It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: Mail-In Voting Restrictions, Canadian Trade War, Record High ICE Detentions 

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

The gang discuss the death of Dolly Parton, a drought in Puerto Rico, SCOTUS allowing Trump to implement his executive order on mail-in voting, trade negotiations falling apart with Canada, how police are circumventing sanctuary policies, and the chaotic evacuation of a U.S. base in Bahrain.    Sources: https://pridesource.com/article/dolly-parton-tribute https://people.com/dolly-parton-says-she-loves-and-does-not-judge-the-lgbtq-community-8386722https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/ https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/08/18/usda-acts-remove-roadless-rule-restrictions-exacerbate-rising-wildfire-risk  https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/planning/roadless https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/22/us-canada-trade-deal-01046788  https://www.npr.org/2026/08/24/nx-s1-5942971/u-s-treasury-launches-economic-d-day-against-iran-as-war-drags-on  https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/6048370-scott-bessent-trump-administration-slow-roll-iran-war-sanctions/  https://newrepublic.com/post/214646/trump-worker-visa-fees-immigration  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/world/canada/trump-carney-trade-war-tariffs.html  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxvj1zd4qjo  https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/iran-vows-retaliation-u-widens-115405636.html  https://apnews.com/article/puerto-rico-drought-disaster-usda-farmers-water-b4fe620ecbb2272576e79d140f0180dd  https://www.elnuevodia.com/corresponsalias/washington-dc/notas/agricultura-federal-declara-una-emergencia-en-26-municipios-de-puerto-rico-a-causa-de-la-sequia/ https://www.injusticewatch.org/project/ice-informants/2026/illinois-prosecutors-helping-ice/   https://www.injusticewatch.org/project/ice-informants/2026/illinois-trust-act-violations-immigrants-deported/  https://illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/Safer-Communities/Resources-for-Law-Enforcement/Law-Enforcement-and-Immigration/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC1X9shmR24  https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/2092303479054225809?s=20  https://deportationdata.org/news/2026-08-24-ICE-release.html  https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/251258.P.pdf  https://app.deportationdata.org/?agency=ice&dataset=detention-stays&tab=chart&s=eJxVyDEKhEAMQNG7_HqEWRd2IZcJKoOKTCIabcS7W_vKd3Ei38QeXSAMflho777MtpOIuRaE6hYTibE4gqq5FVUS47a-o64IbW5_Tf43-cP9AO8gHXk  https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2026-08/OIG-26-23-Aug26.pdf  https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-17238.pdf  https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/26a124_hgci.pdf  https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/26/trump-usps-mail-voting-rule-lawsuit-states-supreme-court.html  https://archive.is/20260818151459/https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/18/pentagon-evaluating-smaller-us-military-presence-persian-gulf-after-iran-war/#selection-1117.0-1121.36https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-08-21/bahrain-evacuation-military-families-navy-22618186.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-21/stars-and-stripes-publisher-editor-reporter-separated-22620671.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack.

This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on. on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos,

and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you.

Listen to Therapy Gecko on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my love. I'm Ryan Weiss, and for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and a spiritual guide, and I'm sharing with you my new podcast, Waking Up with Ryan. Waking Up with Ryan is a daily audio video podcast, here to help you connect with yourself before the noise of the day takes over. So let's start our days together with a moment of calm, the time. just for you. Listen to waking up with Ryan on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you are tired of listening to opinions without practical solutions, the Tesla Figuro podcast is a training room, not another commentary show. I'm Teslin Figaro. As an award-winning business owner, political strategist, trainer, and jurors-docted candidate,

every episode breaks down the law, politics, media, leadership, into practical strategies you can use in your everyday life. You have an additional footprint. You need to be aware, Because it can help you catch a case or can help you catch a case in your household. Listen to the Tesla and Figaroid podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and special correspondent,

Carlos Berrios Polanco, who we have had on a few times for regular episodes. This episode, we are covering the week of August 19th through August 26th. Robert, do want to start us off with our tribute? Yeah, so before we get going today, as I'm sure everyone listening is at least broadly aware, Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean passed away the day before we recorded this on August 25, 2026. Dolly Parton was more widely beloved than pretty much anyone that was still alive in the United States. Her death was met by immediate mourning from every side of society, and I do mean every side. President Donald Trump ordered all flags to fly at half staff and issued at least as

genuine a statement of respect as he's ever put out about anyone, saying this is a true loss for millions of people. There has never been anyone like her and never will. It's hard to argue with that. The DSA also sent out an official in memoriam, praising part in as a hero to the working class, and you would find anyone hard-pressed to genuinely disagree with that statement, too. Dolly was born in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of a dirt poor and a literate sharecropper. She wrote more than 3,000 songs in her life and had 44 career top-10 country albums, which is nuts. But I wouldn't be talking about Dolly on this show, which does not do obituaries as a rule if she'd just been a rags-to-riches.

entertainment industry success story. Dolly had the good luck to become rich and famous, and she would always emphasize that luck had a lot to do with it, even though she worked very hard. And she grew up poor enough that she never, ever forgot that had things been a little different, she would have stayed dirt poor. So she dedicated her life and her fortune to helping the least fortunate in our society. Parton established the Dollywood Foundation to improve education in Sevier County, Tennessee, and in participating classes, the dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%.

She founded the Imagination Library, her best-known charity, and donated her 100 millionth free book to children in 2018. She helped build hospitals and universities and was the single highest dollar donor to research that created the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When getting vaccinated became a political hot-button issue, Dolly posted a video of herself taking the vaccine and performed a cover of her own song, Jolene, themed after getting vaccinated. She was also a long time and vocal advocate for queer people. In 1990, the son, a British magazine, found out that her Hollywood chauffeur was a trans man named Jason Piro. They interviewed him, and he told the magazine, Dolly has been good to me. I'm not real comfortable talking about myself.

Dolly knows all about me and is a very nice lady. Even back in the 90s, Dolly Parton was comfortable openly supporting trans people and the rest of the queer community. Her song, released in 1991, is probably the first country music song to use the word gay, certainly the first to use it in like a positive sense of the word. And she had queer and trans employees as far back as the early 90s and talked openly about that. In 2016, she was interviewed by Chris as a party for Pride Source and said, I have many gays and lesbians in my own family, she revealed to me. And then she used a word that stuck with me for a decade now, ours.

They're ours and they're who they are, and we know they're wonderful and they're like us. Some relatives back in the mountains, she admitted, still weren't quite sure what to make of it. She also told me casually, like it was nothing, which is exactly how she wanted it treated, that she had transgender employees on salary in her own company, years before most corporations would say that sentence out loud, let alone mean it. People came to her the way they used to come to her mama, she said, to be told it was safe to be honest. You need to let people know who you are, and you need to come on out, she'd tell them.

You don't need to live your life in darkness. Parton strenuously avoided direct political punditry when she could, but after the right-wing moral panic over trans rights ignited in the 2020s, she spoke out, stating her explicit and direct support for trans people. important this is to them. That's who they are, she said. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me. If there's something to be judged, that is God's business, but we are all God's children, and how we are is who we are. There's so much more to who Dolly was and what she did from reinvesting royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of I Will

Always Love You into the Black community, after refusing to license the song to Elvis, to starring in the best little whorehouse in Texas, arguably the best film about either Texas or whorehouses. She did it all in her life. I think the loss of Parton hurts so keenly because of the very thing I started with, though. The fact that her loss has been mourned across the aisle almost regardless of political stance. Dolly Parton was the closest thing our culture had to a secular saint, a Joshua Norton-like figure who could have waited into the middle of a deadly partisan riot and parted the fighting with her presence, like that baby at the end of children of men. I might be going a little bit far with that last one, but in my research for this, I came across a recollection of Dolly by Roger Ebert that I feel I need

to share. Roger Ebert, if you're on the younger side, was a very famous Pulitzer-winning film critic, and this is him talking about meetings that he and his partner, Gene Siskel, had with Dolly Parton. In Dallas for the premiere of 9-to-5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the plane home to Chicago, I confessed it to Siskel. I had been granted a private half-hour with Dolly Parton, and as we spoke, I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing and comforting. Gene listened and said, Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her. We looked at each other.

What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer to it in wonder. And to close off, I think I should give us all some advice, courtesy of Dolly Parton. Find out who you are and do it on purpose, and do it with purpose. You got to know who you are because so many people try to emulate or copy somebody else. And that's what I've got to say about Dolly. Thank you, Robert.

for some less good. I mean, how do I say this? Some people who are less good than Dolly Parton. Yes. There are billions of them. Let's start with some small things regarding people who are not as good as Dolly Parton. Darlene Graham just won the runoff election

for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina. Graham won with 52.5% of the vote, dominating in the eastern part of the state where Trump campaigned for her last Friday. in Myrtle Beach. On Wednesday morning, the Department of State, in partnership with the Department of Treasury, has announced the Italy-based autonomous anti-capitalist digital service provider, Autostici InVandadi, or the IA Collective, is now a specially designated global terrorist

organization. To quote from Treasury, quote, Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control took action to counter the growing threat posed by violent far-left terrorist groups by sanctioning the IA Collective, an Italy-based entity that supplies specialized digital architecture, tools, and services for Antifa cells and other violent far-left extremists, including the foreign terrorist organization Palestine Action. The IA Collective also operates the web platform no blogs, which hosts many Antifa and anarchist communiques.

notably, the State Department has repeatedly asserted that Rose City Antifa used the NoBlogs platform online, and that is simply not true. What they are referring to is Rose City counter info, a separate website that is not affiliated with Rose City Antifa, which is used by local anarchists to make community bulletin board style updates. I cannot emphasize enough that these are totally separate groups with often very different politics. But on both social media and official State Department press releases, these two groups have been conflated, asserting that Rose City Antifa used the AI collective tools to organize and incite violent and criminal acts. Something else I want to emphasize is that Palestine Action, the UK-based organization, is described as a

foreign terrorist organization in the Treasury Department's announcement about sanctions regarding the IA collective. And in that same announcement, sanctions were also imposed on Palestine Action, which the Treasury Department accused of supporting, quote, numerous acts of terrorism. But as of recording, Palestine Action has not been officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization. And then one thing from me, the Trump administration moved ahead this week with its plans to rescind the 2001 roadless rule, which blocks road building in infantry-drode-lose areas of national forests, not in wilderness areas or national parks, if some people have been reporting. The new rule was proposed on August 18th with a public comment period beginning that day. The justification that they're going for with this is it will prevent wildfires. And I believe they're going for, like, it will allow fuel mitigation to prevent wildfires. It's worth noting that there were already provisions in the Rodas rule to allow for, like, thinning of small diameter timber. What they didn't do is add budget to do that, right? So, like,

if they were making a serious attempt to do fire mitigation in so much as that is something we can prevent, which I don't think it is, then they would have added budget, but they haven't done that. it's just worth pointing out that the construction of roads will allow people to get into areas that were harder for them to get into before and the thing that tends to start wildfires is people. So people being in these areas will allow people to start fires in these areas. I'm going to cover this more in depth on natural causes in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to flag it because the comment period will probably end soon after I do my episode. So if you want to comment and so much that matters anymore, I'll include a link.

So in other news that has thus far wound up not really being news, President Trump has declared, quote, economic D-Day in his attempt to end the war in Iran, win the war in Iran. So in theory, economic deed A is supposed to be a bunch of what are called secondary sanctions. Secondary sanctions are not just sanctions on a country, but are sanctions on any country that does trade with. the first country, in this case Iran. The specific focuses here are supposed to be, quote, cryptocurrency, technology, golds, aviation, and shipping. Now, the issue here is that if you are going to do secondary sanctions against countries that trade with Iran, the actual largest target here would be China. Now, reporters repeatedly asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessence, who is nominally the person is supposed to be running these sanctions.

If he was going to name which countries there were going to be secondary sanctions against Bessnett refused repeatedly. So these sanctions were supposed to begin later this week, but the administration has been, I don't know if slow walking them is the term, but they have refused to actually impose any. They are claiming that they are not imposing any because they are giving countries time. to comply voluntarily. But as of Wednesday, August 26th, there have been no actual sanctions imposed.

Every conceivable joke comparing this to D-Day has already been made. Then he actually by the press corps in an unexpected bit of bravery. There were several members of the press core in various press conferences asked, hey, so D-Day was

a surprise and you're announcing this. Can you explain this conflict? And got a bunch of non-answers. So maybe this is the giant inflatable set of sanctions that they are using to draw attention from the actual set of sanctions. James, you unfortunately know significantly more about D-D-A than every single person in this administration can buy so. Oh my God. It's a thing that they make you do when you're a British man in your 30s. Yeah.

But if any sanctions actually come from this, we will let you know. As of Wednesday, August 26th, this is another failed attempt to win the war in Iran that seems to have been called off before being. Speaking of tariffs. So the other big piece of big tariff news is something that we talked about a few weeks ago, which is the U.S.'s attempt to impose 50% tariffs on a broad swath of Canadian goods. ever since then the U.S. and Canada have been in trade negotiations over these tariffs, and these negotiations have completely fallen apart as Canada has walked away from the table. Now, there are a bunch of reasons why these specific negotiations broke down completely. I'm going to go through some of them.

One of the big ones is that one of the biggest sources of cross-border trade between the U.S. and Canada is the fact that in a similar way to the U.S. and Mexico, Mexico, there is a lot of cross-border trade revolving around U.S. auto manufacturing, right? And Canadian auto manufacturing, a lot of, you know, Ford, General Motors, stuff like that. A lot of trucks are produced in Canada. The U.S. was negotiating, reducing the tariffs on Canadian automobiles to 15 percent, but they were only doing this for cars and not trucks. And so they wanted to leave the truck rate at 50 percent. And there were a whole bunch of very, very fancy trucks that American consumers buy and that Canada makes that would still have 50% tariffs.

Sure. Yeah. This is one of the things that normally when these kind of trade battles have happened before automotive stuff has been written out of them almost immediately because it's terrible for a bunch of American companies. But the administration was refusing to back down on this. And, you know, the Canadians walked out. They have wooden alcohol tariffs that are already in effect.

there are going to be more tariffs coming on September 8th. More bafflingly, one of the big things that Trump has been on is trying to restart the Keystone XL pipeline. Yeah. Which Cardi is like, no, we're not doing this pipeline unless we get a better trade deal. But then in a truly startling set of proposals, the U.S. wanted to be able to set Canadian steel tariff rates? Sure. The nominal argument here is that the U.S. is trying to, like, quote, unquote, stop the import, the flood of cheap steel from countries like China, and they could only do this if the Canadian steel tariff rate matched the American steel tariff rate. But the goal for this was for the U.S. to be able to review and set Canadian tariff rates and make sure that they match American tariff rates on other countries. Which, this is the kind of stuff you do to a colony?

51st date. Yeah. Can confirm. Very colonial thing to do. Shocking from America. I've never seen a country do this, right? To do this to another sovereign country? Like, Canada?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we did this to a rock. I've never, I've never seen anything like this. It's bizarre. The insistence that, like, yeah, we have any sort of say in their international policy is de facto making Canada, trying to make Canada agree that they're a colony, right?

Right. Yeah. It's very weird the way this is being written about in the American press. They're like, they're like, oh, well, this is Canadian autonomy and sovereignty has become a political issue. And, like, yes, obviously, there's no country on earth that would agree to this. No. Like, even the staunchest American, like Saudi Arabia would not agree to let the U.S. dictate its tariff policy. No. It's absurd. And this has managed to accomplish the absolutely staggering feat. of uniting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with Doug Ford,

the right-wing premiere of Ontario. Jesus Christ. And also, because these people just hate winning, I don't have another explanation for this other than racism, Canadian negotiators claim that the U.S. was trying to intervene in Canadian policy about the digital promotion of French films, which is a direct attack on Quebec. And yeah, and a bunch of very, very important legal protections in Quebec about, like, the French language.

So they have somehow managed to unite a political coalition of Doug Ford, the Quebecese separatists, and the ruling liberals, all of whom it's pretty insane. It's unbelievable. They're just going systematically through every single conceiving. political bloc in Canada and pissing them off. So these negotiations obviously collapsed. Obviously, the Canadians walked away. Obviously, there was almost total support in Canadian society for doing this. Yeah.

No, Canadian nationalism is at like an all-time high. Yeah. This is really just carrying over the sort of trends that we saw in the last Canadian election where Carnieve saved the liberals from like total, total and utter demise by feeding into this sense of like nationalism. Like, yeah, based on being under threat from Trump.

And the guy who was running for the conservative prime minister was too associated with Trump. And so that really hurt them. And it built this really big coalition in Canada to push back against the conservatives as a way of pushing back against Trump. And really put forward the liberal party as this, as this like counter force to Trump's America and the attempted in. incursions into Canadian sovereignty, which Trump is still trying to do. And it's impressive how much Carney's been able to hold on to that coalition while ruling. It's been over a year now. And stuff like this shows that it's, if anything, only like gotten stronger in recent, weeks during these negotiations. Like pulling together, Doug Ford, the Liberal Party and the

cabuqua into one united block is like an unprecedented piece of like national unity. The fact that other Canadians are backing up the Quebecois after fucking Trump tried to make restrictions at like the French language and can't like that that's nuts. The fact that I'm going to be on the slide of the Kevin Cua as like a Midwest Canadian. It's nuts. Very impressive by Trump. Yeah. And I think what's interesting about this, right, is that like, you know, throughout Canadian history,

there's been a bipartisan series of debates that have cut across, you know, like as cut across every political party, there have been factions in both about whether or the extent to which Canada was going to be sort of a branch plant economy of the United States. And that's just over. Everyone at this point has, you know, sort of unified and saying, no, we're not going to continue doing this, you know, to sort of cap this off. one of the demands from the Trump negotiators were that Canada would end this program has been doing of the sort of the sort of bi-Canadian program where, you know, they've been doing something that the U.S. also has been doing for ages of encouraging people and encouraging government contracts to go to Canadian companies, which has been intensified in response to

sort of America. I mean, what I think inaccurately, and I can't believe I'm saying this in in regards to Canada as American imperial aggression. And Canadians have refused to do this, and instead, this has been intensifying attempts to sort of do whatever is possible to try to decouple the U.S. and Canadian economies. Obviously, that's not something that's particularly possible in a macro sense, just because of the reliance on both, you know, oil exports and also the way that the auto sector is intertwined, but this is, this has become economic policy in a way that would have been unthinkable even like five years ago. In specific, like the by Canada campaign to push for consumers just to buy products made either by Canadian companies

or made in Canada has been a massive success. Yeah. Talking with my family in Canada about this. Like this is penetrated into all parts of the country, including like the conservative Alberta province where my family lives, where yeah, this is like a big thing. It's hard to understate how much of an impact that that has had in the country's consuming habits in the past like year and a half. Yeah, Trump has the ability to do this in an incredible number of countries, actually.

Like, he has created some fantastic alliances. He's been great for the maple syrup business. Let's go on ad break and then return for more news. Ads for Poutine and maple syrup coming up. From your mouth to God tears. Not at the same time. Maybe at the same time now. Maybe that's all they have.

I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore. Check out our brand new episodes. featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, Wolf forades, I'll Believe in Anything, and tattoos all the things she said, and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, Crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone,

as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're a alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip,

I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. Yeah, I'm obsessed. So I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite

book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the time. Nothing is off the story. the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners.

Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman?

Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine.

Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state.

Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested. or just like, oh, I've got my life, I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Carlos, welcome. Hello. What is your special segment for us this week on executive disorder? There was an American colony segue that was hanging right there. You're like, you know what? My bad. From the soon-to-be colony of the U.S. Canada to the current colony, Puerto Rico, on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, declared that 26 out of the 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico were undergoing a drought disaster.

Per the AP, more than 33% of the archipelago is under extreme drought, and another 40% is experiencing severe drought. So I should say that this emergency declaration has been. been a long time coming, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets extended to other municipalities. Puerto Rico has been experiencing pretty bad water problems since forever, but they became particularly acute last year when more than half a million people lost water because of a broken pipe. Earlier this year, another break caused about 300,000 people to lose water more or less. In my area, which is kind of outside of the metro where it's been most affecting, we lost water for about 10 days early in the summer. And now, because of a mixture of aging infrastructure,

that hasn't been fixed and a continuing drought, it looks like that might be the case again soon. At least we're stockpiling as much water as we can. So to talk about the infrastructure problems real quick, part of it is really due to how bad the system is we lose about 60% of the water produced by the local water utility before it gets to people's homes, which is. Jesus. It's become normal to us, but it's kind of crazy to say to other people, at least in my experience when I've talked about it with others. And quite a few of the reservoirs that feed us water have not been dredged in years. Yeah, and part of the reason the drought is going on is because of the super El Nino, which has been causing temperatures across pretty much the whole world to go up.

So I also want to talk about two pretty big investigations published by Ara Bogalo of Injustice Watch, one in collaboration with Wired and the other in collaboration with the Intercept. To kind of set the scene, Illinois has this thing called the Trust Act, which generally prohibits law enforcement in Illinois from participating in immigration enforcement. This includes not detaining or not continuing to detain any person based solely on whether they have an immigration detainer. They are not supposed to, quote, assist in any capacity with an immigration agent's enforcement operation unless required to by a judge's warrant or federal law. Several other states have laws like this, essentially making them sanctuary states. However, as Bogota writes, this hasn't really stopped local officials from collaborating with immigration

enforcement. In one case, a Riverton police officer ran the name of a 31-year-old immigrant for a law enforcement database due to a traffic infraction only to get a phone call from the FBI almost immediately. The FBI agent was trying to see how he could help ICE detained the guy, the man who was stopped. The solution came from an outstanding state warrant the man had out for him. The police officer technically was not detaining him on an immigration base, but the outcome was the same. Perry Bogato's reporting, since, Trump came into office officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois have collaborated with immigration officials by feeding them information. This has led to at least 150 people being put into

the immigration system throughout Illinois, even though as a sanctuary state, it's ostensibly not supposed to do that. In another exchange reported by injustice watch, a Tinley Park officer was asked by an ICE agent for quote unquote lead data on a person the officer had stopped her speeding. The officer responded with a bunch of information about the guy, including his address and phone number, and also told the ICE agent that, quote, his crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently. There are several examples of this kind of wink and nod collaboration by local officials with immigration enforcement for a variety of different ways, including emails or housing detained migrants at the request of the U.S. Marshals, then releasing them into ICE's hands.

The second story published by Baguallo is much the same, but focus on county prosecutors role in enforcing immigration law. Per her story, quote, states attorney's office in one out of every six Illinois counties acted as valuable assets of federal immigration enforcement, sharing sensitive personal data about the people they were prosecuting without criminal warrants, public disclosure, or legislative oversight, and with no accounting of how often it happened or who was affected, end quote.

Some of this came from simply answering when DHS agents came calling, while some prosecutors volunteered information of their own volition. In Marion County, one assistant state's attorney emailed the information of a man in a case he was prosecuting only for ICE to respond, quote, we'll take care of it and detained him three weeks later outside his home, along with his 17-year-old son. The same prosecutor per injustice watch emailed the same ICE agent within 20 minutes after flagging the first person saying, quote, I've got another potential. It's worth noting that per Bogalo, more than half of Illinois State Attorney's offices said they had no record of contacts with ICE. However, what I wanted to highlight here was that even in states, people would consider quote-unquote safe because they're sanctuary states or sanctuary cities. The mechanism of the state continues to collaborate with immigration enforcement under the table. We've seen this in a bunch of places already, mainly for state, local, and municipal police officers doing this exact same type of thing across the country.

But the prosecutor's thing, as far as I know, is pretty new, especially at this scale that Bogalo reported on, right? So this kind of wink and nod collaboration is likely happening across the board in the United States and we'll be hearing stories like this probably for years to come. Yeah, I think like people should be aware, I guess. I just want to say really briefly that like sanctuary jurisdiction laws are not necessarily doing what people think they are doing.

Like cops are going to cop. Yeah, absolutely. And you see this all the time with like when they put into, you know, the queries they put into flock, when people look at their flock hot list and they just put like investigation or crime as the reason why. Like that is what's happening there, right?

When your jurisdiction tells you that these flock cameras aren't going to be used for immigration, when the cop just puts in investigation, you have no idea what it's being used for, right? Yeah. Absolutely. And I should also flag that a bunch of sanctuary cities have specific ways in which they'll collaborate

with immigration enforcement. So, for example, a big thing is Operation Stone Garden where they use municipal, state, and local cops to patrol the border, and sometimes, ostensibly, it's not supposed to be for immigration enforcement, but I'm pretty sure that it's happened across the U.S. where it's being used to enforce immigration. Yeah, or like, look at NDAs, right? Like, it's in theory a trespass thing, top of it being, I guess it's a federal trespass in that instance because it's a military installation.

For a citizen, that would be like a trespass thing. Yeah, there are a bunch of these ways. The California Values Act has all these carve-outs in addition to, like, as far as I'm aware, never having led to a prosecution. These sanctuary city laws of a cop or a prosecutor or sanctuary jurisdiction laws, like they don't have teeth. Yeah. Yeah. And insofar as Sanctuary City laws did anything under the first Trump administration, it wasn't because of the laws themselves. It was because of the mass resistance to it.

Yeah. We don't fix this with sanctuary laws. And I think anyone who's telling you that that is the case is either, like, lying to you or unaware. Exactly. I want to talk a little bit about some documents that the deportation data project has obtained by Freedom Information Act request, and they show us some data about ICE detentions. One of the things they show is that ICE is focusing more and more on people with no criminal record

rather than as a claim focusing on people with convictions. As of July, the majority of ICE arrests were people with no convictions and no pending charge. This comes in the same week as the Fourth Circuit post-Chevron ruled that if a person's criminal conviction is vacated for any reason, that eliminates immigration consequences coming from that conviction that will only be in the Fourth Circuit right now, right? It was reported today in a few outlets that July had the highest number of ICE arrests, almost 50,000. That's correct, yeah, yeah. And it's very interesting. June saw the previous record, right? And then July, so an even higher record. Specifically, I'm looking at detention bookings there. Okay.

So it is possible that someone could be booked in having previously been detained once, right? Like, we can't sum all of these months. It's unlikely, but like Flores, right? The Flores settlement governs detention of minors. But I don't think there's a prohibition on redetention under Flores, as I understand it. So, yeah, as you said, these are the highest numbers that we've seen in this. administration. The data set I was looking at goes back to 2022, but I would be shocked if there were pre-2020 numbers that were higher than this. So I think it's probably pretty safe to say

these are the highest numbers ever. Yeah. It's interesting to break it down by state, which I did. A lot of that increase came in Texas and Florida. If you're like, if you, if you graph the like number of bookings by state by months, you see huge spikes in Texas and Florida. Texas has always been the highest rate. It's a vast state. It has a large migrant population. You have support from local law enforcement, but the Florida peak was particularly notable, as were Arizona and Georgia. California, by contrast, it didn't go up as much. And I want to get in a little bit, I'm going to go through some more data and tell us more about what this tells us about how ICE is going about things now. The number of people in detention is lower than its peak of

January this year. This is probably due to the all-time high number of book outs from detention in July. The vast majority of those were removals. Some of them, people who bonded out. And out that the bath bulk of those are going to be removals. We can also see certain detention facilities growing in population, notably Camp East Montana. A few months ago, I reported on the GAO report, government accountability office report, which highlighted how terrible conditions were there. As far as I know, it's still called Montana, not Montagna. I don't know if that's just they don't have the capacity to add accents or maybe they go for something else there. overall this data shows that the ice surge in July was really huge.

And it shows us a little bit about this home and era approach, right? They're not doing what Bovino did, which was gratuitously using violence and crowd control and a highly visible militarized presence in blue states. They are doing this in red states as well. And they're doing it in a less sort of confrontational way. Not that it's not confrontational to grab someone and tear their family apart. Of course it is, right? But Bovino was trying to manufacture media moments.

Yeah, less of a public spectacle, I guess. Yeah, Bovino has been about the spectacle for years, right? Like, he had, in the Biden administration, he had social media people on his payroll in the El Centro sector, like, and video content creators. So, like, Homer is going about this differently, but clearly he is very effective of what he is trying to do. And it has been harder for people to oppose, said Pavino's, like, flood the city with Border Patrol guys who played carriers approach. DHS OIG, that's the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, has also released a report this month detailing how the focus on deportations are all costs has impacted the fentanyl market. So the report, which looked at how HSI, that's Homeland Security

investigations, has used expensive technologies, spoiler it hasn't, concluded that quote, as ICE shifted priorities towards immigration enforcement, HSI's level of effort on fentanyl declined from fiscal years 2024 to 2025. Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24%, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl decreased by approximately 30%, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39%. Indeed, there are fewer HSI agents doing fentanyl investigations now than they were in some years under Biden, which is remarkable when you look at how massive the budget for DHS is, right, and how, like, aggressively they've been recruiting people. Well, no, James, they have been recruiting people. Well, no, James, they have to infiltrate the sunrise movement meetings.

That's more important for national security. They're sitting in cars outside memorials to Alex Pretti taking pictures. The report also looked at a school called Raven. The N is lowercase. The rest is not. You could ask me why, and I wouldn't be able to tell you. It's a group of analytical tools. It stated that, quote, from fiscal years 2022 to 2025, HSI spent more than 150 million

developing the Raven platform. It was not widely used. Most of the offices surveyed, abandoned using it altogether and complained that it, quote, did not work and, quote, crashed. Hell, yeah. We love to see it. Yeah, it goes into, like, I think this is probably something that we can, we're going to see more, right, as we continue, like, massively inflating the budgets of these agencies, that they will just do things that end up being like a bridge to nowhere. but their attempt at some highly sophisticated analytical tool platform that would generate leads seems to have failed. Well, it's failed. They're not using it anymore. That's interesting. Something I did not mention in yesterday's episode about the ICE surveillance

in Minnesota is like DHS's use of Clearview AI to do some like analysis of suspects. Yeah. Which identified people with similar names but are different human beings in the Clearfue AI reports when they were looking into anti-ice protesters. Yeah, this is, maybe this is what led to the famous case of Olivia Rodriguez getting detained at the border a few years ago. It used to be humans detaining a second guy named John Smith on the Do Not Fly list. Now it's automated. Yeah, yeah.

Those people have lost their jobs and it's very sad. But yeah, they love to use AI, right? They use AI in their surveillance towers at the border. I'm sure we'll see a bunch of money thrown at AI ship that will end up going nowhere. in the next two years. Yeah, and I would not be surprised if some of the budget increases that they have received

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Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. Let's return to our show's namesake because there's a big update on Trump's March executive order. to restrict mail-in voting. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court lifted one injunction blocking parts of this executive order. But as of recording, there is another injunction in a separate case that still remains in place. However, these injunctions relate to different parts of the same executive order. So the entirety of the order is not blocked by courts, and parts of it may now be able to go into effect, possibly before the midterms.

Let's start by talking about the injunction that the Supreme Court just lifted. A group of 23 states sued the government over Trump's executive order on mail-in voting for infringing on the state's authority to administer elections. A district court agreed and blocked the executive order. But on Monday, the conservative majority ruled 6'3 in a shadow docket unsigned ruling, finding that the states and the lower court lacked the legal authority, to block the executive order because no harms

have yet come as a result of the executive order. What? Basically, it was too soon to file a challenge because the order hadn't yet gone into effect. Jesus Christ. And the plaintiffs had yet to suffer

any injury. Yeah. And like, that's the whole fucking point of the shadow docket. It's based on the idea that the applicant faces serious irreparable harm if the emergency order is not granted. The main example of this is like if someone's facing execution on death row, but under the logic of the conservative justices in this court ruling, such an inmate wouldn't have

the grounds to stay their execution because they haven't died yet. It's completely bad shit. This is not how these rulings usually work. And having this ruling on the shadow docket itself. is just like insults to injury. The majority wrote that the state's supposed concrete injury was in fact only a, quote, unduly long chain of inferences. So this ruling from the Supreme Court will now allow DHS to create and send,

quote unquote, state citizenship lists to each state 60 days ahead of upcoming federal elections, cataloging each person in every state who DHS believes is eligible to vote. Now, the Supreme Court does note that, quote, states are not required to use the lists, unquote, but just the existence of these lists and the creation of them could be incredibly troubling. Of course, they could be used in the future. But as, like, James has discussed, like, we do not have, like, a single, like, list of U.S. citizens.

and the idea that DHS might be trying to, and in fact is now allowed to make such a list for a specific purpose, could have a lot of far-reaching ramifications, even beyond, like, elections. Yep. Yeah. It's also important to know that as of the Supreme Court's new ruling, the attorney general will now, quote,

prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and local officials or any others who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters. So even if states are not required to use these citizenship lists from DHS, Trump is still effectively compelling states to follow these lists or else they could face prosecution. Yep. In the ruling, the conservative majority wrote that the lower court concluded states did suffer a present injury because it required them to, quote, begin planning now how to comply with the order, unquote. But the Supreme Court stated that states, quote,

cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is certainly not impending. This is wild. This is the wild thing to say that states are only suffering harm because they're trying to figure out how to comply with the order as written, and they're just doing that to themselves as opposed to that being imposed from the president. Right. So the suggestion is that they would just be like, will not comply, see you in court when this comes in, I guess. That will be how they should approach this. And that is maybe what they are going to do going forward because there is now a new lawsuit, which I will discuss in a second regarding some of these issues.

Okay. And again, the whole argument from the conservative court is that basically no harm has yet been done so they can't file a challenge. However, because this is a shadow docket. ruling, the court did find that this injunction would cause the government to likely suffer irreparable harm if the stay isn't granted. I love our just like cartoon Calvin Ball ruling legal bodies. It's one of the most cartoon rulings I've looked at. And we've looked at a lot of cartoon rulings this year. Yeah, that's almost the only rulings we get anymore. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the court does note, quote, the court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure

taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell. But the order itself does not harm the states, so the district court lacks justification to bar the government from trying to implement it, unquote. So they admit that in the implementation, of this executive order, it might violate the Constitution, right? The government, the federal government might violate laws, but just the order as written can't do anything because it's just text. It's

it can't actually do anything. So you can't challenge it. So that's all bad. But let's let's talk about the kind of the other half of this. So this ruling did not address the part of the executive order requiring the post office to review the eligibility of voters before sending them an absentee ballot. And there's a separate injunction by the same lower court judge blocking the Postal Service from implementing their proposed rule change in accordance with Trump's executive order. This executive order directed the Postal Service to, quote, initiate a proposed rulemaking. That includes several quote unquote proposed provisions, including a new requirement that outbound absentee ballots feature a unique barcode to facilitate tracking, and Trump told the Postal Service

to not mail any ballots to people who are not on a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters. Now, in the Supreme Court's ruling on that other injunction, the conservative majority wrote, quote, if the Postal Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule. And well, well, well, last Friday, the Postal Service outlined and published their new final rule. Quote, the rule introduces new mail piece preparations and data reporting standards for federal ballot mail that must be satisfied prior to presenting outbound federal ballot mail for acceptance into the mail stream, unquote. So the new rule requires states to use standardized mail-in ballot envelope designs to be compatible with automated processing to display a consistent

election mail logo and an intelligent mail barcode. State and local election officials will also have to use a new federal ballot mail portal to administer absentee ballots. And this portal will be used for two things. This is like a digital portal. State officials will use the portal to certify the design of their new envelopes in accordance with the new requirements and must provide the name and address of the voter as found on the outbound federal mail ballot envelope, the issuing state, and the barcode on the outbound and return federal ballot mail envelopes prior to presenting an outbound federal ballot mailing for acceptance. So that's the data. States have to submit to the Postal Service. It is a name, address, the barcode, and the state. That does not go as far as what

Trump's executive order wanted the Postal Service to go, but this is going to be a new step, or at least a new process to do some of the same steps that have already been kind of been done in like an ad hoc manner. And rather than this following a 60-day deadline as set in Trump's executive order, the Postal Service's final rule contains an optional 90-day notice for states to tell the Postal Service that they'll be using mail-in ballots, and a recommended 30-day soft deadline to upload voter data into the state. new portal before the Postal Service will accept any mail-in ballots. And importantly, if states do not follow the new proposed rulemaking, the Post Office just will not accept mail-in ballots.

Quote, the Postal Service will generally not accept to outbound federal ballot mailings unless compliance with the rule's new standards has been verified, meaning they have to upload that data into the portal and have these new envelopes. Now, the rule does note, quote, the Postal Service will not play any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rules, or counting ballots, unquote. So they're not directly, as of how this rule is written, they're not going to be directly reviewing citizenship lists when they receive those ballots, but they will have the name and the address and the state and the barcode. And even if the Postal Service themselves will not be verifying eligibility, that doesn't mean Trump officials

who won't ever use this new centralized mail-in-ballot portal database for other purposes in the future. The published final rule says that the post office is ready to implement this rule after the government obtains timely relief from the lower court injunction in preparation for the 2026 election, which has yet to happen as of recording. But on Wednesday morning, a few hours ago, 23 states have sued over the final rule. over this new rule, as the Supreme Court told them they could once this rule was published. So again, this rule does not go as far as what Trump wanted, but it does open the door for certain things. And combined with the DHS citizenship lists and the Attorney General being able to prosecute people who do not essentially follow those lists at the state level,

this could be combined with aspects of Trump's executive order to make mail-in voting more difficult. and introduce very, very, very severe penalties for states that don't follow what the executive order is outlining. Yeah, this is great. This has been part of the project for a while, right? Like, yeah, attacking elections has been the thing that has been like the cost of entry into the Republican Party, yeah, since 2020. They hate the idea of people voting. Yeah, like a free and fair election is something you have to be opposed to. Like, that's the most disgusting thing that a conservative can imagine today, yeah.

I'm sure, like, if I had to guess, we will see a lot more visible ice stuff again, give it a couple months, you know, right before the election, that wouldn't shock me at all. Yeah. Quick update here. After recording, a federal judge lifted that final injunction blocking parts of Trump's executive order. So now the administration is fully cleared to implement aspects of that order ahead of the midterms. That new 23 state lawsuit will target the Postal Service's final rule, which can now be implemented following the lifting of the injunction. For our last section, let's turn to the U.S. military.

Let's start with Carlos. The oceans around the U.S. have once again become killing fields because the U.S. military carried out two strikes against vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean that it alleges without publishing any proof, we're trafficking drugs. The first strike was in the Pacific on Sunday, and it was the first one of these strikes in roughly two months. Meanwhile, the second was in the Caribbean on Tuesday. Per the Guardian, this brings a total to 68 strikes with an overall death toll of at least 227

people since the strikes began in September of last year. These strikes come at the same time as the U.S. announced that Colombia, Guatemala, and And Honduras agreed to allow joint military operations against criminal groups on their soil. It's worth noting that per the guardian, Guatemala denied reaching such a deal. Ecuador launched these operations earlier in March, and right before we started recording, the Ecuadorian police announced that it had dealt a, quote, strong blow against organized crime through operations, Factoria and Jericho with international cooperation of the DEA and Southcom that led to the arrest of 43 people.

Robert, do you want to close this out? Yeah. So as I'm going to guess everybody remembers, about six months ago, Iranian strikes crippled a U.S. base in Bahrain and damaged a major logistics up. This is part of why the Abraham Lincoln has been running short of supplies and has been just out of a bunch of stuff because they had to redirect and move supply. We talked about this last week to the base in Diego Garcia. One of the other things that happened after that base in Bahrain was struck is that the U.S.

Navy found themselves planning a hasty evacuation for roughly 13. 1,300 family members of servicemen and women, as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense that worked at the base. If you aren't super familiar with how the U.S. military's overseas footprint works, we've got a shitload of bases all over the world, and those bases all fall into two broad groups. You've got ones that are large and safe enough for soldiers to bring their families and to host large numbers of full-time live-ins civilian employees, and you've got bases that are considered too close to the action for all of that to be safe. These DOD communities of civilians are like little chunks of suburban America transplanted to locations across the globe. They have their own schools, bars, clubs, and grocery stores. Most of my family grew up around the air bases that we have on Okinawa. And even during the Vietnam War, there was never any chance that people living there would come into direct danger.

Unless, like, there was a nuclear war, but then who gives a fuck? Iran, however, has the ballistic missile capacity in order to strike these bases. And this has been the case for years. For a long time, they've been able to hit these bases in Bahrain and other parts the Middle East that they've been heading lately, but they've restrained themselves historically because in previous iterations of this conflict, both sides abided by certain lines and rules. Trump threw the whole playbook out, and it turns out that none of our facilities within missile range of Iran were hardened and ready to be shot at by missiles. There had not been,

and it would have been extremely expensive to do that for all these bases, and nobody really thought it was necessary. And even when we started a war with Iran and knew that there was a chance they were going to start retaliating, there were so much arrogance within the administration about both our missile defenses and about Iran's lack of capability that I don't think they thought it was possible that we would get struck in any meaningful way. So the evacuation from Bahrain was chaotic and poorly executed. Laura Cortay reported on this in an August 21st article for Stars and Stripes, which is a newspaper owned by the Department of Defense that is at least on paper editorially independent, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But from that

article, quote, early in the war, a mass text message went out to evacuees directing them to contact the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society, a nonprofit that aims to assist military families during emergencies. However, when one spouse called the phone number listed in the announcement, they were connected with a National Bank of Canada, the spouse said. They give you an idea of just how piss for the planning was. Like, no one checked. I'm guessing they probably had some AI, like, throw shit together for people. But nobody was, like, prepared to evacuate these people.

And even once they knew they had to, nobody. took the care to make sure that these folks got correct information, right? And I'm not asking you the listener to sympathize with a bunch of families of servicemen and women who are, again, participating in an illegal war against Iran. What I am asking you to do is look at what this says about the lack of planning and understanding of what we were getting into when Trump and his cronies started this war, right? Here's another quote from that article. Some evacuees say they have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors of temporary housing while their cars and furniture are stranded in Bahrain or aboard ships

unable to leave the region. Many say the prolonged displacement has taken an emotional toll and worry about its long-term effect on their family's financial and emotional well-being. We literally have been making this up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on for this length of time. Vice Admiral Kurt Rinshaw, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, set on Wednesday at a virtual town meeting, when you've got the commander of U.S. Forces Central Command being like, well, we're making up the Evac plan and how to take care of these people as we go because we never thought that we would have to care about this. That's a bad fucking sign, right? So U.S. Naval Forces Central Command or Nabsent was based in Bahrain, right? That's where their headquarters were.

And we've had to move the HQ. I think it's floating right now. But none of the civilian staff who are critical to keeping it going are working wherever they've got it right now. and it's unclear where they're going to relocate to, because again, nobody knows fucking anything because they didn't plan for any of this. Furthering the confusion, the Washington Post recently reported that top Pentagon officials are currently considering a massive drawdown of U.S. military presence in the Middle East after the war ends. Now, I find this interesting because this reporting came out the exact same time, Trump started threatening slash promising to make the Strait of Hormuzza, U.S. territory, and charged tolls, which would obviously necessitate an expanding. U.S. presence in the region. This report was put together by people within the Pentagon who were kind of acting on their own recognizance. They were not ordered to do this.

So this is basically a result of people who are somewhat smart in the Pentagon going, we cannot maintain all these bases with the increased level of hostility and knowing that Iran now can and will strike them. We need to reduce our capacity because we cannot defend all of these bases or keep them safely operational. Whereas Trump is just blasting off and we're going to take the straight and the whole Hold it. So you have inside the Pentagon, people saying we absolutely cannot hold on to all of our

current possessions in the Persian Gulf. And Trump just sort of making whatever fucking statements he wants to make. Per the Washington Post, one of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America's large overseas military bases have been battered for months by Iranian strikes. And the damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild bases as they wore before

the conflict. Now, again, this review was not ordered by Pete Hegeseth. This is the thinking of sober and prudent people who remain at the Pentagon, and they have to do it on their own because they know that none of their bosses are going to order this, right? If it becomes immediately obvious that, oh, we actually have to do a drawdown, they'll get the order like they did with the evacuation of Bahrain, and they'll just be told to figure it out suddenly. So people are trying within the Pentagon to make sure they have a fucking plan together, knowing

that no one in charge is going to plan things out properly. And there's a lot of funny quotes from that article. I'm going to read another here. Before the start of the war in February, U.S. Central Command evacuated many of its bases, judging them too vulnerable to Iranian missiles and drone attacks to maintain normal staffing levels. Some of the shifts away from the major Gulf facilities might last after the war, a person familiar with the posture adjustment said. Iran thinks we are in the traditional places, the person said, declining to specify the changes

so as to not put U.S. service members at risk, and we are not. And then the article immediately goes on to say, six U.S. service members were killed in a March strike on Port Shweba of military facility in Kuwait, and more than 200 U.S. facilities have a damage or destroyed during the conflict. I just find that clash between, well, we moved our stuff before the war, so Iran doesn't know where our stuff is. They think that we're one place and we're in the other, and it's like, well, then they hit and killed and wounded a bunch of guys,

because actually they had a pretty good idea of where we were. Yeah. I was just thinking, as you mentioned those bases around, but I don't know if you saw this tweet Ziet, maybe we're supposed to call it, by Barry McCaffrey, who was like, I don't know. Was the U.S. general commanded U.S. forces, I think, in the first war in the Persian Gulf, right? Right, right. In my judgment, the U.S. armed forces probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases.

Iran now poised to control access to the Gulf states. U.S. will have to negotiate new access into Western Saudi Arabia, Israel, southern Europe. Like, God, that's bad. It's sometimes just so revelatory to pull out and be like, oh, fuck. Yeah. a change in the global order of things. Yeah, exactly. The age of uncontested U.S. hegemony is over,

and it was ended for absolutely no reason other than a bunch of people hate Iran and thought they could just instantly win a war. Yeah, like we wound up to take a haymaker and ended up missing and falling over and hitting our head. It's like fighting analogy. Yeah, it is kind of funny to think that, like, the British Empire lost its largely uncontested power

and wealth in a lot of areas, because there was like a night-neutral. Marish war that cost millions and millions of people their lives. And Britain burnt a shitload of its treasure and young men fighting it. And there was another war not that long later in just the day. And whereas the U.S. was just like, I don't know, what if we just shoot ourselves in the dick for no reason? Let's see a bad word.

Swing and amaze. It's great. The patterns of empire. Yeah. And that Stripes article is just there's, I'll read one last quote from it, just for an idea of like what this is doing to the families of these people. One spouse of an active duty sailor who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal said the repeated displacement has traumatized her children. The family first fled to a U.S. base in Germany where donations from the local military community helped them set up a temporary household.

They were later told they had to relocate again, this time to the United States. She said her kids are developing serious behavior issues as a result of the move and that the youngest now barely recognizes her husband during video calls. This is all really bad. There's a lot of ugly quotes in that article. And again, this is a defense department-owned news. newspaper. Within hours of that Stripes article being published, the Pentagon went after the supposed editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They basically wound up firing the editor-in-chief, the publisher and the reporter who wrote that article, Laura Cortay. The editor who stood by Laura is

Erick Slavin. I think that's why he lost his job because he refused to throw her under the bus. And I do applaud them both for doing the right thing. But that is also noteworthy that Stripes has always had a degree of independence. They have reported on things that the Pentagon, the DOD didn't want them to because they're reporting on like actual issues that like troops and their families are facing you know and you know that's an important thing for that community to have and one thing that signals is that that does not exist anymore nor no degree of independence can be allowed when it threatens the propaganda anyway that's what i got good stuff carlos where can people find more of your journalism online you can find me pretty much on every social media platform my at is

Bakero 2-X-L, it's V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L. And on it could happen here. Yeah. As well as it could happen here, that is true. I forget that, but yes, I just spoke with James about U.S. colonialism. Yeah.

How it started, and now it looks like it might be ending. We'll see. Waits from pivoting in a different direction. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, what a hard-warmid story. I guess there is hope for the future. That's what we do here at Cool Zone Media. that's what we do.

Yeah, if you want to email us, you can do it. Coolzone tips at proton.m. Me. Should I list the categories of emails I will not be responding to because they grow every fuck. Just don't be weird in there. It's for tips about news.

Don't be weird. Don't be weird. Don't be weird in there. I think that's an offset. Yeah, this is not the place to flirt with people or it might be the place to tell us your conspiracy theories. Tell us your conspiracy theories.

All right, episodes done. No, Robert. Oh, that's going to be a tough. That's going to be horrible. Send all your conspiracy theories to add James Stout. Do you know about your fucking work already? Anyways, put Transco on your couch. We reported the news.

We reported the news. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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