Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 79

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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own decisions. It could happen here. It could happen here, a podcast that it is. It's happening to you here, right now. Bad things, good things, all sorts of things. Because today, we are talking about the ultimate in bad good things, Donald Trump's indictment and very brief arrest. Garrison, Davis, James Stout. How are we all doing today? How are we all feeling this week? We did it, Joe. Mission accomplished. Time to pack up. Yeah. Dark Brandon has come for Trump, finally. So I figured we would wait until a few days had gone by. There were a lot of when the initial indictment was announced. We didn't even actually know what all the charges were. There was a pretty long period of time that we didn't know what the

actual crime at the center of this was, but most of that is now relatively clear as are kind of the earliest stages of the fallout to the Trump indictment. So I feel like now is a reasonably good time to talk about it. More may have occurred since we recorded this. But broadly speaking, the thing that Trump got indicted by, as according to the 13-page court filing outlining the case against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was what's called a catch-and-kill scheme in which Trump and his Trumpettes would basically bribe people to not write bad stories about him. It's a hush money thing. My assumption is that basically everybody at that level of wealth and prominence does versions of the same thing. And these, in fact,

are not crimes on their own. You can bribe somebody not to say a bad, talk about a bad thing you did to the press. Where things get illegal is that Trump made a series of payments, primarily these $130,000 in payments to Stormy Daniels to buy her quiet. And then he had to falsify company records or his people falsified company records to disguise the payments as legal fees. Bragg is arguing that not only is this a crime, but it's a felony crime because he did this. He falsified these records to disguise these payments in order to further additional violations of the laws. And those additional violations of the laws, the actual core crime here is that under New York law, disguising these kind of payments in corporate records is a crime. It's typically a

misdemeanor, but it's a felony if the business records were intended to obscure a second crime. And in this case, the second crime appears to be the use of funds to advance his presidential campaign, which was in violation of campaign finance laws. So the core crime that makes the misdemeanor a felony is the fact that he was doing this in order to advance his presidential campaign. And thus, the payments that he was making were basically counted as part of the limited amount of money you can spend financing your campaign. And he violated that. That's the gist of it, as I understand what's actually being argued here. Yeah, that seems to be about the sides of it. And just for people who aren't familiar, Bragg is Alvin Bragg.

Yeah, Manhattan DA. What's really concerning about this is that if they can arrest Trump, that means they can arrest any one of us. That's right. All the money that I've paid for people to hush up stories about me, including Stormy Daniels. There's a lot of talk about is this a weak case or a strong case? None of us are lawyers. I go kind of both ways about this. One of them is that Alvin Bragg is a guy who whatever he believes about this case is also a prosecutor that is a political position. Prosecuting someone and failing to get your man is bad for your career. And if that man is the president who you indict for the first time in living memory, that would be really bad for your career. So my assumption is that Bragg, at

least, believes he's got a really strong case. Otherwise, because this is a tremendous risk for him, right? Now, obviously, can Trump wriggle his way out of it? Well, Trump is extremely good at wriggling his way out of things. And he has all of the money in the world for lawyers. So I think it would be foolish to say it's a slam dunk. Either way, the people who are saying that like this is a weird thing to prosecute him for, I guess. But, you know, it does. I can see the logic that this guy that Bragg is kind of going with. And it's, do I think this should be a felony? I guess I don't care as long as it does some damage to the man and causes him some like consternation, which is like the question, right? Is this actually going to harm him? But

yeah, I think that is the more debatable question, right? Like, it's just going to harm them or help him. There's a lot of talk about, is this a political prosecution? And my general response to that is, well, like, nearly all prosecutions are political, right? Like, even something that wouldn't seem like like a decision to go after a rapist. Well, most rapists are not actually ever like charged or brought through the justice system. So if you're a prosecutor choosing to do that in a specific case, there's a degree of politics factoring into your decision, even if it's just as simple as like, if I take on this case and I lose it, it could harm my ability to like move forward in the ways that I want to in my career. So I, the fact that now this is political

and perhaps a grander sense, I have no doubt that the fact that this is Donald fucking Trump, and everything that's happened since 2020 has happened, that he has, he has been a party. And I have no doubt that that all factors into this. But I just don't see that as being like the fact that finally a prosecutor is, is making sort of a political prosecution of a man at the top of the hierarchy is not something that concerns me terribly. Yeah, I didn't think like, I'm more concerned that this seems to have propelled him to the front of the Republican race and that he's getting a bunch of donations off it than I am about any, any potential consequences like all the actual indictment. It is certainly an interesting political move for DeSantis to

back Trump on this and not, not like comply with extradition, not that it would ever get to that point, but that is still a move that DeSantis made on purpose, which is an interesting political move considering he's a future candidacy. And it is, let's talk about that a second, because obviously 34 felony counts sounds like a lot. That is, in fact, quite a few felonies. But the, at least the coverage I'm reading is like, it's basically unheard of for someone to actually do jail time for this as a first defense, which I don't know, whatever, like. Does that matter? It's absolutely breathtaking that he doesn't have a single crime on him, given that he's essentially a career criminal. Well, there, there are continuing,

like there's like the potential for prosecution still from like that call he had with the Secretary of State of Georgia, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Yeah, I think there are a few sort of more serious. There's a number of things that he, yeah, this may not be the last Trump criminal indictment that we see. Oh God, we can, we can only hope. We can only hope. Because, because it only gets more funny from here. And that's the only reason to hope. Yeah. Well, unless it doesn't. I'm seeing a lot of like panic from some people, certain, certain folks in the progressive and kind of center left media sphere who were like, this is just handed Trump the nomination. This

might have just handed Trump the election. From what I'm looking at and from the polling I'm looking at, I mean, I think there's a good chance this helps. I mean, I think the polling certainly supports the argument that this will help him cinch the nomination. I don't really think that was super in doubt before, although he has definitely gained on DeSantis since all of this, this whole process started. There is evidence. I'm looking at a 538 article right now. Trump's indictment might be making him more popular among Republicans. But kind of the point that's actually made is that the group that's getting more likely to back him is his base. Yeah. Like maybe it's people who were softer on him because he didn't back, you know, the J6 people. Maybe some

of them are just folks who kind of drifted away because, you know, it's the years in between a presidential election and that's a natural thing. So it may have galvanized his base. He's certainly he's raised four or $5 million. He's claiming seven now. He's claiming seven. I mean, that seems real possible. He is saying that a significant chunk of it, I think like 20 percent might be more than that now. We're like first time donations. That is what his people are claiming that is not. I have no way of knowing if those numbers are legitimate. What we can say is that the polling that we're seeing nationally does not back the idea that this is causing a sea change in the likelihood of Americans to support Donald Trump. About 69 percent of Americans,

according to a very nice, according to an economist, you go poll, say that in general, failing to report having spent campaign money on payments in order to keep someone silent about an issue to affect and affect the outcome of an election is a crime. About 90 percent of Biden voters back this while about 54 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2020 said the same, which is interesting. Now that doesn't mean they also think that this is what Trump did, right? They're just saying they think that that is a crime. About 57 percent of Republicans, according to that same or according to a Yahoo News, you got poll, about 57 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners said they would support Trump in a head-to-head against Ron DeSantis, who received

31 percent. That's an increase in support for the president by about 10 percent. But DeSantis has only gone down by eight percent. So you can see basically what's happening is that this is causing people to flock from DeSantis to him, which is not evidence that we're seeing a broader national sweep. Quinnipiac University NPR PBS News Hour Marist poll kind of broadly supported the idea that investigations into Trump are popular among Americans, more popular than not at least. About 56 percent of Americans say the investigations into Trump are fair. About 41 percent say they're a witch hunt. Independence are pretty split on the issue, but obviously Democrats wildly support of Republicans very much against. Most college educated adults come down on this being fair,

as do most Gen Z and millennial people. Adults without a college education, white evangelicals, and those in small towns are most likely to call it a witch hunt. An NPR PBS News Hour Marist poll shows a plurality of Americans. 46 percent believe Trump has done something illegal related to those investigations. Another 29 percent say Trump has done something unethical, but not illegal, while only 23 percent say he's done nothing wrong. Overall, 57 percent of Americans say that criminal charges filed against Trump should disqualify him from a presidential bid. 38 percent say it should not. That would be an area where I actually agree with the Republicans. I don't think that having charges against you should disqualify you from running for president.

Look, man, I think if you are a fucking murderer, you should be able to run for president. People have the right to run for and vote for whoever the fuck they want, and I think that that is a strong core belief of mine. Not going to vote for Trump, but I think the fact that he's getting charged with a bunch of felonies should not, if he was in jail, he should be able to run as people have in the past, in my opinion. Eugene Debs, famous Trump president. I'm kind of more interested actually in, I think the Republican response is fairly predictable. All of this, we could have called that the moment they said they were inditing him. The Democrats, I don't think the Democrats are ever going to do anything useful that will really change material conditions or

make things much better for working people in this country, but the fact that it gives them the option to pivot back to like orange man bad as their only campaign, as their only promise, as their only sort of principle, which they put forward as a reason to vote for them is still bad. I think it prevents even the modicum of accountability that we have for all the shit that the Democrats have done and all the shit that they haven't done in the past, like three, two, two and a half years since the election. I think that's so much broader of a problem than just dealing with this set of charges. I am sympathetic to the idea, if you just kind of look at history, that you can't let people do the kind of shit Trump did and not try to fucking go after

them and not hammer the sons of bitches, right? And this is not, you know, they went after the beer hall putsch Hitler was jailed for like a year. So it doesn't mean that like slaps on the wrist don't necessarily have much of a protective effect. But I don't know, like I am so torn on this. I mean, obviously, it's really funny. I think if this is kind of the start of a series of prosecutions that's going to make this guy's life hell and that might actually even force some consequences for him, then I think that's broadly speaking a good thing as long as it doesn't like disqualify him from the presidency, which I think would be a bad precedent. But I don't know, I'm broadly on on team. Yeah, man, fuck him up. Like, we know this guy would have,

and in fact, his has his promised to if he gets into power again, use the state, use the justice department, remake it in his own image and destroy his enemies. So I'm not against the idea that like, well, the dims, I tend to agree with you on most things, James, like, I don't believe the dim Democratic Party deserves to have an easy election right now. Because they've failed. I mean, this is the week where we're getting the announcement from Biden that he's essentially taking kind of the soft answer to the GOP attack on trans people participating in sporting events. We were also about a week out from his most recent announcement on or maybe actually it's been more like a couple of weeks on the border shit. We just had that horrible fire

over in Juarez like a week or so ago, like the Biden administration has let a lot of people down in a number of ways. There's, you know, some of the drilling shit that's about to start up again. And Alaska is really unsettling to me. So I, I agree with you, I don't like the idea that they can make this be an orange man bad election again. And I'm hopeful that some of what we've seen, you know, particularly like the most recent election in Chicago, you know, maybe, maybe there's kind of at least room at the state level for a lot more progressive to edge out kind of centrist dims and force some consequences that way. But I, I also am worried about, you know, this, this authoritarian who threatened to jail and murder a bunch of people

I care about. And like, I want, I want him to spend the rest of his life tangled up in that shit. I don't know that that's what this is going to be, you know, maybe they'll, they'll fail miserably here. But I don't know, I do think the kind of panic that you're getting from some people like this handed them the election, I'm not seeing evidence that that's the case. I think that maybe if this had happened in like 2016 or even 2020, sure, you might get something like that. But at the point where at now, I just don't think new people are coming to Trump in numbers. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it, and it very much makes sense for the liberal state apparatus to try to defend itself from what it sees as like an insurgent reactionary factor, right?

Like that's, that is, that is how they view Trump and Trump's political power. So it makes sense they will use their own powers to try to resist that from gaining control again. Whether or not you believe the state apparatus should exist at all or how, how valid you view its existence, it makes sense what they're doing. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I am, I mean, honestly, I am surprised they committed to it because there is, in part because this is a tremendous risk for Bragg and the people around him, right? If this, if this fails, which it very well might, you know, obviously that would have, could have consequences for everybody. But, you know, it could have really serious career consequences for this guy. And I am surprised that you've, you've got someone

willing to kind of throw the dice here. And I'm hopeful that maybe that inspires, especially since this case, by the way, since I'm sure people are curious, no one I've looked at who knows more about the law than me expects this to hit trial quickly. Again, Trump has all of the money in the world. And this is like probably going to be a pretty winding process. Outside of just the normal problems of like a rich man is being accused of a series of crimes and has many lawyers. The Secret Service has a lot to say and when and how the actual trial part of this commences and that has a chance of extending it. So my hope is that as this kind of winds on maybe the fact that Bragg was willing to kind of take a shot in the dark here, so to speak, inspires some of

these other prosecutors who have been, you know, poking at Trump to take a swing. And maybe with enough swings, you know, it'll be like that that guy we had on Troy Herdeby's and his bear armor suit, you know, you get a bunch of bikers to surround him with two by fours and just swing until they're all broken and he's on the ground. It'll be like, it'll be like that scene from a Ventures End game and all of the George Soros DA's are going to come in through the portal. Garrison, absolutely not led by George Soros. I have never been angrier at you right now than bringing up that fucking Avengers scene. Yeah, so did y'all watch Trump's video response? Oh, the one that played on all of the new stations except for MSNBC?

Yeah, yeah. We should talk about that. I actually did not watch it. I attempted to avoid that as well actually, but have you subjected yourself to that for us, Robert? I sure did. And I have a summary of the most salient parts. First off, I think that MSNBC made the right call. They kind of summarized what was going on, but like didn't just let him speak, you know, uninterrupted for like 15 minutes, something like 20 minutes. Talking of interrupted, Robert, would you like to be interrupted by some plugs for goods and services? Absolutely. Donald Trump is a master spokesman and these are master products. Get your gold. We're back. It's been such a glorious, glorious time. Everybody's really

feeling powerful today, mighty. Anyway, Trump. So I don't know, I watched this fucking thing. I guess my overall sentiment would be kind of boring, right? This is not the level of energy or the degree of kind of like manic, violent undercurrents that like his American carnage speech had, or even that like some of his more recent speeches in front of crowds have had. I don't see, there's so many people I've watched have takes on this who are like, and that one of the joys of Twitter is you'll see some guy who's, I don't know, an analyst at some newspaper be like, wow, Trump was really low energy. He seems frightened. You know, I'm telling you, this is a scared man. He's worried about these charges. And then like someone else with almost

the same CV at a different place will be like, wow, Trump seems angry, you know, he's about to, he's about to lash back. Everybody better be ready for his counter strike. And honestly, I just thought it was like kind of perfunctory. It didn't, he certainly didn't seem low energy, but he didn't seem like he had, he didn't seem like he had much to say other than kind of of meander over some of his, some talking points that are at this point, mostly pretty lukewarm. He kind of runs through at the start of this, a laundry list of right wing talking points that like the Democrats spied on his campaign in 2016, that he was subjected to fraudulent investigations from the Russia and Ukraine stuff, to the impeachments, to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

And then he broadens it by talking about how the FBI and the DOJ relentlessly pursue Republicans. And I was kind of expecting him to lean more into the, I am your vengeance, shit that he's been doing lately. He doesn't really as much as I had expected him to in this. Like you can, he kind of like dips his toes into it. But I think he's so focused on what's happening to him that he doesn't, he doesn't like push that as much as I was kind of expecting. So this is what comes after him, like ranting about the DOJ and the FBI relentlessly pursuing Republicans. He then kind of like goes into the election fraud claim stuff again. He gives a bunch of lies there about the election and about there being like ballot stuffed and all that kind of

shit. Then he like pivots straight from that to talking about how Twitter purportedly worked with the Biden family to hide information about Hunter Biden. This is like debunked Twitter file shit. Yeah, update on the Twitter files. Matt Tobebe has just left Twitter because it was lame. Substack. We do know obviously like they did stuff like say, Hey, please remove this video that shows Hunter Biden's penis. But also like that's not number one is not supposed to be stuff that's on Twitter. That's kind of like crossing the revenge porn line. And you know, both sides made requests that things be removed. Trump claims, and I'm not sure where he says that there's like, like somebody calculated this, but I haven't been able to find who made this

calculation that if Twitter hadn't intervened against him, he would have won the national election by 17 points. And then he's like, and that's I didn't even need that many, you know, you could have dropped that by 16.8 and I still would have won, which is not true really. Again, it's all just lies. It goes on. He compares the United States to a third world country because of the 2020 election. He calls Alvin Bragg a Soros-backed prosecutor, which he does a lot. It's not true. But Bragg, you know, people are using Soros-backed as like, at least a lot of the Nazis are really leaping on that one. Yeah, they've gone back to Soros, like they did the three parentheses for a while. DeSantis mentioned Soros at least twice in his thing. Twice, yeah.

Yeah, it's a big one for them. I mean, I think it is a good move on their part to frame this prosecution as election interference. Like that is a smart move for them to funnel all of this via that narrative. Yeah, it helps keep the election fraud lies going. It also helps because there's been a number of like, you know, Chesa Boudin who got booted in San Francisco recently is one example. But we've seen a number of like progressive prosecutors get elected by kind of dim and, you know, center left coalitions. And that's allows them to kind of connect this to one of the more successful talking points, which is the purported like horrible violence in the streets of cities like San Francisco and whatnot, the like surgeon crime and liberal, you know,

cities with liberal prosecutors. Again, it's all bullshit, but it's not a bad tactic for tying into like, well, let's make a link between this thing, Trump is claiming that's hurting him and this thing that people see every night on like Fox News that has been a pretty durable talking point for the right for several years now. Trump makes that there's a weird line in here where he says that like even the rhinos and the Democrats agree that the case against him is bad. I'm not sure. I mean, you know, I suspect he's just kind of like looking at Twitter chaff there. He then kind of derails a bit by talking about Afghanistan and all of the military equipment and lives lost in the same breath. And then from that, he kind of one of the things that comes up

over and over in this is him talking about how embarrassing this time is for our country, how all of our enemies are laughing at us, etc. Like that is a I mean, he's been making that point for a long time, but it definitely it's one of those things I think is a little bit of a window into the man's thought process because he clearly thinks and perhaps I mean, it must have a degree of of resonance with his base. But the idea that like America has been embarrassed because he's facing charges and because of, you know, Biden's failures as he sees it over in Afghanistan and elsewhere, like embarrassment is a big thing he tries to get across in this that like, you know, lady, lady liberties been caught with their fucking skirt up or something like that. It's a,

I don't know, it's interesting to me that that's such a focus for him. There's a couple of fun lines in the part about the military. He talks about how it's woke at the top, but under him, it was able to defeat ISIS in four weeks, which man, it took years, like we know it took years. I was there for some of it. Large part of that was not Americans at all, but like, no, no, and a large part of it was not Americans at all. There's a weird moment where he talks about the investigation over his call with Salinsky. And then that call where he tried to force Georgia secretary of state to discard votes that he's being investigated for, where he's like, this is one of like the most beautiful

Trump moments of the whole speech. Cause he's like, you know, that perfect call I had with Salinsky, I told you all it was a perfect call where my call with Georgia secretary of state was even more perfect. It was, it was the best call anybody's ever had. Nobody had a problem with it. Lots of guys were listening in and they all thought it was great. It's just, he can be such a funny man. It's not even insane. It's just like, I don't know, nobody, nobody else talks like that. Nobody else describes a phone call as perfect, right? Like a normal person. And this is maybe there's a degree of Trump's success you could see in this, but like no normal person being accused of like having attempted to interfere with an election during a phone call would describe

the call as perfect, you know, a normal politician would refute the claims against them would say, you know, I never did this, I never did that, you know, this is taken out of context or whatever. Trump's just like it was perfect. But you don't remember the last perfect call I told you about that people thought might have been a crime even more perfect. This is the most perfect phone call anyone's ever had. Yeah, then we get a long derailment about the Biden like, you know, the classified document shit that got him raided. He talks about how Biden's possession of classified documents was like the worst that anyone's ever done and was criminal because he was just the vice president, but the president's allowed to do it. But everybody does it. But the way Biden

did is the worst that anybody did it. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, it's not like, it's not an interesting Trump speech. I don't think he's like panicked or anything. I just kind of, I don't know, maybe he's just sort of like checking off a thing on the to do box, but it's not one of the, it's not one for the speech books, right, or for the history books, I don't know the speech books, that's not a, that's not a thing. That's not a thing at all. There is a really fun moment where he's like kind of late in the speech in between him complaining about Letitia James. He like points to his sons and he's like, I got two great sons, sons both doing really great. And then he's like, and bear, and then as an afterthought, he's like, Baron's going to do a great job too someday.

He's tall. Talking of tall, did you see that they'd also, they faked a mugshot of him and made him six foot five? Who faked the mugshot? The Trump campaign faked a mugshot of him to sell more. And then just added like several inches to his, a man with no insecurities. Ben Shapiro moment. Trump a legalist arc. I'm not saying there's nothing to be concerned about in the right wing reaction here. It is worth kind of looking at the response that has occurred has largely been fucking nonsense circus shit, right? At most of the big rallies, particularly in New York, that have happened as a result of this, there have been more press on the ground than anyone

on either side of things. It's not, it's just so far not pulling people out. Do I think there's a chance of isolated terrorist attacks by people who I see themselves as defending Trump or democracy or whatever? Certainly not a 0% chance, but in terms of things that I think are likely to have a mass destabilizing effect, I'm not seeing it yet. And I think a lot of that's due just to the fact that the Trump supporters who are kind of have the highest potential of being convinced to do that shit are all scared as hell, both of the feds and of each other. The sheer number of them that have like turned on each other during the J6 investigations like has, it means that whenever there's talk about doing another big series of rallies,

it devolves in a lot of these online places into like, well, you know, this is probably being set up by the feds. This is probably a honeypot to trap us, which is, I don't know, it's not a situation I would say you should rely on lasting forever, but that does kind of seem to be where we are right now. One other aspect of the right wing response that I think is worth mentioning is some of their like propagandists and political people have made the promise that since that now there's been a precedent set for indicting former presidents, now they finally are able to go after democratic politicians whenever they want. And I just am worried that they're going to threaten us with a good time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's also like,

it's not just threatening us with a good time because we have seen in Tennessee right now, they're forcing two democratic legislators out for their support of gun control and like, you know, specifically two black democratic. Yeah, two black democratic legislators. I'm not, you know, in line with most of the democratic party on gun control, but what is happening here is anti-democratic bullshit. Like that is it is authoritarian. It is completely fucking unacceptable. And people ought to be out in this like a lot more ought to be done. And I think probably a lot more like I don't this that's one of the thorny questions that actually does concern me. Like, what do you do in a situation like this? What do the what kind of leverage do the the feds even potentially have?

It certainly doesn't look like they're in the mood to do anything now, because I think that's the kind of that's the kind of thing we're going to see a lot more of in red states in order to know what little resistance it lists. And that's really concerning. They're not going to like go after someone like Obama, which frankly, somebody somebody should for the amount of bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there should be charges against the man. There should be charges against Bush, you know, the dubs. There should be some charges against Clinton. Fuck it. Go after them all. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dig up George H. W. Bush, put him on trial as a corpse like that one pope like I'm on board. But no, they're going to they're going to end up going after just like

small like minority politicians who are like fighting for like reasonable things, you know. And who are doing things to actually jam up the works of kind of the March of far right. Yeah. Authoritarian laws in red states. Exactly. And you know, I am sure that as that picks up pace, they will point out what's being done to Trump as a justification. But like people should be aware that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it because it looks like it's going to work for them in Tennessee. And they did it in Tennessee for reasons that had nothing to do with fucking Trump. Yeah. Right. Yeah. If you want to talk about like what fascism is a big part of it is that weaponizing of the state apparatus, right?

Yes. Against opposition, against your whatever your scapegoat group. And like it does concern me for people living in in red states. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not saying there's nothing to be worried about from the right. I'm just saying yeah. At the moment when I'm looking at like the way I kind of conceive of a threat matrix, I don't see us in a more dangerous position as a result of Trump getting charged. And I think an argument could be made that it's a positive move. I really hope we get another nail gun guy. Oh man. Yeah. That fucking dude who tried to who tried to solo the FBI with a nail gun. Maybe that guy'll come in with like a jigsaw or a yeah. No, no, no. I think I think ladders. I think it's it's it's time for like a ladder mob.

That that's that's what I'm excited to see. Ladders and like simple pulleys. It's getting pinned to a building with someone 20 feet away with a ladder. Make a make a trebuchet, judge. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Yeah. Let's let's let's have a continuing series of competitions to see who can build like the most effective medieval siege equipment. I want to see some fucking scorpions up on the hill, you know. Yeah. I'm going to do is it Greek fire, Turkish fire when you pull. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that really that's a boy. That's like the hummus debate, James. You know, let's just call it Cyprus fire and we can be fine. I don't know where you guys get any other thoughts on the Trump arraignment, indictment,

arrest, etc. No, it is very funny. I did enjoy seeing that guy fall off his tall bike. That was a highlight of the week for me. Yeah. There was a good video from the New York protest of a guy falling off a tall bike. Yeah. Shout out to the skateboard. I will. I will. Let's see. I will send send of a few things to the chat. The the signal chat that I feel like our people are worth seeing. This is what I spent. This is what I spent most of my day doing is sending people these memes. I think it's important that is that is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the biggy crown saying tell Donald I want him to know it was me, garrison. Yes, that is. Oh, no, you're joking. Oh, yeah. If I if I actually see Ruth Bader Ginsburg again, I'm for fuck's sake.

Now that was an Urakai with a pussy hat. Oh, God. Looks like brunch is back on the menu, boys. That one I do appreciate. Yeah. Okay. There was there was a good one that was like it was like the jailer dropping off Trump in Epstein's cell. All of all of all of the lights go off. And then from the corner, a man in dark cloak says, Brandon sends his regards. What a what a wonderful time for memes. Well, everybody, that's our that's our episode on the Trump arrest. We figured we should we should talk about that to answer the question that so many people ask me, are we closer to having a civil war? I don't know, man, it doesn't it doesn't

feel like this this has moved the needle on that at all. The national divorce is happening any day now. Any day now, I swear. Like I think the thing that's worrying right now is, you know, not just kind of the low level series of exchanges of of terror attacks and shootings and murders and stuff and just street violence that I I do think is going to kind of continue to be a problem up through 2024. But also just like what we've been talking about in terms of red states pushing for these increasingly really violent laws aimed at doing direct physical harm to small groups of people that they consider to be their enemies for whatever reason of identity. That is like the increasing criminalization of groups of people in red states,

the the flight of folks from those states, the the like the the fact that you are kind of seeing the country settle into two blocks that have wildly different legal systems that are often opposed to each other. That's a conflict that is is absolutely happening. There's no denying that it's occurring. This is not a debatable thing. And I don't see the feds having any idea of how to fix this at the moment. We'll see where the elections go in 2024. The fact that Wisconsin that their their Supreme Court election went well means a lot. It means that that's one state where the the process that we're seeing happening in places like Florida and Tennessee, that is a significant amount of people protected from that. And it also means a lot for the 2024

election. But it's we we are in a really rough place still. I'm not like thinking we're in at the edge of 1776.2 or whatever the fuck the right 1865 or whatever. Robert Evans is going to personally be the next John Brown. Yeah, I hopefully not. But I am I am I think I'd be really good at being a terrible farmer. How's your beard? Yeah. That picture of John Brown like leading the troops will remain one of my favorite pieces. Oh, yeah. No, he's got he's got a hell of a beard in that one. Yeah, I don't know. I think the threat, you know, continues. But broadly speaking, what's happened to Trump is either good or neutral, but certainly funny. And that's, I think, a good point to end on for the day. Some people can't stand the rain,

but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V E S S I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie come alive in the rain. If you love NASCAR, organized crime and civil rights, boy, do I got a story for you. Back in 2015, a rookie driver named Derek White made history as the first ever Indigenous driver in the NASCAR Cup series. But just a few months later, he was arrested in Canada's largest ever

police operation. Cops had spent more than a year following his every move because they believed Derek White was a major figure in an international criminal organization. He was the front man, if you will, for the organized crime slash Hell's Angels. Well, see, that's one thing that they didn't really do to her homework. Now, Derek's fighting his charges in court. His defense relies on his rights as a native person. And the craziest thing, he might actually have a case. It's not only my fight, it's the whole nation's fight. From campsite media and Dan Patrick Productions, this is Running Smoke. Binge all episodes now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dates don't usually end with a satisfaction survey. And yet we rate everything in our lives,

from Uber drivers to local coffee shops. So why don't we do the same thing when dating? We're here to conduct the Ultimate Romance Review, featuring daters hungry for love who have agreed to call up old flames to gather honest feedback. Welcome to exit interview. He upgraded himself to business class while I was in economy. Wait, wow. What? There's feedback that will make you cringe. She could be a little bit hardheaded, like not reading, the writing on the walls. And feedback that will make you swoon. But she said that she had feelings for you. I had no idea. Really? And maybe you'll learn a thing or two yourself about how you can be a better dater, lover or partner. Obviously, like Nia is going to learn something. I didn't expect this. Welcome

to exit interview. Listen to exit interview on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, everything's recording. My cat is grooming herself. So now's the time. Now's the time. Okay, great. We should just use that as our intro. Okay, good. I mean, I'm fine with that, whatever. Okay, let's do it. That's our intro. That's our intro. Sherene's cat is grooming herself, and that means that this is, it could happen here. And I am James Stout, and I'm joined by Sherene Eunice. Yes. And not her cat. She's just rowdy, and I have to really sometimes plan recording times around her schedule. And it's just the way my life is now. And that's the attention she deserves. None of this is as

important as your cat. But it's a bit of a serious one, sadly. So I want to talk more again about the border, something we've spoken about a little bit, and something I kind of want to keep coming back to, because things haven't really got any better. In fact, they've potentially got worse. So where I want to start is last month, and we're recording this on what the 4th of April. So a week ago, I think, a fire in the 28th, the 28th, was it? Okay, yeah, what's that? Three, yeah, a week ago, a week ago today, a fire in a detention center in Suidad, Juarez killed 41 migrants being detained there. Well, then two dozen other people were seriously injured, and every single one of the about 100 people detained in the migrant detention center

was hurt in the fire. The reason that every single person was hurt, became clear in a video obtained by Texas Public Radio, and later confirmed by the government in Mexico, it shows two people dressed as guards rushing to the camera frame. You can see people in the cells just really pulling and kicking and beating on the bars. The guards sort of run up to the doors, but they don't really appear to make any effort to open them, or to let the people out of the cells. Instead, they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill the corners of the cells. Gradually, the smoke fills up the whole screen until you can't see anything else, and the men in the cells are left to die. It's, it's horrifying. Yeah, it's one of the worst deaths that's available to a human

being, and the fact that people who are already incredibly desperate and have taken huge risks to get there and died, like literally yards from the United States border is just, it's almost kind of unfathomably cruel. But what is in a way crueler is this statement made by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said, the tragedy illustrated the dangerous grifts in traveling north, and he cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling incidents in San Antonio in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. These cases, he said, are a reminder of the risks of irregular migration. But what we're talking about here isn't a consequence of irregular migration really, right? Because these people weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or

cartels. They were in the hands of the Mexican government when they died. And for him to blame this on irregular migration, I think is, is very indicative of the way the Biden administration has approached migration policy, which is to come to try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility for the cruel things that it's doing for the consequences of its policies and its actions, which I want to get into more. I don't want to linger on this fire too much because, hey, it's unfathomably awful. And like, I don't think it, I don't think we need to spend hours and hours like going over something for people to know that like, there is no situation in which the government should burn fucking 40 people alive. That like, it's inexcusable. We know that

like it was the shelter was set up in 2019. And I want to get into why this shelter that which seems to have been a pretty terrible conditions to begin with was set up in 2019. Why people who claim to the United States to try and have a better life, a safer life ended up in a shelter in Mexico and how we've created a system where people keep dying at our southern border, right? Some of this will be stuff we've covered before. If people have listened to the other stuff I've done on the border, if people have listened to the butterfly sanctuary episodes, they'll be familiar with some of Biden's border policies, but I wanted to address these. Did you see that they lowered the death toll from 40 to 38, I guess, after hospital visits? Like,

that's the one part that I've read that is nice so far, is that two people have survived. Yeah, that is good. I've seen 38, 39 and 41. I wasn't sure what the exact, so 38 is the newest one. Right now I'm reading 38 after it was on, it was 40 and it was lowered to 38. Okay. Wow. Two people were reanimated. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, it's just like, they're probably in terrible condition. Like they're probably going, they're having like a life changing. If not, like all, like it's just terrible. No. Yeah. And like access to care for those people. I mean, those people may have access to care, right? Because what happened was high profiling within the news, but like generally access to care for people, like I have seen,

I've seen a person die because they don't have access to their medicines that are very cheap and very easily available. Like again, like we are talking feet, like I could throw a tennis ball into the United States from where it was standing. And that's because the system treats people like numbers, not people. Yeah. The migration center is like a, like a big jail. You know what I mean? It doesn't even, I don't know. Yeah. It's like an old timey fucking Western jail with people crammed into cells with, with, you know, like legit bars on the walls. So shuttle conditions in Mexican detention are often very poor. And those conditions have been exacerbated by something called Title 42. People have probably heard about Title 42 a lot. There's a lot to say about Title

42, but very briefly, it's a Trump era public health policy that invokes a public health rule to push asylum seekers out of the US and into Mexico, regardless of whether or not they might legally qualify for asylum. This shelter was stood up as a consequence of something called the migrant protection protocol. People call it the migrant persecution protocol because that's more accurate. But I was going to say like, wow, doing a great job with that. Yeah. Like people enjoy being wrong about Georgia or well, but this shit is perfectly Orwellian. To call a policy which kills little fucking children, the migrant protection policy is dark. It's often called Remain in Mexico as well, which is what it does. It requires people to remain in Mexico while their

asylum claim is processed, despite the fact that this might not be a safe country for them, and that this might violate various international laws and conventions on asylum, but the US doesn't subscribe to all of those as we're going to find out. Now, Title 42 has been through some legal ping pong recently with Biden sort of trying to get rid of it, also defending it in court, a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it. So it's explained a little bit of where we're at with Title 42 right now. It's actually set to expire on May the 11th. The Biden administration is rolling out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after May the 11th because they're concerned about like a large influx of migrants, which I just want to point out was always going

to fucking happen when you like pushed people just the other side of your fictional line in the sand. And then at some point, you're going to have to stop because at some point, Mexico is already the third most popular country in the world for asylum and you can't force this all on them. So since it was first implemented in 2020, the government has used Title 42 to expel migrants from the US-Mexico border nearly 2.7 million times. That doesn't mean you will see these statistics quoted constantly credulously by people who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about and it really makes me angry. That doesn't mean 2.7 million people, right? And because Title 42 makes people cross more than once. It creates this kind of loop where DHS,

right? Normally CBP or Border Patrol, sorry, picks people up and dumps them back in Mexico without processing them. And those people are now in a place they don't know. They don't have any family. They don't have any hope. They don't have any money. And all they do is kick their heels until they can find a way to cross again or someone to cross them again. And sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer them unlimited crossings. So they'll pay someone to smuggle them across, right? And that person will say, well, you get unlimited crossings. I didn't even realize. I didn't know it was so standard. They're like, okay, this is going to happen. You're going to get a limited crossing. You know what I mean? They're expecting it to be

this perpetual loop. Yeah. A few years ago, maybe they wouldn't have done. But another way that this is sometimes termed as catch and release, which they're not fucking fish. It shouldn't do that to fish either. It's not really nice to fish. But it's dehumanizing. Yeah, it's extremely fucking dehumanizing, right? And what it does, and what I've seen, it's not like a unique insight of mine, is that it forces people to cross in more and more dangerous areas. You combine that with a wall. And the fact that it's very well documented that the Trump administration wanted to maximize the amount of miles of wall that built. If you remember in one of the presidential debates, he made a claim about a certain number of miles of new wall he built. Yeah, he was just speaking

out of his arse. I foyred it like the next day. And they were like, they provide a number of different numbers, or many of which relied heavily on repairing existing border fence. But they just went like hammer and tongs trying to build new sections of wall to include skipping areas where it was harder to build, valleys, mountains, that kind of thing. So what this wall does is it forces people through the areas where it's hardest to cross, and those are the areas where it's easiest to die. And so these people are now forced to make riskier and riskier crossings to try and avoid getting caught. Or to wait in Mexico where they're at a very high risk of abduction or sexual assault, extortion or violence, and we'll come on to maybe a couple

of those stories later, just from people I've talked to. The result of this policy is that border cities in Mexico are flooded with migrants, and often with soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace. Last month, the Mexican National Guard and the immigration authorities raided a hotel full of Venezuelan migrants in Juáles. Local news outlets reported that the migrants, mostly young men, threw stones at the officials and a brawl ensued, and eventually they called off the raid. In another incident, authorities raided a church and dragged off a number of Venezuelan migrants who had been given sanctuary there. Some were beaten, and one advocate said they were essentially tortured. This prompted, yeah, this is horrific, right? So a lot of the

young men, it was all men in the detention center that caught fire. Most of them were from Venezuela, right? A place like I've lived in Venezuela. I have a lot of sympathy for those people. Yeah. Actually, I found a breakdown, I guess. There was 1300ians, 12 Salvadorians, 12 Venezuelans, a Colombian and an Ecuadorian. So even that's crazy. There's so many people from all of those countries. It's, I don't know. Yeah. We'll see a bit later that there are certain pathways for Venezuelan people. There are some pathways that don't exist through other people that they're not insufficient, and they're there, how do I say this, unfair, but sort of they exist. But yeah, those people from those countries, we see a lot of Haitian people at the border here too.

But yeah, that's a pretty common kind of border mix up of folks. Unfortunately, often you won't see Haitian folks, that there are sort of segregations even within the migrant community. And often Haitian folks have kind of segregated out, which is unfortunate. Like I thought the horror is when it's kind of that's the population breakdown. Like wouldn't the Haitian border crossing be like somewhere else? I don't think to say. No, no, no. That's not done at all. I don't know what the breakdown, I know there are Haitian people in Juarez. I know there are Cuban folks in Juarez too, and they've kind of, some of them have stayed in Juarez and established kind of their own communities. And that's had some sort of

some negative results for anti migrant feeling in Juarez, from what I've heard. I know there are a lot of Haitian folks in Tijuana. A lot of the Haitian people come via Brazil, where they've spent time like preparing for the Olympics that were there and building stadium and stuff. So a lot of them tell me they've come up from Brazil. And then obviously with like increased violence and Haiti now, you'll see more Haitian people again. There's a decent Haitian community that also is established in Tijuana and has is, that it's their home now, right? I had no idea to be honest. So now I know, I'll accept being a little bit dumb. So everyone can learn. Not at all. It's not very well reported on. And I think it's,

honestly, people have stopped reporting on it since 2020 as well, like since like Orange Man Bad stopped being like the prevailing mass media message. No one gives a fuck about migrants anymore. Like there's a pronounced drop off when I cross people. And I don't know. There are some very good reporters, of course, you know, we've spoken to some of them in Tijuana and in San Diego. But yeah, you just, there was a lot of parachute reporting on migration in the Trump era. Some of it very bad. Some of it by people who didn't have the language skills to be working there and didn't understand what was respectful or what wasn't and things like that. So I have strong feelings about how the migrant caravan in 2018 was was reported on, for instance.

But yeah, you definitely see a ton of Haitian people and Biden has gone exceptionally hard. I'll include a link at the bottom of like a piece I wrote for NBC about Biden's anti-Haitian bullshit, but like exceptionally hard specifically against the Haitians. So you can find a tweet from the Haitian, the United States embassy in Haiti, where it's just got a picture of Biden. I think it says don't come. I'm paraphrasing that it needs to be official account. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. Like, you don't see this in other countries either. Even, you know, they've made, like they've made, there's a ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine, right? It's hard not to see that shit as racist. Of course. Yeah. Of course is Ukraine. Yeah.

Yeah, right. Because it's great. It's great. But also you have to look at the like, why did that happen? Right. And if we can't like express like, like Russian bombs kill kids in Myanmar too, Russian bombs kill kids all over fucking Africa. And if we can't have solidarity with them, or we can't with Ukrainian people, then I'd like, it's hard for me not to see that as to do with their skin color. Yeah. And then that is bullshit. And so yeah, title 42 were ended May, when the COVID public health emergency order expires. Biden said earlier on that he would end title 42. He then faced these lawsuits from conservative states. But at the same time, the Biden administration fiercely defended title 42 in litigation bought by the ACLU and other groups challenging the policy.

Even the CDC, right? The CDC Center for Disease Control was like, no, the shit isn't necessary. And it's cool. We should stop. The government has argued that public health concerns for letting migrants into the country due to continued threat of COVID-19 outweigh the possible harms done to migrants who return to cities like Nogales, you know, Juarez or Tijuana. You don't even need a COVID test to fly into this country now, I don't think, right? Like, my family come visit me. So the end of the emergency kind of makes that a moot point, right? Like, you can't have a public health order to protect us from the disease, which you're saying isn't a problem anymore. But the damage that this has done will take years to rectify.

And the backlog that it's created is already being used as an excuse to do more cruel and humane things to people who are just looking for a fair crack at life. Sreen, do you know what won't build a wall around itself and force people to risk their life to get here? You tell me, James. Well, what is it? It is these silver coins that have Ronald Reagan on them who probably outflanks our current immigration policy to the left. That's our guy. Yep. Uncle Ron. Okay, we're back. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Oh, maybe it was a gold advert. I hope it was a gold advert, because I know that everyone enjoys it so much. Please don't message Sophie about the fucking gold things. We know.

Yeah, we know. We know. Trust us, we know. Yeah. It's also, it's just funny. It's funny to me that someone is buying gold adverts and presumably none of our listeners are buying gold and yet I have health care now. I mean, it must be working somewhere. Like, you know what I mean? How else would they afford to keep advertising? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Someone's doing something. Yeah, someone's buying gold. It's like one guy. If you are that steadfast listener who buys everything we advertise. Thank you so much for our pinchecks. We salute your dedication. So Biden hasn't really come up with a distinctive immigration policy of his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of failed to undo the damage Trump has done, created a two-tier system

in which white Ukrainians get to slip the line while black and brown migrants wait in terrible conditions. And for some reason, he's gone as hard as fuck as he can to stop patients coming here, which the reason might be pretty obvious to some of you. Oh, and we're still building the wall, but we're calling it a barrier now. Of course. So yeah, it's totally different. It's rebranded. Yeah, it doesn't have a little plate on the top. It's a slightly different shape. You can, like if you scroll back far enough on my Twitter, you can find comparison pictures of the Biden barrier and the Trump wall, but it's like literally just like a glow up, like a terrible horrifying glow up. Yes. Yeah, the wall's having its little, it's a freedom wall now or something.

But if you all don't follow the butterfly sanctuary as well, a high value Twitter account and sometimes stealing automatic rifles, not stealing, I should say, but National Guard leaving automatic rifles on her property that she takes care of. But yeah, you can listen to our butterfly sanctuary episodes for more on like the Biden barrier. But we're more than halfway through Biden's term now, and we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling a border policy on his own. At the same time, because we're more than halfway through his term, or perhaps just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies about being kind to migrants, he's trying to move towards the center and the center of US politics is like somewhere to the right of Attila behind these days.

So he's been hit pretty hard by the Republicans on immigration. And it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty hard on largely on just shit that's made up or misunderstandings of this and the number of interactions that Border Patrol has or willful or un-willful, I don't know. But many of the critiques are in pretty bad faith. But nonetheless, like it's been an area where they've criticized him, right? And so he's trying to move towards the quite and quite center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed or his administration has proposed something called a transit ban. The transit ban people might remember and the initial kind of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller, due to looks like a lollipop

and also like a white nationalist. That's a great. His head is too big for his neck. He's shiny. Yeah. That's not the only thing that's wrong with him. So this proposal would render migrants ineligible for US asylum if they cross a sudden border illegally after failing to ask for humanitarian refuge in another country they traveled through, such as Mexico. Right. So unless you somehow come straight to the US, which you can't do because you can't get on a flight to the US without the correct travel documents, then you'd have to travel through another country, right? And they're saying that you should apply for asylum there. In practice, this would bar most North Mexican asylum seekers unless you took advantage of one

of the programs that Biden has proposed to allow people in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with a US sponsor under a humanitarian parole program, where they apply from their home country and then get credentials to travel. So they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This might not be safe for some people to do in those countries. But they have a means to get here. It's metered, I think, at 30,000 a month. Those people from those same countries and during the same conditions, if they came here on their own and then applied to asylum as they're right under US law once they entered the country, right? And it's worth noting that most people coming in that want to apply for asylum. So they wanted to turn, that might have changed a little with Title 42, but previously

people were seeking to turn themselves in and say, hey, I'm here to apply for asylum. They can now be expelled under this legislation. So if they don't use this or they don't have a US sponsor, which kind of creates, you shouldn't have to know someone in America to come here and avail yourself of basic human rights. Yeah, it's just it's purposely like getting people out of the group that can go in, you know what I mean? Like it's excluding people, but it's just like by default. Right, thousands of people. And this legislation now allows them to be for expedited processing expulsion. And if people do want to apply for asylum at the southern border, they need to use an app, which is called CBP one. That's just the craziest thing I've heard in a while. Sorry.

Yeah, it is. I'm on another planet. Like what? What? I don't know. It is incredibly powerful, like lib brain, to be like, don't worry, we've made an app. We've got you like, it assumes that people have the app is not available in all the languages that people speak. Of course not. Yeah. Like last time I was at the border, like I had worked with a colleague who spoke a Romo. I speak French, he spoke Haitian Creole, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, right? Like those are people I interviewed in an afternoon. You know, there are dozens of languages. So the app isn't available in those languages. The app is a giant clusterfuck. It doesn't work, it crashes all the time. You can find like little kids, little kids who come up from

Tijuana to go to school who can tell you 10 things that are wrong about this app. But you can also find people who make six-figure salaries in Washington who think it's great. Right. Regardless, it's a fucking app on a fucking device that is such like, I don't know, I think it's just so lazy. It's lazy and stupid. I don't like it. Yes, it is both of those things. It assumes people have a cell phone, which it might not. Yes, very elitist, yes, exactly. Yeah, like it made your phone get stolen, someone could book all these and try and game. Like there's a million where it assumes you've got fucking broadband, connectivity, you know, Wi-Fi, all these things. It's

yeah, it's just insane. Like it's amazing how detached one can be from reality and still be the person in charge. Yeah. Yeah. What if no people in charge? So, migrants crossing the border without documents can be subjected to expected removal, as I said. The proposed regulations indicate the migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who generally cannot be deported due to strained relations with the government there, would face deportation to Mexico instead, which fucking just, again, makes us someone else's problem. A dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive. They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organizations,

including the United Nations Refugee Agency, in imploring the administration to immediately withdraw the regulation. So, there's a period of public comment, which is what's happening at the moment, right? So, he's found a policy which no one likes, both from the right and from, you know, people are allowed to live with dignity. That's hard to do, that's hard to do. Well, you're never, he's never gonna fucking... I don't know what the, like, tramplicant one, but, like, it's some version of machine guns on top of a wall killing little children. Yeah. And you could just be a decent person, or you could try and placate fucking psychopathic Fox News people. So, Mexico is already the third most popular destination for people

seeking asylum in the world, after the United States and Germany. In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay in the state where they apply. And that's resulted in large numbers of people being concentrated in places like Tapachula on the southern border with Guatemala. And that creates, like, an infrastructure issue there, right? Which it's also worth, like, I'm sure people are well aware that, like, I wonder why all these countries have been fucking destabilized, right? I wonder if there was a country which helped do that for decades. Why are they leaving? They're home, like, why can't they go back home? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. If only The Clash had written a song about it, for us to understand better. So, Mexico granted 61% of asylum requests from January through November

last year compared to 46% in the USA for fiscal year 2022. That is an increase of a low of 27% under Trump. But it still suggests that more than half the people get sent back, right? And where the fuck do they get sent back to if they can't reliably go back to their home country safely? Mexico abides by something called the Cartagena Declaration, which promises a safe haven to anyone threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. The US currently observes a narrow definition that requires a person to have been individually targeted. That's a distinct thing, right, for limited reasons, as spelled out in the UN Refugee

Convention. But it appears that the Biden administration has plans to retrain DHS agents, and they're currently telling them, or they seem to be proposing to tell them, I should say, to let migrants enter the US to pursue protection only if they qualify under the International Convention Against Torture, which is an absurdly high bar, right? Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, like, against torture. Wow. Yeah, I thought we were going to say after all that. Yeah, it's a ridiculously high bar. Like, there are very real things you could be afraid of. Like, I've spoken to people who have escaped forced sex work, right, who've had members of their family killed, threats made to their own lives. None of those, maybe the forced sex work is

torture, but maybe some of those things wouldn't meet that bar. But I think any reasonable human being, right, if you met someone in the street, and they said, hey, so my, you know, so and so killed my daughter and my father and my uncle, and they said they're going to kill me, you'd say, like, come into my house, I'll look after you. But there's a country we're saying, fuck you, you're on your own. And yeah, that's, that's not how you be a good neighbor. A source on the inside of the administration recently has reported that the Biden administration is considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families court crossing the US-Mexico border illegally. And so this is, this is the thing that, that all the people were very upset

about it, that no more kids in cages thing. But we fucking do that again as well, I guess. They likely won't do like separation of minors, which is what they did before, right? They took the kids away from their parents and detained them separately, which is just fucking like I cannot imagine. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's just unspeakable trauma and like just like for both for everybody involved. I mean, like same with the wall, though, like it's just the same thing where the same thing is happening. It's just like marketed differently. It's just like packaged in a different way, and it's still fucking terrible. Yeah, like, I just, I don't know what you expect these fucking people to do. Like, and I don't know how you, how you expect someone,

like, even if you're purely self-interested and you're just concerned about like US security and like, you know, making America great again or whatever. Like, if you lock little children up, like they're going to fucking hate you and you can't blame them. Like it's, it's, it's inhumane. It's, it's what dictators do. It's, it's fucking unfathomable, but- It also like drives me like just insane to think about people that are actually there in, in the flesh. Like that see people, like the children crying or something and like just there's so much terrible things going on and no one does, there's not enough. I don't know. I just, I can't imagine doing that. It should be like, okay, my job is this and I'm going to continue. I don't know. I don't like it. I don't

like it. No, I don't like it either. Like of all of the things I've reported on and like I've reported on some dark shit and like being to some dangerous places, et cetera. Like nothing has been harder for me to get over than little kids at the border. Like I have hundreds of stories about it, but I can remember one little girl. This shit makes me want to cry. I remember this one little girl who who she'd left her teddy bear behind and she wanted the teddy bear. And like this little girl's like living in a fucking tent, right? This is in 2018 when, when the midterms were happening, so they were holding a large group of people right next to the border, right? They were staying in a baseball stadium and myself and some friends had gone to help. And this little girl was just

like the sweetest little kid. Like she came up, she was holding my hand and then I asked if she wanted to go on my shoulders and she wanted to go on my shoulders. And at this point, the way that they were getting people to leave that area and go to another area was by cutting off their access to water. We were able to get some water and we were able to give them like as much water as we could buy on our credit cards. And I asked her what she wanted and she said she'd had to leave her teddy bear behind and it just fucking broke my heart like without like going into too much personal trauma details like that shit kept me from sleeping for weeks. And I found it so hard to come back. It was like 2018 around November, I guess, and like go to like a, I remember someone

was having some Thanksgiving thing and just, I just wanted to fucking shout at everyone and be like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Anyway, so I went and bought her a teddy bear. That's devastating. It's especially from a, from a child, you know, like their, their experience and their perspective is just like, just, I don't know, you see how raw it is. Yeah. Like, I know no children shouldn't be treated by that full stop. Like we shouldn't be standing in the parking lot of a fucking Tommy Hilfiger discount store in San Diego launching tear gas at little children in Mexico. It's one of the, like the images of like what America does to people that will stick with me forever. It's, yeah. I'm glad you were, I'm glad you were down

there helping though, like especially getting, according to their access off to waters, like the most, like one of the most inhumane things, but then again, it's all very inhumane. Yeah. And that time was difficult for everyone involved. That was also one of the most impressive. This is one of the times when large NGOs weren't allowed to operate because of various concerns and legal things. So the entirety of the aid effort for those people was done through mutual aid, right? Through completely ad hoc mechanisms. There were church people, people from various migrant advocacy groups in San Diego, people from El Otrolado, who we've spoken to on the podcast. That's how I met them for the first time. A number of those people actually

were surveilled by Border Patrol as we found out two years later and had warrants on them, et cetera. But everyone who came came like not because it was a job, because it was the right thing to do. And like there wasn't a day I was down there that there weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff. And this is my friend and I, someone managed to get us a projector from their workplace and how they got a projector from their workplace. I don't care. And a bunch of DVDs. My friend used to be an electrician and they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a nightclub and another part of Tijuana at an old nightclub, old and massive thousands of people were in this big kind of open at nightclub situation. It was very strange. They had the women and the young

children in one area that like very clearly had been a pole dance room. Anyway, and they had like these bars sort of like, you know, like a balcony area. So we went up to the balcony area and me and a couple of these older kids who with the migrant group were able to get like climb across the roof, find some wires, connect a projector and do a little, make a little movie theater for the children. And they remember they were watching like Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It's so sweet. When I left and yeah, they were having like just... Those little gestures are so important though. Like it's... Yeah. I mean, it doesn't fucking fix anything, but if they can have two hours of watching a

film about a dog or whatever and be like not there. Let them have that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. They deserve that. They deserve a lot more than that. But yeah, it was those little nice things that made it bearable, I guess. But yeah, they was... I still have like fairly disturbing recollections of lots of things. That's another border. So let's just do a quote from Joe Biden. Because we do love a bit of Joe Biden. My message is this. If you're trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua or Haiti, you have agreed to begin a journey to America. Do not, do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally. Starting today, if you don't apply through the legal

process, you will not be eligible for this new parole program. Anyway, Joe Biden could go fuck himself, but I think that... I hope that obviously lots of my little anecdotes have helped, but we shouldn't see these people as statistics or numbers. We should see them as people. So I've got a couple of interviews I've done. These are just ones that went back to some notes and found. So I was just going to read them out. So I won't give their names just for their own security, but sometimes I've used pseudonyms on the publicies. Sometimes I have used their names when they're willing to use their names. It's their choice, but it should always be their choice if you're a fucking reporter and you're filming

children without their consent or their parents' consent in a refugee camp. They're not just a spectacle for your story. Yeah, exactly. You can jog on and I hope someone throws your camera in a river. So here's one. I have three daughters, age 13, 10 and 6. I've always had my own business selling food and I paid what we would call extortion money, but with the pandemic, I couldn't pay well over three or four months. Instead of I didn't pay, they would burn down my shop and me and my daughters would be raped and killed. With what little I had left, I left with my daughters. It's hard to get work here. As an immigrant, there are some jobs, but not the sort that are

for me. I have to try and be an example to my kids. One day I was juggling by the traffic lights and some guys tried to pick me up. They said they knew where I lived and they would hurt me and my daughters so I didn't work for them. They made me work in a bar. I escaped, but that's how I broke my hand. I didn't want to go to the US, but I need to leave this country now for the same reason I left my own. I'll read one more. We came from Honduras to flee the violence. We have come to this camp in the last few days, but it's scary here. We don't feel safe. There are people coming and taking photos of the children of the women. Men offer the women here money to go with them. They tried to get them to sleep with them. There's a woman here filming us as well. We found

out she's a big activist for Donald Trump. This was in 2021. Some people came to snatch a child here. Between the group, we're working to make a security committee to protect the children because there are people who would take the children here. We aren't a caravan. We're just people from all over the world who have come here for a better future. We're asking Biden. We know it's complicated and he has a lot to sort out and we have patience. We know he has to make compromises, but please think of us here. We are in danger. Please give us a solution. It's fucking heartbreaking. Yeah, it is heartbreaking. I wish there was some kind of happy ending. I can put on this or I don't know. There are great things you can do with mutual aid groups.

There's a group that I'm hoping to interview next week called Borderlands Relief Collective in San Diego who do a lot to help people crossing the border. There are groups like Alotro Lalo. You can donate to the public comment is still available for the Biden's proposed new restrictions. So I guess you can comment on that if you think that will help. I guess this is an area sometimes where talking to politicians might help because they make the laws that affect people's right to kind of live with basic dignity. But yeah, I don't have a great solution to this, especially like if people aren't in a place where people here are struggling to get by, understand that not everyone can afford to donate. Of course, yeah. But yeah, this is pretty bleak and just because

it's not being beamed into your living rooms anymore because an orange man bad doesn't mean that it's still not impossibly cruel. Yeah, I mean, just because another old guy took over, it doesn't mean like the same things were already there. It's not like they just poofed into thin air like all the terrible things that were already happening. That's what I don't understand is like people just assume, I don't know what they assume, I'm not going to ramble on like that, but it's just heartbreaking and you should donate if you can. Yeah. Yeah, donate, do stuff, shout at people, do whatever you think will make a difference because it's pretty bad. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it.

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police operation. Cops had spent more than a year following his every move because they believed Derek White was a major figure in an international criminal organization. He was the front man, if you will, for the organized crime slash Hell's Angels. Well, see, that's one thing that they didn't really do their homework. Now, Derek's fighting his charges in court. His defense relies on his rights as a native person. And the craziest thing, he might actually have a case. It's not only my fight, it's the whole nation's fight. From campsite media and Dan Patrick Productions, this is Running Smoke. Binge all episodes now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dates don't usually end with a satisfaction survey. And yet,

we rate everything in our lives, from Uber drivers to local coffee shops. So why don't we do the same thing when dating? We're here to conduct the Ultimate Romance Review, featuring daters hungry for love who have agreed to call up old flames to gather honest feedback. Welcome to exit interview. He upgraded himself to business class while I was in economy. Wait, wow. What? There's feedback that will make you cringe. She could be a little bit hardheaded, like not reading, the writing on the walls. And feedback that will make you swoon. But she said that she had feelings for you. I had no idea. Really? And maybe you'll learn a thing or two yourself about how you can be a better dater, lover, or partner. Obviously, like Nia is going to learn something. I didn't expect this.

Welcome to exit interview. Listen to exit interview on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to IkaDapit here, a podcast coming live, not live. Really not. I need to come up with a better bit than coming to you live. But coming to you from from now fallen apparently on fire, destroyed Chicago. So so so so say the many oracles sooth sayers and cops who live in the city who are now absolutely convinced that the city is going to descend into crime and chaos, etc, etc. After the cop candidate got absolutely blown the fuck out in the last elections. And yeah, with me to talk about this election and a couple of other elections that happened on the same day that were very funny and where the worst people in the world got

absolutely destroyed is Ali, who was one of my friends and is an election analyst. Yeah, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, Mia. Nice to be nice to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, because this is just very funny. It's extremely funny. I personally was really enjoying getting to read the Twitter tea leaves. You could tell kind of which alderman we're having meltdowns on election night. Yeah, so I guess I guess we can start with with the stuff that happened in Chicago, which is that Paul Valles, the the the the butcher of the public education system, the running dog of the cops, the hero of J6 people, I was just kind of

thwacked in an election by Brandon Johnson, the sort of progressive candidate who I'm very excited I no longer have to pretend that I like particularly much. Yes, now, as as Mia says, Paul Valles, resident Dino from Palos Heights, a southwest suburb of Chicago who conveniently bought an apartment in Chicago exactly a year before the election, which is how long you have to live in Chicago to be the mayor, lost the runoff to Brandon Johnson, a black progressive who was on the Cook County Board. About when all the results are done coming in in a couple weeks, it'll be about 52% for Johnson and 48% for Valles. As Mia says, this lets a lot of people on the left no longer have to keep up the charade of, oh, Johnson's the best thing that has happened to

us in sliced bread. If you are like more of a democratic party loyal progressive voter, this is a very, very good thing in your eyes. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think there's something very interesting and kind of fitting about this, which is that, yeah, one of the things you've talked about is that, yeah, like Fred and Johnson is the first like progressive TM mayor Charles had since like, I mean, literally since Harold Washington, who was first black mayor in the 80s. And it's very interesting also because a bunch of the reforms that Harold Washington did were specifically overturned by Paul Valles. Yeah. Like he's the guy who did a bunch of educational reforms that fucking sucked that destroyed Washington stuff.

It's no, it's it's really wild how like Chicago politics is analogous to to go really out there for a second is analogous to the state of Hawaii in the sense that people never die. The same people are going to be on your ballot for 50 years and you just kind of have to suck it up and deal with it. But every so often, someone good comes along, or at least someone better. And if you get them into office the first time and if you get them to survive their first reelection campaign, then they get to be one of the people who's on the ballot forever and who never dies. And slowly, but surely you can make Chicago politics less shitty. But yeah, as Mia said, this is going to be the first progressive Chicago mayoral administration since Harold

Washington and Johnson won the same way as Harold Washington did on. Yeah. The backbone of Johnson's coalition just as with Harold Washington's was black voters. Johnson got about 80 percent of the black vote because in Chicago elections are usually more about race than anything else. But in addition to the black vote, Johnson won with progressives in white and non black communities of color, as well as LGBTQ voters. And finally, fulfilling the dreams of the here's how Bernie can still win people from 2015, an actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters. The Chicago Board of Elections is I don't think that anyone would call them great, but they do produce some nice live statistics on election day as the votes are

tallied. And voters under 45 had a turnout surge of I think it was about 20 percent, whereas voters older than 60, the raw number of their votes actually went down. And this likely does almost entirely account for Johnson's margin of victory, that he was able to turn out young voters and that old people just like stayed home. Yeah, I think it's also, you know, we talked about this in the episode we did about Paul Valles. But one of the things about the initial election was that like the fact that Johnson made it out of the primaries at all with a genuinely nightmarish like age bracket of turnout in the first round is sort of a miracle. But, you know, it got a lot better for him in this one. And that

genuinely seems to have like, I don't know, like I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time like canvassing their asses off and it actually seems to have worked. And I don't know. I mean, you know, it remains to be seen to the extent to which this was about like the fact that Valles is like probably would have been the worst mayor of Chicago in like we don't have to go. We don't have to go back that far. A daily was mayor of Chicago as recently as 2011. That's true. But I don't know. Daily. Yeah. I mean, it's not like Chicago has good mayors, but I think he would have been okay. I think he would have been the most politically far right mayor Chicago has had in a long time. Oh, yeah. Like he's just a Republican, like a pretty like,

yeah. And, you know, that fucking sucks. But he got clobbered. There's also there's a really funny result I want to talk about, which is that, okay, so the part of Chicago, the neighborhood of in Chicago, where the Cubs Stadium is, is right next to Boys Town, which is the fucking gay district. And if you go in and look at like, well, I say, I say it's the gay district, like a lot of it's now the rich, gay part of Chicago because it's not priced out. Well, it kind of is. No, it's not. Market Park is the rich, gay part of Chicago. That's true. That's true. Okay. It's more of a rich, gay part of Chicago than it was like 40 years ago, like 30 years ago. Yeah. But like it did like literally exactly split. You can like, you can like see in the data exactly split down

the line. The gays voted for Brandon Johnson and all the people and all the Cubs fans voted for Valis. It's so funny. It is. It is extremely funny. And I will give a quick shout out here to the Chicago Urbanist Twitter account who made what I personally think is the funniest meme to have come out of the election, which is a bunch of like stick figures and just like black and white labeled Valis voters running from a like steamroller, a pink steamroller with a rainbow like wheel being driven by a bunch of gay people and the steamroller is labeled Boys Town. It's really good. Like they I don't know. Like there is this sort of like this is sort of like this is the coalition that well, I mean, again, we talked about this like this is this is

the hair washing coalition. Like this is the coalition that if you if you're an elect electoral list, like you need to produce something that looks like this if you want to have any serious chance of winning. Yes. Yeah. And the fact that it actually worked is sort of. Oh, it's a goddamn miracle. Yeah. It never works. People have been trying to do this for like 40 fucking years and it never works. I mean, people have been trying to do this for 40 plus years, but it's also like this is really the first election that I can think of anywhere. Since Barack Obama's re-election in 2012, we're like, this is the coalition that actually put someone in like an office that got a lot of national attention and that mattered. That's not

to say that it like literally hasn't happened anywhere else. I'm just saying I can't think of any off the top of my head. But like in 2012, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected president of the United States with less than 40 percent of the white vote. A feat that has never since been repeated. Clinton got less than that and lost Trump, obviously won and Biden won because white voters swung left in 2020. So like this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people fail to put together and that Brayden Johnson miraculously pulled off. Yeah. And I think on the one hand, OK, this is legitimately kind of because the result is not the thing that normally happens. It is legitimately an interesting question as to why this happened and like a sort of like

legitimately kind of difficult like political science question. On the other hand, most of the people attempting to answer it have just, oh, my fucking God. Like if I have to read another New York Times article writing about this, that's like just clearly cobbled together from three Wikipedia articles. Like I'm going to literally go insane. I think you, me and every other person in Chicago, you know, no matter if you were a Johnson voter or a valis voter or someone who stayed home, we can all come together in our hatred of that 538 piece that was drawn on the morning of election day. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are lucky. And I'm not going to tell you if you really want to. I will give you a very brief summary of it,

which is that 538. No, no, no, we don't know. They did a racism. They did a racism. That's what I'll leave it at. They did a racism and they were very rock. They basically did the four races, this white, black, Latino and leftist. Yeah, which is very funny. But hopefully I hope I'll take a stab at explaining what happened and hopefully it's better than most people's explanation. But I think part of it is that, as I mentioned earlier, historically, Chicago elections have been about race and like this was no exception. This was much more of an ideological break. Like the ideological lines were a lot clearer in this election than previous mayoral races. But the foundation of Brandon Johnson's electoral victory was the 80% of the vote that he got in

black majority neighborhoods. Black voters in Chicago selected the black candidate because they looked at the white guy and said, oh, we think you're going to be a massive dipshit. And beyond that, you have a couple of other things working in Johnson's favor. So like one, when it comes to the youth vote, I cannot really believe I'm saying this because I when this was announced, it's not that I thought it wouldn't help. It's just that I wasn't sure that it would help enough. But Johnson got a lot of national progressive figures to endorse him, including Bernie Sanders and his campaign literally flew Bernie in for a rally on a college campus here in Chicago. And I think that genuinely did actually get a lot of

young people to realize that there was an election that they should pay attention to. Which is like like like this happened, like people fly in Bernie a lot and it never matters. But like it mattered here, which is sort of amazing. Mm hmm. Absolutely. Like just a lot of this election was wild. I think the other thing that really helped Johnson was that a, like Chicago is a lot less white than it used to be, which is not something that usually gets said in this day and age, because Chicago is becoming whiter than it was like 10, 15 years ago. But Chicago was a lot less white than it was in the 80s when Harold Washington was elected. And so like there was more of a ceiling on Paul Valles'

vote than Harold Washington's opponents had, which meant that Valles had to be able to appeal to not just white voters who reflexively were against any black candidate, but he also had to make inroads in Hispanic, Asian, as well as black communities and trying to get the black conservative vote. And he didn't, Valles didn't do a terrible job here, but he just didn't do a job that was good enough. He actually probably won the Latino vote. It wasn't like a huge win, but it was a win. But the problem is that turnout in on the southwest side of Chicago, which is where the majority of Chicago's Mexican American residents live, was just super low. Just like really, really atrociously in the tank. Like to the extent that like this is the kind of

turnout that inspires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers to vote level bad turnout on the southwest side. So if Hispanic turnout had been on the same level as white and black turnout, the race probably would have been a lot closer. Valles also won Chinatown, which is something that got a fair amount of attention on social media. But Johnson was able to win the two other Asian ethnic enclaves in Chicago, which are the Vietnamese neighborhood in uptown called Asian Argyle, as well as the Desi neighborhood on the far north side. And I don't think we can really say how Asian voters overall voted definitively, because Asian voters in Chicago are pretty well diffused through the city. But it's very clear that like Valles did not get

the runaway win with Asian voters that Eric Adams, for example, did in New York City. Yeah. And I specifically want to talk about Argyle for a bit, because the fact that Johnson won Argyle is fucking insane. Oh, yeah, these are like, like this is a community of Vietnam War refugees. Like these people are hardline anti communist, like you go into these restaurants and they all have Fox News on. So like, yeah, Johnson winning these voters is incredible. Yeah, I mean, like one of the most famous noodle shops there was a guy who was at January 6th. Like this is this is a like a stereotypically unbelievably dog shit place for Johnson. And yeah, and I'm gonna say this about the Chinatown and there's something like I mean,

you just you can know something like I've been tracking for a while. I mean, just by like walking through it, the Chinatown during the pandemic and kind of after it was having a bit before has gotten just notably more fascist. Like, there's a lot of stuff there. I mean, the anti homelessness stuff is really, really, really intense. They've been going really hard. And that's the thing that kind of makes sense, right? Like this is a thing that you would kind of expect out of like, yeah, of course, small business owners are going to like go right like that's like that's that, you know, that that's the you can you can you can find Marx writing about this phenomenon like 1848, right? Like this has been a thing since the

beginning of time. But I don't know. It's gotten it's gotten legitimately kind of scary down there. Yeah. And like a lot of it also, I think was, you know, there's been a divergence between how the north side Asian enclaves like the Desi neighborhood and the Vietnamese neighborhood have responded to this kind of stuff versus Chinatown, especially on the other big social change that happened during the pandemic, which was the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Yeah. I think from what I saw, like the reaction on the on the north side among these Asian enclaves was pretty overall supportive of the protests, whereas down in Chinatown, as well as in McKinley Park, which is a Hispanic majority neighborhood but has a pretty significant

Asian population, those neighborhoods had this really, really big like surge of anti Black racism in response to the protests. Like there were quote unquote, neighborhood watch groups that got formed. And it was just it was bad. And, you know, the Vietnamese voters on Argyle, you know, even though they're very like, you know, they have Fox News on, like I said, and they're really anti socialist anti communists. There was a state rep. I am probably going to butcher his name for which I apologize, but I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced Han Wen, who is Vietnamese himself. And he won the seat last year in 2022. And like he's very progressive. So there has been this very sharp divergence in how the like Asian neighborhoods in Chicago

have responded to some of the social events of the last few years. Once again, my people, they're the great nation of China has fallen into social imperialism. I think the last thing that really should be talked about in the context of Johnson's electoral win. And when we come back, we can talk about the city council, because that's also pretty interesting. Is that something that if you want to watch elections, especially if you want to watch Chicago election, something you should understand is that the the capital M machine in Chicago is pretty much gone now. And Brandon Johnson's win pretty much seals this. And it's not that the people are gone or that like the, you know, logistical operations of the machine

are completely dead. But the machine has now lost two elections in a row. Because as much as Lori Lightfoot sucked and she sucked so much, she also was an anti machine candidate. Like she was like capital A anti machine when she ran. And Brandon Johnson is not anti machine in the way that Lori was, but he definitely was not the candidate of like the machine. So like, they lost two elections in a row. Mike Madigan has now been like indicted and he's probably going to prison for a very long time. You should explain who Mike Madigan is because if you live in Illinois, like you know who Mike Madigan is. If you don't live in Illinois, Mike Madigan, for my entire life, for like the lives of people who are much older than me has been like the most,

the single most powerful political figure in all of Illinois, like he runs. Everything. Yeah, like he has like an iron grip over everything that has happened in this state for like 40 years. Yes. And he finally got indicted on some federal like charges of like, I don't even remember what the charges were, but it was very like Al Capone ask of like, we finally found something to nail you on. So we're going to. And so he got indicted last year and it is actually pretty impressive like how quickly his machine fell apart. Like he just, he didn't have an air ready to take control. And so it's not that like machine politics is gone from Chicago. It's more that instead of a machine, there are now going to be a bunch of smaller

machines, which is going to make it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have some say in the political process, which is a good thing. Yeah. And like the Chicago machine fucking sucks ass. I mean, like we talked about sort of like, I mean, Valus was a machine guy, right? Yes, absolutely. And you know, like the thing about the, the, the, the, the machine has two values and it's corruption and neoliberalism. And honestly, like not even neoliberalism is so much anymore. It's mostly just corruption. Yeah. I mean, they've kind of, I would say, I think they've gotten less ideological over the last 20 years. Like, well, like I think they last like decade and a half. But they, yeah, they really, they really fucked it. Like

Chicago was like the political machine. And you know, like, I mean, they're in large part responsible for the creation of Obama's career. And they've parlayed that into losing to like the least popular mayor in like a generation and then losing again, like to somehow to Brandon Johnson. And it's, I don't know, they've, they've, they failed spectacularly and fuck them. They're awful. And I, yeah. Yes, no, absolutely. Yeah. Fuck these guys. They've, they've, they've, they've, they've robbed the working class for too fucking long. Yeah. No, fuck these guys. Good riddance. The world will be better when they're dead. Yeah. Do you know what else the world would be better than if I, you know, okay, that was, that was, that was not my,

that was not my best effort. I apologize. But the world's question mark, maybe better place if you buy these products and services question mark. I don't know if I'm legally allowed to say that. We'll see. Anyways, here's some ads. And we are back. Yeah, we should talk about what Johnson actually wants to do. Well, do you want to get into that? What do you want to talk about the city council first? I think they actually overlap pretty well. So like we can, let's, let's run through what Johnson says he wants to do and we can then talk about how much of that might happen. So Johnson, like we were talking about is definitely going to be the most progressive mayor in Chicago's history in terms of what he campaigned on at least.

This was a crime election, like the dominant issue was crime. And Johnson did not say the words defund the police. In fact, he actually explicitly said that he would not cut the police budget. But aside from like those literal words, he very much is in line with the progressive priorities of de-emphasizing like using people with guns to go through like six weeks of training or whatever. So he wants to pass a bill called treatment not trauma, which is replacing cops with mental health responders for 911 calls about mental health crises. He wants to pass another bill called the peace book ordinance, which would expand restorative justice and violence intervention, like projects and programs in the city. And he also wants to pass an ordinance to

put significant restrictions on police department raids and like the police department is just actual ability to do raids altogether. There is a very infamous contract here in Chicago called the shop spotter contract, which is this dumb software that is supposed to be able to like tell police when a gun goes off. And like as far as I can tell, doesn't. And just like straight up doesn't work. So Johnson wants to get rid of that. He also wants to eliminate the gang database, which if you are from Chicago, you probably know what we're talking about is this very infamous list of about 120,000 people, 95% of whom are either black or Latino. And they are on this list called the gang database more or less because one day some random Chicago police officer decided

to put them on the list. It's very dumb. It's very racist. It's very blatantly unconstitutional. And hopefully Brandon Johnson is able to get rid of it. Yeah. And these and these are all things like, you know, as much as we can talk about the extent to which like is, you know, as much as we can, we can talk about the sort of the complicity of like mental health responders and the police system, wherever the fuck, like these things would all like make a lot of people's lives better and make the police weaker. And you know, I mean, one of the things about this election right is that the people who are actually affected by crime vote for Johnson, the people who are not affected by crime at all, all voted for Valles. Yep. And part of the reason

for that is that like, okay, if you're in a place like in Chicago, that has a bunch of crime, you were dealing with like, you're dealing with the crime, you're dealing with a lot of people getting shot, which is fucking shit. And then you're also dealing with the CPD, who are like function, most of the time are functionally a cartel about about every like, we're kind of due for another set of like prosecutions, like roughly every like, seven or eight years, there's a massive series of arrests by the FBI, or like the feds come in and like discover that there's like a giant, there's a giant cartel operating out of the CPD, we've talked about this. Discover and discover and air quotes because everyone knows. Oh, yeah, everyone knows. And you know, the

Chicago police in particular, are very famous for the code of silence, which is that every single person if a cop commits a crime, every single other cop will cover for them, going right up to the top of the ladder of the police chiefs and all the way down to like, L dipshit like, like beat cop. Yeah. And, you know, and so, you know, like, if you're a person who has to deal with these people. Oh, it sucks. It fucking sucks. And like awful. Chicago is kind of in many ways, not the ground zero, but like a ground zero for a phenomenon where you have these poor neighborhoods of color, who, you know, the people who live in these neighborhoods, they are simultaneously overpoliced and underpoliced because the police don't

bother to show up half the time when like they're theoretically needed, right? Like someone gets shot, you call 911 and the cops don't bother showing up for hours if they bother showing up at all. And at the same time, when they do show up, they often cause more problems than they solve. Like Chicago has really, truly horrific clearance rates of violent crime. And this is mostly because CPD just insists on maintaining this really awful balance. You know, if you do believe in police, you want there to be a pretty healthy balance between beat cops and detectives, right? Well, with Chicago Police Department, there almost are no detectives left. Like it's almost all beat cops. And so there's not many resources that go into actually investigating crimes that can't

be solved by someone just walking around or driving around in a patrol car. So these neighborhoods, like, you know, you go down to the south side or the west side, a lot of these, a lot of the residents in these neighborhoods would tell you because they're not leftists, right? So they would tell you that they want more police officers. But they don't want more beat cops, necessarily, like they want more detectives and they want officers who are actually going to care about them as people. Unfortunately, the Chicago Police Department is made up of fascists. So like, you know, low chances on that front. But it's like, that is the problem these neighborhoods are facing is that like the police don't bother to care. And when they bother to show up, they

often make things worse. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think the other thing that's sort of important here, right, is like, you get a lot of, you know, like, it's very easy for people to be like, oh, hey, look, actually, these people want more police. But it's like, you know, when you look at what there was a study taken right before the election that was talking about voters, like what their preferences on like, what their sort of opinions on crime are. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I think it was like, only 18% of the people who said that crime was important to them, wanted more cops. And almost everyone we are part of it was like they part like one of their big concerns was legal guns. And then the other big concern

was just like the fact that there's these places are really poor. And there's no opportunities for people. Because it's like, there's there, there aren't economic opportunities. There are so many guns just on, you know, just lying around in these communities. And obviously, that's a problem throughout the country. But it's especially bad in low income neighborhoods in Chicago. And the other thing was mental health, like, you know, and that's one of the other things that Johnson wants to do is he wants to reopen the mental health clinics that got closed down by ROM or Rahm Emanuel, who is a previous mayor of Chicago, who is currently being inflicted upon the people of Japan as the US ambassador. And, you know, they deserve it. This is this is what you

get for starting with the CIA, you fucking, fucking dipshits, man. Like if liberal democratic party didn't want to have to get fucking have to deal with Rahm Emanuel, they shouldn't have taken all that CIA money. But yeah, like, Johnson wants to, you know, reopen these mental health clinics, he wants to increase funding for public schools, which have very much not gotten the funding that they need in Chicago for the past several decades at this point. He also wants to expand public transportation in Chicago, like there are a lot of proposals flying around for expanding the train lines and bus lines and bike rid. There are also, as me and I were talking about before we started recording, there are a lot of lead pipes, like water pipes in Chicago. So many

sort of lead pipes. Yes. And like Chicago is like supposed to be replacing them. It's proceeding very slowly. Johnson wants to speed that up. There's like very genuinely a lot of research on the books directly linking lead poisoning to a lot of social problems. Yeah. And so it's very much one of these things where it's like, you know, if you replace the lead pipes, crime will go down. And I want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure stuff for a second, because like, okay, in the in the last three years, Chicago's public transit system has just been fucking imploding. Oh, it's it's so bad. There are there are reasons for this, some of which I can talk about some of which I can't like partially was the pen partially lives the pandemic and they

like a bunch of the people who supposed to be running the system fucking died because, you know, they got forced to work during the pandemic. But like, you know, you'll like trains just won't show up. There are buses that are basically unusable because it's it's like you're basically sitting there trying to roll double ones as to whether the bus will fucking show up at all. All the wait times are enormous. Like, it's a real shit show. And like, it's it's substantively way worse than it was when I was in the city in like, 2015, 2019. Yeah, it's really, really bad. And it's, it's it's atrocious. Yes. The other factor that's be talked about there is that like, so the Chicago public transit system is not free, like most systems, like it is funded by

fuck writer fairs, like it's very yeah, it costs a lot to get on a comparatively it costs a lot to get on the train or go on a bus. And one of the kind of like, self reinforcing cycles has been playing out the last few years is that Chicago also has a really bad homelessness problem. And this is directly linked to the fact that the city just does not want to give people housing. Yeah. And so what ends up happening is that a lot of Chicago's homeless residents, especially in the colder winter months, they end up on the trains, especially the two lines that run 24 hours a day. And you know, these are people who are really they're living in really, really terrible conditions like they don't have regular access to clean food and water, let alone like clean access to like,

like regular access to like hygienic facilities. And so ridership really plummeted on the lines where homeless people started to like, just go on in order to stay warm. And so you get the hit because writer fairs are now down, because people don't want to deal with being on the same train line as homeless people who, you know, frankly, just don't smell that good or have mental health problems. And the city doesn't want to give these homeless people housing, let alone like even like smaller things like like access to bathing facilities or healthcare or anything like that. And so it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of now fairs are down, so there's less investment, so more people abandon the system. And it is this thing, we're like, this will this would get solved if Chicago

committed to giving homeless people housing. But that's just not where the city has unfortunately been. Yeah, and I mean, you know, and what's been happening instead is like, you know, increasing anti homeless architecture, like Chicago train stations fucking suck ass, because they're all designed so that's impossible to sit on anything. Oh my god, there are like two benches in each station. It sucks. So many stations like it's so bad. Like it's just awful. Like one of the things that Chicago has they have these like, you know, it gets really, really cold here in the winter. So they have these like warming stations so that when it's like fucking negative 20 out, you can be in the warming things. But there's no they intentionally make it so there's no

benches in them. So you can't sit in them. Yeah, it sucks. It like it's, you know, it's they have this really just like the hatred of homeless people is turned basically into a war against all society waged by the city. And yes, it's atrocious. The good news is that Brandon Johnson wants to pass an ordinance called bring Chicago home, which would put a tax on property transfers for like, I think it's like homes that are worth over a million dollars. That and the money from that tax would go entirely to funding programs for the city's homeless residents all the way up to an including permanent shelter or like permanent housing solutions. So, you know, you know, fingers crossed on that one, because that I think, along with the public safety measures is really the

thing that the city needs the most. And Johnson also on the housing front, he wants to liberalize zoning laws, which I know is a very big debate on the left at the moment about, you know, how we go about approaching building more housing. Johnson very much is on like the pro development end of things he wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so that it's easier to build multifamily housing in previously like single family housing zoned areas. He does also want to pass just cause for eviction. So like your landlord would not be able to throw you out just because. Yeah, which is a good thing. Yeah, Chicago's landlords are really shit. They're terrible. I have seen things across the board terrible. Yeah, like I got like I have seen

shit doing tenant organizing that is like, like, like things that make me like have to control my reflex to vomit just remembering them. Truly atrocious. But yeah, the other thing, and that something that will matter to you if you are living in Chicago very much is that Johnson wants to cap property taxes. So one of the things has been driving a lot of reactionary politics in Chicago is that property taxes here are linked to inflation, which means that if you are a property owner in Chicago in the last couple of years, your property taxes went up by like 15 plus percent, which understandably made a lot of people mad. Because you know, if you if your taxes go up by that much that fast, you at least wanted to be going to something good. And under

our previous well soon to be previous mayor Lori Lightfoot that absolutely was not happening. Yeah, like over time or some shit like. Yes. So Johnson is he campaigned on on decoupling property taxes from inflation. So they would no longer just automatically go up, which would bring a lot of financial relief to a lot of Chicago families. And also he would basically like wants to pass a lot of taxes focused on wealthier residents as well as big businesses to help fund some of the programs, which brings us to the city council and how much of a chance he has of getting this passed, which is better than you might think. If you are familiar with Chicago politics, something that surprises people who don't

live in the city is that Chicago is not run by progressives. There is actually pretty much never been a progressive majority on the city council. And there isn't. There will not be a progressive majority on the new one that comes in with Johnson. He is going to be presiding over a minority government in parliamentary terms, which I think we should use more often because I'm a nerd and I find it fun. But basically, there are 50 members of the Chicago City Council. They are called Alderman because we insist on having a city council that is the size of a state legislature here. And about 22 of them are going to be aligned with Johnson, more or less. So he's going to be three votes short on a lot of things, at least from the beginning. He is going to be negotiating

with the black political establishment here in Chicago, which is one of the smaller machines that is left in the aftermath of Madigan's indictment. And we are going to see how this goes. Some of those black alderman are friendlier to Johnson from the get go, partially because of ideology and partially because a lot of them just like personally know him and like him. Some of them are very against him for similar reasons, like they either ideologically don't line up or they just dislike him on a personal basis. We should talk. We should say a little bit about Johnson's not like some kind of like political outsider. No, he's been around. He's kind of he has like interesting relations with the old sort of like prepwinkle, like a labor machine.

He's definitely like Johnson is definitely part of a machine. His relationship with like the old machine was very bad, but he is definitely part of a machine that is tied up and like the institutional labor unions that have a lot of sway and democratic politics here, including the Chicago teachers union, which like, you know, Valis's whole stick during the runoff was that Johnson would be a stooge for the teachers union. And the teachers union really just like the teacher. This is actually kind of funny because like the teachers union really just swept the board here, not just with Johnson, but with like a lot of the city council races were they weighed in. So if you are a member of the Chicago teachers union,

who does not approve of their leadership buckle up, because the next several years they are going, they're almost certainly going balls to the wall of like, well, if we can get a mayor, we can get a lot of other people too. Yeah. And we should mention here, Vetch. So a lot of the other unions in Chicago, like, are kind of yeah, they range from add to shit. The college teachers union got taken over by this group called core, who are like like a sort of rank and file like lefty like, I think, I think a good way to understand core is that like, with the caveat that like, teachers in Chicago really don't make that much money in the grand scheme of things. So like, income wise, this is not lineup, but these people are

very much like kind of resistance liberals on steroids. Like, they're not going to be like frontliners in the socialist revolution anytime soon. But like, they are definitely on the far left of the Democratic Party Coalition. Yeah. Well, we should like, they're not like, like they are, they are like, I don't know. I have complicated feelings on them. From the sort of Atticus perspective, they're like, they're they're as good of a thing of like union people as like, you currently have again, we've talked about this could change with NNU very quickly. But yeah, they've they've been responsible for pushing a lot of things that are very good. Yes. And they've they've they've turned

the union into like, I mean, well, it's okay. So like, one thing to talk about, like, they actually do go on strike, which is the thing that a lot of unions don't like go on strike. They do they do political things that are usually pretty good. And they are an actual sort of like, they're an actual class space for things getting better. They are the Chicago teachers union is definitely like a net good force in city politics. And something that also like, CTU gets a lot of negative attention, even on a national level. And so something that surprises people who don't live in Chicago, if they know about the teachers union at all, is that the CTU is actually very popular among the city's residents, like most

like people love the Chicago teachers union, like when the teachers last went on strike, the public was over overwhelmingly on their side, which is why they won. And CTU also like their 2019 strike against Lori Lightfoot was very much like the inspiration that touched off a lot of the teacher strikes that happened in red states over the next several months. Like they very much kind of led the way in some in some areas. Like, so they are like, like Mia, I have complicated feelings about the CTU. But overall, they're a good thing for city politics. And like, they make Chicago a more progressive place. Yeah. And this has been true for like a while to like, to the extent that when like,

I think in like back in 2012 and core was like, like, back when core sort of first taken over was first doing their strikes, like even the CTU people were surprised about the extent to which like, when they went out, like the streets turned into a party, like people actually really do like them. Like, I mean, the cops don't, but like, fuck them. Like, like the cops don't like them. And to CTU's credit, most Chicago teachers dislike the cops. Yeah. They've they've been they've been trying to get cops out of schools, which is good because yes, cops in schools are especially in Chicago. It's really bad. The last thing I think we should mention about the city council before we move on to some of

the other elections we need to talk about is one of the things that gets criticized about the left as an electoral force in places like New York or Los Angeles, especially those two places is that it's very dominated by white people. And I do want to provide the context for those of you who are not from the Chicago area, like that's not true in Chicago. The progressive movement and the left like leftist movement on an electoral level in Chicago is very much driven by people of color. And you saw this in the city council election results. Almost every single seat that progressives flipped on the city council was in a black or brown ward. And even the two wards, like the two white majority wards where they flip seats, the new alderman or older women in

both cases are people of color. So like this is just like context for those of you who are not from Chicago. This is not a case of like white leftist gone wild. Like this very much is a rainbow coalition, not just in the sense that Brandon Johnson won the election off of Rainbow Coalition, but in the sense of the electoral left in Chicago is very, very much a rainbow coalition and has been very effective because of that. Yeah, it's very funny too, because you see people like the sort of right wingers in Chicago like constantly screaming about like lakefront liberals and you look at like the actual base of like left policy shit. It's like, okay, this is simply not what's actually happening here. Yes. The honest like the thing about

like race and its relationship with progressive politics to Chicago is that the most progressive neighborhoods in Chicago, based on their voting patterns, are almost always the most racially integrated. And that's not to say that like all of the racially integrated neighborhoods are progressive because that's not true. There are some pretty integrated neighborhoods on the southwest side that are like very conservative because a bunch of cops live there. But but most of the racially integrated neighborhoods of Chicago are also the most progressive neighborhoods. And that like really just flies in the face of the whole like white lakefront liberal narrative. And is something to pay more attention to. Okay, again, it cannot be

emphasized enough. Brandon Johnson, the progressive candidate is black, he's running against a white guy. There was a very large attempt to paint like Brandon Johnson is like an out of touch, like white liberal. Yeah, that was very weird. Yeah, I think like they just have, I don't know, I mean, it was just the sort of like ideological bankruptcy of like, like the sort of like capitalist establishment is like they have nothing. Right? Yeah, they're like the only the only thing they have left is like calling a black guy white. And it's just like, shut the fuck up. Like nobody believes the shit anymore. Like, oh, and on that note, it might be time for some ads. Yeah. We are we are back from our ads. I hope you have enjoyed the destruction of the

entire world. Yeah. Okay, so we have talked about Chicago for a long time, because you're both from Chicago, it's very funny, and it's very interesting. But oh, actually, okay, I'm realizing this, there's one more thing I do. The two more things I do specifically want to mention about Brandon Johnson that I forgot earlier. One is that he, you know, it's genuinely unclear to me whether this is a real ideological belief he has, or whether this is the thing that you said to not get called nitty semi, because it was electorally expedient, but he released a really, really shitty statement on like what kind of investment sanctions of Israel. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like I personally, oh, yeah, it was terrible. It was really terrible. But like based on what I saw from the aftermath

of that, I'm inclined to believe that this was more something he was told to say. And the reason for that is because the reaction it got with the crowd he was in front of was like he was speaking with Jewish organization, like the reaction was very like, okay, dude, but that's not what we asked you about. Like it was a response to a question about like, oh, you know, how do you handle anti semitism? And I think there are just unfortunately a lot of really dipshit consultants in the Democratic Party who hear the words anti semitism and think you have to talk about Israel, which is really truly and ironically anti semitic of them to think. Like, yeah, I think he was probably told to say that I'm not going to go out on a limb and I guess what his actual beliefs on Israel

Palestine are. But I'm pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb. Yeah, but like I like the but the actual consequences is like he was equating like he was equating BS and anti semitism, he like go you should try to go find the clip somewhere because it's genuinely bizarre and shit. And this is this is the part of the episode where I want to remind people that like, when when when these kinds of people get into power, it is not as good as people think it's going to be like another thing he very like he almost immediately like right after he got elected started trying to convince Biden to have the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which would be a fucking shit show. Yeah. This is Mia from the future here.

Two days after we recorded this, the Democratic Party announced that the 2024 Democratic National Convention will indeed be held in Chicago. So yeah, it's going to suck. That effort predates him like that's already been in the works like he definitely immediately came out and said like yes, I'm in support of this. Yeah, which is like some people don't understand why. Okay, so like what the thing that happens when when when National Convention comes to your city is that your city is occupied by the cops. And then like wherever the convention is happening basically turned into a war zone because anyone who comes out to try to protest them just gets like the shit beaten out of them. Yes. And there's also usually a lot of anti homeless policies that get

rolled out in advance. We actually this is it's not as bad as Sophie talked about with Lula in terms of the World Cup, but it's a similar kind of thing that you get with these kinds of candidates where they they do these sort of like giant they do these sort of like mega project developmentalism shit because they want the status that comes from it and the result is stuff that sucks and that you know, nominally like at least in theory like contradicts the rest of his platform, right? Like this is going to be a thing that brings a lot of cops into the fucking city. He's in theory supposed to be trying to have policing done by like people who are cops. That's going to suck if it works. Yeah. And that is that is your reminder for if you do live in

Chicago like me and I that just because Brandon Johnson got elected does not mean that you get to sit home. Like if you are involved or invested in Chicago progressive politics, just because you have a progressive mayor doesn't mean you get to sit back and relax. You have to do a lot of work to hold these people's feet to the fire. Yeah, like you're like you're you're going to end up fighting these people and it's going to suck and you're going to have to do it like if you if you believe in the things that you think that you claim to believe to and are not sort of just acting out of like, you know, either you're not just purely acting out of sort of candidate loyalty. You were you were going to have to

fight people that you helped get elected. And you could have to start for that. Start for five stages of grief now. Okay, moving, moving, moving on from that shit. Moving on, we need to talk about Wisconsin. The other big election that happened on Tuesday night was an election that flipped the Supreme Court of the state of Wisconsin from a conservative majority and not just like lowercase the conservative but like batshit insane Christian nationalist conservative from a majority of those people to a liberal majority that is hopefully going to make life better for the people of Wisconsin. So for those of you who are not paying attention to this, which is likely even more than the people who were not paying attention

to Chicago because state Supreme Court races, most people, if you tell them about those react with that's a thing. Yeah, and I mean, to be to be fair, to be fair, this is probably the most nationally prominent like state Supreme Court election of my lifetime. That means that maybe four people know about it instead of one. Yes. So on Tuesday night, Janet Protasewicz, who was the Democratic Aligned candidate, beat the Republican Aligned candidate, Daniel Kelly, who was himself a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by 11 points, which is a really big deal because Wisconsin voted for Joe Biden by 0.6 points. So this is very much like landslide level territory for Wisconsin for Wisconsin Democrats. It was very much a perfect storm,

like the areas of the state that have been trending towards Republicans experienced massive reversion back towards Protasewicz and the areas of the state that have historically been Republican also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the single reason it happened, is because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought American gender dynamics back by a solid 75 years. Protasewicz successfully turned the campaign into a referendum on abortion rights, which is why she won by the margin she did. There was huge turnout in Madison, Milwaukee, and college campuses. There were multiple college campuses, I think where there were more votes cast in this state Supreme Court election than there were in the midterms last November.

So this really was like every single thing that possibly could have gone right electorally for the Democrats in Wisconsin did, obviously with very, very like grim background context of the overturning of Roe, but a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement that voters did not forget about Dobbs after the midterms, like this is still an active force in national politics that is pushing people to the left. Yeah, and I want to specifically talk about this for a little bit too, because I think the media has kind of has really, I think, fallen down on the fucking job here, which is that like these people, honestly, like because it's like all the people in the fucking media class are either like themselves are like

hardline anti-abortion ghouls or they're people who this doesn't affect. And, you know, so they just stop giving a shit after like a couple of months because it's like, whatever, who cares. But like this is a if you are living under this, like this is this is like you can't fucking ignore this. No, like it is it is a it is an immense engine of death and human suffering that, you know, it's it's, I mean, this is the US, right? We live under a norm, like we live under a lot of immense sort of engines of death and human suffering, but this is this is a kind of engine that just sweeps through. I mean, it sweeps across the sort of know what you think of as like the quote unquote,

like like traditional, sort of like, I don't know, like, class life is the right thing. But like, you know, it's just a thing that like kind of sweeps across the urban world divide in a lot of ways, like it sweeps across a lot across a lot of the sort of normal political divisions, because the Republicans have been like, their their line on abortion has been hijacked by, I want to say hijacked, right? This is what this is what these people always wanted. But it's it's been it's being set by a bunch of just deranged Christian nationalists whose opinion reflect maybe to like 30% of the country max. Not even that, like the like the ruling of the judge down in Texas on I'm going to mess up how to pronounce this and I apologize. But Mipha Preston, which is

is an abort like a pill that among other things can induce abortions. There was like a Republican judge down in Northern Texas, who attempted who like attempted to overturn the FDA's approval of the drug with the FDA approved this drug in the 90s. And his ruling very much was insane, like on top of just like the superficial insanity of trying to do this. His reasoning was that, you know, this man wrote a ruling saying that the Constitution guarantees fetal personhood, which is a which we you know, would result in a complete and total ban on abortion nationwide under all circumstances. And that's a viewpoint that is shared by less than 10% of Americans. So like, it's just, you know, the Republican Party has gone off the cliff after

they went off the cliff here. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know. I think this whole, I think there's a lot of ways in which this entire sort of election, the election dynamics of this are really grim, because the Democrats are the people who let this shit fucking happen, right? Like for years and years and years and years, they just think, you know, they used abortion as an electoral thing and then did fucking nothing to actually make sure that abortion would be that would be saved. And they finally lost it. And now it's like, you know, it's the thing that's like, like it's the electoral issue that's coming to bail them out of their like electoral woes. And that fucking sucks in a lot of ways. But it also means, I don't know, like it's beating

some of the worst people in the fucking world. If we want to actually make sure that people have the ability to have safe abortions on demand, we are going to have to do a lot of fighting that is not just showing up to these elections. Yes, absolutely. But it is, yeah, no, like like Amiya said, it is really just like heinous that so many of the Democratic Party bigwigs who presided over the 50 years of Republicans saying they were going to do this and not taking Republicans seriously are never going to be held accountable for this. Yeah. And I don't think I need to put it out with this, too, was like the Republicans the entire time we're in every single way they possibly could like outlawing abortion without

literally outlawing it. And people just stood that like the Democratic Party was just like, we don't give a shit like we're not we're not going to like actually like fight this except for occasionally to run a losing candidate, right? Like I don't know. Yeah, no, it's it's insane. And like there are there are people in the Democratic Party who were trying to raise the alarm. Those people were generally ignored. But the, you know, now that abortion rights are gone on a national level, we are seeing this electoral backlash. And it is having the impact of like, you know, Republicans have been unable to effectively make the national conversation about inflation or about crime or about trans athletes, which is also a losing issue for them.

But God knows they keep trying. They have been unable to make the national conversation about those topics because voters are now looking at them like, but you're the freaks that took our abortion rights away. What's wrong with you? And in terms of Wisconsin, pro to say which being on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is almost certainly she doesn't take office until August, which is a really weird amount of time for her to have to wait. Like I don't know why Wisconsin is like that, but it is. But once she is in office, Wisconsin should have restored abortion access, I would say almost immediately, basically, like as soon as someone can file a lawsuit over it, because right now, abortion is currently illegal in Wisconsin under a law from 1849,

that the only exception to the law is to save the life of the mother, which like, I think people who are not personally impacted by the possibility of pregnancy or the possibility of childbirth, I think really don't emotionally internalize what the language around some of these exceptions means. And it's like, if you are hearing the words like the only exception is life of the mother, that's really terrifying, because it means like if you're going to be permanently injured as someone who's pregnant, but you're not literally going to die, abortion is not an option for you. If the fetus that you are carrying, you know, whether you wanted an abortion or not, if that fetus has some kind of fatal defect that is going to mean that your baby dies within hours

or days after being born, and is going to be in pain the whole time, abortion is not an option for you. If you are pregnant because of sexual violence or because of incest, abortion is not an option for you. And it's like, you know, I am a cisgender man, so like I can't personally understand, but like I can only guess how terrifying of a reality that is. And the, you know, the only good news out of this is that once, say, which is an office, that law is probably going to go away as quickly as possible, which is a much needed victory for the people of Wisconsin and hopefully is, you know, carries the momentum forward for like post 2024, hopefully we have a Democratic trifecta again, that can legislate abortion rights nationally and take it out of the ability,

take away the ability for courts to strike it down. There are some other ramifications for the state of Wisconsin that should also be mentioned. For those of you who live in Wisconsin, if I say the words public sector union law, you know what I'm talking about the very infamous law that was passed by Scott Walker back in 2010 2011, I think that really restricted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions and like this sparked a recall campaign against Walker, which failed. And protests say what has said on record, she said it in a campaign appearance, because this race really just discarded all pretensions of like judicial impartiality. But she said in a campaign appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law.

So that law is probably going away, or hopefully will be going away. Wisconsin also has very gerrymandered state legislative maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down the same thing with its congressional maps, which means that Democrats can probably count on two more seats in the House post 2024. And also, on a basic like do we live in a democracy or not level in 2020, when the Trump campaign was filing all of its really idiotic lawsuits alleging voter fraud. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin was the court that came the closest to taking those allegations seriously. They voted by one vote to dismiss the case, because one of the conservatives broke ranks and he has been hounded by the far right in Wisconsin ever since. Wisconsin was one

vote away from just throwing out the popular election results, like the popular vote results. So they're, you know, protests say what's winning is literally an insurance policy for continuing to have the state of Wisconsin be a democracy. Yeah, which is good. Like, I don't know, having having a state that is effectively ruled by dictatorship that was about to attempt to install like a dictator's president is good. Like, I don't know, this is my my my lip take on this is in fact not good when a bunch of people are ruled by just an open dictatorship. Which is essentially what Wisconsin, you know, has been barring Tony Evers' wins as a governor

in 2018 and 2022. Like, until he was in office, like Scott Walker presided over a single party dictatorship in Wisconsin. And so like, you know, which is part of also why protests was able to win by the margins that she did, because, you know, Wisconsin is a swing state. It is reliably going to be close to 50 50. But especially on social issues, it has a liberal majority. And a lot of people paid attention to this race, and they saw correctly the opportunity to dismantle the dictatorship that effectively has had control of Wisconsin for the last decade plus. Yeah. And I mean, you know, the other thing like part of what we have what's happening here is that if conservatives are actually allowed to do uncontested rule in a place that's even like

kind of not just like a 100% like conservative districts, the results that they like the actual policies they put in place are fucking horrifying. Yeah, it's bad. It's like obviously bad. But like you get I mean, you get you get stuff like what happened in Tennessee in the last week, where they the state legislature expelled Democratic lawmakers for like engaging in the mildest of protests against like an open carry bill. And, you know, just in a real cherry on top moment, the Tennessee state legislature only expelled the black legislators who protested and the white legislator who joined them survived her expulsion vote. Because, you know, we don't want to be like the days of the Republican Party not wanting to be too on the nose about the racism

are long gone. Yeah. But yes. So but overall, good things happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday. And some of the really terrible things that were put into law in that state in the last decade are hopefully about to go away. Yeah. There were some other places, mostly in the Midwest, because once again, the coastal regions of the country last down. But there were some other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday. St. Louis, Missouri has had a progressive city council and there was a very strong kind of law and order challenge to that progressive majority based in the city's white majority wards. And after Tuesday night, it's pretty clear that progressives will continue to have a majority on the city council in Kansas City on the other end

of the state of Missouri. We are probably going to get the most progressive city council that the city has ever had there. The main left wing group got all of its candidates through to the general election, which is on June 20. And the main like right wing tough on crime group seems like it's seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats. So, you know, once again, the Midwest is the engine of American progressivism, and the West Coast can suck it. Yeah. There is one more piece of good news, which is that in Illinois, there was a set of far right groups that ran a bunch of school board candidates, like anti critical race theory, anti queer anti trans platforms. And actually, I'll just say the names of the groups because

people should know these groups are awake Illinois Moms for Liberty and the 1776 project. Basically, these groups are, you know, if you went to the south in the 1970s, you had the Klan, and then you had the white citizens council, which was the supposedly more respectable face of white nationalism in the south in the 60s and 70s. And groups like Moms for Liberty and Awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups like the Proud Boys. And very, you know, fittingly with the analogy here, these groups are primarily run and staffed by conservative women, just like white citizens councils were down south about 50 years ago. And thankfully, these candidates almost all went down in flames. I think there is a school board election in me and I's hometown,

which is very notoriously conservative for people in the area. And even in that, you know, our hometown, they've lost. And like these losses extended into downstate Illinois, too. And like, there's a small city called Quincy in Western Illinois, where it's like this is a place that votes Republican routinely by like 30 points, like a 65 percent majority. And these far right school board candidates lost in Quincy, Illinois. So thankfully, people saw through the bullshit and were like, actually, you people are weirdos, and we're not going to hand you power. Yeah. Another thing that was very funny is Carbondale, which is like a very, like this is like, I like this is this is this is a Carbondale is a southern Illinois ass town is like,

not quite as far south, technically speaking, because you can go in Illinois, but like it's close. Yeah, I elected their first trans person to serve in a city council anywhere in Illinois. So like they're they're getting clobbered and fucking Carbondale. Like they had a really really fucking destroyed. And I'm very happy about this because I, you know, a lot of kids are going to grow up in schools that are way less shitty than they were. Yes. Like even when I was there, we're like, God help the generation before us was just like survived shit that like would have killed like me and most of the people I know, like, yeah. Yeah, no, the schools that me and I grew up in were not a great place to be queer or trans. Yeah, any variety.

But I mean, this is also going to help because of I have I still don't know what the Biden administration was thinking about this, but like the new like rule that they're rolling out around trans participation in K through 12 sports through the Department of Education. This got a lot of attention on Twitter in the last couple of days because I'm going to be as charitable as I can here to all of the people involved. But there was a panic on in progressive circles on social media and especially queer and trans circles because the Washington Post decided to frame this rule in like the most like hyperbolic way possible. And this is not me saying that the rule is good because the rule could definitely still be bad.

But the Biden administration is essentially from what I can tell trying to include trans kids in Title Nine protections. The proposed wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs to be improved. But the outcome here can be good in the sense that it would ban blanket prohibitions on trans kids in K through 12 sports. And it would require exceptions to like it would require like any exceptions to pretty much be like, you know, you have to prove that there is a danger to like fair competition here, which is the standard that Title Nine uses for sports for cisgender men and cis or cisgender boys and cisgender girls. So like, can be good. Will, you know, if you are invested in this, the public comment period on that rule is about to open. It's definitely a

place where you should speak up and say like, hey, the wording of this is a little shit. Like, like, let's be clear here that the presumption should be that trans kids should be allowed to participate in on teams that align with the gender they identify as. And thankfully, because a lot of these dipshit school board candidates lost, hopefully, some of these school boards will be taking the right side of history here. Yeah, go go go. Okay, so I'm slightly more angry about this than than you are because I I I I I don't know. I think I think there's a pretty glaring hole in this that lets transphobes just be like, well, obviously. Oh, yeah. And I yeah, I think the wording is is vague. Yeah, it should be made a lot less vague. I think it's bad. I don't know.

I think I think the backlash to the backlash about that went too far of now. There's a bunch of people insisting that this is in fact a really good rule and like, no, like if if it's if it's if it's executed as is, it is going to let a lot of people do a lot of French public shit. Yes, as is it is bad. If they change the word, you know, that it can be better. Yeah, so I'd go yell at Biden until he makes it less shit. Absolutely. Whenever you have to do this. Yeah, if you see him, if you see him walking down the street, yell at him. If you see him in a restaurant, yell at him. Yes. Yeah, very, very genuinely like a it's always a good idea to yell at the Biden administration about anything. But be especially go yell at them about this. This can

be done multiple ways. You can reach out to your congressional representatives and tell them that you want the rule wording made better. You can go there should be soon a direct like form you can fill out on the Department of Education website where you can provide your own personal opinion on the rule. But basically go yell at the Biden administration and tell them to insert language into the rule that makes very clear that the legal presumption that must be overcome should be that trans kids get to compete on the teams of the gender they identify with. Yeah. So yeah. Having now yelled about that for a bit. Yeah, we should I think start wrapping up the last sort of bits of electoral news. Yes. Okay. So the last thing I think we should talk about is probably Denver.

Denver for those of you who do not know me and I, which is probably almost I would hope almost everyone who listens to this. I will die on the hill that Denver is a West Coast city. Is it is not physically on the ocean, but the vibes rancid and like the rest of the West Coast, Denver let us down on Tuesday night. The mayor's election is going to run off between two candidates who both have pretty awful platforms on homelessness. And there is one that is worse. So if you are looking for the candidate to hold your nose and vote for right now, you know, see how it goes. But right now I would say that is Mike Johnson, not because he has anything good to say he's and he doesn't. But because his opponent, Kelly bro says that she would have homeless people

arrested if they refused to leave camps in public parks. So she just fucking blows and she shouldn't be, you know, never be allowed anywhere in your power. The other bit of Denver news I think we should talk about is there was a housing referendum where the proposal was to turn an old golf course that is not currently being used into a housing development that would have I think 25% affordable units. And it would part of it would also be turned into a park. And in truly what I thought was the dumbest thing that happened on Tuesday night, the proposal lost. And the Denver branch of DSA was campaigning against this housing development on the premise that building more housing is bad if someone profits off of it. And I definitely

understand that profit and listen, like profiting off of housing is bad. We also need more housing. And Denver especially desperately needs more housing. And somehow we got this incredibly stupid coalition of nimbies and like green space environmentalists and the Denver DSA that all came together to stop the housing development. And Mia, I'm sure you probably think a little differently about this than I do. But I saw this and I was like, what the hell man? I mean, okay, so here's my I know very little about this might take is it if you have the opportunity to destroy a golf course and you vote no, you are like, as long as you're not literally building a prison camp like reactionary dogs, the bourgeoisie destroy every golf course.

Always a good, you know, that's actually that's pretty good. That's that's a pretty good line. I should start saying it to more people destroy every golf course you can. But yeah, now this it was, I think the most frustrating thing that I saw happen on Tuesday night. And I think it is one of those questions that the left is going to have to deal with in the next couple of years is like, all right, we have a lot of cities that desperately need a lot more housing. So how do we get it done? If you, you know, without just turning it over to the real estate lobby, because obviously that would also be really shitty. But the answer cannot be don't build more housing. Yeah, I mean, the thing I will say about this also is that another answer

is like, you know, we covered this on the show to like the other part of this. If you don't want a city that's just like absolutely horrific, you need to have a strong tennis movement. And you need to need to have tennis movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control and move towards like actively like fighting deceased buildings from like from developers. And that's that's the thing that's happening that there are places where people are doing this. It can be done. Yeah. So yeah, like that, I don't know, like I feel like I don't know, I'm not going to go into my entire thing on the sort of Nibbimi debate other than saying that like increasing the power of tenants will give you a bet will give you the best options.

Yes, very, very much. Tenant unions are good. Yelling at the Biden administration is good. Destroying golf courses is good. And abortion rights are good. Yeah. And go fight for these things and things that aren't elections because every once in a while an election will give you a result, which is the worst person on earth has been replaced by a slightly better person. And, you know, I do like to not be ruled by the worst person on earth, but the ideal political situation is the one where we're not like people cease to rule over us. So yes, no, you got to you got to do the non electoral work alongside the electoral work. You can't just be relying on elections to make things better. You got to be pushing for it all

the time. Yeah. Well, I say, yeah, I am much softer on electoral. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, Mia would rather Mia would rather than everyone doing electoral work start doing better things with their time in her eyes. Yeah. But if you are going to be a person who does electoral stuff like it doesn't it doesn't matter what electoral victories you win if you are just not doing anything that isn't electoral because the actual sort of the actual composition of political power in the city and the sort of the city's class composition, the balance of forces between sort of like, you know, I mean, it seems like between unions and employers, right, like directly between workers and between the employers, there are lots and lots and lots of things

that are very, very important, even if you are an electoralist that are mostly decided outside of almost almost entirely decided outside the ballot box. And if you don't take that into account, and you try to just run like the most well engineered political campaign, you're going to end up like the 2016 Democrats. Yeah. Yeah. Now, everything that Mia just said. And yeah. Yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the longest amount of time I will ever be caught talking about an election that doesn't involve a coup. Yeah, this happened here. Yeah, thanks. Thanks again for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on. And all of you go happen to someone. Some people can't stand the rain. But at Vessie, we can't get enough of it.

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in Canada's largest ever police operation. Cops had spent more than a year following his every move. Because they believed Derek White was a major figure in an international criminal organization. He was the front man, if you will, for the organized crime slash Hell's Angels. Well, see, that's one thing that didn't really do their homework. Now, Derek's fighting his charges in court. His defense relies on his rights as a native person. And the craziest thing, he might actually have a case. It's not only my fight, it's the whole nation's fight. From campsite media and Dan Patrick Productions, this is Running Smoke. Binge all episodes now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Dates don't usually end with a satisfaction survey. And yet, we rate everything in our lives, from Uber drivers to local coffee shops. So why don't we do the same thing when dating? We're here to conduct the ultimate romance review, featuring daters hungry for love who have agreed to call up old flames to gather honest feedback. Welcome to exit interview. He upgraded himself to business class while I was in economy. Wait, wow. What? There's feedback that will make you cringe. She could be a little bit hardheaded, like not reading, the writing on the walls. And feedback that will make you swoon. But she said that she had feelings for you. I had no idea. Really? And maybe you'll learn a thing

or two yourself about how you can be a better dater, lover, or partner. Obviously, like, Nia's going to learn something. I didn't expect this. Welcome to exit interview. Listen to exit interview on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. My chickens just come to me. You don't catch them. You just have to... Yeah. It's love, not coercion. That is how you catch a chicken, which is not what this podcast is about, is it, Robert? No, it's not. No, I'm fortunate. We're doing the catching chickens episode next week. But today, we are joined by three guests. We have Ava, Moe, and Wode. And they're going to be talking to us about solidarity with anarchist prisoners and how you can do that

and why you should do that and why people have been doing that for a long time. So would you guys like to introduce yourselves and just tell us your names and any relevant affiliations and your pronouns? I'm Ava She-Hur. I've been working with June 11th for about a handful of years now and been doing prisoner support for almost 10 years now. I'm Moira Meltzer-Cohen. Everyone calls me Moe. My pronouns are they or Moe. And I'm an attorney and I do a lot of work with political prisoners, people facing politically motivated prosecutions, and incarcerated people who need gender-affirming care. Excellent. Yeah, it's very important, Steph. Hey, my name is Woad. I use he and pronouns. I've been involved in prisoner support for 25 plus years and enjoying

anarchist-related activities for longer than that. So I think if we start off with perhaps explaining like what June 11th is and sort of the history of it, why this is a day that people can show their solidarity with anarchist prisoners, that would be great. And just wonder if you want to talk about that. Yeah, so June 11th started as a day of solidarity with Jeff Lawers when he was serving like a 20-22 year sentence for torching some SUVs. But eventually he was able to get his sentence shortened and he got out. And at that point, Marius Mason and Eric McDavid were in prison with 20-year sentences for eco-sabotage activity or in Eric's case being entrapped for such. And so it eventually changed to be about Marius and Eric after Jeff was released.

And then Eric McDavid also got out of prison and since then it expanded to all long-term anarchist prisoners. I wonder like obviously we're in like April and August people have a few months before June 11th and they might be interested in doing this. They might not know any people directly they're incarcerated or they might not have had any experience with that sort of in their close circles. So like if we start with like how people can show solidarity to incarcerated people, I think that would be great. And so are there like things that people can do? How can they do that like so that people I guess people who are incarcerated can hear them or hear from them? Yeah, I mean writing letters is kind of the classic go-to. There's also ways to communicate

digitally over the phone with people locked up. You know putting money on someone's books goes a long way. Everything is extremely overpriced in prison and monopolized by the corporations that provide those services. But I mean if you're looking for people you have stuff in common where they're particularly political things, kind of carrying on the struggle and including their name in those activities is part of that. And if you are in communication with them, talking to them about those things, getting their input and helping them feel included in those struggles goes a long way. Yeah, I think that's such an important point because like when you're talking about someone for example who's been like entrapped by the Feds or whatever

law enforcement agency was responsible for it, like you're talking about a strategic pattern that the state uses to clamp down on resistance. And the efficacy of that strategy is entirely determined by their ability to kind of break people and to break movements by both making people suspicious of each other and by locking up and damaging the people who are kind of most prone to action. And I think doing stuff like this like not only helps kind of heal the distrust that is inherently planted by the state when they do stuff like this but also helps the people who are kind of most targeted and who have suffered the most for the cause not feel like they're swinging in the wind, you know? Yeah, I think it helps mitigate the fear of repression and

arrest and especially things like terrorism enhancements when people know that like they're not they're not going to be alone when they're in prison even if it is for decades. Like there's going to be people supporting them and writing them and fundraising for them and like including them in their projects like the entire time. Yeah, I would say too that any time a movement or something becomes more effective, they become the focus of the state tends to sharpen on them and a lot of the prisoners that have been supported around the June 11th day of solidarity were involved in environmental animal rights activities that were particularly effective and particularly destructive in a positive sense particularly like the ALF and ELF actions of the

90s brought on this very intense repression in the early 2000s that came to be called the green scare. Yeah, kind of our theme for this year is that that repression like doesn't work. All these like movements and struggles and activities continue even despite that kind of repression like there's still you know activity in defense of the earth and animals and land defense and there's still like really militant clear self-defense and there's still a lot of like a ton of activity against police and against racist police violence and murder and like as much of those as much as those things are repressed like it doesn't stop them and they just keep getting stronger. I think the only thing I would add to that is one of the

most important things about doing political prisoner support or prisoner support in general is that the state really does work to criminalize politically motivated behavior and politically motivated beliefs which functions pretty effectively to distract from the central message of social movements whatever social movement it may be and providing prisoner support and continuing to keep people who are in prison apprised of those struggles continuing to engage in those struggles can really function to refocus on that central message even despite the fact that state repression is a very effective drain on movement resources and a very effective distraction from movement messaging. That is super important like if we look at like

the movement for black lives or the George Floyd uprising however we want to kind of phrase it like the speed and like severity with which the state kind of cracks down on that and attempts to infiltrate it attempted to create suspicion attempted to create fear was like I think most people listening might be familiar with that even if they're not familiar with the the green scare or like previous incidents and it's not just like I know we have people listening in other countries this is not just a America thing right like British cops literally fucking married people in the like in the early 2000s as part of their undercover situation and one of them also went to clown school which is funny that that is a charming story yeah it's one of the

thank you not to refer to the police academy that way yeah I guess they all went to clown school in the sense yeah so yeah we'll do it we'll do our long-promised clown block episode one day but I know you have some insight into Mario's case as his lawyer right so could you explain a little bit about about that case if people can understand like how a politically motivated prosecution works in the ex-supposed justice system that we have so just to clarify I represent Marius now and I do advocacy for him while he is confined I was not his criminal defense attorney so Marius was active in the very late 90s and early 2000s and the investigations that were going on at that time in the state repression that was focused on the movements against environmental

degradation was deep and concerted and went on for many many years and that's sort of what we refer to as the green scare right the criminalizing of environmental movements and I talk about criminalized behavior and criminalized identity a lot so I'm actually just going to take a second and explain what I mean by that yes please so the criminalization of identity refers to where law enforcement in the state are policing monitoring targeting identity rather than unlawful conduct and the criminalization of belief similarly it refers to the state targeting people on the basis of their beliefs rather than on the basis of unlawful conduct so movements social movements there's a very long and well documented history of social movements

being criminalized by the state even in the absence of any unlawful behavior so the movements against environmental degradation were heavily placed targeted infiltrated and many federal grand juries and setups and entrapments and successful prosecutions stemmed from that criminalizing of environmental movements and Marius's case was among those basically the state managed to turn Marius's former partner into an asset and effectively charged him prosecuted him for several acts of politically motivated destruction of property all of which were calculated not to harm human beings he pled guilty and was sentenced in 2009 had his had the offenses to which he pled guilty not

been perceived as politically motivated he would have probably gotten about seven years because the prosecution argued that his behavior was politically motivated which I mean I think is true he was hit with a terrorism enhancement which increased the severity of his punishment on the basis of how serious an offender he was then deemed to be the prosecution asked for 20 years the judge imposed 22 so here's an example of how beliefs are criminalized at his sentencing the judge and the prosecution both invoked and referred to what I think most of us would view as really unremarkable political behavior in ways that that really cast it as very sinister and so Marius's contact with people who were on his

support committee who were engaged in various kinds of civil disobedience about which Marius likely knew nothing was cast as Marius being in continued contact with people engaged in crimes which was a violation or would have been a violation of his bond conditions and on the basis of that claim that Marius was violating his bond conditions by being in touch with these people who again were engaged in what I think most of us would see as completely unremarkable civil disobedience constitutionally protected political behavior this was one of the bases on which the judge imposed this sentence that was even longer than the prosecution had asked for and there's a number of other examples of this kind of criminalization of routine political

behavior one of which is very significant which is that when Marius finally went to prison he started a reading group and based on the content of the books that they were reading he was transferred from a lower security facility pretty close to his family to a facility and not just a facility but a particular wing of a facility which was the administrative segregation unit at FMC Carzwell in Texas which was much much farther from his family and was involved all kinds of extremely stringent conditions that I would argue were first amendment violations so you know we see not only the the really intense surveillance and targeting of social movements but the really disproportionate punishments and sort of retaliatory behaviors all the way down all the

way from investigation to through to incarceration and conditions of confinement. That's atrocious obviously so I wonder like when you receive those like maybe perhaps you should first explain what a terrorism enhancement is in case people aren't familiar. It is a what's called a sentencing enhancement and it allows it authorizes or in some cases requires a judge to impose a harsher sentence for behavior that's intended to I don't remember what the exact language is but it's it imposes a harsher sentence for unlawful acts that are intended to intimidate or coerce the public or public institutions. Okay so that's that's what increased like nitty-triple that sentence in that case yeah and was that

specifically like because he'd expressed like anarchist ideas or just because it was like his actions were in sort of furtherance of that earth liberation front kind of goals. I think it was explicitly because it was an ELF associated action yeah right yeah. It was part of this crackdown on on environmental movements it's similar to what we're seeing in Atlanta right now like right down to the terrorism enhancements. What we're seeing in Atlanta right now is actually a little bit more astonishing just in terms of first of all we're not really seeing it necessarily a terrorism enhancement there is a statute that criminalizes what they are calling domestic terrorism.

It operates similarly right there's a predicate act and then if it's politically motivated you know so you could for example potentially have something like politically motivated trespass right or politically motivated graffiti and they could charge it as domestic terrorism. The enhancement is a sentencing mechanism but it certainly is not new. What we're seeing in Atlanta I would say is it is remarkable but it is a continuation of the same kind of targeted policing efforts to chill social movements efforts to disrupt social movements to isolate people to fractionate movements. It's the same kind of thing that we have seen really since the beginning of policing in this

country and that makes a lot of sense when you consider like the the role of the police within the state and the goals of some of these social movements right which we're pretty to have to explain that in detail for people to understand what's going on. So like with these people facing you mentioned a couple of the other people who who had faced political prosecutions and were incarcerated and then had their sentences reduced and maybe we could explain like how that was able to happen right because that's obviously like a desirable outcome. I don't know the like the legal things that happened for that but it was like a it was like in the courtroom kind of a solution. Okay yeah I'm curious just kind of in

general since you've all had more contact with these folks who are incarcerated and have been kind of the victims of this this state violence when they talk about like what is kind of meaningful to them in terms of outside connections in terms of like you know what we're talking about here what kind of stuff do they bring up as like having a positive impact on on their mental health on their kind of ability to endure what they're what they're going through. First I would say that communication is a big thing like being able to talk to people to write with people and you know a long term like regular correspondence is great but even just like little messages of solidarity can be really meaningful. Material support is always huge like that's going to make somebody's time a little bit

better if they can get stuff off a commissary you know by enough stamps all those things. But a thing that I hear a lot is like people want to see the the projects and the struggles that they're involved in continue so if that's like defense of the earth if that's against the police or or whatever it is like people like to see that because it's you know it's not just about their own case but yeah about those movements that they come from and or somebody's you know radicalized inside these things that they have committed to and been written from participating in in a huge way not entirely but you know people like to see to see that continue and see see victories see like creative attempts and things like that. That makes a lot of sense I think.

So for people like I know like I'll sometimes write to incarcerated people for like various things and it can be quite difficult to like to work out the process of doing that and and it can be especially difficult and it was especially difficult during during like the the worst of the COVID kind of lockdowns and such and like you couldn't I was trying to write to a guy in one federal in Tahoe and they wouldn't let the person email me because they claimed that the keyboard was like a high-touch surface and this yeah right like and which people were getting COVID in in this facility all the time. But how would folks go about like let's say they wanted to to write to Marius and just say like you know we wanted to express the solidarity and and say sucks

that this is happening to you or whatever how would they go about doing that? There's a couple of things that are specific with Marius that I will want to tell you but you can go to if you google inmate locator BOP you can search Marius's name or the name of any other prisoner and you'll basically end up with it'll show you their information including where they are confined and you can usually click on the name of the facility and it will take you to the website for that facility and show you how to send mail to the prisoner. There's also if you go to nycabc.wordpress.com or any of the other anarchist black cross websites. NYC ABC is my home chapter so that's the one I'm familiar with. But if you go to the anarchist black cross websites there are zines and I think

a whole list that is pretty well updated of all of the anarchist political prisoners and instructions on how to write to them. One of the things that is on those websites that I would highly encourage you to take seriously are instructions about how to responsibly write to people who are under increased monitoring and surveillance while they are being confined because retaliation against prisoners even for things that the prisoners themselves have not done is very commonplace and so if somebody well we very much want to make sure we keep in touch with people and give them news of the outside world including news about their social movements one thing that can happen is that those letters simply will not be delivered

and another thing that might happen is that the prisoner themselves may face disciplinary consequences formally or informally just as a result of having been the intended recipient of that news. So you know I would say as I often say discretion is the better part of valor in this instance. I think you have to have a kind of a first do no harm attitude about this where like at at the end of the day regardless of like your anger or your desire to talk about you know certain things your primary concern here has to be not making things worse for somebody who's already in a terrible situation. Yes and and I would also like to point out that prisoner mail is monitored and so among other things you might be making things worse for yourself.

So I would be cautious and circumspect about what you write to people whose mail is being read. The other thing is with respect to Mars in particular unfortunately in order to get mail to him you still have to dead name him and if you want to hear more about that particular set of struggles I'm happy to talk about it but suffice it to say for now that if you go to supportmariusmeson.org there should be some instructions about how to write to him and I'll make sure that the support group puts up clear instructions but unfortunately you do have to put his dead name on that envelope or it will not get to him. It's extremely frustrating but yeah it could be really annoying especially if you're trying to look for somebody

using the locator and it has a gender notifier and then it's not the correct gender notifier and yeah that can be difficult but like yeah it's an effort worth making right and it really can help someone who's going through a difficult time. Yeah and people do have really specific interests apart from movement work as well and you know Marius paints he sent me this incredible he sent me a number of paintings over the years. I have one actually that I think I shared with you earlier of Sackle and Danzetti that he made. He sent me a really great portrait of Jimmy Page once. He also recently sent me a beautiful scarf that he had knitted or crocheted I guess. People have hobbies people have interests and they're happy to talk about those things as

well. Yeah that's what makes us like a whole person right and I think having a little bit of that helps you to keep that little part of yourself in a work could be a difficult place so yeah hopefully people can send crochet letters should we have some keen crochet listeners. This is probably the part of the podcast where we stop and make ourselves amenable to capitalism by doing an ad break. I wonder like what can people do on June 11th right obviously like people should keep on this ongoing correspondence I think that's really important and I was speaking to someone from the Leonard Peltier Free Leonard Peltier group the other day and I know a lot of people write to Leonard Peltier and like I know that that's a great source of like strength for

him especially as he's like aging in prison. I was wondering what people could do on June 11th like to sort of further discourse spread the word take actions to solidarity kind of things to people do. June 11th activities you know actions in solidarity really run the gambit you know it's been very popular to have like a barbecue or a benefit show, things to raise money and then there's actions that more have more in common with why some of these people were incarcerated and like if you check the website June11.org is a list of previous actions that people have taken and the whole gambit of activities that you know people have participated in. I know with the revitalization of this as like an international day of solidarity

there was an interest in trying to think outside the box more you know it's it's difficult to like no one's going to reinvent the wheel or you know maybe that's as much as they're doing but but there's a variety of different activities and last year's theme was sort of like doing something different than you might normally do to just diversify what is happening. One of my dreams for June 11th is for it to be an opportunity for you know our movement prisoners to be integrated into other things so it's you know it doesn't have to just be oh this is like the prisoner support activity or like we're just going to write letters but you know people do things like art shows like Mo mentioned like a lot of people paint a lot of people write poetry and to

integrate that into like maybe already have like you know a community around poetry readings or something like that and just to bring that into into whatever like little corner of the world or whatever kind of activities that we're already involved in for these things to like reference each other right like we reference our prisoners and they can reference these things that are happening outside that are like integrating them. One of the things that since I've been involved a lot of times we try to elicit or solicit statements from the people we represent I have been to a number of really wonderful June 11th activities that have included an art show a number of punk shows in various people's basements and I think as just an individual I mean first

of all I think it's a great opportunity to do community building to do letter writing but I think it's also something that even if you are you know relatively isolated you know you can just make a commitment today I'm going to send five bucks to somebody's commissary. Yeah I think I was looking back at one of Marius's previous June 11th statements and one of the things he referred to was a civil rights attorney that he'd worked with was asked you know what does the movement need most and he responded everything is everything meaning you know anything any advocacy that you do in one area will redown to the benefit of all of the rest of us and all of the other areas and I have found that to be true and I have found that specifically to be true even

in terms of the legal effects of doing advocacy for Marius has had really huge benefits for other trans folks who are in prison who I've represented and then doing advocacy for those folks has had really incredible benefits for Marius so I mean I think it is materially the case that you know you struggle where you are you do what you can on June 11th or any other day and you know you move the needle. Yeah I think that's very well said. Yeah absolutely. You know June 11th is specifically for people who have long sentences and that's really about like the increased risk of just kind of like falling to the back burner as there's new like waves of struggle and you know new emergencies and crises all the time this is an opportunity to like really take

a moment to really focus on that memory and so I hope with June 11th we can like kind of build bridges like generationally you know like I wasn't really around with Marius you know during the green scare and Marius got arrested and it's something that I learned about and got involved in later and I hope that you know with new people that we meet and new people who like we share projects with we can tell them about our prisoners and also you know where where I happen to live there's occasionally meet somebody who used to know Marius from you know 20 years ago and so kind of in both directions like into the past and into into the future like yeah just trying to spread awareness about these people yeah I think that's yeah I think it's it's so important to look at this

as part of a long struggle and that's you know what you and Moira are both talking about in terms of it's it's building connections it's it's kind of this like the sedimentary layer that that creates the actual foundation for positive change and you know we have there's this kind of Hollywood brain thing I think we all have where we get bent out of shape when when change doesn't kind of come and in the the form of these kind of calamitous moments and and kind of culminations of struggles and stuff but it's it's you know the the process of winning is the process of like part of it is the process of showing up for the people who are casualties you know who are being who are being who are suffering the most for it and part of

it is kind of the the the the way in which that allows you to kind of build networks of solidarity that are the necessary foundation for continuing the struggle. Absolutely I would say that in the years that I've been doing this work one of the most important parts of it is being really consistent in showing up for the people who are who are being horrendously punished because that's the only way that everybody understands that they will be taken care of right but speaking of winning I do have an update if you have a second on another June 11th prisoner Eric King from my beloved colleague Sandy Freeman who represented him successfully recently and got a not guilty verdict for him after he was charged with assaulting a corrections officer

which is I mean if you know anything about federal indictments a magnificent coup so Eric currently has a clan act conspiracy in Bivens lawsuit pending against more than 40 state defendants his team is trying to achieve release from the ADX via a writ of habeas corpus he's not currently getting access to communications visits or programming but he is still strong and resilient and his recent victories are an object lesson in the fact that we really can fight back and win please donate to his support fund and please uplift what is happening because this is the future for anti fascists in the Bureau of Prisons nevertheless we do continue to struggle and sometimes even to win and I think our stories of triumph

are not frequently enough told and so one thing that we could do this June 11th is try to gather all of those stories and make sure that those stories do get told I think it's really important like you said to see these little victories and like not to see it as distinct from a broader struggle like if we want to do anarchism and build ways of taking care of each other outside of the state then we need to take care of people who are victimized by the state and like if this is part of doing that we're proving we can do it by doing it right and like Robert said like we're not going to storm the winter palace necessarily yeah like we can build up power in different ways and this is a way of doing that I'm thinking of like more international like cases I know

for instance that where I come from the British government fucking loves to put people who volunteered to fight for the ypg in prison or their parents if they send them money for food which yeah great country but I know that like all over the world like in Spain and Catalonia where I've lived like this is a thing too so are there any other like international cases that you want to sort of draw attention to very currently right now Alfredo Caspino in Italy is has been on hunger strike since October against the particularly isolating and particularly repressive 41 peace prison what he calls a non-life in there it's a prison that was primarily used against mafia bosses but you know in the classic state misinterpreting anarchism has considered Alfredo a leader and particularly

and so locked him away without access to almost any means of communication and so he's had a lot of health problems as a result of this you know he was originally locked in for shooting a nuclear executive in the knee after some particularly callous remarks from him following the Fukushima disaster and that nuclear companies has ties with like the you know the larger war machine the manufacturing of weapons for war and you know he's caught other charges while being in prison for previously alleged activities including just being an anarchist essentially kind of what you talked about straight criminalizing political sensibilities you know Italy has been doing that Chile has been doing that previously against people like Monaca Caballero and Francisco Solar

who have been in and out of prison for years now and are currently facing more charges for allegedly sending bombs to police training facilities and such down in Chile and in your own England Toby Shown is someone who got out recently after being receiving terrorist charges for allegedly being involved in an anarchist website called 325 and and financing terrorism through like accepting donations for their work and things like that but he did not get convicted of that he only got convicted of some minor drug charges and so he's been released to kind of a halfway house now but they continue to try to mess with his terms of release because of his politics because he's an anarchist and unrepentant they continue to try to mess with

them essentially. On the website June11.org there's a page with information about a lot of prisoners both in the US and internationally you know a little bit about them most of them it has their address if there's a support site with more information that's linked to it as well. Okay that's a good place for people to look and anything else you guys wanted to get to to discuss issues for incarcerated anarchist people or I guess other ways to support incarcerated people? I guess I would like to remind your listeners that all prosecutions are political and that people who are locked away in you know the cages that are the federal facilities and the state and local and county facilities are all dealing with the same kinds of isolation and deprivations

and a lot of them have even less support than some of our long-term anarchist political prisoners and so you know I understand this is a program about June 11th and of course I want to uplift June 11th but I would also like to suggest that to whatever extent you can get involved in just prisoner support I think that more support for more prisoners is always a good thing. Yeah yeah. Be in the streets in whatever by whatever means fighting the society that makes prison a necessity is is the longer game right? Yeah you know related to what Mo was saying I wanted to mention another long-term anarchist prisoner Michael Kimball who is in Alabama and just thinking about like how supporting him has resonated to like so many other people in

prison in Alabama like the way that he has been able through the support of you know some of his friends on the outside then support like so many other queer people that he's with in Alabama and been able to like collectively organize and like share radical history like you know they have a have a role in it too and and our support for them can like resonate far beyond just an individual. Yeah I think that's a great point. Yeah and other things to mention we are we have a fundraising goal for Marius this year of $2,500. We're trying to get some bookstores on board to you know have some June 11 stickers donate a little bit of money so go to your local bookstore, info shop, red space etc. Nice is there any any other like resources you guys

wanted to plug? Social media is anything that people can follow to find out? You can follow Marius's support on Twitter at at support Marius there's also an Instagram that I think is at support Marius Mason. I would also like to plug the concept of not talking to cops. Smart. June 11 also has some social media presence there's really only regularly active on on the mastodon account and it's just at June 11 at June 11. Yeah that was fantastic thank you very much guys really appreciate your time. Some people can't stay in the rain but at Vessie we can't get enough of it that's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech so when everyone else is staying in you're getting

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did and really do their homework. Now Derek's fighting his charges in court his defense relies on his rights as a native person and the craziest thing he might actually have a case. It's not only my fight it's the whole nation's fight. From campsite media and Dan Patrick Productions this is Running Smoke. Binge all episodes now on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Dates don't usually end with a satisfaction survey and yet we rate everything in our lives from Uber drivers to local coffee shops so why don't we do the same thing when dating. We're here to conduct the ultimate romance review featuring daters hungry for love who have agreed to call up old flames to gather honest feedback. Welcome to exit interview. He upgraded

himself to business class while I was in economy. Wait wow. What? There's feedback that will make you cringe. She could be a little bit hard headed like not reading the writing on the walls. And feedback that will make you swoon. But she said that she had feelings for you. I had no idea. Really? And maybe you'll learn a thing or two yourself about how you can be a better daters lover or partner. Obviously like Nia is going to learn something. I didn't expect this. Welcome to exit interview. Listen to exit interview on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello podcast fans. It's just me today. It's just James and we're doing another episode about the border. I'm joined today by Emmett and David from the Borderlands

Relief Collective. And we're going to talk a little bit about people doing mutilate on the border, the situation on the border and for those of you who live a long way away from it and a sort of pretty shitty thing that Border Patrol did to some supplies which were left out on the border earlier this month. So yeah, Emmett and David, if you'd like to sort of introduce yourself and explain a little bit about the roles you play, that would be great. Hey there. I'm happy to be here. My name is Emmett. I am splitting my time between being a geochemist, a transcription session oceanography, being a PhD student and trying to reconcile what it means to be living in this Borderlands and being a part of a community that is partially criminalized, depending on who you

were, where you come from, and also what it means for you to seek safety and freedom in your life. So I work in several organizing spaces, trying to shut down different detention centers, as well as supporting folks just make ends meet in San Diego and also supporting people keeping their lives and staying alive in this extreme borderlands that we live on. Hey, my name is David. My job, I work as a surgeon. I've been living in San Diego for about 10 years and I've been doing humanitarian volunteer work in the Borderlands, which we call doing water drops for something like six years. I got started with Border Angels and also did volunteer work with Border Kindness. I highly recommend that organization and more recently

have been doing water drops in a mountainous area between San Diego and TJ with friends. And we just recently found a name for our group and it's Borderlands Relief Collective. Great, yeah. And I think maybe, I think if people think of San Diego, they think of like the zoo and maybe SeaWorld and the beach and all that kind of shit. So can you explain what it's like? I've spent a lot of time in the area where you guys do water drops. Can you explain what it's like and why it's such a difficult area to pass through for people who are trying to move north? Well, yeah, San Diego, as you said, people think of the beach, but actually I think someone told me that San Diego County has some of the most diverse kind of ecosystems of any county

in the so-called USA. We have high mountains where it snows when it gets cold out. We have low deserts where it routinely exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, I mean 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime. And as far as the geography of migration, it really goes back to, you know, it's a direct consequence of federal border policy. I think many people will be familiar with the term prevention through deterrence, which is sometimes elaborated as prevention of migration through environmental deterrence. And the whole concept is going way back to Clinton administration, the areas of the border near cities like San Diego were increasingly militarized with high border fans, intense patrol by armed officers,

and increasingly recently electronic surveillance with the idea of relying on the extremely harsh terrain of the deserts and mountains to form a kind of a natural defense. But they quickly found out within, you know, basically the first year or so of that federal policy that numbers of people crossing the border did not decrease. However, deaths skyrocketed. That's something we understood, you know, people in Washington DC understood many, many years ago, but the policy persists. So the bottom line is people who are crossing the border from Mexico to the USA often resort to crossing in the most remote and dangerous areas of the border. So the area that we're going to be talking about this mountainous region between San Diego and Tijuana

are literally folks are going up and over the tallest mountain in the area, literally up and over the mountain of extremely arduous walk. And when we do these water drops, we're well rested, we hike all day, and we come home exhausted. And we look at our Gaia apps and find that we've only hiked a very small portion of the actual total journey. And we're always humbled by just the resilience and determination of people who do this crossing. Yeah, it's another thing I think people don't realize is that the amount of like physical just difficulty that people have to endure coming here is immense. And of course, the reason that people are willing to take those risks is because it's not like they come from a place of safety, right? It's not, it's not, it's

not like they, you know, the reason they're willing to take risks is because it's a risk. Being where they were is a risk. I think a lot of people will maybe have become more engaged with border policy during the Trump era, certainly like the like legacy media narrative focused on the border very briefly, like maybe it peaked around the midterms in 2018, I think. And then people have lost a lot of interest since then. So for those of us who live on the border, it's remarkable how little has changed, I think. Maybe it's not particularly remarkable because I don't think we really expected it to. But like, can you explain what if anything has changed since 2021, and how things have sort of remained the same in many ways?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And it brings up a lot of the political nature, or kind of skewed identity based conversations that exist in migration. And obviously, there's a lot of rhetoric that is quite hyperbolic around the so called morality of people who are migrants in general, and then kind of categorizing certain people as worthy or not worthy of entrance into the so called nation. And kind of furthermore, what does it mean for people to believe any of those narratives and then support them at a federal political level? And as you're saying, during Trump era, there was a lot of conversation in response to very, very hateful rhetoric from Trump administration targeted at certain people, but not from a deep place of

really understanding or characterizing the conversation in general, or speaking by the fact that in San Diego, or in California at large, more than half of the farm workers who kind of create this city that we are, or the state that we are, and support the very backbone of the fact that we're all still having our hearts beat, our migrants, and that our economy at large, as well as just the fabric of our nation, is based on migrants and immigration. So for us to pick and choose what that looks like is not only missing the majority of the point, but is using as a talking piece, is really as a talking piece for certain identities to feel vindicated, to spend money and support certain for profit corporations. For example, Core Civic, one of the largest

prison corporations, prison corporations in the country, got $1.9 billion a previous year from the federal government. And therefore, like you think about the connection between these enterprises, and stories about immigration are quite linked. So I don't have all the statistics in front of me about how the specific number of crossings has changed, or the population has changed, but on the whole, nothing has really changed as far as the need goes. So thinking about four years ago, what were the specific crises that were occurring, that were causing people to seek safety in the United States? Maybe some specific decisions have changed, and others have risen. And as more and more people are coming to the United States, fleeing from climate-related

disasters, as well as ongoing stability, it's not as if the US has engaged in any real project to support people to begin with, or understand the underlying causes. So from that standpoint, nothing meaningfully has happened from either administration to really understand or create policies that would support anyone seeking safety or from making decisions that are quote-unquote aligned with US best interests. It's never been a part of the conversation. It's more to basically capitalize off of people in their suffering, whether that be to be a story line that US is helping people, or is a savior of others, or is trying to crack down on armed bandits or criminals who are crossing this borderland. I think it is worth... The course of

example is really interesting, because Biden made a big thing of talking about shutting down quote-unquote private prisons, but it's still very much funding the same things when they're dot for people who are citizens of this country. Yeah, and for those who aren't fully versed in the basic relationship between private prisons and immigration, there is a relationship between customs and border protection and different prison corporations to basically put people who are apprehended, who are not initially deported under Title 42 in detention while their cases are ongoing and investigated, or asylum, or refugee status. And so these prisons make a profit and can basically

demand a certain amount of money from the government per person who is in one of their facilities. And there's also a minimum that they will continually get money from the government regardless of whether the beds are filled, but they have an incentive to keep beds filled. So there is an economic relationship between these corporations and the government to basically put more people in detention. So that's a huge underpinning of this whole conversation is who is getting money and how does it further the certain aims of corporations, but also agencies that basically get a larger amount of federal funding through apprehension of people. Right. Yeah, like Biden has funded DHS more than Trump did, like DHS's budget.

Just Department of Homeland Security of which customs and border protection is a part, border patrol is a part of customs and border protection. It's a giant pyramid of people put in people in prison. And it's also worth reinforcing, I think, for people that these people have done nothing wrong at the point in which they are incarcerated, right? Like they have obeyed all relevant laws and are getting in conditions which we've decided not befitting prisoners in the United States, but are okay for these people, not that anyone should be incarcerated. But yeah, there's still a two tier system. So can you explain a little bit about your efforts to do mutual aid and to like do a little bit of kindness on the border and make

things a little bit better out there for people who are coming north? Yeah, what we do, again, just is in collaboration with other organizations that have been around a long time, a lot longer than we have, border angels, border kindness in California, no more deaths in Arizona, many other organizations. And it really boils down to, we don't want people to die on the trails crossing through the borderlands. And that actually informs where we drop. Unfortunately, all of our recent new routes that we supply, they're directly because we know that people have died in those locations or required rescue. We work in very close relationship with other volunteer organizations that focus on search

and rescue and search and recovery, search and recovery, meaning recovering human remains of people who have died. So there's a number of outstanding organizations that operate in California, Arizona, Texas. These include Eagles of the Desert, Armadillos, many other organizations. Most of these are actually made up of volunteers who are first generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And so when people die or require rescue, we do find out from our friends and comrades in these SAR organizations, and we build water drop routes directly around that knowledge. So yeah, it really boils down to, yeah, we don't want more people to die making this journey. And so as far as what kind of supplies we leave, it's what we think may make a difference. We leave bottles of

water, energy drinks like electrolyte, Gatorade and so on, cans of food with pop tops, all kinds of cans of fruit, beans, chili, whatever we think people may need. Of course, we tailor it based on the time of year. In the mountains in the winter, it gets freezing cold, lots and lots of rain. So we've been leaving waterproof ponchos, warm clothing. And the summer, of course, it gets scorching hot in the desert. People die of hyperthermia. They literally cook to death. That's where electrolytes come in handy. Sun hats, bandanas, baseball hats, first aid kits. We leave kits full of medical supplies. And more recently, just observing the kind of used items that we find on the trail. Kids stuff, diapers, pacifiers. We leave tampons,

that kind of stuff, containers of infant formula. So it's kind of an iterative process, just leaving what we think people need. And yeah, that's kind of what we do. And just so folks are super clear, this is all like an initiative among you and your comrades, right? You're not supported by any government entity. The government entity is kind of doing quite the opposite of what you're doing. Yeah, correct. We are all volunteers in the sense that nobody is paid. We don't have any formal affiliations with any other NGOs, much less governmental organizations. Right. So maybe people are wondering, they might have been familiar with the court case in Arizona, or they might not be like, if what you're doing is considered to be legal humanitarian

aid or not. Are you comfortable talking about that? Yeah, so I think that's definitely a gray area that we find ourselves really occupying. And I think that's a bit of this kind of propaganda machine is what does it mean to engage with somebody who is seeking safety and fleeing for their lives? There's a certain place where that's touted to be a wonderful thing if you're Catholic charities and are providing beds. And for example, I wanted to make that distinction between several kind of charity organizations who do receive federal money to be engaged in this conversation versus grassroots mutual aid networks and communities who are doing this because it feels like it's part of their community's mission, their family's mission, or it means it's part of

them being true to themselves and true to what feels just in this very confusing world. So what we're doing is very explicitly leaving humanitarian aid supplies that are potentially life-saving in areas where we know people need them. We are not having any specific or hands-on or person-to-person engagement with anybody. So in Arizona, Nomas Muertes became part of a conversation about providing critical medical support. And that was a court case that really tested the limits of what it meant to be in this gray area. And what was really important from the nuances in that conversation were what constitutes aiding and abetting, or so-called aiding and abetting of illegal immigration, which is basically, again, a very large gray area

between are you enticing people to cross? Are you being paid as a smuggler to cross? Are you doing something which is encouraging people to cross? None of which was activity that was engaged with Nomas Muertes or us. But in their case, specifically providing medical aid across the boundary, and they were raided, their camp and their impromptu field tents, where they were providing life-saving medical support, where it was raided. And kind of the finer points of that were that the outset being that the First Amendment protects humans in their religious freedom to practice whatever it be that furthers their religious beliefs and faith. And a very large point of their work was their affiliation and dedication to preserving human

life, which as we can imagine for many folks listening to this or in general, that is very core to their belief system. And so there are very clear protections in the First Amendment of preserving people's right to practice their religion. So that was a case that kind of established a lot of what we're working under is these basic protections to be humanitarian aid workers following basic belief systems. What we're doing specifically is leaving supplies. So leaving supplies, the most egregious thing you can basically say about that is that we're littering or that we're abandoning property. And so again, Nomas Muertes and in this larger conversation was established in the court that leaving humanitarian aid supplies that were with

the intent of saving lives is not litter. So that was also a very big point, which is saying no, we are not just kind of walking down the street and throwing out your bottle in the back of your truck. This is specifically with the intent of saving lives. And the third place is that we are abandoning something in this area that would be constituted abandoned property. And as we'll speak about in the future, our supplies are consumed quite rapidly. And there is a statute in this state of is it abandon property has to be has to be left for more than 10 days to be considered abandon property. So even if we are leaving things in these regions, it is not considered abandon property. It's been less than 10 days. So basically, I guess, just to say that nothing

we're doing is illegal from any standpoint, and also the case in Arizona kind of helped make a distinguishing makes some distinctions between whether our activity is is also frowned upon in public land, which is not because it is constituting humanitarian aid in a place that is desperately needed. Right. And I think if folks go out to like, I mean, most people aren't going out to like Valley of the Moon or what have you, but like if you want to look for abandoned stuff there, it's not hard to find. And it's not you guys doing that, like shooting barrels or whatever of it. Someone was shooting a barrel last time I was out there. Let's talk about how quickly those supplies are consumed. Because I think, again, that will be like news to some people,

right? Like, you guys are out there every week. And like, how much stuff you dropping and how quickly does it go? Yeah, to tell you the truth, we're still we're still finding out ourselves because every time we think we know the answer, we're surprised by how fast it's being consumed. The bottom line is what it's being consumed as fast as we can leave the supplies. So Emmett and I and many other of the members of our organization, Borderlands Relief Collective, we also are active in Border Kindness and in the past with Border Angels. And so we're used to a certain rhythm of doing a water drop, circling back usually a month later. And we're happy if maybe half of the supplies have been consumed. That's a good day. When we started doing water drops in

this mountainous region, first of all, we were just blown away by the evidence of heavy foot travel. I mean, these are, even though you'll never find a hiker, a recreational hiker on these trails, they look like like established trails, they're worn in trails. And when we started doing these water drops, there's just a river of discarded water bottles, clothing, food, wrappers, and just things that we have never seen before, that amount of human activity, literally on the top of a mountain where you never would think, why would someone cross over a top of a mountain to get from point A to point B? So like I said, we're still learning what the proper interval is. Some of these locations that we drop, we come back a week later, and they're

pretty much 100% consumed. So yeah, we really, it's become apparent. We have been having a lot of discussions that we're very eager in trying to expand our number of volunteers, because the more we do this in this mountainous region, the more we learn how pressing the need is. So we're having a hard time just supplying essentially one path that goes up and over the mountain. And we know that this is just one of many paths that are used by people in this region. So really, we're finding 100% consumption every week or two at most of our drop spots. Yeah. So if people did want to, we could just get that in here now, if people did want to help you and they're in the region, would they be able to sort of where they could reach out?

Yeah, sure. We just, like I said, we just came up with our name after a fun communal decision-making process. And we just a couple of days ago did our first post on social media. So if anybody's on Instagram, just search for Borderlands Relief Collective and click on the email and send us a DM, get in touch. If you're anywhere near the San Diego, we'd love to talk to you. And definitely would like to expand the number of volunteers. So you spoke a little bit about, like we spoke about this Arizona case, right, where people got raided. I know you guys have also had some less than stellar interactions with CBP Border Patrol specifically. And I get really mad if I call it Customs of Border Patrol because it's Custom and Border Protection.

So you guys had a thing last month now in March. Do you want to explain a little bit about what happened in the incident, first of all? Yeah, so as part of our, so I think as we already talked about, we go out every weekend. And that's, again, we're all busy lives. Dave is literally a surgeon. And we're basically trying to find a time that we can get people together to go out there. So we pick the weekends. And we have a changing number of people who are able to be out there with us. So as one of our normal water drop weekends, a route that starts basically at a road that is along the ridge of Otai Mountain, we start hiking down the south side towards the border. And I've established multiple routes along that path. And this one particularly is

so slow going. You only go a couple of miles, and it takes you most of your Saturday because of how steep it is, how thick the brush is, and also kind of, as Dave was saying earlier, even in the middle of daytime with hiking boots, it's really treacherous. And we've spent a lot of time making sure that we're safe in the process of going there ourselves. So as we left our first drop, and then a second, and I went down to our final drop and turned back, sorry, going back up the mountain. And we came to our second drop site. And as we arrived, we found something that was kind of really hard to process at first for us, which was that every single item that we had purposefully put inside of a crate, and we had counted,

and we had a left as we do, was scattered and littered across the ground. We had left more than 20 liters of water, and every single bottle of water was opened and dumped out and thrown indiscriminately around this site. We had left, again, something like 20 cans of food, beans, tuna, condensed milk, fruit, and every single can had been opened and had been, in its contents, thrown around the area. We had left bags of socks and hats, and those were covered in beans and fruit, and again, thrown into bushes, they could not be used. We had hand warmers, because it's very cold, and hand warmers are essential to kind of keep mobility. And every single one was diligently opened, as if someone had really enjoyed taking time

opening it and thrusting into the dirt. And that was something that was so painful and just confusing, very demoralizing, as you can imagine, after just hiking that far. But more so, it felt so deliberate and hurtful. And initially, we're, of course, wondering what had happened. We've done this for several years, many years, and never had we seen something like this before. And it became very apparent that someone had deliberately destroyed our crate. Even the crate itself, this milk carton, was smashed in half. The bottom of it was torn out. And that is something that's very hard to achieve. Milk cartons are not very light, thin plastic. This was someone who had actively put a lot of force into smashing a milk cart, so that nothing was

left behind. On the way down, one thing that I didn't say a second ago was that we had seen an agent on the trail, which was unique for us, because normally they're just in their cars with binoculars looking from the road. So we had seen someone near the trail, but lost track of them earlier, and we had kind of put it out of our minds. So after this happened, we had kind of put two together, and we're wondering if this agent had followed us down the trail to the site. And then while we had left, stayed behind and destroyed the goods. It seemed like the beans were still drying, and the fruit was still drying in the sunlight, so it hadn't have been too far from the time that we had dropped initially. And this is at a moment that there was five of us and trying

to figure out what it meant for us to deal with this. Two of us, including myself, raced ahead to try to see if we could interact with whoever has upped the trail, knowing that they couldn't have been too far away. Not with any specific plan other than just ask them, what did they do, and why did they do that? Just in the sense of outrage, the sense of moral corruption that someone would destroy this in a time that the CBP, as well as we know, that people are losing their lives because of lack of access to these very goods that were destroyed. Yeah, so we raced back as fast as we could. It was about a 45-minute hike back up, and we were really breathless and almost kind of feeling sick to our stomachs because we

were both outraged and also hikes faster than we should have. And just as we had gotten back to our cars, kind of giving up hope that we'd interact with them, we saw two agents in their cars kind of pull away, and we flagged them down and got in front of them and kind of motion for them to come back so we could speak to them. And I'm not saying we're the most savvy people, but we basically ramped them and said, did you destroy our supplies, which they acknowledged that they did, and only afterwards were we able to get our wits together to start recording them. And as we were here in the audio, they acknowledged the fact that they knew where our site was, and they acknowledged the fact that they regularly destroy goods. And for us, the entire

interaction was just so sickening. First of it, after a while, there was five of them with their guns and their large guns out, as well as their basic intention to use intimidation, their sheer numbers, as well as this kind of perverse authority they have as the sole agents in charge of this public land. This is wilderness and BLM land, in which they have no authority over us, yet use this sense of just power and ability to cause harm to minimize anybody else being able to advocate for themselves. So we tried to stop them from doing that, and I kept asking them, did you destroy our water and why did you do that? And is that within your job description? Because there was something very clear to them, to us, that they didn't even know what their legality was.

They kept trying to deflect it, the conversation saying, oh, migrants are leaving trash all the time and referring to people as illegal aliens with this kind of larger rhetoric is saying that they're trashing the mountainside. It's their fault. And as we repeatedly asked them, did you destroy our water? And they repeatedly said, well, have you seen what they do? And then kind of also saying, well, yeah, we try to clean things up. We try to pick them up, but that specific site was too far. So we just left it. We just destroyed it and left it, which as on the on the piggybacking on their conversation about this trash and that we're littering, and they're accusing us of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, they basically

have nothing left to say about what their actions meant. And without their their purview, their mandate of their jobs. And it was an act you could tell they were uncomfortable with because they were not within their job description. And we asked for their supervisor, they said they're going on the phone supervisor, the supervisor never materialized. And we can only assume that they had a conversation with somebody in a superior saying back down, what you're doing is, is, is, is not correct and don't engage further. And since then, we've had conversation with with their superiors and with with CBP offices to the effect of saying that this was not within their job description. And this they do not condone this activity.

So kind of looking into that further, they were very much acting as individuals, but individuals within a culture of abuse, and within a culture of, of sabotaging humans access to life saving supplies. And that was nothing new to them. That there's that they had nothing they'd never encountered somebody trying to oppose them for doing that. Yeah. Is it in your job description to slash water and open cans and dump food all over the public land and rule this area? To ban the property, but then you're going to pick it up and carry it to your garden.

It's a long hike. How I would I do that? No, I'm like curious, I'm just curious. It's okay for you to record. And look for public property? And what do you do with it? We destroy it. We try to clean it up. That's cleaning it up? No, that's one of the things we try to do.

That was not cleaning it up. We either have to clean it out or try to clean it up. That was too far for us to bring. So you decided to just trash the whole area? Like when they funded and equipped and transported and armed by the state, and like it's that's not the same as individuals just because we've seen that in Arizona, right? Like people who are militias or what have you going out and sabotaging life saving supplies as well, but it's still a little different when, you know, we have to pay taxes for them to go destroy

water caches. And these are people who regularly, as we've seen on multiple occasions, use helicopters to try to flush people out of under a tree that they fly within 30 feet of the ground and use the force of the rotors to force people out and up a hillside to wade in cars. So their use of money and the use of force is definitely central to the tactics. Yeah, yeah, or he's helicopter to fire tear gas into Mexico. And it did a few years ago. But yeah, it's certainly and that intimidation is like if I think people again who don't live here

might not be familiar with it. Like I've been out in down by the border with Kumeya people doing religious ceremony and had Bortak guys dressed like, you know, like Navy SEALs hanging out with our 15th and plate carriers, while people like burn sage and pray. It's yeah, I mean, the militarization, if you somehow can't conceive to care of people dying in the desert, the militarization of the border still affects everyone here. And it makes our lives left safe. There's a crime thinks, crime thinks slogan that I always like to like use in these things,

which is the border doesn't protect you, it controls you, which I think is kind of apt for this. So now that they've trashed your supplies, right? And you found out they weren't supposed to. I'm interested like how going forward, does that mean that you can't use that route? You can't drop stuff there anymore because you're worried about it happening again, or because you're worried about them hanging out there to intercept people who are using your like supply cash? On the contrary, we've learned from the examples of other people who have been doing this work.

Emmett already mentioned, no more mortes, no more deaths in Arizona. Dr. Scott Warren, we've learned so much from their example, where, you know, they were hauled into federal court and won. And so we've learned from their examples of how to do this, as well as within here in California, the history of border angels. So back a few years ago, Border Patrol was slashing gallons of water in the deserts of Eastern San Diego County, as well as Imperial County. On one particular day, the Border Angels volunteers found about 50 gallons of water slashed in the most violent way, and they knew it was Border Patrol. And so the way Border Angels responded was number one, to change their tactics

to start dropping supplies deeper in the backcountry, where the Border Patrol agents, you know, it's rare to find a BP agent that's motivated enough to really hike for too far away from their air-conditioned vehicles in the summertime. So number one, they were going farther away from the roads and highways to the actual routes that people are walking. Number two, they punched back hard in public using social media. Back then, it was Facebook, you know, this is going to be, you know, right when Instagram was getting popular, but just, you know, getting the word out and Border Angels is an organization that's been around for decades. They have a big following, the word spread. And just like many bullies,

you know, they kind of back down if you get in their face sometimes. So that was our experience with this practice of Border Patrol slashing gallons in the desert with Border Angels. So when this crime occurred on March 18th, in the mountains, we knew we could not back down. So we went back a few days later. That's when, as Emmett mentioned, we witnessed Border Patrol helicopter for about an hour, flying about, you know, it seemed like 10, 15 feet off the ground, really, really low using the rotor wash to flush human beings out of the brush as if they were hunting animals. And then we were back, you know, the next seven days later, after they destroyed the supplies, we went back with a good group.

Number one, to clean up this shameful mess, these two Border Patrol goons left, we cleaned up all of that stuff, and we left probably what, three times the amount of original supplies. And on our milk rates, we actually left laminated signs that addressed one by one, all of the accusations that these Border Patrol agents tried to make against us. So the signs say, do not destroy, do not remove, this is not garbage, we are not littering, and this is not abandoned property. These are humanitarian aid supplies protected by federal case law, the 1994 Protection of Religious Freedom Act, and so on and so forth. So we put those signs just prominently on the milk rates, you know, just to send a message

that no, we're not going to back down, we are going to leave supplies. It is within our rights, and it is in support of human rights to do this. So of course, we have to be strategic about this. I mean, there is the danger, you know, if we're always going back to the same place, you know, we're kind of, you know, blowing up the spot as it were, you know, we're bringing heat to a route that's needed by people making a crossing. And so we are mindful of that, you know, we don't, we try to go to different places on different weekends, and not try to bring too much attention to these paths. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I wonder, like, if people are, I was just thinking for

people to visualize the area, is there a place they could look up on like Google Earth so they could see, like, where this kind of stuff is happening? Are you comfortable? You don't have to give like a exact location, obviously, but. Yeah, actually, I mean, speaking of, you know, Google Earth, you mentioned the Valley of the Moon. I mean, Google Earth is impressive enough. But anybody can just use Google Earth and zoom in all the way and just follow along the border, and you'll find thousands of footpaths. So, yeah, it doesn't take, you know, like a much detective work to actually visually see these footpaths. But yeah, it's real steep terrain, as Emmett mentioned, the last couple of times we've gone back to this spot where

the two agents destroyed the supplies. Emmett has actually brought a mountain climbing rope just to make certain sections easier where we're kind of repelling down this dry waterfall. So, really, really steep, very loose trails, very easy to break an ankle. And it just, in that context, it really hits you. We see so many shoes and boots along the path and just have to kind of just pause and think, well, if this person lost their shoe, if the sole of their boot melted off and they're hours away from the nearest road, what does it mean? How did they complete the journey? Did they complete their journey? So, yeah, a little bit hard to describe, but I guess anybody who's, I guess, kind of familiar with Southern California, steep mountains,

loose terrain, kind of get the picture. Yeah, yeah. They're going to cut value to the moon. There's plenty of pictures of the very intimidating border fence that they have there. It's like three for eye and rusty. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to address that you feel like maybe people don't, that people should know about the border they don't, about the work you do that maybe is misunderstood? Yeah, I guess I want to maybe bring up some of what I think is hard to convey to people who aren't there and aren't connected to a community who is suffering because of this or who aren't maybe thinking along the lines of what it means to be a human in this space and actually be risking your life and coming up against helicopters and a federally backed

militia who is actively seeking to harm you. None of us in our group are claiming anything more than just witnessing what it means to be out there, but I guess what's been true for me and kind of my conversations with my community over the last couple of years is trying to share this. There is so much pain that is being inflicted upon this landscape and there is so much harm that is actively supported by our nation while people are in some of the most intimate and painful moments of their lives. Leaving your home whether it be in another continent where you need to take a flight over to make this crossing or whether it be hiking through Central America starting in South America for months before reaching this moment or leaving your

family in your community closer to the border. These are moments that anyone who is alive could feel the pain of and the misery of having to abandon all that you know and put yourself at the mercy of the desert and CBP's really aggressive and harmful tactics. So beyond all of the cases in the politics, I oftentimes as we're walking just try to put myself in the position of someone who is making these decisions and as Dave was saying we're coming across people's clothing, food, underwear, places they've slept and the amount of the poignancy of human desire to be safe, to come to a place where they feel like their lives can be protected or that choice is worthwhile is something that is so lost in the numbers and the amount of

people who die or what happens after it and so for us I think making it not about your political beliefs or the asylum process but just the actual choices people are having to make very human decisions. That is something that is kind of haunts us and the feeling that all we can do is leave water in a place that it might make the difference between someone in that position surviving or not and furthermore just living in a community where you know from the top of the mountain we can see downtown San Diego and all of the luxury of this military town, all of the universities and all of this opportunity that we enjoy and just a couple miles away the lack of access to just water, feeling how similar humans are to each other

and our basic needs and how that's being taken from people is really harmful and particularly as you were saying these are areas held sacred by the Kumeyi people and have been places of migration for at least 10,000 years. These are places that were difficult to travel and that people did for similar reasons to survive to be safe and there is a legacy of oyas, of clay pots buried in the sand for travelers that has been ongoing for thousands of years and for our current administration and government to create this wall and this place of so much pain is just testament to just the insanity of our desire to protect the border against something else, protecting the borders against something that we feel is harmful to us. Meanwhile

this migration is fundamentally how we survive and how we respond to these moments of change in humanity and criminalizing that and causing harm to that is just barbaric. I'll let you collect your thoughts and you can come back and make that statement because I think you do it very eloquently but I want to jump on there and just kind of echo and elaborate on what you said. We find lots and lots of physical items but we also meet people on the trails and that's a new thing. I've been doing these water drops for some time now but when you say what has changed under Biden, not much. There's more people crossing the border than ever. There are more people dying than ever. As far as as a volunteer who spends most weekends

out in the borderlands, the only thing I notice is they stopped building Trump's 30-foot high fence and they started pouring all that money into electronic surveillance where every single month we see more towers popping up all along the border with all kinds of very very fancy military grade surveillance equipment and as well as aerial surveillance. Lots of airplanes, helicopters, I'm not sure if they're using drones but certainly there's a lot of aerial surveillance but what we see as far as the human dimension is in the old days we see footprints, we see shoe covers which people wear on their feet to hide their footprints from Border Patrol, we see the empty water bottles and discarded clothing but now we're

encountering people pretty much every time we do a water drop because the number of people crossing is so high, people are crossing in the daytime whereas in the past usually they would cross at night so wouldn't you say Emmett like pretty much every time we go out at least one of our volunteers if not the whole group sees or even interacts with a migrant on the paths and of course we respect their autonomy, their privacy, we don't engage with them if they don't want to engage with us but the thing that I'll never forget is about a month ago we were out in this exact same area supplying the same path and it was a rainy day, cold, we were wearing our Gore-Tex insulated clothing, we'd done a water drop while we were doing the water drop we can see

on the next mountain peak Border Patrol helicopter landing to pick up somebody who required rescue and this is a case that we have been getting updates all night with Armadillos, one of the search groups and thankfully this person was found alive and Border Patrol was so-called rescuing him, another word for arresting him and after we witnessed that we hiked back to our vehicles and just as we were getting to the trailhead the exact same location where on March 18th Emmett and other volunteers had this interaction with the two Border Patrol agents who destroyed the humanitarian aid supplies, the exact same parking spot we pop out and start walking toward our vehicles and it starts snowing and two individuals come out of the mist

and approach us and start talking to us in Spanish and talking to these two people, these two men, one young, one middle-aged in the course of the conversation, you know, sorry, I kind of choke up when I talk about this stuff. Yeah, so this was the younger of the two, I was 16 years old and the older dude was his father. We encountered them as it was snowing so of course first thing we did is got them in our vehicles, one of our volunteers, Avid Heiker, had his backpacking stove with him and cooked up some tea and some gave them food and let them warm up. We gave them literally the Gore-Tex winter coat software backs to warm up and once the dad was shivering violently,

really showing signs of clinical hypothermia and talking to the younger man who was in better physical shape, he was explaining that the two of them were hiking through the mountains because his mother was already living in the USA, they were trying to reunite with her and they had been in this mountainous region for the past two days and looking at them, they're wearing hoodies, you know, like, you know, sweat shirts, sweat pants and sneakers in this and anybody who lives down here in Southern California, you know, we've had a very unusual winter, lots and lots of rain, so it had been raining heavily over the past two days and nighttime temperatures in the 30s and these two men had been out there for two

days, soaked to the bone and that's why they approached us because they were in trouble and they were asking for help. So after they warmed up, we discussed the options, of course, you know, we respect their autonomy, you know, they have the option to try to continue going on their way with supplies or if they felt it was unsafe to do so, we were ready to help them. The heartbreaking thing is, you know, they did ask us, could we let them ride in our vehicles off the mountain and we had to explain that, you know, we were pretty much guaranteed to encounter Border Patrol agents on that road and that really it's not something that we could do because, you know, we could be arrested and charged, you know, for federal felony crimes,

but we said, look, you know, if you really feel you can't continue, we will help you contact, you know, call 911, but we explained that's 100% going to result in Border Patrol coming because as folks may know, you know, you know, in the USA along the border, you know, emergency medical response, search and rescue is unfortunately considered in the domain of law enforcement. So if you are a US citizen, or if you are someone from another country that happened to come here and have a visa or just be considered the good type of foreigner, you know, you're going to have a very impressive response with sheriff's department, search and rescue, volunteer organizations. If there's any hint that you may be a so-called

undocumented person, it immediately gets sent to Border Patrol and you have, you know, Borstar respond, the Border Patrol search and rescue group, which is a far cry from the civilian search and rescue folks. So we explained to them, if we call 911, you're going to be apprehended, you're going to be arrested by Border Patrol. And after thinking about it and discussing, they said, yeah, we cannot continue. We're, you know, this is too dangerous. So we did call 911 and Border Patrol did come and frisked them and cuffed them and yeah, did arrest them. And yeah, that's not, not the only time that too often we have witnessed human beings being arrested by Border Patrol. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think, I think it's really important

to give like, put like faces and names to these things rather than the Border Patrol will constantly talk about the million whatever encounters, right? They like to fucking inflate the numbers because it's often the same people, but it's each one of those is a tragedy, right? Every time someone has to make a choice between risking their life in one place or risking their life coming to another place just so their kids can have a crack at growing up safely or so they can be safe or so they can experience like one tenth of the things that we take for granted every day. Like that's an incredible human tragedy. And yeah, they happen every single day, every hour of every day at our border because of the things that our government does there. And yeah, it's important

to feel that stuff because I think that's, it should provoke in all of us a very strong reaction. It's pretty messed up that there's almost universal bipartisan agreement that it's fine and okay by people who have never been here and don't understand. One other thing I want to add and Emmett, you may have other things. One thing I wanted to really center is something we've referenced several times, the Kumye. This is Kumye land. These are the indigenous people who have lived here since the beginning of time. The archeological record goes back 10,000 years, but we know people have been here since the beginning of human time really. And look at the map, this so-called border cuts in half traditional

Kumye territory. When we do these water drops out in the desert or in the mountains, these you know, these paths that people are using to migrate are often, or in many, many cases, traditional Kumye paths. And we see evidence of that every time we, you know, do a water drop, especially out in the desert areas where it's a rare water drop that we will not find pottery shards lying in the sand or come across rock shelters, some with pictographs, and it's just a very poignant juxtaposition of Kumye cultural artifacts with modern-day shoe covers, discarded water bottles. And of course, many people who do migrate are indigenous themselves. So, yeah, personally, you know, I view all of these

border issues through the lens of history, culture, with the core truth that this is indigenous land, this is Kumye land, and it has always been, and the modern so-called border is a very recent political creation, you know, that, you know, mid-19th century, you know, before that, this was Mexico, and now where we call it the USA, but this is all recent. And from my perspective, unless you are a Kumye, I really don't know how anybody could, can really get on their high horse and really speak with any authority about who belongs here, who belongs here, who doesn't belong here, because the rest of us, we are all guests on Kumye land. That includes every single border patrol agent, and that's something I always

like to remember. Yeah, yeah, the border is very much like colonialism in action. And it's even, we're going to have some Kumye folks hopefully in the next couple of weeks to talk about the desecration of Kumye burial sites by the border wall, which is an ongoing thing, like I haven't stopped when they just, I can't tell stories about it like I could in 2020, because, you know, Orange Man bad isn't a thing anymore. But yeah, like all across the border, right, not just here, the Yaki, the Tohonod, all across the border is native, the whole of the so-called United States is native land. And it's not indigenous folks out there trying to kill people in the desert. Is there anything, Emmett, that you wanted to add?

Yeah, I just want to say this, well, I know we're going to be able forever, so we'll stop rambling a second, but I guess I really want to say, and this is coming from a very skewed white male's perspective, but I just feel like so much of these power structures that we're engaged with and us as a nation trying to find our identity, it's so hypocritical, particularly in this moment where climate and social instability is at its height, I mean, in my lifetime, and I think in many of our lifetimes, we see this as a really precarious moment. It just feels so hypocritical to police people's soverities to find safety and to be in safety. You know, we have all of these ideals in our country around respecting each other's freedoms,

and also as we are importing and exporting so many goods and also so much culture, and so fundamentally intertwined with the lives of people from all over the world. For us to say what is wrong and what is right in this moment, and for us to have this moral authority to put people in prison just for seeking safety for many years, and of course, I have many people I know and live with who were in detention for several years for seeking that. The amount of just how twisted it is that we are comfortable spending our lives as Americans never considering or never really critically engaging with this active pursuit, this action to limit people's ability to survive.

It feels like it really needs to be centered in this conversation. And again, this is coming from my skewed perspective, but I really want to make the point clear, this is not about these lofty ideals of what a country could be or who and who is not justified or useful in our country. We make these arbitrary assessments of what's justified or what's legal and not legal, and very often those are just continuing the legacy of exploitation of black and brown people, the exploitation of landscapes, the exploitation of labor, the exploitation of people whose voices are not heard politically, economically, and continuing a conversation of an O-Time Eastern Center, people who are detained are

cleaning their own cells and their labor is actually being exploited as well. You can't distinguish the fact that the history of policing in our country and the history of prisons is specifically a project to continue white supremacy. And you can see particularly the differential policing of immigration currently and the differential way that certain people from certain countries are or are not valid to enter this country and at the very least be treated with respect and dignity in their process. And that's what we see CBP every single day violating people's basic access to human dignity and access to life which are protected by all nations in writing and very often not in practice.

Yeah, and this was said like it's a very basic human thing. It doesn't need to be like shrouded in constitutional law. And like you also said, the capital flows very freely across the border that people aren't allowed to. And yeah, it's pretty messed up. Guys, where can people, if they want to support, if they want to just send a kind word, where can people find you on the internet? The best way probably is on Instagram. We have an account, Borderlands, Relief Collective reach out to us. And I do want to give a shout out to our sister organizations, Border Kindness, their water drop program led by Jacqueline and James has been doing tremendous work for years. Border Angels, which is kind of the parent organization of water drop

volunteer groups in California, are our comrades who do search and rescue, as well as recovery of those who have have died, including Armadillos and Aguilas, Eagles of the Desert, very, very proud to be in this community of people who are trying to help people in the Borderlands. Yeah. Thank you very much, guys. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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