It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: Green Card Application Changes, the Pope’s AI Encyclical, Federal Court Blocks GOP Map in Alabama

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

The gang discuss USCIS policy changes making it harder to apply for a green card, law enforcement tracking anti-AI sentiments, an Alabama congressional map ruled as racially discriminatory, and the Trump admin pushing the Fed to allow transferring crypto.   Sources: https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-10598/refugee-admissions-for-fiscal-year-2026-emergency-presidential-determination-presidential  https://x.com/Southcom/status/2059440695488790898  https://x.com/atrupar/status/2059452011636982241 https://x.com/AndyKimNJ/status/2058624606085226502  https://lavocedinewyork.com/en/news/2026/05/26/how-ice-silenced-the-face-of-the-delaney-hall-hunger-strike/   https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2026/05/ec112dg10%28e%29.pdf  https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-602-0199-AdjustmentOfStatusAndDiscretion-20260521.pdf  https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-602-0198-SIJDeferredAction-20260410.pdf   https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2059679711391838507 https://x.com/PAKenglishh/status/2059021151242801270 https://x.com/JenGriffinFNC/status/2059045450666131705  https://x.com/USAfricaCommand/status/2059300434313982084 https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/nigeria-says-strikes-were-aimed-at-protecting-all-religions-not-just-christians-1b3676cf  https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/green-card-news-uscis-memo/ https://www.foxnews.com/politics/feds-subpoena-hasan-piker-medea-benjamin-over-cuba-trips https://x.com/ryangrim/status/2059420660758171701?s=20 https://www.theverge.com/policy/902284/cuba-aid-convoy-phones-seized-cbp-nuestra-america https://apnews.com/live/election-primary-texas-runoff-05-26-2026 https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/court-clears-way-for-alabama-to-use-congressional-map-blocked-by-lower-court-as-racially-discrim/ https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-243_f20h.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K2ZfobOClPyEWDtLELathLkD1eYNTCAD/view https://alabamareflector.com/2026/05/26/federal-judges-block-alabamas-use-of-2023-congressional-map/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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James, some small, whittle-iddy-bitty news items to start? Yeah. Let's talk about the little things. Then we'll talk about some things in more detail. The Trump administration has lifted a cap on refugee admissions by 10,000. This sounds like good news until you realize it is to allow more white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States of America. Great stuff.

I hate this country. I found the Federal Register thing. It's still the document's still not up there, but I will link to the place where the document will probably be. The Dutch will never be forgiven. The United States has also continued its campaign of strikes in the Pacific. Yeah. The most recent one left two survivors,

along with one man who was killed. So there's Guardian published a piece a while ago about what happened to some survivors who were taken by a US military boat, the US military boarded their vessel, stole their food and beer, and then transported them to El Salvador where they were questioned

and then released to immigration authorities and eventually sent home, basically. I guess effectively deported for illegally entering El Salvador. After they were brought there by the US? By the United States, yeah, after the US bombed. Yeah. So we don't know what happened to these two people. I guess Coast Guard activated search and rescue after the strike. So hopefully they've found them. It's better than them drowning out there.

Their Department of Homeland Security is auto-extending the temporary protected status for Lebanon. Not because they affirmatively chose to do so, but because they failed to renew or terminate it in time. So it auto-extended. Mark Wayne Mullen, the DHS secretary, has claimed that the Department of Homeland Security is drawing up plans to not process incoming international flights in sanctuary cities. What? Yeah. This is ahead of the World Cup, right? Yes. So let's play a little clip. We are currently, which we're not initiate yet, but we're currently drawn up plans to say, listen, and these sanctuary cities were the local radical left Democrats.

aren't allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either because they don't want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process immigration at their facilities. Nothing about that makes sense to me. The line he's drawing, I guess, what I want to guess at is that he's claiming that in places where police won't support ICE by removing protesters from the streets outside ice facilities,

the United States is not going to allow international travelers to enter at airports in those cities. There's a lot to break down there. I'm not really going to because suffice to say that this would cause absolute chaos. That's not going to happen because that's going to heavily disrupt capital. That's just not happening. Yeah, it's not really possible for this.

work. Like, it's not that they can divert to non-woke airports, right? That's not how air travel works. Is this silly? But it's interesting. Like, Mullin has been a bit less kind of crazy in his, like, posting

as policy. But maybe he was just getting warmed up. I mean, he's, yeah, he obviously does not understand who is true masters. If he actually thinks this is something that can happen. Yeah, he, I don't know if he does always just talking to Fox News and, yeah. said what he thought Fox News wanted to hear.

Mullen was talking about this in response to a large and growing protest at Delaney Hall, which is a private detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where 300 detainees have been on hunger strikes since last Friday. Mullen has verestly claimed that they chose to do this on Memorial Day, Friday, of course, not Memorial Day, and that they want their ethnic food. People in detention are entitled to religiously appropriate food, but that's not what's happening here, right? People are on Hunglestrake because of the conditions in the facility.

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, who's been there for a while with protesters, he got pepperballed and tear gassed. He entered the facility to inspect it, and he made a thread on X.com, the everything website where he detailed horrible abuses inside, including a woman who had been denied OBGYN care and a pregnant woman who had miscarried inside the facility. DHS has claimed in response that, quote,

In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens. That's an incredible thing to say. When someone has just detailed the fact that people are having unaccompanied miscarriages in your facility and being like, well, we do worth things to Americans here. Jesus. There are really a lot of layers there. On Monday, one of the leaders of the hunger strike was transferred out of the facility in Newark to another facility. right? It's not uncommon for people to be moved around in immigration detention for various reasons, right, to include, in this case, they're organizing. Finally, the OPCW has published documents detailing a large hall of undeclared chemical weapons that it found in Syria.

What is the OCPW for those who may not be acronym aware? It's the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons. Why this is interesting, firstly, there has been open source reporting, detailing the use by Assad of chemical weapons against his own population for years, and this confirms that. Secondly, there is a particularly disgusting faction of the left in the United States and elsewhere, which has spent years denying that this is the case, spent years affecting. running cover for Assad murdering little children with chemical weapons. We had very good evidence of this was happening before.

We now have incontrovertible proof that Assad had the ability to do this and did do this. We already know that he did it. But it should really make you question the legitimacy of any media source that continues or ever has denied that Assad used chemical weapons or indeed any politician or political actor. There's no instance in which it's okay to use chemical weapons against civil. period. And anyone apologizing for that, in my opinion, is pretty despicable. In other news, about two weeks ago, ABC News, nuked the 538 archive, scrubbing all the articles with links now redirecting to the ABC Politics homepage. As annoying as some of the 538 type people

can be, this is a bad removal of documented information going all the way back to 2008. It is unfortunate that ABC has done this. There still is third-party archives of these articles that you can find, but it will make actually referencing information held, or previously held on 538, much more difficult going forward. Yeah, and I also just want to say this is a continuous problem with storing information on the internet, which is that, yeah, information on the internet is incredibly ephemeral.

It is very easy for entire people's lives work to simply be deleted because the parent company decided to make a move. And yeah, there's a bunch of people who do good work on digital preservation, but all of the work that we produce online is significantly more ephemeral than we tend to think about. Yeah. Yeah, as Jamie Loftus said in her last regular podcast that she did for us, this is a future piece of lost media, right? Which is true of almost everything anyone puts up on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. There are groups of people who have worked over the years to try and mitigate that, including the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. They are currently under attack, as is from within the Wikipedia Foundation, as we'll talk about later. But, like, yeah, it's, it's the only, the only way to make this stuff not be ephemeral and to actually, like, keep a permanent archive of culture is to support the people doing that. And the people doing that are never going to be entirely cool with, for example, the people who make movies.

Or the people who put out newspapers. and there's an extent to which they just need the backing of us and of our government to say, you can't stop them from doing that because it's in the best needs of the human race. And that's not going to happen right now. Anyway. Last weekend, Fox News reported that socialist live streamer Hassan Piker and the leader of the activist organization Code Pink had been subpoenaed by the federal government as a part of an investigation into a humanitarian aid trip to Cuba

with a bunch of left-wing activists and influencers last March. Fox claimed this investigation as part of a, quote, broader dragnet involving as many as 40 American citizens who joined the Marxist convoy to Havana, unquote. After returning from Cuba two months ago, 20 U.S. citizens were briefly detained

and interrogated at the border, and 18 of them had their phones and other devices seized by CBP agents, at the Miami International Airport. Yep. Fox reported that these new subpoenas show that Piker is now caught in a, quote, federal inquiry into whether activists who travel to Cuba in March violated U.S. sanctions laws through financing, coordination, or delivery of goods to Cuba, including potential contacts

with Cuban government personnel or entities on the island, unquote. Also claiming that this investigation is part of a, quote, broader effort by officials at Treasury, State, and Justice Departments to curb malign foreign influence operations inside the United States, unquote. Now, Hassan Piker has said that he learned about the subpoena through Fox's media reporting, and he has not yet been contacted by the government. Fox referred to these subpoenas as, quote-unquote, administrative subpoenas. And it turns out, neither Hassan Piker nor could,

Code Pink have actually been subpoenaed by the government. They've not actually been served by the federal government. Oh, boy. On Tuesday, the leader of Code Pink told Ryan Grimm that she received an email from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control requesting information about the trip to Cuba, suggesting that there is some probe here, but it's not technically a subpoena. And there's still no indication yet. if Hassan Piker has received a similar request for information.

And like, this is bad. It's not unusual if you go to a place like Cuba than American citizens. They're certainly not supposed to have transit too directly to be stopped in question on the way into the country. And it's now not unusual for devices to be taken. None of this is good. Like, the fact that they could just take your shit at the border remains bad. But, yeah, as Garrison has said right now, this is not what a lot of initial reporting made it look like quite.

Yeah. No, if anything, it seems Fox is trying to encourage this broader Dragnet and manufacture consent for there being subpoenas for people on this humanitarian age and influencer trip. Yeah. James, speaking of Cuba. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about people seeking to become permanent residents of the United States. and we'll get to the Cuba tie in a minute here.

So a USCIS policy memorandum has advised USCIS officers that most non-U.S. citizens seeking to adjust their status will now have to leave the USA to do so. What is adjusting? Adjusting is generally when somebody who is here on a non-immigrant visa or here on another immigration status adjusts to become a permanent resident, right? And previously they could do that inside, the United States, or they could go to a consulate and they could apply for a green card of a

consulate outside the United States. Now they're saying that aside from cases of what they are calling extraordinary discretion, they're going to make people leave and apply from outside the United States. That is bad. What is worse is the way that this overlaps with their existing policies, right? People already applying are facing huge delays. I've reported on that before. And now new applicants and possibly people who are halfway through their process will have to leave. That will often mean spouses leaving their spouse and their citizen children if they have them for an unknown amount of time, right? This could take years. It's very realistic to expect this to take years. This dovetails with existing visa bans on 75,

countries. What that means is that people from many of these countries cannot obtain any immigrant visas. There are some very small exceptions to these visa bans. In the case of the 20 countries which are on a complete ban, there are exceptions for athletes attending the World Cup or the Olympics, for example, right? So like Iran is one of those countries. The Iranian team can attend the World Cup. They're actually staying in Tijuana, but crossing the border to come and do their matches. For everyone else, though, if you leave and then you have to come back to collect a green card, you re-enter on an immigrant visa, then you get your green card, right? If you are prohibited from having an immigrant visa because you are a citizen of these countries,

then you cannot re-enter, and thus you cannot get your green card, and thus this is a de facto bar to people from those travel-bank countries getting a green card in the United States now. which is very bad. I also noticed that there is not an exemption that I can see for the Cuban Adjustment Act here. The Cuban Adjustment Act is a special expedited pathway for Cubans that allows them to adjust to legal permanent resident status. It used to be two years now.

It's a year. This is particularly interesting, given the USA is talking so much about how terrible things are in Cuba, but also saying if you've made it here and you're safe and you feel safer and you want to stay, you can't. You have to go back to Cuba and apply. I guess to adjust. It seems very hypocritical, but that's nothing new.

Yeah. So I spoke to a couple of folks who would have expertise in this, and I don't have their permission to cite their name, so there isn't a consular option for Cuban seeking to adjust. They can't do it outside of the country

and that the Cuban adjustment act. They have to do it inside the country, so they think that this would entirely not include them. But like everything else, it's a little bit unclear, and we will find out, I guess. Last month, USCIS also removed categorical deferred action for SIGS individuals. SIGAS is special immigrant juvenile status.

It's granted to people in the US who are inside the United States without status who have been subject to abuse, abandonment or neglect as found by a court. The Trump administration has already deported many of these young people. But this policy memo formally removed. categorical deferred enforcement, which the Biden admin began doing in 2022. Essentially, some people will be told on receiving S.I.JS that they would be safe from deportation and they could receive a work permit. Deferred enforcement is the same thing that people under DACA have, commonly referred to as dreamers. That has now been removed. The people with S.OJS can adjust

to being, the SIGS offers a pathway to permanent residency, but now these people will evidently have to live in fear right up until they are able to become citizens if they're able to become citizens. Jesus. Yeah, like these are some of the most unfortunate people on the planet. Like, like people who get SIJS, like use of it has increased for like unaccompanied minors, right? But, or children, I should say, people who have come across in the last, maybe since 2018-ish, but still, it's people who have often gone through really terrible things. The justification cited, and I'm quoting from the memo here, is that, quote,

the criminality, gangs, and program integrity concerns in special immigrant juvenile petitions report reviewed over 300,000 aliens, S.I.J petitions filed from the beginning of fiscal year 2013 through February 2025. Key findings included 853 known or suspected gang members who filed SIGA petitions, with most receiving approval over 600 MS-13 gang members. members filed S.I.J. petitions and more than 500 were approved. Among them at least 70 had been charged with gang-related federal racketeering conspiracy offenses and many others charged with violent crimes in the United States, including murder or sex offenses. Additional S.I.J. petition approvals included more than 100 known or suspected members of the 18th grade gang,

at least three Tren de Raguay, gang members and dozens of Sroenios and Nortenios gang members. If you go back and look at those numbers, 300,000 petition. I see 70 charges. Yeah, that's absurd. That is a fraction of a single percent. Yeah. If they reviewed 300,000, even if this like 850 number is correct, is completely correct, which is not.

That's like less than one third of a percent. Yeah, exactly. It is a minuscule fraction if every single person who they suspect, and given what we've seen about suspicion, that could be as much as having a tattoo, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's ludicrous to join one up with the other and say, for all of these young people, many of whom have gone through horrific things,

now will have to live in fear again. That policy memo came on April. I found it when I was looking through the policy memos on the USCIS website, and I haven't seen any other reporting on it. Maybe I've just missed it, but it certainly is something people should be aware of. I want to do a scripted series on SIJS people for understandable reasons. Not all of them want to get up in the media right now. Yeah.

In terms of all the immigration changes. that have happened. This collection of stuff is like some of the worst that I've heard you talk about. Yeah, it's really bad. Like they started deporting S-IJS people. Even, even immigration lawyers who have been like this second Trump administration is going to be really bad. The second Trump administration is really bad. People did not expect them to begin going after these people. And they did when they were detaining. Another thing they've claimed is that like some of them are over 21, over 18 because they can still apply up to 21 in certain jurisdictions, right? Again, sure that doesn't mean that they haven't been through terrible things like many many 21 year olds in

America rely on their parents for things yeah these people often don't have their parents or have in some cases been abused by or abandoned by their parents and then sending them back to a place where they may be in danger where they may not be safe right there is no moral ethical justification for this really it's really bad it's really horrible yeah it's just it's pure undiluted violence. Yeah. And likewise, we can very clearly see if we look at the list of travel bar countries is going to be a bar on people from a large number of countries where the majority of the population is not white getting citizenship and legal permanent resident status in the United States, right? Something that has very clearly been a motivating factor of policy for a long

time. So yeah, more shit news from me about immigration. Talking of shit news, we have to pivot to advertisements. We. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

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Listen to Rebel Spirit season two on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Oh, boy. Well, that's all been very depressing. You know what's not depressing? Catholicism. Oh, and that. That too.

Two great tastes. It tastes great together. Two things that make us all happy. Oh, man. This week, the same week that we're recording this, Pope Leo the 14th, issued. and encyclical Magnifica humanitas that warned against equating machine intelligence with human intelligence, he declared, we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.

This has been seen, I think, by most critics of artificial intelligence as a pretty good encyclical. It is very long. It's well over 100 pages. So this is not like a quick read. You should think about this as like going in and reading a book. It's a really interesting document, among other things, the Pope quotes J.R. or Tolkien at one point, which is a nice little bit. He also makes a lot of references to mathematics and specifically like kind of comparing the way Catholicism thinks about divinity and the Holy Spirit and all that to certain kind of geometric shakes, because apparently he was a math major. I did not know this, but it comes through in the writing of this.

I would say my overall impression is like, oh, the Pope has a lot more understanding of, like, technical stuff that I thought he was going to have. This isn't, this is not like a bad thing from a, like, a basic understanding of how the technology works standpoint. Obviously,

a lot of this is based around the Pope's beliefs about the, like, what humanity is and the divinity within humanity, which is not something that everybody believes, but I also have found an awful lot of atheists and just kind of like non-religious people who have been sharing this because while they don't agree that like, you know, human beings are

sacred because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ necessarily or whatever or that we were made by God, they agree with the fact that there's something special about humanity that is not being recreated by these LLLNs. And so I've seen a lot of like praise as a result of that. However, I've also seen what I thought were pretty salient critiques. And the number of one critique here is that this encyclical was released at an event that was kind of co-launched with people from Anthropic. And the Vatican worked with Anthropic for this release and are in general kind of partnering maybe the wrong term, but working alongside them to try and have a dialogue about the future of AI and what it shouldn't, shouldn't do. And specifically, one thing

that Pope Leo talked a lot about was the need to demilitarize or disarm artificial intelligence, as in remove it from use in, like, defense industries and certainly make sure that it's not making the call to actually kill people. And that's something that Anthropic has also took us stand on in so much as that now the U.S. government is trying to remove any partnership it has with Anthropic. Yes, yes. They at least were openly against that. Now, that doesn't mean Anthropics a company I like or a company that everybody should like.

They still plagiarized, huge millions of people. basically anyone who's ever written a book. There's a lot of illegal things, objectively illegal things. Anthropic did, and that's why there are numerous lawsuits against them now. And I think it is, in fact, a problem that one of Anthropics co-founders, Chris Ola, was invited to speak at this event in the Vatican. Because one of the first things he did after, you know, thanking the Vatican and the Catholic Church and the Pope for having him there is kind of disagree with what the Pope had said that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. Because Ola says, said that these systems, I'm not a quote from an article in the register here by Thomas

Claiborne, quote, AI systems, he said, are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us from our words. And as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious to those of us who train them. This is what I have an issue with. Yeah. No, they're not. They're mysterious me in the same sense that like, if you make a car that had always just been a simple ice engine, if you make that a hybrid and you throw like a computer screen and a bunch of shit in it, you're going to have a bunch of problems with car as like a manufacturer that you didn't expect to have because you added complexity.

Right. We can't predict every single outcome of machine learning, right? Yeah. But the way that, but the way this Anthropa guy is using, you know, basic, basic facts about like machine learning and neural networks, but framing them in a way to. These are mysterious. Like the human brain is mysterious. Yes.

And no. Yes. Yeah, but it's also like, course you can't predict what the output is your entire process is you're just multiplying matrix. against each other over and over again, and then checking to see if the output of the random matrix multiplication you've done is what you want. Like, yeah, no shit.

A good dumb person comparison might be. If I were to buy an empty house and I were to fill that house with random shit for 30 years for so long that I've forgotten what I've put in the house, and then I sent you into the house to grab something at random from it, I might be totally surprised by what you bring out. That doesn't mean anything mysterious or sacred has occurred. It just means that.

I've forgotten all the shit I'd put. putting that house, you know? Yeah. Or it's like, it's like if you make a machine that just like spits out a random output, yes, you don't know what it's going to be. Like yes, this is this is what you have done. Exactly. It's a random output when it was been trained on the corpus of like human knowledge, right? Yeah. And one of the things that I find very frustrating is that Ola made the statement that AI systems are made from us and from our words, right? And he says that in a way as to like, and that's good. It means that like we all are a part of this and it's a part of us and so there's humanity at it. No, no, no.

AI isn't like made from our words. They stole our words that are consent in order to monetize them for themselves. That's different. That's real different. Yeah. In the same way that back in the day when I began teaching, people would plagiarize by copying, pasting things from books. Yeah. Those are also made by people's words.

It doesn't make them sacred. Yeah. Makes them stolen. Now, Ola lists in here three questions for discerals. And he phrases this, like, and I hope the Catholic Church can, like, help us figure out how we should move forward with these things. These are the big questions behind AI. And I want to quote again from that piece in the register, because the author of that, Clappert, has a funny bit here. Ola, how can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. We have many. What is called taxes? I know there is litigation already ongoing. We also have the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, among others, as wealth-sharing models when the thing else works. It's a good piece. I recommend reading it. That's good. Yeah, that's good. That's what I've got to say on this. I mean, yeah, obviously, this Anthropa guy is going to frame certain things as marketing for the company, right?

That's going to determine the way that he uses certain words and the way that he discusses machine learning and neural networks, right? When he's saying that this is like based on the human brain, roughly, it's because, yeah, it's because it's a machine learning neural network. So that's going to frame the way that he's doing it. I think it makes sense for the Catholic Church to try to enter into dialogue with a company like Anthropics. Sure. Especially if they can, you know, unite against Teal's efforts and even maybe some of some of the efforts of Open AI. But obviously, Anthropic has their own motivations for doing this, which is to enrich themselves. Yes, yes. But I don't think it's surprising that the Catholic Church will also try to enter into dialogue to influence the outcome of these things. I think in general, the Pope's statement is fine. I think the Pope's statement is fine. I do think this might be a data point in terms of in the future. Church may be to recognize. that you can't actually work with these guys. Perhaps that will be the outcome. We'll see.

Well, but I mean, I think, I think that's part of what's happening here, though, right? Is it, like, the reason the church is taking anti-AI positions while working with them is that they're, like, they're trying to have it both ways in terms of co-opting both, like, the anti-AI movement and also work, like, work with these companies to sort of build, like, build their influence base. I don't see it fully that. I think for the Pope's, because he's been very consistent about being horrible. by the growth of the arms industry and the idea of AI weapons and war, I kind of suspect from the Vatican standpoint when that all erupted with Anthropic pulling out and saying they

weren't willing to work with the Department of Defense on the things the Deod wanted them to do, that that's probably when the Vatican made the call, but I don't actually know. You know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say that the more sinister outcome is definitely not what's occurring, but I think there's a number of ways to kind of look at what the decision that was made and why it was made. I mean, the Catholic Church is one of the most globally influential bodies on the planet. They do have, like, their theological reasons for opposing AI, as well as sort of ethical reasons that it's illuminated by the Pope in terms of, like, worker protections, in terms of

the anti-war stuff. And I do believe he has, like, actual, you know, legitimate spiritual beliefs about, like, what humanity is. And it was something I appreciate is that he doesn't just take this, like, AI skeptic point of view and just to deny that, like, AI will, you know, significantly transform our world, right? Because I think AI is transforming production in some pretty significant ways. The Pope's not just hoping that AI will go away. He's affirming that we actually need to do something about this to protect our own humanity. And even though AI is not human, humans do determine how it will be developed and therefore we should act. And I think that makes sense for his position. Yeah, I don't, I'm not. I'm not.

not surprised as to the fact that he's doing it. I guess my long-term doubt is I don't think any of these companies have the ability on their own to make responsible choices. No, certainly not. The future of these. And I don't think they have the ability to contribute to responsible decisions. Sure. I think they need to be manhandled. Yeah, totally. By armed agents of the state, otherwise armed us are going to have to do it, you know? That's the reality. No, 100%. And that's the reality not just with AI.

That's the reality with every mega corporation, right? If the government does not stop them from destroying life for large numbers of people, then large numbers of people are going to do crazy things to them, you know? And if you want crazy things to stop happening to, for example, the CEO of OpenAI, maybe he should stop saying his technology might kill everyone. Yeah. On a related note, Wired has recently obtained thousands of documents from the DHS, FBI, and state-level info-sharing anti-terrorism.

They're called fusion centers, where information is shared between the feds, the stay and local law enforcement. Yeah. And a report from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau has warned of widespread upheaval in response to the adoption of AI and has coined a new term, quote, anti-tech violent extremism. unquote. This is a quote from this report.

Quote, the chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City, unquote. This is interesting. Also, according to Wired, the Intelligence Bureau report referenced the Zizians and warned that quote, paranoid views regarding AI may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizsian's trial, thanks to their, quote, attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent, and belief that humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring

its compliance with human morality or face existential consequences for failing to do so, unquote. Oh, God. This is really interesting. This stuff that Robert's been talking about for quite a while. Yeah. And like, I think this report was actually written before the Sam Altman-Maltman-Maltoff cocktail attack, or at least was written around the same time. But I think probably a little bit before.

But considering the Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman's property and the gunshots fired into the home of a pro-Data Center city council person, like, it makes sense that law enforcement is considering anti-AI violence as an emerging threat vector. But it also makes sense to be concerned that nonviolent opposition may get caught in a federal or state level drag net. Yeah. And that's what fusion centers do, right? They think a whole bunch of shit. And that's exactly what fusion centers do. Yeah. And most of this wired report is talking about documents from fusion centers. And like, as we have already seen, law enforcement surveillance capacity and scope has been empowered and extended by the National

Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7. Yeah. and public organizers and protesters are much easier to target than the small minority of people that actually end up committing violent crimes. Wired reported that federal, state, and local agencies are gathering and circulating intelligence about alleged threats to data centers. The intelligence documents that Wired quotes from outline a variety of threat actors and models, not simply data center protests.

Quote, adversarial actors, including state-sponsored entities, criminal groups and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists, may target U.S. data centers. These actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the U.S. economy, using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining, or leveraging third-party entities such as front companies to gain access to U.S. data and infrastructure, unquote. So that outlines not just like environmental or like the general anti-data center beliefs held by the American public.

This shows actual threats to national security by hostile state actors or criminal groups, as well as people with their own environmental or ethical reasons for opposing AI domestically. Though, Wired also reported that a fusion center in northern

Virginia created a report on Tesla takedown protests and in-person assemblies like demonstrations at an Arlington County budget meeting and a Fairfax County School Board meeting where people voiced opposition to AI. Yeah, and this is, again, also, like, historically what these fusion centers have been used for,

as James was talking about, I mean, like, all the way back to, like, God, I mean, like, I probably should have worked out in what order I wanted to talk about these, but, like, yeah, fusion centers have been used to target everything from, like, anti-arrock war protest stuff in, like, the mid-2000s through, like, yeah, like, fusion centers were, like, one of the big coordinating agents for, like, all of the repression in 2020. they've been used in like anti-Palestine protests in like 24 in the campus occupations so like yeah like these sort of like intelligence reports are talking about like different threat factors but going after protesters is like what these fission centers in a lot of cases are designed to do

so yeah yeah definitely a thing to be concerned about given what these things are and what they do yeah speaking of cryptocurrency mining uh oh boy so yeah speaking speaking of speaking of of using large entities for crypto bullshit. So last week we talked a bit about Kevin Warsh, the new Federal Reserve Board Chairman's, like, ties to the tech right, right? Ties to Thiel, ties to Andresen, ties to this whole sort of world of like tech venture capital money. And today I want to talk about, as an executive order from May 19th from the Trump administration,

that orders the Federal Reserve to consider allowing crypto companies and other non-FDICT, I see insured entities to use FedWire. Okay, so what is FedWire? On a macro level, FedWire is the reason the entire American economy functions. It is the payment service that banks in the U.S. used to both send money to each other and to the Fed. If you wanted to do an analogy, right, you could say that FedWire is PayPal for banks, but like the reality is not that.

Like, PayPal is like FedWire for people, right? FedWire is maybe the single most important infrastructure piece of the entire American economy. I was going to talk about this a bit later, but the surface on an average, the Fed estimates that it moves $1.1 quadrillion dollars per year. Where does a quadrillion fit in the number bigness scale? That's a million million dollars per year. Right. Like the entire American financial system moves through this service. And you can also, like, move money to the government through this.

So you can do exchanges with the Federal Reserve itself or the different Federal Reserve banks. Now, in order to get access to FedWIRE, you have to be an actual bank, right? You have to be, like, an FDIC insured bank. And crypto has not had access to this system. Like, crypto, I really don't want to call them crypto banks because they're not banks. And that's why they haven't had access to the system because they're not banks. Crypto is not money. and it's not, none of this stuff is subject,

I mean, it's subject, I guess, to a little bit of, like, securities regulation, but it's not subject to actual, like, FDIC regulation or, importantly, deposit insurance, because, again, these are not banks. Now, crypto has been trying to get access to the Fed Wire system for years, because in order for crypto companies to sort of, like, interface with the rest of the banking system, they have to, like, basically, like, get a bank to act as a partner for them,

instead of being able to, like, directly move the stuff around, because they can't access the system. And so Trump has at least given an executive order for the Fed to consider doing this. Now, Trump cannot actually force directly. Like, you can't just sign an executive order that says you have to let Crypta do this because of the Fed independence.

But the Fed had already sort of like opened a period of public comment on this. And this is something that I think Warsh is, this is why it's important that this is happening after like the appointment of like Kevin Warsh. or like after he'd been, technically speaking, before he'd been confirmed, but like after, or like, like, before he'd been sworn in, but after, like, they knew he was going to,

he's going to get through because he is extremely friendly to these groups. This is also a thing that's sort of important for the crypto industry, because one of the issues that crypto has is that actually trying to, like, move cryptocurrency around is just a nightmare. That's like one of the reasons why no one actually, like, uses it to purchase things because it's such a disaster. And getting access to the Fed's payment system suddenly kind of, it gives you a sort of, like, you can use the Fed's payment platform, which actually works unlike theirs, which do not.

Now, the other reason I'm bringing this up, so it's worth mentioning that even if the Fed were to allow them to create accounts with the Federal Reserve, they wouldn't for now have access to a lot of the services that the Federal Reserve provides. like they wouldn't be able to do like, they could take advantage of like repo injections and like stuff like that. Like a lot of the stuff that the Fed uses to stabilize the economy through like injecting money

into the banking system and injecting bonds and stuff like that into the system, they wouldn't have access to. But it's pretty clear that these crypto groups wants that eventually because that gives them access to like the actual sort of banking capacity of the federal government, which allows them access to things like very low interest,

short-term loans and liquidity, etc., etc., etc. And what I want to close on is that this is what Warsh's thing is, right? He wants there to be more integration between this sort of like, I call like FinTech, right? Like the financial tech things. But, you know, between these very fascist right-wing tech companies, they want them to be more and more directly integrated into the payment services and into the banking capacity of the U.S. government. I mentioned earlier that Fedwire moves, again, $1.1 quadrillion dollars a year. now this is also what's very dangerous about Trump's people being in control of the Federal Reserve because there is so much infrastructure inside of the Federal Reserve that if it breaks even a little bit,

things that we don't think of at all. Like literally no one thinks about like even even if you do banking stuff you tend not to think about Fedwire because it just works. And this is less of a risk now that like Doge Grapers aren't running around. But one of the dangers of Trump attempting to pay control of the Federal Reserve is that people will break something like this while doing something like attempting to integrate crypto companies into it. And so that's just going to be a continuing risk that we all sort of

have to deal with because tech companies and the Trump administration and now the President of the Federal Reserve want to fuck with these systems on which everything in all of our lives depends on in ways that we never see. Cool.

All right. Speaking of the things that all of our lives depend on, Here are the products and services that support this podcast. Products and services, that's right. Leslie. Yeah. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them.

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What's the news, name? Huge news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to a podcast. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what. we should call it. Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it

one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad,

Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. On Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends, we help make you funnier on this episode.

My guest's Bob, Odin Kirk, and Kids in the Halls, Bruce McCoha, try and help the Kazoo Kid and Tazan Day be famous again. What if there's an alternate universe show where you guys are incredibly popular? Well, and they could travel up the land doing meet and greets. They're constantly needed at malls. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smygill and Friends.

on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway.

If you're an historian and you leave out half of what you're, what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence.

We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, and we're back. So I have to unfortunately talk about Wikipedia,

or at least the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously, I think everyone here is pretty big fans of Wikipedia, which is at this point has gone from the thing my teachers used to tell me I couldn't use in projects to like, by any objective measure, one of the most significant projects in the history of human knowledge and like storage of things that human beings know and have learned. It's one of the last, like, gasps of the promise of the old internet, and it's also the thing that underpins all of the AI chatbuffs alongside Reddit in one way or another.

And the answers that they give people, like Wikipedia's incredibly important for AI, which is why, like, the Wikimedia Foundation has made deals, like, with the AI industry in order to get money for letting them scrape, like, Wikipedia, which is kind of part of why the Wikimedia Foundation is currently doing really fucking well monetarily. They've got a little under $300 million in reserves, which is about a year and a half worth of money for them. So first off, wait, so you're saying those little banners that they'll have to the screen every time I use Wikipedia are lying. I don't want to, actually right now I do want to discourage people from donating to Wikipedia. Historically,

I have not. But yes, you should first off know if you've been feeling bad about not donating. They don't currently need it. They're okay right now. And they shouldn't get more of your money until they stop doing the shit that I'm about to tell you about. Because over the course of 10 days in May, the Wikimedia Foundation has engaged in what you could call major union busting, firing employees who are trying to organize their fellows and trying to, like, represent those values within the Wikimedia Foundation. And my main source for this is a pretty good article that Jake Orlowitz put out on Medium recently, Big Tech's anti-Labor playbook has come for Wikipedia. And it starts with the firing in mid-May of Brooke Vibber. She was the very first full-time employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and its first CTO, the chief technical officer.

And for more than 20 years, she's like one of the main engineers that has made Wikipedia work, right? And she's also a union organizer. So she's a very important person. She's the lead developer for MediaWiki, which is the platform that runs Wikipedia, and it had been since 2003. and is just a very big person, both in terms of how Wikipedia works and in terms of, like, the way in which, like, their unionizing efforts have gone. She was laid off without any, like, real cost given.

And then a week later on May 21st, the foundation disbanded the community tech team, which consisted of five engineers and a manager. The community tech team had the job of listening to Wikipedia editors, which are number one, the reason Wikipedia has content and number two, volunteers. Right? So these are regular employees whose job has been to hear what Wikipedia editors want and then help make sure that the salary employees on the team fulfill those desires in as much as that as possible, right? And so when you fire these people, you are saying, we don't really give a shit about the volunteer community. And it's also noted in this and Jake's article that most of those engineers were union organizers. Now, there is currently a solidarity petition for Wikipedia editor. So if you are an editor of Wikipedia, I think it would be great if you signed that solidarity petition.

This is the first time that editors have had to do an organized solidarity action with paid foundation staff. And yeah, it's a whole thing. The salaried staff there are not on one side about this. This is extremely controversial. It has a lot to do with the fact that a number of the old guard, including the folks who are like a number of like some of the oldest people at Wikipedia have a kind of of libertarian bit to them, you might say. And in January 20th of 2026, Bernadette Bion was recruited as CEO of the foundation. And her prior career included work at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, as well as a spokesperson role for the NSC, the National Security Council.

She was on the Obama Foundation. She was the U.S. ambassador in Chile. Oh, great. So this is someone who comes from a background in which fucking with union attempts are very like normal. and accepted. The union's demands are not extreme. They would not have any meaningful impact whatsoever on the pile of cash that Wikipedia has. There's no excuse for the Wikimedia Foundation doing this. You should be pissed at them and not give them more money until they make things right. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm done. Nice. All right, so we need to update once again the

situation with the United States War in Iran. The USA this week again bombed Iran in violation of ceasefire, calling it a self-defense strike. I mean, it's still a violation of ceasefire. The negotiations are ongoing. Both sides remain a long way apart. There have been various, like, leaks and reports of where negotiations were at. One suggested that Iran would exchange freeing up its assets and other sanctions relief for removing highly enriched uranium.

Iranian State TV leaked details of a supposed memorandum of understander. standing, which would be like the memorandum that they would sign in order to say, like, hey, let's get back at the table until then these are our rules, kind of. This is the rules we're operating under while we negotiate. The MOU said the blockade would end and the trade would be reopened, but the USA has denied that MOU. I don't want to go into the blow by the blow of like leaked and denied things because it's just a waste of time.

None of that's real. It's all stock market manipulation. Like, it's all just trying. Yeah. Sorry. That's literally my next sentence. Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn't stop people killing. It doesn't stop people dying. It does change the oil price and it does change the stock market. And I think if we report on this too credibly, we miss the fact that that is the real impact. And that is how we should frame this in our reporting, not do the barakravity thing of rushing up a bullet points of something that someone told you and never consider why. Well, James, you will never have a career to Axios with that attitude. Yes. I think that that bridge has been burned, Garrison. But my path in life has been. lit by the bridgey side burns. One thing I do want to note is that Trump has attempted to, he appears to want to tie a peace deal to having other countries in the region signed the Abraham Accords. Abraham Accords, you're not familiar, 2020 agreement in which the UAE, Bahrain, later Sudan and Morocco normalized relations with Israel.

Interesting. That is unlikely to happen. No, wait, you killed the Ayatollah, now you think they're going to sign the Abraham hammer-quot? Like, what are we doing here? Yeah. I mean, it's just going through a wish list of shit, I guess, that he or people close to him won. Yeah. Meanwhile, Iran is continuing to attack Southern Kurdistan, right? I think this offers a very clear vision of what Kurdish groups could expect if they decide to ally with the U.S. and Serb as a ground force. And of course, there are very many reasonable reasons that they would want to do that, right, to include

liberating themselves from an oppressive regime. But the United States, as it has done every other time, would probably abandon them, and they would be subject to this. They are already subject to this just because of rumors that they were associating with the United States. This week, one strike injured nine, P.A.K. Peshmerga, several of them very critically injured. Talking of strikes, let's pivot to Nigeria, where Afrocom is claiming its strikes have killed 175 or more ISIS members. I know that I am like the lonely voice on this. The second I and the second S in ISIS stand for Iraq and al-Sham or Iraq and Syria. Yep.

Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. It's constantly frustrating. ISIS-Khorasan province. It's not what it means. ISIS, West Africa, no what it means. Yeah, so it's the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sharm in Africa. What are we doing it?

Yeah, incredible. It's now made it into you. Like, it would be like if there was like a Christian fundamentalist, like the Georgia Baptist School of London. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's like the United States of America. Yeah, the United States of America, Japan. Yeah, like, come on.

Not what the word means. Yeah. I mean, yeah, in the new counterterrorism doc, I think they almost exclusively refer to it as ISIS K. Yeah, so that's Khorasan province, right? Which again, not in Iraq or al-Sham in what we would call Afghanistan today. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah, this is where we're out with the fucking.

an acronym is not an acronym, it's just a word, I guess. No. I remain angry. Meanwhile, fighting between Boko Haram and Iswap, which is what I'm going to be using, Elect Chad continues to threaten even worse famine in the region. And Hexeth is claiming that these strikes were part of a campaign to defend Christians. And I just want to note one more thing to give you a sense of how committed this president is. Maybe a year ago, he heard the call of Nigerian Christians. who were being targeted and killed by ISIS in Nigeria. And he said, Pete, I want the War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians.

Partnerships like that can take time behind the scenes, but he never wavered on it. And we got the assets there, and over the last month, and there hasn't been much coverage of this, we killed ISIS number two in Nigeria, who's most responsible for killing Christians and trying to target the U.S. homeland, and have since, because of the intel we gather, killed hundreds of ISIS. members who are targeting and killing Christians in Nigeria, creating a whole new opportunity there. So there's a lot of things we do that the media pays attention to, and a lot of things the president empowers the department to do on behalf of the American people that he deserves great credit for. So here we are paying attention as he asked. You will notice that the

Africom claim of 175 is not hundreds. However, Hexeth in that statement, claimed hundreds. Maybe we are missing something. Or maybe he's referring to the December 20. 2025 strikes and including all of those and rolling them up together. It's, of course, worth pointing out that Nigerian government has pushed back on this narrative, that these strikes are to defend Christians. There are Christian bishops in Nigeria who have pushed back on this narrative. Because as with many Islamist terror groups, the majority of people, these people have killed, are not Christians, right?

Many of them are Muslims, many of them, people of various other faiths. Like, Boko Haram, right? The name roughly translates to, like, Western-style, education is forbidden. It's haram. Like they're going after people who are in that community who have sought out Western education. There are many, many, many instances I could say of these people killing Muslim people. Hexas wants to make this a crusade. And that's just not how things are on the ground. It's a very simplistic understanding of a much more complicated reality. But yeah, that is what I have on Nigeria this week. He is right that the US media covers Africa

much less than it should. But we're trying to do our best here. We have one more story, big story, before we close. But first, we should mention the Republican primary in Texas on Tuesday. After gaining Trump's endorsement last

week, Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton won the runoff election in the Republican Senate primary race. Paxton won by almost 400,000 votes, beating the fourth term incumbent Republican settler John Cornyn at 64% to 36% of the vote.

This is the second week in a row where Trump has successfully intervened to steer congressional primary win away from incumbents and toward staunch mega loyalists. Paxton will now go up against Tala Rico in the general election this November. Should we mention Paxton calling Tau Rico transgender? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not just Paxton. Miller.

Miller. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There seems to be a whole GOP move to brand him as trans potentially. Yeah. As part of their, which I kind of see is some degree of desperation, although I can't really imagine Paxton losing this election.

So maybe it's just that they're completely out of other ideas. And Paxton does seem to have more liabilities than Cornyn would. Sure. But he's Paxton and this is Texas. You have to keep that in. Like, they're not going to take Texas. This guy has been charged with crimes, and the GOP tried to get rid of him. Texas refuses.

Yeah. Like, Texas is like, absolutely not. I mean, I never am putting my faith in Texas, as we all know. Yeah. But if I were to set up a pairing, the Tala Rico v. Paxton pairing is the one I would pick, as opposed to Tala Rico v. Kornin or, you know, Crockett v. the Paxton. Sure.

I'm not going to say there's no way that Tala rica wins it. It would be an astonishing like a minute. It would be really. Yeah. Look, I'll come on here and admit

I was wrong and I'll be thrilled. I just spent too long living in Texas. I'll see this as like the person who's been the most consistent like assuming there's an election that even sort of functions normally. This is going to be like a 2008 style wave. They're not like they're not going to win Texas

And until I'm proven wrong, I've been saying this the entire time I've been doing this show and I've been right every single time. So, like, prove me wrong, Texas. You know, when I see a flip for Texas coming, I'll call it out. But I don't right now. Nope. Yeah. I'm not saying it'll never happen because demographically probably will at some point.

Like, unless they really succeed in their genocide dreams. But that ain't happening now. Yeah. Now this cycle. Finally, let's talk about another one of these redistricting cases and one related to the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act. On Tuesday, a federal court blocked an Alabama congressional house map drawn by Republicans in 2023. A three-judge panel found that the drawn map was intentionally discriminatory based on race. Just two weeks ago, the Supreme Court cleared the way for this same map to be used.

in the 2026 midterm elections. Alabama Republicans have since labeled the district court panel activist judges. It's worth taking a look at who these judges are, I think. The 11th Circuit judge was first appointed to a district court by one Ronald Reagan. The other two district judges were appointed by Trump. And this exact same three-judge panel had already found this exact same amount, to be intentionally racially discriminatory years ago. This new district court order also rejects the state's claims that the 2020

map was just drawn with partisan, not racial intent. Right, and quote, the purpose of the 2023 plan was to distribute black voters across districts to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are black, unquote. This latest ruling is part of a specific redistricting battle that has stretched on for five years. with Republican maps being repeatedly struck down, appealed, redrawn, and struck down again. I've seen some confusion on the exact series of events here, like what the Supreme Court has ruled on,

which maps are being used. So I want to just briefly go over the sequence of events as I understand it. In 2021, a district court ruled that a new map drawn after the 2020 census likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld this decision in 2023, barring the use of this 2021 map. After the Supreme Court decision, the Alabama legislature adopted a new map in 2023, but a federal court again found that this newer 2023 map also likely violated Section 2, and the Supreme Court let a ban on the use of this map go through by declining to block the order,

but they did not rule on the map itself. So the court appointed a special master to draw a new Alabama house map to use going forward. In 2025, following a trial, the district court officially ruled that Alabama's 23 congressional map did in fact violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Finding the map was, quote, an intentional effort to dilute black Alabamaan's voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way, unquote. importantly, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on the actual 2023 map itself. After the district court's ruling in 2025, Alabama did appeal to the Supreme Court,

but they delayed consideration until after the Louisiana case. As we know, that ruling effectively nullified much of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, establishing that intent of racial discrimination must be shown, not just discrimination as an effect in the drawing of voting districts. But after that ruling, Alabama asked the Supreme Court again for a quick appeals decision before the state's scheduled primary and to put the lower court's order barring the use of the 2023 map on hold, considering their recent ruling in the Louisiana case. And on May 11th, the Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency shadow docket appeal,

vacated the order blocking the use of the 20203 district map, and sent the case back to the lower court for further review in light of the Louisiana ruling. So that's a lot. But remember that the district court already ruled that the 2023 map intentionally discriminated based on race, the very requirement set by the Supreme Court's Louisiana ruling. So when the district court reconsidered the case this past week, they found that the Louisiana decision only strengthened their original ruling that the Alabama GOP map was intentionally discriminatory and diluted black voters. This is pretty much what Sordomer wrote in her dissent

when she argued that there was, quote unquote, no reason to send the case back to the district court because that court had already concluded that Alabama, quote, violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of black voters in Alabama. That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of and unaffected by any of the legal issues discussed in the Louisiana case, unquote. So that's essentially what happened. That's essentially what the district court found. The three-judge panel also rebuffed opposition to the court-ordered map in Alabama on the basis that it bears a similarity to the map at the center of the Louisiana case, writing that it's their understanding of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that race as a

districting criterion cannot be used when drawing maps, but that quote-unquote relevant racial data may be considered for a lawful purpose, like checking that the drawn maps comply with Voting Rights Act precedent. It's not that racial data is used in the drawing of maps, but after the maps are drawn, they can be checked against racial data to make sure they comply with Voting Rights Act law. The district court wrote that Louisiana's black population is not as concentrated as in Alabama, requiring a black majority district to slice through multiple metropolitan areas to scoop up black voters, whereas in Alabama, it's quote-unquote relatively easy to draw a reasonably configured majority black district.

Quote, we are unsurprised that race-blind relief is available here, but was unavailable there. Here, it has been consistently obvious to us from our visual assessment of the geographic dispersion of Alabama's black population and statistics about black population centers in the state that black voters in Alabama are relatively geographically compact, unquote. So essentially, it's actually pretty difficult to draw a map that separates out the black population to be a minority force in all voting districts. As for demonstrating intent, the district court found that the Alabama legislature only enacted the discriminatory map after no way. it would dilute the impact of black voters. And by having prior knowledge of the disparate racial

impact, including from federal court findings, and then passing the map anyway, that itself shows intent. Furthermore, the judges wrote that the case's, quote, enormous record contains no evidence of a partisan motive, unquote, in the drawing of the 2023 map. I'll quote again from the recent order, quote, in the simplest terms, the sequence and substance of extraordinary legislative events against the backdrop of the legislature's knowledge compels us to conclude that the legislature doubled down on racially discriminatory vote dilution after we and the Supreme Court found that it was racially discriminatory vote dilution. The same evidence leaves us no room to conclude that when the legislature did all this, it had party politics in mind.

The only available intent evidence tells us that consideration of race were the key reason, unquote. So the court ordered Alabama to use the alternative court-ordered map already used in the 2024 election for the rest of Alabama's 26 congressional elections, after which the legislature can then create a new congressional district plan. And of course, the state of Alabama has already appealed this to the Supreme Court. And we will wait and see if they decide to hear this case. Yeah. This will continue to be a thing we're going to have to report on. We should say for some time, right? Like, yes. This is going to result in massive changes. Yeah, we will continue to cover them, I guess. It is interesting that this is the first time I've seen a court really like interpret the Louisiana ruling for like another case to a, like, this is like an over 70 page like ruling. Yeah. And they discuss like where the Louisiana case does apply and where it doesn't and what it means to quote unquote.

consider race in the evaluation of these districts. And it would be interesting, you know, if the Supreme Court decides to hear this, if they're going to affirm this court's interpretation of their ruling, or if they're going to say, no, you got it wrong and strike down their interpretation. But, you know, right now they did really outline, like what it means to use race in reference to these districts and how they cannot be used in the drawing of the district. Right. But that it can be considered. to make sure that it complies with the Voting Rights Act, and that does not mean that it was used as an instrument

in the actual drawing of the district. And I think that that specificity is an interesting part of the new ruling. Definitely. I think like, it's just like any other Supreme Court decision, right? Things tend to sort of bounce around before they're entirely clarified. Yeah. Like I said, this is like a five-year-long case,

all stemming from the 2020 census. Yeah. and the maps that the Republicans have tried to draw after that, which as multiple courts, the Supreme Court and the district court have already concluded, the GOP tried to intentionally dilute the votes of black Alabamans, right? And because of the way that the black population is concentrated in Alabama, there needs to be an intentional effort to do that, right? Whereas in this Louisiana case, the drawing of districts had, you know,

had to look more gerrymendered to create these black majority districts, Whereas in Alabama's case, that's not really necessary. And in fact, a lot of the maps that were referenced in testimony were like algorithmically generated. Huh. That's interesting. It wasn't like, uh, they didn't get the crayons out and like, uh, draw lines like how Lichellbridge Jerry did back in the day. No.

Great, great. I love that. I'm sure we can expect much more wonderful algorithmically generated election. Well, yeah. Content. What a time to be alive. Um, if you want to email us. Plus, coolzone tips at proton.me.

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