Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 217

Episode Date: January 31, 2026

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  - Gaza and the Board of Peace feat. Dana El Kurd - Everyone vs ICE: On the Ground In Minnesota - Everyone vs ICE: On the Ground In Minnesota, Pt. 2 - To Catch A Fascist: An Interview with Christopher Mathias - Executive Disorder: Alex Pretti Shooting, DHS Funding Bill & Rojava You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: Gaza and the Board of Peace feat. Dana El Kurd UNOCHA on ceasefire violations - https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/humanitarian-situation-update-353-gaza-strip  BBC on the Yellow Line - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxl6zkenqo Aljazeera on the 20 point plan - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/16/us-declares-phase-two-of-gaza-ceasefire-but-what-did-phase-one-deliver  The Huffington Post on Putin’s invite - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-has-invited-vladimir-putin-to-join-his-gaza-board-of-peace-kremlin-says_uk_696e0478e4b0fb912e9948f8?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1768820090  Aljazeera on Board of Peace - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/18/trumps-board-of-peace-appears-to-seek-wider-mandate-beyond-gaza  Who is Nikolay Mladenov - https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/1/15/who-is-nickolay-mladenov-the-diplomat-tasked-with-disarming-gaza  Everyone vs ICE: On the Ground In Minnesota Rent Support for neighbors in Phillips: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-phillips-families-in-urgent-need Rent Support for neighbors in Central: https://www.gofundme.com/f/critical-rent-assistance-for-central-neighborhood-families Rent Support for neighbors in Powderhorn: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-powderhorn-families-in-crisis Supplies for Political Art Making: https://givebutter.com/spno Protective Gear for Legal Observers: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-equip-twin-cities-legal-observers-with-ppe Diapers and Menstrual Supplies: https://secure.everyaction.com/jLLKnfwWk0qdptMbYLoyPQ2 Abolish ICE Shirts: https://www.eaglescreenprint.com/printshop/p/defend-612-abolish-ic3-wnj6e Northstar Front Line Street Medics: https://www.paypal.com/biz/profile/northstarhealth Twin Cities Swoletariat Bail Fund: Venmo: @TCSwoletariat Cashapp: $TCSwoletariat To Catch A Fascist: An Interview with Christopher Mathias Preorder Chris' book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/To-Catch-a-Fascist/Christopher-Mathias/9781668034767  The article Chris mentioned about Spit & Dan: https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/death-in-the-desert-2263332/ Executive Disorder: Alex Pretti Shooting, DHS Funding Bill & Rojava https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=fHjlCV6d7gVSHjiN&t=1222&v=Amhb8PK_an8&feature=youtu.be https://www.foxnews.com/video/6388288892112 https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/25/politics/video/bovino-dana-bash-full-interview-digvid  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/26/greg-bovino-agents-victims-pretti-minneapolis-shooting/88361659007/  https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.229758/gov.uscourts.mnd.229758.107.0.pdf  https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.229758/gov.uscourts.mnd.229758.109.0.pdf  https://www.startribune.com/ice-raids-minnesota/601546426  https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/115968824541011312  https://bsky.app/profile/vanhollen.senate.gov/post/3mdg7b7k5nc2q  https://newrepublic.com/article/205723/dem-senator-harsh-new-takedown-trump-hits-home-breaking-point  https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-287  https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2015826728644391063?s=20 https://x.com/MayorFrey/status/2015917704725622985?s=20 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/greg-bovino-demoted-minneapolis-border-patrol/685770/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIM7ap12vPo https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/2016564180757725221?s=20  https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/stephen-miller-alex-pretti-trump  https://x.com/cspan/status/2016557604282011748?s=20  https://prospect.org/2026/01/26/ice-trump-democrats-funding-department-homeland-security-alex-pretti-minnesota/ https://www.axios.com/2026/01/26/senate-democrats-dhs-funding-government-shutdown https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/us/alex-pretti-protesters-minneapolis-invs https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2025/04/29/patriots-plane-guantanamo https://www.audacy.com/national/sports/pats-team-plane-apparently-used-for-ice-deportation-flights https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/29/new-england-patriots-charter-jet-guantanamo https://apnews.com/article/ihan-omar-vinegar-attack-minneapolis-385a30eaf6acc40d6ba5c6c45c09304dSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Delarocha, a host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release.

If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delo Roach on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru.

And back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the red weather on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether it is getting swatted or just hateful messages online, there is a lot of harm and even just reading the comments. That's cybersecurity expert Camille Stewart Gloucester on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. Every season is a chance to grow. And the Therapy for Black Girls podcast is here to walk with you.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brandford, and each week we dive into real conversations, that help you move with more clarity and confidence. This episode, we're breaking down what really happens to your information online and how to protect yourself with intention. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You know Roll Doll. He thought up Willie Wonka in the BFG.

But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roll Doll, I'll tell you that story, and much, much more. What? You probably won't believe it either. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Okay, I don't think that's true.

I'm telling you. I was a spy. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know

this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ad. 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here.

My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a professor of political science and a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. Since I last recorded an episode, those in power have been very busy. The world looks different from a month ago. What would the assault on Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, the, as of this recording, possible invasion of Greenland, it's been hard for even the best of us to keep up. As Nemek from the series Andor would say, the pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.

I will never not squeeze in an end or reference when I can. Given that this is the state of the world, what's happening in Palestine has largely slipped out of most people's feeds, and certainly the media headlines. But lots is happening, lots of dangerous things are happening, and I'm going to take this episode to give an update about what's been going on. Since the ceasefire was announced three months ago, 449 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks,

and another 1,246 have been injured. Over a hundred of those killed were children, according to UNICEF. The Gaza Strip has been reduced even further, with a new, quote, yellow line demarcating where Israeli troops will remain, and where Palestinians are not allowed to go. They literally placed concrete yellow blocks on the ground in Gaza. And as the BBC notes from a report January 16th of this year, Israel continues to push the Yellow Line

further and further into what remains of Gaza. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs notes, quote, the Israeli military remains deployed in over 50% of the Gaza Strip, beyond the Yellow Line, where access to humanitarian facilities and assets, public infrastructure, and agricultural land are either restricted or prohibited.

In this context, and despite this context, and despite this context, the Trump administration has declared that phase one of the ceasefire agreement is now over, and that phase two will commence. The US has announced the launch of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Special envoy Steve Whitkoff shared the news in a social media post, writing that phase two establishes a transitional, technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. He also wrote that it began, the full demilitarization and reconstruction of Gaza, primarily the disarmament of all unauthorized personnel.

Whitkoff says the U.S. expects Hamas to comply fully with its obligations, including the immediate return of the final deceased hostage, and warns that the failure to do so will bring serious consequences. Now, this is the declaration, even though, really, aside from the return of Israeli hostages, no part of the 20-point plan that the Trump administration put forward as the quote, peace plan was realized on the ground. Aid is being let in, but not at the levels that it's needed.

Attacks against Palestinians haven't stopped. Nonetheless, phase two is apparently starting with the naming of members of the Board of Peace. Now, if listeners will recall from a previous episode, Trump declared himself the chair of this Board of Peace that's supposed to bring peace to the Middle East, and Tony Blair was tapped to run it, much to the outrage of anyone who witnessed

Blair's cooperation and the destruction of Iraq. Now, this Board of Peace is going to run the Gaza Strip and it's quote-unquote technocratic government and it's going to make sure Hamas de-militarizes and that Palestinians don't step out of line. The Board of Peace is one aspect of the Great Plan, great standing for Gaza reconstitution, economic acceleration, and transformation plan,

a plan that apparently will turn Gaza into the, quote, Riviera of the Middle East. The Huffington Post reported January 17th that Trump is setting a billion-dollar price tag for any country that wants to participate on this board. Members so far include Tony Blair, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Whitkoff, Mark Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, Israeli billionaire Yakir Gabay, and a number of others along the same vein.

Among those Trump has invited include Vladimir Putin, famously very interested in peace and not at all in eradicating Ukrainian existence. Trump also sent a letter to Victor Orban, far-right-wing president of Hungary, to join the Board of Peace. Orban has apparently accepted this invitation. To remind listeners, Orban is one of Trump's models for authoritarian takeover of democratic institutions. Orban is also very close ties with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, despite his anti-Semitic politics. Now, I thought the letter he sent to Orban

and to every other right-wing politician he's been inviting was quite telling. In the letter, Trump invites Orban to join, presumably with the billion-dollar pay-to-play, and calls the Board of Peace a quote, bold new approach to resolving global conflict. Reuters, reporting on this issue, quoted an anonymous diplomat, saying,

it's a Trump United Nations that ignores the fundamentals of the UN Charter. In fact, the Charter of the Board of Peace doesn't even mention Gaza. So what is this bold new approach to resolving global conflict? It's apparently a resolution to conflict that includes a neo-colonial oversight board run by white men to make sure the natives don't get too excited. Now, this oversight board is intended to manage conflict, because let's be clear, this isn't about solving conflict at the expense of the people who have been facing the brunt of this conflict.

So we should take them at their word that this is going to be the way that global conflict is going to be resolved from now on. This is the blueprint. Gaza is only the test case. And in this new form of authoritarian conflict management, the world will operate without any pretensions under the premise of might is right.

and if the Gaza reconstitution, economic acceleration, and transformation plan is any indication, this plan is predicated on encouraging Palestinians to ultimately leave Gaza, at least some significant segment of them. So not only might is right, but ethnic cleansing is a more than fine way to resolve a dispute. And finally, the plan is predicated on the idea that reconstruction is a business opportunity. So to review, might is right, ethnic cleansing is a-OK, and war is a prime real-estate development opportunity. Now, things get even worse when we bring in the guy who's been tapped to be the director general of this board. Nikolay Mladenov is a Bulgarian politician, an ex-UN envoy, who has been tasked with, quote, disarming Gaza, according to a report by Al Jazeera published

January 15th. He's the guy who's going to oversee the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic government, which is run by a Palestinian bureaucrats, and make sure that they stay in line during the reconstruction phase. Somehow these bureaucrats are supposed to reconstruct Gaza while not being able to operate in most of it. Anyway, Mladenov, this guy is really something. He's a Bulgarian diplomat that worked as a minister for one of the most corrupt governments in Bulgaria, a government that faced mass protest pretty persistently. He is part of a right-wing populist party in Bulgaria. His father was also involved in politics, specifically in the Bulgarian virgin of the KGB, before the transition from the communist

regime. Since 2021, he's been working in an Emirati institution, the Anwar Gargaj diplomatic academy, where he came out as a, quote, vocal proponent of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states. Now, it all checks out, honestly, that this is the guy who's going to be the director general. The fact that this person is the one being chosen for face two of the ceasefire, and the fact that he has this kind of political background should make clear that the plan for Gaza isn't just a blueprint for the world, new levels of authoritarian conflict management with no pretense,

but also part and parcel of the U.S.-Israeli-Imarati vision for the region. Now, this vision is one where Arab authoritarian-refering and Israel, with the U.S. supporting, remake the Middle East into a, quote, modern, developed, tolerant Middle East, essentially by pouring concrete over graves and building megacities on top of rubble. Their vision of the Middle East is one that is authoritarian and contained. More citizens are subjects. These subjects can have some social freedoms and maybe some economic opportunities, but should never think that they can have an opinion on anything that happens to them. This is a vision where states like the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, can arm malicious to conduct

ethnic cleansing in Sudan, and Israel can get away with ethnic cleansing in Palestine, because ethnic cleansing and genocide are apparently a perfectly reasonable way of getting rid of undesirables. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't how these states operated even before the genocide in Gaza, and I'm not saying it wasn't how the U.S. allowed certain allies to operate, even before Trump. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when Palestinians were indefinitely occupied and no one cared. Or when Arzach was ethnically cleansed and Azerbaijan got away with it. President Biden gave his blessing to the destruction of Gaza after October 7th after all. But there used to be a pretense, a pretense of international law

and a, quote, liberal international order. There also used to be variation on these issues. This type of authoritarian conflict management wasn't always tolerated. In fact, Arab liberals who advocated for democracy would often say that the U.S. is different from China or Russia, in that at least it was committed to democracy and international law and human rights rhetorically. Even if there was hypocrisy, they thought that that space between reality and rhetoric could be leveraged and exploited. But now there's nothing to be leveraged. Authoritarian conflict management is the modus operandi of powerful states,

and according to Donald Trump's new doctrine, the Don Road doctrine, each powerful state gets to do what it wants in its own sphere of influence. In fact, not only is territorial aggression valid, it's actually the way the world should work. According to all of Trump's spokespeople and parts of his administration, conquest is totally fine. Here's Stephen Miller on Greenland, for example. Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years to control a territory,

you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests. So Gaza is indeed the blueprint for what happens to weaker states in war, or what happens in this case to stateless. people deemed undesirable and expendable. Now, what are the Palestinians saying about all this? The technocratic government, made up of Palestinian bureaucrats, is saying it's committed to a reconstruction of Gaza that is rooted in, quote, peace, democracy, and justice.

The Palestinian authority, the largely illegitimate and undemocratic governance body, that apparently governs the West Bank somehow and represents Palestinians, they're putting out statements welcoming the Board of Peace and Trump's vision. Maybe because they think this will earn them a seat at the table, or maybe it's a way to sideline their main opposition Hamas in whatever crumbs of Palestine they're allowed to control in the future. Hamas has said in a statement that they also welcome the formation of the administrative committee for the Gaza Strip, to quote, achieve calm in Gaza,

while noting that they are working with mediators to get to the next stage of the ceasefire and they accuse Israel of trying to break the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli government, ironically, rejects any Palestinian involvement, even at the technocratic level, and have vowed to take it up with their friend Trump. And the Palestinian people? Well, here is Gaza journalist Hind Khadari of Al Jazeera English. And what has been the reaction in Gaza to that announcement of a move to Phase 2?

Well, just like you said it, an announcement, a symbolic announcement to Phase 2, Palestinians do not see anything on the ground. There is no change. And despite all of that, we're still hearing drones, as you can hear in the background. We also heard a couple of explosions since the early hours of the morning where demolishings are still going on across the Gaza Strip, especially after the yellow line. But Palestinians are frustrated. They're very disappointed.

They thought that phase two would give them the freedom of movement. that would give them reconstruction of Gaza, would also give them a little bit of what they lost. But on the ground, nothing happened, nothing changed. What we know so far is there are 15 members that have been approved on to be ruling Gaza. But there are a lot of questions and concerns. How is this going to happen?

What is going to happen to the people here? The reconstruction, the Raffa Crossing, thousands who need to get education, and also people who need to travel, abroad to either get their treatment, to get, to reunite with their families. So there's a lot of questions, but mainly there's a lot of frustration because there's nothing changing on the ground. People in Gaza are beyond exhaustion. Everyone wants some path forward out of this nightmare. But I really don't think, for all the reasons I described here today, that this is it.

And we shouldn't let them. The Trumps and Orban's and billionaires of the world, get away with the narrative, that they're peacemakers, and that apparently this is all in the name of tolerance and peace. That's it for me today. Thank you for listening, and hope you're all staying safe. Every January, we're encouraged to start over, but what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help.

I'm Mike Delarocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures were taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you.

Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Dolorotcha on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Delocha and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was hard to read. wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California,

interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you, sons of a bitch, come around her and my wife. Boom, boom, this is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll. is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What?

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock,

before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back Bejan Robinson. When I'm on the field, I'm feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything.

just slows down. It just makes you feel great before I run the play. Just like Bijan, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game playing for your mental health at love your mind playbook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the ad console. Hello, welcome to cool people did cool stuff slash it could happen here episode. And this is a little pickup we inserted because James and I, hi James.

Hi, Margaret. And Margaret, that's James. Yeah. We're on each other's shows this week. Yeah. We just spent three days in Minneapolis culminating in the general strike last Friday, and we were there to cover the rapid response networks

and the mutual aid networks that people have been building. And that's what we're going to be talking about in these two episodes. But the reason that we're recording this little pickup right here to listen to at the front of it is that nine hours after we finished recording these episodes, shortly after both of us had left the city, a man named Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in what is obviously something that you all are familiar with. And we just kind of want to mark that

because I think the tone and what we're talking about right now is we're so excited about these networks that people have been building, but obviously the tone would have changed a little bit had we recorded it only nine hours later, and we would have been talking about something slightly different, and that's just the breaks of podcasting. Yeah. The fundamental message, I guess, wouldn't change,

but we all know that doing what these people do can have terrible costs, and we were reminded of that again Saturday morning. I guess we should just say that we grieve his passing and we're sending our thoughts to his family and the people who loved him. Yeah. It could be a really hard time for them. Absolutely. Hello, and welcome to cool people could happen here.

I'm one of your hosts, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today as my other host is James. Hi, Margaret. We are doing a special crossover episode of It Could Happen here and cool people who did cool stuff, and we're doing it because James and I are in sunny Minneapolis, which is true. The sun was out. Yeah, I saw the sun.

Yeah. Yeah, I saw it through a cool. cloud of cold, cold air. The vapor of our own breath, freezing. I have seen more people today with frozen eyelashes than any other point in my life put together. Yeah, I breathed into my goggles briefly, and that froze. Yeah. Yeah, I took them off of my eyes froze.

Yeah. Yeah. It was minus 30 Fahrenheit feel, I guess, with wind chill. Yeah. What is that in Celsius? They come together at minus 40, so it's going to be like minus 35, something like that. Yeah. It was for those who are not familiar, cold, very cold.

And so the two of us came up to Minneapolis a few days ago, and we have spent the past three days here talking to everyone we can about the rapid response networks that people have built to try to keep themselves and their neighbors safe from ICE and federal repression. and the sort of federal occupation of the city. And so what we thought we would do. This is kind of, neither us have written scripts yet. We are still here.

We just had a fun slightly hectic day where we spent only about 20 minutes, reasonably sure we were getting arrested. We didn't get arrested. No. Thank you, comrade train. Yeah. We got on a light rail and we're able to leave a kettle by a light rail, which is a new experience for me.

Yeah, very European. Yeah. and yeah we came up here to talk to people and that's been the like the story that I'm I'm most interested in right is that we have all of these stories that are absolutely true the stakes are really high here but the things that people are building here are really incredible and people know that they're holding down ice here in a way that no one would have expected I think and I don't know so yeah you want to should we just talk about about kind of our days? Yeah. I think I just want to ground people before we do that, in that so much as a reporting on Minneapolis has focused on trauma, and so much reporting on migrants focuses on trauma, right?

And I think people who have listened to our podcast know that that's not really a game. And so I understand when they hear that we've been in Minneapolis, I think we're going to talk about horrific things that we've seen. I want to talk more about the beautiful things that we've seen. Because I think those get missed, and they're super important, especially if you're listening in another city in the US, which will face some degree of this or is facing some degree of this, right? So I want to ground this in saying that rather than talking about the trauma people experiencing, which I'm sure will be incidental, I want to talk about how closely people are holding each other here and how special that is and what we can take from it. Yeah, and like without obviously, we're like, we're not trying to paint a rosy picture of what's happening here because what's happening here is like, I, I'm a cold-hearted journalist historian person and I was crying multiple times in the past couple days as people told me about some of the stuff they've experienced, but some of it has been, you know, we've asked people, we've said like, hey, what do you want people to take away from this? And one of the main things is that kind of a like, hey, you can do it too kind of thing. And, and, The other thing that people have talked about is like, it would be really nice for people to see that what we're doing is amazing here, even if it's like coming out of such horrendous adversity.

Yeah. Like one of the things that I've taken throughout my career is that in hard times we can build beautiful things. Yeah. That's what I wrote my book about, really. Yeah. And what I've tried to report on all over the world, I think this is more evidence of that. And so, like, you're going to hear things which were amazing. And the people who have done them are wonderful,

but they're not uniquely special. You can do all these things too. And, like, I want you to see that it is possible where you live. Yeah. So one of the first things that we did when we got here, we talked about, you know, to put ourselves in the story, I drove a long way and James flew a long way. Yeah.

You know, I picked up James at the airport, and we came to where we're staying. And we were talking about like, and it was late at night, and we're like, all right, what are we trying to do tomorrow? And what are we trying to see? And what are we trying to learn? Yeah. And one of the main things, one of the first questions we had was like,

what's the scale of what's happening here? Yeah. Right? Like, what were your impressions of the scale of what was happening? Hmm. We should talk about what's happening here. Just like really quickly, I bet you all know about it in the news. Why do I have a different tone of voice when I'm talking into a microphone in this way?

And said, usually I'm in a Zoom call, but instead we're both sitting in a, a bedroom on opposite ends of the bedroom talking in the microphones and I somehow have a different cadence and I don't know how I feel about it. Also, I've had to drink caffeine, which I don't do because we've had to do an awful lot. And anyway, what was I about to ask you? How widespread stuff is? Oh yeah. Like what was it? Okay, we were going to talk about what's happening here. Yeah. So if people aren't familiar, right, ICE, which is immigration and customs enforcement, the agency charged with removing people from the United States who are non-citizens,

right, who are considered deportable. Specifically, the branch of immigration and customs enforcement that we are seeing here is enforcement removal operations, aka ERO. We're also seeing Border Patrol, right? In the last year, actually more than a year now, right? It's begun under the Biden administration with Operation Return to Sender in the Central Valley of California. We are seeing Border Patrol agents used to do internal enforcement, right, of people who are

generally documented, sometimes undocumented, but always non-citizens. They are detaining them in the street. They are detaining them outside schools. They're detaining them at the bus stop. They're detaining them at places to work. And when I say detaining, that's a misnomerating people. They're grabbing people out of cars. They're snatching children and using them to bait out their parents.

They're smashing people's car windows and pulling them out. They're barging into businesses. In one case, they ate at a Mexican restaurant and then arrested the workers there later that day. I've visited a lot of places where terrible things happen, right? The shit that is happening here, it's the shit that people come to America to get away from. Yeah. It is men in masks with guns, pulling people who have done nothing wrong, who are here, not harming anyone, people who do not have criminal records, just for the, I don't feel like I need to say that on this show, but I need to say that every time I talk about this, right? Like the vast majority,

something like 80% last time I looked at a stats of these people have no criminal records and a criminal record could be something like fucking parking in the wrong place. I've been arrested. Yeah, also, I don't care. I've done a lot of crime. Everyone listening to this has done a lot of crime whether or not you've been caught. Yeah, yeah. You're speeding as a crime.

You sped, yeah. You went a little bit too late through a red light, whatever. Yeah. I don't think that matters. Right, exactly. Even if you're a lib, even if you believe that our justice system is fair, It should be fair for everyone. There should be different consequences for different people.

Let's move past that, right? So how widespread is this? Margaret and I got in late. We sat up even later talking. We looked at the shitty vegan pizza. We ate it. It kind of was shitty. It was a little sad about it.

Yeah, I've had better. I won't name drop. Yeah. We work up the next morning and within five minutes of our waking up, we heard like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep coming down the street. Yeah. Both Margaret and I ran to the front door, spent a while trying to put on snow boots, and watched an ice agent rolling down the street in what they normally drive in,

which are rental SUVs with the windows blacked out. Yeah. And people following them, alerting the block that ice was here, right? Yeah. And we're not downtown. We, like, picked an area that's like slightly, but we thought it was slightly out of it. We got warned that nowhere is goon-free. Yeah, and they were right.

Nowhere is goon-free, right? I mean, we have probably been within a 30-minute radius of the spot we're staying at for three or four days, right? We've seen ice pile their car into a telephone pole. We've seen spent munitions on the floor. Ice tear gas some people, a few blocks from us, but they were gone by the time we got there. And I don't want to get this out, like front and center at the start. It was not ice who catch. protesters today. It was Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. Yeah. It was not ICE who arrested

people who approached them with their hands in the air trying to work out what was going on. That was Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. I've seen press conferences with Minneapolis Police. I don't know what their deal is. I'll tell you that Hennepin County Sheriff's Office for actively participating in this, right? Yeah. I'm not buying this local cops good. This will shock listeners. Yeah. I'm not buying the local cops good, federal cops bad narrative. Yeah. When cops get asked what side they're on now on the side of the other cops. Well, it's interesting because the thing that you have is that you have, you know, there's the great classic, like if those were neutral in times of oppression or siding with the oppressors,

right? Yeah. Because the overall situation here, it seems to be, is that you do have much more the oppressive force here as an outside forces compared to any other protest movement I've seen in the United States. People are very aware that it is outsiders who have come to their city to steal their neighbors. Yeah. Right. And so, because of that, the federal forces are the forces that everyone's mad at, whereas a lot of the people who are standing up to federal forces are neutral or fine with police and even like the concept of other federal agencies. They just don't want people snatching neighbors. Now, that's not universal, but it's like some of the people we've talked to. Yeah. But what state level law enforcement has decided is that they are committed to keeping the peace and they can't keep the peace against ICE, which they probably on some level morally know that they need to, but they don't. And instead they're like, all right, well, we can mess up with the, you know, the protesters. The protesters. And that won't be protested. They're right protesters. Right. But yeah, like, when we saw people drive down honking,

the very first thing that we experienced in this town, and we weren't sure what it was. We were like, is that, is that people following ice and honking? And I had done a fair amount of research before I came, and I kind of knew about the whistles and, but I didn't really know about this, like incredible network that people have built. Yeah. That what we saw was not in any way exceptional, right? That was just a standard street on a Wednesday morning. Yeah.

And so we get into my vehicle and we start driving, you know, we have some places we think we're going to go check out. We have some, you know, friends who are local who are going to talk to us. And we get like two blocks, three blocks before we find people protecting Somali daycare. Yeah. Right. And we, well, before that, right, we went to the food co-op to get food.

Yeah. And we went into the food co-op and we got our food. And on the way out, we see this big old sign on the door, which is like, we're closed on the 23rd, ice out of Minnesota. Yeah. Ice out of Minneapolis, whatever it is. And it's in English and Spanish and it's like in solidarity with our migrant neighbors, we're not opening. Yeah. And like, obviously it's a food co-op, right?

Right. It's not a reactionary space. That sort of planted a seed for me. Like, ah, like, this is a big ass business, you know, like, like, uh, it. It's not a business that necessarily relies on migrant labor, but I can see it being a space where people are in solidarity. I wonder how wide that is. And they, even in the time we've been here,

I've seen businesses put those up that didn't have them when we were going out on Wednesday. Right. Like people being like, nah, this isn't right. But yeah, to go back, we, what happened was that Margaret was driving. I was riding next to Margaret. I saw a group of people. One guy had kind of tanned trousers on. And I was like, stop.

Margaret, Margaret, slowed down, signaled and turned into the parking lot of these folks were at. And they immediately, they had seen us, right? Ham on the brakes and turn up in a vehicle with out-of-state plates. Then we better go speak to these people. We probably scared them. What's funny is, we thought we scared them. No. They're not scared of us.

They're looking to see if they're on to us. And it's such a huge difference, right? Because when people are scoping us out, they're not like, oh, that might be, ice, they're like, is that ice? Let's fucking get them. Yeah, yeah. Like, if that's ice, we need to roll. Right? We need to, we need to let people know. We need to start honking. We need to start whistling. Yeah. So we get out, walkover, and we start talking to these people. And like, the person who was most forthright, most forthcoming was an older lady.

I mean, she shared her age of us. I think it's fine to say. I think it was 76. 76, yeah. It's probably around zero Fahrenheit. Like, even warmer than that, right? So, like, you know, minus 10 Celsius, something. there. Yeah. Let's not wearing a hat. Yeah. Just give a fuck.

Yeah. I'm chilly in my like brand new winter clothes that I wear and I live outside in the mountain. I don't live outside anymore, but I live in the mountains. Yeah, yeah. I'm wearing all my nice technical gear. Yeah. She's got a poncho on, a parker.

Yeah. And she's just like so zealous. Like, she's so happy to be doing what she's doing and so proud of herself for being the person who did it. Yeah. And she has every right to be. In an earnest way, like in a way that... Not in a self-congratulatory way.

Just in a like, I am 100% convinced I'm in the right and I will talk to you. Yeah. And I will say it with my whole chest. Yeah. Like, do you want to share some of the stuff she said? I thought it's really... One of the things that she said that, yeah, like, I mean, you know, she... I didn't get the impression.

She was like a wild political radical or something, right? And she's just like, you know, my father fought fascists in France and Italy and, like, he would be proud of me. Yeah. I'm like, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure he would. He would be. Yeah. And I'm sure it also be disgusted at what's fucking happening.

Yeah. And, you know, and while we're talking, the Somali family whose daycare it is comes out and gives us simbosa's. And we're like, no, no, no, no, we're journalists. You don't have to give us anything. We're like, not even helping. We're like, and they're like, you're here. You're with us. You are taking food.

Yeah. The guy was like, no, we're Somalis. We feed people. Like, what's your dealer? You vegetarian? and we were like, we were vegan. Yeah. So he comes out, goes back, comes out with the vegan ones.

You know, like, and they were delicious. Yeah, no, there was some best food I've ever eaten. As we're standing there, more people come and go. So you're like, okay, this is happening here, right? You know, no pun intended. And as we leave, we talk to a few more people, we leave. And some of the other people we talk to are like, and they're people from different scenes.

It's not, you know, like. It's not just the old lady scene, right? It's a diverse crowd. Right. And, you know, we talk to a father who I tangentially know through the metal scene. who was like, yeah, my kid goes to school here. Yeah. Like, no one is taking kids while I can stand here.

And he was like, I have work to be doing. He's like, we're supposed to be recording this band today or whatever. And he's like, no, I'm here. I'm doing this. There's no sadness. You know, there's just... No, it's like, this is what I have to be doing. It's the most important thing to do.

Every two blocks. Yeah, there are people on the corner. Yeah. Usually two people, sometimes alone. And those, what we later learned, because we were like, holy shit, there's ice watchers everywhere. Yeah. Those are just the marked people we see. Yeah, yeah.

That's the minority. Yeah. There are people driving constantly in very organized but entirely decentralized networks of rapid response, where they have come together in these like hyper-local signal loops. signal is an encrypted messaging app that you can use on any device, Android or iPhone. The government can't break its encryption.

However, there's no truly safe system. It's the safest one we have, and it automatically deletes messages after a period of time. If you set it up to, which you should. And so people are using this system, and, you know, a ton of these people had never heard of Signal before in their life, and now they're using this system.

And also, we talked to folks, and people felt that, like, a certain level of transparency about the networks they're building is very useful. Yeah, we should probably address this head-on, like, just to be super clear, like everything we are sharing

is because people have implored us to share it. Right. We did not sneak in and find its information. People openly gave it to us because they wanted you to hear it. Right. Because they understand that this is the kind of system

that is currently proving effective and they want people to learn from what they're doing. And so they've created hyper-local systems, like block by block you have groups where neighbors are able to check in on neighbors

and people are able to say hey I saw this thing right? You know and so there is constant presence all over town and when I say town

we spent our time in Minneapolis but we have talked to a lot of people who say the St. Paul is doing a similar thing the suburbs are doing a similar thing even some small towns elsewhere in Minnesota I'm starting to do this

yeah I don't quite know where the town is but if people are local like a few years ago, I went to a massive rent fare here, and I've really outed myself. It's okay, I brought a cloak I must wear. And folks all the way out there are doing it too, which is, that was, that place had a rural Midwest vibe, let me tell you. And so people are doing this all over. I have never seen unity like this. No. Like, the only time I've seen a city this much in lockstep is when I was in Camislo in 2023 and, uh, Where is that?

Camichlo is a capital of what is generally referred to as Rajava, the autonomous administration of North and East Syria. And at that time, we were being bombed by Turkey. Turkey takes offense at Kurdish people having any autonomy. And this is what that felt like, because there is someone invading your town and taking your friends. Yeah. And everyone, I remember there were funerals, right?

So one bomb killed 34, SAISO, like the internal security forces. Yeah. And I remember... everyone rolled out for the funeral. Like, it was like a general strike. Yeah. And that's what it feels like here. Like, you could walk through town the day that happened and see people were sad,

and they were sharing their sadness. Yeah. And here, people are mad, and they're sharing their anger, but also their love for one another. Yeah. Even when someone was killed by ICE, this did not stop people from doing this work. Yeah. It brought more people out to do this work because people are like, no, this work needs to be done. And on some level, the scale is that, right?

Because if someone is seeking asylum, like no one runs unless they have a reason. And so sending people back to the places that they've sought asylum from often just means killing people. Yeah, I mean, let's look at the things that have happened in the last month, right? Gay men being sent back to Iran, where the punishment for that is death. People from this community, Korean people, right, being sent back to Myanmar, where we know that they are directly delivered to a military prison.

They are sending people back to Mauritania, where again, you can be punished for being queer by death. Right. Like, what is happening here is that people's lives are at stake. I think sometimes people think, oh, it's inconvenient you go out to a place where life is less, you know, you don't have a target. No, that's not the deal.

Yeah. We're sending people back to Venezuela, right? We're sending people from the U.S. to Venezuela. The U.S., notably just kidnapped. the president of Venezuela. Those people aren't going to have a nice time. Yeah. Right?

And if you were a U.S. intelligence agency and you wanted to insert people into Venezuela, that's how you would do it. Yeah, and Venezuela knows that. Venezuela, yeah, they're not that dumb, and they're very paranoid. Yeah. And they're a state which has a great deal of ability

to do violence based on that paranoia. And so people are aware of the stakes and they're between something about it. And what's cool, it's so interesting because at the same time, you know, there's a little bit of like, yeah, we're built different, and certainly around the cold. That is absolutely true. And there is all of this stuff in the history of at least Minneapolis that people have built resistance out of, right? You know, all of this very active multiculturalism going back

decades. We've talked to organizers who grew up, you know, we talked to an organizer, grew up in the American Indian movement and was talking about like black and indigenous solidarity going back to the 60s and 70s, right? And, and was saying like there's all of this multicultural and solidarity. There's also all of these like cultural events, right? They have this huge May Day parade, right? Or festival every year. It's funny, I've spent a lot of time in Minneapolis,

but I've never actually been here for this, but everyone's always talking about it. Where basically people go to this park and build puppets and build giant puppets together. But it's decentralized. And so there's all of this history of decentralized organizing. And in 2020, of course, you know, the uprising kind of began here. And people are very aware of that. And so they have all of these networks that have been built for years. And they weren't necessarily like crazy active in the intervening years.

But people know each other on some level. And that's the thing though, because we expected kind of, I expected people being like, ah, yes, they had all of these deep interconnections. And most people were talking to were like, no, I know my neighbors now. You know, six months ago. We had the, we have these like small seeds. Right? And so people here are and aren't special about that. Yeah. But do you know it is special? I can, I shut it to think, Margaret. I think what's special is the fact that you and I run anti-capitalist podcasts.

It special has a lot of meanings. Yeah. That are interrupted by advertisements. Yeah, it is different. It is a thing. And here they are. Yeah. Thank you. Please insert in a name of advertising.

advertiser here for buying us a low-grade vegan pizza, which still cost us more than $50. And we're back. I wanted to talk a little bit about the structures that exist, right? And I think probably the way to do that is to break this down into two distinct, I guess, categories. And I think these are distinct in terms of organizing for the most part, right? One is mutual aid and one is rapid response. And I just want to break down why people are doing mutual aid first, right? First of all, we're doing mutual aid because it is the way that we build a better world by taking care of one another without trying to extract profit from one another.

Why they're doing it is because people right now who are at risk of deportation are afraid to leave their homes. They are living like a lot of Jewish people lived in nuts. This is a comparison to somebody whose grandparents fled the Holocaust made. for us today, like Jewish people did in Nazi Germany, right? The difference is this time they know their neighbors have their back. Yeah. And so they're afraid to go out, right? Schools are offering remote education because kids are afraid to go to school because ICE has

been hitting school bus stops. Yeah. People can't go out and get groceries and they can't go to their jobs. So they can't pay their bills. And so that requires, if we want to take care of people, we have to feed them. We have to help them pay their bills, meet their materials. needs, get their kids educated, right? That is a heavy lift.

Capitalism extracts a pretty heavy fee for paying rent, right? We give most of our lives to capital so that we can get food and pay rent and clothes and shit. We have to do that without that here, right? And people are doing it. So they are organizing food drop-off. They're organizing diaper banks. They're organizing to give people rides who might not feel safe driving by themselves.

Yeah. They are taking people's kids. Often, right, a scenario that I'm very familiar with is citizen children born to non-citizen parents. So those kids, no one is safe when you have this many people running around with weapons, right? And very poor training and a lot of anger and, yeah, not very good at driving in the snow. But their kids are still able to go out and go to school. But it's a bad idea for the parents have taken. Right.

So you're seeing people organizing school runs. getting food for people. Then you've got businesses that are owned by migrants, right? Or businesses that are largely staffed by migrants. So it's trying to keep those places afloat so that community can continue to care for itself,

but when its workers can't come in or what if the majority of the clientele of the business of migrants? Well, maybe people volunteer to do delivery, right? So that that business can stay afloat and those migrants can still get, the foods that make them feel safe at a time when they don't feel safe, whatever it is.

Right? People are meeting each. others needs without trying to extract like financial compensation from each other. And to talk about the decentralized nature of this again, and it's like hyper-local, like no org, many orgs, but no one org stepped in and was like, ah, this is the way to do it. Here's this top-down flow chart. Instead, all of these groups started in different ways. Like we've talked to people from like different neighborhoods where like, ah, it all started like this. and then they paint a completely different picture

from people from three blocks over. Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, someone was like, the mutual aid here started with one mom who was like, well, I'm making food. Yeah. And in her own kitchen, made food. Yeah.

And then it was like, I will carry the entire weight of the world as necessary upon my shoulders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then other people were like, okay, I'll help you lift this. I think of the, Have you seen the meme about like I can't lift weights with my anarchist friends? No. I can't lift weights with my anarchist friends because every time I pick up the barbell,

like 30 of my friends come over and help me lift the barbell while singing John Henry. Yeah, that's perfect. And that's like what's happening here. And so one person starts doing this thing and people say, oh, that's a good idea. And there are these other networks that can then tie that in. and people will be heavily involved in one network and have a little bit of an understanding what's happening in the other networks.

But enough people are talking to each other that they're learning best practices, they're learning, what doesn't, doesn't work. And they're also changing to... Yeah, to meet threat. Yeah. I think the other thing is here that no one's coming in

with like tax deductible funding. Yeah. Right? This is just people taking care of people. Yeah. That has been sustainable for some time, right? Like since mid-December, we're now in late January. that is a thing that like there is a need for money

to keep making that happen and that is an area where people outside of Minneapolis can help if they want to so I just want to flag that and we'll drop some resources at the end of these two episodes and we'll probably drop at the end of the first episode and hopefully if you feel so inclined you'll be able to help financially but yeah let's talk about rapid response

ICE is not as large of an agency as they wish it was you know there's so much news about how hard of a time they're having hiring people to the point where they like hired the like the leftist journalist who was like applied as a joke you know or applied as a need here

you know and so they've they've had this surge here the flood they called it I believe of agents here and you know there's about 3,000 I think ice agents in the city I think it was metro surge here midway flood was Chicago

uh okay and they can't do that everywhere at once no so if you play video games Minneapolis is tanking Do you know the concept of tanking?

Yeah, you don't have to be a video game. You can do it in Dungeons and Dragons. I know, I know. They do. Yeah, you can tank in Dungeons and Dragons. But the actual, weirdly, I think the concept of tanking comes not from Dungeons and Dragons. Later additions, this is a nerd tangent. Anyway.

James and Margaret talk about Dungeons and Dragons. The concept is that one person stands there and takes the damage while other people heal that person. and do damage to the people attacking that person. Or like prepare themselves. Yeah. Well, in the video game version, you know, one person takes all the damage while everyone else is also helping do the damage back.

That's literally just the World of Warcraft version. But Minneapolis is tanking. The Twin Cities and Minnesota are tanking, and all of the ice agents that are here aren't somewhere else. Yeah. And one of the ways that they're making that possible is the rapid response. Yeah. And rapid response, that's what the name says, it is a way to respond rapidly, which is the other, okay, this is the other question I had coming in.

Why does this work? This was my thought. I was like, why does blowing whistles at ICE agents make them not able to kidnap people? Yeah. So I was like, does this work? And that was one of the main questions we asked people. The answer is yes. Yeah.

It doesn't work all the time. This is still a tragic situation. Yeah, yeah. Everyone involved is kind of traumatized to medium to greater degrees. I don't want to say to lesser degrees. Yeah. You know? But what happens is, is that if the ICE agents are outnumbered, they usually don't successfully abduct anyone.

Yeah. Even though they're the only harmed people in the situation, even though they theoretically, the way that police would act, being outnumbered, it helps, but it's not as much of a game changer. Yeah. with ICE being wildly unpopular, occupying force, so far at least currently, outnumbering them seems to often stop abductions. At first, I believe December-ish, the way that ICE was handling things was these big, spectacular raids that we've seen in a lot of places. 30 agents are showing up and raiding this place, right? And so if you get a call about that, a rapid response can be 20 minutes, can be 30 minutes. You can show up and you're still part of fighting a...

against this happening. And this is what's happening all over the country, right? Yeah. So ice here adapted and started moving faster and faster. Yeah. And so now often these abductions take two or three minutes. So they were like, how do we get a crowd in two minutes? And when an organizer first, like what everyone here is an organizer, when a person who does this first suggested that to me, my thought was like, well, you don't. Yeah. That's impossible. It's not. They do it. Yeah. and they do it because everyone here in Minneapolis, like not everyone, everyone, but I haven't run across too many counter examples. Yeah.

Is themselves willing to respond? Yeah. Like, and so when you hear people honking and whistles outside, you go outside. Yeah. I mean, we heard someone was mentioning that they had seen, and to be clear this morning, again, the real feel was in the minus 30s, Celsius and Fahrenheit. Which is last Friday, if you're listening to this.

Yeah, but they had said they were on a block. They heard some honking. They come outside. They were outside and cut off pajamas pants and crocs, screaming and blowing whistles. Yeah. Right? Like, and you, we saw it even when someone mistook us for ice agents, right? And within a couple of minutes, a couple of people would come, and we were like,

yo with journalists, like, long hair. Yeah. Yeah. Like, Yeah, septum ring. Yeah, exactly. Like, crusty. Like, you can see us coming.

But out of state plates. Yeah. A city is made of people. Yeah. Right? Like, the people are like, the blood pumping through the veins of a city. It's not made of buildings. Yeah.

And there are people everywhere. And when all of them are willing to show up. Yeah. Right. Or half of them. Yeah. Well, in the entire time we have seen here, the only person who has expressed any negativity about what is happening is a person in a truck

today who was honking at a large protest that we were part of in a way that was clearly adversarial. Oh, yeah, yeah. Literally won the person. He was also stuck. Yeah, he was also stuck and had been stuck for some time. And it appeared to be struggling with a merged situation that happened when, like, we actually don't know his political opinions.

We just know he was unhappy. Yeah, he was just, that's the only person I've seen express any upset. Yeah. Like, every, the person checking us out at the supermarket, the people who we have run into at coffee shops, right? Like, Randos outside the Dollar General store. People we see in the street,

but other people we see in the street, it's cold as fuck, no one's just like viving on a park bench currently. But everyone is 100% in it. On the fuck these guys page. Yeah. Like we today, we heard about an ice vehicle

that crashed into a pole. And this is actually fairly common, I believe, because one, they don't know how to drive in ice. Yeah. And Minneapolis is icy. And they were driving like a, I don't know whether the vehicle was all wheel drive or not.

It was a Ford Escape. Yeah, but it, it was some not all-terrain tires. Yeah, no, those were pretty, those were some California ass ties. Yeah. And it's just crashed into a pole in a, like, pretty impressive way. Like, they had to be going at a decent speed. Yeah, they'd both airbags had deployed. The radiator was done.

The engine block was, you know, like, they'd crumple the front of the car. it's because they drive erratically when people are driving behind them to try and get rid of them and they are driving ill-equipped both skill-wise and vehicle-wise yeah and so we showed up an hour and a half after the crash they just abandoned the vehicle there they came and got some of their stuff out of the car tossed some tear gas yeah tossed some tear gas we saw the canister on the ground of

c s gas and they just left it there and they were not going to clean it up I don't believe they will ever clean it up. That'll be on the local police or whoever, you know. Yeah, city. And we're standing there, and a guy drives by, and he's just a normal man. Yeah, yeah. No distinguishing features. Man in van.

Yeah, no belief to be a subcultural or lefty or someone drives by and is like, oh, shit, is everyone okay? And I was like, oh, that's a nice vehicle. And he just starts laughing. He parks his car. He gets out. He's taking pictures. Yeah, yeah.

And this happens over, and this must have been happening over and over for an hour to half. Yeah. What else I noticed then was like, so we were walking up and this person popped out of their house and was like, hey, what's happening? We were like, oh, I spiffed it into this pole. Yeah. And they were like, okay, if you guys need anything, like, I'm here, I'm taking care of some kids or an elder. I can't remember. But they were like, you need to come in the house, it's cold, just come to come knock on the door.

Like, you need a hot drink, you know, like. And we're more press. We're not like, hello, we are the. activists, you know? Yeah. Like, you know, to be clear, I'm wearing a helmet, Mark, we're both wearing helmets with big blue press patches on them. Yeah. So one of the things I noticed is like, and it's been repeated a bit and then reported on a little bit like these 3D printed whistles, right? Yeah. One of the ways that people identify someone were saying, that they'll know you're cool, it's like people are all carrying whistles around the next. Like almost, I was just keeping an eye on

this as we met people throughout the last few days. Everybody had a caribular. being with their keys and a whistle on it or a whistle around their neck or there was a whistle on a lanyard on their wrist it's like a little marker and what's interesting is we've talked to people about how the beginning and a lot of people are like this seems kind of silly yeah right you're like oh they're the federal i mean they're the gestapo right yeah yeah and we have whistles and so it seems so absurd yeah but there's so many parts of it they hate they want to operate in secrecy Yeah, yeah. We see watchers on every corner.

We don't see ice. Like, this is a city under occupation, but it's like visibly under occupation by its own defenders. Yeah. Right? It is like infiltrated by federal agents. Not like you don't, you know, I've been in places where you have like the police rolling around

and their tank things with tires. Yeah, bad cats. Yeah. And like, this isn't that because they can't actually express much force they can't even be seen as they go. They're trying their very hardest to hide, right? They have tinted vehicles. They cover their faces.

They keep getting different rentals so people can't recognize it. Yeah. Like they are trying their best to blend in and failing. Yeah. And everyone having a whistle. So not only is it effective

because it draws attention to them, it makes you a defender. Yeah. It's a very cheap and easy way. you hand some a whistle and you're handling them responsibility you're saying like you are now it's like I mean he's handing some of their goddamn sword you know it's like night fantasy land way right yeah like you're one of us when we take care of each other and you are going to defend people yeah and you're going to defend people by casting these people like it's so interesting because I'm so used to thinking like

power doesn't need to hide right like yeah you know and when journalists are like oh well what they really fear is is the truth and you know, I'm like power doesn't need to hide but the power is not with the folks driving around in occupying the city right now

the more relevant power is with the folks standing on street corners who don't feel the need to hide who aren't afraid, right? And like, this is part of why I hate saying things like this, I think we're gonna win.

Yeah. And I haven't felt that way in years. and like, I think that this spirit, the spirit that is animating this city is the thing that will get us through it. And when I say when conditions are all weird and hard, and we're going to lose a lot of people. Like, we're going to lose a lot of...

Yeah, like, we're having people off the street here every day to try all of this. Because when I'm like, oh, people are stopping so many abductions, there are also, everyone we've talked to has stop abductions and failed to stop abductions. and fail to stop abductions. And that haunts a lot of them, I think. I think so too.

And, yeah, people are really torn between those two things. Yeah, I'll just say that, like, as someone who's been in it for a minute when it comes to, like, advocacy for migrants, right? Yeah. If I go back three years ago to 2023, it was 100 crusties and anarchists and Quakers and Sikhs, who were feeding thousands of people in the desert, right? Yeah. And in a big city, a metro area of 3 million people 45 minutes away, people didn't believe me when I told them it was happening

because nobody gave a shit to include the local media. And then I was in L.A., right, in summer this year. Yeah. And there were young folks there who were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, right? And did really inspiring stuff. Did really inspiring stuff and very brave stuff. And so many of them were those kids who are in that situation

where they are citizens and their parents are not. Yeah. And they believe in the right to freedom of expression and speech, and they came to use it, right? But I could walk five blocks from there, and it could have been any other day in L.A. Right? Yeah.

I went to a fancy coffee shop. I overpaid for a coffee. Because the white people didn't give a shit, you mean? Or it didn't do a shit. No, you're right. But they cared. I think they cared. A lot of people say, oh, it's terrible what's happening.

Yeah. But, you know, some people spoke to me about their film script. It's L.A., right? That's a given. But it. did not feel like the city was locked in. This feels different to that. Yeah.

It feels more locked in than it even felt in 2020. Yeah. Because everybody sees this as an external thing. Yeah. But do you know what doesn't like doing ad transitions right now? It's me. I don't actually like doing it, but that is my job. And here's some ads.

And we're back. The external threat part is really fascinating and is like a key to a lot of this, I believe. Yeah. You know, the difference between the tone of 2020 where it was this nationwide internal threat. This is still absolutely present, right? All of the problems from 2020 are still here and bigger. Yeah, it's 40 millimeters at a hospital. Yeah, earlier today.

Yeah. And we watched them arrest a lawyer. Yeah. And we'll get to that. But the thing I've been thinking about, is that in protest movements, you often say things like, oh, it radicalized you, or I got radicalized by this. Yeah.

This isn't radical. Even though it's higher stakes, more risk, like, it's not radical to say, man, I don't think you should kidnap literal children, you know? Yeah, it's very normal. Yeah. Which is why very normal people are very pissed off. Yeah. And like, and one of the things has come up from multiple people, you know, and the internet

commenters will say, well, then why'd they vote this way? And that's just a, that doesn't get us anywhere. Yeah, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. We've talked to a bunch of people who are like, oh yeah, that Republican business is closed for the general strike. Or my neighbor who is very conservative is pissed as hell. Yeah. I saw a sign today and we'll get to the big protest. I sorry, what would Ronald Reagan do? Yeah. The person, right, so this person has not just thought that. Yeah. They have got out their pens and paper and their crafting supplies. Yeah.

They've made that sign. They've got their ass down to the middle of town, and it is minus 10, minus 15. And they are out and about with their what would Ronald Reagan sign because they have that pissed off. And no one's mad at them. Yeah. Because at a certain point, it doesn't matter. Yeah, like, I'd rather they were here. Yeah.

Like, exactly. And, like, the thing I've been thinking about a lot is that glad you're here gets so much further. than what took you so long. Yeah, 100%. And there just is a line, the federal government has crossed it, and the more people who are aware of that, the better. Yeah. I think it's really important that part of the organizing here

has been so wide and so inclusive and so broad and yet so focused, right? Yeah. It's so focused on keeping their neighbors safe, and thus it can be so broad because most people think that's the right thing to do. That is what is allowing them to do this right now. Yeah. And it doesn't matter where someone was yesterday or in November of 2024

if they're on a street corner today looking out for their neighbors. And I'll say that I'm not going to name them, but to shout out, part of the reason I'm here is that, like, someone I know who I don't know if they have a political ideology to their name, just a young queer person I know was talking to them a couple weeks ago, and they were telling me about how, you know, I didn't understand the scope of the rapid response networks. It's hard to see from outside.

Yes, it is, yeah, yeah. And necessarily it's something that people don't always talk about to everyone, right? Right, totally. And so, you know, talking to this person, and they're like, oh, earlier today, I, you know, went and stood in front of an apartment building because of ICE. And I was like, your apartment building? And they're like, no, about a block away. And I'm like, okay.

And they're like, yeah, I just wanted to go stand out front to make sure ice didn't get in. And I'm like, okay. I don't quite understand, you know, and then they're like, oh yeah, and I, you know, I go to the hotels where ICE are at and me and my friend sit there and write down license plates. And I'm just like, and I'm imagining this is just like an activity they're doing. Yeah, yeah, right. I don't quite understand, you know, but I'm like, why are you doing it, right? And not that, not that it's a, it's an obvious answer on some level, but they're like, because I told myself, I was someone who would do what's right. Yeah. And I think then in all of our hearts, we tell ourselves that when it comes down to it, we do what's right.

And, like, you know, people are like talking about, like, comparisons between now and Nazi Germany and the rise of fascism. And they're like, you know, there's the meme about, like, how you all ended up fascists. You're failing an open note test. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Minneapolis isn't failing the open note test. Yeah, yeah. They are like passing with flying colors, right? Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I think, you and I are both history appreciators. And history has taught us a lot, right? The big coalitions do better than small one or ones are fracturing two million pieces. Like, leadership isn't what we need. Participation is what we need. And yeah, you see a lot of it in action here. And like all of us, right, like anyone who's spent any time reading, writing, learning, listening to history, whatever, has thought, what would I do?

what we're finding out is that yeah we're not alone and having thought what would I do and most people have said well I wouldn't be one of the ones who did something and so they're doing something yeah and I think about maybe the my last thought for today

is that when ice abducts people which they do every day yeah do they just disappear people right they just show up they pull someone over literally just for being brown to be really 100% transparent yeah like the the police have come out and been like,

could you please stop pulling over all of the brown cops? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when they pull someone over, they just take them, and they leave the car, sometimes running, sometimes in drive, and just drive away. And I was like, are we walking into a ghost town?

Are we going to see this everywhere? And like, in my three days here, I haven't seen the abandoned vehicle except the ICE abandoned vehicle that they crashed. But it is happening every day, and we have talked to people who see it every day. And a very common activity is the ghastly

approaching an abandoned vehicle, abandons the vehicle that has been deoccupied. The person for the vehicle has been stolen. Yeah. And trying to figure out who the fuck it was and going through and finding the information to contact,

people's loved ones and say like hey your your wife has been stolen yeah you know and like and that and we were talking to you know a decent number of the people that we talked to about this were Jewish

and they're you know talking about like this is what my family told me about yeah you know and like that was one of the first things that someone told me that really made me cry this whole thing has been like really challenging all my cynicism and detachment from from hard things

but hearing those stories and then just seeing the people who do that which could be anybody yeah because people step up it's uh god i just i i i say i can only imagine it you know but it like that is a daily reality here is someone was just stolen. Yeah. A person was just stolen and I have to go through their effects to figure out who they were. Yeah.

I guess when we were speaking about that, I was thinking about experiences I've had in the desert, right, where you find someone's bag. Yeah. As they're walking through and it's got too hot, they've taken off their bag and you go through all the little ephemera, the little things that people thought were worth carrying across the world. and you try to piece together their life and work out who they are and you look at pictures of their children and you look a picture to their spouse and their home and you hope that they're okay right like and in this instance they're not okay yeah right and it's not the abstract violence of the structures of borders and walls and surveillance that have killed them or taken them in this instance right it's five people in masks in a car over there

yeah and it's happening in the middle of cities where people can see it right part of the function order is to take the violence away from where people can see it. And they got away with that for so long that they figured they could just bring it into cities. And it makes my heart so proud that when people could see it, they said, fuck, no, you're not doing this in my town. Yeah. Because for so long, I've believed that if people could, like, the reason I'm a journalist, right? The reason that I have spent the better part of 10 years, like, I'm, like, receiving trauma, is because I, I really believe in my heart that people could, if people could see the cruelty, they would care and they would do something.

Yeah. And like, this confirms that for me, right? Right. People can see it and they have cared and they have done something amazing. Right. And that makes me so proud of them. Yeah. The Paradise Built in Hell, as Solnit put it.

Yeah. You know, people are finding community in a really active way. and learning what people can do for each other. And the levels in which people are plugging in, you know, there's the whole long-standing cliche that for every frontline activist, there's 10 support people. Yeah.

And you're like, well, here it's, those lines aren't so clearly delineated. Yeah, yeah. Because on some level, you know, we've talked to people who have been like, oh, my neighbor who, you know, has so many mobility issues that they can't leave their house.

Yeah. They're just hanging on the front porch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because the front line comes to you, right?

Yeah, like we talked to someone earlier who was pepper sprayed this morning while walking their dog. Yeah. You know, because while walking their dog, they witnessed, masked agents stealing a person. Yeah. Well, I'm about to do it for part one. Yeah. It could cool people here. Mm-hmm.

And we'll be back on Wednesday. day or whenever it, we actually don't know what the scheduling is going to be of this particular episode. Yeah, we'll be back in the subsequent episode of the podcast feed you're listening to. That's right. That's right. And, yeah, you're going to final... Let me say this, right?

I was really sad when I came here because my friends were dying, Rojava. Yeah. And I wish I was with them in a strange way. Yeah. Because I know the sense of togetherness they feel. And I felt that here and that was really special for me because I would struggle to be dealing with this alone. Yeah. And we're going to talk a bit more about rapid response stuff.

And there's also just to point some articles people's way. There's a series of articles that came out from crimethink, which is crimethink.com, that have talked about some of the structures of rapid response networks. And people here are putting together a lot of resources about what they have and have learned and we're going to be talking about some of those things that people have learned and things like that. But it's really worth understanding wherever you are because you're also that person who can hang out on your front porch. I mean, not necessarily, literally you hang out on your front porch, but it's like the idea is when the entire city mobilizes, it works.

And I think that when we realize that we can mobilize the entire country, it works. That's my theory. Yeah, see you all soon. Hi, friends. It's me, James. I'm back, and I'm back because we ask some people on the ground if they could provide us with some links to places where people could donate that have been vetted that they knew would be going to people, helping people on the ground. And they provided us with a lot of different links. So I'm going to tell you what each of these links are, and if you'd like to donate, you can just scroll on down whichever app you're using to the podcast show notes,

and you can click one of the links below. So there's rent support for neighbours in Phillips, rent support for neighbours in Central, rent support for neighbours in Powderhorn, supplies for political art making, protective gear for legal observers, diapers and menstrual supplies. There are abolish ice t-shirts that you can purchase.

There is a fundraiser for North Star Frontline Street Medics and the Twin Cities Swalertiary at Bail Fund. There are links for both of Benmo and Cash App donation there. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike Delarocha, host of Sacred Lessons.

This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures were taught. to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship

with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Dolorotia on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Delocha and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years, writer, where I could not say your name.

I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a bitch to come around here in my wife. Boom, boom, this is the red weather.

Listen to the red weather on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman.

And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. your podcasts. All right, son. Time to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school. Oh, did you now? Okay. What's first? Smoky Bear said to... First, drown it with a bucket of water,

then stirred with a shovel. Wow, you sound just like him. Then he said, if it's still warm, then do it again. Where can I learn all this? It's all on smokybear.com with other wildfire prevention tips, because only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your State Forrester and the Ad Council. Hi, friends. It's me, James, and I just wanted to explain, as you're listening to this, we recorded this around midnight on Friday after having spent, I think, three days, four nights in Minneapolis. And the tone of what we recorded here is hopeful. I remain hopeful and inspired by the people we met in Minneapolis,

and I remain so proud of everything they've done. But about nine hours after we sent this off, to our editors, Alex Prattie was killed by two Border Patrol agents. And the tone of this would have been different if we had recorded after that. And that's just the nature of the work we do. But we don't want anything in the hopeful tone here to suggest that we don't grieve his passing, that we aren't thinking of the people who loved him right now, because we understand that they're going through a very difficult time.

But we still want you to learn from what's happening in Minneapolis. and for what people are doing there. And we hope that you remember that as you go through this episode. And I think that honestly, those two things that we have to balance, just as we deal with the state of the world, is just, you know, everyone we talk to, this was so present on their minds, is both an awareness of the beauty of the things that they are building

and also an awareness of the darkness that has caused them to need to build these things. But anyway, we hope you enjoy these episodes and are following more closely with more current news about what's happening and are talking to the people around you, wherever you are, about how you will keep yourself and your neighbors safe. And yeah, thank you. Hello and welcome to Cool People Could Happen Hear It, a podcast, which is what happens when two podcasts love each other.

And go to Minneapolis, go on a trip, remember Minneapolis in the winter. Yeah, where it is cold. I am one of your hosts today. My name is James Stout, and I am very lucky to be joined by my friend Margaret Kiljoy. Hello, welcome to the thing that we're doing. Should we talk about today?

We talked last time about some rapid response in mutual aid, and there's more to be said about that. Yeah, today is the 23rd. Yeah, it's the past for you all. But it's present for us. Yeah. It's amazing. podcasting works like that.

Today was the second realish, real general strike I've been to in my life. Yeah. First one was in Oakland during Occupy. Okay. They pulled off a pretty serious general strike. Thousands of us shut down the ports. It was really beautiful. Oh, yeah, that was post.

Today, no one had to shut shit down, really. No. With the exception of the federal building, which we will discuss. Yeah. It's been remarkable. We've been here today. It's Friday. How just the momentum has grown, like, see,

We went past some place. I think it was like a place that repaired like electronics or some description. They just had a little thing being like, attention, we're not opening on Friday. Yeah.

Like it's these businesses which have no reason, you know, like these outward facing reasons to, you know, it's not even businesses which rely on the community for business

and have to signal the community that they're with them, right? It's just people who are being like, yeah, nah, not, you know, like,

that seems like, give a shot. Yeah, let's, we got to do something. Yeah. let's all close down and go protest. One thing that I was sent,

didn't share this with you, Margaret, because I'm unkind, was a list of businesses that were like, yo, we will not be participating in, like, profit making today. But if you need X, that's what we do,

come by. Yeah. Like, if you're hungry, if you're cold, if you need a cup of coffee, if you need a bicycle fix, whatever it is. Like,

if you want a screen print, abolish ice on a shirt, swing by. Like, we'll just be opened up for the community, say hi. Yeah.

Like, we don't want your money. We just want your solidarity. Like, I thought that was cool. And on some level, it's been happening for a while to like to talk about how yesterday we went to Powwow Grounds.

Yeah. Right? There is a indigenous own coffee shop called Pow Wow Grounds. They're actually worth donating directly to because they're mutual aid projects. That'll probably be in the list of things that we include. And you go in and the coffee is free now. And, you know, we were like,

well, we want to pay you for tea. And they were like, you can pay us for tea. Yeah. And we were able to like put some money. behind in case someone else came in and needed some. Right. But the entire space has been taken over by a

mutual aid organization. And it's, you know, indigenous run. We talked to someone from AIM, American Indian movement. Yeah. About the work they've been doing there. And, you know, which is that they've been, you know, basically just turning it into like

making sure everyone has everything they need. Yeah. By creating these places that are good to hang out in, you make really good rapid response places. Yeah. We, you know,

this is the first person we heard from about just like, I was like, how does this work? How does the rapid response work? I was like, well, there's more of us

and there are them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can keep showing up. And, yeah, so like, you know, people are,

people are hanging out there. And so, you know, and it's right in a place where ICE likes to fuck with people. Yeah. Well, it's like,

for people who aren't familiar with that block, right? Like, I've read a lot about aim. Yeah. I'm interesting. Like Franklin Avenue,

I believe, That's an understanding with community watch, which is what's happening now. Yeah, exactly. We're doing patrols to keep their community safe. Yeah. It's a cool little full circle movement. Yeah. This is a space which is obviously designed to like center and protect indigenous folks.

Yeah. But they were just like, yeah, anyone who's out there doing the work, please come by. We got snack packs for you. We've got this little earmuffs we made. We've got four different soups, got a vegan soup, got a gluten-free soup. Like they were more than happy for folks to come by, get fed. Yeah. Get warm.

Yeah. A big thing here. People, you know, sort of make light of, you know, there's the whole quip that really works on me, which is the like ice made the classic Nazi mistake. They invaded a winter people in winter. And that's true. But it is exceptionally cold right now. Yeah.

Like, we last night, I think due to an error on my part, were locked out of the place we're staying. Yeah. I think it's fairly clear that I fucked up there. Yeah. It's fine. It becomes a risk to your well-being pretty quickly. To put it in other way, how cold it is. Today, I took the battery out of Margaret's vehicle and blew hot air from a hair dryer on it for some time.

Yeah. So a jump would work. Because a jump wouldn't work without also heating up with the battery. The battery didn't have enough coal cranking. Yeah. Despite being a brand new battery. Yeah. You need different tires for your truck.

You do different oil for your vehicle. You need your battery to be warm. Yeah, people have engine block heaters for gas engines. I don't even have a diesel. Okay, so this morning we knew as the general strike, we went and got enough supplies to have enough food without having to go shopping today. And, you know, we get up.

We knew that there was going to be a direct action this morning at the Whipple building. And the Whipple building is, oh, I wish, once this whole thing is scripted, you'll understand all this better. But there is a building that used to be a fort. and it was a fort in ye oldie, even more murder of indigenous people times.

And it was the fort from which they would go out and capture people. And that is what it is again. It is the center of the ice operations here. It is where everyone is taken, both citizen and non-citizen, for processing. And there's like one way in and one way out. And there have been people, I keep talking about, we were talking about this hyper-local rapid response.

Yeah. There's been people at the Whipple, building at this crap of a place with one way in and one way out. I mean, this place is a fortress house building. Yeah. Right. Where it's real easy to kidnap people because the kidnap place is right there. Yeah.

There have been people there are basically every day. Yeah. And like just blatantly being like, we are here to track you all. Anti-ice people have been there every day. Yeah. So there was a call to go to it this morning. And so we did. And, you know, as press.

Yeah. And he did not get there on time. Because my car would absolutely not start. Yeah. Yeah. But multiple people came to rescue us. Yeah, yeah. Like, multiple people showed up to help out of towners who aren't even core of, we weren't there to get stuff done.

We're just here to talk about it. Yeah, yeah. Like someone came to office a jump. Someone else was like, hey, did you get a jump? Yes. Someone was like, do you want to ride? Do you need to borrow my vehicle? Yeah.

And these weren't people we've known very long. Yeah. The longest we'd known these people was since Tuesday. It's Friday. And so people come up, get the vehicle working, we drive there. And the whole time, both of us are moderately outdoorsy people, right? To put it mildly in your case and to be accurate in my case. And we spent the whole time be like, do we have enough gear?

Do we have enough winter gear? You know, we both have these new insulated boots we got for this trip. And like I live in the mountains. You were a literal sports person. Yeah, I enjoy to be in a mountain. When I have time, I will go into the mountains and sleep outside. Yeah. It is cold.

It is like... It was cold. You know, there's a cold when your nose hairs freeze when you breathe in. And then there's a cold when you're like, my eyes are like actually icing over. Yeah. Like, this is alarmingly cold. Is the coldest day here since 2018 or 2019 is what we learned? Yeah.

And, you know, when I talked to my friend before I came, I was like, it's going to be horrendously cold. Are people still going to show up? And, you know, my friend who lives here was like, well, we will, ice will be miserable. Yeah. And we saw probably 10,000 people outside today. Yeah, between the two protests, mostly the larger one. Yeah, like, so we roll up, right, and there is a small shield wall, barricading one of the ways that ice gets into the Whipple building to incarcerate the people who they have snatched. Yeah.

There are probably half a dozen shields and then two big corrugated steel. Which is the level of bravery of that. Yeah, that is audacious. Yeah. Because there were maybe 100 people in that whole formation, right? And the shield was facing two ways. We check it out. As we arrive, we see what we later learn was an Italian camera operator.

Yeah. They had been maced in the face. I just want to break down again. Like, we've made light of the cold and it's funny that it's cold. You get maced, right? Generally, you want to pour water on your face. Right. The clock is ticking pretty quickly once you're saying.

start pouring liquid on exposed skin in these temperatures. The clock is ticking on exposing skin in these temperatures. Any exposed skin is danger. I have this like basically bala clava that I like, I don't wear a protest. That's sketchy. Yeah. And then I'm like, oh, no, I'm going to like die if I don't wear this thing that covers every inch of my face.

Yeah. Like I have a helmet with goggles and I wasn't wearing the goggles for particularly like I didn't think I was going to get a pepperball in the eye. I needed the air not to touch my eye. So, like, this is amazing, it's serious, right? And I saw that, and I saw them pouring water, and I was like, oh, shit, actually, that's quite grave. And they actually did have a staged water truck to spray people.

They didn't spray people with water. Yeah, that's what we heard, where there was a water truck staged in the parking lot. To be clear, like, that could have killed someone. Really easily. Yeah. So then that was one entrance. We were like, let's go, go back the other entrance to see what the whole scene is here.

As we're walking. First of all, we come past someone with one of those, like, trolleys. that people pull, they have the better part of like a thousand hand in foot toe warmers. And they are stoked to be given them out, right? So we put hand warmers inside our gloves. Then we see someone who's pulled up in a minivan that is the warming car. Yeah. People do get cold.

They get in there and they warm them up. Yeah. We come around. Someone has snacks. Someone's playing public enemy. Yeah. As we come around further, we see this is the place that ice are coming in with people, right? Yeah.

And so there are people who were there shouting at them. I saw a couple of snowballs thrown. Yeah. And like, yeah, there were people who were throwing snowballs, right? But there were also folks who just turned out to be like, you know, I'm more of a, that's not my vibe. Yeah. But if you would like a snack while you're throwing them, I'm here for you. No one was like, hey, don't do that.

Everyone was showing up in their own way. Yeah. And that was really cool. Yeah. And that's like one of the things that, you know, I asked at one point, I was like, what's the like discourse like about, you know, the usual. thing that divides people about like, I'm going to use air quotes here you can't see, but violence and nonviolence, which are like complicated.

Right. You know, and there's obviously people like, we've met people who've been like, and we're nonviolent and they're like really excited and that's an important part. They were people who had yellow vests on being like peaceful observer don't shoot. Right. And then there's also people who were like, we didn't see any of it, but there's graffiti all over town. Yeah, like fuck peace, justice doesn't bring it back.

Yeah. And I was like, what's the discourse like between these groups? And everyone we've talked to is like, there isn't time for that. Yeah, we got shit to be doing. Yeah. And like, you know, even when people are discussing things, they'll try to start having a discussion. And someone's like, hey, ice is on that corner. Yeah. And not that these discussions aren't worth that. Well, I famously, my pinned post on Blue Sky's discourse is the mind killer. But like, and you can see it just like right here, right? Because there's people who are like, when you show up with shields at a shield wall at, blocking federal agents from being somewhere, you're clearly being mildly antagonistic. Right?

It is a rowdy thing to do. And at the same time, right, like we didn't make it to this because they were happening at the same time, more or less, but not very far away at the airport. We're not the news in this particular case. It could happen here is a news show,

but this is still not the news we're reporting right now. Like 150 clergy people were arrested civil disobedience because the airport's being used to transport people away. You get real quick tangent about that. I think it's really beautiful because there's so much, you know, the national press is, of course, like these anti-Christian people attack church. And you're like, no, the churches are on our side except like one or two of them.

We were staying next to a church. Yeah. And like we get up in the morning that first day we heard the honking and we see like, yeah, the church has got a sign being like, I'd notice, I shit seems bad. Yeah. I don't think it's not what Jesus would have done. Yeah. So we're at the thing and, you know, we're like, okay, this is happening.

And we start seeing the police getting ready to use munitions, right? We come back from the first place to where the shield wall was, right? Right. Shield wall is no longer there. We think, huh, weird, no shield wall. And then there's a line of police. Oh, look at that. It's Hennepin County Sheriff's Department.

Yeah. And yeah, go ahead. No, no, I mean, that's the thing. It's always really sad when you come back and expect to see a shield wall. and instead there's a line of police. Yeah. And they are yelling dispersal orders at the shield wall, which is already dispersed.

Yeah. They're like, they've been, they've been pushed away. We can't really see. Like, several hundred yards away. Yeah. Like, we just like straight up can't see them. And we are told,

and no uncertain terms, by some other folks who are standing. This is not a large crowd. The crowd has been moved. And we're just kind of, yeah, there are. There are. There are.

One, two, three, four, five, six of us. Yeah. There's six of us. And I was going, I was counting, people in my head, I can say six. No, no, you're right. And two of the people were standing next to are like, yeah, if you cross this red line, they told us that if we cross this red line, the National Guard

will shoot us dead. Yeah. And we did not test that. Yeah, I'm not sure if they would, but Neil Young had a song about it. Right. And we're not in Ohio. It would be fine. And, and... Minnesota National Guard. Yeah. And so they are not letting us go. Yeah. To be clear, the red line would have signified we were entering into like a military area. Right, totally. With no like barricades or anything like that. They had barricades further along, right? Yeah, yeah. Just to make vehicles weave so you can just drive straight up.

It's the side of a public road. We're at the light rail station. Yeah. So there's the line of police and they're mostly facing away from us. There's about two people facing towards us. Our cars between them. We are marked for us. Yeah. And wearing a bright red helmet with press stickers on it. I was wearing a blue helmet with press stickers. really black. The first, the cops keep pushing the shield wall further away from us and we hear them

on the LRAD. This has been declared an unlawful assembly. I did hear somebody shout, by who? That is a very good question. Honestly. Yeah. Unfortunately, the Hennepin County Sheriff Department were not very interested in answering questions. Yeah. And the way that we learned this is that a couple of people, I would call them older folks just from looking at them from a distance. They weren't the young rowdy's holding shields. They were absolutely not. No, it was an older gentleman in a male presenting person in Carrards. Yeah.

Right? Who walked up. Coveralls. Yeah. With hands up. Yeah. Very clearly hands up and seemed to be asking or talking. Yeah, it was like probably going up to being like, hey, what's happening?

Yeah. Like whatever. Yeah. Can I go over there? That person was arrested. Yeah. So was another person who was with him. Yeah.

And they were told they were arrested on the LRAD. We could hear them. Yeah. You are under arrest. Yeah, that was very strange. Yeah. Then a bus arrived. More cops got out.

Yeah. And those two people were put on the bus. Yeah. Three people. There's three of them. Three of them. Three of them put on the bus. Yeah.

Okay. The majority of the police then turned to face us. Yeah. All six. By now there's probably 12 of us. Yeah. Because other people are like, hey, my car's over there too. Yeah.

Because they're in between us and where we part of cars right now. Yeah. And then they turn the LRAD around, right? Yeah. And then they tell us that they have issued a dispersal order due to some thing, about like a legal conduct. Yeah. Which again,

we are standing on the platform of a light rail station at this point and I have seen no one do anything other than stand around. I've seen someone through a snowball but that was somewhere else. We're in a different location and then they say we have five minutes to disperse

and they give us a cardinal direction. Yeah. We have to disperse east. On to a road that no one with us knew what was. Yeah. We're all looking like where to... We're in a kind of weird maze of barricades.

I had previously tried to walk up to this line and be like, can we go through to our car, please? Yeah, we would like to disperse. Yeah. Because at this point, we're like, this is just going bad. Yeah. We're maybe under arrest now. Yeah.

Right? We're here to report. And if we get arrested, we can't report. Yeah. And there's nothing to report on. Yeah. Because the cops have cettled us with two other press. Yeah.

The rest of the Italian news crew. Yeah. Who now don't have a camera. Yeah. But brave as hell. because they're just still standing there and they're like, you know, thick Italian accents and they're just like, our camera person got maced. Yeah, they'll be fine, but they got maced.

Yeah. And so the cops had very clearly indicated that they were not interested in that arrangement. So we went back to standing there wondering which way was east. I was trying to get under my layers to my watch so I could pull up a compass. I had figured out which way was east. I even had a suspicion about how to go that way, but I am willing, I believe, from talking to other people who were elsewhere there that day? That day. Today, this morning, it's been a long day.

I don't normally drink caffeine. I am on caffeine. I believe that is where the other line of police was starting to kettle people from. So I actually believe they were not actually offering us a way out at all. Yeah. I, on the other hand, just realized I couldn't get to my watch. I knew it was before noon, so I was looking for where the sun was.

Yeah. Gonna do some celestial navigation. And at that point, we saw, Well, actually, at that point, we went to the train platform, and a light rail train was going not towards our car, but away from it. But it didn't open the doors when it came to the platform. We were like, we want to go, though. I said, Margaret, we're fucked. Yeah.

And Margaret said, get ready to run, I guess. Yeah. And then as they were advancing towards us, Comrade light rail train arrived. Everyone got on the train. Literally last minute. Yeah. I just scootle straight past the police line. And then we got off and commenced walking around to try and find a way back to our vehicle.

So that was our morning. That was, I mean, whatever. We are the parties least affected. But to be like really just transparent about it, this is the coldest day of my life. I've experienced negative temperatures before. Yeah. I haven't experienced negative 30-something wind chill. Yeah.

Like we were seeing people getting off. the light rail, everyone's eyelashes had frost in them. Yeah. Anyway, just to keep hitting that point. Well, like, that was one of my concerns with detainment, right, with like cops, legendary don't treat people in their custody very well.

Right. And I was very worried about that two, they did seem to be getting the people there arrested quickly on that bus. Yeah. But, like, that was one of my worries. Right. You get to, if you lose a glove when you're being handcuffed, that's not a, that's, you know, that's serious. Yeah, that's, that's, you know, that's serious. Yeah,

It's like maybe you lose your fingers now at the end of that. Like, it's like genuinely like a, I know we keep harping on it, but it's just, it's a, it's a massive risk characteristic. Yeah. My car's a mess right now because we can't clean it because that involves standing outside in like negative 18 or whatever the fuck. All of these numbers have become meaningless to me at this point. Anyway. You know what keeps me warm, Margaret? The handwormers we purchase with the money that we get from advertisements?

Yeah, I was going to say thinking about, uh, thinking about how the products and services that support the show, love to support me and the work I do. But I don't think they actually know what I do. I think it's look at our listener numbers, to be honest. Yeah, I think they don't hear our ad transitions. Maybe they're in trouble. I'm almost certain they don't.

And here they are. And we're back. So we go to this and then we go to the clear highlight of the day, which is the ice vehicle crashed into it. Yeah, this is when we decided, we got to, we received word that an ice vehicle had teaboned telephone. Yeah. Yeah, I was doing a blue sky thread and I was like, nope, that's a shorter thread because we got to go. Yeah. I'm not as good as Marga is at skeeting while I'm at things. So I'm so used to being in places where it would be a risk

to where everyone involved posted I was there. Yeah. So yeah, we go, right? We park a few blocks away once we see flashing lights. Yeah. We start boogeying up the street at fast walk pace, which is about as fast as you're going to go when it's an inch of ice on everything. Yeah. And we see this car that has There's traffic coming roundabout that clearly they were not expecting to be there. It looks like they've been trying to go straight over the roundabout and have... Yeah, they just... Like, the front of their car is just rash. In a 15 mile per hour street.

Yeah, yeah, like a street where, like, you would expect a child to be riding a bicycle in the summer. Yeah, and it's like, it's one of those streets that's like cars on both sides. One lane that... Yeah, the one lane that two cars have to pass each other by backing up. Yeah, and they clearly just blew through it. I don't give a fuck. And that's like a thing we've heard over and over from the people who, who tail them is that they,

they drive erratically, they drive, they drive recklessly because they are, they think they are immune to all consequences. Yeah. And they are. They are until someone, like the only people giving them consequences are the people of the city. Yeah.

Not the city itself or the state. Yeah. This is a thing, actually, I'll just, I have spent more time than nearly every one. one at the southern border United States in more places, right? In California, in Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona, I've been up and down the border. There is one thing that unites the border experience, be it on Tor Nardtum reservation in Arizona, be it in San Diego, be in New Mexico, or in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas,

and it is that Border Patrol's driving is a risk to everyone. And you can hear the most straight-up right-wing people have thought, I love what they're doing, I don't want the migrants in my country, but I wish they wouldn't drive like dicks. And they've killed people on the autumn reservation, right? Like, this is serious. And what is happening, once again, is that the border is coming to a city and people are seeing this is not new, it's new here.

The driving erratically is such a perfect, though, example of, like, what power does to people. Like, you have an unaccountable force and they will do horrible things. They will do major horrible things, like kidnapping people, and they'll do petty, I don't care. I am just drunk on power things. But they will leave the cars in drive when they pull them out, right?

It doesn't take a second to park to park. Or like... Yeah, in this case, they will case a telephone pole. Right. Anyway, so then we decided we're going to the big march downtown. Yeah. You know, because the General Strike

has a component that is a big march downtown. And the single most important thing about that to me was, again, to keep harping on it at the cold. because I know a lot of people who go to these sorts of marches, right? And these are the sorts of marches that a lot of people go to who don't necessarily do a ton of other political activity. Although here, it probably feels a little different because a lot of the people going to that march who probably are the kind of sign holding going to the big march kind of people are also quite possibly

at the very least showing up when they're whistles. Yeah, doing the work, right? They're buying the groceries, whatever it is. Like, I think one thing I was struck, so we're walking towards this march, and it is one of the things that you get this a lot when you're going to a big action, right? You feel like a salmon and everyone's just swimming up. They're swimming in the stream together or, you know, whatever, a tuna. And you're all going towards the same space. And that's cool. That's always nice to feel the size. And then we get there and it's big. Like, there's a lot of people. And it's cold. Like, I know we keep hopping on about the cold. It is cold as shit. Margaret's ear was a little bit out We were both worried about Margaret's ear You know, like

You want to ensure it Like skin coverage in these temperatures Yeah We get there and like So they're meeting in like a big square And then they're marching through the street right Yeah And there are also people on like

There are internal walkways Between buildings above the street And all of them around with people With signs or cheering and stuff Yeah And the thing I noticed as we got there It was like immediately we set foot in that square We're once again being offered

Hot Coco hand warmers. There's a guy with like a, you know, there's orange insulated containers they use it like sports meats. Yeah, like a Gatorade thing. Yeah, yeah, he's got soup in it.

Yeah. He's backpacking the soup. Yeah. It's vegan and gluten-free and he's handing out soup. There are multiple people who have just set up to care for people

because it's cold and people might need caring for, right? Yeah. Like, there are all kinds of facilities there to like look after folks. Yeah. We received some hand warmers, I think you and I both took some hand warmers. And there wasn't, at least where we were like a speaker, there was some chanting.

Yeah. At this point, like, I would love to include the B-roll of chanting. Unfortunately, it was so cold that both my voice recorders refused to work. Oh, yeah. One by one, every electronic device that James brought ate shit. And I, like, you know, I'm much, you all listen to my shit. I'm much more of a vibes podcast. where I like just observe and then write everything down.

James is a proper podcaster and journalist and like, you know, as B-roll of things. Not as much today. My voice recorder, which has been through the Darien Gap, has attended to Syrian Civil War, has been to the place where the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb. She didn't make it out of Minneapolis.

It's gone to Valhalla now. Which is sad. I even tried to record on my phone, but my phone just black screened on me. It was comedy. Yeah, it was. pretty funny. When the cell phone died, it was like, previously I had been to paint a picture fuel using my nose to unlock the phone and then like actuate apps because I didn't want to take my

glove off. We would take turns taking our hands out of gloves to touch buttons on things. Yeah, or to like adjust each other's clothes or like, yeah, someone watched me doing the phone thing and they just gave me a nod like, yeah, doing the nose phone. Yeah, yeah, totally. And like, I don't know, I just, I keep talking about how the sense of togetherness, it's inspiring. Like, full disclosure, I'm not a big rally person. I'm much personally more interested in mutual aid and direct action. I'm disinterested in it when it seems like a way for people to check off that they've done their resistance. Yeah, definitely.

If that feels like you're warm, fuzzy and that's all you want. But in this case, it was more, I don't know for certain, it was more of a warm, fuzzy, or people who are also just doing this hard thing day in and day out. It felt like when you and your friends, like when you're doing a hard, long, mutual aid thing, right? You know, like, or let's say you're engaged in a project that feeds people every week. Yeah.

And once a year you get together and have a dinner together, right? It felt a bit like that or like, you know, a little bit, like when we were feeding people in the desert, we would sit down afterwards and I was talking about this with someone today. We would, like, eat vegan MREs out of the packets, like people eat goguts. Yeah, because we were too tired to warm up our food, but we were hungry. Yeah. But we would just spend a little bit of time in community and celebrate what we'd done.

What was cool, though, was like sometimes after those big actions, you feel a little lonely. Yeah. But, like, it felt like that was just everyone going over there, but, like, there was also everyone elsewhere as you kind of went around the city, you know? Right. Like, it didn't. It wasn't like that was the end of it. Yeah. And I was worried it would, you know, draw people away from other things.

But, you know, even this huge crowd was only a tiny portion of the people. They're doing things in the city and people are still doing things. And at one point, I was like, hey, it's, maybe it's Thursday. We were like, hey, we saw less people out today. Yeah. Was that because the cold was starting to drive people inside? And we talked to someone and they were like, no, ice was less out today than it was yesterday. But if ice had come out, all of those people would have come out again.

They were all staged and ready to go. And one of the things, actually, the warm, fuzzy thing, that feeling, one of the things that we talk to is that people are, very aware that they're organizing for the long haul. Yeah. You know, I, again, I'm, I don't have the news in front of me, but the word on the ground here is people being like, we think ICE might be here until June. Yeah. Right. And so people are like, how do we do that? Yeah. And one of the things is that, like, there are people providing things to the people doing things. You know, the people whose job is to provide things for other people or having people provide things for them. Yeah, yeah. And there's this moment I think about all the

time, I'll accidentally do like the, you know, I was at this protest in the Netherlands and the cops try to grab my friend. Yeah. And they try to grab him because he's screaming, the Netherlands is a police state, which they try to make their point by trying to grab him. Yeah. Right. So everyone holds on to him. Yeah. So the cops start just beating the crap out of the people holding on to him. Yeah. So people start grabbing onto the people who are holding on to the person. They start trying to beat the people who are holding on to the people who are holding on to the people. By the time it gets to like four layers of, out. The cops are just like, yeah, fuck it. Yeah, fuck this. All right. The center person is never

arrested, you know, and that's what solidarity is. Yeah. But that's also a lot of the mutual aid stuff. Like, you know, we're talking about people who are like, yeah, we work day in and day out on this stuff. And other people are, like, massage therapists and regular therapists are talking with us, you know, and like, people are building the infrastructure to try and make it sustainable. And who knows? I don't know whether you can truly sustain what's happening here, right? But like, they're going to fucking try.

Yeah. The way I like to explain anarchism to people who, there's sometimes the confusion, right, that people think anarchism is a predilection for chaos and violence, and that's not what it is. I like to explain anarchism at its core is building ways of caring for one another that don't reinforce ways of controlling one another. Yeah. And that's what people are doing here, right? Yeah, under any name.

Yeah, it doesn't mean. The rest of it is really ephemeral. A lot of them are anarchists, but not anywhere near the majority of them. Yeah, but I think we can use what Jim Scott called the anarchist squint, right? And see us people building networks here that make the state unnecessary. Yeah. Irrelevant. Right.

And the state violence is still very much relevant. But other, right, the feds are going to cut funding. Yeah, they can cut food stamps from Minnesota. Yeah. People are still going to get food to their neighbors. Yeah. Right? They can cut education funding.

We heard that there are schools which have a very diverse background. And by diversity, I don't just mean like people of different races, but also people of different income brackets. Right. And the wealthier parents are like, which families aren't able to work? How do I help them make their rent? Yeah. Oh, God.

It was funny when people were like, oh, you know, the thing where like the rich parents are like really excited to help everyone and feed everyone. I was like, no, that you do realize that's not the stereotype. Right? Let me tell you. And like, it should be. Yeah, it should be. Well, I think folks are really like, huh, what do the world without these people look like?

Worse? I don't want that. Yeah. Like, what do I have that I can use to stop that? I have my time. I have my body. Have my money. Let me give them all of them.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was very cool. I think the specific thing that has made people, I saw little signs He had the name for one of the guys from a lot, Liam, the very, very young kid, right, the five-year-old kid with the

Superman. The one who was, yeah, grabbed the other day. I saw a lot of people with signs about that. Like, made me want to cry, even just seeing the signs. Yeah, with these little outrages continue to bring people out of their safe, warm, comfort bubbles and be like, no, like, I am going to do whatever it takes, my money, my time,

whatever, right? Yeah. You know William Van Sbronson? Yes. For people who were listening, there was an IWW member named William von Sbronson, who was killed by ICE a number of years ago now because he decided that he would go and try to set some ice stuff on fire. Yeah, middle of the night. Yeah, I think it was buses, right?

Unoccupied buses, to be clear. Yeah, middle of the night, empty buses, the buses that they're using to kidnap people. And the cops showed up and killed him. Yeah. Right. And he was seen as kind of this lone wing nut. Yeah. And I'm watching it and I'm like, this man is going to be written about history books.

It's like a guy actually started doing something early about this. And in his statement that he wrote, I'm not telling people that this was a wise action for him to have taken, whatever. Yeah, yeah. But in his statement he wrote, he wrote a line something like, I am off to fulfill my childhood promise to myself to be noble. And like, he knew he was going to die doing that action, right?

That certainly seems to be the tone from the letter. But that line, the idea of fulfilling your promise to yourself to be noble, and the thing that is beautiful here is that you can now do that with people and effectively.

Yeah. And I think that that a lot of the things that stop people from taking action is a belief that it would be shot in the dark. It would be a lone thing. It wouldn't accomplish

anything, right? Because most actions you can take by yourself don't accomplish nearly as much. And to be clear, the people who built rapid response networks here, they learned from other cities. They learn from Chicago who learned from L.A. Right? That is the lineage that I have heard presented.

But they have developed and expanded because this is actually a bigger thing than operation on ISIS part than either of those. But so people can do what we've been put on this earth to do, which is be our best selves. And I think that there's, even as hard as it is for people,

I think that there's a dark beauty, that they get to know who they are. and they get to know that they are people who will make sandwiches, you know, because that's the thing. And they will risk everything to make sandwiches. Yeah, yeah. They will risk everything to follow ice vehicles and honk it. Like, imagine following a murderer down the street going,

this man's a murderer. Yeah, yeah. This man right here shoots people. Well, not just that, right? This person has a power to kill me and not face consequences. Yeah, that's what they're shouting at people. Yeah, yeah. And everyone is shouting it at them.

Yeah, yeah. And it works. Yeah. And it's people who you wouldn't expect to people who you would expect, both together alongside each other. Yeah, I think a lot about how, like, how much things have changed in this country in a year.

Lots of it's bad, right? But like, Abolish ICE was a pretty niche position in 2020. Yeah. Let me tell you, you didn't really hear it, right? Abolish ICE is a compromise position now. That is the centrist position. Yeah, yeah. I like that is uh yeah reform ice center right yeah yeah yeah i think reform ice is some parts of the

republican party right abolish ice it's pretty much in between the two yeah the political parties haven't caught up to this fact yeah but uh they'd never do right they always take longer than everyone else but let me tell you there was uh you know what would ronald regan guy do yeah when you've lost the what would ronald regan guy do you're in fucking trouble yeah totally this country yeah and i i love how it's like we talk to a lot of people with a lot of of different political ideas. Most people didn't have a, this is my political ideology.

I am an ex. But like, you know, people are like just blunt, like, well, it would be better if the politicians were doing it and they're not. Yeah, this lady who, again, the lady said,

those are local cops, you don't have to worry about them. Yeah. A couple days later, turned out. But she was like, it would be great if our politicians were with us, but they're not,

so we're going to do it ourselves. Yeah. Like, that's all you need. That lady's done more. then your average internet anarchist who's out there fed posting every day. Yeah, totally. Right? Yeah. That's really all you need.

Yeah. Well, we're going to take one more ad break. That's all you really need is advertisements. And it goes a little something like this. And we're back. I feel warmed in my belly by those advertisements. Yeah. Hopefully you buy something that you don't need.

Yeah, I hopefully you skip past them. But yeah, yeah. You double tap the old head. phone button. It normally goes 30 seconds. See, the problem is that I like, I don't usually, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I don't have Cooler Zone media because I have Android. Yeah. So I have to listen to the ads.

Yeah, I know. So the ads come on. Just remember if you tag at I write okay, if you have any issues regarding the, that failure. That'll definitely work. Yeah. And so sometimes when I'm like, because I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm like doing like woodworking or like cleaning or doing stuff on my hands.

Yeah. And so I, like, I don't want to put down the saw in order to press the button. So I do it with my left earloat against my shoulder. That's how I skip them. Yeah, because I don't have cool as own media either. But maybe you do. Yeah. This has been a diversion about shit that doesn't bother you.

Yeah. Lucky, lucky thing. We will have a lot more reporting. This isn't the end of the episode, but we'll have a lot more reporting. about Minneapolis and the structures that people are building, and Minneapolis and St. Paul and the outline areas. Someone kind of correctly checked me on the fact that I keep saying Minneapolis is just where I spend less of my time.

Yeah, and things are different, but things are different block by block. But a lot of that we really want to kind of do write, and we're going to write scripted, but we're just really kind of in it right now and really want to talk about this. And part of the reason we want to talk about this so soon is because things happen really fast.

and just that everyone we've talked to has told us that they want people to know, you know, the horrors are getting out on some level, which is good. It is actually good that people are learning all these horrible things, but a lot of the scale of the resistance isn't getting out, and the efficacy of the resistance isn't getting out. And people want people to know because they want people to know that they can do it too. Yeah, like I saw someone had a, like, shockingly someone had a, opinion on the internet.

Someone had said that like talking about this makes it dangerous to these people. No. First of all, I think... I mean, there are things that we don't know that we shouldn't, we wouldn't say. Yeah, sure, there are things that we wouldn't ask about or that people wouldn't give us interviews about

if they thought they were dangerous, right? But like, what makes it safe is that everyone is doing it. Right. What makes us safe is that there are more of us. And what people asked us to do will share this because they are safer if you do it too. Yeah.

Right? There are tens of millions of people who are just as outraged as that older lady that we met on the first day. And what keeps that lady safe and your neighbor safe and her neighbor safe and people who you've never met safe and yourself? Yeah. And yourself is you doing it too, right? Like if it stops here, if you can't grab migrants off the street here,

then you can't grab dissidents off the street somewhere else. Right. And like, you know, we've seen all over graffiti and, you know, we saw a huge piece of graffiti at the ice building, basically. Yeah, I read it into the mic, actually. Yeah. My mic was working.

First, it came for the undocumented, and I said nothing because I wasn't undocumented. Then they came for the Somalis. And I said nothing because I was not Somali. Then they came for the activists, and I said nothing, for I was not an activist. Then they came for me. I am so grateful that we live in a generation that has read that poem.

Yeah. You know? And seemingly taking it to heart. Yeah. And more people have than I thought. And I think all the time about solidarity, you're shocked to know this. You know, obviously the moment that makes me cry on the most regular basis is, of course, the charge of the Roherom when the riders of Rohan ride to Gondor to face the... Anyway, even though Gondor wasn't there for them, where was Gondor?

part of the reason that I love solidarity so much is because I keep joking that I'm going to write the misanthropic introverts guide to socialism because like I misanthropic introvert at that heart right I also love people right yeah and I most just I love most people over there yeah yeah and I grew up not proud to say pretty self-interested right and I was like a very lost in my own head and and I'm a selfish and And I very quickly, as upon this meeting anarchists and meeting people who believed in responsibility and freedom, was like, oh, I am safer and more free and more able to express my full self if I am part of a community of solidarity. Yeah. And so even though in the immediate moment it is more dangerous, like, there's the old joke about like you don't have to be faster than the bear.

you just have to be faster than your friend. Yeah. That is the single worst idea in the world. Yeah, because then bad start eating people. Right. So if there is a monster and you can outrun someone so you think you're safe, you now have to be the fastest person. Yeah, yeah, right.

You're safe until you're not. To be part of a community that turns around and fights the monster might be more dangerous for yourself in the immediate sense. And being someone who stands up is that. It is that saying like, well, even though in the short term, it is more dangerous for me to stand up by having been participating in a society where we stand up for each other, I am safer. Yeah. And so even if that means like my literal death, like, I will have been safer, even if you get like weirdly utilitarian about it. Yeah, an aggregate, you are safer.

Yeah. And so is everyone else. And so it's not a, it's not a charity. It's a solidarity. No, like, solidarity is in a sense, is in your own self-interest because we want to live in a world where people will take care of each other. Right. Not just in case...

Union jobs pay better. You know? Yeah. Not just in case we need to be taken care of. Right. But because I often think about that. I think it's John Stuart Mill, right? Ask not for whom the bell toll.

The bell tolls for thee. Like, what he's saying there is not, what's that bell ringing? What he's saying is, I participate in humanity and so when humanity is devalued in his case talking about bell or funery bell when humanity is devalued

my humanity is devalued and therefore in this case where the bell is ringing for me I am a human and when they undermine our common humanity therefore they undermine this thing that I have and I won't let them do that because I participate in humanity

and so as it happens there's a person who's been subjected to inhuman violence. And so I will stand up for humanity. And in doing so, I will stand up for making a humanity that will stand up for me. Yeah. And, like, I think about a lot because John McCain wrote it in an obituary for the last American Lincoln Brigade volunteer. And I don't agree with John McCain on anything, really.

Yeah. Right. But I do on that. And, like, I was thinking about it today when I saw what would Ronald Reagan do guy. Yeah, because John McCain was a man who believes something. He believed things I don't agree with. Yeah, including a lot of racist shit. Yeah. John McCain clearly thought that the Lincoln

Brigadiers were on the right side of history. Right, right? And Winston Churchill's nephew fought in the international brigades. Huh. Right. Folks with whom I share very little in terms of politics, a lot of British upper class people fought in the international brigades. Yeah. They probably weren't

anarchists, but they were anti-fascists. They were better anti-fascists than the people who stayed at home and you couldn't tweet. in 1936, but they would have been if they could. Yeah. Right? Because they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Yeah.

And many of them died. Many of them are buried in Spain. A Spanish people remember them fondly. Yeah. Right. They have annual ceremonies to remember the sacrifice they made before any of the people who are attending those ceremonies are alive. And if more people had said, yeah, I'll go, right?

Like, the bell's ringing for me. Yeah. I'm not going to stand for a world where this happens. I'm going to fight for one where it. doesn't, then we might not have had the Holocaust, right? We might not have had the Second World War. We might not have had Stalingrad. And also, all the people who found Stalingrad are the reason it didn't get worse. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah. It would have been worse if people hadn't fought. Yeah, right, yeah. We had Stalingrad so the Holocaust wasn't more so that Western Europe

doesn't speak German. Yeah. Right? Like, every single one of those people who stood up to stop that probably wish that they'd stood up earlier. Yeah. And every single one of those people who stood up earlier I probably wish there more people to join them. Yeah. And I think about that a lot, right? It's not news. To anyone listen to this that I wrote my PhD under Spanish Civil War and think about it every day.

Yeah. If you wanted the non-dramatic version of all this, you're listening to the wrong two podcasts. Yeah, yeah. But I think a lot about what we should learn from that, right? I translated a piece for a zine, strangers in the tangled wilderness. Oh, yeah.

It's a publishing collective that I work with. And I translated a piece by a Belgian anarchist who's referred to as a constellation of acronyms. Charles Riddle was his birth name. Louis Mercier Vega was his name he lived with for most of his life. And he wrote this piece called Refuting the Legend, where he talks about what he feels that he owes the people who died, right? And I think about that love, like, the thing that he comes up with is that he owes the people who die the truth so that we can learn from it and do better. and he shouldn't just make them into heroes he should make them into real people with flaws

so that people can understand their flaws and they can know what we can do better and think about that a lot right so many people have gone before us so many brave people have gone before us and we owe it to them to learn right

and I think we have like when I was thinking about this when that older lady said to us oh my father wasn't the Second World War like and I think about it again when I saw the poem today like we have to learn from that experience right

and you have to stop it now, not when it comes for you. Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that we talk to multiple people who some of their families had survived the Holocaust. Yeah, the reason they were in America in many cases were because their grandparents had come here to flee the Holocaust. Who were making comparisons to that, and you're like, they're not doing that lightly.

And I feel like almost, you know, when we talk about this sort of grandiose things, I'm like, I almost feel like, I'm like, ah, we're talking about people with whistles. We're like, yeah, but we're not. I mean, we are. We're talking about people. whistles. Let's hope it stops at whistles. Right. And that is what is effective right now. And it like is,

you know, it's spreading something. And it's going to be so interesting to see what comes of this. Everything will be changing. You know, there's no reason to specifically set up everything that you all do in whatever city or town you live in exactly the same as they do it here. But there's like so many things to learn from them. And more than anything else, the thing to learn from them is like, you just show up. Yeah. It's not that every single person in the city has quit their job to do this full-time, right? Obviously, economies don't function like that. But you don't have to quit your job to walk outside your house when you hear someone yell help,

which is what is happening with whistles and honking. Yeah. Right. And just spreading a culture of we take care of each other and neighborliness, right? And that is like weirdly fundamentally. it is an American cultural idea. We're just bad at it. We've kind of forgotten a lot of it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, because obviously isolation is a big part of American individualism is a big part of it. But like, everyone's a little bit happy when they get to like, oh, you need a lawnmower. Oh, yeah.

When I get to fix my neighbor's truck. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Yeah. Get up and give someone a chain stool. And one of the things that we, to maybe kind of end on,

and the thing that I, I want to end on. You know, we were asking people like what they wish other people knew, what other people could know. And there's a couple things that people mentioned, and we'll write more about this and pop up the podcast more about this.

But one of the things that people mentioned is they wish they had started earlier about knowing their neighbors. Obviously, it wasn't too late. It's the whole like, like with any kind of preparedness, right? You wish you started out of, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, now is the best, you know, yesterday is the best time

and today is the next best time. Yeah. Right. And like just literally knowing them, not necessarily becoming their friends. Like a lot of people are like, no, I wasn't friends with them. I just sort of knew them. Yeah. And then also one of the other things that people, just as another thing, people mentioned that they wanted people to know is that when you build these networks, you need to build autonomy into them at every level. Yeah. You need to build the idea that the person who is following ICE is at the end of the day in charge of how they do that. Yeah. Like even if, you know, you know, people are like, oh, ice is over here. You can't say, everyone go do this. You can, someone can suggest that. Yeah. Right. But having built autonomy into these networks makes them so much stronger. And in an interesting way, partly because it makes them less predictable to ice. Right. Because you never know what someone's going to, what they're comfortable with and they're not comfortable with. Yeah. So like, that is,

basically a diversity of tactics makes movements strong. If they don't know how we are going to behave, they can't. And not just like, if everyone's rowdy, no. They don't know if you're going to be rowdy. And when the rowdy and non-routy support people, they support each other. Anyway, those are the kind of last thoughts I have before I actually sit down and look at all my notes

and write something real. Yeah. I think for me it's everyone here. said that like it was funny when people were like we were like how did you start organizing and they were like you know last july we had a block party and a potluck yeah and it just seemed to be just a thing until it became the foundation of this thing that exists now right yeah if there's one thing you can do it won't cost you any money it will take you a little bit of time and it will probably make your life better it is go out on your block and meet your neighbors and i know that can be hard

for people. Yeah. I know it can be scary. But we're talking like trans motherfuckers who are doing this too. Yeah. Yeah. It's people who are, who have more at stake than I do. Yeah.

Right? Like I'm the cisgender white man for people listening. The best thing you can do is start to form community. And it could be in so many ways. One thing that like I really like to do is like, I have throughout my life developed certain skills and certain hobbies. And I love to share those. with people.

You know, if there is someone in my neighborhood, they got a bike outside, they're trying to fix a puncher, I'm going to go help them because I've done that 10,000 times. Yeah. Right. Whatever it is that is your thing that you like to talk about, that you're good at, that you know about. Think of a way you could share that with people. Maybe you like to bake.

Maybe you like to knit. Maybe whatever it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't. Oh, there's people with like free hats and scarves at these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could just be the person who knits the scarves. Is that your way to contribute?

If that's your way to meet your neighbors, right? Put on a knitting circle, to put on a baking thing. I like to grow plants. I'm always growing plants and I'm stoked. When my neighbors stop by and say, hey, I really like your basil plant and I want to make. Which is how they pronounce it when they say that's here. Yeah, when they say to me, because otherwise I look at them and say, get out of my home.

You know, and if they want to make something, I give them some, right? Or if they say, hey, I just need a couple of tomatoes and I notice, of course I'm going to give them, right? Leggues, whatever that is. Your neighbor's away for a couple of weeks. Hey, do you want me to look after the house? Your car won't start. Let me jump it.

Right? I have one of those little jumper packs. I love to use a little jumper pack. Oh, yeah. If you have a tool and someone needs the tool, having a multi-tool on you is the best way to feel good all the time because someone's like, oh, I wish I had a rent or not. I wish I had a flyer's. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And there you go. Like Superman. Yeah. Do those things now. I know we hop, Margaret and I both hop on about this. But like, this. This is how you build a better world.

It starts on your block. It starts by building a better neighborhood, building a better street, building a better apartment complex. It could be hard to see people in an apartment complex. It could be hard to see people in the lift and put the look at the floor. Put a little sign up. Just be like, hey, we're going to have a pot luck. Hey, the little bit in between the pavement and the road's kind of fucked up.

Anyone else want to help me put some plants in it this springtime? You know, whatever it is that is your thing, start using that to build community because it's community that's going to get you through this. Yeah, and it's like, you know, I don't always like talking to people, but I just, when I'm in a new place,

I'm just like, hey, I just moved here. Nice to meet you. I'm so-and-so. Do you need my phone number? And I can do the kind of like, you know, I want you to my phone number because I want you to call me instead of the cops if I'm being too loud, right?

Yeah. But like, you're going to make a little bit of a faux pa in certain communities by being like, hey we should know each other. Yeah. But usually just a hey, we should know each other, isn't actually offending as many people as you think. Yeah, like, I know a lot of people don't live in cities too

or some people are like, I grew up very, very rural. Yeah. But actually, like, we had to know each other because like there wasn't really anyone else you could go to. Oh, yeah, in my mind, I'm like, when I live rural and I'm like, that's how you have to know people. Like, yeah, like I remember someone's horse fell in a wealthy of people at a swimming pool. Like, yeah.

I ain't lifting the horse out by myself. Oh, yeah. My neighbor's pig keeps walking onto my property. Yeah. It's not as big of a deal as lower is falling in, but just constantly my neighbor is like, my pig got out again. Yeah.

Like we, there were a million reasons. I'd hope you would know people anyway. But again, like, hey, I'm so-and-so. I just moved here. I just wanted to say hi. Maybe you bake something,

whatever, take something over. Most people aren't going to be mad at you. Yeah. Well, that's kind of our preliminary stuff. and we're going to be doing so much more with it, but we just kind of wanted to get some ideas out while we were both in the same place

in this shockingly beautiful city around people who are so fucking inspiring. Yeah, yeah. Everyone we talk to is so inspiring, even if the, like, the tragedy of it, you know, I feel so weird being like, here's the hopeful stuff when I'm like, we're describing a horrible thing.

is the land of kidnappers. Like, it's just like literally kidnappers have descended upon the city and we're like, you're just going to kidnap people. When you put your taxes this year, that will fund the kidnappings. Yeah. For cool people did cool stuff.

That's the core idea of the show is that when people, you know, it's the intro, when people are trying to do bad things, there's people trying to do good things. And so that's why taking a break from history content, talking about something that's just fucking happening right now. It is cool people doing cool stuff up here. and or maybe more than cool because it's freezing.

Yeah, freezing people doing cool stuff. Yeah, feel free to workshop at home. Yeah. A better way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'm coming back from a place more hopeful than I left.

I know that's my thing that I do. But like, I really believe that in the darkest times we can build beautiful things. And I don't believe that any less after being here. Yeah. That's a great thing about being a goth. Beauty in the dark stuff That's like fucking Anyway

We'll talk to you all For me next week And for James, who knows Probably freaking tomorrow A couple of days here Yeah Yeah Yeah

I thought my job was hard Anyway Yeah Good luck with everyone And take care of your neighbors And fuck ice Yeah Thanks everyone for listening to all of this

And if at the end of this You're thinking that You would like to help Some of the people who are on the ground We ask people that we trusted on the ground to provide us with links to different fundraisers. And basically, you know, I never share a fundraiser unless I can support it with my whole heart and I would support it with my own wallet. The links themselves are going to be in the show notes. But there's a couple different ones.

There's rent support for neighbors in Phillips, which is a neighborhood, rent support for neighbors in Central, rent support for neighbors in Powderhorn, supplies for political art making, protective gear for legal observers, diapers and menstrual supplies is another fundraiser. Abolish ice shirts, including the shirt I am wearing right now as I record this, North Star Frontline Street Medics, and the Twin Cities Swolaterate Bail Fund. And there'll be links to both a Venmo and a cash app for that one. Anyway, thank you, everyone, and take care of each other. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand.

understand ourselves more deeply. What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike Delarocha, host of sacred lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures were taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship

with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Dolorotia on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Delocha and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather.

It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody.

There were years right in where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, to interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a bitch to come around her in my wife.

Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to the Red Weather on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roll Doll. the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories?

It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true.

I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Doll got cozy with him? the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a Congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids.

The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at soundedouttogether.org.

That's sounded outtogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. Hello and welcome back to Icad Happen Here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today we're going to be talking about something that is happening here, doxing Nazis. Specifically, I'm talking to Chris Matthias about his new book, To Catch a Fascist, The Fight to Expose the Radical Right.

Chris, thanks for coming on today. Oh my God, Molly, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I'm so excited to talk about this book. You sent me a copy of it recently. I don't think I remembered until I was reading it. and I talked to you while you were writing it. Yes. Yes, you did. Yeah, yeah.

You're one of the many, many people I talked to. And you are quoted in the book, in fact. I can't remember if you told it to me or if I cite it from somewhere else, but you once compared the research that goes into doxing, unmasking Nazis, to basically investigating your ex's Instagram account, which I thought was an amazing comparison. Because you're basically saying, like, this type of work is accessible if you've done that type of sleuthing. Which is not something I'm admitting to do.

I'm not nosy about my exes. I'm just saying it is something many women are very good at. Exactly, yes. And they don't realize it's a transferable skill. Yeah, exactly. But for those who don't know, Christopher O'Mathias has been covering the far right for more than a decade, right? Yeah, yeah. You were with Huffington Post for a long time and you've been independent for a couple of years?

Yeah, so I was at Huff Post for like almost 14 years. and about 10 of those, I know it's wild. And 10 of those years, I was covering the far right, which is how I ended up in Charlottesville in 2017 for a United the Right rally, which is something Molly and I have talked a lot about before. And yeah, after I got back from Charlottesville, my editor at the time was like,

this is your beat now covering the far right. So I was kind of like among this like initial crew of like digital media journalists who suddenly found themselves on the like the right extremism beat. And pretty quickly, you know, I realized while I was trying to unmask people in the far right, that there were already people doing that work. And they were anti-fascist activists. Yeah. And so to prepare for today, I listened to a couple of interviews you've done about the book so far. It comes out first week of February. February 3rd. Yeah, we're close. Yeah, yeah.

I was listening to those interviews. And I was thinking about, you know, this is a different audience. Like, you don't need to explain to people who listen to it could happen here when Antifa is or what Doxing is. Yes. But I think the book very delicately and unapologetically explains those things to people who might be afraid of them. Yeah, I mean, that was the entire intent of the book. And I'm so glad you picked up on that. You know, I think I kind of imagined writing this book for my parents for like kind of, you know, boomer liberals, if you will, or centrist. and other people just, I think,

that have a lot of misapprehensions about Antifa, understandably. And, you know, the goal of the book was to demystify what Antifa is, explain it to a wider audience, and to make kind of more radical politics that Antifa represents more palatable to a wider audience. And the way I tried to do that was to make the book a bit of a thriller, so that was accessible. and make it into like a spy narrative.

And I'm hoping that the very kind of average reader will be able to dive into this and come out understanding more radical leftist politics that maybe wasn't accessible to them before. That's such a hard needle to thread because, like, I could give this book to my dad, right? Right. But I also enjoyed reading it. Yay, good. For the listener, you should go out and get this.

It's not just for your dads. You will like it to the cold open, right? like the introductory chapter starts sort of in media res with your framework of the book, right? This Vincent Washington, this infiltrator inside Patriot Front. Yeah. And the thing is, I know about Vincent Washington. Right. I read the leaks that Vincent was responsible for.

I was actually the one who told Thomas Rousseau in person about the leak. What? I didn't know that. Oh, yes. For the listener, Vincent Washington is not a real person. So he is a real person, but that's not his real name. Yes. Right?

It was, so within Patriot Front, they all get a pseudonym, and then their last name is, like, their state. So Vincent Washington was a man whose name is not Vincent, who might be from Washington. And he infiltrated Patriot Front, and he leaked all of their rocket chats. And the day that leak was published, it was January 21st, 2022. Yes. It was the day of the March for Life. Yes. So Patriot Front was in Washington, D.C., and I had a suspicion that Patriot Front would be there.

They don't announce that kind of thing ahead of time, but I was pretty sure they were going to be there. So I went to Washington, D.C., and we were standing outside the National Archives. And Thomas Rousseau had his little bullhorn. He had like 20 or 30 guys, and a little matching fits. And they were so tickled with themselves. They were so tickled.

People were just falling all over themselves because these, like, scary Nazis were on the street. And I actually, I have a video. I'll embed it in the final. Oh, my God, Molly. Hey, guys, your rocket chat. Just rocket chat. Everything.

All your DMs. All your DMs, the metadata attached. Why do you have your shield up? No one is going to hurt you. We're just going to make fun of you. The videos that you send your network leaders, those all have metadata and UnicornRey's posting them right now. Holy shit, Molly.

How did I not ask you about this for the book? I could have put this in there. Oh, my God. It was incredible. Because, you know, Thomas Rousseau later was like, oh, it's like not a big deal. He looked scared. Oh, my God.

He looked scared. Yeah. It's like I know about Vincent. but seeing the story from his side of things was so different, right? Like, I use these leaks all the time, but I, you know, never get to know about the leaker. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. So, again, this is kind of my goal for the book, was that these kind of anti-fascist spies, and I feel like most Americans don't know that Antifa had so many spies over the last 10 years that were infiltrating these groups, you know,

they were the hidden hand behind thousands of news stories because they collected all of this invaluable intelligence, you know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of private messages that these white supremacists were sending to each other, which then were posted on a database on Unicorn Riot, which, you know, wonderful researchers like yourself and other people used to mine for clues and details that they could use to identify all of these previously. synonymous Nazis. So for example, you know, and I wish I could have seen the look on Thomas's face. I can't wait to see that video. But yeah, I mean, like they released, I believe it was like 400 gigabytes worth of rocket chat messages and, you know, videos and photos and stuff. With metadata

still attached to them. Exactly. With metadata still attached to them, which we'll get to in a second, by the way. There's a good story about the metadata. But, you know, ultimately, that data, would contribute to doxing, unmasking, I think about 80 members of Patriot Front, which is just remarkable. And I think, you know, part of the story I was trying to tell was that these anonymous anti-fascists who are doing this work, you know, anonymously, like they're not doing it for acclaim or glory. They're doing it because they see it as a form of community self-defense. And, you know, what they were doing, you know, I think outstripped the efforts of major media. media news organizations, you know, academic institutions, civil rights organizations.

Oh, no doubt. Law enforcement, definitely. Like, they were doing more work to destabilize and destroy far-right groups than I would argue really anyone else. And then the subsequent work that builds off of that by civil rights groups filing these, like, large Klan Act lawsuits, those lawsuits don't exist without these leaks. Signs v. Kessler doesn't exist without these leaks. The three lawsuits against Patriot Front don't exist without these leaks. Yes, exactly. And I've been thinking a lot about this this week, right?

Because it was the anniversary of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face five years ago. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary to those who celebrate. And that was a beautiful moment. And I think we can all agree that it's so funny to watch Richard Spencer get punched in the face. But every year you see people say, and that's what stopped him. And he was never heard from again. And he shut up forever after that.

Right. And that's not true. That's not true at all. Like, I love the guy that punched him in the face, but that didn't end it. Yes, exactly. An infiltrator did. An infiltrator did. And I think, again, you know, kind of the goal of the book is that most Antifa in the public imagination is most often associated with Nazi punching.

And, you know, for good reason. Like, like most people learned about Antifa in 2017 from videos like the video of Richard Spencer getting punched. It's so interesting to look back and realize that no one in America knew what the fuck Antifa was before 2017. And then by the end of that year, everyone had heard that word or knew that. that word. It was the boogeyman. Yeah, it was the boogeyman. And it was added to the Webster Dictionary. Oxford Dictionary shortlisted it for Word of the Year. Like, it's a remarkable climb for, you know, a piece of language, a word. But the like viral videos that catapotted that word into the, like, lexicon kind of obscured the bulk of the work that Antifa was doing, which was

espionage and intelligence gathering. And kind of like the creation of this remarkable underground informal intelligence agency that like just completely fucked up so many fascist groups. And like, you know, at the end of 2017, Spencer famously said Antifa is winning. And he was referring not only to getting punched everywhere he went, but to these very efforts to identify all of his followers who knew that if their Nazism was public, they wouldn't be able to like operate in public life. They wouldn't be able to hold down a job and so on and so forth. Because I guess both the Nazi punching and the Nazi doxing, they are different means to a similar end, which is to enact a consequence, right? So that if you're going to be a Nazi in public,

there's going to be a fucking consequence, whether that means you get decked in the jaw, or it means all of your neighbors know what you said online. Your mom knows what you said online. Like people know who you are. Yes, exactly. The way I always describe it is the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman. You know, back, in the 80s and 90s, anti-racist activists, like, with groups like anti-racist action, you know, would post flyers in neighborhoods that said, meet your local Nazi. Right. And what they were doing was not only warning the community that that guy down the block

is liable to commit violence against people you know and love, but like you were getting at, they were creating a social cost for being a fascist. They're basically leveraging an existing societal taboo against explicit white supremacy and fascism to ensure a consequence. It basically says, it tells people, if you're going to join one of these groups, we're going to name and shame you. You're going to lose your job.

Your girlfriend's going to dump you. You might lose your apartment. Your family might not want to talk to you anymore. Like you're going to be a pariah. And I think it was really effective. I mean, obviously the animating question of my book, of course, is what happens when that taboo starts to disappear. But it's not gone yet.

It's not gone. Some of the other interviews I was looking at, people are saying, well, is there value in this anymore? Because you can work for the State Department to be a Nazi now. Right. You can do the White House social media and be a Nazi now. Like, is there still any value in this? And I think the answer is obviously yes. Yeah.

They wouldn't wear masks if they didn't have to wear masks. Yes. Right? Like some of them are mask off, quote unquote, but like not all of them. Patriot Front still marches in masks. Ice agents still abduct children in masks. They're covering their faces because they know what they're doing is wrong. Yes, exactly. And I think it's also as much of a mask-off moment as we might be living in in some ways, you know, this act of research and identifying the threat is still so important because it's, you know, preserving that societal taboo. It's still saying that that social cost is something we still want to preserve. And it is, you know, I think very interesting that the anti-fascist work now is kind of pivoting towards identifying ICE agents.

And MAGA and the Trump administration is horrified of this tactic of identifying ICE agents. And for good reason, because the story I tried to tell in my book, this tactic played a really big part in destroying fascist groups. They know that it could destroy their ethnic cleansing project. And when you look at the polls, like, since Renee Good, the favorability for ICE is just plummeted. And the support for slogans like Abolish Ice have sky. rocketed. So like that societal taboo against kind of white supremacism that's being displayed by ICE is definitely still there. And you ground this sort of in the history too in the book,

in the chapter about sort of the history of unmasking, whether that's with digital doxing or identifying members of the clan, there was still a social cost to being identified as a Klansman in the 1920s. Yeah. Like there was no social taboo against being racist in the 20s, but there was a social cost to being identified as a Klansman. And I think we find ourselves in the same unfortunate place. Yeah, totally. I mean, and honestly, that was one of my favorite parts about researching the book, was diving into the efforts to unmask the clans. Obviously, there were efforts to unmask the first clan, but, you know, one of my favorite stories about unmasking the second clan took place in Buffalo, New York, and there was actually a very large clan chapter in Buffalo. And, you know,

The second clan wasn't confined to the south. It was everywhere. It was in the northeast and the Midwest. Right. And it was animated not only by anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism, but also by anti-Catholicism. They were really angry at this new wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. They didn't allow Catholics in until the 70s.

They had to have a big summit about it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. When they decided that Catholics are white. Yes, exactly. And this is, I mean, it's just, it's so much to unpack because, like, obviously, like, my family's Catholic. And I enjoy all of the privilege of being white. But, like, you know, back then, like, you know, Catholics were, you know, this other.

You had a dual loyalty to this mysterious king. Yes, exactly. So at any rate, the clan in Buffalo is really big. And, you know, one night they even have this elaborate cross-burning ceremony where 800 people take the oath for the clan. The mayor of Buffalo, though, is Catholic and forms a coalition with, you know, black buffaloans and Jewish buffaloans. And the mayor ends up enlisting a spy to go undercover into the clan. One night, the clan's secret headquarters in Buffalo are ransacked, broken into and ransacked.

And suddenly, this list of the clan's membership ends up in the hands of the mayor. The mayor makes some like deft denials of any involvement, but says that he's going to post the list downtown. The list is posted downtown. So many people show up to look at the list, to see who among their neighbors is in the clan that they end up having to move the list, I believe, to a warehouse to fit all the people

so that they could form a line. And then in the ensuing weeks and months, clan-owned businesses are boycotted and vandalized, Klansmen turn up to their jobs only to learn that they've been fired. Good. And before long, the clan just completely falls apart. And interestingly enough, clan headquarters down in Georgia heard about what's happening in Buffalo and was really alarmed by it.

So they send an investigator to Buffalo to figure out who the spy is. They figure out who the spy is and they get in a shootout and they both die. Jesus Christ. Which underscores, you know, the state. of this work sometime. Right, which is why, you know, the Richard Spencer Puncher and the infiltrators, they do their best to stay anonymous because the stakes are lethal. Yeah.

Right? Like, they will kill you back. Yes. These organizations can't survive sunshine and they're so aware of that that, yeah, people have been killed for this. Yeah, absolutely. You and I have both faced our share of harassment and stuff, but there's older tales of, you know, anti-racist action.

back in the 90s, two of its members, you know, anti-racist skinheads, were in Nevada, lured out to the desert by Nazis under false pretenses and executed in the desert. This Fourth of July weekend, right? Yes. We still honor them on the Fourth of July. Exactly, yeah. Their names are escaping me right now. Spit Newborn and Daniel Shersey.

Yes. And there is a fantastic Orlando Weekly feature article about, I believe, Spit. that I think is one of the best pieces I've read in a long time that maybe we can put in the notes. I think people would really enjoy. Yeah, absolutely. And then there's more recent examples of that, too. You know, over the last five years,

there was three members of the base, which is like a neo-Nazi organization. Obviously, I love that your listeners know all this, by the way. No, but they could use the recap. Yeah, yeah, but know who these groups are, at least. But they were arrested for conspiring to kidnap and murder to anti-fascist activists in Georgia. It was a couple living in a kind of remote area, and they had a very detailed plan to burn down their home and, like, kill them in their beds and kill their pets.

I mean, it was, if not for the FBI agent who was their friend, that couple would have been killed. Yeah, no, it's really wild to consider. The FBI agent was friends with the Nazis. I should clarify, there is almost always an FBI agent who is friends with the Nazi. Yes. And that's the important thing, right? You know, like, these anti-fascists are infiltrated. these groups. And so is the FBI, right? Like a lot of these hate groups, somebody is either a paid informant, a freelance informant, or an actual undercover agent. And that's great, I guess, but a lot of times they will prioritize keeping their agent undercover over using the information

to protect anyone. Yes. And when we do it, when anti-fascists do that, we are invested in protecting our communities, not building a case. Yes, exactly. You don't need to take this to a grand jury. don't need to keep a guy in there for 20 years waiting for the big fish. You're protecting a community. Yes. I mean, there's an example of that in the book. There was a kind of this white whale in anti-fascist circles that people were trying to identify. And he was a leader in the Bull Patrol, which of course is this community of Nazis that praises mass shooters and tries to encourage other Nazis to commit mass shootings. And he was eventually identified as this guy named Andrew Caseret in Sacramento, California.

I remember Vic. Yeah, and his student his pseudonym was Vic Mackey, yeah. And antifascist identified him. I published a story at Huff Post. It emerges later that Andrew Caseret was already

on like the no-fly list. Yes, which means the government already knew who that fucking man was. When he was recording a podcast about shooting me in my womb through my vagina. And the government already knew who he was. Yes, and which is just insane.

And they'll claim it's like investigative secrecy, like, it's some kind of pragmatism, but it's like for what? Like they're posing an urgent threat. For one thing, I felt safer. And I was safer. Once I knew who he was, once someone did the work of identifying that man, and I could say, with certainty, he is in California. He is not near me. I was safer. Yes.

And like anti-fascist gave me that. The government did not give me that. The government would never have given me that. Yes, exactly. And I think it's also, you know, obviously, you know, a big tenet of militant anti-fascism is that you don't trust law enforcement or the state in this fight. And not only for the reasons we're describing now, but there's like this historical irony in when the FBI or law enforcement in general infiltrates white supremacist groups, they end up finding a bunch of their buddies in these white supremacist groups. Like they ended up identifying a lot of police officers. And I think it just goes to show the ways in which, obviously, law enforcement and white supremacist groups often share similar goals.

Very much so. And sometimes once they have a guy in there, I mean, I'm sure it happens still to this day. We don't have the records of it happening now. But we have the sort of 60s and 70s era co-intel pro records now that do show that, you know, they had tons of FBI agents infiltrating the clan, allegedly to disrupt the clan. But that's not what they were doing. They were steering the clan into disrupting the civil rights movement. Yes. Yes.

But, I mean, most famously, the Greensboro massacre where, you know, the clan and other white supremacists murdered some anti-fascist communist activists. And then it emerged afterwards that an FBI agent was in the group, but didn't report kind of their plans for violence. Over and over again. Yeah. And those five people died for it. Yeah, exactly. Which is why I will always trust an anti-fascist infiltrator over an Friol. FBI agent.

Yes. I loved the historical parallels, right? You know, so you take doxing all the way back to the second clan. You know, this outside agitator narrative is not new. It's something Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about. You're seeing that now, right? Like, oh, you know, these people protesting their outside agitators, this isn't the real community. The real community wouldn't behave like this.

It's the same as it ever was, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, you know, since Antifa kind of exploded into the American consciousness, Maga and the Right seized on Antifa as a boogeyman. And they trusted that kind of liberals and centrist were going to throw Antifa under the bus, right? That like they weren't going to come to Antifa's defense necessarily or even acknowledge a lot of times that Antifa existed. And, you know, that allowed them to create this boogeyman of like epic proportions. So like in 2017, after Charlottesville, a synonymous pro-Trump troll called Microchip starts a petition to declare Antifa, a quote, domestic terrorist organization.

This petition goes viral, gets like 300,000 signies, and Microchip ends up giving an interview to Politico where he's very upfront and frank about why he's doing this. And it's not because the White House is actually going to declare Antifa domestic terrorist organization. Oops. Oops. There's no federal domestic terrorist statute to even do that. Antifa is not an organization. He's very explicit to say, I'm doing this to set up Antifa as a punching bag and to deflect and distract from the far rights, very real violence. Pretty wild that he said it.

He just said it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like that he admitted it, meme. Oh my God, he admitted. He admitted, yeah, yeah. And, you know, over the next few months, every time there's a mass shooting, you have folks like Jack Posobic and other kind of disinformation artists jumping in when, you know, there's not a lot of information yet to blame these mass shootings on Antifa. I mean, there's a weird troll who still thinks I'm responsible for January 6.

Yes, yes, exactly. Very impressive work, by the way. You know, so they're using Antifa that way to, like, distract and deflect. They're blaming Antifa for wildfires and train derailments and all this crazy shit. And then, you know, there's a little bit of a wall. And then in 2020, the George Floyd uprisings happened. And, you know, the George Floyd uprisings are one of the biggest mass uprisings in American history. It's completely grassroots and organic.

and it is led by black protesters in their communities inspired by uprisings again in Minneapolis. It's too soon for history to be repeating. I know it's really crazy. But the Antifa boogeyman now is repurposed as kind of this outside agitator's trope on steroids, right? So Trump and all these MAGA influencers rush to blame Antifa for fomenting these mass uprisings, which is absurd.

Yeah, sure, Antifa activists were at these uprisings, but, you know, they weren't instigating them, nor would they have the organizing power to instigate such a massive uprising like that. When the right is doing this, it's an effort to make these uprising seem artificial or, you know, kind of astroturfed. Something you can dismiss, yeah. Something you can dismiss as anorganism.

organic and artificial. And it's a way of distracting from the very real grievance at the heart of these demonstrations, which is that we want cops to stop killing black people. So throughout the summer of 2020, the Antifa panic reaches like absurd levels where, you know, there are rumors, viral rumors of busloads of Antifa roaming the countryside looking to burn down white businesses. You know, again, Antifa's blamed for wildfires in the West. All of a sudden, you get these paramilitary groups, militia groups, out West,

using these Antifa rumors as a pretext to literally occupy towns, entire towns. You know, you have 40 white dudes in full camo and vests, carrying big guns, patrolling the streets on the lookout for this Antifa menace. You know, there's like a story about in Sandpoint, Idaho, which is this gorgeous town in the panhandle. And these, like, group of, like, high school kids go on a Black Lives Matter march across a bridge. And all of a sudden they're being followed by these, like, middle-aged white dudes carrying AR-15s and calling them racial slurs. Jesus Christ. So, like, basically, the Antifa Bougieman in 2020 is repackaged.

again, not only to sew division on the left and to create this outside agitator's narrative, but to create this pretext for vigilante violence. And there was a lot of vigilante violence that occurred in 2020. Of course, you know, now we're in 26, and we saw throughout last year as well. The Antifa Bougieman, again, is being, you know, summoned to call whoever opposes the Trump regime's effort to ethnically cleanse the United States, you know, domestic terrorists. Right. The enemy is simultaneously very weak and very strong in their minds, right?

Like, we're all a bunch of soy boys who live in our mom's basements, but we are also a massive networked, armed organization with unlimited funding. Yes, exactly, exactly. And, you know, obviously Trump claimed to formally designate Antifa a domestic terror group in September. Doesn't mean anything. He did say it. He did say it.

And then he held an Antifa roundtable at the White House with a lot of our friends, Andy No, Jack Posobic. But, you know, as farcical as it all is, it's also deeply dangerous and alarming. In September, Trump designates Antifa Domestic Terror Group. And then last month, they murder Renee Good and Cold Blood. And what do they do? They call her domestic terrorist after the fact. Exactly. It's pretext.

It's all pretext. Because if you create this sort of shadowy network, of unidentified agitators who are responsible for unspecified but very bad crimes, you can kill anyone say it was them. Yeah, exactly. I wrote a piece for the nation recently about how there's a tendency in response to like this escalating maga hysteria about Antifa. There's a tendency among liberals and centrists to dismiss Antifa as not existing.

To ultimately say that it's not even a thing or to say, well, Antifa, just means anti-fascist, so we're all Antifa. But like, to me, that entirely misses the point. Like, A, like, Antifa is real, and it refers to, like, a very real subculture and a very real tradition, militant tradition, of anti-fascist organizing. And if liberals and centrist can't acknowledge that Antifa is real and come to their defense, then, you know, the people doing this work might be in some danger. And I think it's important to show them some solidarity right now. It's such a complicated reality, right? Because it's not a group. Yeah. But it is. It's also, it's a thousand different groups, groups of two or three or ten. It's not like a nationwide membership

organization. You know, it is just an idea, but it's also a history, a set of tactics. Yes. It's all of those things and it's none of those things. And it's different depending on who you ask and why you're asking. Yeah, exactly. And like anyone can do it, you know, like, right. Anyone can take up the mantle of militant anti-fascist work. A lot of people are doing it on their own. Yeah. And I think like that's what's been so kind of inspiring to me about Minneapolis and the uprisings, right? Is, you know, everything that community is doing right now is a grassroots organic response.

And they're doing it because no one else is going to do it for them. Yeah. There's this axiom that we talk about a lot in anti-fascist spaces and anarchist. and anarchist spaces and black liberation movements, you know, this axiom of we protect us. And, you know, that is on very big display right now in Minneapolis where you have people doing what anti-fascist activists were doing to Nazis in 2017,

which is monitoring them, following them, disrupting them. They are figuring out where they are staying, where they're eating, and pressuring those businesses and those hotels, not to serve them. They are showing up outside their hotels, doing noise demos. They are identifying them.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, we protect us is such a, you know, it's such a short, pithy phrase, but you don't know what it means

until you feel it. Yeah. Right? Like, I think in Minneapolis, people are feeling it. They're protecting each other, right? You know,

here in Charlottesville, after Unite the Right, you know, when local authority figures were saying things about Antifa, you would have, you know, white grandmas get up,

there and say, don't you say that about Antifa. Right. Don't you say that about Antifa? You know, it was a word I didn't know a month ago, but they saved my life. Yes. Right? That once you have experienced that kind of community solidarity, that we protect us ethos, once you've seen it, you know what it means.

Yes, exactly. And nobody's going to tell you different. Yeah. And like, you know, it's also just so clear in Minneapolis that like the Democratic Party and, you know, law enforcement, the local police are not doing anything. you know, like they're not there. The people that are supposed to protect you aren't going to. Aren't going to.

The police will watch you get beaten in the street. Yes, yes, exactly. And your senator will say nothing when the president calls you a terrorist. Yes. And so, you know, I think it just kind of goes to show that this kind of militant anti-fascist tradition is an organic response to conditions. It is like an insurgent form of community. self-defense. As horrifying as the footage coming out of Minneapolis is, especially that photo this

week of the five-year-old being detained, which I can't get out of my head, and which makes my blood boil thinking of it. I can't cry on the recording. Yeah. No, it makes me want to cry too. Something really struck me reading the book. You know, I was saying, like, you know, I read Vincent Washington's leaks, but I didn't know anything about Vincent. You said that he told you he was moved to start taking this kind of militant action by the Portland Max train stabbing. Yeah. I mean, that stopped me in my tracks. Yeah, you know, and I think one of the more moving parts of researching this book was realizing

that all of the anti-fascists doing this work had brushes with fascist violence in their communities, and that's what inspired them to do it, you know. Vincent was in Portland in 20, what year was that? It was May 2017. May 2017, right. And he gets on a train at Hollywood Station in Portland, goes to a friend's place, has a good time, and then later reads the news, and realizes that had he taken one train before his, that left about a minute before, he could have been in this car where this white supremacist named Jeremy Christian started. started harassing two black Muslim girls. He is haranguing them, telling them to get out of America when three men intervene.

Jeremy Christian slashes the throats of the three men and two of them die. All right, God, we're going to get emotional on this. But one of the last. This one really gets to me. I've sort of brushed up against the story and a couple of things I've written. I mean, it's one of the most moving encounters of all of these sort of moving. pieces, right? A Nazi committing violence against a Somali immigrant, right? That's so relevant today. Ordinary people intervening. Only one of them was sort of an active anti-fascist in his

community. The young man that survived, Micah Fletcher. The other two were just... Everyday dudes. They didn't have anti-fascist politics, but they saw a Nazi threatening a little girl. They saw a Nazi threatening a little girl, and they lost their lives. And as one of them, and I'm blanking on his name right now. Talesian. Talesian, yeah. Was lying, bleeding out. He said, tell everyone on this train, I love them.

So I actually flew to Portland a few days later and ended up interviewing his girlfriend. Oh, my God. Who kept a journal of their relationship and read me passages from it and, like, you know, how beautiful their relationship was. They had just moved in together. They were growing a garden together. And before he left that morning to get on that train, he said something really wonderful just about how much he loved her. So, you know, basically his day started and ended with these expressions of love. That always really wrecks me.

Yeah, yeah, me too. But seeing that that was sort of, you know, as someone who got into this work after seeing what happened where I live. Yes, exactly. It was very striking to me that, you know, it was the same for Vincent. It was something that he was not involved in. He didn't witness the stabbing, but he was so close to it. It felt so intimate to him, and he felt like, well, I have to do something. Yes, exactly. And there were so many other examples that I name in the book of these really horrendous hate crimes taking place in Portland and Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest, which, you know, historically has been a hub for white supremacist organizing. So, you know, for Vincent, the threat felt very real to people he knew and loved, which is why he decided to go.

undercover into Patriot Front and to fuck up Patriot Front. He had done some other anti-fascist work before that, like kind of monitoring the Proud Boys. But then, you know, I think when the proud boys were on a bit of a decline after January 6th, he started to look at groups that operated more in the dark and were more secretive. And he decided to focus on Patriot Front. And how prescient at that time. I mean, Patriot Front in 2017, didn't exist in early 2017. but sort of as they rebranded into 2018 from Vanguard America, I mean, how prescient of him to know that that would be the place to go? Yeah, no, totally.

Like, that's where I think the energy was and, like, kind of the anonymous organizing was going. And, you know, and what he did was really remarkable. I think a lot of anti-fascist infiltrations and spy work is done online. You know, people are just creating a username and an avatar, and they can manage to do most. most of the espionage from behind a computer screen. You know, one of the more significant acts of espionage during this era is a guy that goes undercover into Identity Europa and again manages to get reams and reams of their private

messages, which end up on Unicorn Riot. And that destroyed them too. Destroyed them. And, you know, those messages, the panic in the Discord like database, ends up identifying a hundred Nazis in Identity Europa, which is just remarkable. The anti-fascist spy that did. this, I talked to, and he just had to do an interview with an Identity Europa leader to get into the group, and I got to listen to that recording, and it's remarkable. But, you know, after that,

he didn't have to do that much in-person, you know, method acting to pretend to be a Nazi. Vincent, however, did. He, you know, for five months. He was going hiking. He was going hiking, man. Because Patriot Front requires you to go on missions and hikes and, you know, kind of group activities, He had to do shit in person. So, like, this dude was acting, like, deserves an Oscar. You know, so he climbed Mount Rainier for two nights with 13 other Nazis. Oh, my God. And by the way, at this point, had earned the trust of his local chapter so much that he was named the official photographer and videographer for the chapter, which is just delicious.

They're so smart. They're so smart. So smart. I mean, it's like, it's like that Simpsons bit, right? Like videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had. They take video of everything they do. Yes. And then because of these leaks, we see that in several lawsuits against Patriot Front, right?

Like they are recording video as they, you know, vandalize civil rights monuments and things like that. And then they got sued in three places. Yes. And it's basically the Stringer Bell, like, are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy, you know, me? Yeah, they are. And they are. So, you know, eventually all this data that has been. and collects, and by the way, so he's in the group for about five months, he's scheduled to go

to their big march in D.C., but at the last minute, claims he can't because the FBI knocks on his door. That's a lie. He's just doing that to scare Patriot Front. When Patriot Front gets to D.C. and goes on their march, some anti-fascists in D.C. know their plans, and they know where they are parking their vehicles for this march. They know where Patriot Front is going to march. And let's just say some Nazi cars get redecorated. Some tires did not make it out of D.C. that night. Tires did not make it out of D.C. Some windshields did not survive.

There is some graffiti. Patriot Front gets back to their U-Hauls, first off, that they use to get transported into D.C. from suburban Maryland. Their U-Haul's are fucked up. They get back to Maryland finally and to see all their cars fucked up. So, you know, there is an act of sabotage. They realize they have an infiltrator. before long they realized that it's the man they know is Vincent. And I think they think that that's it.

Like there'll be a few dockses, but, you know, that's it. It didn't seem like he hacked their server. But then, of course, a month later, all of their messages end up on Unicorn Riot. You tell Thomas Rousseau the news of this. Oh, that was such a treat. Yeah, I can't believe we've never talked about this. And over the course of the next few months, years, So many Patriot Front members are identified.

And there's also some other delicious details like Vincent, after his infiltration is over, he has all this Patriot Front propaganda material that he kind of took along the way, banners, pamphlets, shields. So what he does on New Year's is he makes a towering pyre of this material and lights it on fire, makes a really beautiful video set to Old Langzine and posted online for Patriot Front to see. And I think, kind of warning them that, like, you know, there might be some more coming, some more docks is coming,

some more stuff coming. And the thing is, like, Vincent's story is just one story, one kind of remarkable story of anti-fascist spywork. Over the last 10 years, there are so many other stories that I heard about that for various reasons I couldn't put in the book or there wasn't room for in the book, book. But it's just, yeah, I'm very, I feel very privileged that I got to tell this story that not many people know. It was such a great framework for the book, because it's not just about

that particular infiltration, but it sort of provides this running framework, this sort of introduction to the concept. I thought it was very nicely done. I was excited to learn about Vincent because I have only, like I said, read his leaks and then the lawsuits that had inspired and then the lawsuit against him. Right, yeah. Which was dismissed last week. Yes, it was. So congratulations, Vincent. Yes, it was, yes. The book gets into this a little bit, but Patriot Front does end up ascertaining what it believes is Vincent's real identity, and they file a lawsuit in a federal court in Washington, and it had been ongoing for the last year or two, but was finally dismissed in court this week, yeah, or last week. So congratulations to the person who may or may not

have been Vincent. Yes, exactly. We'll never know. We'll never know. Because it didn't make it to I don't think I never made it to a hearing. No, yeah, yeah. I know I said I wouldn't take up a ton of your time, but I can't let you go without talking about Redbeard. Oh my God. This is the first concrete, confirmed, published docs of Redbeard. Oh, my God, yeah.

I can't believe it's taken us this long to talk about it. Thank you for reminding me. So for the listener, you know, we talk about how this is work that is accessible to everyone, but it is not for everyone. In Red Beard is someone I have read so many incorrect doxes of. And that's why it is so important, it's so important to be sure of what you're writing, because I've read 100 failed doxes of this man. Yeah. And this one's real. Yeah. So Redbeard,

to those who don't know, again, was kind of this white whale in anti-fascist circles, white supremacist will. Basically, in so much as he was one of the men filmed in Charlottesville in 2017, beating D'Andre Harris. For those that don't remember, DeAndre Harris was a black counter-protester resident of the Charlottesville area. He was a 19-year-old teacher for special ed students,

and he ends up in a scuffle with Nazis that are leaving Charlottesville, leaving the rally, and they end up in a parking garage where five of them beat him while he's on the pavement with metal poles and other weapons. And it's captured on camera.

I think it's, you know, one of the more distressing things to watch from Charlottesville. I actually happened to be in the garage at the time, was running towards DeAndre when one of the Nazis pulled a gun and started waving it around. So I ducked behind a car. By the time I got up, DeAndre was stumbling away. There was a pool of blood on the pavement. Wait, I have to go back to the footage. Who was it that pulled the gun? I'm not sure.

Were you over on the police station side of the divider? I think I was running. I have to go back and find you in the footage because I think the guy who pointed a gun at you is Teddy von Nukem. Oh my God. Well, if we could make that idea, that'd be... Because he pulled the gun. He did.

I mean, somebody else may have pulled a gun, but Teddy pulled a gun. Okay, I need to look at a photo of Teddy Van Nukem. It all happens so... He's dead. Oh, it's that guy. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay.

All right. Let's talk about this way. Sorry. Molly here, recording after the interview was over. I went back and reviewed that footage, and my memory did fail me a little bit. here. I was thinking about the right moment. Right after the victim in that beating has sort of broken away from the main portion of the assault and he's running away, the video taken by

Unicorn Riot pans over to follow him. And as the camera sweeps across the area on the other side of the parking garage, you can see a Nazi named Teddy von Nukem. That's his real name. He changed it. He takes a swing at the victim with what looks like a baton. And at the same moment, somebody does pull a handgun, but it's an unidentified man standing right behind Teddy von Neumum. I had the image mixed up in my recollection. Sorry about that. Teddy von Neukum, as I said in the interview, is dead. He shot himself in the chest in 2023, the morning he was supposed to go on trial for fentanyl trafficking. I wish I could tell you who the little Nazi with the gun is, but it looks like there's no ID on him. Not yet anyway. Sorry, for the listener, this is something, I think Chris and I have both

spent probably 100 hours looking at frame-by-frame video from 17 angles of this particular assault for a variety of reasons. Right. Right. So it was this brutal gang assault on this young black man. And four people went to prison for it. Yes. And some people didn't. Some people didn't. And one of them was a, you know, kind of a bigger white dude with a big red beard wearing a baseball cap who from that on earned the nickname Red Beard. There are all these, like you mean, mentioned kind of. A million. Just like every fat guy with a red beard on the East Coast has been identified as red beard. Yes, exactly. And it was like all these like kind of amateur online sleuths. I think Sean King was in the mix for this back in the day. You know, trying to ID this guy,

no one can find him. A lot of people are falsely identified. The Charlottesville Police Department can't find him. The detective puts out like a call for help, but nothing comes in. eventually, and where my book kicks off in this story, is there's a group of anti-fascist researchers called Ignite the Right that is dedicated to identifying every Nazi that turned up in Charlottesville in 2017. And they create a database of all these photos and videos and a list of all the people that have been identified. And the list of names that they are identifying keeps on growing and growing.

And they're identifying some really crazy names, like one of the stories I ended up doing, was about a police officer who was working as Richard Spencer's personal... John Donnelly. John Donnelly, a security guard in Charlottesville. So they're doing a lot of really significant doxes like that, but they still can't find Red Beard. Eventually, they decide to use facial recognition,

which is interesting. You know, obviously I think anti-fascists our principal are opposed to facial recognition software, but I think, you know, you kind of can't show up to a gunfight with a knife kind of situation. That still, I think, is not enough in this case, right? Because the commercially available facial recognition software that, you know, the average non-law enforcement person would have access to really struggles with round faces like his and big beards. So he's got a big beard and a hat and his face is very round.

And so it's going to pull a lot of just sort of round-faced redheads. Yes, exactly. And so, like, you know, it's a very important in anti-fascist work. A facial recognition hit is never 100%. You have to corroborate it. It's not enough. So they finally use facial recognition for red beard, and they get a hit. And the hit is a baby-faced, beardless, like 19-year-old white dude in a army uniform at a base in Georgia.

And he's about to shake the hand of President George. W. Bush. And the reason he's photographed for this is because Bush is making a visit to this military base. I believe it's Fort Benning to announce his troop surge in Iraq. So a lot of these people are about to be sent off to his war. And then he brought the war home. And then he brought the war? Oh, man.

Yeah, brought the war home. And then so the anti-fascists zoom in on this photo. but the name tag is blurry. So they can't figure out who Red Beard is yet. So you make a long story short, I end up filing a public information request to the George W. Bush Library in Texas. Right, because they would have had to vet everyone who was there.

Yes, exactly. If the president's going to hear. Yeah, and my angle on it is that I ask for higher resolution photos. We get the higher resolution photos and zoom in and sure enough, there is his last name, Heilman. Now, all we have is the last name, so there's a lot more work to do. These anti-fascists go through military yearbooks. They don't find anything.

They go through so many social media accounts until eventually one day they see a Facebook account that belongs to a man named Jay Heilman. It's crazy he still had Facebook all these years later. Oh, it's wild. And there are photos of him in the military. being sent overseas somewhere. And then they take notice of this one particular detail, which is that there is this meme he posts of fucking Tom Hardy from the Dark Night.

And he's saying the fire rises, right? It's that meme of him saying the fire rises, which of course in like the Dark Night is supposed to mean like all this like death and destruction is about to commence. Like it's a phrase you hear in fascist circle sometimes kind of as like a half joke. But what was interesting about the meme wasn't so much the meme itself, but where and when Facebook said it was posted. He left the location on it. He left the location on it, which was Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12th, 2017.

So that is how they unlock the identity of Red Beard. You know, there's a lot more to the story in the book, and I think I will be identifying Red Beard in a new story somewhere soon. so look out for that. I love to hear it. Make Joe Plotania answer for his refusal to prosecute. Yes, yes, yay. And it's not enough to say the victim doesn't want to cooperate because you don't need victim cooperation to prosecute malicious wounding in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Sorry, Joe. You're already here first. I was hooting and hollering when I got to that part of the book. I can't believe it. Because I had heard, he had heard, do the grapevine, that the prosecutor was aware of his identity and had chosen not to prosecute, but I didn't know his identity. So what a thrill. Yeah, yeah.

It was a real journey. My ex at the time joked that there was a third person in our relationship and that person was Redbeard because I was so obsessed with trying to find him. I mean, truly, truly a white whale. Yeah. In, I guess, several senses of the word. Yeah, exactly. But like I said, I promised I wouldn't take up a ton of your time.

I'm just so excited about this book, about this story. It's not just for your dad who doesn't know what Antiva is. Yes. I thought it was thrilling. I learned a lot about some guys I've been thinking about for years. Right. Yeah, that means the world to me, Molly. Thank you.

And you also have been such an important voice in these spaces and helping me out over the year. So I appreciate it. I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much for coming on. People can pre-order the book to catch a fascist, the fight to expose the radical right, by Christopher Matthias. You can pre-order it now from Simon & Schuster, and it comes out February 3rd. Wherever you buy your books, don't buy it at Amazon.

on. I'm going to make sure my local anarchist bookstore has put it in order for it. You should all do the same. What else do you want to plug? Where can people find you online? Yeah. So I'm freelancing these days for different places, Guardian, MS Now, the nation's slate. So look out for me there. But you mostly just find me on Let's Go Matthias on Blue Sky. And I'm still on the Nazi site, but don't really post there anymore at Let's Go Matthias as well. Wonderful. And like I said, make sure you pre-order that book. It is a Fun read, buy a copy for your dad who's scared of Antifa. Yes, please. Thank you so much, Molly.

Thank you. Every January, we're encouraged to start over, but what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike Delarocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures were taught to carry alone.

We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Dolorotcha on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaurocha and start listening on the free IHeart radio app today. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around.

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years right at where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists,

whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a bitch to come around. My wife. Boom, boom, this is the red weather. Listen to the red weather on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.

But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film.

How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from? his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.

Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back

Bijan Robinson. When I'm on the field, I'm feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes you feel great

before I run the play. Just like Bejohn, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game playing for your mental health at love your mind playbook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the ad console. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening

in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of January, 21st to January 28th. Massive snowstorm across most of the country, at least the real parts of the country, which is the east coast and the south now. And wow, there is a lot of snow.

It makes me feel kind of like a penguin, just walking off into the mountains by myself, weathering the weather. Finally, I feel akin to the president, who is now also a suicidal penguin. At the wrong end of the globe. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, as soon as they start the remigration,

they're going to be deporting penguins to Greenland. To fuck it's getting to Greenland. Yeah. It's held in a military detention camp off of Greenland now that we might own a tiny bit of our military base. Still very unclear with the details of that Greenland deal are. No. He just wanted to be able to say he made a deal. And I don't know if it's going to be any different than the status quo was before,

but he'll claim victory and so will his supporters and we'll all move on. As we kind of already have. Yep. There's too much other bullshit going on. That is the motto for 2026. Some of that bullshit is the third immigration enforcement related shooting

in Minneapolis in just three weeks. James, do want to start with that? So yeah, I was in Minneapolis. I was actually just in Minneapolis airport when this happened. On Saturday of this week, Alex Prettie was shot by two CBP agents in Minneapolis while he was filming an immigration raid in which ICE agents attempted to pursue someone into a donut shop that seemed to have locked the doors. Pretty seemed to be trying to assist a woman who had been pushed to the ground by agents when the agents grabbed him, mazed him, beat him, disarmed him, and then shot him several times. Preti, who was 37. It was a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. And when this confrontation with

immigration agents began, he was legally carrying a SIGP 320 handgun concealed inside his waistband. I can go on and summarize the video for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's obviously quite distressing. So, you know, if you're going to watch it, just know that you're going to see someone die. Video shows several agents beating Preti as one grabs a handgun from his inside waistband holster. very quickly after this, 10 shots are fired by at least two agents. You can hear at one point an agent shouting gun, gun. He's got a gun. Yeah.

And then in the aftermath, another video shows agents asking, where is the gun? So it doesn't appear that the agent who cleared Preti's gun informed the other agents that that had happened. Though the agent that first fired at Preddy was standing right behind the agent that disarmed him and is literally like looking down at where the gun is being removed as he then seconds later starts shooting. Pretty falls to the ground than more agents fire on his body as it lays flat on the ground. Yeah, the CBP initial use of force review, which was sent to Congress today, suggested that... On Wednesday. Yeah, this is Wednesday the 28th.

Two agents fired. So we know at least two agents fired, right? It's not entirely clear. I don't think if all of these were CBP agents, but at least one of the agents who fired shots was an eight-year CBP veteran and a range safety officer. Greg Bovino has declined to identify them because he said that would be doxing.

That's not what that word usually means. No. DHS has claimed that Preti had two extra magazines on his person, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. What they provided was a photograph of a SIGP320 with a red dot site and a slide lock backed. Clearly on the front seat of a vehicle with two charge courts next to it, right? That's not normally how evidence is treated in a crime. That is an unusual way to go about that, but if mildly, DHS Secretary Christie Nome has told reporters that Prattie attacked and impeded law enforcement and was brandishing his weapon.

Videos don't show that. The only time that you see his weapon is when it is removed by the agent who takes it out of his waistband. Prety appears to be holding his black cell phone for the entirety of this interaction. Yeah, and it's very clear that it's a cell phone, right? CBP agents are inches, obviously, from the phone and his phone. There is no reasonable claim. No, as a rule throughout the interaction, there was never any confusion

that would have led them to believe he had a gun in his hand or to be unaware that he had been disarmed. There's no argument for that. No, you can't make a case for that reasonably. People will do it unreasonably, I don't care. The allegation that he attacked them was repeated by FBI director Cash Patel in the interview he gave to Fox News.

I'm going to give a little video of Nome's claims. This individual impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them. State the facts as they unfolded on the street today. We were doing a targeted operation against an illegal criminal, and this individual came with a weapon and dozens of rounds of ammunition and attacked them. And these agents took action to defend their lives and to defend the lives of the people around them and acted according to their training. A CBP commander at large, potentially no longer commander at large, Gregory Bovino,

claimed that Preti had assaulted federal agents and throughout a press conference that Bovino gave referred to Preti as a suspect and the people who killed him as victims. Bovino also claimed that Preti planned to quote massacre law enforcement. Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement? situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road and then assault, delay, and obstruct law enforcement. Or was he there for a reason? Did he fall victim to that violent and heated rhetoric by a Mayor Frye, Governor Walts?

Look, Dana, they're trying to portray border patrol agents and ICE agents as Gestapo, Nazi, and many other words, did this individual fall victim as many others have to that type of heated rhetoric. I want to stay focused on this incident right now because what you were saying is that he went there to try to stop this law enforcement operation. All of the video that we have seen shows him documenting it with his cell phone, which is a lawful thing to do. And the only time he seemed to interact with law enforcement is when they went after him when he was trying to help an individual who law enforcement pushed down. So where do you have the evidence to show that he was trying to impede that?

that law enforcement operation. Sure, Dan, at first he was there in the scene. He was in the scene actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement to the point. But that's not illegal. He wasn't impeding it. He was filming it, which is a legal thing to do in the United States of America. Now, Dan, let's don't freeze frame adjudicate this now. He was there for a reason.

And that reason was to impede law enforcement to the point. What evidence do you have of that? And here's a good point, Dana, is the fact that de-escalation techniques were utilized during this action. Those de-escalation techniques, whether it was physically trying to remove them from that law enforcement scene, that active law enforcement scene in which law enforcement... I wanted to include a little bit more there because I feel like that's one of the few times we've seen him not just able to deliver his... Right, where someone's pushed a little. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Well, and there's a thing in the video that I think is really effective where, you know, you can hear him lying about the video and then the video is playing next to it. And you can just see what is happening. And then he's just saying shit. Yeah, it's a good piece of television news goes. That's not the worst piece I've seen. Yeah. Him saying they use de-escalation techniques as you watch half a dozen guys mate him in the face and then beat him. Yeah.

is, I mean, there's this line I think a lot about in chapter 7 of 1984, which was the party told you not to believe your eyes and ears. It was their final most important command. I mean, I don't, if this ain't that, then I don't know what is. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they don't even try to convincingly lie at this point. Yeah. They just keep to the narrative that has been set at the top. Yeah.

Well, not even in this case at the top. It was kind of set at like the upper middle. Yes. The top has been backing off from this narrative, at least a little bit. We'll get to that kind of back and forth in a sec. But, I mean, it's very clear from this that they just consider blowing a whistle to be impeding. Like, that's all the justification that they need. They consider his presence there.

As long as you are physically presence there. Yeah. Anything you do that they don't like is assaulting an officer at this point. Yes. It's kind of a minor point, but also his pronunciation of Gestapo. Gestapo, he does that every time. It's like, dude, we can, we know, we know. Yeah.

He's like he's wearing that fucking coat. He's wearing the outfits. He's wearing the outfit. He's like, come on. And yeah, no, it's, it's pretty insane. Yeah. I love the articles that are like, no, he's just wearing a traditional old style military coat. It's not a staph, okay.

Guys, come on, man. I've seen a lot of Border Patrol agents, guys. No one else wears that coat. He picked that coat because of how it looks. To my knowledge, that's not a uniform. for the Border Patrol. No, and he's never been in the military. Yeah. You know what he isn't? It's a secret police unit. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, no, I think it's worth eating that one. I want to talk about this ACLU lawsuit, right? So in sworn testimony, which were part of this ongoing

lawsuit, multiple witnesses said Preti did not brandish or draw his handgun. Quote, I have read a statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached him with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and They took him to the ground. One said. Another witness, a doctor, was prevented from performing CPR. Quote, none of the ICE agents who were near the victim were performing CPR, they said. Agents demanded the physician's license, which evidently they did not have, right?

They just ran out of their house in their pajamas. Their testimony continues, quote, I could tell the victim was in critical condition. I insisted the ICE agents let me assess him. They appeared to be operating under the assumption that these people were ICE. Some of them were CVP, I should just say that. They also noted that agents, quote, appeared to be counting his bullet wounds. Yeah. Jesus Christ.

And there is video that shows him doing bizarre things to his remains that are not within the remit of trauma care or first aid in my experience in training, which is pretty significant when it comes to like this exact scenario. The documents that released today so that they placed a chest seals on him. They were placing chess seals on him. Yeah. Yeah. That might explain it. It looks like they're sort of pulling up on his show. shirt. I mean, this whole, again, this whole instance very, very clearly documented with video.

Multiple angles. After this shooting, an agent is like on top of his body screaming for scissors to cut off his clothing. Yeah. And then later they place chess seals according to that document that was released to Congress. Yeah. Weird not to carry scissors in your first day kit when you were out of trauma shoes. But mine equivalent, I guess. I mean, these guys don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing, right? Bavino also noted in his press conference. that the agents were still at work, but they had been redeployed for their safety outside of the Twin Cities. Following the shooting, a vigil was held, and there were protests, including some armed presence in the protests. Minneapolis Police Department attempted to hold the space, both to keep the vigil away,

and earlier that day they had refused to leave when told to do so by federal police. later that night, they deployed extensive, less lethal munitions to clear the vigil. Let's go on ad break and then return to discuss the back-in-forth characterization of the shooting from Trump's cabinet. We are back. The day after the shooting, Cash Patel went on Fox News to say that it is against the law to bring a firearm to a protest. Nope. Here's a clip. As Christy said, you cannot bring.

a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have that right to break the law and incite violence. Yeah, that's wrong. In Minnesota, it is not against the law for permit holders to carry a firearm well attending a protest. And it's arguable whether what Prattie was doing is even, quote unquote, attending a protest. Yeah. These sorts of spontaneous mobilizations against ICE are not like a formalized. We are protesting in this location at the point. It's not a protest rally. It's community mobilizations. The term of protest is going to be applied a little bit loosely. Now, the DHS statement, three hours after the shooting, made this

claim, quote, this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement, unquote. This is the phrase that Bovino said verbatim at the press conference on Saturday following the shooting. Miller said something similar on Twitter. as he was tweeting at Democrat politicians, quote, a would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and a domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement, unquote. Christy Noem also had a press conference the day of the shooting, where she said, quote,

when you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, unquote. But by Monday, the White House began softly backtracking previous DHS claims about this shooting. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt said that she has not heard President Trump characterize Prattie as a domestic terrorist. That same day, Fox and Friends asked DOJ attorney, Todd Blanche about whether Preddy committed domestic terrorism, and he replied like this.

With all due respect, sir, my question is more pointed, do you believe your colleagues may have gone farther? You are an attorney, a DOJ, 18 U.S. Code 2331, it has a legal definition of domestic terrorism, and it doesn't appear to most of the country that have watched the available video, and we'll see if there's body cam video. I'd love to know if that's going to come out if there was such a thing, but it does not appear to have met that definition of domestic terrorism. So I'm just sort of wondering how you in the DOJ are viewing whether your colleagues may have gone too far. Look, I don't think anybody thinks that they were comparing what happened on Saturday to the legal definition of domestic terrorism. What we saw was a very violent

altercation. And I am not going to prejudge the facts. You're right. There's a bunch of video that's out there. There's a bunch of video that we haven't seen yet. in the minutes leading up to what happened and in what happened afterwards. And you're right, to the extent there's body cam or other videos that witnesses are still providing to us. So I'm not describing it as anything except for a tragedy. That's pretty, pretty wild. Two days after Kristynoem tried to literally give a definition of domestic terrorism at a press conference. And then DOJ attorneys just claiming, no, it's not the real legal definition of domestic terrorism. Yeah.

Like, this word is just a rhetorical tool for the administration to deploy at well. Yeah, we just were using it because we killed a guy and we wanted to shut down discussion. Yeah. Yeah. And when we didn't stick the landing because there were multiple angles on video, now we've got to find something else. Yeah. And we just did this. How many weeks ago was the...

No, I mean, this whole incident shows how vital documenting interactions like this can be. and how much public opinion is something that is not just fully dictated by administration statements. Like they tried to deploy a narrative, which after enough circulated, documented footage contradicted, public opinion of this incident formed in pretty strong opposition to the administration's claims. Yeah. Yeah. This has penetrated into a lot of places that are under ordinary circumstances, either extremely a political, or very conservative. Yeah. I am trying to remember, honestly, the last event that I saw between this and 2020 and the George Floyd uprising that had this kind of penetration into mainstream non-political society.

I remember one of the biggest things that I saw was this moment of, oh, actually, this specific shooting has gone to a point where it's reaching people who normally would never hear about this stuff was there's an NFL commentator named Kurt Warner who used to be a, he's a very famous quarterback. The only thing he ever talks about is quarterback play in football. This is the only thing he ever does. I'm not 100% sure about this, but when I look back, I couldn't find him saying anything about George Floyd. And Kurt Warner came out and gave a statement about how this shooting was a horror and that the administration was lying about it. And you saw this sort of rattling through, again, very, very conservative sports circles, which again,

in an NFL circle specifically where this kind of stuff never really penetrates. This weekend, you know, as this sort of murder was happening, the NFC and AFC championship games were going on in the sort of immediate wake of this. And these are, for people who don't follow football at all, these are the, after the Super Bowl, this is the semifinals. The winner of these two games goes to the Super Bowl. These are the second most important games of the entire NFL season. and fans at both of these games

booed the national anthem a thing I have never heard of before at a football game. Yeah, that's wild. Right, like the beginning of most football games, there was a bunch of troops holding the flag. And people, they didn't do this in 2020. They were booing the national anthem.

So one of these games was being played in Denver and the other one was being played in Seattle. and in the game in Seattle that the Fox broadcast kept cutting out the national anthem because people kept chanting fuck ice so they would just literally be

cutting the audio anytime that happened and this just kept happening to the entire course of this I have never seen anything like this breakthrough into sports like this it's been breaking into

there's a whole bunch of stories about just random groups on a Reddit whereas from breaking through into where you're getting statements from like oh god I wish I remember who on Blue Sky saw this from

but the person who runs the subreddit that's like playing your cat's butt like bongo drums without a statement about this? I'm glad they finally

spoke up, honestly, you know. We've all been waiting. Oh. But like I saw this in spaces where like climbing forums or climbing subredits.

Like, no, because they just shot a nurse in the head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the second time

they did it. And the thing to me that I think is really significant about happening at NFL games, right? One of the two teams that was playing in the game in Denver is the New England Patriots,

right? The New England Patriots are famously very, very close to Trump. As an organization, their owner is very close to Trump. So I had remembered a story from last year about, so the Patriots have a jet that is the Patriots jet, that they fly all their players around in, that has giant

letters the Patriots on it. Yeah. That is technically run through a charter company. But, you know, I remember last year there's a story about how their jet was doing flights to Guantanamo Bay. Sure. That makes sense for the Patriots jet. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. This is the kind of organizations that we're dealing with here, right? And while I was looking into the story about the Patriots jet being used to do things to move, apparently not detainees to Guantanamo, but apparently just military people and supplies, which they do a lot, I found a completely unrelated story about a different Patriots jet in, during the Biden administration doing deportation flights to Honduras. And this isn't considered an ideological thing. That's just money.

Like this is the kind of conservatism. You're dealing, yeah. You know, and I mean, this is technically the contractors who are doing this, but, you know, it's the plane with the Patriots logo on it. And they were doing deportation flights under Biden, like four years, three or four years ago. And now people are booing the national anthem, enchanting fuck ice. A lot of the stuff that we've talked about and we're going to talk about about the way the Trump administration has been backing off of this is because they have been forced to watch

the entire country go, holy shit. You just murdered this guy. And then lied about it. You just executed him in the street. Yeah, and lied about it. Yeah, I think they're lying. And you can just see them. And this is also the second time they've done this in a couple of weeks.

Like the lying thing is like, I think, for a lot of people, that's the really insulting thing. It's obviously a tragedy to have someone be killed by federal law enforcement like this. Yeah. But the blatantness of the lying, I think, is what really activated people here. Well, yeah, because this is for years, they've skirted. by on the situations like the written house thing where you can kind of see what happens, but depending on what you bring into it ideologically, that can look like two different things, right? Depending on whether you think those protesters are dangerous or not or whatever,

like that's a video that like everyone saw the same video and took something different out of it. That's not the case with this video or really with the Renee Good video for most people. Yeah. And it's really jarring for them. Most people who were not political, because that's what we're about it is like the sheer number of people who do not normally wait into this stuff who are making a comment. They would see one of these videos that is much more like if you're just kind of coming in and watching it, it's kind of unclear what's happening. And they would go, oh, it's another big con. I'm just not going to get involved with it. People are arguing about what this is. Let them argue. I'm going on with my life. This is very clear what's happening,

very clear that they're lying. And it's just upsetting. It's deeply upsetting to even people who don't normally think about this shit. Yeah. And I think part of that too is also, you know, there were a lot of people who didn't get involved with the Renee Good shooting because, you know, even then, people were still like, oh, well, maybe it's complicated. But once you've seen the second shooting in two weeks where the line from the administration is exactly the same, and you have video images again, that's how you get someone like Kurt Warner, who was a faith family football guy, he's very open about being a Christian, is very open about, he doesn't talk about politics, but he's very obviously conservative in a way that he doesn't think is political. Yeah. And he

looks at this and goes, holy shit, they murdered this guy and the government's lying about it. And that's a kind of breakthrough moment in all of this. I've seen a lot of stuff from like folks in the gun community, like who you wouldn't normally expect to be critical of the Trump administration being critical. Yeah. Because the Trump administration has come out with just like insane. They're repeating like anti-second amendment talking points. Yep.

I also saw his name's Tony Thomas, but he was previously the commander of, Special Operations Command, right, has been sharing. And unfortunately, AI, quote, unquote, enhanced photo of this shooting. God, God. That, I need to talk a little bit about that, but please continue. Yeah. It's remarkable that you've got someone whose job has been killing people for the United States government, right? Who, like, retired to a role in investment banking, who doesn't normally make statements in

public about immigration policy. But, like, again, this one is kind of broken containment, right? like they saw the police shoot a man in the back multiple times in broad daylight from multiple angles and yeah this one's been really hard for them to spin. Yeah, one of the things that

you know, when you talk about sort of read it as a site of this, right? One of the things on the front page of Reddit for a while that day was just a thing from like R-slash picks where it's a picture of a frame in this shooting and then it's a picture of a Nazi officer with a gun to the back of the head of a prisoner they're about to shoot

and it's almost identical frame for frame. And that's the kind of thing that's just going around on like the front page of Reddit. Part of what I think is happening here is they got very convinced to their ability to kind of just brute force

their own reality over what actually happened and maybe they gambled too hard. Yeah. So much of the story is like the ultimate conservative nightmare of the government physically disarming you

than executing you. Yeah. And that sequence of events is I think also in part what has created this pretty consistent turn away from the Trump administration's the DHS, this like initial statement on what happened here, which the administration themselves

have started to roll back on after the public rejected this claim that they kept making on him being like a terrorist, him intending to massacre law enforcement, all these things that they have no way to actually prove. On Tuesday, Stephen Miller pulled CNN that they are, quote, evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following White House approved protocol. and that the initial statement from DHS following the shooting was, quote, based on reports from CBP on the ground, unquote. On Wednesday, the DHS spokesperson, Trish McLaughlin, repeated this claim on Fox Business.

Secretary Nome accused Alex Preti of being a domestic terrorist. Is the administration standing by that language? So initial statements were made after reports from CBP on the ground. That was a very chaotic scene. We know that our ICE law enforcement are facing rampant violence against them, a highly coordinated campaign. So that is why this investigation is so important so that we can get accurate facts to the American people. Trump has denied that Preddy was acting as an assassin and has called the shooting a quote unquote very unfortunate incident. But he has continued to say that Prattie should not have been carrying a gun.

Quote, you can't have guns, you can't walk in with guns, you just can't, unquote. Yeah. The Minnesota gun owners caucus has been pretty impressive. Yeah. I'll say that. Like, generally, right, like, especially organized gun owner groups in the United States tend to align very heavily with conservative politics. They have been, like, reinforcing that what Prettie was doing was in nowhere legal,

and should no way lead to you being killed. Yeah. As of Wednesday, we do know now that the Border Patrol agents, involved in the killing of Alex Pretti have been placed on administrative leave. Around January 26th, Trump struck some kind of deal with local officials,

namely Mayor Frey and Governor Tim Walz. Local officials have said that, quote-unquote, some federal agents would begin leaving Minnesota. Bonvino is expected to return to California with the Atlantic reporting

that he's been stripped of his, quote-unquote, commander-at-large title and has been locked out of government social media accounts. Tom Homan has arrived in Minneapolis to take over immigration enforcement operations, and local Minnesota law enforcement have ramped up their policing of protests, especially outside of hotels where ICE and Border Patrol agents have been staying. And it's important to note, as you're seeing a lot of stories about sort of ice pulling out of

Minneapolis and, you know, an administration rollback because of the sort of Bovino movement. And everyone that I have talked to in Minneapolis, and this is a fairly large number of people, have all told me that everything on the ground remains the same. The raids are continuing and they want to make sure that everyone understands that the raids are continuing and that the same kinds of things that ICE and the Border Patrol have been doing up until this point are continuing to happen under, I guess, quote unquote, new management. Yeah, I think they may have withdrawn some Border Patrol agents, right, but the bulk of the people they deployed were actually ice. agents. They, to my knowledge, have not been withdrawn home and is not exactly a, like a liberal figure when it comes to deportation, to build it mildly. It might be like a change in the outward appearance, but the practice of what's going on. That has not changed. Do we want to just have any kind of final discussion on that AI enhanced image that's been circulating? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's an AI enhanced image. And this is, when I posted this, I've seen people comment that, like,

oh, it's more disinformation from the fascist. This is the opposite of that. Yeah. Someone AI enhanced a still frame from the video, because there's a question as to whether or not when one of the ICE agents disarmed Preddy, did he negligently discharge his firearm into the ground? And did that maybe spook them and cause the remaining chain of events?

I don't think it's clear. And the video is not super clear as to whether or not the gun is firing. It's kind of grainy. Yeah, we don't know that yet. So in like the new AI enhanced version, you literally see like a tongue of fire coming out of the barrel of the gun. And then a full round of 556 seems to be exiting it. Like with the casing?

They just made shit up. It looks like it has the casing. It looks not like a firing gun looks. And the text on this is this is from the AI Info Twitter account. An enhanced video of a man who disarmed Alex Pruddy shows the show's gun allegedly misfiring. His ICE agent runs with it, which has also been said to have spooked other agents into firing. AI video also enhances the visuals of the bullets. It would be clearly visible to the human eye.

It's like, AI didn't hit shit. You had a five-year-old scribbling on it. And, you know, I don't know. I guess this could be them trying to be like, oh, it wasn't a federal agent's fault. It's those damn sick P320s that spooked everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, number one, AI can't enhance things. Nothing can enhance a photo.

That's not a thing that's real. You can't just, like, add details to a photo. that weren't in in a way that's different from just photoshopping them in. And that's what AI did. Someone said, add visuals of a bullet, and they did. And it's bad. It looks like a fucking sparkler is stuck in the end of a handgun. Yeah.

But yeah, it's just shit like this. That's just going to be everything. Like every clash, every murder, every controversial thing that happens, there's immediately going to be a bunch of different AI slot videos and analysis. And what scares me most, or not even scares me, what I think is, what I think is, is the biggest problem isn't even just the straight up disinfo videos. It's the stuff where people are claiming, look, I did some research using this AI and it revealed this thing that isn't immediately visible to the naked eye, but this is clearly what really went on. Yeah. And how that's

going to supercharge fucking conspiracy theories about stuff and how the response when people are like, but the AI didn't enhance anything will just be like, you're not smarter than an AI. You don't know. Like that's the kind of thing. It's just going to be annoying. Like the truth ecosystem is already so damaged. I certainly wouldn't say that this is going to definitely make everything worse, but it's going to make everything more annoying. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I've seen this image that you're talking about, but I've seen a whole bunch of other, like, AI enhanced images of the shooting. It's specifically like the moment where, where, or like around the time that the agents are, firing into the back of Prattie. And it's mostly like AI sharpened images, but taken to such an

extreme extent that literally one of the heads of the Border Patrol agents is just missing. You know what? I wouldn't call that enhanced, but I'd say it's an improvement. You have to kind of look for it because of how much movement is in the end. Right, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I've seen this, the AI enhanced like, like, still from the pink jacket lady angle of the shooting. I've seen this image spread all around by people showing like how, how like brutal this looks and it you don't need to spread this AI sharpened version

with the with the head missing like there is like regular stills that maybe are a little bit more fuzzy but they actually are real and you've seen a few other like AI altered images spreading around around this shooting specifically there's been like

AI altered images of Alex Preti that like slightly changes his like facial proportions that have been used at some like memorials have been have been spreading on the internet. And that sort of stuff has been incredibly frustrating just to see the sort of proliferation of these of these AI images into like the news cycle. I shared the enhanced image. That looks really bad. It's really bad. No, that's like that's like cartoonish. Yeah, I've not seen that. Yeah. It's like a kindergartner. It's unreal. You don't need to do this. Like the people that

have seen the footage knows what happened. You don't need to spread these fake images. Like public opinion has already formed on this. Yeah. We'll go on ad break again. But I think, think to close this section. I'll play this short clip from the Minnesota Timberwolves game, which is a basketball game, I believe. Yeah. Which they held a moment of silence for Preddy and people chanted towards the end. I'll shorten the moment of silence for the audience, but you can take a listen here. The tragic laws of Alex Prady that occurred yesterday in Minneapolis. We extend our love, support and heartfelt sympathies to Alex's family, friends in our community during this difficult time.

Please join us in honoring the life and memory of Alex Pretty with a moment of silence. All right, we are back. After the shooting on Saturday, Chuck Schumer said that Senate Democrats would not be advancing a House-approved appropriations bill with the currently included DHS funding. Right now, the Senate is considering. a six-bill spending package that was narrowly approved by the House, thanks to seven Democrats, and now Senate Dems are seeking to separate out the DHS bill and advance the five others. These six annual spending bills are set to expire on January 31st.

If at least some Democrats don't sign on to the bills by Friday, there will be a partial government shutdown. On Wednesday, Schumer reiterated, quote, until ICE is properly reined in and overhauled legislatively, the DHS funding bill doesn't have the votes to pass the Senate, unquote. Possible immigration enforcement concessions that Democrats are pushing for include but are not limited to independent investigations into the recent shootings, mandating judicial warrants for immigration arrests, mandating body cams, requiring agent identification, no masks, no arrest quotas,

no roving patrols, and restricting border patrol agents to the U.S. border. Yeah, so I want to address, I've actually addressed the roving patrols before, and the evidence standards for the stops on those patrols. I'm not going to do that, but I do want to address this last one, right, with the quote-unquote U.S. border. So in the statute, Border Patrol is supposed to operate within a reasonable distance of the United States border, which they interpret to be a 100-mile distance.

Now, when you are thinking of border, you might be thinking of land borders, but remember, this also includes ocean borders. They interpret the Great Lakes to be international waterways, and thus it begins 100 miles from the shore of the Great Lakes. For context, that still doesn't get you into Minneapolis, right? You're looking at a bit further, 250 miles, which is the shortest line I could draw on a map. People seem to be operating under a misapprehension that this includes airports, and it does not. And I keep seeing this repeated online and people keep telling me, the statute is actually very clear on what does and does not constitute a border. And it talks about external borders. And airports are not included in this. Border Patrol does not operate within a hundred mile radius of every international airport in the United States. Really unclear if Democrats will be

able to get some of these things. Obviously pushing for more training has its limits. The people involved in this shooting had years and years of training. And gave the training in some cases. They were doing what they were trained to do. Yeah. But there's other stuff in here, like mandating body cams, which though Border Patrol currently has body cams, like ICE and Border Patrol, they have body cams.

They're not required to always have them on. This would be seeking to change that. Other things like requiring the identification of agents deployed, not wearing masks, not having arrest quotas. These would significantly change the way that ICE operas. it's on the ground. Yeah. Possibly the most important thing that they are seeking here is the emphasis on judicial

words as opposed to this administrative warrant that ICE has been using as its primary justification the past few months. I think we should refer to those. I've been called the administrative warrants. I think a better, I guess, down to use as the form 215, because that's what it is. It's a form that they filled out, right? Like, it is not a warrant in any meaningful sense of the word. Yeah.

But yeah, I'm just noting that because that's a, that's a, that's a just. change I'm going to be trying to implement in my work going forward. The last Minneapolis-related story for this episode, which is a mostly Minneapolis episode, I guess, is based on a CNN report that has claimed that federal agents encountered Alex Preddy a week prior to killing him. Preddy is said to have been driving and stopped his car when he witnessed ICE agents chasing a family on foot. Preddy began shouting and blowing a whistle before agents tackled Preddy and broke one of his ribs.

Prattie was later released on this scene. DHS has told CNN that they have no record of this incident, though an anonymous source told CNN that Prattie was a known and identified protester to federal officials on the ground. Quoting CNN, quote, earlier this month, a DHS official in Minneapolis sent a memo to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,

Homeland Security Investigations officers, assigned to the state on a temporary duty asking them to use a form to input information on protesters and agitators. It is unclear whether the new intake form was used to share Prattie's information. It's also not clear whether federal agents who encountered Prattie on Saturday recognized him before they confronted him, unquote.

Yeah, it's definitely HSI that has been doing the federal stuff that involves citizens, I guess, right? Like when they are investigating detaining people, I know Pam Bondi is there today. again, and has posted pictures of people who are detained with HSI officers, which is not a usual thing to do. But, yeah, HSI, for whatever reason, they're kind of using as their, like, surrogate FBI in these instances. James, then you can also speak on the sort of, like, surveillance of protesters, quote-unquote agitators that feds have been doing on the ground based on what you saw in Minneapolis. Yeah, that's, thank you, yeah. So, look, I was at the Whipple Building, right?

The Whipple Building being the Federal Building in Minneapolis, where they are taking people who are being detained and where ICE and CBP are deploying out of every day, right? I was there because there was a protest on Friday as part of a general strike. And I noticed they looked like CBP or ICE, right? They had, like, what I would describe was, tactical helmets and gear on, but using DSLR cameras to take pictures of people protesting. They were in vehicles and they were shooting. I can't remember if they had a door or the window to a,

allowed them to take photographs, but I noticed that is an effort at surveillance, right? It is not unreasonable. I know Garrison, you also have this video, which happened in Maine, right, of an agent more or less saying this, but it's not unreasonable to think that there is surveillance of people who are engaging in First Amendment protected activities. Yes, and there has been some desire among ICE officials, including Tom Homan, who went on Fox News earlier this month, to say that he's pushing for a database, quote, were those people that are arrested for interference impeding an assault, we're going to make them famous, unquote.

So this news that Alex Freddie had been previously identified in some way by federal law enforcement follows an incident last Friday where a federal agent in Maine photographed illegal observer's car and said, quote, we have a nice little database

and you're now considered a domestic terrorist. I'll play this clip here. It's not illegal to record. Exactly. Yeah. That's what we're doing. Yeah, why are you taking my information down? Because we have a nice little database.

Oh, good. And now you're considered domestic terrorists. We're videotaping you? Are you crazy? George McLaughlin has told CNN that there is, quote, no database of quote-unquote domestic terrorists run by the Department of Homeland Security, unquote. I want to say something about this main video,

which is that I've been seeing a lot of people circulating this as, oh, there's new repression tactics happening here. They're going to show up people's houses. This has been happening. I mean, I know it was happening in Chicago. It probably was happening in L.A. I just don't remember off top of my head. But the stuff that's happening here where these people take pictures of your face is not new at all.

It's not some kind of new innovation in these repression tactics. Like, obviously be careful. But this is not a reason that everyone suddenly needs to be afraid that there's like a giant crackdown coming. They've been doing this the whole time. And so far, it really hasn't. Like, it sucks, but it hasn't stopped Minneapolis. It hasn't stopped Chicago. No, they're trying to intimidate you to stop doing this. Like, that is the point of this agent walking by and joking about how you're now a domestic terrorist. Yeah. Because that's not actually real.

That is a way to scare you into not showing up based on the, based on the idea that if you do, they'll take a picture of you and now you get added to this domestic terrorist database. Yeah. Now, is it possible that they're making like some kind of catalog of, of pictures of protesters that they can maybe use for reference in the future to build a case against someone or if they arrest someone

they can look to see if they've been at previous protests. No, that's not impossible. That is something that they've been doing for quite a while. It's something that anti-fascists do against like proud boys back in the day where you just document

a lot of people at a protest and then maybe eventually the information will become useful. Right. That is not like surprising, but like I've seen some pretty outrageous claims going viral that like after predatory

had this encounter with law enforcement previously where they broke his rib, that was then specifically targeted in the following weeks. Like, there is no information for that. Yeah, we have no evidence to prove that. There's no information that this database led to him being intentionally targeted by federal agents on the ground. That is just speculation at this point. Yeah, there's no evidence of that, and there's no evidence that this is like a new kind of campaigned repression. And I want to be very clear about this. If you are spreading this as a, you need to be afraid now because there's a new thing that's happening. You are doing their job. You are spreading the fear that this is an intimidation that this is designed to do. So please stop doing this.

Yeah. I think like I understand that for a lot of people, any form of activism is very new. And everything seems scary. But this is this is one of those times when like you need to check what you're doing because as Mia said, right, this has the legal term is a chilling effect. Right. Like the government, generally courts have found the government should not, should not do things that have a chilling effect on First Amendment protected speech. That's absolutely what the government is trying to do. You don't have to help them. Or not the government, but that particular agent, I should say, acting at work saying he's building a database, right? That is what that is trying to do is, is to have a chilling effect. Well, I mean, I would argue the government's also doing this,

you know, calling every legal observer a domestic terrorist, right? Yeah, I guess, yeah, Fair enough. So we should mention this, just so we don't leave it out, although we don't have a ton to say at the moment about this. But like the day before we recorded this on the 27th of January, I believe, Ilan Omar was doing a town hall in Minneapolis, where she is a representative and was assaulted by a man named Anthony James Casimirzac, who was a 55-year-old. He was carrying what looked like a syringe, but without a needle, just like a

Like a large syringe, like the kind you'd use to, like, give medicine to an animal or something. Yeah, like an irrigation syringe. Right. And it was filled with some kind of off-brownish yellow liquid. I don't think we know what it was. It apparently was foul smelling, obviously. And he ran up screaming, you must resign, and sprayed some of it at her. I don't know how much got on her.

He was tackled very quickly by a security guard. Omar seemed to be squaring up and ready to fight him, which was, you know, expected, given like the kind of shit she's had to deal with, right? She's had to be a very tough person. She doesn't seem to be injured. I don't think there's any evidence that the liquid or whatever was something that caused or is likely to cause health issues, which, I mean, doesn't make it not assault. It just, I don't think she's currently in any danger, thankfully. Yeah.

There's been a chorus of denunciations about the attack on her from a bunch of other elected leaders. I know people have said that, like, it's been ignored, but at least it hasn't been for. from other people in the house, right? There's a lot of folks, including some Republicans who have made comments on it, just because none of them like the thought

of having shit sprayed on them, I think. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we don't know a ton about this guy and why he did otherwise, other than that, he presumably hated Illinois, right?

And that he wanted to get her to quit her job or otherwise harm her in some way. We don't really know much about this guy. There's some people talking about the fact that his kids seem to be on the left, Well, he's clearly not as if that's weird. It's not.

If your dad is the kind of crazy asshole who will spray poison on Il-on Omar at a town hall, I can see how maybe you become the opposite of him. But yeah, that's about all we know at the moment. Well, I do want to mention Trump's comment on it, where ABC News asked Trump if he'd seen the video, and Trump said, quote, no, I don't think about her. I think she's a fraud.

I really don't think about that. She probably had sprayed herself knowing her. Yeah, you said that like a guy who thinks about her constantly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really hideous stuff. Yeah.

Producer Sophia here with a quick pickup, as we did not have this information at the time of recording. This is as of January 20th, 2026, per AP News, quote, The Justice Department has charged a man who squirted apple cider vinegar on Democratic representative Omar at an event in Minneapolis, according to court papers made public Thursday. The man arrested for Tuesday's attack, Anthony Kazmurzak, faces a charge of forcibly assaulting, opposing, impeding, and intimidating Omar, according to a complaint filed in federal court. Authorities determined that the substance was water and apple cider vinegar,

according to an affidavit. After Kazmurzak sprayed Omar with the liquid, he appeared to say, quote, she's not resigning, you're splitting Minnesotans apart, and quote, the affidavit says. Authorities also say that Casmerzac told a close associate several years ago that, quote, somebody should kill, end quote, Omar, court documents say. Casmerzac appeared briefly in federal court Thursday afternoon. His attorney told the judge, her client was unmedicated at the time of the incident and has not had access to medications he needs to treat Parkinson's disease in other serious conditions he suffers from.

U.S. magistrate judge, Dulcey Foster, ordered that Kazerzac remained in custody and told officials he needs to see a nurse when he is transferred to the Sherbourne County Jail, end quote. Again, that is via AP News. So I want to very briefly update people on Rajava. Keep asking for a whole episode. We will do one, I've been in Minneapolis. It's kind of a lot going on right now. Yeah, and you may have noticed, but this is all very important, right?

Like, horrible things are happening. So the STG, that's a Syrian transitional government, Ahmed al-Shara, Julani's government, right? And the SDF, Syrian Democratic forces, which includes YPG and YPGA, the armed forces that defend Roshava, have signed a 15-day extension to their ceasefire. Both sides are accusing the other of widespread violations of the ceasefire. Both of them are right. I've seen a lot of videos of ceasefire violations. Ceasefire was internationally mediated, likely by the US, and likely because of huge concerns

around the escape of Islamic State prisoners. there was an attempted IS suicide bombing in Iraq yesterday as we record this. That's the first time I can remember one of those happening in a while. The person was apprehended. But the US, I know, has been transferring detainees from a prison near Hesaka. They're transferring them to US facilities in Iraq. The presence of the detainees is not the thing that is going to make the US support their allies in Rochava or their former allies in the SDF.

I guess I should say now that the U.S., once again, it's not going to be a good friend to the Kurdish people. Trump has also truth that Iraq should not appoint Nuri al-Maliki as its next prime minister. In his truth, he said, quote, I am hearing that the great country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouriel Maliki as prime minister. Last time Maliki was in power, the country descended into poverty and total chaos. That should not be allowed to happen again because of his insane policies and ideology. If elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq. And if we are not there to help, Iraq has zero chance of success, prosperity, or freedom, make Iraq great again.

Jesus Christ. First off, I mean, Maliki does suck. He's a really bad guy. Yeah, this is not a like yay Maliki post, but this ain't the way to go about doing that. No, I mean, just the whole, we will cut all ties and support to Iraq thing when everything happening. there is still downstream of us fucking with them. Yeah. We did this.

We spent 20 fucking years killing people in Iraq. Like, you don't just get to be like, oh, yeah. And like the idea that we were doing regime change, but when the regime isn't the one that we like, that people elect, and I was like we're doing regime change again. Like, obviously the whole thing was a fraud and a lie. Yes. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Still is. Yeah, very concerned for my friends. Uh, all the parts of Kurdistan, the peace process between the PKK, in Turkey is falling apart. And state violence in Iran is still absolutely repugnant scale, right? Yeah.

Yeah, pretty tough time in that part of the world. I'm thinking of them. So finally, I want to give a brief update on my story from last week about this attempt to end Fed independence and this attempt to sort of do an investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve. So earlier today, as we were recording this, we got the result of the Fed's vote about what they were going to do with interest rates.

There's a whole episode about that. Go listen to that if you want to understand what this is. But the Fed, instead of cutting rates as the administration has wanted, has decided to hold interest rates at the same level, which was what was expected out of the Federal Reserve before Trump started putting even more pressure on them. However, we did not get any updates from anyone at the Federal Reserve about this Department of Justice investigation or any of the Trump pressure that's been being put on the Federal Reserve. So we'll keep you updated as the situation evolves, but all we got was a very normal interest rates are being held at the same level. We will include our list of mutual aid fundraisers for Minneapolis

again in the show notes for this episode. Should you like to donate? put a transfer on your couch. Yep. And if you want to email us, cool zone tips at proton. Dot me, use a proton mail address to send it.

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Thanks for listening. A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Delo Rocha, a host of sacred lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection,

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