Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 232

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Starting point is 00:01:54 Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. 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

Starting point is 00:02:11 somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen here.

Starting point is 00:02:29 It's me today, James, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quentin, who is a senior staff technologist at the EFF, and Colonel Panic, who is a hacker. And we are going to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is coming our way, I guess, the end of privacy and what you can do to stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for joining me, both you. Absolutely. Yeah, hey, James, happy to be on the show again.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for making the time. So I guess, like, in the cases somebody lives under a rock, we should start breaking down some of the different like surveillance mechanisms that the state is building. And maybe, Carol Panic, you can kick us off with with flock, because that is the one that has probably got the most attention recently. And then Cooper, we can pick up on some of the many other privacy violation tools. Certainly, you may notice all these cameras popping up around your town.

Starting point is 00:03:26 They're on a black pole. It's a black camera with a solar panel. And these are what we call flock cameras. they're really easy to spot, but they're essentially ALPRs, they're automatic license plate readers. So this is like a form of dragnet surveillance where anytime you drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate. And they've expanded this to do other things like facial recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed person detection is another one, which is really dodgy.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Yeah, fascinating. It just looks for people who are acting distressed. Or I think it's a sound thing too, right? Oh, okay. Yeah, I think it's pretty similar to gunshot detection. It looks for people shouting, people in the heightened state of emotion, right? I mean, this could really easily be a protest detector, right? Yeah, or imagine if that was a fucking peacock.

Starting point is 00:04:18 Like, when peacocks get angry, they really sounds like someone's dying, or a fox. So, yeah, I mean, false positives are already a huge issue for gunshot detections in general, right? They can go off for a balloon popping. They can go off for fireworks. Yeah. And then just because you're in the area, you're now part of an investigation. So perhaps we should talk a little bit about some of the other ones, Cooper. Maybe we start with facial recognition.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Yeah, yeah. Facial recognition is all the race these days. A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this. We've seen, of course, ICE with their mobile fortified tool that's gotten a lot of press lately. and then this is a app that that runs on Android phones that they can scan people with and apparently, according to them, get a fully 100% accurate identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial recognition will tell you that that is not true and that can't possibly be true.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Facial recognition is never 100% accurate. And in fact, there have been dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned, in charge because of incorrect facial recognition results. This has also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There was a woman in Oregon

Starting point is 00:05:41 who ICE scanned her face, and they scanned her twice. Both times, it came up with a different identity for this woman. And it turns out that both of those identities, neither of them were the correct identity for this woman. Jesus. But ICE

Starting point is 00:05:57 has been using this as as a, you know, sort of judge, jury and execution to determine whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens when you come to the United States, you're a migrant rate, is that they will collect a large amount of your biometric data.

Starting point is 00:06:19 But it seems that even with all of that, the resolution that they have on this scan is actually very poor. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, that is correct, right? So the way that this works, the databases that they have, it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's most likely checking against the like TSA database of biometric scans that you do every time you take a flight. Of course, all of the at the border biometric scans, the ingress and egress scans,

Starting point is 00:06:47 any sort of visa information or anything like that. There's also the Clearview AI. So even if you've never done any of these, there's another app called ClearVie AI, which is used by law enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing. But its backend data is all of the photos that have been posted online. So they're using data from social media, Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match and determine who you are based on that sort of

Starting point is 00:07:15 publicly available data as well. Great. Yeah. What a reassuring thing to hear. The high cost of the free service. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's talk about a couple of other things.

Starting point is 00:07:28 I think those are things that people have a very reasonable fear of, concern with, anger or about, however you want to put it. There is some stuff which I think perhaps we just need to understand what it means, I guess. And maybe we could start there. I know Cooper, you've done a lot with stingrays or cell phone site simulators, lots of names for them. Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of years working on a project called Ray Hunter, which is a open source project to detect cell size simulators or stingrays or MC catchers, whatever you want to call them.

Starting point is 00:08:05 I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short, the way it works is it's a little piece of software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those little things that you buy to get like Wi-Fi in various places from a cellular connection. And it looks at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that it's connected to, specifically the control traffic, not what you're doing, but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting into the towers. It looks for a number of suspicious things, signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative of MCC capture activity. So we've been running this for a year. There's several hundred of these around the U.S., if not a couple thousand, but we don't have exact numbers. there's a bunch of these all over the U.S.

Starting point is 00:08:47 We had a bunch in Minneapolis, people have been running them in Chicago and L.A. when that was going on, people have been running them all over the country. And we have found some evidence of emcy catchers, but a lot less than we expected, or a lot less than many people expected. I actually

Starting point is 00:09:03 didn't expect to find many. And specifically, we have not found any evidence of emce catchers being used at protests. And I should stop here for a second to explain what a stingray or MCC Catcher is. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:17 This is a fake cell tower, essentially, that tricks your phone into connecting to it. And so that your phone will identify itself to the MCCatcher. These are used for, the primary reason these are used for is to track down a specific person. So, like, what we see in court documents is that these are used to verify that somebody is home before a police raid happens, right? This is what the vast majority of use for these is. That is one use. The other potential use, and the one we're actually more concerned about, is that these could be used to identify who is in a specific area. You can set one of these up outside, let's say, outside of a mosque or outside of a protest, an anarchist meeting or a

Starting point is 00:10:05 anti-fascist meeting is regularly happening, right? And identify the people who were in that meeting by getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone company and saying, give us the subscriber information for these people. And that is a far more concerning use. And we are not seeing it so far with Ray Hunter being used for that. What we're seeing is uses that seem to be more in line with the sort of manhunt or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation, which is also what we're seeing in core documents.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Interesting. Yeah. it doesn't mean that the government cannot find out that you were at a place or at a protest, right? It just means that they're not using this mechanism of doing that. Yeah, that's exactly right. So people have asked us what our theories are for about why we're not seeing these to protest, because for a lot of, for a long time, there were a lot of activists that were pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest, right? Or then maybe, like, You know, to use the old, there was the old Cointel Pro language was like the architects of Cointel Pro

Starting point is 00:11:11 wanted activists to feel like there was a cop behind every bush and inside every mailbox, right? And that was really the impression that a lot of activists had about emcy catchers, right? That they were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that they were just constantly being used. And it seems like that's not the case. And I think there's a couple reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about a million dollars for an MCCatcher contract. So these are actually like fairly rare.

Starting point is 00:11:38 And they're hard to operate. They require a lot of technical knowledge. They require a lot of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually go do all this work if it's not necessary, right? And it's a lot more expensive. Then using one of the many other surveillance technologies they have, flock, facial recognition, things like PennLink, which we can talk about in a little bit.

Starting point is 00:12:02 but other databases of location, because our phone, advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location, right? And there's a whole surveillance industry around that selling that data to police. Also, the other big issue is that there was a legal decision in 2020, 2019. I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers, so we need to get on this. In 2019, called Carpenter versus USA.

Starting point is 00:12:29 And the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to actually, historical cell site location information. So this is where people were located based on what cell towers they're connected to. That police would need a warrant for that information. And it seems like at that time, a lot of law enforcement agencies decided that that also extended to stingrays. Whereas previously they had not been needing to get a warrant to use their stingrays, it seems like a lot of them thought, oh, okay, this seems like it probably also applies to stingrays. therefore, any case using

Starting point is 00:13:05 Stingrays without a warrant will get thrown out, therefore we're going to need to get a warrant to use this thing. And it turns out, having to get a warrant was too high of a bar for most police agencies and made them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had to and thought they could get a warrant for it. But there's a lot of other things they don't have to get a warrant for.

Starting point is 00:13:27 So we think, my theory, is that they are using these other technologies, that are easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get a warrant, and saving the stingrays only for when they are sure they can get a warrant, and when they cost and complexity is justified. Yeah, that makes sense. It's 2018, June 22nd, 2018, that Supreme Court case. Thank you. Real-time fact-checking here on ICHH.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about Penlink and, like, other location data. I did hear recently that it's possible that Iran had used. commercially available location data to target some of its strikes on U.S. troops in the Middle East, which is wild to consider. I had not heard that, but it's not surprising, and it is absolutely wild, right? So Penlink is a company that actually previously had sold a lot of software to help out with MC catchers. So interestingly, they have now pivoted to different types of surveillance.

Starting point is 00:14:28 So they, a few years ago, acquired this company, Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the software that was acquired by Penlink in this sale. There were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway, there was a report on Citizen Lab that's excellent. I'd highly recommend it. But the short of it is that Penlink has acquired two of their main products, one of which is called Tangles and the other one is called Weblock.

Starting point is 00:14:57 Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links between different people, different organizations, say like anybody who has interacted with the John Brown Gun Club or anybody who has interacted with the socialist area or anybody who has mentioned the words Antifa, right? You can go build a dossier on that person, build a dossier on who their friends are, what they're talking about, scrape specific groups,

Starting point is 00:15:35 any sort of left-leaning group, right? They can build a dossier on that, who all the people are, who their friends are. And then they have this tool called Weblock. And what Weblock does is it is a near real-time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide. And so how, it works is police can circle a specific area on a map and it will show information about all of the phones

Starting point is 00:16:04 that they know, you know, that we're in that area in some sort of time frame. And I think that the data gets updated every 24 hours. So you're going to have about a 24 hour delay in that data. So you circle an area just like with your finger and you're going to see who was there, you know, as them 24 hours ago and back to, you know, whatever time frame you set. you can then select any one of those phones that were in that area and see information about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information, like what sort of age bracket that person's in, what their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether they're a parent, what their nationality is, et cetera, et cetera. But you can also see a historical map of where that person or where that device, we should say, has been. been, right? And so you can see where they spend their days, which is probably their work or something like that, where they spend their nights, which is probably their house, you know, where they spend

Starting point is 00:17:05 sort of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house, something like that, right? But you can see everywhere they've gone. You can see if they were at a specific protest. You could see everybody who was at a specific protest. You could do a lot of different things with that. And we think that they get that data from advertising networks. We know they get it from apps on your phone. And basically those apps are sending information to advertising networks, which is then sold or scraped by Penlink to add to their database for this app. And all of this is then sold to law enforcement so law enforcement can get this information and none of it requires a warrant currently. Law enforcement does not think they need a warrant to acquire this data and judges have

Starting point is 00:17:51 upheld that so far. Yeah. So you're saying when you download an app and you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and then sold to third party? Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps. Most didn't. We've been really strongly encouraging people to not give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason why that app should have location permissions, right? Like on my phone, the only app that has location permissions is my Maps app and my weather app, right?

Starting point is 00:18:20 And that's because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them. But if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid, like if I was heading into something, I mean, if I was heading to something that I didn't want people to know I was there, I would turn my phone off or at least put it on airplane mode, right? Yeah. You know, short of that, you could turn off location services entirely for your phone, right, and give no app your location. But yeah, it's our phones are snitches, man.

Starting point is 00:18:47 Our phones are snitches. Yeah, that is the big take home is the big snitch you carry around in your pocket. it take everywhere with you. Talking of snitches, I can't think of a way to pivot this into adverts, damn. Products and services. Here's some things you can buy to snitch on you. Yeah, hey, buy these things. They'll give away information data. Sell it to an Israeli company who'll sell it back to the cops. All right. We are back. I hope you bought something nice. I want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting.

Starting point is 00:19:33 It gives people something. They can understand a little more about the web of surveillance around them, right? They can feel a little bit more informed. So let's talk about it. Maybe, Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off, you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't know how you want to put it behind some of them. Yeah, certainly. I came up with the idea for what people are now calling we spy.

Starting point is 00:19:57 It actually was initially called OUI Spy. It was organizational unique identifier, which is the first, six characters of a Mac address. But it's art, you know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it. It has dual meanings, we spy. But this actually kind of was born from the war driving community, which is old school driving around trying to find devices, just seeing what's out there. And so essentially, you have all these devices that are transmitting around you. And it's totally fine and totally legal to just receive passively. And so things like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to just drive around and just kind of see what devices are in your area.

Starting point is 00:20:43 And through this, I came up with a device that was based on remote ID stuff prior to We Spy that just detects drones and then transmits it over mesh-tastic. Or detects a device and transmits it over mesh-tastic. And then I was like, it'd be really cool to have a device that if you have a device that you want to know, when comes around you, it'll just beep. And so I just took a microcontroller and drew out the design for this thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the firmwares that do a few different things. For instance, if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove by or something, you could put in the OUI for that or the Mac address for a specific device. And you can just tell, you can get alerts when devices are around you essentially. So that's where all that began.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Yeah. To explain how this might help someone. Let's say like you just wanted to get an idea, right, of the surveillance infrastructure that you encountered in your daily life. You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't know all that shit is. Your local newspaper is dead now because everyone's local newspaper is dead now, right? So there's no reporting on it. Like if they wanted to get one of these devices cruise around town and work out like when they were being spied on, like what kind of abilities would it give them? So there's drone detection on this device, so you can have it alert when drones are near or have it map via remote ID. But the biggest one, I think, that has been the most important one is the flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras than flock. But this is the important one lately. So a lot of people are out on, you know, out doing word driving and doing real-time research and contributing to, you know, adding to this database of flock cams, signatures essentially. And it's either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and some of them are over-cellular, too. But essentially, I made a firmware called FLOCU. When you drive around, it just war drives flak cams.

Starting point is 00:22:45 And a good friend of mine did some recent research and found out that if you put the microcontroller into Wi-Fi permiscuous mode, it'll detect more flock cams. So that firmware just came out a couple days ago. So constantly being added to. So if anyone has, you know, Mac addresses, OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kid. Yeah, it allows people to then let crowd source or do community-based mapping of this stuff, right, to give people. And like, I know I have friends who have reported on gunshot detection software. It won't surprise people to find out which communities are the most surveilled and which communities are the least surveilled, right? But it nonetheless is important. Like, that's an

Starting point is 00:23:37 important function in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones. People might be thinking, why, why would I want to look for drones? Drones are super cool. I just fly them around to see the birds. Like, you can explain that drones might also play a role in surveillance? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a avid drone flyer, so I developed this just for funzies, you know, and made a drone detector. And I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are the PD, unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's really interesting to see and to see that they're flying, you know, more regularly than any hobbyist. Yeah, yeah, this has become a big part of like cops used to have to send up a helicopter to look at something from above, right? And they still do all the time.

Starting point is 00:24:23 I hear that shit over my house every day. But they can also do it with it right now for much less money. But do you want to explain Ray Hunter a little bit for people who are like, they're suddenly shocked by all of this and they want to turn their car into a beeping machine? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I will do that. I want to extol the virtues of We Spy for a little bit before that, though.

Starting point is 00:24:45 Yeah. I mean, this is how I linked up with Colonel Panache because I thought this was such a really amazing project. And I think that it serves a couple of purposes, right? I think that there's one very practical purpose of, like, this can help you map out the surveillance in your town, right? You can export the data from this and upload it directly to lock mapper, right? Or there's some other site that'll help you, like, plot a route from point A to point B,

Starting point is 00:25:14 avoiding flock cameras, which I think is really cool. It also just helps. sensitize you to how many flock cameras are in your town. Like people, like they, they are unobtrusive to a degree, right? Like, they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah. Right. But when you're like, I was surprised by how much it went off in my town.

Starting point is 00:25:38 And then I'd look up and I'm like, oh yeah, fly camera, fly camera, okay. Right. And it got me used to like spotting those cameras around, right? And I think that it's a really, it's a really useful piece of, of propaganda work essentially in that way to get people used to spotting these, to get people thinking about, well, where are these? How many of these are there in my town? Right?

Starting point is 00:26:00 Like, people are like, well, you could just go look for them. Yeah, but people don't, right? You've got other shit to do. Yeah, like. Yeah, exactly. But if I hear that from the, from the, you know, really loud buzzer, right? I know that something is going on, right? It's more of a, it's a little more jarring.

Starting point is 00:26:18 It's good in that way. Yeah, I see it as like a little, I don't know, imagine a little parrot sat on your shoulder and went, you're being spied on, you're being spied on, you're being spied on, just constantly. Yeah, yeah, and you realize the extent to which that is happening. The surveillance, coal mine canary essentially, you know. Yeah, canary is better, better analogy. Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat, right? Yeah, yeah, instead of every time you're lying, it says that, it just says surveillance every time somebody's lying on you.

Starting point is 00:26:46 Yeah. The other thing that I think is cool about no UI spy and Raimentor and why I think these are good projects is it gives a lot of people something to do, right? Fascism can really make people feel helpless and this overarching surveillance can really make people feel helpless. And it's really easy for people to fall into privacy nihilism and security nihilism, right? And just be like, well, I'm going to be watched constantly. There's nothing I can do. so, you know, sprit, why do anything, right? And this gives people something to do, right?

Starting point is 00:27:21 There's a thing you can, and Americans love buying a thing, right? We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you can go buy or build or set up or whatever, right? And go start pushing back even just little by little on the surveillance around you, right? And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other things, right? It becomes easier to go to your city council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It becomes easier to find and organize with other people in your community, right?

Starting point is 00:27:55 It becomes easier to start to, you know, think about direct action. You know, in that sense, it becomes a bit of like propaganda by deed, right? Like, we're giving people the tool to get off their couch and start to push back and start to fight back and start to become a part of a community. Right. So I think it's really important for that. With Ray Hunter, so I already kind of described how it works. But we had a few goals with Ray Hunter. One was to figure out, you know, how often the cell size simulators were being used in the U.S. And around the world, but, you know, I live here.

Starting point is 00:28:31 So this is my main focus, but specifically how often they're being used to spy on protesters, right? Because we were getting this idea that a lot of activists thought that they were everywhere, right? And I thought that other things were a much bigger threat, right? Like, there are things that I'm more concerned about, but also cell site simulators and stingrays are pretty mysterious, right? Like, we don't, we know the broad strokes of how they work, but we don't know the technical details of what exploits they are using to, you know, essentially trick people's phones into connecting to them. Right. So this was a, this was a chance to try to get some ground truth information about that as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And we have succeeded in that. We have a bunch of recordings from around the U.S. of things that we think are quite likely to be self-side simulators actively in use by law enforcement, and we've got some ideas about how they're working and what they're doing. And the other goal is that we wanted to try to calm down some of the fear and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was a threat model that they need to worry about and give people more. accurate threat models, right? Yeah. And like also give people, you know, a modicum of comfort, right? This is not a self-defense device, right? This is actually like at the end of the day,

Starting point is 00:29:50 this is a data collect, like, not not data collection. We're not collecting your data, but this is a research project. Yeah. We're collecting the data about like, how often do we think we're actually seeing these, right? But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, right? Because you have this, you have Ray Hunter with you, right? And if it doesn't go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off, you're like, okay, you know, maybe this is not actually a threat model than I need to worry so much about, right? And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I need to worry about? Oh, probably things like Penlink, probably things like celebrate and the cops arresting me and making a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:26 Right. Probably other, you know, facial recognition and other things like that, which I think are the things that you should be thinking about and worrying about. Yeah. That's been the point of Ray Hunter, and I think it's been successful in that sense, right? But yeah, we really, I mean, we want more people to install this, right? Especially the next time ICE lays siege to a city, right? We want to have, we want to have some there. You know, late in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set up where we then had like a couple hundred of these on the ground in Minneapolis. And we didn't find, we did not find anything in Minneapolis that we felt was conclusive evidence of an MC catcher.

Starting point is 00:31:03 Well, ICE was there laying siege to the city. Hopefully there is no next time they lay siege to a city. Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again. But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get sort of a ground game set up very quickly to try to determine if they're using this form of surveillance or not. So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products and services. If you buy them, that will probably result in your data being collected, which will in turn be sold, perhaps to an Israeli company who will sell it to the cops. Shamba would never sell my data. All right, we are back.

Starting point is 00:31:47 I think that's a really good explanation. of the value of these devices. The more you know, the more you know. And this is a struggle that I have on a daily basis at a moment. There are so many things to be angry and scared about right now. We don't need to invent shit that we shouldn't be angry and scared about. We need to focus on the things that are a real threat. And there are things in this landscape, which are a real threat.

Starting point is 00:32:12 And so I think it helps people to have that. Like, it's one thing to go on flogmas. or whatever and be like, okay, well, they're there and there and there. It's another one to be like, well, shit. In my going out to get a pizza with my friends, I was spied upon five times. And I think that it's very valuable. At the same time, nobody tried to sell site's booth

Starting point is 00:32:33 and get my information that way. I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit about like how people can organize. San Diego has done a spectacular job of signing a contract that they can't stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stop using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money to a spying company, which is great because our city is and run by the sea. It will continue to be a shit show forever, apparently. But like, let's assume

Starting point is 00:33:00 that other people have slightly more competent local government. What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they signed that. California politics is a shit show, but San Diego is a fucking joke. Many examples of this. Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our Lord 2025, he got indicted by the FBI. So like, how stupid do you have to be? So I have no leg to stand on, but also in California, so it all tracks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the great times on the left coast. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:32 Let's talk about how people have organized their communities against surveillance. Like, just to, like, paint a picture for folks here, right? Like, the flock camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The flock camera doesn't know if you're, You came from another state to obtain reproductive health care. The flock camera doesn't know if you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for your little baby. It captures all of that shit, right? Like there's a broad range of people in this country who are fucking disgusted at that,

Starting point is 00:34:06 people who we might not be used to organising with. But perhaps you guys could like explain like how or if you're aware of instances where people have organized against state surveillance, it would be. cool to hear about that. Yeah, I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina at an event called Nerd Night. And Nerd Night is essentially, it's a way to go to a bar without just a bunch of drivel. You know, you go and then somebody does three talks, 15 minutes each. And so the host was kind enough to give me a 25-minute slot at the end to talk about flock cameras in our city here. And it just so happened to be happening before they tried to vote on a real-time intelligence center that centralized flock, axon, and all of our drone data into one just like wall of surveillance for the city.

Starting point is 00:34:58 And so I did this talk and a city council member showed up. Our coolest city council member, Kim Roney, she showed up. And during the questions at the end, I was unsure because on our portal here, The APD says, you know, we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim Roney came up and confirmed that something like 4,000 agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them, but they can request and we just hand it over. So that's one thing that we learned at that time. So this prompted a big push that was kind of happening for city council.

Starting point is 00:35:36 So a lot of folks that came to that talk came to city council. And I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board. I mean, this is Appalachia here. Nobody wants to be surveilled in these haulers, you know. Yeah. This is one of those areas where we can build really broad coalitions, like of people who we might not agree on with, on everything. Like, this is a threat to anyone who wants to do almost anything,

Starting point is 00:36:00 apart from, I guess, just go shopping. One interesting point is that over 100 people showed up to city council. You know, this is new to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit. And I seated my time to another speaker, but over 100 people showed up. And then they pulled it from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda. So lots of folks left, but then some folks stuck around for general comment and still got it out there.

Starting point is 00:36:25 But, you know, we'll see what happens down the line. They love to do that tactic. They did the same thing in Oakland when it was up for when it was up on the agenda. They said a lot of people showed up to discuss it. And then they were like, oops. No, never mind. We're going to pull that from the agenda today. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:39 It's such a shady tactic. No, I mean, at EFF, we've seen similar things all over the country. You know, a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts recently because of community pressure, right? This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care, right? They want to score easy political wins, right? Flock sells them this as an easy political win, right? They can stop carjackings, right?

Starting point is 00:37:07 They can find car thefts. They can do all these things that are popular. Nobody likes being car jacked. Nobody likes having their car stolen, right? But when people show up to city council and push back and fight against this, it makes it not an easy political way. Yeah. Right? It makes it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies.

Starting point is 00:37:28 And it should be. Yeah. We shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen to be outside. And like, look, I would love to not have a car, right? But this is America. Like, everybody drives all the time. That is, that is the society we live in, unfortunately. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:46 And you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society. And like you said, I think we can build very broad coalitions around this, right? And we can start to, like, hey, you know, remember how, you know, how mad you were about flock? Like, yeah, wait until you find out about these other surveillance technologies, right? Like, now let's talk about campaign finance and how all these companies you don't like are financing politicians, right? Like, you can, you can hold people to the left, and this is a good way to start interacting with those people. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 00:38:22 Even people on the right, even sort of are more, you know, the more libertarian folks. They hate them too. A lot of them have gone full Nazi, but the ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right, like should really care about this stuff, right? and you can, you know, this can be a way in with them as well. Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need to and everyone else fuck them. Yeah, absolutely. But I think this is a really good area to organize because all of us stand to lose something. It's so fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which like someone is watching or could be watching you.

Starting point is 00:38:57 There's a million reasons why people could be mad at that. There's plenty of room for abuse, you know, there too. And it's been documented, you know, really. You sent video with Ben Jordan. I mean, you know, oh, yeah. If you give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to vet people on this level, you know, and if you give people who, you know, God-like surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing?

Starting point is 00:39:20 And there's been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveilled their ex-partners and then consequently pulled that person over, which is just insane. Yeah, no, they've used this to stop people to surveil current partners, ex-partners. is like the idea that police would never abuse their power is completely absurd. And anybody who is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think. Yeah. And yet, like, it is, not that the Dems are like necessarily, I mean, they're not on the side of goods, especially in this area.

Starting point is 00:39:54 But like, it is a big blue state thing. Like, don't think that because you live in California, this isn't happening. Right. This is very much happening. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, to talk about that real quick, right?

Starting point is 00:40:06 Like, we have, I am blanking on the bill number, but we have a law in California that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from flock with, from license play regions in general, with outside agencies and with ICE. And it still happens all the time. Yeah. Police just willfully ignore this law. You know, I mean, like, we see immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't do that, we know that. You know, people in ICE had buddies in California law enforcement. They text them.

Starting point is 00:40:38 They say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement texts, runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or crime or, you know, some other such nonsense. Yeah. And then, you know, sends the information back to ICE, right? We call that the good old boy system down here. Yeah, yeah, up here too. And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people from local law enforcement all across the country. and this is part of why, right?

Starting point is 00:41:04 Like, it gives a workaround. SB 54 is the California Values Act, which... Thank you. Thank you. You are welcome. That is my shit. There has never been a prosecution under SB 54 as far as I'm aware. This law exists, like, largely to make the politicians who passed it feel good.

Starting point is 00:41:22 There are some parts about transferring people who are in detention already. But, like, these systems give so many workarounds, right? Or, like, if the data... belongs to the company and not to the city or if it's stored on a server somewhere else. All of these things provide potential work around. So I don't think, I guess, that because your local city council member has tweeted about ice being bad, that that means that your flock cameras are not being used for that. It's very hard to ring fence this shit.

Starting point is 00:41:57 Yeah, absolutely. If people want to learn more about this, if they want to maybe, get a ray hunter if they want to get a wee spy or a mesh detect. Do you want to explain mesh detect for people really quickly? We didn't touch on that one. Yeah, mesh detect is essentially, it's the first advice that I made. And its primary function was to detect drone remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any drone over, I believe it's 500 grams,

Starting point is 00:42:22 has to transmit pilot location and drone location in real time, either via BLE or Wi-Fi, which is pretty whack for like, you know, amateur flyers that just want to fly around. But that being said, it's a great OScent tool. So I started with that. And essentially what this does is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over mesh-tastic Laura networks. So you can set up a, for instance, set up a node way out somewhere. And then you can have it sends you a message down the line when a drone comes by over mesh-tastic.

Starting point is 00:42:58 Or you can set it up somewhere and have it. say, okay, there's a body cam down here or whatever device, a Tesla, anything, you know, a lot of devices randomize their OUI these days, mostly phones, but there's plenty that don't easily detectable. So send it over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection, essentially. So if people wanted to get a We Spy, to get a mesh detect, how would they do, how they go about it?

Starting point is 00:43:25 What are the ways they could get or make one? Yeah, I have a website called kernelpanic. tech and it's C-O-L-O-N-E-L. It's a little bit of a play on words, but these devices, like, if you really need one of these things, hit me up, we'll talk. But also, it's just two wires, you know, like, you can take my design and just reverse engineer it and copy it, and I put the wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source.

Starting point is 00:43:50 So if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub, you can take this and make it on your own. I've made home assistant integration. So, like, if a UI pops up around your house, you can just get an alert via your smart home. You could just go on there, dev it out. If you see something that I screwed up, just let me know and I'll fix it or we'll collab. So it's all open

Starting point is 00:44:11 source. How about Ray Hunter? Yeah. So folks can go to rayhunter.org and that is our Rayhunter documentation. That's the Ray Hunter book essentially. And there you can find links on

Starting point is 00:44:27 where to buy the hardware. We do not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware on eBay or Amazon sometimes. The Orbic is what people use in the U.S. primarily. It's in like South America. In Europe and parts of Africa, there's a T.P. Link device that fits the bill better for those areas. And once you buy the hardware, you can install the software on it there.

Starting point is 00:44:53 The hardware, unfortunately, is not open source because, like I said, we didn't build the hardware. We're just repurposing old hardware, right? when the project started, you could buy the hardware for like 10 or 20 bucks. Now it's harder to find because of people have bought out a lot of the supply and other scalpers have wised up to the fact that people are trying to buy these. So unfortunately, we've created a whole like mini market. I'm a market maker, God damn it.

Starting point is 00:45:20 We've a hyper-capitalist right here. But no, there's like, there's a whole, you know, mini market of people selling like already installed Ray Hunters on eBay and stuff. I don't recommend paying more than like 40 or 60 bucks for the hardware. But then, yeah, the software is free. It's free. It's open source, right? It's on GitHub.

Starting point is 00:45:40 You can go edit it right now. And, you know, I know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to this show and I just want to say, like, there's so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right? Like, we keep kind of, mentioning that, like, a lot of police hardware is made by this company

Starting point is 00:45:55 AXon. And it has a, you, very unique Bluetooth signature that can be easily detected, right? There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do with counter surveillance. And the chip that the OUI spy runs on, the ESP 32, is this really powerful little chip that only costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale. And it's got Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a bunch of really cool capabilities that you can use to make some really cool counter-surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the tech-minded folks to think about this, come

Starting point is 00:46:27 look at these projects, you know, write your own code or make your own projects, right? But like, the quote from hackers, and as you're beautifully designed PC board says, Colonel, we can snoop onto them as they snoop onto us, right? Exactly. We need to spy back,

Starting point is 00:46:43 right? We need to raise the cost of them spying us, right? And that's like, sorry, let me, that brings me to another tangent. What's really cool about these products is like, you can build Ray Hunter for about $20, right? You could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled thing from Colonel for, you know, a few dozen dollars. I don't know these price off my heads.

Starting point is 00:47:06 I don't want to say. Or you could build one for, you know, under 20 bucks, right? Yep. And you are then, for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks, you are making useless a surveillance tool and a surveillance network, which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, right? The economics here are on our side. Yeah. Right. Like, this is just like any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right?

Starting point is 00:47:30 Like, it costs millions and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments of the U.S. to set up this surveillance economy. And we can defeat it for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks each, right? Like, we can do this a lot longer than they can. They will go broke before we do. And I think that that's really important, right? Like, the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on our side. Yeah. It's also like, it's cool to understand and make stuff.

Starting point is 00:47:59 I am very good at fixing things that work on, you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts, right? Like that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck. I can fix my bicycle. I can fix. Are you saying you like ice internal combustion engines? In many ways, both ices will be the end of all of us. I enjoy to fix one. I like to look at it and go. Like, uh-huh, okay, this goes bang and then this goes up. And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to learn a new skill, especially like once you get into your 30s. Like, it's good to learn shit.

Starting point is 00:48:34 Yeah. And this is approachable, especially like the guides for these are very approachable, even if you're not like a tech punk. If this is your first time going on GitHub. And that there are people you can reach out to, like real nice people. You won't get an AI tech support. Someone will help you understand this shit. That is cool.

Starting point is 00:48:54 There's a platform called M5 Stack that makes it really easy. So, like, you get a Zhao ESP 32, but M5 Stack makes it so that, like, you don't even have to do soldering, and they have drag and drop coding. Oh, cool. So you can just plug in sensors and things like. You can make a drone detector out of one of those and already has, like, a screen on board. And so, like, it's super cheap, and you could just debit out really hard and just go for it. You know, it's easy for makers nowadays, like, like in the 50s, right?

Starting point is 00:49:23 You'd have to have an entire military and industry complex behind you to do this kind of stuff, right? Or a corporation. And now you can just make yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool. Yeah. And like, you know, I was in Minnesota there at the time when lots of ICE and CBP agents were too, when they took a lot of people and killed two people. And like one of the things that was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone was so locked. in, like, to include grandmothers, to include a dude with a sign that said, what would Ronald Reagan do?

Starting point is 00:49:59 Like, no one of those people in their town, right? And that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not everyone can be out on a street corner, whistle in a whistle, or driving around, right? Some people that have, have, like, a really powerful skill set. And if you are someone who can't be out, you can still help create these. You can help code this stuff. Like, it's beautiful when our resistance takes the best from all of us, and then we are all better because of that. Absolutely. Beautifully said.

Starting point is 00:50:30 Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites, utilaid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want. Take a peek at deflock.m.e. I have nothing to do with that project yet, but they map on the flog cams. You can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or to find things you have. haven't seen, but other than that, just

Starting point is 00:50:52 Colonel Panic. Tech and definitely check out EFF. They got a lot of good stuff going on, and they've been doing it since the early days. Yeah. I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self-defense guys specifically. That's at sSD.eff.org.

Starting point is 00:51:06 We got it. We're the only continuously updated and longest maintained security guides. There's also the activist checklist, which is a really great, another really great resource. The surveillance self-defense guides are almost like a textbook. Like there's a lot of info there. But if you just need the like

Starting point is 00:51:24 quick and dirty Clif Notes version, activist checklist is really great for that, right? And they're doing a good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them. And then, yeah, check out, you know, Rayhunter.org for Ray Hunter stuff, kernelpanic. Tech for his stuff since he plugged my stuff. I guess the other thing that I will plug is Open Archive, which is a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. They're making an app called Save, which allows you to securely record, archive, and verify videos of whatever you want, say, such as human rights abuses or, you know, police atrocities or things of that nature. And so I recommend that project. Go check them out. They're really good folks. If you're doing a lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place

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Starting point is 00:52:45 Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, Help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

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Starting point is 00:55:26 Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Counterterrorism. No, I prefer table terrorism. Counter. I hardly know her terrorism. Hi, this is, it could happen here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:46 I'm Garrison Davis. That's Robert Evans. Not a lot to be proud of with that introduction. No, not much to be proud of. But there's also not much to be proud of considering the 26 White House counterterrorism. strategy. That's right. So I think we put equal amount of work into this as Sebastian Gorka did. Every year the new counterterrorism list is, it's my dune, you know, or whatever big movies coming out this year. I was excited. Yeah, I mean, I was excited until I actually read it. And

Starting point is 00:56:18 that's what we're going to be talking about today. And it's a short one. This is, this is very short, actually. This is just 14 pages of actual text about half the length of previous comparable documents. Now there's been a lot of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released. And we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's first start by talking about how the document starts with a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump dated May 26th. Trump lists counterterrorism accomplishments from the first year of a second term, like mobilizing DHS to remove illegal alien criminals and jihadist sympathizers, to arresting the ISIS-K operative who planned the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Afghanistan,

Starting point is 00:57:08 and rescuing over 100 American hostages. Speaking of, Trump also says he secured the release of the remaining October 7th hostages, and Quouch began the process of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven for terror. and extremism, unquote, and that's through establishing Trump's own Board of Peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt, quote, unquote, devastating blows to Iran, which Trump calls the world's number one state sponsor of terror. Other actions, Trump admin has taken, include designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and, quote, deadly cartels as terrorist organizations. With Trump boasting that he, quote, began using the strength

Starting point is 00:57:50 and power of the U.S. military to stop and destroy cartel operations. The example that he includes here is when the U.S. Armed Forces captured the, quote-unquote, narco-terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. So, Trump's opening forward, covers the majority of what this 16-page total strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote, cartels, jihadists, or the governments who support them. Now, what Trump doesn't actually write about in this forward is what most reporting on the new counterterrorism strategy has focused on the later inclusion of left-wing terrorism as one of the nation's leading terror threats. And that's what we'll be mostly talking about today.

Starting point is 00:58:41 Well, good. Though we will cover the other two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on. Now, this strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, a far-right Hungarian commentator who briefly served in Trump's first term. This new document states, quote, A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed. We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make established ways of doing counterterrorism,

Starting point is 00:59:21 insufficient or obsolete. This strategy lists three main types of terror groups the U.S. is currently facing. Narco-terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamic terrorists, and violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists. Now, we'll get to the narco-terrorist stuff later.

Starting point is 00:59:44 But let's start with that last line, which is clearly, Clearly pulling from Trump's Antifa Terrorism Executive Order. Yeah. As well as the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7, which directed federal law enforcement to investigate potential crimes relating to political violence and terrorism, quote, under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism. This is a pretty clear political weaponization of the intelligence community apparatus.

Starting point is 01:00:14 And the new counterterrorism strategy doubles down on what MSPM says. established, writing, quote, In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American,

Starting point is 01:00:35 radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement to cripple them, operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere, unquote. Sure. Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any Antifa groups killing Americans?

Starting point is 01:01:05 They have one case. They have one case. Not Antifa groups, but yes. Oh, they don't have cases of, you know, state sponsors backing Antifa. But they do have one instance included of violent, to wing extremism, which we'll get to in a sec. That's one example across this like 14 to 16 page document. Now, the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations animating violent conduct included NSPM7. Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family religion and morality.

Starting point is 01:01:51 After this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote, we are taking ideology and counter ideology very seriously, unquote. Now, despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left-wing extremism,

Starting point is 01:02:07 something that Biden never really did with right-wing extremism, at least in documents like this. No, shocking. Despite that clear focus, this counter-terrorism strategy claims that counterterrorism operations will be executed, quote, unquote, apolitically. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:02:22 And actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the Biden admin previously weaponized counterterrorism operations against innocent Americans. Great stuff. Quote, as real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies. This is the only example of quote-unquote left-wing violence included in this entire document. Just this. Just this one killing. Now, on executive disorder, we have reported on a few instances

Starting point is 01:03:04 where the Trump administration has tried to weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as being motivated by like anti-Christian bias, even when the people committing those attacks were themselves Christian. And for all that we can tell, we're not religiously motivated against Christians, but they've tried to glum onto a few of these incidents. Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Starting point is 01:03:29 Exactly, right? Yeah. But they've tried to glim onto these examples to build this narrative of like anti-Christian violence, which is rising in the United States. And as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack. More on that later.

Starting point is 01:03:45 After this new counterterrorism strategy dropped, I did the thing that I assume anyone would do and read through the past like three or four counterterrorism strategies. Really? Yeah, great. Great stuff. From the past 10 years. Good work. Trump released one in 2018 and Biden's came out in 2021. Now, the first mention of any non-Isableness,

Starting point is 01:04:09 Islamic terrorist group in Trump's 2018 counterterrorism strategy is the Nordic resistance movement, quote, a prominent transnational, self-described national socialist organization with the anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left-wing groups, and others, unquote. This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on Islamic terrorism, specifically ISIS and al-Qaeda, but also briefly mentions the neo-Nazi National Action Group in one paragraph, and in another reads, quote, the United States has long faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead

Starting point is 01:04:51 motivated by other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism, unquote. But that's really all it has on non-Islamic extremism in what is a 34-page document. By the time Biden got into office, white supremacist violence had risen dramatically, and the Biden admin released a domestic terrorism-specific counter-terrorism strategy. This document released in June of 2021, starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the KKK during reconstruction to attacks on black churches and synagogues and the El Paso shooting at the Walmart.

Starting point is 01:05:33 Then the document covers what it calls anti-government or anti-authorization. authority violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the congressional baseball game shooting, and the recent January 6th attack. I'm going to read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here to compare, quote, today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations. They also take on a variety of forms, from lone actors to small groups of informally aligned individuals, to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards at specific communities to violent self-proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of animating ideologies,

Starting point is 01:06:11 racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those who promote the superiority of the white race and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats. These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence towards the same segment or segments of the American community, whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims,

Starting point is 01:06:32 or other religious minorities, women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals or others. Their insistence on violence can at times be explicit. It also can, at times, be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted in a perception of the superiority of the white race that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent notions of racial purity or cleansing, unquote. Now, Biden's strategy does later specifically mention quote-unquote anarchist violence, though within the broader context of anti-government

Starting point is 01:07:04 or anti-authority extremism. Quote, a significant component of today's threat includes self-proclaimed militias and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government

Starting point is 01:07:17 based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions which they perceive as harmful to society. The document goes on to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists

Starting point is 01:07:33 and other groups. and other groups that resist or oppose legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by the government. This strategy also names a few single-issue ideologies which may motivate violence like abortion, animal rights, environmental issues, or involuntarily-sellent violent extremism. But that little section there is the closest that the Biden strategy gets to, quote-unquote, left-wing violence, as Trump would call it. But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on like left-right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the exact motivating factor driving the violence.

Starting point is 01:08:13 His document reads, quote, The definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no distinction based on political views, right, left, or center, and neither should we, unquote. Biden's AG, Merrick Garland, would often say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not policing ideology, and quote-unquote, violence not ideology was an often repeated refrain during the Biden administration. And this is something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI investigated Stop Cop City under Biden,

Starting point is 01:08:45 and a significant portion of the domestic terror-related charges while Biden was in office were levied against Stop Cop City protesters by the state of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies. and almost all of whom were charged with terrorism were not actually charged with any specific violent crime. We'll talk more about the partisan weaponization of terrorism or counterterrorism after some ads. Excellent.

Starting point is 01:09:28 And we're back. It's such a blast from the past to read through all of these Biden counterterrorism manuals. Yeah, boy, back in those days. Yeah, makes me nostalgic. dick. It's just a totally different world. Yep. Like, it's unfathomable to, like, think of the federal government now using this kind of language, talk about, like, ethnic cleansing being done by the white supremacist-motivated

Starting point is 01:09:53 terrorists. It's like, it's just a totally different, totally different ballgame. Now, in Trump's a new strategy, it states that under the Biden admin, U.S. officials, quote, used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections, unquote. Now, under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism-related prosecutions following January 6th, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump himself, and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop the Steel efforts. In 2022, the DOJ opened a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations, and just that year,

Starting point is 01:10:35 $100 million of additional resources were allocated to the DOJ FBI and DHS for countering domestic terrorism. Now, this increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks. The government accountability office reported that between 2010 to 2021, domestic terrorism-related investigations had grown by 356 percent, with 231 confirmed incidents, according to the DHS. In just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations more than doubled. During this time period, the intelligence community classified racially or ethnically motivated violence as the most common type of attack. It's 35% of domestic terrorism. And this category also contributed to the most deaths. The second most common type of attack was anti-government or

Starting point is 01:11:27 anti-authority motivated violent extremism with 32% of attacks. And that category covered a lot of different things, including the militia stuff as well as the anarchist stuff. It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though. Yeah. Now, the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison, Trump's new counterterrorism strategy does not contain a single mention of

Starting point is 01:12:00 racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism. Weird. Not one. Not one. Which is like which is astounding right. Even like beyond beyond the clear partisan weaponization like just from a counterterrorism standpoint like this is bizarre. This is this is quite

Starting point is 01:12:15 quite a choice. The last pillar of Biden's counterterrorism strategy was quote confronting long term contributions to domestic terrorism like racism, bigotry religious or ethnic hatred unquote. Meanwhile while Trump's new strategy says that the fearsome powers of the U.S. government must never be abused,

Starting point is 01:12:36 quote, whether under the guise of deradicalization protecting our democracy or any other pretext, unquote. Great. Which is, like, I don't, I don't even know how to respond to that. Yeah. I would always, yeah, like, what are you supposed to say? I mean, it, it demonstrates they're not actually interested in combating what is the most, lethal form of domestic terrorism.

Starting point is 01:13:02 No. And they never have been. Even in Trump's first term, at least they moved towards that as the threat was increasing. But now they just have no interest whatsoever and actually target de-radicalization as an example of the fearsome powers of the U.S. government. Yeah. Like the thing that never worked and never actually did anything is the big boogeyman for you guys. Okay. It's wild.

Starting point is 01:13:27 The new strategy includes a few. Examples of U.S. government overreach, quote, Our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community, which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool. Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates,

Starting point is 01:13:55 this administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being used politically against innocent Americans. So that's the main example of partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start with this first one, targeting Catholics attending traditional mass. This refers to a 2023 FBI memo from the Richmond Field Office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were displaying a growing interest in traditionalist Catholicism. Great.

Starting point is 01:14:24 And how trad Catholic extremist violence could be minimized. by building connections within the church. Sure. Now, random Latin mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this memo was discussing the quote-unquote growing overlap between the white nationalist movement and quote-unquote radical traditionalist Catholics. And how white supremacists may use trad-cath social media to promote violence and recruit. This memo also made a distinction from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer Latin Mass

Starting point is 01:15:01 and the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call radical traditional Catholics, what we would just call tradcats like colloquially. After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI. Sure. Yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in Cash-Metra's era. I'm going to go on a little bit of like a tangent here Because I wanted to get more information about this Richmond field office memo and investigation So it turns out

Starting point is 01:15:33 The FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest At a church and this church was not considered by the Vatican To be in full communion with the Catholic Church But it's still Catholic affiliated This priest refused to speak with the FBI About communications he had with a parisher who was a self-described radical, traditional Catholic, clerical fascist, self-described, who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a special needs of school, armed resistance against the government,

Starting point is 01:16:02 learning how to manufacture pipe bombs, and using untraceable means to purchase supplies to manufacture 3D-printed weapons. Posting about that on this Catholic account. Yeah, nothing sketchy. This Nazi was actually previously arrested in 2019, after being overheard making comments about political violence, while purchasing several AR-15-style rifles, multiple high-capacity magazines, and large quantities of 2-23 ammunition, as well as making online statements

Starting point is 01:16:26 advocating civil war and the murder of politicians. Now, after getting out of prison, this guy started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to commit violence.

Starting point is 01:16:44 He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to possessing a destructive device. So the FBI was looking into this priest because this priest was not talking to them about what the communications were with this Nazi. Communications that they know existed. And so they briefly looked into him. This caused a massive backlash among the right. This is where Marjorie Taylor Green was posting about defunding the FBI.

Starting point is 01:17:07 A lot of the dismantle FBI stuff coming from the right was based on this incident of the FBI, targeting conservative churchgoers. A little side tangent there. The other main example from the Trump counterterrorism strategy refers to parents and school boards. This is in reference to a letter from the National School Boards Association requesting federal intervention into the harassment threats and attacks against school boards in 2021. And this letter read in part, quote, These heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terror and hate crimes, unquote.

Starting point is 01:17:44 After this letter was sent, the AG, Mayor Garland, announced that the government was going to look into these threats. This, too, sparked a huge backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later, the National School Board Association apologized for some of the language they included in this letter. So those are the too many examples of this horrendous government overreach

Starting point is 01:18:11 and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's just, it's frustrating how, like, reality doesn't matter at all here. But, like, what is the point of even, like, going in and line by line? Here's everything that's wrong with that. I don't even know anymore. No, it's not a matter of convincing.

Starting point is 01:18:30 It's often a matter of just holding my sanity together, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, it's important to, like, look at it. And to some extent, document how bullshit it is. But it's also just, like, it's incredibly frustrating to, like, see this fucking trad-cath priest, get away with shit that like people would go to prison for if the ideologies were reversed, you know?

Starting point is 01:18:51 Yeah, sure. If you, if you switch this stuff around, you can imagine how the Trump administration would be handling it. Yeah. A unitarian pastor. Right. Planning some kind of attack with like an Antifa super soldier.

Starting point is 01:19:04 Well, or just if you've got like a unitarian pastor or whatever, like someone who is tangentially attached to someone left wing who was like posting about carrying out an attack. Like the, the level of backlash would be higher and would hurt more people. No, horrendous. We've seen stuff like that happen.

Starting point is 01:19:22 The sections on left-wing terrorism in this new strategy actually only make up a few paragraphs of this 16-page document. So what is the rest of this counterterrorism strategy really about then? The first priority is the, quote, neutralization of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations, unquote. The primary threat is the so-called narco-terrorists previously mentioned. And this term, narco-terrorists, was invented in the 80s by the president of Peru, to describe attacks on the police by drug traffickers.

Starting point is 01:19:58 But since then, the term has come to mean a variety of things. In this new strategy, Trump doesn't just consider drug trafficking as a means to fund terrorist groups, but also implies that drug overdoses themselves constitute a form of terrorism. Right. quote, the borderless America created by the Biden administration was so badly exploited by threat actors that during one 12-month period, more Americans died as a result of illicit drugs flooded into the country by the cartels than all the U.S. servicemen killed in combat since 1945, unquote.

Starting point is 01:20:35 Let's look at those numbers for cigarettes. Let's just add tobacco in. Let's just throw tobacco into the mix. See how that, oh, does it dwarf every other drug-related death toll combined? Yeah, it sure does. Obviously an absurd statement. Yeah. But I think it is crucial to understanding how the administration is operating by understanding

Starting point is 01:20:53 that they consider drug overdoses to be terrorism. And that's a big part of like how they're able to do what they're currently doing is by weaponizing terrorism as a category. The strategy later considers illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to be weapons of mass destruction. Sure. Right? This is the same category of weapons as a nuclear.

Starting point is 01:21:14 their bombs. That is how they categorize it technically. When the U.S. government uses the term terrorism, it's supposed to mean activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of the government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. It's really that that last half that constitutes the terrorism part. That separates terrorism from just any crime. It's the intent to

Starting point is 01:21:49 intimidate or coerce civilian populations or influence the government. But the FBI defines international terrorism as, quote, violent criminal acts committed by individuals and or groups who are inspired by or associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations, unquote. So if you designate a group of foreign terrorist organization, that means that what they are doing is, terrorism. And that last bit leads us to Trump's kind of core strategy to combat drug trafficking, designating cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, which will, quote, make available additional intelligence authorities and deny and disrupt their financial streams and access to the United States, unquote. After the designation, Trump authorized, quote,

Starting point is 01:22:37 dozens of strikes by the Department of War against cartel drugboats, resulting in a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling into the United States, unquote. Citation needed. Yeah. We will get into the second priority of the counterterrorism strategy after these ad breaks. All right, we are back. For our last section here, let's start by talking about the second priority of the counterterrorism strategy released last week.

Starting point is 01:23:19 The second is the targeting and destruction of Islamist terror groups. especially al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS-K. Trump's new strategy blames continuing jihadist plots against Americans, quote, in part because of the failed forever war policies, the empowerment of terror supporting regimes like Iran, and a past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on, unquote. So how's that going? How's that going? I haven't checked the news in about three months.

Starting point is 01:23:53 Robert, can you briefly fill me in? Good. No, no, no problems. It's flyed. Everything's fine. Yeah. We solved the failed forever war policies. We did. We did. No more forever wars. We've got a short war, but it's one of our shortest, Garrison. Iran is in no way in power. I can't, I can't tell you how short this war is at the moment, you know, incredibly short war.

Starting point is 01:24:15 Iran isn't exercising economic influence over the whole world right now? I know you think that this all been a disaster, but I'm going to put on a graph how long World War II lasted next to how long this little adventure in Iran has lasted, and you tell me if it's a problem. Hmm? Wow. One of those numbers is bigger than the other. Yes, we're fine.

Starting point is 01:24:33 It's wild. It's absolutely bad shit that they have this in here. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's so funny. It's insane. So the document talks about Islamist terrorism in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe for over four pages. It takes up a significant chunk of the strategy.

Starting point is 01:24:52 These sections of the document largely mirror Trump's national security strategy from last year and talks about how, quote, unfettered mass migration in Europe has been the transmission belt for terrorists and discusses the need for, quote, honest conversations about Islamism and how hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals. The more these alien cultures grow and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed. As the birthplace of Western culture and values, Europe must act now to halt its willful decline, unquote.

Starting point is 01:25:31 Sure. One of the more explicitly fascist sections of this strategy. Trump's new CT strategy does discuss the integration of counter-cartel and counter-terrorism efforts saying it allows the U.S. to, quote, disrupt the shared networks financing and logistical routes used by both designated drug traffickers and Islamist terrorists, unquote. The main success story of this strategy is the capture of Maduro, quote, the illegitimate leader

Starting point is 01:26:00 of Venezuela, a cartel boss in league with terror sponsor Iran and its terror proxy Hezbollah, unquote. We've talked about this strategy for like 35 minutes, and you may have noticed that so far we've really just talked about identifying targets with very little. discussion actually on actual strategy on how to counter these threats. That's because the document has very little on actual strategy to counter these threats. It lays out three steps for countering terrorism, identifying terror actors and plots before they happen, cutting off their arms, funding, and recruiting streams, and ultimately destroy the established threat group. Methods for going

Starting point is 01:26:45 about this are, quote, a series of similar, high intensity, but short- campaigns against jihadist groups, left to see that happen, as well as sanctions, shadow fleet, oil tanker interdiction, and covert operations to disrupt funding and state sponsorship of terrorism. That's it. That is really the bulk of like the actual like strategy of how to do this. Yeah. And that's the important thing to remember for all that's scary about this and for all like the people freaking out and not to say if there's nothing to be concerned about, this is the government saying this. They have a lot of ability to fight. with people certainly should be concerned about this, but at the same time, don't forget,

Starting point is 01:27:24 they don't know what they're doing or have a real plan for most of what they're doing. No. Like, this is hacked together, cobbled together, and executed by people who don't know what they're doing, and at least in one major case, are drunk all the time. No, it's pretty stunning to compare this to the 2021 Biden one, which is very, very complicated in laying out actual strategy to dismantle domestic terrorist operations. and this just this lacks a lot of a lot of the same like strategic outlook. Lastly, the strategy outlines current functional aspects of the threat environment.

Starting point is 01:27:59 That's the term it uses, functional aspects. These are like complicating factors. I'll go through these line by line. New and evolving collaboration between nation states and threat groups such as cartels. Alliances between established terror groups. exploitation of new weapons like drones by cartels and jihadists, the remaining threat of terrorists acquiring and using nuclear biological or chemical weapons, which President Trump has rightly labeled the single greatest threat to this world, unquote.

Starting point is 01:28:32 All of this stuff is like Bush era terrorism stuff. Like this is all very outdated. Not necessarily outdated, but like it's not cutting edge, I guess, what would be the more correct way of putting this. like you're just talking about drones now in 2026. Yeah. But another one of these, quote, unquote, functional aspects is, quote, new and deepening alliances between the far left and Islamists, i.e., the red-green alliance, unquote.

Starting point is 01:29:03 This really just takes up a single line. They don't expound on this. I'm pretty sure this would relate to like pro-Palestine protests. Is this really like people in the far left either supporting Hamas or just. generally being pro-Palestine or anti-Israel, that's what they're calling a red-green alliance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like a throwaway line,

Starting point is 01:29:23 but I thought it's worth including just because of how odd it is. It really stands out. It's at like the middle-to-end of the document way after they actually do their, like, three paragraphs on left-wing extremism. They just kind of throw that in there as a new complicating factor.

Starting point is 01:29:38 Yeah, of course. So what does this all mean for the left? Almost nothing in here that pertains to the left isn't already in National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7. This new strategy does not designate trans people as a class as terrorists, nor does it categorize trans people as nihilistic violent extremists like some have previously reported. Yeah. It essentially states, like NSPM 7, that being extremely pro-transgender can be a motivating factor

Starting point is 01:30:11 in carrying out terroristic violence. And the only example provided is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which we still don't have an illuminated motive for besides the suspect allegedly expressing frustration at Kirk for spreading vaguely defined hate.

Starting point is 01:30:28 The strategy claims, quote, our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us. We will not permit the weaponization of America's unparalleled

Starting point is 01:30:39 counterterrorism capabilities for partisan purposes, unquote. Despite clear political weaponization and Gorka specifically mentioning that we're going to be countering ideology. Now, a way to kind of explain what's going on here,

Starting point is 01:30:56 like, think about racially motivated or ethnically motivated violent extremism. Being racist isn't illegal. But if someone threatens to shoot up a black church because they are racist, then that qualifies

Starting point is 01:31:10 as racially motivated violent extremism. The Trump administration is basically using the same MO against people with left-wing anarchist or anti-fascist views to either stop crimes before they occur or crack down harder on people or groups who have committed crimes motivated by those ideologies. The joint terrorism task forces were already directed to investigate Antifa-aligned groups and individuals, quote,

Starting point is 01:31:38 engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation. And that's been happening since at least October of 2025. What's in this document is already been in effect for a while, and we've already seen some of the results of this in the federal Prairieland trial last February following the shooting of a cop outside an immigration detention facility in Texas last summer. The government, in that case, used the specter of Antifa to link a group of defendants together and argue for ideological motive.

Starting point is 01:32:06 and a federal jury convicted eight people of riot, conspiracy, and material support to terrorists, even if each individual defendant did not commit an act of violence. Yeah. So there's cases like that, and then there's also cases against the SPLC, which, while the government hasn't specifically said are part of their anti-Antifa investigations, you can see some similar throughlines there. Yeah. Right.

Starting point is 01:32:33 in a broad sense, that's how it relates to like current left-wing activism, right? The sort of threats and risk that has existed, really ever since Trump took office, but especially after the Antifa Terrorism Executive Order and National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 are still in effect. That is still the same level of risk. This document doesn't introduce anything new. Now, overall, what this strategy tries to do is connect all of the ideological targets of this administration, right? Put them onto a map intersecting each other. That's what it's doing with this red-green alliance. So it's trying to connect all of these ideological targets while expounding on Trump's justification for mass deportations of suspected

Starting point is 01:33:14 cartel members, military strikes on boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela, and the ongoing war in the Middle East. That is really most of what the document is trying to do, is actually build up the counterterrorism justification for all of Trump's military actions. And that's one thing that is, I guess, slightly frustrated me in people's discussion of this new strategy that a lot of it's based on threats to left-wing activists in the United States, while not really focusing on the bulk of the document, which is building the justification for Trump's murderous military actions around the world, right? Actions that are blowing up people in boats, bombing schools in Iran, things that have like a sizable death count.

Starting point is 01:33:58 and the sort of logistical and theoretical framework that Trump is building through this document does have really, really devastating lethal consequences. And I guess that's what I wanted to focus on a little bit, a little bit more, rather than just the targeting of left-wing extremists. Yep. All right. Well, fun. I guess we'll see what happens next.

Starting point is 01:34:20 Yeah, I mean, we're going to see them continue to carry this out both domestically against left-wing activists and overseas, including like right now, right? This is what they're doing in Iran. They're talking about Cuba. This strategy does not grant them any new powers, but it does give us a look into how they are thinking about regime change and the Donroe doctrine, right?

Starting point is 01:34:39 Yeah, Jesus. It's all so dumb. This U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere. And I think that's really the core of what's driving this document is U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere, rather than explicit political persecution of ideological left-wing enemies, which is, of course, still a factor and still a thing to be concerned about and monitoring and fighting back against. Yep, absolutely. Well, all right, guys, and that does it for us today, huh? Yeah. Let's go be elsewhere. All right. See you around. Say hello to your new favorite drinks.

Starting point is 01:35:24 Introducing new Mick Cafe refreshers. I see cool, undeniably refreshing and available in three flavors. Strawberry watermelon, mango pineapple, and blackberry passion fruit. Only at McDonald's. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel,

Starting point is 01:35:53 help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right?

Starting point is 01:36:12 That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

Starting point is 01:36:26 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You burn me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.

Starting point is 01:36:52 Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most. shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levant this plant to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know.

Starting point is 01:37:19 Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis, and I know firsthand because I competed there myself. I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs Tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Garris,

Starting point is 01:37:49 every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on clay. Genshin won. I mean, she went down in three to Rovachina, but I'm delighted. Yeah, she's an outsider to win the French for me. And she likes Clay. Listen, Lennarabakina is arguably the best player in the world right now. And I actually can win on any surface. Because if she's serving, well, good luck.

Starting point is 01:38:10 Consider this your court side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Humanity is not a parasite. But the systems we collectively uphold today are citizens. parasitic. They maintain their hold on us due to our interdependence as we rely on each other to survive and these systems, as destructive as they are, are how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain their whole, of course, through ideology. The sets of ideas about the world carried through

Starting point is 01:38:54 religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc. And to some extent they maintain their hold through violence. And so we can, and I believe we must, break free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating with each other with nature, and I'll talk about those ways at the end. By the way, hello, and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined today by Mia Wong. Also here. Yeah, we're doing great intros. So I want to talk about paracism, the development of paracism over time, as discussed in Samuel Miller McDonald's book, Progress, which I highly recommend, quite an enjoyable read. So I actually really first heard about that book years ago before it was even out, and I had

Starting point is 01:39:50 reached out and I was like, oh, I would love to, you know, get a copy as soon as it's available and talk about it and stuff. And, you know, I was at that point in my life. life, I was really voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course, we know the flaws with these grand narratives. They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these narratives and understanding aspects and angles of our history, at least when you take a critical approach to them. Because, I mean, history is, as the name implies,

Starting point is 01:40:29 a story. You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history. And so progress offers one framework through its three eras of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different forms can coexist. Forms can come and go. It isn't this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But there are trends that we can observe. And so these three phases, the McDonald discusses, identifies particular ideas of progress, forms of parasism, and agents of history. And I think it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics,

Starting point is 01:41:13 and ecology that intertwine to make up history. Obviously not perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist adjacent approaches to tracing the development of the state in history. Peter Galiluse had worship in power. James C. Scott has against the grain. And in progress, although I don't think he is anarchist or anarchist adjacent, in progress, McDonald's starts with the beginning of recorded civilization in 3,000 BCE and looks at the way that many early states developed from a blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So, I mean, humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before recorded history, right?

Starting point is 01:42:09 They spread across the globe. They experimented with all kinds of different social, political, and economic organizations that are now lost at time. And the dawn of everything by David Greber and David Wen grew kind of wrestles with some of this. In the early years of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state development. From roughly 3,000 BCE to 1400 CE, this is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesonarica, and medieval Europe saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this phase heaven in the book, not to cosine, and.

Starting point is 01:42:52 as an ideal, but to illustrate the prominence of religious power in this time period. And me, I know even hosting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitants people have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially for the experience of domination in our day-to-day lives. Yeah. Well, and it's something you can look at sort of in that period is the emergence of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems. Graber talks about this, I think that actually where a bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become like credit are these things that are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes.

Starting point is 01:43:47 And so you have the situation where, you know, the things that are going to become the building blocks of economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history are developed in order to in order to fuel these sort of hierarchical massive complexes where like just staggering amounts of resources are like fueled into into these sort of temple complexes and that's a you know that's a thing that continues to current present day indeed you know indeed we have we have temple complexes yeah like what what is temple complexes and the sense of megachurches nowadays. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:22 It's like, what is, what is the megachurch, but like the temple complex is farce? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's the thing, right? We are seeing an echo of this historical time period, even in the present. Because the idea of progress in this time and in these places was about progressing

Starting point is 01:44:44 toward a higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods, you know, ensuring that different groups of, people were in their proper place in that order. And so you had the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture, which established this particular kind of order. And when disaster struck, whether it be floods or droughts or invasions, this was a sign, a sign of the times, perhaps, that the order was breaking down.

Starting point is 01:45:14 And so it's really funny to me that, you know, in this progressive account of the idea of progress that McDonald's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone away. You know, they haven't been replaced by the next era. They have just taken on subtler forms and sometimes not as subtle forms. Yeah, there's a concept that the journal Chuong uses where, I mean, they're specifically talking about like the ways that elements of like the Chinese, I guess you call it the socialist regime, are sort of taken and then used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing from biology called exapation, where something like evolutionarily that was used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a new thing. So it's like,

Starting point is 01:46:03 you know, you've like Finn becomes hand. I'm a lot of great biologist, but this is this kind of thing where like you have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the old notion of what progress was of like the sort of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are. are like excavated by the next thing that's going to happen. And that's taken by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing. And we still have our sort of like versions of it that have been taken through like countless numbers of world systems. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:35 Yeah. I definitely see that. Of course, there were differences in how they would have, I think, approached religion and thought of religion compared to how we do. Yep. Psychologically, in a time like that, they didn't really have this more prominent. and culturally accepted secular minds said that we have today, where religion could even be seen as something separate from everything else.

Starting point is 01:46:57 You know, for them, religion was how reality worked. The seasons, the harvest, illness, victory in war, all of this was interpreted through a sacred lens. People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at least thought about it in that lens, and they understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy. On a material basis, though, because I mean, we do have to think materially and not solely ideologically, these societies engage in what McDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labor, and land. And the agents of this parasitism are city, states, kingdoms, and empires.

Starting point is 01:47:40 On the city-state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlands and on an empire level, their conquering neighbors, done for either integration and taxation. or tribute or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that we do today. There were limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power or fracture.

Starting point is 01:48:09 Tensions would begin to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict and contact and intellectual traditions developed. Over time, governance would get more bureaucratic. Religions would face reform due to challenges from within, and by the time that we approached the late medieval period, around the 1300s and 1400s,

Starting point is 01:48:33 and he's from a Europe-focused account, or old-world focused account, the world is indeed changing. The transition has begun from this heaven phase to the next phase in McDonald's framework. As in the nation, faiths from 1400 to 1900, where we move away from a world of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a world of human order. Religion persists, of course, but authority has begun to move from the heavens down to Earth,

Starting point is 01:49:16 an earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated, and controlled by human beings. And so we see this in this time with the emergence of the sciences and the emergence of you know, newly minted political theories. And the idea of progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increasing efficiency, mastering the environment. Hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment advances in navigation and so on. And consequently, parasitism as a process becomes more disbursed. Extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by maritime tree roots,

Starting point is 01:49:57 taking resources from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals, and labour, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains, as wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks the extraction of others. You know, the rich is being built up at one place because of the poverty being developed in another place as the agents of this time of the kingdoms and empires but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states and to be clear i'm not trying to say that these are the sole agents of history in any of these particular periods but just that they were significant i don't want to deny the role of you know the politics from below the rabble as graber sometimes refers to them

Starting point is 01:50:50 would have also shaped the development of history. Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and it's something you were talking about from the top. But as with all of these sort of like really, really broad, sweet looks at history, this is capturing trends in a few places in the world. As they moved, there are obviously many, many, many other things

Starting point is 01:51:15 that are also coexisting with all of these systems at the same time. the entire world in like 2000 BC is not just like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere, right? Like there's a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting with each other from, I mean, I can't even. There's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms, some of which are states, some of which are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macro history like this, you are looking at certain sets of them and matching patterns with them. but that also is not, we're also not saying here, but that's literally everything that is happening on Earth because it's not. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:51:56 But yeah, just, just want to get that in for the people who are going to get very mad about this. For sure, for sure. We are aware of the presence of other narratives. We have, we have,

Starting point is 01:52:05 we have done our postmodernism training. We have done our historical archaeological stuff. I just, I'm putting this note in. Of course. Of course. And like I was saying, they had these other eutrials.

Starting point is 01:52:20 but for this particular narrative, we're focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and the nation states. And, you know, nation states, we take them for granted now, but they really were not always a thing. You know, the idea of a group of people

Starting point is 01:52:34 with a shared identity, language, culture, and history being artificially, I would say, unified under a state, it has to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know, you didn't have this concept of France, of France until France was built and the whole world has suffered as a result.

Starting point is 01:52:55 You know, you didn't have this concept of Italy. You didn't have this concept of Nigeria. You didn't have this concept. These nation states had to be constructed. Yeah. Even China, which is seen as like the sort of archetypical example of this, like we have a bunch of records of people in the 1500s. And I think even through the 1600s, like going and talking to people in China

Starting point is 01:53:19 and being like, yeah, you're in China. And the people are talking to are like, what the fuck is China? What are you talking about? We're like under this ruler who's under this ruler, who's under this ruler, who's like. Yeah, exactly. You know, so yeah, these things have to be constructed and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think.

Starting point is 01:53:39 And then to actually get people to identify with them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases. Yeah. And usually by, you know, a process in which. I mean, the only way to cause people to have a positive identification with, like, a specific new bounded national territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other. So, yeah. One of these, what of these also, like, the question of the national, like the 20th century national liberation movements is when you get, like, for example, like pan-Arabism. It's like, okay, like, whose national liberation is this?

Starting point is 01:54:13 Because sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or Yazidis. it's yeah you know yeah this is all of which is to say what you were saying which is this is a violent and bloody process that is a lot more recent than people understand absolutely this time also saw a lot of revolutions bloody indeed you know the rise and fall of old powers and new powers and this is also a phase i think that could be marked by its contradictions you know you had this rise in tide of ideas like liberty and rights and, you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as was socialism. But you also had, obviously, this vast industrial exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of the sciences and scientific classifications,

Starting point is 01:55:06 but you also saw how that gave way to pseudo-scientific justifications for inequality. You know, the great chain of being, the idea of the white being on top of everyone else. Yeah. You saw self-determination for some and self-determination, not so much for others. As far as time I reached the 1800s, the pace of change was exceedingly dramatic and volatile. Industrialization, urbanization, communication, and transportation converged to compress time and space. We see the booth of new ideas and reformed relations. and by the time we reach the early 20th century, a new phase is taken shape.

Starting point is 01:55:49 We are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from 1900 to the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want to call it, is this fast, interconnected set of systems that organize how we live, produce, consume, and even think. The system does not have, you know, a single king or a figurehead that you can point to as the big bad. despite, I think, people's efforts to try and find a big bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global markets and industrial and post-industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy and all these different things chugging along almost like

Starting point is 01:56:32 it's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration. I'd like to throw a little poetry every once in a while. It rocks. So the idea of progress becomes very economicistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency. Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics.

Starting point is 01:56:56 That's the thing that people are worrying about when they're on Fox business or whatever, the financial times, whatever spaces of dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually all our people's needs being met. It's what's growth looking like this quarter? how efficient are we exploiting the planet. Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that clip on CNBC

Starting point is 01:57:18 that we played in an ED a few weeks ago whenever this is coming out where the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors? Yeah. I saw that.

Starting point is 01:57:34 I saw that it's horrifying. Haunting. Haunting shit. The way that our economy has been built around these metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea of progress in this time tends toward the economicistic, you know, the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and so on. And parasism in this system phase is, as the name implies, systemic.

Starting point is 01:58:03 To quote directly from the book, contiguous parastism had captured energy from indigenous societies and native wild and domestic species this is the parastism of the first phase disparate parastism meanwhile had captured energy from indigenous societies imperial subjects and both exotic wild and intensively domesticated species abroad and that's the second phase and so the new form networked parastism captured energy from all of these as well, but with the addition of ancient species of plant to animal in the form of fossils. This enabled concrete energy capture through increasing electrification and then the digitization of extraction and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense populations

Starting point is 01:58:51 of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system were built in the 19th century, it was only in the 20th century that it came to dominate, end quote. So this parasism is networked on another level. You know, it flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil, gas power, maintains the entire economy, maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure. All of it, a whole world, as we've seen, has been built around these fossil fuels. And something as simple as blocking a fairly small street can have a dire impact on

Starting point is 01:59:32 the entire world, much of which is yet to be felt even as the straight has now been reopened. Well, it's not been reopened. About to be seemingly. I mean, Israel did valid this East fire, though, right? So probably will not be opened again. Yeah, I mean, even before that, it hadn't been reopened. I don't know. I have no idea when this episode is going to come out.

Starting point is 01:59:59 So I am standing for the record here. Yeah, it's very hard to comment. It's impossible. It's like not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out whether the straight is open on a hour to hour basis. Yeah. Like, I don't know what the fuck. It's going to be like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:00:17 Like maybe someone will have like filled the straight in by the time this episode comes out. Like, who knows? Who knows? Yeah. Sorry, I've been so straight-pilled. That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess the point I'm trying to make is even in the hypothetical scenario where the straight is fully open,

Starting point is 02:00:35 you're still going to feel the impact of that brief period of closure. Yeah. For years. Yeah. This system phase, by the way, it's not just on the whole extraction of resources, of land, of labor. You also notice that it extracts our attention as well. through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit.

Starting point is 02:01:17 And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from the future and from a million-year-old ecosystems. Eventually, that debt is going to catch up on us. In fact, it already has begun to catch up on us. We're not in the when climate change happens in the future. It is happening right now. And the nation states are carrying on business as usual. And business is booming.

Starting point is 02:01:45 You know, the agents of this parasitic phase do not care. This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these massive transnational entities. And what you'll notice about this period is that they are the agents of this time, even sometimes more than countries. Some of them, some of these corporations have more power than in. entire countries. And so the advent of mass communication and globalization, we also saw ideological coalitions, which could be seen as another agent in this phase. You know, the government, institutions, media, tech giants, and movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives that determine what people, be it workers, consumers, users, or citizens believe as normal,

Starting point is 02:02:27 necessary, I did never tell them. As a person living in this time, it is very difficult. to see it. You know, you get used to a certain system. It's, you know, it's like water to a fish. Yeah. If you're abstract, intangible, like, what are you talking about? There's nothing besides this. It can be the reaction you get sometimes. And it is not on anyone individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system, the biggest picture. Nobody, I think, sees all the machinations of the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know, it sees you as a part of its functioning and to kind of bring it to close. What I want people to take away from this is that, you know, you can be and you are an agent

Starting point is 02:03:16 in history. Yeah. Now, whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine or you are an agent of history that serves as a wedge in the machine, that's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth, deep inequality, technology. technological advancement, military might, environmental strain, atomization. The 2020s have been a whirlwind of a decade already and it's not even over yet. Oh, God.

Starting point is 02:03:48 Still four more years. Yeah. This decade sucks. It really does. It really does. It really does. But the system is not unassailable. Yes, it can and it does adapt to our.

Starting point is 02:04:04 ruptures, but it is a lot more fragile than it puts forward. You know, to borrow from, I can remember who said it, the concept of paper tiger, it comes from Chinese mythology or Chinese military philosophy, right? Yeah, like I know Mao talks about it a lot. I don't actually know where it's from, but yeah. Yeah, but I say that to say that it's a paper tiger, you know, a particularly sturdy paper tiger. but a paper tiger nonetheless. Yeah, and never have the people

Starting point is 02:04:38 who are attempting to ride the paper tiger have, like never, in the entire history of modern capitalism, has it been ridden by people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing? Like, never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it. And they are, you know,

Starting point is 02:04:57 they are already kind of tearing it apart because they don't understand it at all. Yeah, I think one of the, One of these signs of that was just the idea that you can kneecap your country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen. I mean, honestly, the U.S. has not faced the consequences that it should for the things it has done in this year alone, that's alone in its decades of history. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:29 But, I mean, when you saw the deconstruction of U.S. aid, right? which was one of the U.S.'s primarily mechanisms of having swaying other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, and also intervening in the domestic politics of other countries. To break that down, like a bull in a china shop, when that was really like one of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal world order float, it really, I think, is an indication of the incompetence with dealing with. Yeah, and then even on top of that,

Starting point is 02:06:03 think on an even larger scale, right, the entire premise for, I mean, like the entire premise of the Pax Americana, right, the entire premise of the post-World War II American order was that the U.S. Navy would keep the world's oceans open for supply chains. Yeah. That was the whole thing. And it worked exactly as long as the U.S. never actually had to fight a war over, like, the sea lanes that it couldn't militarily control and then we fought the one war which would prove that we cannot in fact secure the sea lanes for global capital. Apoccal transformations are happening in like the very structure of global capital because these people think that like the idea of not using your military power and then reaping

Starting point is 02:06:51 the reaping the world-spaning trillion trillion dollar rewards of this. like they thought that shit was like girl shit yeah I mean the whole the whole point of what I think part of the point of invests in an honest military might is so that you don't have to use it yeah it's just try and scare people

Starting point is 02:07:13 into just bowing down you're just station your troops outside their territory and you're like yeah are you gonna really try and challenge us yeah and then you went and stomped all over somebody and obviously had to stand up and defend themselves and now everybody's seeing what it is, you know? Yeah, and it's a situation too where, like, yeah, like Iran has always technically had the military power

Starting point is 02:07:35 to, like, control the Strait of Hammuz, but they never did because the consequence of that would be the U.S. bombing their cities. So the only way you could possibly lose control of the Strait of Hamos is if you bombed the cities first. So all you had to do was not do that, and it would be fine. Yeah, but I mean, the little girls in the school with Hamasna, So, oh, God.

Starting point is 02:07:57 Yeah, it's just. It's just a tragedy. God. It's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the balls because they just, like, wanted to go kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror. And also, they so clearly have no idea what the fuck they're doing

Starting point is 02:08:15 that it makes a lot of things possible. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you know, what comes next? we're seeing, like as you said, epochal transformations just in this year alone. This phase to be in currently as defined by

Starting point is 02:08:32 McDonald is not going to last forever. You know, unlike previous phases, however, this phase has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hinterland that one can escape to. Yeah. And so what comes next can be

Starting point is 02:08:48 fragmentation. It can be some kind of devaluation. or calcification, or it can be a social revolution. And the moment and the cogs and wedges in this moment are actively deciding that. But I think we can do without this parasism. As McDonnell notes, there are other ways of relating with each other and with nature. He borrows from the ecological language of commensalistic and mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other.

Starting point is 02:09:22 For example, we provide hives and protection where bees pollinate crops and produce honey. And in commensalistic relationships, one organism captures energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other. There's lots of animals and plants who make their home among trees while neither harming nor helping the tree itself. Although some of them do end up helping the tree in more indirect ways. But finally, in parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous, for our world. One organism, that being us, has captured the energy of another or of multiple others to those others detriment. Our system has put us in the position of essentially being mosquitoes on planet Earth and not in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health

Starting point is 02:10:11 of the ecosystem, but literally suck in more blood than the system can sustain. And so we have to, we have to shake things up. We have to emboldened, I think, new forms of relations and what those relations look like. Not up to you. As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. Sending a spicy picture to your work chat instead of your significant other? That's so embarrassing. You know what's not? Debt? Consolidate your debt with a loan from FIG. No hassle, no judgment. Borrow better with FIG. Visit fig.ca. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with

Starting point is 02:11:02 Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Starting point is 02:11:21 Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard. Herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Starting point is 02:11:37 Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen, Kingdom on Earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.

Starting point is 02:12:13 Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levin this went to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive. The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me?

Starting point is 02:12:42 Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis, and I know firsthand because I competed there myself. I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Garris. Every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on Clay. Genschen win. I mean, she went down in three to Rabakina, but I'm delighted.

Starting point is 02:13:19 She's an outsider to win the French for me. And she likes Clay. Listen, Lina Rabakina is arguably the best player in the world right now, and I actually can win on any surface, because if she's serving, well, good luck. Consider this your court-side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Welcome to IKed Happen Here, a podcast where the thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler colony of the United States.

Starting point is 02:13:56 In the mask of humanity is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind... I think calling it a new Jim Crow is that title's already been used for something else, but it's a return overtly to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era. So I'm your host, Mia Wong. Let's talk about what is actually at issue here. And that is a recent Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Kallay. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question, of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in his congressional

Starting point is 02:14:40 map in 2024? Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the point where there were two majority black districts in 2024. On a macro level, what is that state here is can a state create an electoral map where they spread all of the black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every district, thus making it impossible for black voters to select the candidate of their choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop. Like, this specifically, like this is one of the very specific things.

Starting point is 02:15:25 I cannot emphasize this enough. This specific thing, which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things. It was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this. And this has led to the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is a long and complicated history that, frankly, could be its own, probably is like

Starting point is 02:15:53 multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short, short version of what a minority majority district is, is it's a district where the majority of voters are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a lot of these districts in the South, specifically, to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters

Starting point is 02:16:18 to elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect a candidates of your choosing if you are part of a minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff was, passed in the first place because under what we call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is other non-white people, too,

Starting point is 02:16:44 but like this is primarily black people. It was very, very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for can never be elected. This is, this is one of the bases of Jim Crow over discriminatory. nation. The Supreme Court has decided no, actually. What they've decided is that if the Republican party that controls a legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about, where they spread out all of the, like specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts so that black people can't elect a representative. In order to challenge this as violation of your, of your voting rights, you have to prove, definitively prove, that the intent was racism and not

Starting point is 02:17:34 literally anything else. So, for example, and this is the thing that's really at issue here, right? You have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisantly, which is amazingly a thing that's legal to do in the United States for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also, you have to be able to prove that they created this map specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group. And also, you have to create a map that would allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want. Like, for example, again, making sure that Republicans have all the seats in a state, but also not be racist. So you have to create a map for them that would allow them to do this in order to prove that there could be another map that achieves.

Starting point is 02:18:26 there are goals of like partisan gerrymandering that isn't also racist. It's completely unhinged. Legally, this is, this is a shambles. We have covered some downright, like, hideous nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme Court decisions, right? Like, this Supreme Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in, like, living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out. with. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because there have been so many abhorrent ones, even just from a pure legal perspective. This one is so bad it defies

Starting point is 02:19:13 belief. So, okay, one of the main issues here is section two of the Voting Rights Act. I'm just going to read what it says, quote, no voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting. or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results, and keep that in mind later, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in Section 1973B. So again, can I emphasize this enough, right? The way this is written is that it says that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting or have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens to vote in account of race. Right. It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now, this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that. Actually, you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote.

Starting point is 02:20:25 from a piece in SCOTUS blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the Charles B. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb, Eversold Chair in Constitutional Law, is the director of election at law at Ohio State University. You've written a book on electoral law. He's a constitutional law professor. He specifically does election law. He is like by no means a leftist. He's coming into the right of like Justice Jackson and her dissent in this case, right? But even he. I'm just going to quote what he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get from legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section 2, but it destroys the

Starting point is 02:21:14 central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982, America, amendment to the section's test creates a, quote, results test for determining whether there is liability under the section, replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section 2 back.

Starting point is 02:21:55 to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis. So what happened here, right, to make this extremely clear, is that Congress in 1982 had amended this. They amended what this thing said, right? Because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that you have to prove that, like, these people were like mustache twirling, saying the N-word in fucking clan robes doing Nazi salutes.

Starting point is 02:22:20 You have to, like, prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If the result of it is racist, then you can't do it. Even if, like, nominally what you're saying out loud is that you're doing this for non-racist reasons. If the result is racism, then you have to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that.

Starting point is 02:22:45 We're just, like, flipping it back to an intent standard for no reason other than I want to be able to do racism and help Republican Party win seats. the other thing that fully talks about is the court is arguing that Congress can't draw from the 15th Amendment in order to have the Voting Rights Act work in the first place. I'm going to quote him again. Yeah, the court in this decision did not need to consider the question of congressional power to enforce the 15th Amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section 2 with the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the 15th Amendment. but under Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article 1, Section 4 to enact laws governing the, quote,

Starting point is 02:23:33 time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory intent and not rely on the 15th Amendment at all. So, okay, what does this mean, right? What Alito is saying is it like, oh, well, actually Congress doesn't have the authority to like write the section of the voting rights amendment. They don't have the authority to do it under the 15th Amendment because it like oversteps the rights of states to, you know, like run their own elections. Right. So I'm going to do the thing I did last time with Fully's thing and just read the full Article 1 section 4 of the Constitution.

Starting point is 02:24:12 By the way, when something says like Article 1 section 4, you have to remember that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like the First Amendment, right, the freedom of speech. an amendment. That's not in the original text. That had to be added onto it. And obviously we have something called the Bill of Rights that like, you know, was like the first 10 amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like put like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. That was not in the original text of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like, fuck it. This is going to be in the original thing. Right. So Article 1, Section 4, this is from like the original fucking body of text of the Constitution says quote

Starting point is 02:24:55 the times places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations except as to the places of choosing senators so yes obviously they can fucking do the voting rights amendment they literally have the ability like it says in section one Congress may at any time by law Make or alter such regulations By such regulations they mean the times,

Starting point is 02:25:29 places, and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right? So obviously they can fucking do the voting rights amendment. It's literally just there in the Constitution. It just says that. It's all like this. It's gibberish. It's like, oh my God.

Starting point is 02:25:45 You can just read the text of the Constitution, and it says you can do this. It's God. Holy shit. Even from the perspective of, like, if you treat the law as real, this is just pure Calvin ball shit. Like, I mean, it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know what's real and not Calvin Ball?

Starting point is 02:26:06 It's these products and services. We are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been? It's been about two weeks since the court did this decision. The court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to gerrymanders, the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing this via, again, the shadow docket, which is their ability

Starting point is 02:26:37 to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision. An unsigned one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great. It's amazing. And by amazing, I mean, Jesus fucking Christ.

Starting point is 02:26:54 This happens about a week after the original Supreme Court decision. This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already found to be explicitly, racially motivated. A thing Alito said in the decision that he wouldn't do, right? Alito says in a decision that he won't overturn A, cases that are like overt discrimination, and B, that he wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it anyways.

Starting point is 02:27:25 Like, Jesus Christ. I just like, oh, my God. So the short version of the Alabama conflict, I'm drawing here from Slate's story on this thing, is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of both of the congressional, black congressional candidates in the state by gerrymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In 2003, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't violate the Voting Rights Act. So this was three years ago, this, like the Supreme Court said they,

Starting point is 02:27:59 had to do this. Here's some slate. Quote, Alabama, however, refused to comply with that order. Again, they got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to do it. So the lower court imposed its own map featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found that in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional racial discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause in addition to the Voting Rights Act.

Starting point is 02:28:31 Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate states now raising to eliminate black representatives from their congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift its bar, but it refused. So they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re-jerrymandered black communities in light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough. This vote from when they were granted this position, this vote is in like eight days. Right. People had already started voting for candidates and primaries, right? And Supreme Court was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can you can fucking re-jerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine. Even though, again, I can't emphasize this enough. In the ruling, Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't overturn this exact case and then they did it. It's mind-boggling. It used to be, like it really truly did used to be that if you were going to do shit like this, you had to like,

Starting point is 02:29:29 sort of like pretend that you were following some kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You can just fucking do Calvin bullshit. You can just literally lie about what you're doing in your decisions. And then just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as Slate went on, this has been pointed out by a whole bunch of different outlets. The Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that would have,

Starting point is 02:29:55 were trying to like make more democratic maps, both in the sense of like, not being racist and also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon. It's too close to the election for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear about what's happening here is that the court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of them. non-white people to vote. And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement, right? It's like one of the biggest goals of the

Starting point is 02:30:42 moderate wing of the movement was to have elections in which black people got to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And that's what's being done here. right? And this has been pointed out. It was like anyone who's read any kind of analysis of racial politics in the U.S., one of the consistent themes of the sort of, you know, what you would call, I guess, like the era of Black uprising, right? The sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson, I thought I guess you could talk about the stuff in the Bay before that, roughly from Ferguson through 2020, was that the U.S. was not a democracy before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because the principle

Starting point is 02:31:28 of one person, one vote was not real because you could simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group. And that was the status quo of the South and also like a lot of other parts of the country too was this very overtability of these people to, you know, not only just like this is, this is one of the components of segregation, right?

Starting point is 02:31:53 It's not just like imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right? It's also, you know, like preventing, it's preventing black people from voting. And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just effectively destroyed, right? It's the thing that, like, made it possible to even sort of, like, in the loosest sense possible, called this country a democracy. And it's gone. It's just gone. And now, you know, it's like, okay, like, what fucking is this now?

Starting point is 02:32:28 I don't know, it's like it's, it's an even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state. This is what the goal of the Republican Party has always been. Like, they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever, right? It's, you know, dating back to you, if you want to look at like what Trumpism descends for, we talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of like the school choice movement.

Starting point is 02:32:56 And the thing about the school choice movement, was that it was an anti-integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites-only schools, a bunch of these sort of right-wingers were like, okay, well, we'll just do private schools, or we can do that. And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right? You know, sort of both evangelicalism

Starting point is 02:33:17 and sort of Bush administration and Trumpism and Reagan, too, is this shit. And this has been what the Republicans have done when they've been in power, right? This is a lot of the Trump administration, like what they were doing, like all of the stuff about DEI, all the stuff about wokeness. But this is also a lot of what Doge was doing was trying to make it so that black people like couldn't work for the U.S. government. Right. It was a huge purge of black women from the U.S. government.

Starting point is 02:33:43 And, you know, now we're seeing this on the level of elections. And on this level, what the Republicans are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps is remove non-white people and especially black people from Congress. they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan, it's just partisan gerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black voters, because black voters won't openly vote for the party of white supremacy. And they're also claiming that, like, not doing this is, like, infringing on the civil rights of white people. A thing that, like, is completely, you know, just gibberish world turned upside down nonsense.

Starting point is 02:34:23 But if they could just do that now, because there were. power because the court will just let them do this shit. And so I think in a way that really has not been conveyed in the media and in the discourse, like this is one of the leekest moments of this administration, right? You know, on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right? On top of, you know, just like the ethnic cleansing of not my people from the U.S. that ICE is doing. What they're doing right now is attempting to end multiracial democracy in the U.S. And obviously, politically, I have my critiques of electoral democracy as a concept, but having it just revert back to only white people get to decide who politicians are

Starting point is 02:35:10 is something even worse than what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic shift in just literally what this country is toward something that unbelievably unfeithably leaked state of pure white rule and the people who are talking about this think that it can be reversed just by voting more but no it can't the whole point of this right is to make sure that elections

Starting point is 02:35:44 and whatever the will of the people is is incapable of actually affecting the white supremacist state because non-white people just don't get votes. You can't just vote harder your way through all of this shit. You have to actually do things. And, you know, if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society, we're going to have to actually take action to combat and actually resist the fact that this is,

Starting point is 02:36:14 like, this is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state now. Yeah. So this is, it could happen here. I don't have a non-bleek way to end this. But the common refrain is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And I think you can also add to that, right? If you've ever asked yourself, what would you be doing during Jim Crow? The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now. And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's time to move. Sending a spicy picture to your work chat instead of your significant other?

Starting point is 02:37:00 That's so embarrassing. You know what's not? Debt? Consolidate your debt with a loan from FIG. No hassle, no judgment. Borrow Better with FIG. Visit fig.ca. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Starting point is 02:37:17 Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs, banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

Starting point is 02:37:38 you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection.

Starting point is 02:37:57 Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Cuba me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness.

Starting point is 02:38:19 So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levin this went to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life.

Starting point is 02:39:00 Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis, and I know firsthand because I competed there myself. I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs Tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Garris. Every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on clay. Jen Chinch win. I mean, she went down in three to Rovachina, but I'm. Delighted. She's an outsider to win the French for me.

Starting point is 02:39:35 And she likes Clay. Listen, Lernerabakina is arguably the best player in the world right now. And I actually can win on any surface. Because if she's serving, well, good luck. Consider this your court side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Speaking of things that are on fire,

Starting point is 02:40:06 America. All right. I did my job. Garrison, what are we doing? Who are we? This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, their crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yep. This episode, we're covering the week of May 6th through May 13th. Yep. James, some small news items to open us up. My little grab bag of news stories, yeah. The United Kingdom Parachute,

Starting point is 02:40:36 supply and medical personnel into Tristan de Kuna last weekend to respond to the Hunter virus outbreak. A man had got off the cruise ship where the outbreak began in April and returned to Tristan Takuna where he resides. I think the cruise ship stopped Tristan Bacuna. This weekend, British paratroopers from the Pathfinder platoon tandem jumped a doctor and a nurse onto the island along with supplies including oxygen, which was critically low on the island. The patient had reported symptoms two weeks after disembarking the cruise ship and they'd spent that time on the island and therefore there's a fairly high chance that they've interacted with other people, right? The island has no airstrip. There was such a low

Starting point is 02:41:23 supply of oxygen that there obviously wasn't time for a boat to get to Tristan de Kuna. So the UK conducted this like fairly, I mean extremely unusual. This is the first time that you're UK's ever done it. The island has a population to around 220 people and only two medical professionals who are obviously exhausted after delivering care to this person who's on oxygen for several weeks. Yeah. So they jumped a couple more in there. Yeah, a fairly audacious response to the hunter virus. Secondly, and I think we can also agree of equal importance, Japanese snack food giant Calbi is switching it to black and white packaging for its snacks. No! No! No! Garison is loading a gun right now.

Starting point is 02:42:08 This is a significant portion of my daily diet. Garrison wouldn't be able to make it through this one. Garrison is going on hunger strike. They are wiring a crude detonator together, it looks like. I'm going to join Iran. Put an end to this madness. This is because ingredients used for the ink on its normal. Colorful packages are hard to come by.

Starting point is 02:42:33 Thanks to the war with Iran and the tax on world trade. Yeah, so if you got one of those little stickers, it says, I did that, and you've got a packet of black and white crisps. Now you can combine the two. Put on your black and white lame-ass ships. Yeah. Yeah, the one thing that gave us joy is gone. The Nigerian military has once again carried out an airstrike on a market, killing at least 100 civilians, according to Amnesty International. The airstrike on the Tumpur market is the second in a month to hit a market.

Starting point is 02:43:06 The Nigerian military claims the area was to hide out for bandits, but it has yet to acknowledge the civilian death toll. Government in this area is more or less like only present through its ability to project force like this. And I've seen interviews with locals suggesting the town was under the control of non-state groups. Previously, people remember the Nigerian government has suggested that anyone doing business with the people that's targeting is also a legitimate target. which is how it has justified dropping bombs on crowded markets like this. CNN is claiming that the CIA facilitated a car bomb in Sinaloa. The article seems to have sources in or very familiar with the operations of Ground Branch. It also alleges that the US government employees who were killed in the car crash.

Starting point is 02:43:52 Last month were members of Ground Branch. More than the fact of this story, it doesn't shock me that the CIA is killing people in weird ways in different countries. No. That is one of the things that they do. That's like the CIA's job. Yeah. The fact that CNN has a source that is leaking ground branch operations,

Starting point is 02:44:13 that is not usual. For someone in the CIA to be talking to someone at CNN, while these operations are ongoing, right? And like, yeah, operations in Mexico are exceptionally high risk for these kinds of folks. like in 2012, some Mexican federal cops opened fire on U.S. government employees, presumably not acting on behalf of the federal government, right? Obviously, it puts this mission at risk, which isn't, like, this is already a high-risk thing, but the fact that somebody has felt the need to leak

Starting point is 02:44:46 this to CNN is pretty remarkable. Speaking of potential CIA leaks, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent claimed on X the Everything app that before the president, launched the war in Iran, quote, the U.S. intel community, including CIA, was an agreement that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region and shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel and the U.S. unquote. The Supreme Court extended access to remote prescription and melt delivery of the abortion pill Mithopristone until Thursday, May 14th, which is the day this episode releases.

Starting point is 02:45:29 the night this episode releases. Around Thursday, they're expected to make a shadow docket ruling on whether Louisiana's ban on male order abortion pills can go into effect as the case continues through a lower court. A golden statue of President Trump was unveiled at a Trump resort in Miami last week. The statue was blessed by evangelical pastor Mike Burns, who said, quote, let me be clear, this is not a golden calf, unquote. Uh-huh. God, it's so hard. I, like, you, you, you went through everything you just, like, the little parade of horrors like you do every week. And then you just drop that, that there's, there's a priest blessing a golden statue. Pastor. Pastor. Sorry, you're right. Pastor. And I, I know that, like, they, that he had dressed in the moment, like, the whole golden cat thing of it all. It's just funnier that, like, he knew I got to say something. Like, I got to, I got to make a comment on this. That's what got me. that he felt that he needed to address the golden calf in the room.

Starting point is 02:46:32 Really genuinely funny. This is not a golden calf shirt. Has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the shirt. Oh, fuck. Yeah, it's great. But yeah, grim stuff. Yep. So a national survey of 1,000 Americans by NewsGuard and UGov suggests that about half of people

Starting point is 02:46:53 in the United States, a survey think each of the attempts on Donald Trump's life were staged or they're not sure if it was real. For the White House correspondent's dinner attempt and the Butler, Pennsylvania attempts, 24% of those surveyed thought the attempts were staged. 32% were not sure in the White House correspondent's dinner attempt and 29% for the Butler Pennsylvania event. It's more than half if you add them up and I'm convinced it was real. Super funny.

Starting point is 02:47:25 I'll quote from the report here of the 12% of a month. Americans who said all three attempts were staged, 55% were Democrats, 38% were independents, and 7% were Republicans, according to the report. Really interested in that 7%. Yeah. What are they getting out of that? I don't... Yeah. In what way do they think it was staged?

Starting point is 02:47:46 It's just like, hell yeah. We're owning the libs. We're staging. We did it. Look at us go. I think it may just be like, well, I voted for Trump because I wanted my taxes to be lower, but I know he faked that. Yeah. This is obviously worrying and this trend is something we've been talking about for years at this point.

Starting point is 02:48:05 This is why I've been kind of such a hard ass about the liberal conspiracyism that is growing. I don't even find it worrying anymore, Garrison. I find it liberating that we're finally here. And I can just be like, ha, ha, ha, look at that. We're finally free from the shackles and truth. Everyone's dad on the muck together. Nobody's standing pretty anymore. everybody's just wallowing like a filthy pig and shit.

Starting point is 02:48:32 That is pretty much the status of the U.S. news market right now. Yeah, I'm fine with it. God, it's fucking bleak. It's so bleak. I just, I don't want to address the factual elements of each thing because there's no point. No, right? No, we should all know that's useless by now, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:48:53 Just. Have we not gotten to a place free of that yet? Yeah, I know. I really didn't know what to say about that. I mean, there are like real issues here. A conspiratorial base can be more easily recruited into reactionary thought. This is the idea of the cultic milieu. And we can see a version of this happening with certain portions of the left might engage

Starting point is 02:49:15 with people like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Marine right now. But for me, kind of the biggest issue with this is that it's a refusal to understand or accept the particular moment that you find yourself with them. Like a resistance to the self-realization that you are living through history and that people are active agents in history. It's an historical rejection of the fact

Starting point is 02:49:38 that some people may look at some of the actions that someone like Trump is doing, whether regarding ICE or the war with Iran, and then choose to act in response or in the case of the Butler shooting, the result of social disintegration or under-regulation manifesting as someone's violent, nihilistic expression,

Starting point is 02:49:58 similar to the mindset of, like, a school shooter. My last issue relates kind of to the second issue, like the ahistorical element, how these false flag shooting conspiracy theories also prescribe Trump too much power by not just turning him into this, like, invincible god, but then also assuming that, like, the U.S. deep state is capable and competent enough

Starting point is 02:50:20 to stage major world events like this, like brainwash and groom Patsies into doing these shootings. And like this also obviously removes the agency and the clearly defined history. Oh, the people that do these own shootings, right? It rejects this. Like I said, this relates to the second thing.

Starting point is 02:50:36 It rejects or refuses to understand the moment that you're living in and that people actually are active agents of history. And like the people that do these shootings have their own family and their own friends. They have their own history that we can show and prove and assuming that all this is like fake that like the government has like manufactured this

Starting point is 02:50:53 or somehow like turned someone who was a normie kind of liberal suddenly into like doing a shooting or has like fake this backstory, right? It gives the government so much power, right? It assumes that the government has power like a magical wizard that totally controls reality. Yeah. Anyway, for our first main story today, let's talk about Turning Point USA. But first, on Sunday night in Seattle, A 19-year-old transgender girl was murdered.

Starting point is 02:51:27 She was a student at University of Washington and was found with stab wounds in the laundry room of an off-campus apartment that she lived in. No suspect has yet been identified. While horrific in and of itself, Turning Point USA was scheduled to hold an anti-trans debate event just days later at the very campus this trans student attended. This event was going to be hosted by a far-right anti-trans lobbyist and influencer named Chloe Cole,

Starting point is 02:52:00 a teen transitioner who subsequently detransitioned a few years later following an acid trip and then conversion to Christianity. Many such cases. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, most normal Christian detransitioner. Yeah. She made an appearance at Trump's last State of the Union address when the president talked about restricting gender-affirming care to minors.

Starting point is 02:52:26 After the murder in Seattle, Cole and TPPUSA continued plugging their anti-trans event online, prompting students to plan a protest to quote-unquote shut the event down, calling to bring, quote, flags, drums, or anything to make noise, unquote. Then on Tuesday, the National Turning Point USA Organization

Starting point is 02:52:49 decided to cancel the event, according to University of Washington spokesperson Victor Balta. Later that night, Tuesday night, Chloe Cole announced the event was postponed because, quote, Antifa has assembled a local militia

Starting point is 02:53:06 in their own words, unquote. Oh, that's alarming. A militia. Now, I was not able to find an instance of Antifa claiming to have assembled a quote unquote militia. Really, no photos of the militia? No documentation of the militia?

Starting point is 02:53:25 Nor was this language, this claim of a militia in their own words, nor was this language included in right-wing reporting of the planned protest. I cannot find a source for this. I really looked. I went through Fox articles,

Starting point is 02:53:40 post-millennial articles. There was nothing about Antifa using the word militia. No one. No counter, no protester that I could find was using the word militia. Now,

Starting point is 02:53:50 Chloe Cole also claimed that they were, quote, explicit threats on my life, and that the protest caused a, quote, level of attention, our security team, and the local PD are frankly unprepared for, unquote. She shared an article from the Canadian far right outlet the post-millennial, documenting threats against the TPUSA event. Threats like one Twitter user in Canada saying that people should shut down the event like might be. Milo Unoplas's Berkeley campus event in 2017, writing, quote, make them hurt for scheduling this. One other Twitter post with two likes, read, quote, luckily the bricks in Red Square are easy to grab this time of year. Okay.

Starting point is 02:54:39 That's the evidence that Andy Noe used to claim that, quote, far left extremists are urging their comrades to carry out deadly violence, unquote. Posts. Just those two posts. That was that was the post that Chloe Cole was sharing via this post-Millennial article that that was the evidence for these deadly threats. Now, I do think it's worth reiterating that to these people, they also believe that just calling someone a fascist constitutes a threat of violence, right? This is something they've been repeating a lot since the death of Charlie Kirk. Yeah. Just calling someone a fascist constitutes a deadly threat. Right. In Chloe Cole's video, announcing that the TPA USA event was, in her words, postponed. She said that after Charlie's assassination, quote, speaking on a university campus in 2026, can come with deadly consequences. But towards the end of the video, she stressed that, quote,

Starting point is 02:55:34 this is not a win for Antifa because truth will always win. I am not afraid of Antifa. Two Twitter posts. That a, quote, rag-tag group of wannabe revolutionaries on cross-sex hormones won't scare her. The enemy is both strong and weak. Yeah, good for her. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 02:55:56 That's how these people work. Now, while I was watching Chloe Cole's video, something sprang to mind. Last week, the White House released a new counterterrorism strategy that named three major threat groups the country is currently facing. Narco-terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists,

Starting point is 02:56:16 and violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists. The document says that counterterrorism activities will, quote, prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist, unquote.

Starting point is 02:56:38 I did a full episode about this with Robert earlier this week, if you want to check that out. Yep. But the left-wing, transgender anarchist Antifa stuff mix up just a handful of sentences in a 16-page document, which is mostly

Starting point is 02:56:54 focused on Islamic terrorism, cartels, and complaining about the Biden administration. For a TLDR, there's nothing new in this counterterrorism document pertaining to the left that wasn't already in National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7. It does not

Starting point is 02:57:10 grant any new powers, nor designate trans people as terrorists. Like NSMP7, it essentially states that being quote-unquote extremely pro-transgender can be a motivating factor in carrying out terroristic violence or threats. Since last October, joint terrorism task forces across the country have been directed to investigate Antifa-aligned groups and individuals, quote, engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation. This new document is just describing things that are already happening, while building Trump's justification for military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change

Starting point is 02:57:52 in Venezuela, and the ongoing war in the Middle East. But in the wake of this new strategy being released, I wonder if TPUSA's canceling of the event and Chloe Cole's language in the announcement might also be designed to coax Trump's feds into going after. radical transgender antifa terrorists, whether that may be individuals who possibly sent threats online that I just couldn't see, or just made semi-questionable posts on Twitter.com,

Starting point is 02:58:26 or who simply spread the protest flyer online or the protest organizers themselves. Yeah. I think that is something to keep in mind. This new counterterrorism strategy, it mostly serves as a chilling effect for speech and for organizing like I said, it doesn't actually grant new powers,

Starting point is 02:58:44 but it can scare people into thinking that the Trump administration is designating a whole class of people as terrorists. And stuff like this, you know, protests, right? That is one thing that they can investigate. You know, threats online, that is something that they can investigate, right? That is what they are actually looking into. They're not just investigating random trans people as terrorists. They will be looking into, you know, threats or questionable posts made on social media, right? Those are the things they actually can look into.

Starting point is 02:59:14 And I think some of Chloe Cole's language about the quote unquote deadly threats she received, stuff like that could be used by the Trump administration as a pretext to investigate people. Yeah. Whether or not those threats even were real, right? I did not see anything that I think constitutes a deadly threat based on the post-Millennial's reporting. But her saying that might be enough for a local FBI field office to want to investigate, you know, student activists at this university. Right, right. Yeah, I think that makes sense. So that's what I wanted to talk about here. This is by far the thing I'm seeing people freak out about the most right now is like overall the idea that like they've just declared it, you know, a terrorism, a violent terrorism to be trans or to be anarchist or to be, you know, any of the things like anti-capitalist mentioned in that in that document. Yeah. And what I'm actually seeing on the ground so far is very much the same kind of prosecutions that they.

Starting point is 03:00:11 they've been doing and the same kinds of, like, messaging that they've been making. And I think that, like, you're right on the money. This is something to pay attention to. Like, does this get a response? Is there an actual, like, investigation? Do we wind up to see someone get indicted for a Twitter post? Or, you know, if someone made a threat that we're not privy to, do they get indicted for that?

Starting point is 03:00:32 Like, or do we see something that does look more like a witch hunt where they're going after, like a protest organizer? That'll tell us a lot about kind of what. what's coming in the immediate future. But right now, I don't see anything different than what they've been doing, which is kind of like incompetently and haphazardly flailing at everything sort of vaguely lefty. Yeah. And, you know, I think including this in a document like the counterterrorism strategy,

Starting point is 03:00:58 you know, also serves as a chilling effect, right? This is to scare people. They're trying to spook you. Into not doing anything, right? That is a part of their strategy. Yep. But, you know, they have investigated people for making death threats for years, right? Right? The Biden administration and their FBI.

Starting point is 03:01:13 Yeah, it's illegal to make death threats, by the way, if their actual death threats. That is illegal. Yeah. The FBI under Biden, investigated Stop Cop City. The charges against the protesters at Prairieland started, that investigation started before NSMP7 was even released, right? This is not new, but it is something to keep an eye on to see if their scope is actually changing. Right. you know what else is changing in scope our sponsors

Starting point is 03:01:44 are they not really no same shit and we are back and we are back to talking about the war in Iran so I want to start off with President Trump's extremely

Starting point is 03:02:11 vocal criticism of Kurdish groups one can assume in Iran but that's it doesn't necessarily seemed that his criticism is limited to Kurdish groups in Iran. Let's play the clip. The level of ferocity for protests, you know, the people are watching that they want to go out on the streets. They have no weapons. They have no guns. We thought the Kurds were going to give us weapons, but the Kurds disappointed us. The Kurds take, take, take. They have a great

Starting point is 03:02:40 reputation in Congress. Congress says, oh, they fight so hard. They fight hard when they get paid. So I'm very disappointed in the Kurds. But they were, again, they were. give it. I said it wasn't going to work, by the way. I just have to say it. I disagreed with what they did. They gave it. I said, they'll never get there. And I was right. I like to be right. In this case, too bad. But we sent some guns with ammunition. And they were supposed to be delivered, but they kept it. I said, they're going to keep it. But what do I know? I've only been doing this a short period of time. What do I know? Yeah, fascinating. Here's Diar Corda asking him about this.

Starting point is 03:03:22 Mr. President, you're thank you so much Mr. President. Mr. President, yesterday you said you gave the Kurds arms, but they took it for themselves.

Starting point is 03:03:30 A U.S. military officials says that the Kurds have not received any arms and the Kurdish political parties are denying receiving any arms. So the officials are wrong. The officials are wrong.

Starting point is 03:03:43 Yes. Yeah. Well, there's, the Kurds could be so many things. Like, they just said that officials, I'm assuming the KD, and the P.U.K

Starting point is 03:03:52 is who they're referring to, but that's just like the two big parties in Iraq, which isn't even all of the Kurdish parties in Iraq. Like, not to mention all of the different armed groups, but I have no idea who he sent guns to, and I don't know that he does. Yeah, or if he did. He seems pretty confident that he did.

Starting point is 03:04:09 Yeah, yeah. This is like the opposite of Iran-Contra, where the president's saying, like, I definitely sent them guns. I'm running guns. I was running guns. And everyone else is like, we have no fucking clue. What are he talking about?

Starting point is 03:04:23 Yeah. So I'm guessing this refers to his previous theory that they had supplied guns to Iranian Kurdish groups in January. It's time when there were large-scale protests in Iran that those Iranian Kurdish groups were expected to deliver to presumably Persian protesters, presumably in large cities such as Tehran. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump himself personally vetoed this exact plan in January after receiving pressure from Turkey to do so.

Starting point is 03:04:51 There were some amount back to January, but small arms, as we've said before, would not really have tipped the balance here. Iran's army police, besiege, the IGC, as we've seen since February, can survive assault from the US and Israel. It's not going to be toppled by a bunch of people with AKs. They would have bombed whole cities so they had to. We covered this at a time in our episode about it with Gordaim, but most of the Kurdish groups I've spoken to don't have responses

Starting point is 03:05:17 at this time, but the P.A.K, that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party, sent me this comment regarding the protests in January. Quote, from the end of December 2025 through approximately January 20th, 20, 26, the Iranian regime committed an unprecedented massacre across Ilam, Kamanshan, and Luristan. They mobilized Hashd al-Shabbi militias into Persian cities and deployed a massive military presence into our territories. In order to defend our citizens, we targeted the outposts and military bases where these forces were stationed. We confirmed that, yes, we carried out these operations. So what they're confirming there is that they carried our operations, not where the weapons

Starting point is 03:05:55 came from, right? But we saw those operations in January. Polat Yan, Polit Jan, famous, I guess, for being a founding member of the Yepege or Frundekar, an SDF commander. He's also an author and a politician did make a statement, which I thought was interesting. I'm going to read it at least a good amount of it. because I think it's worth it. Quote, the Kurds are not mercenaries. Kurdish blood is not cheap and the lives of Kurdish youth are not for sale. The Kurds are fighting for their freedom,

Starting point is 03:06:22 dignity and political rights, not to serve the temporary agendas of regional or international powers without any clear outcome for the Kurdish people themselves. At the same time, the Kurds have repeatedly shown their willingness to cooperate in fighting terrorism, extremism and instability in the Middle East. Kurdish forces played a central role in the defeat of ISIS and contributed greatly to regional security. But cooperation must be based on mutual respect, and long-term political understanding. I do not know the accuracy of the recent claims regarding weapons are literally sent to protesters

Starting point is 03:06:50 inside Iran. If such operations truly existed, then the American side should clearly explain which group, force, or individuals receive those weapons. A nation of tens of millions of people should not be collectively accused through vague and unverified statements. Yeah, it's pretty good. Sounds incredibly reasonable.

Starting point is 03:07:06 Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a really reasonable thing. Yeah, it does seem that Trump has some personal animus against the Kurds. I wonder if what he's referring to is that, like, a year or so ago, the last time they sent over more weapons, if he sent some message more recently being like, hey, could you send some of those guns that we already gave you over to rebels in Iran? And they were like, no, no? Like, what do you mean? And he's pissed. I wonder if that's what he's pissed about.

Starting point is 03:07:39 Yeah. It's so hard for me to say. Is he talking about the SDF? Is he talking about groups in southern Kurdistan that they armed? Yeah, he asked him to like pass them along. I have never seen large numbers of American supplied weapons among the Rogelati groups. No. Although they do, some of their AKs come from the US.

Starting point is 03:08:02 If you look at like what's sent over, like a bunch of, and like body armor, a lot of like what the SDF, like the armor they have came from Americans. Yeah. Yeah. And with like a higher speed SDF guys, you'll see like M4's button and even like night vision. like YAT, the anti-terror forces and the SDF, you'll see. But like on the Iranian side, I have not seen that. He's repeated this several times over quite a long period of time.

Starting point is 03:08:29 It seems to be something he genuinely believes. But I have seen no evidence aside from his claims to support it. It doesn't matter, but it does matter in the sense that Trump clearly is personally mad at Kurdish groups. and does not seem to be interested in supporting their aspirations for autonomy, which is disappointing, but I guess, I don't know why, maybe because he feels that he alone should take credit for the defeat of the Islamic State. Like, I can't quite work out what's caused this other than maybe he perceives them to have slighted him by not giving weapons that we don't know anything about.

Starting point is 03:09:07 Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the broader situation in Iran. I don't want to make this like true social review I know I've read Trump's truths in the past I have reached a point where I can't do that anymore that's fair yeah like I can't

Starting point is 03:09:24 people are dying right they bombed a girl's school like this is serious and horrible and it's really hard to bring the gravity that needs to be brought to this and also read out the absolutely bonkers stuff that gets posted and Trump just arrived a missile

Starting point is 03:09:40 strike on Iran as a love tab this past week. So I'm just not going to do that this week. I am going to say that both sides have repeatedly and openly violated the ceasefire, which Trump described to reporters and Dr. Oz as being on, quote, massive life support. Meanwhile, Iran's parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Galibath, has said, quote, Iran forces are ready to deliver a well-deserved response to any aggression, mistaken strategy and mistaken decisions will always This lead to mistaken results. The whole world has already figured this out. We are prepared for all options. They will be surprised. This comes as Trump calls Iran's peace demands, quote, a piece of garbage and quote, a stupid proposal. Iranian demands allegedly included an end to Israeli

Starting point is 03:10:28 aggression in Lebanon and sovereignty over to straightforward moves. Trump has also alleged that they walked back an agreement to surrender in rich Iranian. We've also found that Iran has retained a large number of their missiles and their launch capacity this week. It's also been reported by Jim Laporteur, who is one of the few people still doing these for reporting at CBS. Pakistan has provided safe haven for Iranian aircraft, shielding them from US strikes. Allegedly some civilian aircraft were also sheltered in Afghanistan, but then had to be moved when Pakistan began bombing Afghanistan in March. Iran has friends everywhere, I guess. The United States sent a ballistic missile submarine to Gibraltar this week.

Starting point is 03:11:10 These Ohio-class submarines provide the survivable element of the nuclear triad or the most survival element of the nuclear triad. You can't strike a nuclear submarine before it gets a chance to strike. It's basically impossible.

Starting point is 03:11:23 Yeah, that's the reason that they exist. Yeah, guarantees that you will get to do your thing. Yeah, for mutually assured destruction reasons. It's not super normal to announce their presence in places, I don't think. Nope. But the Navy did this week. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:37 I mean, it can. It depends on like the situation. Yeah, depending on what's going on. This is a little weird, yes. Yeah, yeah. The Pentagon seems to be planning to rename the war in Iran operation Sledgehammer. This seems to be an attempt at an end run around the 1973 War Powers Revolution. They claimed already, right, we spoke about this last week.

Starting point is 03:11:59 They're claiming Epic Fury is over now, and that this is a new and distinct operation. In a congressional hearing, Hegsef denied. that they needed an authorized use of military force. Let's play the clip. It doesn't appear that hostilities have ended. And so the question to you is whether or not the administration has considered or had intended to seek an authorization of use of military force from the Congress. Senator, our view is that should the president make the decision to recommence,

Starting point is 03:12:38 that we would have all the authorities necessary to do so. Do you think that it would be helpful to the president if it was made clear that, in fact, the Congress did provide an AUMF? I think the president, our view is that he has all the authorities he needs under Article 2 to execute. Thank, Mr. Chairman. That's more or less HECF saying he didn't need Congress, which is great. Yeah. Hexas faced pointed questioning from the House and Senate appropriations to defend subcommittees. He repeatedly batted away questions about munitions to pleation and suggested that it wasn't appropriate to answer them in public on the record like this.

Starting point is 03:13:20 Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. He also did not directly confront the cost of the war, which is now approaching 30 billion instead saying, quote, what is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon? And the fact that this president has been willing to make a historic and courageous choice to confront that. It comes with cost, and we recognize that. Kind of an exercise in evasion on Higgs-S part there, apart from his pretty emphatic statement that he didn't think that they needed any permission from Congress to continue with this war.

Starting point is 03:13:51 So we will be back next week to keep you updated on what might be Operation Sledgehammer. Great. Yeah. Great stuff. Very exciting. So on May 12th, 26th, The former mayor of Arcadia, California,

Starting point is 03:14:08 Eileen Wang pled guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and is being sentenced in the near future for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. People have taken this news normally. The foreign government is China. I did a quick little bit of Googling before coming around here and found some fun headlines. one of them in The Lion, California mayor pleads guilty to serving communist China. And that article was written by John Ransom, who's a senior contributor at The Lion, and also has written for the Epic Times, which itself is like the agent of a foreign power, effectively.

Starting point is 03:14:51 The WCBM had a headline, this Democrat mayor just came clean about working for communist China. She didn't come clean. She didn't come clean. she pled guilty for that, you know. And then from the House Committee on China's website, Mulanar warns of CCP influence after California mayor charged in foreign influence plot. These charges highlight the very real threat of the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to influence our free and open society. While it denies freedom and liberty for the Chinese people, the CCP is actively working to subvert our institutions and divide us against one another.

Starting point is 03:15:27 In this case, an elected mayor acted at the direction of CCP handlers, coordinated with Chinese intelligence linked individuals and used a local news platform to spread CCP propaganda. And so let's talk about that. How much of this is true, right? Yeah. I mean, technically, yeah, like, that's kind of what happened, except for the part where they were, like, coordinating to drive Americans apart from each other and create unrest and whatnot. That's not what the purpose of this thing that Eileen got wrapped up in was. she and her former fiancé, a fellow named son who got sentenced before she did, Mike's son,

Starting point is 03:16:07 are accused of basically having run like content farms at the behest of Chinese government officials. Okay. Like they were putting out articles on like the alleged genocide in Zingang, denying like the Chinese government had done anything wrong there. There was any genocide at all in the region. And so it's kind of like propaganda stuff like that. They were serving as like a fire hose of propaganda, per the Justice Department. In June of 2021, a PRC official contacted Wang and other individuals via the WeChat and crypted messaging application with pre-written news articles, including a PRC official

Starting point is 03:16:43 written essay in the Los Angeles Times that stated China's stance on the Xinjiang issue. There is no genocide in Xinjiang. There is no such thing as forced labor in any production activity, including cotton production, spreading such rumors due to fame China, destroy Zeng shang's safety. safety and stability, weakened local economy, and suppress China's development. Minutes later, Wang posted the article on her own website and responded to the PRC official with a link to the article on her website. The others in the group did the same.

Starting point is 03:17:07 The PRC official responded so fast. Thank you, everyone. And this is bad. Genocide denials bad. The spreading slop content on behalf of a foreign government is like bad. It is important to note that this is not like spying or sabotage in any meaningful way. she's not acting to like try to damage the United States. She's acting as like an unregistered PR agent for the Chinese government.

Starting point is 03:17:35 Or at least that's what she had done up to this point in her life. And like everything that she was doing was legal if she had disclosed who she was working for, which I think is also an important thing to note because shit like this happens all the time in the media. Like we all see, there's tons of content that is the result one way or the other of some government's influence operation. And for the majority of the time when it happens, nobody gets tripped up, you know, either because they have friends in power or because they don't quite cross a line.

Starting point is 03:18:06 And Eileen and her friends were not very savvy about what they were doing. Yeah. But they were also not operating on a very large level. Like, this is not a big operation. One of the notes in this charging document is that Eileen sent this Chinese government official a screenshot showing that the article had been viewed 15. thousand one hundred and twenty eight times through her site which is like not we're not talking like big deal influence ops here we're not talking like sweeping powers over like public opinion now

Starting point is 03:18:37 perhaps that's what they hoped eileen would kind of rise to over time she didn't seem to be like a kind of rising star in local government in southern california she got endorsed by some prominent democratic party officials and she was still in touch with her her chinese government handlers at this time. This whole period in which she's like being charged for working as an agent of the Chinese government is like 2020 through at least 2022. So yeah, this is like, you know, a bad thing and it's good that this got found out and that she's not continuing to be the mayor of Arcadia. But also, this is not like the scary thing that the right wing press is making it out to. She was not here to like subvert the U.S. so that it could be invaded or destroyed. She was there to

Starting point is 03:19:22 try to stop people on the internet from being mean to the Chinese government. Like, that was the primary use that they had with her. It's just not that, like, actually scary a story or anything. It's just a kind of thing that happens. This lady happened to become mayor of a small town, basically, which is wild. It's crazy that that happened. But shit like this is going on all the time. Yeah, I think, yeah, people have lost their minds about this one in a way that, like. It's a perfect California city. Like, it's a Southern California town, and she's a Chinese government female spy. Like, of course. Of course.

Starting point is 03:20:00 There was a lot of stuff back when Eric Swalwell was still a relevant human being. There was some attacks on him for associating with a, quote-unquote, Chinese female spy, like, 10 years ago. That was, like, one of the lines of attack against him. Sure. Because, like, someone he had, like, relations with in, like, 2014, what was alleged or found to be, working as a spy for the Chinese government. It's interesting that they're doing this type of stuff at the exact same time that Trump just got,

Starting point is 03:20:30 is like arriving in China right now. It's really great timing. Curious timing there, but... I'm guessing she took the plea this has been a period of some time, right? Like her fiancé. Yeah, yeah, because first her former fiancé got busted and then she was like, I didn't do anything wrong.

Starting point is 03:20:48 And then it became clear that she very much had. Right? So this was like a thing that, Yeah, this has been going on for a little while. It just sort of, once she pled guilty, then you could do the article, like, California mayor pleads guilty to working for the Chinese government. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:21:03 Yeah. Just funny timing. Yeah. Speaking of timing, here are some ads. Great. Yay. Okay, we are back. For one of our last main stories,

Starting point is 03:21:28 let's talk about Virginia and the redistricting efforts. Last week, in a 4-3 ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court blocked the voter-approved redistricting map that passed in April with almost 52% of the vote. The court found the process used to advance the referendum violated the state constitution. According to Virginia's Constitution, the legislature has to vote twice to pass any proposed constitutional amendment before it gets put on the ballot for Virginia voters. But these two General Assembly votes must be separated by a state general election. The first General Assembly vote for this redistricting amendment passed in October 2025

Starting point is 03:22:18 before the November general election, and the second vote to approve the referendum happened next January, so a few months ago. The Republican challengers to the new voting map argued that because, early voting had already begun, the General Assembly's first vote in October did not actually occur before a general election. And that was the grounds the state Supreme Court used to block the voter-approved amendment. The four-judge majority ruled the intervening election requirement was violated because the general election, quote, began on September 19th, 2025. And, and

Starting point is 03:23:02 and just ended on election day, November 4th. Yeah, I feel like you're kind of outside the spirit of what they were going for with that one. No, this on the face sounds quite absurd. It's one of those things that's technically correct, but at the same time... Well, and there's some complicating factors because of Trump's own attempts to restrict early voting

Starting point is 03:23:22 or deem early voting, like, not constitutionally, like, appropriate, or, like, it defies the federal government's definition of the word election. And so now you have some groups in Virginia who are trying to pass this amendment, Democrat groups, who are using kind of similar rhetoric as Trump. We'll get to that in a sec. So Justice D. Arthur Helsie wrote to the majority opinion, saying, quote, this violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void. Early Virginia voters unknowingly forfeited their constitutionally protected opportunity to vote for or against

Starting point is 03:24:02 delegates who favor or disfavor amending the Constitution by not anticipating a legislative vote on a constitutional amendment four days before the last day of voting, unquote. So the court said that the reason why they have this

Starting point is 03:24:18 two-vote requirement across two different general assemblies is to give voters enough time to not just support or not support constitutional amendment on the ballot, but then also vote for state lawmakers who will either approve or not approve the constitutional amendment in the legislature itself, right? So that's what they're saying. It's like this process of having these two votes is to ensure that voters have a say

Starting point is 03:24:44 both in who they put into office as well as on the ballot. And they're saying that this process was violated because early voting had already commenced by the time that the legislature actually voted on this proposed amendment. Chief Justice Cleo Powell wrote in the dissent that the majority, quote, broadened the meaning of the word election, as used in the Virginia Constitution to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election. By extending elections in the Commonwealth of Virginia beyond a single day, the majority's formulation would directly conflict with the federal mandate that elections for federal officials be held on a single day. unquote. So under the Supreme Court of Virginia's new ruling, the district map drawn in 2021 must be used for the upcoming election this November, the midterms. The new map would have won Democrats four more House seats. But considering this ruling by the state Supreme Court, Dems are now eight seats down in the national redistricting battle, which the latest gutting of the voting.

Starting point is 03:25:57 Rights Act will only make worse. Yeah. Over this past weekend, Virginia Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, and Governor Abigail Skibandberger, held discussions on what to do about this ruling. The New York Times reported that Virginia Democrats expressed determination to win two or three of the Republican held seats,

Starting point is 03:26:17 even with the current map, but also discussed a few long-shot options to change the ruling or push forward the map anyway. One of the more extreme measures debated was the possibility of replacing the entire Virginia Supreme Court by lowering the mandatory retirement age from 75 to 54 and then having a new court rehear the case. Sounds great, let's do it.

Starting point is 03:26:44 In between now and November. So it seems the Democrats decided against this path, ultimately, in part because the State Department of Elections deadline for congressional maps is made. 12th, which is a day before we're recording. They kind of ran out of time on this. It's also unclear if they really would have had the bravery to pull such an extreme maneuver, right? Something that may be the correct thing to do, and maybe something they should just do anyway,

Starting point is 03:27:12 if they have the power to fully replace their Supreme Court. Why not? Because the Democrats are currently in a majority of control of the state legislature right now, why not do this anyway, to a certain extent? Also, Abigail Spanberger can only serve one term. So, you know, you're not going to lose much political capital by pulling a kind of insane move like this. But it's not going to happen at least right now. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:27:38 Nope. Virginia's state Senate majority leader Scott Soraville told the new republic, quote, as a practical matter, the move would not be capable of being implemented given the time frame. Now, despite that May 12th deadline, On Monday, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones and Democratic state lawmakers filed an emergency appeal asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put the state Supreme Court order on hold for the upcoming midterm election, arguing that the state court based their ruling on misreading the federal definition of election, and by adopting its own definition,

Starting point is 03:28:17 the state Supreme Court infringed on the state legislature's power to regulate federal elections. Quote, by forcing the Commonwealth to conduct its congressional elections using districts different from those adopted by the General Assembly pursuant to a constitutional amendment, the people just ratified, the Supreme Court of Virginia has deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts, unquote. This case will be initially decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles the emergency appeals from states covered by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. But the U.S. Supreme Court may argue that they don't have the authority to intervene because

Starting point is 03:28:59 the Virginia Supreme Court ruling cites state law, not federal law. The New Republic also reported that state, Senate, majority leader Scott Soraville confirmed that even if the Supreme Court gives them a good ruling, that ruling could be unlikely to impact this upcoming election cycle due to this May 12th deadline. I guess it's just worth saying that the nature of this midterm will be very important for the way you get to vote in America going forward. Yeah, I mean, they're pulling out all the stops. Like, they're throwing any kind of plausible deniability in the trash because this is the

Starting point is 03:29:40 get it or lose it moment for the right, you know? Like, that's very much how they're looking at this. This is to lock it in forever. We'll see. Yeah. A few years ago, Ohio pushed through unconstitutional maps, maps that were deemed unconstitutional by state courts. One federal court did authorize them to use these maps in like an interim period and they're still using them.

Starting point is 03:30:03 And in a piece by the nation, they mentioned this option, but said that they would need to have the backing of the state board of electors. And Virginia might not have that. There's lots of people on the Democratic side that are much more rule-followy than a lot of the Republicans, as we have seen here. Now, Virginia may be able to still pass this redistricting map in the future by spreading out the process over a bigger period of time to not create this confusion about the early voting period, but the map would not be able to go into effect before the midterms, but it still may be able to go into effect in the future. I do think it's also worth noting that the same day that Virginia filed this appeal with the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court also paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority black districts before the midterm elections by overturning a lower court order that blocked the use of a Republican-backed map from 2023. So the Supreme Court is currently weighing in on not exactly the same, but similar, similar things in other states. That was because it was basically pointing to its Louisiana ruling and saying, like, we've ruled on this. Yes.

Starting point is 03:31:12 This was following the Louisiana ruling, yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. You know, great for the old democratic process, voting rights act. Ooh. So there's an increasing movement in the United States, both at the state and the federal level to repeal gas taxes. So in the United States, there's federal gas taxes that everybody pays.

Starting point is 03:31:38 The current federal gas tax rate is about 18.3 cents per gallon for gasoline and gasahol, which is the actual official name of fuel mixed with unleaded gas. That's like unleaded and ethanol together is actually just called gasol. Okay. Never knew that. What a lovely word. Yeah, they couldn't think of anything better. And then 24.3 cents per gallon for diesel fuel, right?

Starting point is 03:32:00 And then some states have their own, like Oregon has its own, like gas taxes. California certainly does. At both levels, like the federal gas tax is there, in short, because it helps to pay for the roads, right? Like, that's why we need a federal gas tax is because it funds what's called the Highway Trust Fund or the HTF, which is a big part of like what keeps our interstate infrastructure functional. and then state-level gas taxes are often also, like, supporting, like, state and local roads, right? And so Trump has talked about temporarily repealing the gas tax for, like, a couple of months. There have been democratic proposals that are very similar. Graham Platner, who's about to be a congressman from Maine.

Starting point is 03:32:47 A Democratic nominee for... Yeah, who's currently the nominee, but is almost certainly going to win. Yeah, for the presumptive nominee, I think. has expressed support for ending the gas tax outright. And his basic plan was something like you have wealthy corporations pay the money that the gas tax is currently going to, and you put that burden onto, you know, corporations instead of people. And it's not uncommon, by the way, for the gas tax to be temporarily repealed during the early

Starting point is 03:33:15 months of the most recent, like, escalation of the Russian invasion into Ukraine and the Biden administration back in 2022. Biden temporarily paused the federal gas tax. tax, right? So this is a thing that happens. It's just always a bad idea because it's the reason why you see people on the left and right make suggestions like this repeal state or federal gas taxes is because it's really easy. It's an easy way to say like, I'm looking out for you. I'm trying to take care of regular people. Gas is too darn expensive already. We've got to do everything we can to make your life easier. The problem is the highway trust fund, which is absolutely critical for

Starting point is 03:33:50 our roads being functional, is already always running at a deficit in 20, It was a deficit of about $13 billion. The main reason for this is that, like, transportation infrastructure is aging every single year and falling behind. And at the same time, that gas tax is not like pegged to inflation or anything. So it has not been keeping pace with the actual needs of the trust fund. So anyway, we're already in a really bad situation with the HTF. Every time we pause these taxes, it gets much worse. And I'm worried right now that, as reasonable it may sound to say something like, well, we should just have the rich pay for that.

Starting point is 03:34:33 You're never going to have any kind of like move that does both of those things at once. They're going to start by repealing the gas tax. And then they'll never get around to replacing it with anything. And then the roads will just be bad forever. I think this is a bad idea. And I think you should be a little wary of politicians doing this because it's an easy. easy way to get a win. But that said, damn near everybody is. So how

Starting point is 03:34:59 wary can you actually be? It's just a really irresponsible, bad idea that has a lot of bipartisan support. Yeah, really ever since the no tax on tips thing, there's been this wave of, you know, people have called this like sloppulous policies or like things that are that are, that are, you know,

Starting point is 03:35:15 populist in framing, but have certain like economic problems or get dispersed in weird ways. You know, Mia's talked about some specifics around the no tax on tips policy. but there's been like a wave of these small targeted tax cuts on various little things to kind of

Starting point is 03:35:33 lift the financial burden that Americans are facing the better ones you know, ones like like Platinum strategy which has a part of his plan increasing taxes on billionaires and oil corporations

Starting point is 03:35:47 but these sorts of taxes are just like little band-aid solutions and that are almost like consolation prices for not be able to just raise the corporate tax rate or income tax brackets, right? And it's, it's like we're adopting these consolation taxes for this presumed impossibility, just actually raising taxes to the level of, you know, if you look at the United States in like the 1950s, super, super high, super high level of taxes that actually funded social services. And one, one thing that

Starting point is 03:36:18 can be frustrating about these, these sorts of more like sloppulous tax angles is it, you know, it undermines the vital role of taxes to actually fund social services. Now, should more of those taxes be funded by corporations and billionaires? Yeah. Absolutely. But I think that should be the focus, rather than these little itty-bitty kind of, you know, cutting away at the corners of like small, small targeted taxes that are, again, like used as like, you know, consolation prizes rather than actually addressing

Starting point is 03:36:49 the pretty significant tax reforms that need to happen in this country. And it's just dangerous in part because it acts as if what the gas tax is there to fund is optional is not like necessary. Like, well, we don't really need this. So we'll pause this whenever like things get bad because we don't need them. But we do. Like our society is reliant upon the maintenance of that fund. And we shouldn't act like it's, yeah, this all is very frustrating to me.

Starting point is 03:37:18 Yeah. You can see why the gas tax in particular is appealing right now. Right now. Yeah. People are struggling. Yeah. Like it is literally $7 a gallon in parts of California. Oh, it's fucking nuts.

Starting point is 03:37:30 Yeah. Like people who, like a lot of people who struggle to make it are really struggling to make it now. Yeah. The way our society is set up means it's very hard for people to exist without a car. So you're like, yes. The populist appeal is obvious. And as is always the case with this sort of thing, the fact that it has an appeal is based on ignorance. because when roads are poorly maintained,

Starting point is 03:37:51 it costs regular people huge amounts of money and the damage it does to their car, far more than the gas tax costs them. This has been established. This is not like I think we have to wonder about there have been studies into this. Like, you pay more money when the roads are bad because your car gets fucked up.

Starting point is 03:38:07 Yeah. And it's reasonable for people to say, well, our country has enough money. Can't we unfuck the roads and not charge me a lot of money? Unfortunately, we just spent 30 billion fucking invading Iran, so no, we can't. Yeah, you have to not do some of the other things that we're doing.

Starting point is 03:38:24 Yeah, that is not up for grabs in the current political atmosphere, right? And even your mainstream Democrats aren't going to ride for that. No, I mean, it requires pressure against mainstream Democrats and obviously the Republican establishment as well, right?

Starting point is 03:38:40 But part of Plattenor's plan is a 50% per barrel windfall tax on, like, big oil profits. which would be significant, but there will be a lot of pushback against this, including among the democratic establishment, and that might require getting rid of a whole bunch of these Democratic establishment figures who are currently occupying seats of power. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:39:01 Well, everyone, think about that. On that hopeful note, you figure out. You figure out how to do it. A note. Where can people send us news-related tips, James? They can do that by emailing. Zone Tips at proton.me. If you want to keep it a little bit more encrypted, you can do it from a proton email address.

Starting point is 03:39:24 So it doesn't bother you. Go ahead and send it. If you have a marketing email, you can not send it. Try not to be so rude to the marketing people. No, I think part of those anarchists left being extremist threats might be against the marketing corporations if James keeps threatening them at the end of this episode. I don't want to podcast anyone to prison.

Starting point is 03:39:47 I'll just block I'm not advocating violence I'm just going to block your email. I will make sure that we never hear from you again. It won't just be me

Starting point is 03:39:54 blocking it. It'll be all of us here at Cool Zone Media. We reported the news. You reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes

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Starting point is 03:40:30 in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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