Factually! with Adam Conover - We’re not ready for what’s coming.

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)ICE is being turned into an army, and everyone will suffer for it. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Folks this episode is brought to you by Alma. How often do you feel heard? Like really genuinely heard? For a lot of us, the answer is not enough. It can be so isolating to feel unheard or like you're lacking a sense of connection in your everyday life. This only feels worse if you're struggling with your mental health.

And that's why I want to tell you about Alma. Alma makes it simple to find a licensed therapist who gets you, someone who can offer support tailored to your specific needs and goals and make sure that you are actually being heard. In fact, 83% of people who see a therapist through Alma say that their provider is the right fit. And Alma therapists bring real experience to the table. On average, six years of it, with 20% practicing for over a decade.

Their easy-to-use directory lets you filter by things like gender, specialty, ethnicity, and more, so you can find someone you truly connect with. You can even schedule free 15-minute consultations to make sure it feels right before even committing to a session. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com slash factually to get started and schedule a free consultation today.

That's helloalma.com slash factually. So on the 4th of July, Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. This thing is without a doubt one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history. Here's a little rule of thumb. This bill is good for everything that's bad, and bad for everything that's good.

It features huge tax cuts for the rich, and massive health care and food assistance cuts for the middle class and poor. That means you. At least 17 million people could lose their health insurance because of this thing. And since health insurance is the thing that people use to, you know, stay alive, a lot of people are gonna die. At least 51,000 every year because of this bill, according to experts. Oh, but this bill isn't content to just murder Americans today.

No, no, no. It's going to murder the future as well. Because this bill ends the incentives to generate clean energy, guaranteeing we will be pumping pollution into the atmosphere for decades to come. Now, is that because fighting climate change is too expensive? No. This bill doesn't give a sh** about saving money, because it also adds trillions to the federal debt.

And it's not like Republicans are unaware of how toxic this bill is. Senator Josh Hawley called its Medicaid cuts morally wrong and politically suicidal. And here's Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. Do I like this bill? No. I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. Well thank you for that clear-eyed evaluation, Lisa, but somehow that didn't stop either of you mendacious f**kos from voting for it. You know, I'm but a simple comedian, not an elected representative, but I think the job of a senator is to vote for the bills you think are good and against the bills you

think are bad. Is Murkowski the Senator from Bizarro, Alaska, where snow is hot and Medicaid kills poor people? Well, no. I don't think she is. I think that this is what she and Holly and the rest of them have wanted to do all along. This is their wish list. These people just love taxing the poor,

giving free money to the rich, slashing your health care, and destroying the environment. It's what gets them off. They don't even bother to pretend otherwise anymore. They live in s*** and they're proud of it. Now you might have already heard about a lot of this. The Medicaid cuts were publicized pretty widely.

But there is one chunk of this bill that has gotten shockingly little attention. And when I started looking into it, it blew my f**king mind. Because what is about to happen with immigration enforcement spending in this country is f**king wild. Let's start by looking at this chart that shows law enforcement spending this year before the triple B passed.

The triple bypass, if you will. We were giving ourselves a heart attack with this f**king thing. Alright, look. You see the amount that we spend on immigration enforcement currently? It's already greater than the FBI, DEA, DHS, ATF, IRS, and any other three-letter agency combined, which is insane. But I want to be clear that this is how much we were spending on immigration enforcement before Trump signed the Triple B. This is how much we were spending on immigration enforcement before Trump signed the Triple B.

This is how much we're spending on immigration enforcement now. We are about to direct an ungodly and unprecedented sum of money towards immigration enforcement and border control. This taxpayer money, your money, is going to be used to fund a massive internal army devoted to racially profiling, arresting, and deporting law-abiding residents of this country. And I don't think we are ready

for how this is going to transform the cities in which we live in America as a whole. We need to talk about what is about to happen, and we need to start building the solidarity we need to fight back. So in this video, we are going to talk about what is coming and what we all need to do about it. But before we get into it, if you want to support the channel, head to patreon.com slash

Adam Conover. And if you'd like to come see me in person doing stand up comedy on the road, if you could use a laugh right about now, which I think we all pretty much f**king could. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brea, California, Los Angeles, California, Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington, Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Philly, Washington, DC, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have a brand new hour of stand-up comedy that I would love to share with you, so if you want to come see it, head to AdamConover.net for all those tickets and tour dates, and I'll give you a hug at the meet and

greet line after every single show. So when I say that we are funding a deportation army, I am not exaggerating. From now to 2029, ICE has the funding to make it the 16th largest military force on the planet. ICE's annual funding is now somewhere between the military of Italy, which spends nearly $31 billion a year to fend off those pesky Phoenician raiders, and Canada, which spends $41 billion annually to protect itself from, well, us, actually. So how is this money going to be divided?

Well, $46.5 billion of it is supposed to go towards building the border wall, which is a lot of money to spend on something that can be defeated by a $5 ladder. Another $45 billion of your money will go towards building immigration detention centers across America. That's $45 billion worth of Alligator Alcatraz, the already infamous Florida immigration detention site that features a lack of water, power outages, mosquitoes, and worm-infested food. Now, Alligator Alcatraz holds 3,000 people, and ICE is looking to add detention space for 80,000 more. So get ready for 266 more facilities just like that somewhere in your backyard. Hope you like maggots. But hey, you can't fill a detention center unless

you have enough black-masked ICE officers to grab people from their homes and workplaces. So the bill also includes $30 billion for hiring and training 10,000 new ICE officers. Hey, are you a hurricane scientist or cancer researcher fired by Trump? Apply for a new job busting the heads of innocent farm workers. Instead of saving lives, you'll be destroying them. That's the American way. So let's be honest about what this is. This spending amounts to a complete reorientation of the entirety of American law enforcement to be against immigrants. Under this bill, by 2028 you're talking about spending effectively 80% of all federal law

enforcement dollars will go to immigration enforcement. I mean, this is insane. 80%, 80% of our law enforcement dollars are going to be spent prosecuting people for committing civil immigration offenses. You know who that's great for? Criminals. If you want to commit tax fraud or some light larceny, now's the time because the feds don't give a s*** about that anymore.

The FBI even deprioritized white collar crime this year to focus on immigration. So the next Sam Bankman freed is going to be Sam Bankman free just so we can lock up a few more of the people who pick your strawberries. And this new enforcement regime could last forever, because the explicit goal of this bill is to create a bureaucracy of repression that is almost impossible to remove. Here's former acting ICE director Josh Sandweg. We're going to see in ICE that it is going to be hard for any future administration to shrink it. And its capacity to deport will certainly be at the highest level it's ever been in the history of the United States.

This is nothing less than a structural change to American government. It injects harsh anti-immigrant repression into the very DNA of our governmental system and makes that one of its fundamental goals and mechanisms. And that is a big change for America because we were, for most of our history, the country that welcomed immigrants. Immigration was like America's thing. It was our superpower. It literally gave us an economic leg up on other nations because people around the world

wanted to come here to contribute to our economy and now we are doing the opposite. We are building a permanent governmental infrastructure to attack and suppress immigrants on a massive scale and with brutal violence and that is simply put going to transform life in our cities in ways that we are not ready for. To get a preview of what's going to happen where you live let's look at what's happening in Los Angeles where I live right now. For the past few months ICE has terrorized our city, kidnapping people off the street and causing massive disruption to daily life. They've been met by major resistance from protesters but Trump has used the city to test out the fascist tactics that

new ICE funding will allow him to spread to every other city in the country. Let's rewind quickly back to May. Trump was unhappy with the pace of deportations. So the DHS increased its quota for daily arrests from 1,000 to 3,000. And this required a change of tactics. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration policy, told ICE officials that they needed to up their deportation game. Rather than develop lists of actual illegal immigrants, he instructed them to just go out there and arrest illegal aliens at Home Depot or wherever else they might be. You know, Home Depot, the place people go every day to buy nails and toilets. That's where they're picking up these

supposed criminals. You know, when a law enforcement agency picks up someone who has allegedly committed a crime, when there's a warrant for their arrest, when they have probable cause, that's law enforcement. But when it picks up random people because of where they're hanging out and the color of their skin in order to meet an arbitrary arrest quota, that's called fascism. Plain and simple. And big box stores are just the beginning. Across the city, unidentifiable masked federal agents, often in military gear, have been conducting these f***ed up raids for over a month now.

They haven't just targeted Home Depots, they've also targeted car washes, farms, and other places of business in LA and the surrounding counties. And before we go on, I want to point out that if you have any question about whether or not that source is accurate, well, it comes from this video's sponsor, Ground News. We work really hard to write these videos and Ground News makes our job easier by rating each story for factuality and bias. So in this story about the raids on Home Depot and its impact on businesses, you can see it's mainly being reported on by sources on the right. You can also click on the bias comparison bar to see how each side reports the story. It is so helpful to understand the biases in our news,

especially with charged issues like Trump's immigration policy. So if you want to understand how bias affects your news and make sure you're getting the real truth, check out Ground News. You can get 40% off if you use my special code, FACTUALLY. Go to groundnews.com slash factually. That's groundnews.com slash factually. ICE's presence in LA has been so overwhelming, so over the top, that just a few weeks ago federal agents with armored trucks marched through a public park, MacArthur Park, on horseback in a show of

insanely unnecessary force. Did they find any immigrants by doing so? No. The only thing ICE stopped was a children's summer camp. And you know, I understand that Jeff took an extra granola bar at snack break, but we don't need an armored car and a horse cop to scare him straight. He's seven. These fascist doofuses have been storming parks, bus stops, farmers markets, an LA fitness, a church, and the Santa Fe Springs swap meet, because generally swap meets fall under the jurisdiction of the fashion police.

These are real places that regular people like you go to, whose lives were disrupted by these raids. And lest you think that being a citizen will keep you safe, no. ICE has picked up plenty of US citizens in these dragnets as well. And after being nabbed for literally no reason, they've been shoved into a downtown detainment center called B-18 where the conditions are horrible. 2800 people were picked up like this by ICE in the first month. And as a result, these sweeps are wreaking havoc on our community. People are afraid to go to work, to let their kids go outside, or to enjoy the Fourth of July or the summer breezes.

Angelinos are literally living in fear, both immigrant and not. These raids don't just hurt our communities, they hurt all of us. So in response to this violent crackdown that is harming the community we love, well, Angelinos did something we've gotten pretty good at in recent years. We protested. There were massive demonstrations, largely in downtown LA. And you know, an earlier version of America used to value protest against government policy

as an important part of our First Amendment rights, didn't it? Well, you know how Trump and his allies responded? They got even more fascist. Trump sent the National Guard in over the objections of the governor and the mayor. The LAPD went around shooting reporters and random pedestrians with rubber bullets. Not a super welcoming vibe to project

right before the city hosts the 2028 Olympics. And Trump even threatened to arrest Governor Newsom. I'm holding him. He's coming to arrest us. Did he do it? You know, I love how Trump threatens to arrest a sitting governor so casually, like it's any other decision. Hey, Mr. President, would you like to add extra bacon to your Grand Slam?

Would you like to construct an oppressive police state on the backs of the most vulnerable? Would you like an upgrade to Maine Cabin's elect for a small fee? You know, I cannot express how strange it has been to live in LA while all of this is happening. We hear the sound of helicopters overhead constantly. In our neighborhoods, people we know are suddenly gone, not just because they were kidnapped by ICE, but because they're hiding out of fear. And anyone who says they don't like it has been threatened with persecution or violence by the federal government. It has changed the way it feels to live in this city. And it is coming for you next because

again ISIS funding just increased by an order of magnitude. They are now the best funded law enforcement agency in the country, which means that what happened in LA is going to be exported to your backyard. Los Angeles City Council member Aonesis Hernandez summed it up this way. Please understand that what's happening here in the city of Los Angeles, we are the canary in the coal mine. What you see happening in MacArthur Park is coming to you. I don't think we're ready for this as a country.

I don't think we're ready to have one of the world's largest militaries attack and kidnap people in our communities on our own dime. I don't think we're ready to have our elected leaders threatened by the federal government. I don't think we're ready for the massive disruption of having millions of people who live in our communities thrown into camps or out of the country. I think it's going gonna be one of the biggest changes we have seen in our lifetimes and it's gonna be impossible to predict what will happen as a result. And the worst part is we can't stop it from happening. At least not altogether. The right wing controls the levers of power in this country and they will for the next few years at least.

They got this law passed and Trump controls federal law enforcement so he can do what he's about to do. But that doesn't mean we can't protect each other and fight back to protect our communities. And crucially, we have started to see people do this. There are many cities and groups that are banding together to sue the administration over its unconstitutional raids and there's legislation to force federal agents to show their faces and identify themselves. But more importantly than the legal route, which you know I don't think we can put a lot of faith in right now, communities are starting to protect themselves. Volunteers are keeping tabs on ICE to inform their neighborhoods.

We're seeing people show up in numbers when someone they know gets abducted off the streets. There are even people who are protesting ICE agents at the hotels they stay at. You see them right across the street in front of the parking lot of the Hilton Garden and they're waving flags making a lot of noise here. Of course they've been here for several hours. Yeah, no justice, no sleep. I think that seems fair. Look, this is a time when it's easy to be down on America. But I want to remind all of us that America is not just the federal government and its increasingly repressive bureaucracy.

America is the people who live in this country, not just the citizens, but everybody who lives in this country. And looking at how the people who live here country, not just the citizens, but everybody who lives in this country. And looking at how the people who live here are reacting around LA and elsewhere, it is clear that they are not going to accept what is coming. They are going to fight, ready or not. And that means we may be able to, if not stop, shift the asteroid that's coming for us. Because even though the violence and horror of these policies can make it seem like the normal rules of politics don't apply,

they actually still do. These raids are so unpopular that they are already backfiring on Trump. His approval ratings are underwater because of them. And at the same time that the American public is rejecting them, support for immigrants is surging. The share of Americans who want less immigrants has dropped from 55% last year to 30% today. And a record high number of people, 79%, say that immigration is good for the country. You know, you gotta love American public opinion. Just last election we were told that America had had enough immigrants and the Democratic Party incorporated those views into the center of their platform. I guess you don't know

what you got until it's rounded up and thrown in a van without a warrant. But again, this public upswell of support for immigrants and against their violent repression is all we can hope for and it could really make a difference. You know, we've seen a backlash to anti-immigrant policies before. In the 1990s, California's Proposition 187 was an attempt to deny public services to all undocumented immigrants. State Republicans ran on it. And back then, California was at least a purple state, but the backlash to this racist, repressive proposition turned California blue for good. So it might be that by violently cracking down on immigrants, Trump fundamentally changes the political landscape of America in ways that he doesn't like.

Not that that makes any of it worth it. It doesn't. People, real people, are going to be harassed, hurt, and killed because of this bill. But as that happens, I think we need to continually remind ourselves that most Americans do not want this. And you know, for those who do, for those who, at the very least, voted for it, I don't think they realize what's about to happen. I don't think that they're ready for how this is going to change their communities.

And as that change ripples across the country, I think a lot of them are gonna realize they don't want it either. That was a Head Gum Podcast. Hey, I'm Gareth Reynolds and I have a new podcast on Head Gum called Next We Have. Now this show is for people with short attention spans, which is everyone. I mean, you're probably trying to skip this ad right now, but don't because you now legally

have to listen to the show. That's how law works. Next We Have is very simple. Each episode has three short segments. For instance, Lisa Gilroy and I write insane revenge Yelp reviews for callers who had bad experiences with the business. The Doughboys play a game called Meal or No Meal. Lisa Gilroy and I write insane revenge yell previews for callers who had bad experiences with the business. The Doughboys play a game called Meal or No Meal.

And Stef Tolov and I go head to head on a thought provoking game called Guess That Sound. The show is as dumb as it sounds and we probably have more fun than we should. But it's a great time and you should listen or watch new episodes of Next We Have every Thursday on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.