the IRS to, quote, take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,

Starting point is 00:38:58 unquote, and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for Investigation and possible prosecution. Quoting the memo one final time, quote, Investigations shall prioritize crimes such as the following, assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism,

Starting point is 00:39:27 arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, and major fraud against the United States. Unquote. At Trump's White House Antifa Roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs

Starting point is 00:39:49 are funding Antifa and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City. There was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop. city, over 60 rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups received money for that from both the billionaire class as well as taxpayer money. So on May 1st, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations, Secret Service, and the acting ICE director raided a home in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted flyers around Los Angeles, containing the names, pictures, and phone numbers of ICE agents with text in Spanish,

Starting point is 00:40:27 reading, Careful with these faces. In April of 2023, three activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers, identifying a police officer connected to the killing of Tortugita on the mailboxes in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about 40 miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation and were later added to the Cop City Rico case. To circle back to the topic of fear,

Starting point is 00:41:07 the targeting of people putting up flyers, simply identifying cops or anonymous ice agents, demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon. That's why they did the recode charges. That's why they do the house raids. It's why they do overt surveillance, where you're getting followed around by police. but they are susceptible to fear as well.

Starting point is 00:41:30 Through their actions, ICE demonstrates a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo. They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assault against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their guns at unarmed people more than half, a dozen times in the past six months. They are scared, and as evil and super-soldiery as they may seem,

Starting point is 00:42:04 they are indeed afraid. To quote, an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, unless you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop. Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some way that shatters their odaloupe, they will break free of their paralysis, and they will find a way through their fear.

Starting point is 00:42:25 So when that starts to happen, it's time to do something new and insane, because you have to keep them afraid. Because, like, by every moral right, they should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes. And if they are too afraid to leave their homes, then they can't go out and do their jobs. At the end of the day, that's their odaloupe right there. The scale of fear as a tool of repression is always exponentially larger than the scale of physical or legal repression. It punches well above its weight. You can look at Atlanta as a good example of this,

Starting point is 00:42:58 and you can even look at some of the arrests made in response to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black-bagging six people to paralyze 6,000, because it's terrifying, because it's scary, like it's fucked up. That's a bad thing to have happened to you. And, like, of course, people are afraid. Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging in anti-fascist struggle, whether you're an anti-fascist, whether you're an anarchist or whatever,

Starting point is 00:43:25 all of us have an ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to work with it, because it won't go away and it shouldn't. Fear can also keep you safe, but we are necessitated by the political moment we are in to find a way to take extensive action in spite of that, unquote. 2020 was a lot of people's first experience with mass protest, and some of those people then carry those experiences into Cop City. But then for other people, Stop Cop City was their first experience, and now you have an even younger generation of people,

Starting point is 00:44:01 the Gen Alpha terrorists, who aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta. But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta as this bridge gap between 2020 and 2025. the movement to stop Cop City as the bridge between these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism. As the Cop City chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people to carry on what's been learned in the contents of their struggle, onto whatever the next volume is, because Cop City itself is in a sequence of events that have happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved in Cop City has been alive.

Starting point is 00:44:43 by generations. Cop City is not volume one. Cop City is volume like 32. But at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power and surveillance led by a wannabe right-wing strongman. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, a big lesson learned from Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit in the middle of the night than anything else. We've had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime of one midnight sabotage action

Starting point is 00:45:20 of the dozens and dozens and dozens of arson that have happened. And this arrest happened very late into the movement. Out of the dozens and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest has been made after the fact. Unquote. Another lesson learned is the difficulty of daily, counter-surveillance, and how much that requires militancy as a daily practice.

Starting point is 00:45:45 To again, quote, from an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta, quote, militant anarchism as a daily practice, understanding your adversary not just as this thing that you meet on the field for 20 minutes of action, and then you both go home and, like, call it, but that they are constantly pursuing you, that you are being, like, hunted for sport, and you have to evade and maneuver constantly. that security culture is a persistent thing throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep having to be a part of it and do so in a very disciplined way, unquote.

Starting point is 00:46:22 A lot of the success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a willingness to take an extremely militant approach to prefigurative infrastructure, which added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated as symbiotic elements of the same creature. Throughout the cop city struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not always able to engage in a directly combative fight, using militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects, the same way they would in a combative engagement, helps prepare for what will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, the state is this constantly churning machine, like it is always trying to acquire new tools and equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still. while they do this and be like, okay, well, at some point in four to five years, a flashpoint

Starting point is 00:47:14 will happen at the place that I live, and I'll go out there and I'll be like, I was in Atlanta, so I'll be good, because I remember how to do all that. Because if you do nothing for the next four to five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel over and over again. And all the, like, fucked up trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been, like, helpful at all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time, unquote. Looking back at Stop Copacity won't provide all the answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in light of the end result of the movement. But it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop Copacity made a legitimate impact on

Starting point is 00:47:59 the resulting facility and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement had, while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. But a small group of activists turned a proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was delayed by years at least $30 million over budget. And the current facility lacks the full mock city design that it initially happened. which inspired the Cop City namesake. Moving forward, both the successes and shortcomings

Starting point is 00:48:42 will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to stop Cop City, as Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti-fascists, anarchists,

Starting point is 00:49:02 and left-wing activists or NGOs, as domestic terrorists. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, quote, what we are seeing is the logical conclusion of our adversary's lessons learned in Atlanta,

Starting point is 00:49:15 taking the things that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale. This is the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that they are doing that.

Starting point is 00:49:27 And if they are doing that, then we should also do that. Like, there's logical conclusions and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta, that it would be silly for us to not try and push those further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle, unquote. The immediate terrain for Stop Cop City was obviously the forest and now the Cop City site itself, but there was also the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites,

Starting point is 00:49:57 and then all the subcontractors around the country and everything that supplies them. And this same model can apply to say the Palestine protests. There's a network that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw with Shaq, like what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect,

Starting point is 00:50:21 but by far not the most effective aspect. And in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much greater degree of hurt. to the companies involved in the Copsity Project, as opposed to the infighting caused by a Waffle House boycott. When reframing what the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what the reality of stopping these things might look like.

Starting point is 00:50:52 And as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond a physical building, it becomes this lovecraftian entity that exists, everywhere. And it's unnerving to contemplate what you would be forced to do to actually realistically confront that. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, it's important to not get trapped in the, you know, we're doing an occupation on college campus. We're just going to keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over and over again. And the cop's really good at clearing us up, but now maybe this time. And I think a part of the struggle here, though, for people is, when you decentralize like that,

Starting point is 00:51:32 the thing that you're doing starts to take on a much different vibe. It can be everywhere, versus this is the college campus where we're doing protest. I generally think at the end of the day, it starts to feel a little bit too much, like terrorism-y. It starts to feel too much like an insurgency, and you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start to open up a little bit, and you back off because it's scary. and that this thing will kill you.

Starting point is 00:51:59 This thing will try and kill you eventually. If you push it far enough, it will try and kill you, and it might succeed. And, like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology. It's the reality of engaging with advanced capitalism. That was the reality of engaging with the police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and in many other places, that this isn't a game. you're not going to get anywhere just kind of sitting on the same

Starting point is 00:52:28 college campus green over and over again, hoping for a different result. Unquote. And as we've seen this year with the State Department cracking down on pro-Palestine protests, just sitting there on the College Green

Starting point is 00:52:43 doesn't prevent you from being black-bagged by the feds, taken to a black site, and deported. To close the episode, in September 2024, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the RICO indictment. Almost a full year later, on September 9th, 2025, the defense successfully argued that the state

Starting point is 00:53:11 AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute the 61 defendants under the state's RICO statute. Due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case, Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute count one of the RICO indictment, the racketeering, and conspiracy charges. Without the sweeping RICO charges, engulfing the 61 defendants, just five defendants would be left with count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have authority to prosecute,

Starting point is 00:53:47 and count three, the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be thrown out on a similar technicality. The prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defense has argued that the state domestic terrorism law violates the Constitution and is far too broad and should be altered or overturned. Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon.

Starting point is 00:54:14 Some of the 61 defendants could face charges individually in Fulton and DeKalb County, but that remains to be seen. The referendum case is still under appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Missouri is still in pretrial. Just because the Copsity trial is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now, quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, people should be very mindful going into the trial phase that does not mean that they are safe. There is no statute of limitations on a lot of this stuff.

Starting point is 00:54:49 Like with a lot of radical movements, you're going to have to hold a lot of that shift. forever. Rely on support structures, rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to, unquote. As Stop Cop City becomes history, there will be an influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement, whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation, or who knows how many books are incoming. There already has been a true crimeification of the movement in certain coverage, which grossly objectifies the life of Tortugita, platforms police as more objective than movement participants and removes autonomy from key subjects

Starting point is 00:55:29 to reframe the entire movement around other public-facing individuals. To quote, an Atlanta anarchist one final time, quote, I think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one that we actually still have to win at, is to not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital, define the ending. That is a scope of battle that we are still engaged with and still have to win. We need to close the book on it ourselves.

Starting point is 00:55:59 We need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do that for us. It would be disastrous if they did. Unquote. This has been It Could Happen here. See you on the other side. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Starting point is 00:56:34 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight, so why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe. In season two of RipCurrent, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry?

Starting point is 00:57:19 and why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available Now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kelly. And some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel.

Starting point is 00:58:04 If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show.

Starting point is 00:58:41 Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Starting point is 00:59:16 who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Starting point is 00:59:35 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to Season 4 of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes. This episode we're covering the week of November 19. to November 24th. Boy, this year's just blown by. Yeah. Fast year. Yeah, they sped up the time stream.

Starting point is 01:00:24 You know what else sped up the time stream? Watching something on Twitter blow up again. We can't seem to stop talking about this fucking website. And I'm tired of it. But the big news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propaganda app is that they introduced a new feature to let you know the location of the account. and also the number of like name changes, like how many username changes it's had since the account has started.

Starting point is 01:00:51 I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles, the common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by this Daily Beast headline, top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign trolls. No shit. Now, as is often the case, this isn't entirely accurate. It's not to say that there's not a shitload of foreign trolls

Starting point is 01:01:11 who are making money by pretending to be American MAGA influencers. There definitely are. We've known about this since well before this Twitter change. One of the most prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong, is a Malaysian man who has never been to the United States and publishes nothing but MAGA content. Now, what's happened here, you can find going through, there's a bunch of threads, there's threads on blue sky, threads on Twitter, threads in various articles that are basically all copies of each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts that have been busted, right?

Starting point is 01:01:41 One good example would be the MAGA Nation verified account, which has on my 400,000 followers started in 2024. It's had five name changes since October 2025, and it is based in Eastern Europe, non-EU. Yeah, that's mega nation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A lot of people have taken to mean, like, it's Russian, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:00 Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which displays as Ivanka Trump, even though it has nothing to do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio. The account was started in 2010. It has had 11 user changes since August of 2020. and it is apparently based in Nigeria. You love to see it. You're seeing like a shitload of stuff like this, right? And it's being taken.

Starting point is 01:02:22 Unfortunately, I think this is a mistake. And I hate to be like the, hey, guys, stop being happy about this, but you should because you're wrong about what's happening here. Most people are. Like the Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like, this is total Armageddon for the online right. It's looking like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as Americans all along. Now, let me clarify a couple things.

Starting point is 01:02:43 For one thing, nothing that Elon has done here, nothing that Twitter has revealed has proven that these accounts exist in any particular country. I'm going to explain why. A lot of people use something called a VPN. And a VPN masks the location that you're browsing and logging in from, right? And you can use a VPN to look like you're posting

Starting point is 01:03:04 from almost any country on the planet. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at all to, like, deal with this, right? like make sure that they're getting someone's actual location, a bunch of accounts, a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look, this is saying I'm from a country that I have literally never been to. Like, here's my information. I'm very transparent. And there have also been organizations, including liberal, you know, coded organizations that have been mistakenly

Starting point is 01:03:31 identified as coming from a country that they are not set up. And for example, the Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has ignited this conspiracy theory on the right, that Planned Parenthood is some European fucking influence op in the United States. No, they used a VPN because they're in danger because it's Planned Parenthood, right? No, I mean, I ran into a very similar situation

Starting point is 01:03:51 because I mostly use Twitter to look at Yowie now. And when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't let me look at the YWI without putting in my government ID for like age verification. Sure. Of course. And then a Nany State hits garrison.

Starting point is 01:04:05 So obviously a non-starter. I'm not giving X the Everything app, my government ID to allow me to look at YOWY in Germany. So instead, I had to put on the VPN, so I'm back in the States, and then I can look at the Yawi. So it's basically the same situation between me and Planned Parenthood here. Yes, I've said often that you and Planned Parenthood are basically identical beings. What's happening here is it is worth talking about, but it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know the truth that it's been revealed about. We don't really know anything

Starting point is 01:04:35 more than we did before this change came in, right? Well, except, Robert, I mean, the biggest the biggest news is that the DHS has been a Mossad operation this whole time. Yes, that's right. Like we've always suspected. Yeah, so the Department of Homeland Security account, I think it was, got listed as having been based in Israel. This is not real. Like, this isn't even X fucking up. Somebody just edited a screenshot.

Starting point is 01:04:58 And there's so many of these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right? That this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood. and a lot of people didn't catch it, right? And it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world, right? This is a standard story with how Twitter works now. And this is, by the way, is overall, I think, beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is that we know less every day about the world. There's more disinformation about what's happening.

Starting point is 01:05:28 People are less keyed in on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions. Like, that's what the story is here, which is that. this app and the way that social media in general works, particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just fogging up reality. And they're doing it in such a way as to make it so that like no one knows anything about what's going on, right? This is like, this is the standard playbook that you've been getting out of like authoritarian regimes from forever, right? What's important is not that just their propaganda be out. It's that there's not really any, any way,

Starting point is 01:06:06 there to be a consensus reality, because if there isn't consensus reality, then you can't put together a large enough block of people who all believe basically the same things about reality to stop what's going on, right? That's what's happening here. And you're wrong if you're looking at this as good. If you believe that this has blown up the right and that this has done damage to them. They're saying the same things about you and about the left because the shitloaded people use VPNs. And you can always cherry pick a bunch of, and I'm not, again, nothing I'm saying, is not saying that they're in a shitload. Like Elon has specifically incentivized

Starting point is 01:06:40 foreign accounts in different countries to make money by getting into the U.S. culture war, right? That is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today. No one's denying that. What I'm saying is that you don't know any more than you did before this came out because you have no way of knowing if any of these accounts are based where X is saying they're based

Starting point is 01:06:56 because of how VPNs work. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I've got to say. It's incredibly annoying. It's incredibly annoying that we have to continue writing about X. The everything, the half of blue sky is people just virtue signaling

Starting point is 01:07:12 that they're not using Twitter and I'm being mad at Twitter. You know, it's the same, honestly, this will get me flack, but it's the same thing about like whether people are angry about substack or fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever.

Starting point is 01:07:25 Like, if you're using social media, you're not doing yourself any favors. And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people. And we use them anyway, because that's the world. Like, we spend, dollars anyway and let me tell you dollars support some bad things we pay taxes and boy howdy i don't

Starting point is 01:07:41 like where a lot of those taxes go yeah yeah yeah yeah but don't don't pretend that because you pick the right social media app that you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to a bunch of things that aren't true we all do it like that's the problem yes they're not good for humans broadly uh do you want to talk about something else it's not good for humans yeah let's not talk about fucking X the every goddamn thing app anymore. No, unfortunately, I have, I have something Robert, which does relate to X, the everything app. So let's talk about Axios.

Starting point is 01:08:17 Oh, yeah. Are you guys familiar with Axios? It's the news outlet for people who hate paragraphs. People who love cocaine, yeah. Yeah. For people reading the news while they're having a dump, that is what Axios is for, they shit out news for you to read while you're having a shit. Again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of the picture here.

Starting point is 01:08:36 No, it's like, it's like the ADHD brain's like ideal news source. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do a line, you have to go take a shit, you catch up on your news. Yeah, it is. That's what they call productivity. It's the Robert Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been asking for. It's really, it's really genius of fucking Axios to hit that demographic, exactly. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:01 Because those people also have a lot of money because they're all day traders. Truk, truke. Yeah, yeah, they smash. No, I have, I have Polymarked on one tab, Califi on the other, and Axios always pulled up. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:14 Yeah. That's split screening constantly. You have one of those Apple, like, flat glass, glass touchscreen panels, but it's just for doing coke off of. You've just got lines cut off on it. Yeah. It's because the meta-glasses are constantly looping Axios,

Starting point is 01:09:28 you don't need your screen. Aren't we've clowns of these people. Sorry? Yeah, Axios and use that left for people who are taking cocaine, has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list as a proposed U.S. Peace plan in Ukraine. Yeah, great. This is what happens when you do journalism at the speed of paranoia. But this has come at the same time as Trump has proclaimed via truth, by the medium of a truth on true social, that Ukraine was not showing sufficient gratitude for what we are

Starting point is 01:10:01 at, like 11 months of him failing to end the war. Yeah. So this. 28-point plan was first published by Axios. And it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number of senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at a security conference in Halifax, Halifax Canada, not O.G. Halifax. Shout out. Yeah, Halifax Jr. The senators pretty much immediately said that the U.S. was not the author of the document. Rubio, quote, made it very clear to us that we are recipients of a proposal that was delivered

Starting point is 01:10:35 to one of our representatives, said Senator Mike Rounds. So what they are saying is that the U.S. didn't write this document and it was delivered to them. One can safely assume by Russia, right? Rubio, using X, the Everything app, then attempted to deny this. So what it appears has happened is that this plan was drafted by Russian special envoy Demetriev, probably was Steve Whitkoff. Sure, that sounds right.

Starting point is 01:11:04 Wickoff is Trump's what is. I think he's a special envoy to Russia at this point. Yeah, I believe he's an envoy to Russia, yeah. Warren Zivon wrote a song about guys like him. Yes, yeah. He has not covered himself in glory in his time doing this. He's kind of a useful fool. He's formerly like a real estate guy.

Starting point is 01:11:24 That'll prepare you to deal with Vladimir Putin. Having sold houses during the subprime mortgage crisis. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty much what he's doing here, right? Like, he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of the times. In this case, it seems that it was then strategically leaked to Axios, right? When Barack Ravid, who authored the Axios article, posted it on X, the Everything website,

Starting point is 01:11:56 Steve Whitkoff responded saying, quote, he must have got this from Kay. This is very funny because we have Steve Whitkoff, right, negotiating a he's process, which affects millions of people, and he also doesn't know how to use the DM button on X, the Everything website. To be fair, X, the Everything app, just change their DMs. And the whole user interface for the DMs is completely different now. You have to put in, like, a pass code, and they claim to be encrypted, and it's much uglier to look at.

Starting point is 01:12:25 So, in defense. In defense of Steve, you can instead leak the source. The same for more secure option might just be to do it all in public at this point. To do it in public, yeah. So Steve, of course, using a codename there, K. We'll never know. Yeah, because we can possibly tell that Kereel Dimitriov might be using K as a codename, also the first letter of his first name.

Starting point is 01:12:53 So it seems very likely that either Dimitriov or someone else in Russia decided to leak this plan to Barack Ravid or Dave Lola, knowing it would be raised at a press conference to be betting that Trump, who, according to Washington Post, seems to have very little detailed knowledge as negotiations, would probably see this as a quote-unquote deal

Starting point is 01:13:12 that then he could claim for himself, right? And it worked. I want to talk about how Axios' model makes that possible, right? I'm very well aware that Barack Ravid was a member of the 8,200 unit in Israel. If people aren't familiar, that's like a SIG-I-I-I-I-I-Illigence unit,

Starting point is 01:13:31 This is widely known. I've seen this being discussed in sort of relation to this. The thing is, he doesn't need to be nefarious for this to happen. And I think the most likely option here is that the Axios model is to do insider journalism and then rush to be the first to post it on social media and then get a bazillion clicks for your 78-word article, right? That is their entire business model. Speed is the name of their whole game. Yeah, that's why they don't use paragraphs.

Starting point is 01:14:06 It's news for people who are like waiting for their coffee at Starbucks or whatever. The problem is, in this case, states or non-state actors, right, can effectively place a leak and they know that Axios will rush it to press probably in minutes, if not hours. And with the way that the United States executive branches right now, it seems very clear that if they can get it in front of Trump, then they're going to get a reaction one way or another. So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out. The United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of this whole process.

Starting point is 01:14:40 And there's a lot of reporting about, like, I don't want to do Kremlinology for the Trump White House particularly. But it shows how these news outlets, these news outlets are sort of don't fact check that rush to press to do everything for social media can effectively be used, right, in a way that the benefits, in this case, Russia, but any number of organizations could do the same thing. Robert mentioned some kind of like war times.

Starting point is 01:15:05 Some kind of wartime song. I was wondering, where is the country of Zivon? You said there's like a song about war in Zivor? Jesus, Garrison. Garrison. Get out of here. Get out of here. About discrimination in the workplace.

Starting point is 01:15:20 I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie thing in my next series. even Gary, it's just going to sail straight past Garrison. Mm-hmm. You ever listen to Johnny Cash, Garrison? I like Johnny Cash. Okay. James Cash. That's what they call me.

Starting point is 01:15:34 Here's the man's. And we're back. New Doge News for the first. first time in, who knows how long. The news being, there's no more Doge. According to a report in Reuters, Doge has disbanded eight months before its scheduled expiration in July of

Starting point is 01:16:07 2007. When I asked about the status of Doge earlier this month, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kippur told Reuters, quote, that doesn't exist, adding that Doge is no longer a quote-unquote centralized entity. Yeah. Caborro has also said that the Doge-mandated hiring freeze is over and that there's, quote,

Starting point is 01:16:31 no target around reductions, unquote, meaning that the Doge era rule of having to fire a certain number of people in order to be allowed to hire people is no longer in use as well. And this isn't really surprising. You haven't really heard about many Doge-related stuff in a while. They haven't been doing anything in a while. musk has basically been out of the center loop of things but also they did the things that they were needed to do right they like did a massacred large portions of government employees and did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several hundred thousand people around the world their

Starting point is 01:17:08 lives through cuts in u.s aid yeah yeah and like two former doge employees including big balls now just work on web design for u.s. government websites and other doge officials have moved to agencies which they administered cuts to. A former Doge team member, Zachary Terrell, is now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Jeremy Lewin, who assisted the slashing of you, say it now oversees foreign assistance

Starting point is 01:17:35 at the State Department. Yeah. So those guys got jobs out of this. All of the people who got fired or got negatively impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to be coming out as well as Mr. Big Balls here. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:51 Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks who worked with Doge are now feeling left in the wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot of people who want these folks to be prosecuted for what they did. There's definitely talk about that if there's another Democratic administration. We'll see if they would ever have the big balls to do it. But there was an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read a quote from that. Musk had not just been their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector, the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and see. secure a presidential pardon if the worst came, without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed. A senior doge figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that

Starting point is 01:18:29 they were still brothers in arms and that Musk would continue to protect them. That led to another protesting and advising, guys, seriously, get your own lawyer if you need it. He lunch great, but you need to watch your own back. Watch your backs, guys. Yeah, and these guys would be some of the more, like, presumably very easy to prosecute and, like, obvious targets if we get another Democratic administration. It's some really obvious crimes in terms of like protection of information, you know, like some some pretty obvious rule breaking that went on. That's not being prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right. It could be prosecuted in the future. That was like first three, four months of the Trump admin. Yeah. What it really was just full steam ahead on this on the Silicon

Starting point is 01:19:10 Valley version of things, right? Like they move fast and break things. Yeah. That's such a wild time to look back on, not only just in terms of how much damage they did, but the idea that if they were going to continue at that pace for the rest of the term. The government already is fundamentally different in some ways, but like how much worse that would have been. Yeah. Yeah. And if Musk's ego is in part what's sabotaged that from being complete and really kind of doing that more like Yarvin-inspired project. Yeah. Huberous kills a man once again. But there is aspects of like the Doge idea and this like government efficiency thing, which aren't fully going away. Like this still is an aspect of the Trump administration, there still is, like, some of those guys at the Office of Budget and

Starting point is 01:19:54 Management and the Heritage 2025 guys who have a lot of this government efficiency, quote-unquote, government efficiency type stuff that they're still working on, including at the Education Department, which last week, the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department of Education by shifting some of its duties to other federal agencies, which the admin claims will, quote, streamlined federal education activities on the legally required programs and reduce administrative burden, unquote. That is going to be done

Starting point is 01:20:27 by these six new inter-agency agreements which have been signed with the departments of labor, interior, health and human services, and state. The Education Department writing in an announcement that this will, quote, break up the federal bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of funded programs, activities and move closer to fulfilling the president's promise to return education to the states.

Starting point is 01:20:52 So by splitting up education department duties among four different agencies in three different interagency agreements, this is supposed to cut red tape and lighten federal bureaucracy. You have seven entities now doing what one entity did before. The elementary high school and post-secondary programs will now be administered by the Department of Labor. That's great. We'll now oversee over $30 billion in education grants aimed at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce.

Starting point is 01:21:24 The Department of the Interior will be taking over the Education Department's Indian education programs and integrating them into existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior with quote-unquote proper oversight by the Education Department. College child care programs and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen by the Health and Human Services. And the State Department will now oversee all foreign education programs, handle international education grants, and fully administer the full Bright program. Justification for this State Department takeover of these funds specifically cited five instances of grants that were used to fund academic and medical research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated from the core mission, unquote. The announcement from the Education Department reads that the State Department.

Starting point is 01:22:14 is, quote, best positioned to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and foreign policy priorities of the United States. This partnership provides an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data collection measures, consolidate program management, and advance national security interests, unquote. That's not good. Yeah, that doesn't seem great, huh? Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning that the U.S. previously has done a lot. of funding of education programs around the world. And to

Starting point is 01:22:48 like see that pretty much like with this current vision of the state department I'd disappear or become even more straight up propaganda like it's really worrying. Look at this kind of builds on that doge stuff that you were talking about. Like this is the end of

Starting point is 01:23:04 the state department doing anything other than propaganda and I guess war making. And specifically like Rubio's focus on education has been to crack down on academics, Palestinian academics, academics who have protested in support of Palestine.

Starting point is 01:23:22 That's specifically what Rubio has talked about in terms of, you know, universities. Yeah. So with all the stuff in that statement about, you know, national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to see what they could be gesturing towards. Yeah. As the announcements are currently written,

Starting point is 01:23:42 a lot of the programs itself, at least in this transitionary period, remain kind of the same. They're shifting who is like, quote, quote, administering them. That's the word they use a lot. But they're not cutting funds to these programs at the moment. And they do talk about them as, like, legally required programs. But I mean, Carolyn Leavitt and Lyndon McMahon have said this is just one step towards fully sending education back to the states. Oh, this fall also result, like, in massive disparities in educational outcomes, state by state in the United States, right? Like, we already have that to some extent, but that's only going to be exacerbated by this, right?

Starting point is 01:24:26 Talking about things happening between the states, let's talk about Gregory Buffino, a person who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States, but has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the border. Border Patrol. He gave an interview to the AP recently that I was just reading. They did confirm interestingly that a few weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Bovino and trying to work out if he was still Chief Patrol agent in El Centro. It appears that he is, but he's also a commander of this operation at large, which is their sort of the thing that has moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte, right, like this sort of internal enforcement operation. He calls his team and now quote unquote sanctuary. Busters. And he said that, quote, there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does build

Starting point is 01:25:16 on what I spoke about in the last ED, right, when we spoke about the idea that the reason they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that CIS map, quote unquote, sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite the passage of legislation in the state, which would have prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do. I also want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use of license plate readers. CBP's has had these for like eight or nine years now. I found the 2017 piece where they wrote out, their justification for using them, right?

Starting point is 01:25:50 Their use has grown immensely, right? Yeah. And it has grown under both administrations. I suppose Trump administration from 2017 to 2020 by the administration, 2020, 2024. We spoke actually in an episode that I think it was just Robert and our that episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom, people love that episode and they send me great feedback because, guys, it's important that we all know that the only person standing up against

Starting point is 01:26:16 Trump right now is Gavin Newsom. Everything else is pointless. But in that episode, we spoke about how many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal immigration authorities, even when California law prohibits them from doing so, right? This is kind of one of those like these things like where it's a ratchet right once you give that power to the state it belongs to all of the state and you can never take it back automated license plate readers have been a big thing in this kind of um the the post 2020 tendency of democratic mayors in big cities uh to massively increase spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance like we have we have automated cameras on our lamp posts here in san diego now right

Starting point is 01:27:04 has prosecuted one jurisdiction that I'm aware of, which is El Cajon, people will be familiar with El Cajon from El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells' attempt to make a country music song about how schools are turning kids trans, that is unironically probably the most national use that El Cajon has made for a while. But Bonta has sued El Cajon for showing that data. My guess is That is because it's El Cajon, right? Because El Cajon is a city where the mayor makes a country music song about how schools are turning children trans. Like it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution.

Starting point is 01:27:43 There are many other jurisdictions doing this. What Border Patrol does with these cameras is it targets, quote unquote, suspicious activities. And then it requests stops. Sometimes these stops are not made by Border Patrol, but are made by local police, right? On the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal before you change lanes. having a brake light out. It could be many, many things, right? The ABCP's quote to

Starting point is 01:28:10 deputy, Joel Bab, of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the Texas traffic code is there's thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for. The idea here is not to explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right? And the fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance is what they call it, right? They're trying to highlight like suspicious patterns of vehicle motion and stop people. The piece has some, they obtained through public records request from a court case, a WhatsApp group chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers, which the officers shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals and home addresses

Starting point is 01:28:48 of people who they were interested in surveilling, right? And it reveals a massive level of surveillance. If you know, if you're thinking of Border Patrol and you're still under the impression that in America, the border can't come to you, wherever you are. This is another example of why that's not true, right? DHS uses these all over the country to include outside of the 100-mile border enforcement zone, right? This piece seems to believe that the 100-mile zone is like a legal hard line.

Starting point is 01:29:17 It's not, it's an interpretation of a quote-unquote reasonable distance. There is no hard line stopping BP for operating further from the border than that. That is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance. distance from the border, it is perceived to fall. Border Patrol has these cameras at fixed points. So, like, that would be Border Patrol crossings, you know, when you enter or enter or leave the country at a port of entry, and then at checkpoints, right, people will be familiar with checkpoints that live in a border area.

Starting point is 01:29:47 And then they also have these in mobile and covert capacities, right? And they're using them to find people who might be driving near the border or staying and then leaving at a strange time. And then they're building a profile of those people's movements and using. that request stops, right? It's a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying to many people. And they have access to these larger integrated camera networks like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before, including I think yesterday's episode, as Flock is like an Atlanta-based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around the forest where Cops City was

Starting point is 01:30:23 being constructed. Now Flock is all over the country. And Border Patrol has access to the flock system. Yeah. And it's used for a whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas. I think 404 media did a report not too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman getting an abortion, not in Texas. Right. Yeah, yeah, I can see, yeah, because Texas law makes it a crime to leave the state in order

Starting point is 01:30:48 to get an abortion or something, right? And that would be their, I guess, yeah, their excuse here. But, like, I think we can all see that that's a pretty disgusting use. of the surveillance state. But yeah, these things grew massively in the time period between 2020 and today. And it was not just in Republican jurisdictions, right?

Starting point is 01:31:07 There's this like unabated support for state surveillance that we saw all over the United States is now being turned against migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which is not great. Talking of not great, we have an obligation to pivot to ads.

Starting point is 01:31:26 I'm happy. I think that's great. I love having a job I enjoy to consume products and services That's right And we're back How's everybody doing Good

Starting point is 01:31:49 Yeah, banging Pretty good Pretty good I just finished my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social 20-204 cup So I feel great. That's great.

Starting point is 01:32:00 That's good for you, Garrison. Really coming together, you know, politics from different sides coming together to enjoy a smoothie, not unlike the meeting between Zoraumdani and Donald Trump. Oh, my God. Oh, how long did you plan that for, Garrison? Like literally five seconds. It just, it just came out. We don't do smooth transitions here like that.

Starting point is 01:32:20 Well, you know, sometimes. Do you know who was smooth? It was Zora Mamdani during that meeting, which. Like a duck's back. like a seal, that kind of smoothness as well. Trump seemed pretty, uh, pretty enamored with Mr. Mamdani, mayor-elect Mamdani, quote, we have one thing in common. We want this city of ours to do very well, unquote. So, this was on Friday. Trump and Mamdani had a private meeting in the White House afterwards, a 30-minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was sitting down

Starting point is 01:32:54 and so I was kind of looming over the side of Trump the whole time, never fully smiling, always having a little bit of like a tiny, like both-sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile. He had a very different look in the White House. But as soon as the press conference started, it was clear that the meeting went very well for Mamdani. Trump was exuberant about the man. Yeah, he seemed really excited. Yeah. It's a little bit. little weird, but he seemed really excited. He stated that they have the common ground on getting housing built, on affordability, on food and prices coming down, saying, quote, there's no difference in party and we're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true,

Starting point is 01:33:37 unquote. Everybody's dream come true. Amazing. Yeah. First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting. I appreciated the meeting with the president, and as he said, it was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the 8.5 million people who call our city their home, who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America. We spoke about rent, we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out, and I appreciated the time with

Starting point is 01:34:18 the president. I appreciate the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for New Yorkers. know the posture people with the green line the green line yeah no i've seen yeah that's going on a couple of times they've already they've had their way with this they've been on it yeah yeah okay it does seem tense the vibes in that room must have been very weird from zoron's side yeah absolutely yeah yeah no zoron's very tense trump's trying to relax him like badly what is that face that you've posted on garr he is it i can only it's like a shit-eating grin on trump's face yeah yeah yeah like he does seem genuinely happy. He's thrilled. Yeah. It's weird. He likes to be associated with

Starting point is 01:34:59 winners. This is one of the big things, right? A lot of, I mean, we'll talk about this more in the takes. Okay. But, yeah, I think it's very clear why Trump's actually having a good time here. Zoron's like the most popular politician in the country right now. And Trump likes winners. And if anything, Zoron has proven to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning. And I think Trump does like that. And that coupled with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoran was able to navigate around Trump pretty successfully. When asked about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel very confident he can do a good job. I think it's going to surprise some conservative people, actually, unquote. And you should add what he said about

Starting point is 01:35:40 liberal people, because I thought that was his funniest line. Oh, and then also liberal people, but they already like him a two or something. Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised. They'll just be happy. Yeah, yes. They already like him. Because they already like, it was very funny. It was very funny. Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters actually voted for Zoron as well, saying, quote, unquote, I'm okay with that. And Zora mentioned that, yes, one in ten Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron. And Zoran mentioned the end to forever wars and the cost of living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke about as he was campaigning.

Starting point is 01:36:18 throughout this press conference, and we can assume to some degree the meeting, Zoran was very laser-focused on New York specifically. And you've even seen this in interviews that he's given to, like, NBC and other outlets the past few days where people are asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a whole on national level, and Zoran repeatedly just goes back to affordability in New York. This is like the one thing that he's going to keep talking about. He doesn't want to talk about anything else, really. And this was evident throughout this meeting, the way that Zorn would reiterate every

Starting point is 01:36:47 question to being about New York. But they didn't shy away from talking about the things they disagreed on, like an ideological sense, ICE being one of them. Here's one of their exchanges about ICE. President, you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City. You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents in New York City. Mr. Mondani, you've called ICE a rogue government entity. I wonder how you reconcile your differences on both of those issues. Well, I think we're going to work them out. And I think that if we have known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people, you know, we want to get them out. And the mayor wants to have, we discussed this at great length, actually, maybe more than anything else. He wants to have a safe New York. Ultimately, a safe New York is going to be a great New York. If it's not safe no matter how well we do with pricing and with anything else, we can talk about anything you want. If you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be. success. So we're going to work together. We're going to make sure that if there's, they're horrible people there, we want to get them out. I think he wants to get them out,

Starting point is 01:37:53 maybe more than I do. So we'll work together. They talked about ICE at one later point in the meeting, where you get kind of a peek at what some of this conversation may have been like behind the scenes about trying to target any ICE enforcement against people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids that round up but just swaths of undocumented people like the Canal Street raid a few weeks ago. It's still not super

Starting point is 01:38:22 clear what they are talking about, but there's not compromise in this point. Like, Trump's obviously going to try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's own positions on this, and I think Zoron will do the same. Before we discuss, I do want to play this, the second bit of their discussion

Starting point is 01:38:38 because you get more of Zoron's angle. We discussed ICE and New York City, and I spoke about how the laws that we have in New York City allow for New York City government to speak to the federal administration for about 170 serious crimes. The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the five boroughs, and most recently we're talking about a mother and her two children, how this has very little to do with what that is.

Starting point is 01:39:07 What the day is we discuss crime, more than ICE per se, we discuss crime. And he doesn't to see crime. And I don't want to see crime. And I have very little doubt that we're not going to get along on that issue. He wants to, and he said some things that were very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction. And he wants to see houses go up. He wants to see a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, et cetera. And, you know, we actually, people would be shocked. But I want to see the same thing. See that, yeah, that worries me a little bit. What about that worries you? I can tell what Trump's trying to do. which is that he really would like to get Mamdani on his side.

Starting point is 01:39:48 And he's, interestingly for Trump, I think he is willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally get Mamdani to agree that ICE has a use. Yeah, right? Like, that's what he's clearly trying to do. And he's clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that. And I think that within the context of this meeting, because of how the questions were being asked,

Starting point is 01:40:10 I don't think Zoran got enough of a chance to fully address that question. So I'll leave it open to see how that is, like how he deals with that in the future. But I don't think he got enough of an opportunity to push back enough on some of the things Trump was claiming here. That does concern me a little bit.

Starting point is 01:40:28 Like I think it's more a factor of how an Oval Office press conference is structured. But I do think that it's like I can see what Trump's trying to do. I think what Mamdani is trying to navigate for is if he can put an end to

Starting point is 01:40:43 roving ice raids that just round up people whether they're at restaurants or home depots and if there's people who have been incarcerated who are incarcerated and if removal operations are specifically against he said like what 170 like serious crimes

Starting point is 01:41:03 and if that is a sort of compromise I guess I don't know like he's he's not an office yes it's unclear the way that this would this would be enacted But if it's a harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from happening or limiting the amount that ice is able to operate as basically a road entity within the city, and I don't think we know enough to actually see what that will look like yet because he's not taking office for another, what, like 45 days. Yeah. Yeah, what he's talking about, when Trump goes about crime, crime is what they have always talked about.

Starting point is 01:41:40 Right, right, when they talk about the ice enforcement. the crimes that they are speaking about vary, right? They will always give the example of the person who's been convicted of child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence, right? But then they will also go ahead and say that crossing between ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime. And then they will use that as a justification for taking anyone, right? And specifically people who have entered within the last two years, many of whom were shipped to New York from other states,

Starting point is 01:42:09 and saying, well, these people entered between ports of entry, which they did after the end of Title 42, right, when we returned to processing people under Title VIII, and they will place them an activity to remove all proceedings. That is what they have been doing for a while. When he talks about the sanctuary policies, New York right now doesn't honor detainer requests, right? In theory, sanctuary laws prevent NYC

Starting point is 01:42:36 from what I understand from honoring detainer requests, which would be an extra 48-hour detainer. We haven't, like as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough to see what he's talking about there. But, like, I don't know if he's talking about a change to those sanctuary policies or not. But, yeah, like, that would be disappointing if you did. I don't see there's any indication that he's talking about a change to sanctuary policies. Well, when he's talking about, we can call them on 170 serious crimes, right? What does he mean?

Starting point is 01:43:03 Yeah, and I think this gets back to the fact that a press conference in the Oval Office is not going to give you a chance to adequately. address an issue like this and I see Trump trying to paper over it and move past as quickly as possible and I understand why you'd show up for this meeting and I think it was probably on the balance the right thing to do but like I'm I am

Starting point is 01:43:25 interested to see what he does next because I think Trump is going to continue trying to push for accommodations and it is kind of it is wild and unique to see that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff but he's willing to move on some stuff because he thinks he can get Mamdani to soften some of his stances.

Starting point is 01:43:43 I mean, I don't... On ice. I mean, that's what he's trying to do here. He's trying to build a case for that. I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to which we're using the word... From saying that this is a rogue government agency to saying that this is a government agency. That's what Trump is trying to push for. Yeah. I'm not saying Momdani agreed with that.

Starting point is 01:44:05 I think that the nature of this meeting did not give him enough time to push back on that. Sure, sure. You have Mamdani pointing there towards, like, an instance of, like, a mother and, like, a, and a child getting affected by this. And, like, and using it as an example of, like, what they are trying to prevent. And, like, focusing on, like, the stopping ice raids from happening as, as, like, the thing that Mamdani is pushing for there. And Mamdani, as the New York City mayor, cannot abolish the entity of ice. and so like the degree to which we're framing that as like mom done is like softening I think still I mean yeah like as as you've said there's not enough here to make a full determination

Starting point is 01:44:46 yeah I just think that's that's what Trump wants to get out of this I think Trump also just wants to be associated with this guy who is currently as Garrison said very popular and it is really wild to see him be so deferential to somebody yeah yeah yeah I mean including in this this this question about Trump being a fascist which he handled in in a very, a very fascinating way. This is nuts. Yeah. Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?

Starting point is 01:45:15 I've spoken about... That's okay. You can just say yes. Okay. It's easier. It's easier than explaining it. Zoran did say yes during that exchange. He did say yes.

Starting point is 01:45:29 No. He in fact did. He absolutely did. It's one of the most remarkable moments in American political history. by any stretch of the imagination as Trump pats him. As it's on the side.

Starting point is 01:45:41 I mean, it's wild. For Trump, this word doesn't mean anything, right? For Trump, like, him saying, it's easier than explaining. That's just indicating to Zoron that you don't have to do this little, like, political game for this reporter and be like, you know, we have disagreed on policies, which blah, blah, blah,

Starting point is 01:45:57 like, Trump's like, no, you don't have to do that. It's easy and explaining, just say it. Yeah, yeah. Which is a sort of like a point against, like, the media. Sure. That's from Trump's point of view. It's like, you don't have to do the little, you don't have to do the little dance for like this like New York Post reporter or whatever.

Starting point is 01:46:13 Just say that I'm a fascist. It's fine. Yeah. And because politics is for him a sort of behind closed doors boys club. And yes, they both have to go out and then deal with the media. But like, you can sort of see that in this sort of highly conviviality that Trump goes for there. I'm not saying that Mam Dami is less necessarily in his boys club. I'm just saying that that is how Trump perceives politics.

Starting point is 01:46:34 Yeah. I mean, he made other references. like when Trump was asked if he considers Zoran a jihadist like someone else in the Republican Party called him and Trump's like, no, I mean, the man standing in front of me is not a jihadist. People have to say certain things during campaigns, but the man I met with today is a very rational man. And like little lines like that, like people...

Starting point is 01:46:54 When you're campaigning, you have to say things that I think that he's getting at a similar point there. But there was multiple points at this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law versus the Constitution or why Zoran flew to D.C. instead of taking a greener train.

Starting point is 01:47:13 Yeah. Silly stuff. And Trump was like, Trump, like, dismissed these questions if, like, for Zoran, essentially. They're like, I'll stand up for you. Yeah. It's something else.

Starting point is 01:47:23 There are more salient criticisms that there are reasonable criticisms you can make of some stuff he's done. Those are not them. Yeah, it's just gotcha media stuff, right? Like, which, which, it's interesting how well, Trump is able to call

Starting point is 01:47:37 sort of their bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Always fascinating. One of the more hilarious attempts at a gotcha question is from Jack Posovic, who was in the room, who asked this. God, he must have been having an absolute meltdown.

Starting point is 01:47:54 Yeah, he can't be happy about this. I want to know one of the policies as well that Mayor like Madami talked a number of times about on the campaign was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what he called minority communities to white-based communities and putting more taxes on white people. I also noticed that in your

Starting point is 01:48:17 acceptance speech, you didn't mention anything about America or Christians or white people in general. And so I didn't know if that was one of the policies that you guys had spoken about. Incredible. And Trump's like smiling like a proud father this whole time as as As Zoron's, like, just bantering this question. It's such an odd, like, schizophrenic moment. It's weird how much more he seems to like Zoran than, like, his supporters. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:48 I mean, a lot of his supporters are losers, and Zoron's a winner. Or even his cabinet members. Yeah, because they're losers, right? Like Pete Hanks, Seth, Elon Musk, they're losers. Yeah, they're all dwebs. I mean, J.D. Vans, right? Yeah. Zorons has proved himself to be, like, an incredibly capable figure.

Starting point is 01:49:02 Yeah. There's a little moment, as Jack's first asking the question, where Trump indicates to Zoro, like, okay, you handle this guy. You can have fun with this. And it's very odd. Not odd and it's unexplainable. I understand what's happening here, actually. I think this is actually very easy to understand, but it's just still, it feels odd.

Starting point is 01:49:22 Yep. Yeah, and just given the adversarial politics we're so used to. Like, there's a lot of moments like this. Like when Trump's asked if he's going to cut off federal funding to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to help. Which is great. And this is, like, an indication of, like, what Zoran was trying to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting, specifically around raids on National Guard deployment and on, like, cutting off federal funds to the city.

Starting point is 01:49:46 one of the methods, I think, that Zoran used to help get Trump on his side is appeal to, like, the real estate brain that Trump has with Mamdani's, like, left-wing yimbi-style policies, talking about rent coming down by building housing, and how much that surprised Trump, because Trump has this conception of people, like, if people usually on these, like, left-wing positions are very, very nimbie in a lot of ways. And Trump was, like, surprised by this. I guess he hasn't really encountered, like, a left-wing yimbing. before and this like this like caught him off guard yeah there's a good point here where trump expresses this now we may disagree how we get there the rent coming down i think one of one of the things i really gleaned very very much today we'd like to see him come down ideally but building a lot of additional housing that's the ultimate way he agrees with that and so do i but if i read the newspapers and the stories i don't hear i don't hear that But I heard him say it today, and I think that's a very positive step. No, I don't expect, I expect to be helping him, not hurting him.

Starting point is 01:50:54 A big help, because I want New York City to be great. Look, I love New York City. It's where I come from. I spent a lot of years there. Now I'm right here. Okay. Later, Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living in New York under Mamdani. And compared Mamdani's popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how supporters

Starting point is 01:51:16 of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa. And through Trump talking about this, you can start to kind of peek behind the curtain of like how Zoran was framing his version of populism, which was able to get Trump to be like friendly towards like the economic affordability sides of his policy proposals in talking about like the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump in 2016 and the crossover support between Trump 24 and Mamdani in 2025. At one point, Mamdani did also address the genocide in Gaza. As Mr. Mamdani, you've accused the U.S. government of committing genocide in Gaza while President Trump were working on peace. Why that? I've spoken about the Israeli government

Starting point is 01:51:59 committing genocide, and I've spoken about our government funding it. And I shared with the president in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their ability. to afford basic dignity. And what we see right now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more than 100,000 school children being homeless in our city. And there's a desperate need not only for the following of human rights, but also the following through on the promises we've made New Yorkers.

Starting point is 01:52:26 And I appreciated the meeting we had and the work that we can do. But you agree that President Trump did do a piece and he worked hard to make the peace because he worked hard to do the peace in the Middle East and everywhere. Do you agree with that? I appreciate all efforts towards peace. and I shared with President Trump that when I spoke to Trump voters on Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist that spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that pharmacy, not too far from Jamaica States,

Starting point is 01:52:49 that people were tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars. And I also believe that we have to follow through on the international human rights. And I know that still today, those are being violated. And that continues to be work that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of. Man, that's so complicated. So conflicting. There's a lot going on. On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record said in the White House that the U.S. is enabling Israel and continuing a genocide.

Starting point is 01:53:18 I'm glad that that happened. Yeah. On the other hand, the fact that it's offroated so quickly to, now let's talk about what we want to do for New Yorkers. And it is like, yeah, it's not, I don't know, it's the only way this was going to happen at all, I suppose. He is the mayor of New York. It's not a national figure. No, I agree. I agree.

Starting point is 01:53:40 But it's totally awkward. Like, it's totally a little awkward. Especially when the topic is genocide, right? Like the vault from genocide to housing affordability, and I understand that both are serious issues, it's still a tonal shift that is jarring. And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the mayor of New York. He has no ability to influence U.S. policy in terms of selling arms to Israel. And the fact that he brought it up at all is positive. But boy, is that is that a wild minute or so.

Starting point is 01:54:09 of talking. I think the reason why he brought that up is to talk about specifically like funds that we are sending to Israel should not be sent to Israel. There's funds that should be being used in the United States to do things to help

Starting point is 01:54:25 people here. And that is like why he brought that up as a segue. Well, and reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea that we should not be spending this much money on this sending weapons over the world to fund war. overseas. It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela.

Starting point is 01:54:45 Yeah. How that all moves. But I think it's valuable to like really slam that home in the White House that like, hey, you ran on getting the U.S. out of these kind of violent entanglements overseas. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad someone said it, I guess. Yeah. It's just weird. This is all a very weird meeting. Yeah, yeah. The whole thing was jarring, I guess. There was another point there where he was talking about like like local local New York businesses and our Trump's father like went to this pharmacy and I think stuff like that was is tactics that he used to get Trump to be friendly with him as well as Trump later spoke about how in one of the rooms that they were meeting in there was a portrait of FDR which Trump had personally like picked out of the storage vaults

Starting point is 01:55:28 to hang and Zoran like Zorn asked him about the portrait and asked if he could get a picture with it and this seemed to please Trump a lot Trump was unable to talk about how he picked out the picture And then Trump said a few really interesting things. He's like, I guess Zoron's a big fan of FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from Zoran. It's a classic technique to get like democratic, socialist politics across to someone. Again, there's moments like that, stuff with stuff of how we talked about like Bernie, some, you know, regular populist rhetoric talking about the crossover between, you know,

Starting point is 01:56:05 voters between Trump and Mamdani, just his general. level of New York, FDR, New Deal, you can see all these things that were used to, like, navigate through this meeting to get, to get Trump to actually seed ground on a lot of stuff, with, I think, very, very minimal concessions, if any, if any real concessions, even from Zornet, like, at all. Like, I think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically throughout this meeting and moved on, like, actual, like, actual, like, promises to withhold funds to invade the city with National Guard troops. I think Trump was the one who actually ceded territory in this meeting. I do not see much evidence of things that Mamdani

Starting point is 01:56:41 could have personal impact on actually losing, losing ground on those things throughout this meeting. It is also important to remember that he has a retort... Mamdami, too, has a rhetorical role to play, right? And yes, he is mayor of New York. He is also an extremely popular politician at the moment. And, like, when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza, that that has rhetorical value. I'm not saying he can go to New York City Council and stop it, but, like, him saying that it is a genocide at the White House is important. And it is important that like when he has this podium in front of the whole world at the White House,

Starting point is 01:57:16 so he used it to talk about the genocide. And he did. But like I don't think we should only think about this in terms of New York. Like it is sure important that someone said that. And I hope he keeps using that platform he has right now to say that as someone who like is definitely looked up to nationally in like DSA circles. I mean, yeah, I think. And this goes into some of the.

Starting point is 01:57:36 the, I guess, kind of, I mean, some of them are critiques. Some of them aren't even really critiques of this meeting. I think a lot of them are people jumping on the opportunity to just attack or on with no real constructive critique there. But this kind of relates to these two different forms of politics that people use on the left. Like politics as a form of personal expression as a form of like posturing as a form of like maintaining of moral purity versus politics as an actual practical method of achieving systemic change. And people engage in these two different modes. And I think there's a role for both of these modes of politics, actually. I think both of these have a degree of necessity. And Zoran has taken one specific

Starting point is 01:58:17 path. And there's others who are very clear in having taken the other path. And there's a bunch, a bunch of critiques from this meeting, quote unquote, critiques, including from a formal Seattle city councilman who is now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashama Sawant. Quote, if I were in Mum Donnie's position, instead of asking Trump to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally of tens of thousands of people in New York City to protest against ice raids to declare that New York City will not tolerate ice and will fight Trump every inch of the way. I would launch a mass campaign for free transit and free child care and build a militant movement to win. Unquote. These are things Zorans already participated in. These are things that have happened.

Starting point is 01:58:59 Just one more, like one more protest. That's going to be more effective than actually having Trump seed some ground on the scale of enforcement? This is part of why I have this like hesitation around discussion of Zoron because I think he's actually doing kind of strategic moves to actually limit the amount of damage that Trump's able to do in the city

Starting point is 01:59:21 and he's doing it through like rhetorical maneuvers and some of that may feel awkward to watch in a like live press conference. But I think the actual end results of that have a lot more potential than say a, you know, a rally of 10,000 people, which effectively does nothing. Yeah, I mean, we've had a bunch of those. That is politics as performance, right?

Starting point is 01:59:42 Yeah. People are very attached to that mode of political engagement in the United States. Like, the large, you know, walking around besides shouting, demonstration, a political intent, it has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random people off the street. I'll just say that. And people have been, you know, like, criticizing Zoran just simply for even taking this meeting because it somehow, quote-unquote, like, humanizes Trump in some way. Like, Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right?

Starting point is 02:00:08 Like, it's like, Zoron's platforming Donald Trump. He is the president of the United States. He wins. He has that position. He has bought the legitimacy. Like, this, I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates Trump's image in a meaningful way. I think what he's doing is trying to actually make New York a safer and more affordable place to live by doing a kind of complicated political maneuver,

Starting point is 02:00:33 which I'm sure is kind of upsetting to kind of go through. But he's doing it. And the wave of criticism that is kind of based on, based on that sort of humanizing argument or this stuff on, like, why doesn't Zorn just protest instead of actually trying to like cut deals or like, not even cut deals? Because that sounds so like slimy,

Starting point is 02:00:51 but like actually like negotiate with the president. And like this criticism comes on the tail end like a week's worth of very reflexive criticism of Zoran for his retention of New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tish, as well as advocating against the New York City DSA's endorsement of City Councilman and new DSA member Chi Aussie's primary campaign against Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. Some of these criticisms, I get the Jeffries one a little bit more,

Starting point is 02:01:18 but some of these criticisms I find to be a little odd, mostly considering the fact that Zoron's been open about his plan to retain Tish for literal months, for literal months, And just this week, people acted like it was this massive betrayal in his like ideological purity or his stated promises, which just isn't true. He's been open about this since like last summer. And on the on the Jeffrey's side of things, I think Zoron's point of view here, is that a difficult primary campaign, one that's probably going to be unsuccessful based on the Zoron 2025 general vote map. It chose that that that'd be very, very challenging. But this, this difficult primary against Jeffries would also inhibit. Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda in the city. The New York Times quoted a leaked portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoran saying, quote, the choice before us is not whether to vote for Chai or Hakeem at the

Starting point is 02:02:11 ballot box. The choice is how to spend the next year. Do we want to spend it defending characters of our movement, or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement? Unquote. Zoran has a very specific focus right now on the New York City government and implementing the agenda for New York City, and the congressional campaign would, in his view, only put more roadblocks to that at this point of time versus, you know, keeping a left-wing ally in the New York

Starting point is 02:02:40 City Council. I guess I don't see why they can't do both. Like, they will be defending caricatures of their movement for the next forever, right, until the internet and stupid politics stopped in part of a politics, which isn't coming any time soon. Like, I think it would be perfectly possible to give that endorsement and still say my job as mayor is to do the shit that I promise to do. I also endorse this person because I think they're a better person than Akeem Jeffries who has been very poor. Like, I don't see those things as mutually exclusive. We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.

Starting point is 02:03:14 What is there to say? That Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed that acronym. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah, Marjorie Taylor Green, leaving. politics. Well, maybe. She's leaving the house at the end at the end of the year. Yeah, leaving the house. Specifically what she's announced. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is unclear how she will continue her career.

Starting point is 02:03:37 Maybe Zoran will be taking her seat. Maybe Trump's new friends. I mean, I really don't think he has much interest in being in the House of Representatives, especially in Georgia. Who would? Jesus. He has a much more important role now, I guess. Like, he's able to do a lot more as executive in New York than he ever would be. It's like a single rep in yeah yeah yeah but yeah no more mtg okay well great if you want to contact us you can reach out to us at cool zone tips at proton dot me we reported the news we reported the news A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Starting point is 02:04:33 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Barry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Starting point is 02:05:13 In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry and why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Starting point is 02:05:48 Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel. If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the Blackcast? When we were making the show, there was so many moments.

Starting point is 02:06:23 feel the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea.

Starting point is 02:06:47 Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What?

Starting point is 02:07:11 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here.

Starting point is 02:07:30 What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:07:59 Grindr, I hardly... This is It Could Happen here where today the It is gay flirting and or harassment. And the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 2024 Republican National Convention. I'm Gare, also known by my undercover alias, Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be one of our on-the-ground RNC correspondence.

Starting point is 02:08:25 A few weeks ago, we provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation Festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think-tank ghouls, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by popular speakers at the event. We'll have some more in-depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention. But on top of our regular coverage,

Starting point is 02:08:48 I also had a special assignment that I more or less assigned to myself. On this show, we often talk about right-wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people, including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment, and physical violence. As these are two of our most frequently covered topics, being at the Republican National Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between conservatism and homosexuality. For years, I've heard rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans

Starting point is 02:09:28 flocking to the gay hookup app Grindr to get laid during the RNC, whether they be 20-year-old Republican twinks from Miami or 53-year-old self-hating closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages. Curiosity has often gotten the better of, me, and I needed to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grindr. In case you're unfamiliar, Grindr is technically a dating app that serves the LGBTQ community, but in actuality, it is a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers in their

Starting point is 02:10:04 40s to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures of their penis. Grindr was launched in 2009 and is arguably the largest and most popular gay dating app, especially among men. Grindr has only been around for two in-person RNCs prior to this point, 2012 and 2016, since all convention activities moved online during 2020 for the pandemic. So this July, for the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around the country could gather in one city, and once their wives fell asleep, log on to Grindr. And this episode, I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grindr experience.

Starting point is 02:10:45 Before traveling to the city that was about to be invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers liked that terrible pun. Based on the massive increase in violent anti-trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew that I would be dusting off my old boy motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male. Although my ability to pass as a straight male is debatable, I can at least ease it. pass as a not quite straight male. My trans-feminine fashion taste has been skewing more mask lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue. I packed up basically all my button-up-collared shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige London fog trench coat. Basically, the vibe I was going for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy

Starting point is 02:11:37 dressed as a 1950s FBI agent. I refer to this as Dale Cooper moating. I was unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like Baron Trump meets Tilda Swinton in Constantine. I was kind of Gabriel Maxing for most of the convention. And though most attendees were unable to pick up on my dykish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did get she heard by the Secret Service when entering the convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke. So that was my general look for the convention. I also completely remade my grinder profile for the R&C. For simplicity's sake, I thought to emphasize my twinkish past and removed the explicitly non-binary

Starting point is 02:12:24 transgender aspects of my profile, replacing some of my more trans-coded photos with pictures of my light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay. Perhaps next R&C, I can experiment with discovering how many of the R&C attendees are chasers, but for safeties at sake, I went to more stealth, online and in person at R&C-related events. For my main profile picture, I chose a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted. I chose the simple yet elegant username, Twink. And for my bio, wrote, Gen Z in town for convention,

Starting point is 02:13:05 which I thought was pretty funny, and signals to people that, yes, I am here for the R&C, but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious. So this was my bait. On my way to the airport, I was already dressed for the part, as I suspected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part of the whole R&C experience. I arrived at the gate, and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with even whiter hair,

Starting point is 02:13:34 wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits, and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range. They all kind of looked like my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were all cosplaying their favorite female Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair. There were a handful of delegates, as well as Republican super fans wearing Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention, the way a nerd would be excited to go to San Diego Comic Con. Others at the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the Atlanta airport. but I could still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their R&C expectations

Starting point is 02:14:15 and in hushed tones asking others at the gate if they were going to the convention. And that's what everyone called it, not the Republican convention, not the GOP convention or the R&C, the convention. As I was boarding the plane, an older woman with straw-like blonde hair sitting a few rows in front of me, waved to me and asked, young man, are you going to the convention? I gave my best, yes ma'am, took my seat and then heard her remark to her friend about how happy she was that more young people are attending the convention. And I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the convention and what I was doing

Starting point is 02:14:57 there, mainly trying to collect as much information about these weird R&C grinder Republicans as I can. And you will hear more about those weird grinder R&C Republicans after the break. This episode is brought to you in part by the Top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening to as I was coming out from Adderall while writing the second half of this episode, as well as these products and sponsors. Okay, back to the grind. Most convention activities took place in the FISAV forum, which had totally taken. about four days to learn how to pronounce. This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my Grindr cruising, so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into the Pfizer Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit

Starting point is 02:16:01 and discreetly boot up Grindr and refresh my feed to see what profiles were in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grindr, one of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector, telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away. Every night when I got back to the hotel, after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check a grinder to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by the airport. The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates. And though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grindr, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were R&C attendees at some of the nearby hotels, roughly 1,500 feet away from my bed.

Starting point is 02:16:50 The Grindr Proximity Detector was quite useful to me in locating profiles active around the footprint of the R&C, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the R&C from out of state. Because Milwaukee is about 650 miles away from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the R&C from out of state, even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling

Starting point is 02:17:22 or other random reasons for why their distance markers might not line up exactly, and I think I have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay, you've been very patient, and now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my grinder inbox. And I got to say, I think I started off pretty strong. While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started, I got one of the very first messages I received from a 21-year-old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close-up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and magenta tie.

Starting point is 02:17:57 Already horrendous vibes. He asked me if I was quote unquote, with the GOP, and I said I was attending with friends, and then I got no further response. I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then after the convention was over, he moved, like, 300 miles away. So I'm pretty sure he was there for the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative, quote, but not a hardcore Republican, unquote.

Starting point is 02:18:25 And he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would, quote, meet my future husband, unquote. The first chaser I encountered with the bio, looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass, saw through my cisgender disguise and messaged me, cock, question mark. I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be T for T who asked me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan,

Starting point is 02:18:53 an anime convention in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me, quote, hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face, which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking for some other gay Republican. Another local with the name Older for Young sent me the message, quote,

Starting point is 02:19:14 Boomer who will talk politics with you, or we can just fuck. I asked him if the quote unquote talk politics pick up line works very often, and he replied, quote, less often than I would hope for. On here, zero, unquote. He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app telling me that they have infiltrated grinder. He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at. So that was the end of that conversation. A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely

Starting point is 02:19:49 excited that the RNC was in town. They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend. One such fellow who described Trump's first R&C entrance as electric, and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd, unquote, would have liked to attend, but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed, quote, extra staffing just in case, unquote. Now, the worst profile picture I found was an older guy wearing a baseball camp and one of those half-faced skull masks like Adam often used to wear.

Starting point is 02:20:28 He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the RNC, but to visit family and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent, very baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking, you're a Republican, and I said, not really, putting it lightly, and he never got back to me. I did find a 31-year-old chaser named Greg, who I do believe was attending the convention, and his bio read, quote, Anon, come drain me, trans, C, D, that's cross-dresser,

Starting point is 02:21:07 Sissy, Fem, to the front of the line. I asked, you like trans? And he responded, yes, we had no further conversation. I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grindr proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grindr

Starting point is 02:21:27 at the Heritage Foundation Party. And lastly, really the only guy I saw who openly claimed to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a 32-year-old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the username Suck Me Off. One word. He described the convention as

Starting point is 02:21:47 exhausting but awesome and told me he was quote proud to support president trump unquote and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing a lot of the RNC speakers including Trump talked about Cory Comptor the man who was killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination so after Mr. Suck Me Off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was I just replied to him poor Corey. And he messaged me back, Corey who? And that he told me what exact hotel he was staying at. Now, part of the danger of trying to use Grindr directly in the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non-zero chance that some passerby or person

Starting point is 02:22:36 sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dick pick that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages. This is simply a non-negotiable part of the Grindr experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some balding 43-year-old married man will appear in your inbox. Ordinarily, I would check the profile first to see whom might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a DM. Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this.

Starting point is 02:23:09 For one, this was research. so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible. But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my DMs, this was impossible without opening up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chat log due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grindr at the RNC. About halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently, but the main glitch I had to deal with, which has since been fixed,

Starting point is 02:23:37 is that I could not access anyone's profile from the DMs page. I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited dickpicks before even being able to check anyone's profile. So there I was watching Ted Cruz's speech sitting underneath about 50 Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of dickpicks to see who was local and who was here for the R&C,

Starting point is 02:24:06 hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog. But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the RNC. Around midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over 1,000 users reported a grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the website Down Detector.

Starting point is 02:24:30 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the final day of the RNC that, quote, reports that the Grindr app crashing increased by more than 90% in the past 48 hours across the country, unquote. The Down Detector Heat Map showed Grindr outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hotspot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in activity. And you will hear more about that activity after this ad break.

Starting point is 02:25:03 This episode of It Could Happen here is brought to you in part by the Challenger's soundtrack remix by Boy's Noise, which I was listening to as I wrote most of this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is also brought to you by these products and services. We once again return to the grind. We've got to keep on grinding. We're almost done, but we've got to grind a little more. Just one more grind. Bro, I swear I'm not addicted. Just one more grind, bro.

Starting point is 02:25:40 Just one more grind. During the influx of reports about the Grindr app breaking during the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the halfway post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive increase in activity. Quote, breaking, an executive of the gay dating app grinder, says the Republican National Convention is, quote, basically Grinders Super Bowl, unquote. This quote from a Grindr executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the

Starting point is 02:26:10 internet, about five different articles, and even disgraced former New York Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon. Content warning, gay Republican. So, Grindr executives are calling the R&C convention the Grindr Super Bowl. Folks, look, I'm openly gay. no qualms about it, proud conservative Republican, I met my husband on Grindr, and we've been together for six years going on seven, married for almost three. Let me tell you something. Just come out the closet, boys. Come on. It's fun. You can be gay and conservative. But look, Grindr's already out of you anyway, based on the hits, and guess who's in town? It's all you

Starting point is 02:26:57 conservatives. Bye. Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to. I also received messages containing variations of, Hey, Sexy, from at least five accounts that have since been deactivated. And this does line up with a report from a Milwaukee area grinder user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, saying that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users. Quote, on any given day, you'll go on there and see a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source, who did not want to be named. The grinder user said on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe 10 users with no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at 50 blank

Starting point is 02:27:39 profile photos, unquote. Now, we don't have any official data yet on Grindr usage near the 2024 R&C, only the down detector reports, which are users submitted. But we do, at least, have data from the last in-person convention in Cleveland, Ohio, all the way back in 2016. A vice article by Candace Brian spoke with sources from Grindr and wrote that, quote, Grindr usage near the Quicken Loans Arena showed a 66% increase during the RNC. Other active destinations, including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach, and Trump Tower, showed no comparable increase in active users, unquote. Many of the local twinks and trans folks certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks

Starting point is 02:28:25 hiding on the app. People would often first ask me if I was a Republican or why I was in town before trying to hit on me. One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something, but I had to check, unquote. As the week progressed, more locals told me that they had found a handful of out and proud patriots online, but really not many. In fact, multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grindr did claim to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who were online for the same reason I was, to see if there was an influx of closeted Republicans. Someone told me, quote, for the record, it's like three times busier here than normal. Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up to, and the chasers

Starting point is 02:29:11 have come out of the woodwork, unquote. Far from being the app's Super Bowl, according to Vice, the 2016 RNC's 66% bump in activity is less than one half of the increase in Rinder activity that was seen at the last in-person DNC, an event which was also a whole day shorter. I'll read from Vice, quote, however, from Sunday to Monday, the week of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher 148% increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia, unquote. It's also worth noting that of that 66% increase in activity around the 2016 R&C, only about 40% of those users were visiting Cleveland. Most were locals.

Starting point is 02:29:58 Meanwhile, 60% of Grindr users active near the DNC in Philadelphia were visiting the city. Oh, and that quote from a Grindr executive calling the R&C Grinders Super Bowl, as well as George Sandos' other claim about Grindr purposely outing gay conservatives, both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts. It's totally made up of pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction. We made it up.

Starting point is 02:30:24 We made this one up. It's a made-up tale. It's a total fabrication. It never happened. It's an urban legend that never happened. So, no, the RNC is not Grinders Super Bowl. I got messages from over 150 different people. Over 90% of the messages I received and profiles visible online,

Starting point is 02:30:45 even while inside the Pfizer Forum, were from locals completely unaffiliated with the RNC. And any boost in activity that can be attributed to people visiting for the RNC, is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy festival of out-of-town gay Democrats who travel to the DNC. And, like, if you think about this, logically, this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has spent the past two years screaming about how all drag queens are child groomers, and though this was the first year, the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage

Starting point is 02:31:19 from their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to, and a attacks against trans people and really any display of a visible queerness. Like, come on, this is the Republican Party. There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are secretly gay. And while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed homosexual preacher, this is not the norm. And all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia. It is an ideological. It is an ideological. drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism. And now for people like Elon Musk and more young Republicans of fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people,

Starting point is 02:32:06 white people, aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex. Never mind the fact that queer and trans people oftentimes can and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit. So no, Grindr wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to be attending the RNC. And while there may not be as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored,

Starting point is 02:32:48 basically figured out. Based on my anecdotal experience and the reports of a hand full of local grinder users and journalists I talked with who were online during the 2024 R&C, and considering the 2016 Grindr data, I can report that merely a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNC attendees. The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly used Grindr or were specifically curious about who might be online during the RNC. I observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone who attends the R&C are guests or delegates. A lot of people work at the convention center or work tech,

Starting point is 02:33:33 and a sizable chunk of people are like myself, researchers, pollsters, or journalists who attend conventions like this for work. And lastly, the final group that fills out the bump in grinder activity, one that I for some reason didn't really expect to see upon arrival, but in retrospect, it makes total sense, are cops. So many cops. There was so many cops online at the RNC. Just like delegates or reporters, they are coming to town from all around the country.

Starting point is 02:34:02 There was cops or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana, and many more states, as well as U.S. Capitol Police, Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI. They were all in town as a part of the security detail. A few of the guys that messaged me, I can absolutely confirm, are 100% police or some kind of military police. A 33-year-old cop or military guy, quote, looking for sexy bottoms with the tags, jock, military, discreet, and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in the gym, said in his bio that he was, quote, really into slim, skinny, toned, and muscular people. He messaged me saying, hey.

Starting point is 02:34:45 Now, I got a lot of hayes in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grindr. You will probably mostly get hay as a message, as well as just, you know, a picture of someone's penis. But between a penis and hay, those are probably the two most received messages you will get on Grindr. There was another guy with a username D.L. Military, who said in his bio, he was working security for the week, and that grinder messages had completely broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat. chat. The DL in DL military stands for down low. It's a tag that only the worst people on Grindr will use, mainly like self-hating gay men who are closeted and it's down low because they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay, just absolutely the worst. We do not fuck with DL, both literally

Starting point is 02:35:35 and figuratively. There were a bunch of other non-locals who I would describe as cop types. I can't 100% say for sure that they are cops but they have like the look you know like the look the cop look I don't know they could also be like a bodyguard or working private security but one of these cop looking guys messaged to me asking if I was a trans guy which I always love to see it means I'm doing gender very well and a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages so yeah a lot of cops which is not completely surprising considering the fact that basically half the cups in the country were at the Republican National Convention in some form or another. A few final notes. Now, this didn't really make up a sizable chunk of the Grindr population,

Starting point is 02:36:25 but after saying I was just covering the R&C, a couple people on Grindr just completely unprompted told me that they were attending the protests against the RNC. Please do not do this. That's a horrible idea for multiple reasons. You got to stop talking about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grindr, especially at the RNC. Horrible idea. Do not do this. And despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile, a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter or the pod, but they were very nice. They gave me some recommendations for gay bars to check out after convention hours. And one person told me this interesting anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't think Trump is going to win. I canvassed for Hillary in 2016. And

Starting point is 02:37:11 least here, it doesn't feel the same. Unquote. I thought that was a little interesting tidbit that I received at probably around 3 a.m. on Grindr. So there you go. Anyway, that was my RNC Grindr experience. I'm sorry to report. It is not the hotbed of closeted Republicans that we meme it to be. It's mostly local gays, a few reporters, and a few more cops. I do not think I'll be reporting on the DNC Grindr, but I am curious to see if there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to the RNC Grindr. So I guess I will maybe post by that on Twitter at Hungry Bowtie if you want updates on that. Anyway, stay safe out there.

Starting point is 02:37:55 Be careful if you're ever on Grindr, please. Especially don't tell someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests. But in general, be careful on these types of dating apps. And I will see you on the other side. Message from Quickie Grindr said you were super close yesterday Wasn't stalking, I promise Message from birthday present emoji

Starting point is 02:38:19 I almost thought you were Josh Thomas Message from anonymous Wait, are you pro or anti-Republican I'm not gonna lie, I mainly asked your politics because I thought you were cute but I didn't want to hit on a Trumper Message from older for young Aren't all the delegates propositioning you? You're cute.

Starting point is 02:38:40 Message from Anonymous. Why establish a totalitarian state if I can't breed its dictator? Message from Suck Me Off. I'm down for anything. L.O.L. Are you supporting Trump? Ha ha. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Starting point is 02:39:19 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Starting point is 02:39:58 In season two of RipCurrent, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry? and why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging

Starting point is 02:40:19 equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available Now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:40:43 Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel. If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look.

Starting point is 02:41:21 On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What?

Starting point is 02:41:57 Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched.

Starting point is 02:42:15 You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:42:45 CallZone Media. Welcome to Nickadap and Here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It is your host, me along with me as Garrison Davis. Hi, I've played a video game before. I'm not very powerful, but I, too, have played many, several video games. See, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say several. I've played, like, a few. I, many.

Starting point is 02:43:11 I have played too many, simply too many video games. So, okay, this is, this is, in some ways, kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there? It's all really bad, and one of the people who's been making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to, like, Piss off the gamers? The PayPal guy?

Starting point is 02:43:34 The PayPal guy. The owner of X. I've been locked in my, in my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah, you might, you might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile 2 for him. We will get to that. See, I don't play those games.

Starting point is 02:43:52 Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo. Uh-huh. Mecca games and Hell Divers 2, like a loser. that's that's reasonable that's reasonable those are those are those are fine games oh and sonic oh god okay pushing aside the subject to sonic so okay i want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these

Starting point is 02:44:20 fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers and i think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in a hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy, but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right? Something like three billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird, because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games.

Starting point is 02:45:01 and it's also mostly people who are women and non-white and yet however comma when people think about like the gamer TM you are not thinking about that yeah like as a political class yeah yeah you know like when people say the word gamer yeah you're thinking of a bunch of weird in-cell right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass and this is in large part because GamerGate was sort of the first

Starting point is 02:45:30 like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity and obviously this is you know this is a fascist movement now part of the reason this works and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely

Starting point is 02:45:44 large group of people because it's new no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like

Starting point is 02:46:00 treated like movies or some shit or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously yeah yeah and so the the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people and this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on the right there are a lot of like sort of political figures i don't know you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming like H-bomber guy I guess is an example like Hassan to some extent

Starting point is 02:46:36 there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like become political but on the other hand gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space oh god garrison I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is have I told you the story about kebab the German

Starting point is 02:46:55 no oh boy okay so back in the dawn time. I played a lot of Harstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good. Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people? No, this is the, this is the World of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's, that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think, I think I peaked at like 2K legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world. Digital collectible card video game. Come on. Oh yeah. Yeah. But 2K legend N.A is like fucking shitter ranks. It's bad.

Starting point is 02:47:33 I was never like good, good at it. I was just like, okay, kind of. But, you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is like all over the fucking Hirstone streamers. And these are like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kabab the German. And it turns out that his actual name was removed Kabab because he was a fucking German neo-Nazi. Well, many such cases. Yeah, for people who, like, are not aware of, of, like, mid-2010s German fascism,

Starting point is 02:48:04 remove kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So, great stuff, great stuff. This is just, was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in, like, the 2010s. Now, this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession. these tech CEOs, like, who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bank and Freed, and this is, this is really technically on both sides of political spectrum, right? We're going to look at Sam Bank and Freed and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new

Starting point is 02:48:42 overlord, I guess. So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Freed. And, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to know, like Sam Bankman Fried, like, is, I guess, like, he is a gamer in the sense that, like, he's, like, addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah, he looks at the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah. Before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud. Well, probably not

Starting point is 02:49:14 anymore. He's probably going to get part of it. Oh, God. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting block now. All young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts. So they put all their money in crypto. So now they're going to vote for whoever makes line go up. I'm going to become the Joker. So, okay, the thing about Sam Bank and Fried, for people who have forgotten who SBF is,

Starting point is 02:49:37 he is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam, where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it. And, you know, Robert did a behind the bastards on him. And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dog shit game called story brick barology meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like, as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed.

Starting point is 02:50:07 And one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of The Big Short, we're going to get to Moneyball in a second blindside, other books. Repertible financial advice books is what I'm hearing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But, you know, like, our very, very powerful, influential and, like, wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along. And Michael Lewis's sort of angle

Starting point is 02:50:36 on understanding him, and this is something that, like, SBF was, like, you know, was, like, projecting, right? In order for this to be the image of him, was him as, like, the gamer. And this sort of just, like, baffles Michael Lewis, right? Because he just, like, doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD

Starting point is 02:50:53 and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit so he plays video games. meetings like no one has ever been like this i i have no idea what you mean uh i actually don't play video games in meetings because it is too obvious but i i play i play video games once a week that's that's that's kind of my oh god this is the one part about sam beckman free that's relatable to me i play so many video games it is my like anti-depression strategy basically like when i need to not think for a while there's just me of playing actually path of exile too one of the games

Starting point is 02:51:22 that we're going to be fucking talking about today something that i play a lot of i i i've done so much fucking gaming, like, God, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a, it's like a Mova, like League of Legends, but like third person. And I played so much smite that they were pros showing my casual games. When the Zuma Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and execute B, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that. I'll inform the council. I'll, I can't argue with it. For our next folks council meeting, I'll bring it to the table. That's reasonable. But, you know, so what, what happens with this sort of thing is that is that Michael Lewis's image

Starting point is 02:51:56 of SPF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally. Because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time. And this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing. And like SPF like is a gamer, right? But like why they, why they make us part of their

Starting point is 02:52:17 cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, It's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies. Or like respectability in some way. Yeah. Except in like the reversed Sam-Bakman-Friedway where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes

Starting point is 02:52:44 him like an eccentric genius, right? Like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah. That's like he's so different, right? like he's he's not like put together and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker. So it's kind of like a double-edged sword in like

Starting point is 02:52:59 that specific way. Yeah well this is all a feedback loop right because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like Michael Lewis right who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play video games they're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream

Starting point is 02:53:16 sort of access journalists right and so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on and it's just really, really easily you just sort of bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like, you know, you show a gamer

Starting point is 02:53:29 like a League of Legends addict and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here but also like League of Legends

Starting point is 02:53:40 makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I know too many League Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit. Terrible game. Yeah, but Arcane though, right? All right.

Starting point is 02:53:51 Oh, God. Okay, we're going to take an ad break, and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence. So we are back. Now, okay, obviously part of the reason this works to is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these really out of touch sort of, sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market, right? But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really, truly an unbelievably

Starting point is 02:54:34 gullible dumbass. And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports. So Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which I'll get to in a second, and he wrote The Blindside, which is a another book that, like, they talk about on Behind the Bastards, you can go listen to that. But I want to go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog, Othian Athletics team, invented, like, baseball metrics.

Starting point is 02:55:04 And they used Sabre metrics to, like, build this roster out of nothing that, like, went to the playoffs and did really well. And, and, like, I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, like, whatever. I'm not going to argue about baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters. in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses

Starting point is 02:55:25 and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right? Is this guy named Paul Podesta? He is, he is like one of the main figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach, basically. What baseball team is this? Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics, or now the Los Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know, they moved to Vegas.

Starting point is 02:55:41 I don't know what they're called now. No, no, they were originally called the athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the, well, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's. Well, they've been the A's forever. But yeah, they've also been stolen Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team

Starting point is 02:55:55 of Oakland. Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, didn't Las Vegas steal? Didn't the Raiders go there too? Yes. Yes, they stole both of them. That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head. Yeah, so, okay, unfortunately we're going to be talking about football here. So this guy,

Starting point is 02:56:14 right, Paul Podesta, is like one of these sort of geniuses. he later goes on to be it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise to Cleveland Browns now to get an understanding of how

Starting point is 02:56:30 wretched the Cleveland Browns are my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons going one in 31 which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit

Starting point is 02:56:46 that is unrivaled in any other major American sports, I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth no one is going to fucking go 1 in 31 in 2 cross two seasons of football again. So again, that is a 1 in 15 season followed by an 0 in 16 season. It's the second

Starting point is 02:57:02 0 in 16 season ever. Unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade. Okay, it's like Mia, why the fuck you're talking about this? Part of this is also like these people are just evil. DeShawn Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women specifically massage

Starting point is 02:57:20 therapist mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit. So that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson's that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right? He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season, and Paul Podesta, who again, is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be, like, touting as like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who'd been on the Texans. And again, like, Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you

Starting point is 02:58:01 on fucking moral grounds. Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans? It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's all you need to know about this. and they traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners. They fucking traded this guy, right? And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade. That is three is the worst trade in the history of football.

Starting point is 02:58:25 It is three first round picks, two thirds, two third round picks and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy who, again, I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right? They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary, the history of the NFL. So, okay, so how does Deshawn Watson, like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who, like, is now laundering being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural, like being a rogue outsider, right? How does Deshaun Watson his like greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season, in weeks one through five out of, out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000s to start weeks one through five out of, again, 759 quarterbacks. He ranks

Starting point is 02:59:14 753 out of 759 EPA for dropback. 753 out of 759. They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling, an EPA of negative 0.3, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would.

Starting point is 02:59:39 how did you trick me into being on a sports episode I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games don't worry we're almost we're almost done with the sports part of it and I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this

Starting point is 02:59:53 which is which is the argument that's that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for the right yeah of course yes I I understand that I can see that yes also I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air and this is this is the best fucking chance

Starting point is 03:00:08 ever going to get. So Jesus fucking Christ. Is this like what I talk about like movies or something? Is this? Yes. Yes. This is what it feels like. Is this what I sound like? Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of this team. Hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator, $230 million

Starting point is 03:00:28 and this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like, you know, the sort of mythology the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on like by the jock or whatever right that's like that's like that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there's like oppressed by this but like it's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way down and you can watch like just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using by using both of these fucking affects so i i want to read something you know in looking at the way that this stuff functions the way that gaming functions like specifically in in the culture and and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like you know as as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world i want to read something by a friend of the show vicky austro while in a piece called game boys video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly

Starting point is 03:01:29 administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement consumer choice is a form of control and unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one was master to live under current economic conditions

Starting point is 03:01:49 games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups but also forms of intimacy, and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches. games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.

Starting point is 03:02:10 They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, writers, and fans have found space in and around games, despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist, industry advertising campaigns and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both

Starting point is 03:02:43 for Sambaypen Freed and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for like what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right-wingers, right, there are a lot of what you would call to like traditionally sort of left-limbing demographics that play video games. and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways

Starting point is 03:03:08 like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work they're also a thing

Starting point is 03:03:20 that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally and like I mean I know this right like I am fucking like I am a Chinese transom who better is better at video games and both the people I'm going to be fucking talking about in this story right?

Starting point is 03:03:34 Right? Well, I heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced, but... Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about the path of exile character fucking next. You know, but, but I mean, it's worth mentioning like speed running, right? Which is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games, uh... Yeah, it depends. It depends a lot on the genre. But yeah, like, competitive fighting games, like, yeah, melee, I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black non-binary furry, who's like one of the greatest fighting game players

Starting point is 03:04:00 of all time, incredibly beloved. the only person in history ever to beat someone 13 to zero and a first to 11 absolute legend right but but you know these are the people that that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force and this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life right now these people are in power and you know who else is in power it's a products and services to support this podcast all hail we are back now obviously the other part of this you know we've talked about we've talked

Starting point is 03:04:44 mostly sort of about racial politics but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming and you know the thing about gaming right is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with like you know the realization of the violence of the gender system and like i am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy Nazi, like gamer dip shit, right? Yeah, that's why I boot up FF7 remake to stare at Cloud Stryfe for hours on end

Starting point is 03:05:12 when I'm feeling sad. But, you know, the problem with what's happening here, right, is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence in sort of in different ways, but it's like systemic violence from the gender system, that is the same system, but these people's solution to is to blame it on women,

Starting point is 03:05:28 right? And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this, or a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and like I would compare it to like you know lots and lots of people deal with social isolation right and deal with this violence but like you know on the other hand most of us don't become mass shooters most most yeah I would say that's that's true

Starting point is 03:05:47 yeah right and so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like fuck them like eat shit like I'm sorry you've you've become Nazis like fuck off skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors but yeah yeah but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking, like, they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right? I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent

Starting point is 03:06:10 because of the gender system, right? But, like, also, he's the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived, and he still has the same sense of, like, aggrievement that powers all these people. And this is, like, one of the key things of, like, the gamer mythos, right? Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by, like, jocks or whatever.

Starting point is 03:06:31 and now it's been shifted to this, it's not anymore. Yeah, now they believe that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities. Right. And it's actually,

Starting point is 03:06:40 the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the top of the system now. It's, but we've had a, we've had a full Uno Reverso. But the thing is just people

Starting point is 03:06:51 have always been at the top of the fucking system, right? And like, but it's this affect, in many ways, it's this feeling they have of them being the ones who were oppressed

Starting point is 03:06:58 that like, you know, made them into the shock troopers that we said, saw with Gamergate. If you're going to read one Vicky Oswald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games,

Starting point is 03:07:07 which is to feel that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good. But, like, as a medium, there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with, like, film or music. But if you're going to read one thing from her,

Starting point is 03:07:25 read a piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of, like, fascist reaction to the really broken state. of cyberpunk 277 when it came out and one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers

Starting point is 03:07:37 are being, I mean, are literally being used as like scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games. And, you know, and this expands out

Starting point is 03:07:42 to, like, workers more broadly. They're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with, like, this game that like,

Starting point is 03:07:48 when CyberPoint 277 came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it was, it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken,

Starting point is 03:07:58 shitty game. And, you know, they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist harassment campaigns and that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like

Starting point is 03:08:11 do this signaling right is that they're also like signaling to their base that like I am one of you etc etc like you should fucking support me for this shit now pivoting a little bit so when I was first talking about this episode I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman freed because like

Starting point is 03:08:26 many such cases yeah like the last the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamer stick thing. Totally. Like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I would say

Starting point is 03:09:02 like he sort of plays video games. He's a ketamine user. He's a Twitter power user. He is the shadow president. Yeah, the richest man in the world, the richest man who has ever lived. Yeah, also that. But he's really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is

Starting point is 03:09:18 like, he's an elite video game player in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this. He's also, uh, I believe the term is a meme lord. Uh, if I'm reading this right. Oh God. One of his path of exile two characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named

Starting point is 03:09:34 Kekeous Maximus. So, like, this is the level of mind. That is one of his favorite names. In his White House office, he has a he has a Kekius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI-generated image of, like, Pepe the Frog and, like,

Starting point is 03:09:49 Roman, like, Caesar attire. I hate everything. So, yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now. Yeah. Oops. So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games. And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually, he's like for a long time been doing a like, I'm a gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're going to get to in a second. This is something that blue sky user gay dog reminded me of because I'd forgot, he has so many gaming scandals I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Eldon Ring, which is very difficult.

Starting point is 03:10:30 game and he had two different shields equipped which makes literally no sense it's like overencumbered like it's okay like the the best explanation i've tried to figure i figured out for like how bad at this game he is is that posting this build on twitter is the video game equivalent of going like hey look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest call you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on hey i love the mosda miata Like, that's, that, that's like the game equivalent was, and everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing. He is just like, like, unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game, like, just baffling incomprehensible bullshit.

Starting point is 03:11:19 And this was like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one, but like, especially, like, this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it. So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly, like, paid someone else to, like, accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4. I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile player, like, very much the same kind of game, basically. Like, you click somewhere and your character goes there, and you click other things that it does attacks. But famously, like, this year, he pretended to be one of, like, the best Path of Exile 2 players

Starting point is 03:11:57 in the world. And he was doing this on his alt account, which has to handle, it's CyberGamer 420, but all the E's are 3s. So it's CYB3R G-A-M-3R 420. Wait, wait, wait,

Starting point is 03:12:13 say that again? It's at C-Y-B-3-R G-A-M-3-R 420. So I think I found something. I think the 420 at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's

Starting point is 03:12:31 birthday, April 20th. God damn it. So, okay, he claims to have one of the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of Exile, where if he die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. To prove that he actually

Starting point is 03:12:49 did this, he does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like, on a Twitter live stream. and it is immediately obvious that he has no idea what he's doing. Like, it's not just obvious people who play the game. I hadn't played Pathfxel 2 at this point, right?

Starting point is 03:13:04 I had only played the original one, like a decade ago, like a little bit of it. And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before. Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like, it was so unbelievably obvious. Like, he, like, walked past one of the most valuable currencies

Starting point is 03:13:18 in the game, just, like, walk past it, didn't notice it. It's, like, staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him. And eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of X-L-2 account, and then

Starting point is 03:13:34 he claims that he never claims that it was his path of X-L-2 account. And this, Jenny Wynley, has been a real problem for him. Because it pissed off, like, the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with, like, millions of views from guys like Asmigold, who was like, a, he's a very famous right-wing

Starting point is 03:13:53 streamer who, like, sucks ass. Like, is, like, a a turbo right-winger like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry

Starting point is 03:14:07 and fucking Asma Gold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit what the fuck and like everyone fucking reacts like this it's genuinely wild

Starting point is 03:14:19 I've never actually seen people like react to this to like to Elon like this and like again like this is his allies on the right, taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying.

Starting point is 03:14:33 Now, what's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affact is still largely targeted towards non-gamer's in the sense that like, there's no way,

Starting point is 03:14:47 I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of a path of exile player on a stream using someone else's account. but like there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that and a lot of the people he talks to about the stuff

Starting point is 03:15:01 are people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people right it's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's really on the one hand yeah he is signaling to his sort of fascist base but in the other hand he's trying to use

Starting point is 03:15:16 this sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation except he fucked up because he spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer but the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video

Starting point is 03:15:35 like on YouTube that is very very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games and cheated record to video games and Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap right and that means we got them folks mission accomplished wrap it up

Starting point is 03:15:51 we beat Elon Musk it's over he's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game he's lost all respect among the farthest reaches of the right so what's next

Starting point is 03:16:09 we have one he has he has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about is this about the one video game he hasn't played which is the funniest Elon Musk Gamer story in my opinion which what are you which what are you talking about that's the one that he had to publicly announce that he

Starting point is 03:16:26 does not play GTA 5. Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that. Because he doesn't like, quote, unquote, doing crime and GTA 5, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene, just couldn't do it, unquote.

Starting point is 03:16:42 Oh, I completely forgot about that. So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God. Now, some gamers might be sick individuals acting out, you know, violence, power fantasies, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GTA-5.

Starting point is 03:17:01 That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times, strange behavior. Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like a different, like the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violence and video games is bad. Because he's trying to signal to all of his group simultaneously.

Starting point is 03:17:20 And all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks, ass, and we hate him. It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy, because, again, he is the most powerful man in the world. No. But it is mildly amusing.

Starting point is 03:17:35 Yeah, but I, so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that, like, the pushback he is getting here is, like, I think actually kind of is significant. So the last thing I want to talk about is, is him pretending to have been like a quake pro, which the thing that he did. Quake pro. And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber

Starting point is 03:17:52 Carl Jobs, who is like, his thing is like people who fake who like fake things in video games basically and he is like not a leftist he's like like a center right guy basically I mean there's arguments about exactly how far right he is but he did a video about

Starting point is 03:18:07 Elon claiming to be a quake player and what he found so Elon like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament but none of the good players were there and he he came his team came in second but they came in second because they had better Wi-Fi than everyone else and so they had less latency which made them invincible

Starting point is 03:18:24 until they ran into a team that also had good Wi-Fi and then he got destroyed, which I just think is funny, right? That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran to someone

Starting point is 03:18:38 who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up is that, like, at the end of this video, Jobs does, like, goes on this whole thing about how, and this is, this is a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream

Starting point is 03:18:53 press, where he literally goes on a thing where she says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie. And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know. And this is a real shift. Right. I have never seen a mainstream journalist right down. Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this. And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback. anything else ever fucking seen

Starting point is 03:19:24 outside of like the left about what Elon Musk is doing and like just the willingness to just be like this guy is a fucking just a serial liar

Starting point is 03:19:32 like everything says is a lie he literally calls him a con like says his activities like a con man he says the things that he's saying

Starting point is 03:19:38 are like either lies or delusional there is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him there was a thing

Starting point is 03:19:46 that happened literally today where Ubisoft you know Ubisoft is a famously like not a leftist company

Starting point is 03:19:51 right like they've done a lot of horrible fucked up sexual assault stuff so Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a character in it and literally the official assassin's creed account replied to one of his tweets

Starting point is 03:20:07 saying is that what the guy playing your Path of Axel 2 account told you in like replied to a thing about Hassan like we are we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space right this thing that had been like a really really consistent

Starting point is 03:20:22 a base of support of people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him. It's sort of being polarized against him by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is. And like obviously like I don't think like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these people do this and like gamers is like a demographic that's important to these people is that like the way that you destroy a coalition by this.

Starting point is 03:20:52 isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right? That doesn't happen that often, but one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents to, allies, to stay home.

Starting point is 03:21:11 And that was enough. Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks, like, came for currencies government, was enough for them to take power. And I think, like, the actual, like, the actual serious point, point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just

Starting point is 03:21:26 systematically tearing away these people's coalition so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can be stopped. So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the

Starting point is 03:21:42 start of GamerGate 2. Gamergate 2 is already happening, damn it. This is Gamergate 3. This is an open call to begin Gamergate 2.5 right now on behalf of Mia Wong make sure you at Mia. Oh, no.

Starting point is 03:21:58 And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we get enough gamers to stay home. Or even better rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller

Starting point is 03:22:15 or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it. Gamers are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not back the regime. That's actually the February Revolution where they stood down. But you know, same point. Same point. Yeah, come on, Mia. Geez, fuck. Look, I am one of the biggest things of, like, people need to remember

Starting point is 03:22:32 that Lenin did not overthrow the Tsar. He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist E guy, who was from the provisional government in between the, okay, we're done, we're done here, we're done here, we're fucking out, we're leaving. What games are you playing? What games are you playing, Path of Exile 2? Don't play Brotato, it will

Starting point is 03:22:48 consume your life. Okay. Play Robo Quest. Robo Quest. It's great. Robo Quest dares to ask the question What if, like, the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a rogue-like with, like, Dooms

Starting point is 03:23:03 combat? That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that then. I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Corps 6. Oh, record 6 rules. Love that game. Love that game. Sonic X Shadow Generations. Final Fantasy 7.

Starting point is 03:23:18 And I'm waiting for Mecca Break to come out for like their official release now that the beta is closed unfortunately the character selection is very gooner coded many many such cases so I made sure to make the smallest chest size available on my

Starting point is 03:23:35 model but the gameplay is fun this has been it could happen here I good Lord they pay me for this I had to watch so many videos about Deshawn Watson

Starting point is 03:23:50 and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 03:24:19 You can now find sources for it. could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. If a Lenovo gaming computer is on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com. You'll find exclusive deals on the gaming PCs you want, like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 gaming desktop and Lenovo Lock Gaming laptop. So avoid all that shopping, chaos and price comparing, and just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com, where PCs are up to 50% off. That's Lenovo.com. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.

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Starting point is 03:25:27 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City.

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 210

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