It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 184

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  16 Dead & a Cover-up: An NHS Trans Horror Story Rendition By Private Jet What's Happening in Immigration Court Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #18 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: 16 Dead & a Cover-up: An NHS Trans Horror Story https://thefreeradical.org/ Rendition By Private Jet https://hardghistory.ghost.io/a-private-jet-to-hell/ What's Happening in Immigration Court Donate to Primrose's legal fees: venmo.com/u/kirsten-zittla https://www.gofundme.com/f/immigration-lawyer-for-primrose Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #18 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/5/22/live-israel-kills-87-in-gaza-shots-fired-near-diplomats-in-west-bank  https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto  https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-elias-rodriguezs-leaked-chats?r=1aiy5i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ajc-access-young-diplomats-reception-tickets-1312062246499 https://www.ajc.org/events/washington  https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/22/us/israel-embassy-shooting-dc https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hjyxay1zxg https://x.com/saulstaniforth/status/1925468225665446272 https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1925650699414646909 https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/Spectrum-Security-Services/Job/Detention-Officer/-in-Los-Angeles,CA?jid=2a4b6034cef9977e https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25954386-24a1153/ https://myanmar-now.org/en/news/myanmar-nationals-deported-by-us-being-held-in-notorious-junta-detention-centre/?tztc=1 https://www.patreon.com/posts/129696965See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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recipients have done the improbable the unexpected showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves I'm a bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the away days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, this is Mia from the future. This was recorded in the now halcyon days of January, 2025. Lots of things have changed. Basically everything everywhere has gotten worse.

This is the story about the oppression of trans people in the United Kingdom. It is very bleak in many ways. The United Kingdom has gotten worse since then. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the definition of sex in the Equality Act of 2010 is quote binary and is decided by quote biological sex. So whatever the sex that some fucking doctor assigns you at birth is your sex specifically under the Equality Act. A bunch of people in the UK have decided that this means that like the courts have Ruled that like sex in general means quote-unquote biological sex

That's actually not what they ruled but they're doing it anyways So there's been a whole bunch of things where for example the Labour Party has started Purging trans women from any like one of their bodies that's supposed to be a woman's body So through the oppression of trans people continues to escalate. Yeah, our only path out is just open and active resistance against them. In a more positive note, Mira, our guest for this episode, has since this episode has struck out on her own and is now the mind and genius behind the outlet Free Radicals

we will link to here and you should go support her work because it's now the mind and genius behind the outlet Free Radical, which we will link to here. And you should go support her work because it's great. Now to our episode. It could happen here, a podcast that is largely about the US. That might exaggerate the extent to which it's about the US. But it is, most episodes are about the US. But sometimes it's about other places.

And one of the frequent places that it's about is the United Kingdom. And specifically, we're going to talk about the United Kingdom because the UK is both an image of the present and the future of the oppression of trans people. And there have been a bunch of just absolutely horrible things happening there that have gotten very little press attention and one of the one of those things is what appears to be a like I guess I would call it like a two-stage cover-up of a bunch of suicides of trans kids on waiting lists for health care and with me to talk about this fucking terrible shit is Mira Lazine who's a freelance trans journalist. Mira welcome to the

show. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so I mean, god, this is one of those I always am excited to talk to people. But I swear to god, like one out of every four times this happens, it's like a I have to pollate you. I want to say I'm excited to talk to you about this because like Jesus Christ, this is the most depressing shit I've seen in ages. Yeah, it's not a fun story. It's an important one. Probably one of the most important I've ever poured it on, but not remotely fun. Yeah. So let's let's go back to the Halcyon days of mid twenty twenty four. I don't know. Things were surely bad then then too, but they're worse now, but they

were also bad then. Yeah. So can you talk a bit about how this story started and about what was going on with the National Health Service, the NHS, which is the British, basically the British healthcare system is run out of National Health Service. Can you talk about the whistleblowers there and what was going on with them? So yeah, I first became aware of what was going on independently. I was working with Alejandro Caraballo, the clinical instructor of Cyber Law Clinic at Harvard. She's a friend of mine and we work together on some decks. She and Ira and some other people were talking about the horrific wait lists going on with the NHS. It's terrible there. I mean, not even just for trans stuff. There's probably millions of reports

of people having to wait months to get essential health care. Some people have died just from like their conditions being on the wait list. We had both stumbled upon some old news reports from like years prior about trans kids who had unfortunately committed suicide as a result of not getting the essential help they're getting need on the wait list. These stories are not talked about the media at all. They got like one are mentioned name what happened to them. And then that was it. So we started to investigate it. She was compiling a spreadsheet of everything she could find every news report of kids who experienced this. I was pitching help and contribute to that spreadsheet. And then right around the same time, the director,

then, of the Good Law Project, a civil rights organization that does a lot of legal stuff in the United Kingdom, his name is Jo-Ann Maugham, apologize if I mispronounced that. He came out with a Twitter thread revealing, and this was very suddenly, he hadn't contacted anyone about this. He just kind of posted it right when he got enough of a story and everything. He revealed that he was talking to a couple whistleblowers within the NHS about what was going down. And not only did he talk to some whistleblowers, but he also gained some independent evidence from himself, his own investigation, it from meeting minutes from officials in the NHS. And so what he found kind of began with the first whistleblower.

This one was someone who did not reveal much about who they were publicly and presumably to protect their job. But Morgan said that with his whistleblowers, he independently confirmed that they did work for the NHS. He saw their IDs. Morgan's not the type of guy to lie. He's a trusted figure in the UK political scene. First one said that there was only one reported suicide prior to 2020.

Significance of 2020 in relation to Shrantz Healthcare at Night Kingdom was that the infamous case Bell versus Tadastock. Not gonna go into detail of this case because it convoluted messy and hellish, but the gist of it is that it led to tightened restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors, particularly in the realm of puberty bloggers. This ruling ended up kind of restricting

how it might act as purely workers. It was a leader overturned, but it already led to lasting damage. Even after it was overturned, a lot of doctors for hasn't even prescribed your blockers because they were worried about political consequences. So a lot of miners weren't getting the care they need. Yeah. And we should also mention here, too, because I think this has been lost in a lot of the reporting on this because like, I mean, I guess this is a story where a lot of the reporting was done by trans people just because like nobody gives a shit. But like the thing about puberty blockers is that puberty blockers with the health care of trans youth were always a sort of compromise measure. That was, you know, sort of put in place as a compromise of like instead of letting kids actually transition and like, you know,

go on hormones, which is, you know, the thing that kids need, right? If your goal is to like improve the health outcomes of trans kids, like the thing you actually want for them, like maximally is for them to have the ability to get gender affirming hormones. But you know, the sort of compromise thing that was happening was like, well, you could have puberty blockers, but you know, you can start hormones later. And that is not a good compromise to begin with, but losing it is even worse because the alternative to that is like, you are now spending even more time with a bunch of fucking hormones

in your system that you don't want. That little explanation is more of the hormones than you fucking want. And you know, you're being forced to go through puberty, which fucking sucks shit. If you're going through, I don't know, I don't know if the wrong puberty is like the correct language or whatever, but like, it fucking sucks. It's awful. And but now you know, and this is something that's happening in the US too, it's also happening in the UK is that the compromise solutions are being knocked out. And we're seeing this sort of knock on effects of these kids losing even the sort of compromise stuff they were supposed to be getting.

Yeah, and they use complete bogus justifications for this. They're like, we don't see any benefits of puberty blockers. And it's like, the point is not that they are benefiting these kids directly. No kid is like, Oh boy, I get to be five years behind on puberty from my peers. I get to look like a 10 year old while all my peers have full on been everything. Oh boy. Like no, the point is that these kids are being deprived of the care they absolutely need to stay alive. And it's being targeted just for the sole purpose of getting cheap political points from what are the hells in office. Yeah. But more back to the whistleblowers. So prior to 2020, when the Bellevue Tavistock ruling came into effect, only one transmitter

died from suicide. I don't quite remember the time frame they used to estimate it, but it was broader than the one they used after, I believe it was like seven years, I think, and the years after which was measured up to like the very beginning of 2024, like January 2024. So not even four years more like three years and two months. They recorded 16 deaths. Yeah, 16 transgender minors committed suicide. And they were all able to be linked to restrictions on people in NHS wait lists. This whistleblower says

on this data came directly from a doctor who analyzed this stuff professionally as like part of his job in the NHS. The doctor also wanted to be anonymous. Undersettingly, he named himself the quote named doctor for safeguarding children. He tried to warn people in the NHS about this. He was like, Hey, there's something wrong. This isn't right. We are fucking up. Yeah. And he talked to so many different people, including Dr. Hillary

Cass will talk about that later. This is a literary device called foreshadowing, etc, etc. giant clip flashing thing here. Giant ominous music surrounding her name. He's probably got a giant clip flashing thing here. Giant ominous music surrounding her name. He just warned of people basically, and they all ignored him. They all just according to him. And this is all alleged I have to say, you know, this has not been verified in the court of law or anything. This is according to the whistleblowers and Morgan, but we have no reason to believe they lied or fabricated this information about this was not even revealed publicly. There's no public outcry. There was no action taken by the NHS or any of these clinics. So that is the first whistleblower

and the whistleblowers connection to that doctor. The second one basically can and gave independent verification of this. They were like, yeah, I've seen the data for myself too. I can confirm this is legitimate. Now, it wasn't just these three staff members who were trying to raise alarm bells. According to the second whistleblower, staff in the NHS were like, hey, well, this is not cool. We need to do something until they got an open letter, sent it to their higher ups.

And reportedly, the director of the Tabistock Clinic, which was at the time, the only gender affirming care clinic for minors in the entire United Kingdom, since there is more opened up, but it's a really complicated thing that's a headache to deal with. But head honchos at tapestock completely retaliated. They threatened them a discipline interaction. They suppressed material. They're basically were like, you go public about this.

If you continue talking about this, you're going to face consequences. The thing the thing I instantly came to mind here, and I think it's just specifically because of number 16, but like the first time I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was there, you know, there's the sort of famous Chicago story of the police killing of the Clint McDonald, where the slogan afterwards was 16 shots in a coverup. And this is fucking 16 dead in a coverup. cover up and this is fucking 16 dead in a cover up and the about a fucking rage that I have for all for this all of this fucking shit that these people covered this up that

they knew this was happening and we're just and not only knew this was happening and not only didn't do anything about it but like actively contributed to fucking making it worse by threatening anyone to try to talk about it is just so unbelievably disgusting. Yeah, I was the first one who broke the story. I basically reported on it like almost immediately after Maldon were public about this because I knew not many people were going to report on this right away. And it was going to kind of be a headache. I didn't know how low you would. But I was the first one to report on it. I did it for journalist Aaron Reed, subsequent Aaron in the morning back in June of last year. And

I had to stop writing it multiple times. Like I spent the entire day getting on it because it was stomach wrenching, reading some of these stories and yeah, doing everything. The only reason I even got through it was because I dissociated the entire time and just kind of the part metalized the anger a bunch because it's like Jesus Christ, this is horrifying. But Morgan was not talking out of his ass with this too. He brought receipts right in the initial thread. He showed leaked meeting minutes and like you can see water marks from the NHS on these

meeting minutes like it is, unless someone wants to suggest that he did a giant conspiracy and fabricated a bunch of very accurate meeting minutes that reflect publicly available meeting minutes elsewhere, it's pretty reputable. Yeah, these minutes show that any test officials were aware of every single one of these stats, every single one of them. People were in these meetings calling for an independent investigation into each of these debts into gender affirming care for miters into the restrictions, they wanted to investigate everything and had detailed data. They had information on the kind of care they received, which was basically negligence. And instead of reporting on this publicly, instead of doing an investigation, they covered this up, they didn't do anything. And they just

pretended like everything was fine. Like there was no deaths as a result of this. They were acting. Nothing wrong was going on. And these meeting minutes are still public to Morgan is not believe in. It's still honest order account. Good Law Project is not fully a thing anymore. They're kind of dissolving their stuff right now, but Morgan is still keeping all information up. It's all detailed

it's publicly there people can see for themselves these minutes and it's horrifying seeing the physical proof it's yeah it's horrifying yeah and we need to go to ads and when we come back we'll get to the second fucking cover-up because there is a second one. They did it again! This time with the British Broadcasting... What the fuck does the C stand for? Corporation, that one. British Broadcasting Corporation leading the charge. And we are back. So let's let's talk about the fucking second cover up because normally normally you only get one cover up when your fucking healthcare policies kill a bunch of

people. But no, two, I got multiple cover ups. Before we get to the second cover up, we need to talk about what the cash report is. Because that's also part of this that we kind of bounced around a little bit, but then didn't. Yeah. Well, yeah. So the cast report is probably one of the worst things to come out of the anti trans crowd in the past. Yeah. Yeah. The gist of it is it's essentially a supposedly independent report commissioned by the United States government to investigate the efficacy of puberty blockers and gender affirming care for minors authored by Dr. Hillard Cass, who they claim is an expert in the subject. I'll get to that in a second. The gist of what it was claiming is that no puberty blockers do anything to actually hurt

the kids. They don't approve mental health. They don't protect anything. Suicide stay the same. It's all bad. Get rid of them and actually restrict gender affirming care too. And also maybe we should de-transition these kids too. It's a very long document. It's actually a set of documents, but the primary one isn't incredibly long I remember when it first it came out last year. It's been in the works for Better part of the last decade most of the 2010s. It's been in the works I don't remember the exact interior that it was initially commissioned

But it's been something United Kingdom government has been waiting on for a while to take action for gender affirming care. Now, to understand the cast report, you got to understand a little bit about Hillary Cass. Hillary Cass is not an expert in gender affirming care, saying that for minors. She has never treated a transgender patient in her professional practice whatsoever. Which thank thank God, because holy shit, oh, she is such a transphobe. Oh my God. Yes. But yeah, also utterly unqualified. Completely unqualified while she was writing it. Instead of talk with single trans person as like part of the consultant, because she didn't do it by herself.

It's way too long for anyone to do buyers, but by themselves, she got a bunch of unknown advisors to help her with this, one of which is a Finnish psychiatrist who has been campaigned against transgender rights for the past 20 years. Yeah. But she did not have any trans people on the consulting board, not a single one. Well, of course, why would you talk to a trans person about trans health care? Like that's why would you know trans people don't know anything. They need to be regulated and told exactly what's best for them by people who have never even talked to them before.

She actually, while she was writing it, she talked to Florida health care officials during the Ron DeSantis administration for information on what to do. And these officials, by the way, they weren't just like leftovers from the prior governor. They were appointed by Ron DeSantis and have literally been Jews bidding and restricting healthcare. Yeah, appointed by the guy who in the last campaign cycle had a fucking ad with a son and rat in it. So like, you know, the level of Nazi we're dealing with here. And not only did she work with them, but there's even more. She worked with numerous people who were tied to anti-trans hate groups, most notable of which is the quote society for evidence based gender medicine.

Oh God, they are probably one of the leading anti-trans groups right now. They are a Southern poverty law center, desiccate group. They're not very fun people. They all have a financial interest in opposing transgender rights. Many of the people with them have been quite well paid to oppose transgender rights in courts. There's a whole rabbit hole to get into there. The point being she's worked with hate groups, she's worked with the Sanchez appointees. She talked to no trans people and she lied a lot. When it the cast review first came out, I was one of the people who was working around the clock to try to be like, hey,

let's not just assume that this is immediately accurate because we should wait for independent scholars to evaluate this. There's a lot of shady stuff going on here. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of things were wrong. For starters, Tess misrepresented a lot of what she did for the review. It was supposed to be a systematic review into all the literature and pubic blockers. The problem is she left out a bunch of studies, especially more recent ones of better elegies She in her method to grade them, basically changed it up last minute and didn't see your review for it from her institutions review the board. She didn't seek any ethical verification on anything.

Yeah, which is which is amazing. It's like, do you know how fucked your report has to be to like your anti trans report has to be to not be able to survive a British peer review board? Like Jesus Christ. Yeah, like it's it gets even worse because as time went on, a lot of journalists, myself included, found a bunch of little patch rolling out seat there. She was misrepresenting this study. She was interpreting that study. Lots of little information.

It was she at one point cited a YouTube channel that is dedicated to opposing trans rights. Then the YouTube channel in her fucking citations. It was a tangential citation. But the point being the fact that she even discovered that shows her allegiances is she was in the cast review. She was trying to cast doubt on the leading medical association for trans people, the world professional association for transgender

health. She was like, Oh no, you're actually not good. They're politically biased. I'm not though. Don't worry guys eyes don't investigate me. Yeah. And in the time since there's been a shit ton of medical experts coming forward, opposing the cast review, being like, no, the methodology is garbage. Not just journalists saying it. There have quite literally been hundreds of meta birds who have come forward to publicly oppose the cast review. These are people across a variety of fields, psychiatrists, pediatrician, endocrinologists,

basically everyone you could imagine who would be relevant to the study of transgender health in minors. They have come forward against it, including most of the leading researchers in the field, including people who have actually worked with trans people in a professional capacity. Yeah. Wow. And this review, it's the reason the United Kingdom went on last year to ban

puberty blockers in all four countries within it. They started in England, then they spread it out to Scotland, Wales with their PD blocker ban and most recently, right before New Year's Day, banned it in Northern Ireland. And because of this, so many clinics are now just not treating trans people, including transgender adults. There are now transgender adults not getting the care they need. Because of something that even discussed trans adults in a meaningful capacity. Yeah, and that's that's part of the thing with with the cast

review, right? Is it like, you know, it literally like it could have just been like 700 pages of Fuck you over and over again, and it would have had the same effect. Because the point of the cast review wasn't actually to like establish anything medically, it was to just have a document that you could point that and then justify any policy whatsoever. Like it's kind of like it's kind of like the way the gambits and the bell curve works. We're like, none of the actual policy recommendations follow from any of the arguments that they're making. But it exists so that you can make those policy arguments and then point to like, oh, it's because because of IQ and this is this is the same like complete bullshit IQ like fake IQ science right like there's literally IQ science used to justify the puberty blocker ban of

course there is why they are claiming that puberty blockers reduce IQ using a study from like 2001 on one of this and a separate study on show my god I said let's study on fucking sheep how are you measuring the IQ of sheep? Like, yeah, okay, we wheeled in the sheep to do the fucking RB standard amplitude test. Like ah, it scored real bad. We gave it a few ready bloggers and it scored even worse. It gets garbage science. Yeah, but one of the important things, like, conclusions here is that, like, so one of the,

one of the sort of things that's happening now is that fucking feral attack dog, I don't know, fucking sue me, you motherfucker, we won the revolution, eat shit, West Streeting, who's now running British healthcare, issued a fucking thing to ban puberty blockers for trans youth. You know, and he cites the cash report. Do you know what's not in the cash report? A recommendation to ban puberty blockers for trans youth. And he cites the cash report. Do you know what's not in the cash report?

A recommendation to ban puberty blockers. Do you know what he's fucking doing anyways? Because that's the actual sort of purpose of the report is to serve as sort of like just a kind of talisman you can hold up and say, ha, see, this is justified. And can you talk about the whistleblowers and the cash report too? Because this is a thing that has seen very, very little coverage that is extremely important. Yeah. So the whistleblowers, they literally reached out to the cast while she was writing the review. She had to be like, Hey, restricting puberty blockers isn't good. And like you

said, Tass did not recommend to ban puberty blockers. She called for more research into it and like some restrictions, but not an outright ban that was not anywhere within it. Even with her extremism, she's like, maybe we shouldn't restrict everything completely. You know, maybe we should just de-transition some of the kids. But she did not advocate for a full on ban and she has even gone public into the media to clarify that she does not believe in a full on ban. And yet she ignored the whistleblowers.

She ignored them when they came to her being like, Hey, there's evidence that restricting puberty blockers is causing these deaths to wreck. And she didn't do anything. We don't know the specifics of that conversation. That's not public information, but you read the cast review. You're not coming away with it thinking, oh boy, she's really concerned about kids who are killing themselves. Yeah, you're coming away with it thinking she doesn't believe a shit and she has her own agenda. Yeah and so okay we're gonna take another ad break and then we're going to get to the

promise second cover-up. And we're back for cover up number two. So, okay, we have now introduced briefly the fucking spawn of Satan himself. West reading, can you talk a little bit more about him and the the cover up that he commissioned of this? So yeah, when I wrote this story, it was getting no coverage. No other news outlet wanted to touch it. There were actually some journalists I talked to. I'm not going to name any names, but journalists I talked to who were trying to get their editors to to publish a story on these claims.

And they were like, I don't think so. I think we're going to do that. It's too speculative and things like that. People were actively shutting it down, especially in the British media. Yeah. And for about a month, the NHS was in orderness and not getting public comment. Enter was streaming. So you said he is the head of British health care officially is like fucking the head of the secretary of state

for health and social care, some shit like that. But he's a sellout. He's a labor guy. You know, the party that's supposed to be at least kind of left wing and some. And he threw trans people under the bus the first chance he got right after turf started pressing him for it. West reading in all his awful, awful glory, looked at Morgan's thread and thought, what if I denied this? So he commissioned Professor Lewis Appleby, or Appleby. He is a leading suicide researcher. He at the University of Manchester, except even though he's been in the field of suicide

research for decades in the past year or so, he's been cozying up to a lot of anti trans people. Yes. There's a shit ton of tweets of him basically talking to TERFs repeating the, oh, we can't have men and women sports nonsense. You can put this in going down the pipeline. Yeah, he's just he's a he's a TERF. Yeah, like that's the yeah, he's not the church. He's a turf who?

Find you it's not professionally really work with Tranthia commit suicide. He does not discuss LGBTQ issues in his research as his primary focus. He does it for the general population Yeah, I haven't reviewed every single study of his so it's probably like one or two that talk about LGBTQ suicide rates, but by no means is he like the guy you go to to learn about why suicide attempts and suicide rates are thing in the LGBTQ population. West treating was like, Hey, Lewis, do you want to write a quote unquote debunking of Moggham Stredd?

So enter the I have it up right now. They quote review of suicide and gender dysphoria, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust independent report. This guy, he basically claimed that nope, there's no data to support this. Actually, Moggham's wrong. It's the data pans it out. The data doesn't lie. It's also funny because this argument is that trans people were already killing themselves. Yeah. Which is like, which is really fucking bleak when you think about it, but...

Now, there's quite a million jokes people can have with this. For starters, the data set is obviously too small to analyze fucking statistically. Makes no sense to try to do a fucking in-depth statistical analysis on what Mogg was going with 16 kids. That's not what you're not going to get shit out of that. That's not really the big issue with it. The big issue that Morgan himself actually pointed out in the same day that this came out

Morgan pointed out that Its analysis was just wrong from the start for starters this guy analyzed both current and former patients of Under identity service former patients of inter-identity service. Malcolm's claims weren't about that. Malcolm's claims were about those who were on the waiting list.

Which is, which is just nuts. Like, I need to stop here for a second. It's like the difference between, again, on the waiting list and have finished care. Like, what? Yeah. What are we doing here? Like, oh, God, how did this get past

any media outlet? I mean, transphobia, but like, really? Yeah. Now, there's other problems with it. For one, it's kind of suspicious. So, Apple by Applebee, however he pronounce his last name, he He's gonna call him Applebee's cause fuck him. Yeah, Applebee's however you pronounce his last name, he's going to call him Applebee's because

fuck him. Applebee's fuck it. He used data directly provided by NHS England. Now, viewers will notice something. Malcolm never claimed to access data directly even to him from NHS England. He was given data from whistleblowers. Malcolm actually in this direct because he wrote a whole slide debunking this debunking. And Morgan was like, he revealed that he actually a month before this was published, he reached out to NHS England to be like, Hey, can I have your data on this subject? I've gotten a lot of information. I want to try to corroborate it. They denied him the data They just denied him it yeah remembering correctly part of it was they claimed the data didn't exist Yeah, yeah, they claimed it didn't exist that they just didn't have it at all

And something they pull that up in there for good old Applebee's No, there's some other insure inconsistencies as As we know, Mogam had receipts. He provided information on minutes directly from NHS meetings discussing these suicides. The minutes don't match up to the data Applebee says. Applebee's is underestimating everything. And yeah, very recently, this has not gotten any media coverage at all. Those who have been following UK politics for a while, especially trans politics, remember the unfortunate case of Alice Lippman. She was a young trans woman who committed suicide as a result of NHS waitlists years ago. Her mother, Claire Lippman, has been a staunch ally of trans

people since she's been one of the few cis people in the UK to be like, Hey, no, I'm putting my all behind trans people. She's a wonderful, she came out publicly revealing that Alice Lippman was not included in Applebee's data set, even though she should have been. She was within. Yeah. The years. So what this says is that Applebee's had bad data that didn't include every kid. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. We don't know about that, right?

It's it's possible he had bad data. It's possible he's also just been falsifying his data because like, again, he won't show it to us. So we have no fucking idea what like what he was with what he was actually provided with and what he was like, you know, what or what things he did to the data sets that he was given beforehand to produce what he's analyzing in his report. True. And there was, of course, a bunch of smaller issues you could point out with Applebee's reveal. But the crux of it, it's bogus. Data is a matchup, as you said, he could be falsifying it.

He could have just been given bad data. We don't know. He's not sharing anything. The NHS isn't sharing anything. Yeah. But all we know is that there's major inconsistencies and they they're not doing shit with it. And this is where we enter everyone's favorite mainstream media, the lovely British media, specifically outlets like the BBC. Right. Literally within the first 24 hours of this review coming out, they reported on it. At this point, my coverage has been

there for a month. It Morgans claims have been out there for a month and more touched. And yet the moment someone came out with the NHS trying to be like, um, actually it's false. They were rushing to report on it. Something they claimed was not newsworthy previously. Yeah. And mind you, Morgans rebuttal to this review was posted publicly at this time, at the time that this media coverage was going up at the BBC article, breaking the story up. The only discussion they give to basically any issues with this. It's just a couple brief sentences talking about Moggum's issues with him. At the beginning, they just claimed that Moggum had profound difficulties. And at the very end of the article, buried at the bottom, they gave Moggum like three

sentences and they left out a lot of information. Like the minutes Moggum showed that he got from whistleblowers, the exact claims he got from whistleblowers. They just didn't report on it. They gave such intense coverage to Alpebys claims in the review and then they just flat out ignored everything Mogam was saying saying everything everyone else was saying. Now again, I add, sure, we don't know for sure whether who's telling the truth, but the NHS has an incentive to lie here.

Morgham doesn't. Morgham is getting his career torched, basically, because of going forward about all this. And you can tell which side the BBC is on. You know, they give the game away at the end where they give the last word of this article to Ken Barker, who is the chief executive of the LGBT Alliance, which is an anti-trans hate group. And, you know, and they give her the last sentence saying that, oh, trans people are spreading misinformation to serve a dangerous and homophobic ideology. And I was like, quite specifically, quite specifically like Kate Barker if you ever

fucking listen to this fuck you eat shit like this is direct evidence that of the BBC's fucking political line here because again they're giving the closing statement to a group that is literally just an anti-trans a group because the BBC is the institutional is a to institutional fucking media arm of the British government and the British government is institutionally transphobic yeah and I'm not gonna say that what the information right now we have it's institutional fucking media arm of the British government and the British government is institutionally transphobic. Yeah. And I'm not going to say that what the information right now we have it's been a news. That's not the problem. The problem is, is it being investigated?

Any nonbiased fucking. Any chess, any nonbiased British would look at Morgan's claims and think, oh, wow, we should look into this. We should independently verify. Yeah, we should try to cooperate. Everything saying or at least see if he's accurate, which which again, and I want to put this out. This is the job of a journalist. The job of a journalist is not to fucking literally reprint a press report from fucking like commissioned by the fucking government.

Your job is to go find the fucking whistleblowers and talk to people. Did the British did a fucking BBC do this no Of course they didn't because they're fucking PR hacks yep They're Pete their PR hacks for a trans genocide and like quite frankly And I will say this on the fucking record because I'm not a journalist fuck these people like this This is what the BBC wants like they like fucking dead trans kids in a cover-up is what they institutionally what this fucking organization wants Because they fucking hate trans people and they are completely Okay with all of this shit happening as long as long as they fucking

Get to do another story about how fucking JK Rowling is a brave truth-teller or whatever Like this is what these people want. I agree and I also agree as your statement Uh, the British media can all go fuck themselves and I hope they rob them hell. Yeah. I don't know how you can as a journalist, someone trained to prioritize truth and nothing but the truth. Look at all this and think this is suspicious going on here. There's nothing the Lawrence further investigation.

Even if Malcolm's claims are false, right? Even if everything Malcolm says, he made it up. He's an influential guy. He has been covered by the media for his lawsuits with the Good Law Project countless times before. He's made national headlines there and they don't investigate this at all. Like, they're rushing to report on everything

fucking JK Rowling says, everything. Some random fucking turf is saying, Maya Angelou, whoever turf you want to run. Oh yeah, I'm realizing there are people listening to this. Maybe you're still listening to the episode and you don't know about the JK Rowling turf stuff, but to get an understanding of how vehement of an anti-trans hate figure she is, anti-trans groups literally wear her face as a mask like I'm not joking she she she fucking retweeted them Good anti-trans group literally wearing like printed out copies of her face as a mask

Like that is that that is the status that she has in in in the anti-trans world, right? Like And then the BBC fucking loves her so everything she does she and she's not even an expert in anything She's a fucking doctor of children's books like yeah You know, it's like what we'll talk to the authors of children's books when we talk to trans people know I mean that's an everything about this is like the BBC never talked to a trans person They did talk to an anti-trans hate group though. So, you know, you you know, you know what fucking talk joining the Trans Hate group though so you know you know you know what fucking side of this is considered valid by the the British political and media establishment. Oh and also at the bottom and like I know that they're

doing this because this is just like standard policy for like if you're doing a thing story about suicide but the very end of the article is a is a link to a bunch of suicide and crisis hotlines so I One one last fuck you to every trans person reading this Yeah, but the one-two punch of we quoted an anti-trans hate figure. Here is a suicide hotline is like real Yeah, it's it's a it's a fucking insult it Yeah, it just gets me how they yeah didn't report on these claims at all when they were initially made. Like it didn't even have to be a big story. Like most fucking outlets I've written for would have just reported as like, oh, this this guy said this, we're waiting more information. Okay, whatever.

It wouldn't be a good reporting, but it'd be the bare minimum. We didn't even do that. They rushed to just repeat whatever the fuck a commission review from the government said that's more reputable I guess than you know leading advocates who actually cited their sources instead of just during shit of the law. Yep and I think that's that that's as that's as good of a place as ND to stop unless you have anything else you want to make sure people know about about this. No I think that's it. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people find you in your work? Yeah. Thank you for having me. I can primarily be found on Blue Sky. That is the main place I post now.

Yeah. I'm at mirielazine.bluesky.social. Beyond that, you'll probably see one of my articles published around because I am constantly working my ass off. Yeah, so this is what could happen here. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's still time for this not to happen here. So yeah, go go go organize and go make West Street in the BBC. Have a bad day. Hell yeah.

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decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days podcast, reporting from the underbelly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today here to bring you more terrible news about migration and deportation. And I'm joined to share that terrible news by Gillian Bruckel, a journalist who has been tracking deportation flights

to Djibouti. Hi Gillian. Hi, how are you James? I'm good. Well, amidst the crumbling of everything, it's wonderful. Yeah. I mean, this is terrible news, but I'm also very excited to be in the Cool Zone universe. I love all of the shows.

Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the Cool Zone universe. It's a Sophie Lichterman comic universe. Oh my God. Such a fan girl. Okay. The United States government attempted to deport 12 men, not of whom are Libyan to Libya on the 7th of May.

Right. It got so far as to take them to the airport, right? In San Antonio. In San Antonio, Texas. And then thanks to a junction, a court injunction, those people were not taken to Libya, those people were instead returned to a detention center where, as listeners to the show will now be aware, they were informed that they were being deported, renditioned, have you want to say it, to South Sudan.

Uh-huh. This news broke a couple of days ago now, I think Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon, yeah. Yeah. And that was when you were able to begin using your, like, OSINT aviation knowledge, looking for, like, this, this flight, right? That was taken out to South Sudan. Because at the time, the United States government was claiming the flight was classified or like a state secret. And that even in court, the judge wasn't aware of the flight was in the air, on

the ground, could it turn around? And the judge in the end, he was going to ask it to turn around. So I wonder if you could like walk listeners through the timeline of this deportation and then how you were able to find out of millions of, maybe not millions, thousands of planes in the sky, the one that was taking these people to, as it turned out, to Djibouti. Sure. Yeah. So I've been a journalist for 15 years, but before that I was a flight attendant

and you know, I'm an avgeek, an aviation enthusiast, the short hand, you know, the hashtag for that is avgeek. And so, you know, I'm always looking at Flight Radar 24. It's an app where you can track different aircraft. And so when I heard that the flight might still be in the air, I just thought, I wonder if I can find it. So I went, first I went on to flight radar 24. And first I looked at all of the departures out of San Antonio for like the previous 24 hours since the previous flight that was supposed to go to Libya that was stopped, that departed from San Antonio.

And so I was looking there and didn't see anything, just commercial flights, very obviously military flights. And I know they've used military aircraft sometimes, but I said, I'm not going to try and touch that right now. I want to see if it's one of these charter companies, Global X, Avelo, that have been doing these deportation flights. Can you explain those to people? Because I don't think everyone's aware of those.

So these are, you know, commercial carriers, but they're contracting with DHS to deport people on their aircraft. So you know, the A320 that you take across the country is sometimes used to deport people to other countries. And the main companies that are doing that right now are Avelo, Global X, I think Omni does some of them sometimes. And I should say there are a lot of people, especially on Blue Sky, a lot of Avgeeks who are tracking and cataloging all of these flights. I wasn't even aware of that community until I started looking for them.

So I didn't see anything, you know, in San Antonio. And then I realized, oh, these people had been transferred to Port Isabel in the last few weeks. So they would have departed out of Harlingen airport, which is nearby. It's a deep, deep South Texas. And so I looked at departures out of Harlingen. It's a small airport. They have like 10 departures a day and it's generally puddle jumpers from one small Texas

town to another small Texas town, you know. And there was one Global X flight to Miami the day before. The timeline wasn't exactly right, but I know that DHS, you know, has been slow to notify attorneys. So I thought, well, maybe this is the flight and they just didn't tell the attorneys till the next day. So then I spent way too much time looking at all of the departures out of Miami to see if there were any global x flights. I saw a few things, but you know, nothing heading across the Atlantic. And so at that point, flight radar 24 will show you publicly available information on flights. It won't show you all flights. But there is another, you know, for like deep, deep av geeks, there's another website called

ADSB Exchange. And this is a pool of all feeder data all over the world of all aircraft in the air that aviation enthusiasts maintain themselves. And they will have military flights that aren't going to be on flight radar 24. They also have a lot more information about planes that have a LAD designation, which stands for limited aviation data displayed. I don't know how much you want me to explain about that. Yeah, explain, explain it.

I think it's interesting for people. Sure. So LAD designation is used most often for like private jet owners, like celebrities and you know, the ultra rich. And basically it means that they have an extra layer of privacy for their movements in their private jets. So if you try and find a specific private jet on Flightradar 24, it won't come up. So like the tail of this plane that did the Djibouti flight is N5AA-88AT. If you search for that in Flight Radar 24, you won't see it. Nothing will come up. However, if you know what you're looking for, if you

know like, oh, I think the flight is heading to Djibouti right now, you can see on Flight Radar 24 that there's a Gulfstream 5 headed to Djibouti right now, but the registration information is obscured. Okay. You know, it's not like that on the ADS-B. You can... You can see it? Yeah, your filters have a lot more power, basically. Okay. You know, your search terms, they're going to go around different designations. Okay. And so some people hate that, you know, Taylor Swift had beef with some guy a couple years ago, because she has a LAD designation on her private jet. He was using ADS-B Exchange to post her flights, you know, ostensibly to shame her for her

carbon footprint. But then she like threatened to sue him and she was like, I have stalkers, like I don't want them to know when I'm landing in Nashville. You know, not going to get into that. But, you know, that's basically the LAD designation and ADSB doesn't care. And so I went on ADSB and I said, well, since I've already seen all the publicly available flights, let me just look at LAD flights. Okay. And so I set that filter and that took it down to a couple hundred planes in the air. And I honestly just got lucky. I just started clicking on planes. Because I don't know

how to search for all departures out of one airport on ADSB exchange. I'm sure avgeeks who are better at it do. But I just started clicking on planes and I clicked, I think like the third plane that I clicked on, had taken off out of Harlingen a couple hours earlier and was over the middle of the Atlantic. Which is not a usual departure for Harlingen. Right. Yeah. It's quite unusual. And so, you know, I posted on Blue Sky to the other avgeeks who were looking for it. I

think this might be it. You know, it's a private jet with a LAD designation that took off from this very obscure airport and is traveling internationally. Nothing else really fit the profile. Right. So we all started looking at it. Yeah. Another reporter named Jacqueline Sweet. You know, I looked up the registration. It's registered to a man named Igor Smirnov, which there are a lot of Igor Smirnovs.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty common name. He's not the chess guy. He's not the Moldovan guy. He appears to have once owned an airline in Uzbekistan and has been in the US for some time. So he has, you know, this private jet. And then Jaglyn Sweet looked up that, yes, he has DHS contracts.

Okay. Then the other thing was, I just Googled the tail number, N58880. One of the first things that came up was that this was the private jet that carried Brittany Greiner home from Russia when she had been released in a prisoner swap. And so that, you know, was the thing where I was like, okay, this plane's been used for like weird government business before. Yeah.

Like, I think this might be it. Yeah. So that's when I posted, once I realized the Brittany Greiner thing, then I posted it and other people, other avgeeks were saying, yeah, I think that might be it. And then, you know, Jacqueline got more info on the contracts. And so this is for about two hours we watched it and JJ and DC said, I think it's about to land in Shannon and you know, soon enough it descended and landed at Shannon. So, Shannon Airport in Ireland is a frequent refueling stop for the US military. And you know, that's something that a lot of Irish people really fucking hate.

Yeah, not a US base to be clear, people aren't aware. Yeah, it's not a US base. This is US military that are just refueling, but they're refueling to do a lot of things that the Irish are not okay with. And so there's an organization there called Shannon Watch, who they're watching all these US activities and pressuring the government to stop this. So I tried to email them before the plane even landed. And I don't know if it was user error on my end or if,

I don't know why it didn't work, but they didn't get the message. I only found that out like half an hour ago. Yeah. But so I messaged them and then I like messaged a couple friends in Ireland like, hey, wake up, wake up. Call somebody, you know, it was 2 30 in the morning. I'm glad my friends were asleep. And yeah, so I don't know how how much I wanted to get into my personal hedging or my journey. But, you know, I used to be like a

neutral objective journalist at the Washington Post for 10 years and I left a year and a half ago. And I've been enjoying being an opinionated journalist. I've been writing a book but you know there's a difference between being an opinionated journalist and actually interfering in a story. And so I kind of hedged for a minute of like should I do anything else? Should I actively participate in trying to stop this flight? You know, am I not going to get a columnist job someday if I do that? Yeah.

You know, I'm ashamed to say that, but I have to tell the truth. That's what I thought. And then I just decided, you know, screw it. I have to do the right thing. So I called the Shannon Airport police. I called the Shannon Guarda, called the police the guard in Ireland. And I talked to, you know, whatever man answered for like a minute. And then he was like, let me, let me, you know, knock you up the chain. you know, knock you up the chain. And I was forwarded to someone else, to a woman who, you know, she sounded smart, urgent, interested. It sounded like she was taking notes. It sounded

like she was taking this seriously. And I was saying, there is a plane with this tail tail number that landed 15 minutes ago that may have people on board who have been illegally removed from the United States, who have not consented to go to their destination, who are being sent to South Sudan when they are not from South Sudan. You know, and I made clear that like, I don't know that this is the right plane, but I'm pretty sure that it is. This plane has been used before for US government business. And I said, I know that our judges orders don't matter in your sovereign country, but a judge has said this is not allowed and it

might be happening. And I don't know what your human trafficking laws are like, but you should know that if there are human trafficking or kidnapping laws in Ireland that might apply to this, like maybe check the plane. Yeah. And, you know, I didn't record the call and I didn't take notes, but I do recall her saying that she was trying to send someone to check the plane and she was, you know, taking detailed notes. What are their nationalities? How many are there?

Yeah. You know, and, uh, yeah. So you know, the call lasted 13 minutes and then I waited, you know, was talking with the other Avgeeks on Blue Sky who were at this point, you know, this is around 10 PM. It's getting a little late. And then, yeah, I don't know what happened. But the plane taxi to a parking stamp near the terminal for a while. And I thought, Oh, it's been it's been turned off. It's parked for the night. I don't think they're gonna let him leave. And then the plane took off. It was two hours after it landed. Yeah. Yeah. And it went to Djibouti where it remains at a time of

recording. Yeah. It's been raised since you first kind of identified this plane. It's been raised. I talked to Darla, so like an Irish member of parliament, raised it today. I saw those exchange about it. I spoke to Paul Murphy, who's the TD for Dublin Southwest. Paul gave me a statement. I'm just going to read here.

The very least the Irish government must do is to inform the U.S. authorities that no more deportation flights are permitted to use our airspace and our airports. We must not facilitate this inhumane and illegal deportation flights are permitted to use our airspace and our airports. We must not facilitate this inhumane and illegal deportation policy." It does seem like even if nothing was done in this instance, hopefully this isn't something that will be able to happen again. I know, as you said, people have been upset about that use of Shannon. I think they used Nock Airport as well, like, for a long time, because the US used them a lot in the in its war on terror.

And Ireland has been a neutral country for a long time and there's a feeling that it compromises out among some people. But this raises a really interesting question for those of us who are following the deportations rate, which is like, we've been thinking that it was happening on military or commercial flights, like you said, but there's this possibility that these smaller planes are being used for deportation. And like, that's very concerning. It means we could have missed things. Absolutely. It also shows the timeline here is extraordinarily rapid, right? Like from the people being informed at 6 p.m. I believe it's 6 PM Pacific.

I've been spending a lot of time on Pacer this week. Yeah. Good old Pacer. Yep. A lot of the money generated by the adverts in this show on Pacer. So at 6.35 Central Time, NM, who is one of the Burmese people in this class action lawsuit, right? So the lawsuit, a number of people trying to get a tentative restraining order against being sent to South Sudan now, previously Libya. At 6.35 Central Time, that person's lawyer was told that they had an order of removal. At 9am Pacific, the lawyer had scheduled a video conference. But at 8.27 Pacific, they were told that that person had already been removed.

Yeah. So pretty fast and like, perhaps that's why they're using these like, small, can you give an idea of like, I guess a lot of people won't have flown on small aircraft, but these are quite like, this isn't a usual thing, right, to be? No, this is a luxury jet. Yeah. That, you know, is moonlighting as a prisoner vessel for kidnappers. And I just, I'm so struck by the dichotomy of the luxury of this vessel, transporting

them to hell, to a country where they do not speak the language, they have no family or friends, to a prison where people are being tortured that is about to descend into civil war, may already be in civil war. I mean, the dichotomy of that is so striking to me and so perverse. Yeah, perverse is the right word. It is like it's a perversely ludicrous, I don't know. Like it's so striking to me as well that somebody who has the financial means

to own a private luxury jet to fly themselves around the world is also profiting off the rendition of people who are trying now to plead and convention against torture right later later they will be tortured if they are flown via luxury private jet to South Sudan and South Sudanese government seems to have stated that it would just return them to their countries from which they have withholding of removal in the first place. Why the US

can't send them to their countries. Right. That's why the US hasn't done it. Right. It's like, you know, it's a diplomatic pickle, but like the solution is in, we'll just, you know, dump them somewhere else. Right. Yeah. And then have someone else do our dirty work, like send them back. Right. You found these contracts. Do you know how much DHS is spending like per flight on these things?

I have no idea. I mean, that is something that, that, I think, are going to be better sources of that information. I've really just begun tracking these flights. I like to track flights all the time just because I have ADHD. It's a wonderful activity if you're neurodivergent to spend some time on ADS-B exchange. But like I said, I was just like, I wonder if I can find this plane.

And I did. And that has opened up a whole world to me of, you know, really dedicated people. Tom Cartwright is one and then JJNDC is another, he wants to remain anonymous who have been tracking these planes for some time. And I'm really inspired by them and, you know, want to join them and help them. We see a number of issues, questions that we can answer with these things, right? The United States deporting people to Venezuela, well, there are lots of entities in Venezuela which are under sanctions, right? So like, how is it doing that? Who is it paying to do that? Like, where is our taxpayer money going? How much is it costing to achieve this rendition of a dozen people, right?

Who at the current time, VAR recording, which is Thursday afternoon Pacific time, the 22nd of May, there you go. I just checked the PACER again, which is what I do all day now. And Judge Murphy's most recent order had clarified that these people would have 10 days to present their reasonable fear, right? So to present their reasonable fear and convention against torture proceedings that they would be, it could face torture, right? If they were sent to these, these places, if the department of Homeland

security determined that they didn't have credible fear, then they were sent to these places. If the Department of Homeland Security determined that they didn't have credible fear, then they would have 15 days to again petition for reopening of their migration case. So that's 25 days for those who are counting. That these people will presumably now have to be accommodated in Djibouti. The DHS is claiming that they can do all these interviews and that one necessitates translators, like one of them speaks Karen, not a language that we have. I mean, there are lots of Karen speaking people in the United States, but it's, you know, it's not language that many immigration lawyers speak.

So I'm guessing there will have to be a translator provided. And so all that is now happening in Djibouti. And like, we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't been able to track these flights, right? And so it's a very interesting way of approaching this. And I think like increasingly the government have recently lost a number of FOIA requests, I guess, like public records do not move at the same speed as the news cycle does. Like I file a lot of public records requests. Most of them, I don't get anything back. The ones that I do- the same speed as the news cycle does. And like I file a lot of public records requests. Most of them, I don't get anything back. The ones that I do- Oh, they can take like eight years sometimes.

Yeah, literally. Yeah. I mean, I have public records requests that I made under the previous Trump administration that I believe are still ongoing. Yeah. It's infuriatingly slow. Like you have a right to respect these records, but you don't have a right to inspect them in any particular time period. And so doing this kind of open source tracking

offers us a window into this deportation machine that the government is building, right? Exactly. In cooperation with the super rich, like using your taxpayer resources. I wonder if people are interested in doing this, like how would you suggest they kind of get going? Are there good explainers out there? I mean the first thing I would do is that I would follow Tom Cartwright and JJNDC on Blue Sky.

Then, you know, get the Flight Radar 24 app. You can see a lot of the charter planes on that app. ADS-B Exchange is pretty buggy and hard to use if you don't have any aviation experience at all, but you know, you can learn. And yeah, I mean, like I said, if you're neurodivergent, this is a terrific activity to just kind of like massage your brain and hyper-focus and, you know, putting it to good purpose to maybe witness or maybe even stop some of these activities from happening, you know, would be great. Yeah, I know. I think that's like there are countries which have strong legislation that

could possibly prevent these, you know, these either planes transiting their airspace or if they're refueling their as you said as you said, in Ireland, like perhaps prevent these people being renditioned to somewhere where they might face torture. I think it's a really valuable thing to try. Like, we should try whatever we can right now. that Ireland knows this is happening, you know, I don't know what happened with the Garda on Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning. I don't know if they were able to board the plane, if they tried to stop it and couldn't. I have no idea. Yeah. Now that they know this is happening, maybe they can look a little bit deeper into their laws and regulations and find a justification so that if this happens again,

they can be prepared to respond. You know, I know that the Irish are exemplars in human rights. And so, you know, if anybody is going to do something, it might be them. Yeah, yeah. I know RTE are now camped out at the airport waiting for the plane to come back, which Yeah, I know. I wish they had checked with the Avgeeks first because the plane's not on the way. Yeah, no. It's not in here. It hasn't left the duty.

Look at the court proceedings. It's going to be three weeks. But yeah, it's great. You've made this an issue there, which I think it helps. Like all this stuff makes a difference. I mean, I just, I want the Irish people to realize because none of their lawmakers have said it yet that Irish authorities knew when the plane was on the ground at Shannon, that there were people who are possibly being illegally detained on this specific airplane.

I just want them to know that. Yeah, yeah. You know, and I hear that their public information laws are also not great, but the police there recorded the call. So there's a recording somewhere if they can find it. Right. I guess I can't find anyone who can answer the satisfactory question of like whose jurisdiction

the plane is under. Yeah, I mean, and it really depends too, like, was the plane parked in the international transit area? Was it in a place where, you know, the guard didn't even have authority? I have no idea. Right. Yeah, these are all questions we can now ask because we know that it was there. And I think that's very valuable. Gillian, where can people follow your work? So you published this on your ghost newsletter first, right? Yeah, I'm writing a book, so I post extremely sporadically,

but I do have a ghost newsletter. It's hardghistory, because it's hardg, Gillian, hardghistory.ghost.io and then I'm on bluesky at Gibrock Hill. Nice. Do you want to plug your book while you have the opportunity? I mean there's there's not like a you know pre-order link. I'm very much still writing it but you know my agent will be mad at me for saying this. The working title is People Didn't Know What Was Wrong Back Then, The Lie at the Heart of American History. I will look forward to reading that.

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know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone and welcome to the show. It's me James today and I'm joined once again by Kirsten Zitlao. We've heard from her before she's an immigration lawyer who takes asylum cases. And we're gonna talk about the asylum system or I guess what's left of it today.

Kirsten is representing somebody I met in the Derry and Gap, Primrose, who you've heard from before. So we're gonna talk about that case. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about ICE detentions inside immigration court. Welcome to the show, Kirsten. Thank you, James. It's good to be here.

Yeah, thanks for coming. I know you're extremely busy. Can you explain to us, like, the asylum system is essentially coming to an end, right? We are not getting new asylum cases. Like, what is the situation for people in the asylum system right now? Yes, that's a correct statement, James. So So there are no new asylum cases. In other words, people who cross at the southern border are now detained only to be removed immediately, basically, or as soon as possible under what's called 212F authority. It's under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Trump has used this authority, which basically broadly says that if the president finds a certain class of

immigrants or the entry of immigrants would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, they may by proclamation, you know, suspend all entry of said immigrants. So that was the purpose and the effect of the executive order discussing the invasion at the border and all the other executive orders discussing invasions and criminal aspects such as cartels and Tren de Aragua, which we all know now is the justification for, alleged justification for just shutting it down at the border. So whereas people used to get credible fear interviews or were paroled into the United States to be allowed to fight an asylum case, none of that is happening anymore.

And people are, if anything, only screened for what's called Convention Against Torture screenings, to just determine like, hey, are they going to be tortured by their government or with the acquiescence of their government if they return to their home country, but even then they are not allowed to remain in the United States or fight any relief in the United States. That just means that they will be deported to a third country. So that was the situation like when we saw the Iranians sitting in the hotel room in Panama, That's what happened there, most likely. So that's the situation at the southern border.

Whoever is still in the United States, you know, who came in before inauguration day is still allowed to fight their case as of now. But there are no new asylum cases, essentially. Right. So for those people fighting their case, the asylum system was already an uphill battle, right? And it became harder after Biden's asylum ban. It was already harder after Title 42. Like people who listened to the show would have known about the people who crossed in 2023. And of course, they would have followed those people who I met in the Darien Gap, some of whom, very few of whom crossed before

January. I literally won, I believe that I'm aware of. Can you explain what the asylum system is like for those people now? Yeah, so I think the biggest two factors affecting asylum cases these days is what you just referred to, which is the asylum ban called the circumvention against lawful pathways that barred people essentially from asylum if they did not use CBP-1, the application to apply for an appointment, which of course only allowed, I think, $1,500 a day or something absurd, forcing most people to cross unlawfully. So that's still very much in place. The litigation has been stalled forever. There's no hope of,

you know, I don't think there's a movement on that. I haven't seen or heard anything. Most likely intentionally, because when Trump did a similar ban, it was overturned immediately. So this is like a new strategy that we're seeing where things are just lagging in court. Right. You know, for example, just a quick side detour, the birthright citizenship issue got up to the Supreme Court real quick, whereas the asylum issue, meaning the border shut down to asylum, is still languishing somewhere before, I think, even just a federal district judge. It's not even in any appeal court yet. So this is all, I think, strategic. So that circumventioning as lawful pathways ban is

still very much an impediment. You know, we all, of course, argue that every migrant in Mexico was in danger and thus qualifies for the exception to the CLP that their life was in danger and they couldn't afford to wait the many, many months for the CBP-1 appointment. But judges, it's been met with mixed reviews. They generally like to see like somebody basically near death for the exception to apply. like somebody basically near death for the exception to apply. And of course, the immigration bar argues that all migrants are basically under threat of death. I mean, any cartel or even immigration official contact in Mexico could have been a death sentence very easily, as we all know. So that's a big thing affecting the latest thing that's also being implemented as a result of this also being implemented as a result of this cartel terrorist organization designation is where it's not just the cartels, it's MS-13 and Tende Auraagua, is that there's

a what's called a trig bar that's applied then also to asylum. And the bar is basically about material support of any of these groups, but it's construed to an absurd degree where even if you made a bowl of food for some Maras under duress, or you made payment because your kid was about to be killed, that's considered material support and you're barred from asylum. Matthew 10 Geez, I wondered if they would do that, yeah. Gigi 11 So we're seeing that too. Other than that, I mean, I have been fortunate to win asylum for folks under Trump 2.0. I mean, I don't know how long that'll still last, but judges are still, you know, granting

cases. So, I'm glad to see that. So that's generally what it's looked like these past four months for asylees. Okay. Yeah, I think it's really important that we do, that there are still possible victories to be had within the court system. And asylum is one of the places where like, there's no more getting on the train, I guess, like the people who are on the train now, we can and people should, if they have the

financial means, and we'll talk about how they can do that later. People should support those people because there's no one else who can go through that system. And like there are people who have gone through horrific things to get here and horrific things in the places that they came from. And even if it's not everyone, we would like to keep safe, we should do everything we can to keep those people safe. 100%. You know, just to say, I mean, and funding somebody's legal fees, I mean, an attorney makes all the difference in navigating these types of issues that I just talked about and

other issues and presenting your case. I mean, asylum cases are still incredibly difficult the difference in navigating these types of issues that I just talked about and other issues in presenting your case. I mean, asylum cases are still incredibly difficult to win. And so representation of counsel is often key. Yeah, I think that the rates of success for people who don't have counsel are dramatically lower. I haven't looked on track recently, but you can normally find that on the, I think track is no longer the University of Syracuse, but it's a place where you can find information, statistics. Let's talk about one of those cases if that's okay. And obviously, we won't intervene in anyone's privacy any more than we have to. But like, I want to talk about Primrose. Primrose is a Zimbabwean woman who I met in Bajo Chiquito

when I was in the Darien Gap reporting on my series, people heard from her in the series. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water, then I can just go. Both the journey was tough, really, really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all. It's not, it's not very, I don't even recommend it. Someone to say, yeah, you study and give no, and even myself, I did know about it. Yeah. I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God, uh, I don't know my family and my family, they don't know where I am right now, but I make it. Yeah. Thank God. I make it safe. Yeah. now, but I make it. Yeah, now you're here.

So I'm just thankful that I make it. You're safe, yeah. She is now in the asylum process, right? Can you explain a little bit about like, where she is in the process? And I will eventually do a scripted series on this, but like, I guess, can we get an update on her situation and how it's progressing? Absolutely. So I came into the case about, I want to say a month or two ago, she had

somebody supporting her, a friend living in Texas. And that situation, a living situation has changed, I believe, which is also not the worst thing. She will be moving with a friend to Southern California, or moving in with a friend rather, but just the situation is very different in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and those types of states. Markedly so and her case is a good example of that. And there's a reason that people like Mamou Khalil and many others are sent to detention centers in that area because it's in the Fifth Circuit, first of all, which is widely renowned to be not a favorable circuit, a court of appeals to immigrants. But more so than that, even the judges themselves are very different from what we would encounter

in California, for example. So my first encounter with the judge was, you know, and this is all virtual, I submitted a motion to appear for her. She had a master calendar hearing in June. I submitted a motion to appear for that telephonically, explaining I was representing her at low or no cost, you know, whatever funds could be raised and could I please appear for a status? It's a status type conference, telephonically. And that motion was met with a really strange response. I don't, to this day, I don't really know exactly it was sort of approved, but then moot because eventually a final court hearing was set.

So that's where we're at right now. She has a final court next year, in about a year and a couple months. But in ruling on my WebEx motion, I was emailed the order of the judge along with a notice that Perma's should self-deport. So judges are sending out these notices with routine other orders in cases where the immigrant has counsel, is fighting their case. It's obvious they're fighting their case. Jesus. And yeah, so it's one of the things where you just feel very strongly this administration's influence.

Are they obliged to do that or is that a choice that the judge is making? Not at all. And in fact, it's completely inappropriate. So all of us are... The immigration bar is taking a different approach to it. You know, some are filing motions to recuse, telling the judges, hey, you need to recuse yourself. You're a non-neutral judge. To send this out in the middle of the case is absurd. It's a due process violation. They're entitled to a neutral judge. I think my approach would be more one of playing dumb because often this has happened. The system, if you will, of ECAS, the electronic system that we use for court immigration filing systems that Elon Musk briefly had access to or whatever was going on there. But anyways,

I digress, you know, we'll send out automatic notices with the emails with the judge's orders. So my approach, I think, will be to give the judges the benefit of the doubt and ask them if this was an electronic notice. And if they say no, then I've gotten it on the record. And if they deny the case, I have that in there for the appeal. But yeah, it's happening all over the country with all sorts of different judges. And it's definitely something that we're grappling with right now. And it's just, it's very ballsy for a judge to say, hey, leave the country. And oh, by the way, I'm a neutral arbiter.

Yeah. I mean, what's the point of having the judge or having the whole process, right? If then they're going to declare this clear bias. Yeah, it's absurd. I mean, it's such a violation of due process rights. And I know everybody in this country now knows the importance of due process, whereas before only attorneys threw that term around. But no, I mean, this stuff really matters, you know? And then also another thing that happened in Primrose's case is that when you have a work permit clock, which is another absurd thing for asylees,

that once they file their asylum application, they have to wait 150 days before they can apply for a work permit. And of course, they're expected to be independently wealthy during those five months or, you know, or starve or I don't know what they're expected to do. Yeah, rely on the generosity of others, like... Exactly. So if you do something like try to change venue or a motion to continue, if you, if you do something in your case that the judge perceives as not moving the case along and rather like kind of trying to stall it or possibly pausing it or slow it down, the judge will stop

the work permit clock the days and it's a whole thing. So Primrose's was stopped because the judge wanted her to get an attorney. So usually when the case is set for a final hearing, that code, adjournment code, they call it, I know from, we have the access to the codes and what stops the clock and what doesn't. And it always restarts the clock because you moved your case along because you're setting it for trial. It's obviously moving your case along. Hers was not restarted for whatever reason. And my only remedy would be to write some court administrator who may or may not ever respond. I can't even go to the judge about this. You know, it's absurd. So that's just the situation that one asylum seeker is dealing with in Texas. So you can only imagine what goes on in detention,ions that, you know, detain

cases in those states. Yeah. People who don't have counsel, like getting that self-deportation if you don't have counsel, like you could assume that you are just obliged to leave and like, your process is over. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And there's no legal basis for the judge to be issuing that. In fact, it's completely unlawful to be issuing something like that at the beginning of the case. At the end of the case, and at the beginning, the judge does have to give certain advisals, but telling somebody to self-deport is never

an advisal that should be given under the law ever. Right. Yeah. It kind of nullifies the whole system. And plus, I should mention real quick that it's disingenuous and harmful and that what these, you know, this administration on purpose isn't telling people with the thousand dollars, take the thousand dollars in self-deport and, you know, we'll pay for your flight and all this stuff. What they're not telling people is that when you leave, you're then subject to a deportation order and that comes with a 10-year bar. This is not mentioned and that's a big deal.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, it seems even like, I think the executive order said permanently leave the United States, right? Well, it did. But then they switched tactics a little bit with the app to self-deport saying, like, you know, leave now, leave now so you have a chance to come back later or something like that. Right. But, you know, without mentioning that, hey, hey, you're barred from the United States for 10 years.

And if you ever return unlawfully, then you're subject to a whole series of, I mean, there's all these warnings that need to come with the deportation order that are strategically left out of all the administration's latest messaging on this topic. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Let's take a break for advertisements here,

and then we'll come back. All right, we are back. And so we've spoken about these like self deportation orders, right? For other people who have entered more recently, right, entered within the last two years, been this has been happening, we're recording on the 22nd for the last two days now, it seems like ICE is dismissing the cases against them and then detaining them directly in court, if I'm correctly informed. Yes. So this has been happening periodically throughout the past four months, but in the past few days, like this week, it's been dramatically ramped up. Like right now, as we're recording

this, ISIS arresting people in the downtown San Diego court and also courts throughout the country. It's been reported everywhere, happening widely this week. And this is another thing the administration said they were going to do and is doing. I mean, you know, they're doing what they said they were going to do. And it's to use what's called 235 authority more broadly. So INA Section 235 applies to people who entered within less than two years, like you said, and they can be then subject to what's called expedited removal. That means that they have to take a credible fear interview and be detained and that they only get to fight a case if they pass their credible fear interview and then they do not qualify for an immigration judge bond. So they only get out if ICE lets them out, which of course ICE is letting nobody

out. So the administration wants to have people detained under this authority, this 235 authority as much as possible to have them have to fight their case detained and either lose the will to do so and or not be able to afford an attorney because detained cases move along a lot quicker and are very costly as well for that reason. So what they're doing is anybody who was here two years or less but was paroled in, so they're in the regular immigration court proceedings, they got out, they're under 240 proceedings, it's called. So DHS attorneys in court are terminating those proceedings, they are asking the judge to terminate the 240 proceedings, so then that case is closed, and then they immediately

restart a case under section 235. And at the second they do that, the person is subject to mandatory detention and ICE is right there in the courthouse to arrest them and detain them. Jesus, yeah. I thought ICE couldn't arrest people in California. Is that California state courts, not federal courts, which are in California? I believe so. And colleagues and I have been talking about this. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but I think also the nature of these proceedings, like the 235 proceeding, like you are mandatory detention. Like you were taken into custody. It's as if you just crossed the border and

are taken into custody. It's treated like that type of situation, like no warrant is necessary, I don't believe, you know. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. So they have very broad authority to detain people like anywhere. That makes sense. Exactly. So the real issue here is that the ethical, I mean, a lot of us are grappling with this and of course, fiercely opposing these motions in that the justification that the DHS attorneys are attempting to use is that circumstances have materially changed since the issuance of their initial case that they're in now, which of course is not the case.

Right, like whose circumstances? Exactly, exactly. Like the rise of fascism doesn't constitute a change circumstance. So, it's just there's no basis for this motion. And secondly, the only basis, like there's zero justification for this other than filling detention centers, lining core civic and geo groups pockets, and intentionally prejudicing an immigrant to have to fight their case detained. I mean, there's no good or legitimate justification for this period, the end, you know? Will Barron Yeah. And fighting it detained will be a lot harder.

They will be obviously in like terrible situation. They are, as we've covered before, often moved to a different state from their council and will make it a lot harder for them if they choose to go that route. I'm guessing that ICE is hoping that people won't fight and will just, or DHS is hoping that people will just choose not to fight. A hundred percent. That's the whole point is, is point is this whole administration's, the messaging and their actions are all about forcing people, breaking people's spirits and forcing them into a

situation where they feel their only option is to self-deport. Yeah, it is heartbreaking. It's very sick. Yeah, it's very disturbing. It's very, very different from Trump 1.0. Yeah, I think that's worth sort of focusing in on that this is a completely distinct and much more radical disassembling of the asylum system as we know it. Absolutely. I mean, I think we can all agree or disagree as far as how we feel about the past four months and what

has happened, but I think everybody can agree the pace at which it has happened is extremely concerning. Right. We are four months into four years and we have seen like a constitutional crisis, like a full blown defiance of the courts. The day we're recording, the Trump administration is attempting to deport people to South Sudan, many of whom, 11 of 12 of whom are not South Sudanese, right? I guess, from what I understand, their attempt to giving those people a credible fear screening

was that they didn't hear them shouting from the cells they were detained in that they were afraid of being tortured. Yeah, they're supposed to give them opportunity to be heard, essentially, and give notice of this third country that they're going to be deported to that nobody and no judge has ever considered whether they have a fear or if they would be in danger or deported to this country. So again, this is a due process situation where, hey, before you can be sent to some random country, especially South Sudan, maybe you should be given an opportunity to present why you have a fear or that something bad might happen to you over there to a judge. And so this was recently ordered, I believe the case is called DBD versus DHS, was what stopped the Libya situation from happening,

where, yeah, a judge said this is exactly what needs to occur. These people need to be given real notice, not this whatever has been happening, you know, and an opportunity to be heard. And then, yeah, they immediately thereafter attempted to, as you said, or I think they did, I don't know if they actually accomplished it with South Sudan. Yeah, my understanding is they are in a country which is neither the United States nor South Sudan on an aircraft at this time. And DHS is arguing that they can do their credible fear screenings there on the aircraft.

I don't know how they plan to give those people privacy, translation, access to counsel. I just looked on Courtless right before we recorded and Judge Murphy clarified Massachusetts District Court Judge that 10 days would be the amount of time that they would need to assert a credible fear. And then if DHS determined that they didn't have credible fear, they would then have 15 days to ask for the reopening of their case. TBD, it is the United States going to somehow accommodate them in where they are. People are speculating they're in Djibouti, which is the largest US military base in the continent of Africa and close to South Sudan. And so if that's the case, yeah, I don't know how they will get due process. We will find out if they will get due process,

I guess. Yeah, they probably won't, but we'll be told that they did. Or we'll be told that they were criminals in the first place, which is the other theme of this administration, right, with the Alien Enemies Act, which has basically been put on pause by a number of same judges who have said, there's no invasion, there's no war, this is absurd, this just flat out doesn't apply. And I have to say that the immigration bar is very, I think, not just the immigration bar, I think all of us are very frustrated that the Supreme Court has not yet come out with a definitive substantive ruling on this because for the people who don't know, the Alien Enemies Act allows the administration to circumvent the INA, which is the whole

immigration court system, and immediately deport supposed criminals who were invading the country. I mean, we all know this with the Venezuelans who were invading the country. I mean, we all know this with the Venezuelans who were accused of being in Trenadera, just for having tattoos. Yeah. And so that is, to me, and I think all of us, the biggest threat to just be able to put somebody on a plane to another country and in a prison in another country, as we've seen with CICOT in El Salvador. I mean, we need our Supreme Court to speak on this and

we need it quickly. Yeah, like if we no longer have habeas, it's a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, like most of them. And there's so many assaults on the Bill of Rights and then we need our Supreme Court to really to step up. And I think I'm not the only one who's extremely frustrated by that because we're in crisis and as we've seen it's fallen on courts and lawyers and judges to try to defend the semblance of democracy in this country but the highest court in the land needs to help out soon.

Yeah, yeah and like this is where like the rubber meets the road right for like maintaining people's basic rights dignity and the other right not to be sent to a labor camp in El Salvador or You know South Sudan a country which is rapidly descending into conflict again I thought the government was barrel bombing this week Well, just real quick another note on the Supreme Court is that they're they're also concerning me as we know There's a lot of Trump appointees there. And so, I mean, it's not even that that's the answer. It's just we're, you know, but we need answers more quickly than what they're giving us.

And it's just, given the rate that this administration is working at, I don't know that they will, if they ever get the case, or the asylum van at the border would even overturn that because historically they've sort of supported his 212f powers. So I'm not saying that's the answer to everything, but it's definitely frustrating to not have basic things already decided, like the use of the Alien Enemies Act. Yeah, like just not to know where we're at. Like, when people are trying in good faith to move forward with the legal processes,

that they have spent their entire life savings on to get here and do the right, quote unquote, the right way. You're still fighting a number of asylum cases as we said before the call, like you probably won't be forever right like at some point there's just not going to be any more asylum cases. I know that you're accepting donations I think through Venmo on behalf of Primrose that we'll be sure to link to that Venmo account in the description of this show so people can donate if they'd like to. Now is the time to do it, right?

It's not like this is going to be an ongoing thing. Like if people don't help now, then there won't be migrants to support or asylees to support later. So like how can people materially support maybe in other ways, right? If they're like on hard times and don't have the financial resources, what else can people do to just to make this a little bit less cruel to some people who are among the most unfortunate people on the planet often? I think even mental and emotional support for the immigrants in your life, I think, is something that that is underestimated because speaking as a very privileged white woman

attorney, US citizen, this has taken a tremendous toll on me. And the mental toll that is taken on the actual undocumented community and the Siles, this messaging is so harmful and so disgusting that I think I would just caution people to not underestimate the power of human kindness to those already in your life. And just empowering them, distributing know your rights cards and information, that still matters. But also, I think the people who are, as we've been discussing, going to be at the most disadvantaged in terms of being able to keep up morale are these people who are going to be mandatorily detained. So in terms of what we were talking about, I believe before we started recording, reaching

out to any organizations. I know in San Diego there's detention resistance. Or even reaching out to the detention center that's near you to be able to determine how you can send a letter, how you can put money on somebody's books so that they can have phone calls with their family or phone calls with you even. I think these types of things are key in light of the administration's clear messaging that immigrants are very much unwanted and criminals. So I think that's where I would come at this from. If you cannot donate, again, like we were talking, if you have a few dollars to spare,

I mean, if everybody has a few dollars to spare, there is a finite number, like we were saying, of asylum cases left, like from moroses. So if people can spare a few dollars here or there whenever they can, it does make the difference. Yeah, no, it does. And it shows that even if the government doesn't want you here, a lot of people want you to be protected. We want you to be safe. Like, yeah, the mental damage it does, I think it's hard to overstate.

I was talking, I remember, to a young woman in Bajo Chiquito, and she was the only surviving member of her family. The government had killed everyone. And so she came to the US, right, to be safe. And like now the government is coming after her in addition to the trauma she already has from watching her entire family die. Like now the most powerful government in the world is coming after you. I can't imagine how that feels. That's a very good point. I mean, yeah, people are coming already traumatized only to be further traumatized by this administration and the system. And yes, I mean, emotional and mental and any kind of support is not to be underestimated in the slightest during

these times. Yeah, like have people over for dinner if you can, or yeah, like call the detention center and put money on someone's commissary, like, just showing people that they're welcome is important. Like, I know a lot of the migrants, like, if I look at my phone right now, and the time we've been recording, one of the migrants I met in the Darien Gap will probably have texted me, they're in Mexico, right? And they just want the world to know about the situation. They know they can't come to the US

anymore. But sometimes people will say, I guess the Americans don't want us anymore. And like that breaks my heart. Cause I think most people, if they knew these people circumstances, right? Like hundreds of people have reached out to me since the Darien Gap stuff to ask how they can help. And like most people do want those people to be their neighbors. And it breaks my heart that they think that we don't want them, that we would rather leave them to die wherever they're at.

It's genuinely really horrible for me to think of that. So yeah, I would really encourage anyone listening if you can to do what you can. Absolutely. And just remembering that, again, these asylum cases are finite. So if you know any asylum seeker or can support any asylum seeker right now, they made it in. Let's give them their best shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we can still help those people. And while we can, we should. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We do appreciate it. I know that your time is very valuable and you're really busy

right now. So we really appreciate your time. You're always welcome back. And if there's anything else you'd like to say before we finish up. Yeah, thank you, James. I think the only thing I just want to emphasize is that, you know, from the standpoint of immigration attorneys, like I feel that we're obviously a subject of an executive order and you know, big law firms are being extorted by the administration to represent causes that the administration believes in and not pro bono immigration work and so forth and so on. So it's not like too many of us have been personally attacked, although, you know, judges have been arrested, even judges for just hiring an immigrant to do work around the house. So it is a scary time to be practicing immigration law, but unfortunately, I do see there being

a time when it won't happen. I mean, I see the writing on the wall where I will not be able to continue mentally and or economically, because a side effect of all this and a very intentional side effect is to make it so that we can't do much for people anymore and or they can't afford us or there's not people here to do anything for because their spirit was broken or their finances and or all of the above and they had to leave. So it is a very intense time, but I came from different areas of law. I've only been in immigration seven years and it's the first time I've thought of,

okay, where am I going to go to next in these seven years? And it's a very real thing. So if you, like I said, it feels very different than Trump 1.0. So, no, yeah, this is considerably more severe. So in other words, take care of yourself if you are an ally, because, you know, the attack is on immigrants and anybody who advocates supports and so forth. And it's a very targeted direct attack and it's very easy to get run down and consumed by it. And so definitely do what you need to do to take care of yourself. And if that

means stepping back, then, you know, I mean, I want to keep my foot in the door as much as possible these next four years on something immigration and asylum related, but there's also economic and other realities that are happening intentionally. So, yeah, definitely. And I think it is important for people to do whatever they need to do to self preserve and take care of themselves as well. I think that's a good place to end. Thank you so much for your time.

And again, like if you're listening, please check the description of the show and we will have a link to Primrose's GoFundMe if you'd like to help. Thank you so much, James. Thank you so much, James. Thank you. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what

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Who's got ED? Us, you, everybody. Yeah. We're giving you ED. This episode, we're covering the week of May 21 to May 28. It was a really busy news week for the latter half of that week, so we're gonna be mostly catching up with that.

Jesus, yeah. And let's start with the biggest news from late last week domestically, the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC. The shooting took place around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21st, outside of an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Prior to the shooting, the suspect was seen pacing outside of the building. According to witnesses and surveillance video, a 31-year-old man named Elias Rodriguez approached a group of four people leaving the event.

As he walked past them, he turned to face their backs and shot two people. They continued to fire as they fell to the ground. One of the victims, a 26-year-old woman, tried to crawl away after being shot. Rodriguez followed her and fired again. Jesus. While he was reloading, she sat up, and then Rodriguez shot her several more times before throwing his gun into a bush. He ran into the museum after the shooting.

Security let him in, thinking that he was a victim. Witnesses say he appeared traumatized and in shock. People from the museum event brought him water, and when they asked him if he was okay or if he was injured, Rodriguez requested the police. When cops arrived, he allegedly admitted to the shooting, and according to witnesses, quote, grabbed a red keffiyeh out of his pocket and started free Palestine chants. Quote, there's only one solution, Antifada revolution, unquote. While being arrested and taken out of the building, he chanted free, free Palestine.

Israel's ambassador to the US claimed that the two victims were deliberately targeted as Israeli embassy employees, and that Rodriguez mingled with attendees at the reception earlier that evening before raising suspicion and being asked to leave. Although the organization who put on this event, the American Jewish Committee, disputes this account. They say that Rodriguez tried to register for their event but was denied entry following a background check. Rodriguez is a lifelong Chicago resident. He got an English degree at the University of Chicago, legally bought a gun in Illinois, and flew with it to DC

the night before the shooting. This event was an American Jewish committee access DC Young Diplomats reception. The description for the event reads, quote, This special event brings together Jewish young professionals, aged 22 to 45, and the DC diplomatic community for an evening dedicated to fostering unity and celebrating Jewish heritage. Join us for heavy appetizers, cocktails, conversations, and a special guest speaker. We are excited to introduce this year's theme, Turning Pain Into Purpose. Hear from members of the Multifaith Alliance and ISRAID, as they delve into humanitarian diplomacy and how a coalition of organizations from the region and for the region are working together in response to humanitarian crises

through the Middle East and North Africa regions." The two victims were a young couple, Sarah Milgram and Yaron Lissinsky, 26 and 30, who met through their work at the embassy. Lissinsky identified as a Christian, though he was born in Israel and moved to Germany as a kid, then returned to Israel and served in the IDF. There is an alternative claim that he was born in Nuremberg and then moved to Israel as a teenager, but most reporting says that he was born in Israel. In the aftermath of the shooting, politicians widely condemned this as anti-Semitic violence.

The acting U.S. Attorney said that they are investigating the case as a hate crime and an act of terrorism. Dan Bongino, Deputy FBI Director, said the shooting was a quote, act of targeted violence. The Israeli Foreign Minister and Netanyahu have laid blame at college protesters and foreign government officials, including the leaders of France, Britain, and Canada, accusing them of blood libel for talking about Israel's quote, supposed genocide and crimes against humanity, unquote, and calling such rhetoric critical of Israel, quote unquote, incitement. Netanyahu said, quote, free Palestine is just today's version of Heil Hitler.

Jesus Christ. They don't want a Palestinian state. They want to destroy the Jewish state. They want to annihilate all Jewish people who have been in the land of Israel for 3,500 years, unquote. to annihilate all Jewish people who have been in the land of Israel for 3,500 years." This is obviously, I think, in a lot of ways, the kind of thing Netanyahu has been waiting for and probably the kind of thing that a number of folks that Trump has put in federal law enforcement have been waiting for because it provides them with some opportunities to

continue their push to criminalize student organizing and organizing against Israeli war crimes, right? The argument they want to be able to make is that just saying free Palestine is an act of terrorism. And there was an act of terrorism here, right? Shooting two embassy employees for the crimes of their government Like that is a clear act of terrorism, right? You can like feel however you want to about it, but like that's the definition of what was done.

But the things he was chanting were not part of the act of terrorism. The fact that he shot people to death was the act of terrorism. Yeah. It's the murdering people that's terrorism. Yeah. And that is already illegal by the way. And quite heavily, I'll be interested We don't seem to know much about where he got the firearm yet that I've come across

So he legally purchased it in Illinois. Yeah, he bought it in Illinois Which has like fairly strict gun laws. Yeah some of the strictest in the US So it's one of those things where there's already quite a bit of regulation around everything that he did here, but fundamentally, if you're able to buy guns, which you are, because of this, you know, if there's an amendment, there will be people who carry out attacks like this. And I don't really know, there certainly didn't seem to be outside of this guy's personal chats with his friends, a lot of evidence that would have set him on anybody's radar. He had been at like a PSL, Party for Socialism and Liberation March in 2017 or something, but like this wasn't a guy who had a history of

violence or anything like that. And quite frankly, that's just a reality of the country that we live in, is that when people like this decide to carry out shootings for whatever reason, the odds of catching them are extraordinarily low. It's very hard to flag for a guy specifically like this because there's a lot of them out there. Yeah. And most of them don't do shootings.

This act has been widely condemned. Pro-Palestine commentators have said that this style of like adventurous terrorism does nothing to help the Palestinian people and in fact only hurts them and plays into what like the Israel lobby and Netanyahu have been like wanting to happen for a while. Yeah, I think Kat Abou-Ghazala, a Palestinian American woman who's running for office in Illinois. Worked for Media media matters for years. Yeah. It does a lot of videos. Yep. Yeah. Anyway, I saw that she'd shared something about how like, yeah, this was something

that evidently should be condemned, right? That is wrong and it's not advancing the cause of Palestinian freedom. Like I think adventurous terrorism is a good way to describe it. Yeah. And was just getting panned by people on the internet, which like, I don't know, people engaging with this like from a place it doesn't come from, like, it's bad when random folks get shot and killed. No, people have used the horrific genocide as a way to like channel their general societal

frustration and find a way to like just act incredibly hostile like to actual Palestinians Yeah, yeah, who don't share the exact same like anti-imperialist TM views that they might have right? It's just permission to abuse people online. Yeah deeply like like verbally violent and like I know like psycho shit and This guy engaged in that kind of stuff as well, as we'll see. Let's talk about that. Let's get a little bit into his background. So, he has a manifesto that he posted on his Twitter account.

And it's cogent, like, in terms of it's not the ramblings of, like, a madman or something. There's nothing, like, at all. He has an English degree, right? He knows how to write. He has worked as a writer for like almost a decade. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that in terms of like, it's very clear what he's trying to say. There's not any evidence here of like a disconnect or whatever.

He's not doing this because he's blaming Israel for making the weather bad or whatever, right? Right, yeah. Yeah. The manifesto is titled Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home. And he attempts to explain the rationale behind his actions. He starts by discussing the unknown total scale of dead Palestinians, writing that quote, atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification, unquote. He writes about how despite protests and shifts

in public opinion, the US government has continually refused to reign in Israel and instead moved to criminalized dissent. He talks about armed action, quote, an armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares in many unarmed actions, unquote. Yeah, and I do find, you know, one of the first things that happened when this attack was carried out was people started theorizing that this had been some Nazi who was using this to, using the pro-Palestinian cost to like camouflage his Nazism. And I don't think that the preponderance of evidence suggests that.

There are two weird things. One of them is that this guy's previous Twitter name was Habbo88 and he was not born in 88. Obviously, whenever you see an 88. It's a cursed millennial. And the other is the bring the war home reference in his manifesto, which is basically a reference to something that I believe was Louis Beam,

who was a neo-Nazi organizer, set about trying to get Vietnam veterans to essentially bring the war home to the United States in order to spark a race war. Those two little things are weird. However, the rest of this guy's fairly well-documented history and background does not suggest anything like that. So I don't think that that's the credible thing to blame this on, quite frankly. Yeah, I'll go over some of that background in brief. Yeah.

He also talked about targeting government representatives, quote, the impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion. He then tells the story of a man who tried to throw Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara off a boat into the sea. He finishes with his thoughts on the quote-unquote morality of armed demonstration, where he discusses this tendency to dehumanize the perpetrators of atrocities as a method for us to cope with the monstrous evil that ordinary humans are capable of. Quote, this action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during protective

edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans, such an action would have been illegible. It would seem insane. I'm glad that today, at least, there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible, and in some funny way, the only sane thing to do." It did find it interesting that on December 5, 2024, Rodriguez posted on his Twitter account that, quote, 80% of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance executive." As for his political background, Rodriguez identifies as a Maoist third-worldist and believes that the global South alone has quote-unquote revolutionary potential. A friend of Rodriguez

described his politics to journalist Ken Kleppenstein like this, quote, he was a big proponent of the emerging resistance axis of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Assad, Syria. How'd that go? He seemed pretty vocally in favor of Hamas for years, way before 2023. He'd always hated Israel and would call it, quote, the little Satan, unquote. For fuck's sake. The Assad test are in supreme as the fucking A-B test for someone having shitty politics.

Yeah, with the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Assad. Yeah, yeah, Assad who gassed his own people, who murdered little children. Including thousands and thousands of Palestinians, by the way. Yeah, Yeah. Like, but again, you shouldn't expect coherence or particularly well-informed opinions out of folks like this. Yeah. His online presence mirrors what I would call like the typical like anti imperialist TM poster where he's there is most of his frustration at the Democrats, sometimes at Republicans, but mostly, yeah, posts about being pro Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, pro Assad,

and particularly the past few years, posting a lot about Palestine. Right. Yeah. With explicit defense and like veneration of Hamas. The same friend that talked to Klippenstein also said, quote, It's driving me crazy that people are calling it a false flag. This development is shocking, but not completely out of character. He always had strong political convictions.

From the sound of the manifesto, he's the same as he was, unquote. Yeah. And I mean, that seems true. Again, we still don't have a perfect knowledge of all of this guy's online life. No, this is just a week away. But based on what Kins posted, based on this interview, that makes complete sense, right? I don't have any trouble believing that for a number of reasons. No, absolutely. This is not a false flag attack.

That's conspiratorial nonsense. Yeah, I think this guy did a thing that he sincerely believed in, and it seems like everything he'd been expressing in the year or two leading up to doing this, you know, was consistent with what he did. Rodriguez was affiliated with the Chicago PSL, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, back in 2017, and spoke to the media on their behalf. Though he would later regret his association with the group, telling friends, quote, PSL sucks shit. I wish I had just done a misadventure

with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization rather than the PSL, LOL, unquote. Rodriguez remained somewhat politically active in Chicago. In 2023, he posted video from a local pro-Palestine march on his Twitter account. Klippenstein spoke with at least five friends of his who all claimed that they never heard Rodriguez express anti-Semitic sentiments. Now one of Rodriguez's friends gave Klippenstein access to a years old private WhatsApp group chat that Rodriguez frequently posted in, including up to a day before the shooting.

Klippenstein says, quote, the messages don't reveal any hatred of Jews per se, but they do portray an often bitter man who hated all sorts of other things, especially Israel and its war in Gaza, unquote. Yeah. And from what we can see of the chats that Kenneth's posted, this matches pretty well. A chat member wrote, quote, I'm almost surprised you're not anti-Semitic, Elias. It usually goes hand in hand with the whole

Stalin did nothing wrong mantra. Ugh. Yeah, and his response to this was like, Stalin ended, you know, among other things, Stalin ended the greatest anti-Semitic state in history, which I've seen as evidence that he wasn't pro-Stalin. He just supported Stalin, you know Defeating the Nazis, but he he says like among other things

So he's really got a number of reasons he likes Stalin Yeah from the exchanges with his friends guys clearly like a like a tanky anti-imperialist type. Yes. Yes Yeah, million such examples. The only time he talked about race explicitly was to lambast white people. Quote, LOL, you probably would have to actually genocide white people to make this a normal country. Like even a very targeted and selective rehabilitation program would probably have to lead to the lifetime imprisonments of tens of millions of white people. There's the Stalin did nothing wrong brain type that we were looking for.

Well, and again, it's one of those things we're talking about this because there's a bunch of guys who express similar views. This is the only one who's done a shooting. When we talk about this making sense, we're not talking about this as evidence that like, oh, someone who's a fucking tanky type is likely to commit a mass shooting. Right, that they go hand in hand. No, this is the first time a tanky's done anything. This is the first one of these I've heard of in quite a long time. It's just this guy, there's a bunch of people who express similar things to this guy, right?

Yeah, yeah. On October 7th, he celebrated the Hamas attack, quote, just saw an incredibly gory video of the aftermath of Israeli troops trying to get dressed for the ambush absolutely massacred by Hamas fighters. I. M. A. O. Love checking back in with the news every few hours like, hmm, I wonder if Israel still exists. You don't often get to credibly wonder if Israel is over yet, today or not, unquote. Yeah, and again, like that just kind of shows the general lack of knowledge. A level of political delusion. Yeah.

Yeah, like a lot of telegram propaganda consumption type worldview here. Yes, and can convince you that what's happening is different from the reality. Yeah. In this chat, he lamented to friends and expressed sorrow at the deaths of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. And sometimes, his ire was directed at other members of this leaked chat, at one point going on an unhinged ableist rant attacking one of his friends for being privileged after they discussed the challenges of having a brother with schizophrenia. Quote, why not just have him committed? You can't possibly be gaining anything from a relationship with

a person like that. Just put him in a padded room and forget about him. Jesus Christ. If there was a person you loved, he's gone now. Let it go. Can you just chain him in the basement and slide meals under the door? I'm just tired of hearing about this guy. He's useless.

We get it. Stop complaining and just dispose of him. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I mean, this goes with the like people who, I don't know, aren't useful to me or of no value, right? Like people don't have inherent value and you know, they don't agree with or are useful to him, then fuck them, they can die.

Like, I guess there's some kind of coherence there. Well, Robert, do you want to mention the something awful? Yes, I do, Garrison. And the... something awful? Yes, I do, Garrison. So the other thing that came out in Ken's article is that this dude was a poster. His friend described him as a dedicated poster, which is the worst thing you can be described as being. And noted that he had been... there had been some... when it came out that like his former

Twitter username had been like Habbo88, that was very clearly a reference to a game called Habbo Hotel. That if you're Gen Z, there's very good odds you don't remember. But it was a big thing for people who were on 4chan and who were on Something Awful. And Something Awful was the website that gave birth to 4chan. It's where I was raised on the internet. And many, many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, I think, I don't remember the exact year, but we started gathering on this game for children. It was like an MMO for little kids and like pretending to be members of a cult in order

to like confuse small children. And then 4chan did their own version of that that was a bit more racist, which is often the case. Yeah, many such cases. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, many such cases. Anyway, when this came out, there was a debate. Was this guy a chaner or was this guy a goon?

You know, a member of the Something Awful forums. And a lot of people thought, I called goon, a lot of people thought chaner because of his age. He was a little bit young to have been a part of the Something Awful, have a hotel thing. I think it's actually likelier he did both, but his friends described him as somebody who was really into Something Awful, right? As somebody who had been influenced by that

and particularly a subset of the Something Awful forums called FIAD, which stands for Fuck You and Die, which kind of pioneered a lot of the most toxic aspects of online discourse. Apparently, Jesus. Now, folks have found at least one of his accounts that doesn't have a lot of posts, although that doesn't mean much because, number one, he could have deleted a lot of stuff, which many people did when they got older.

Number two, he could have had another account, which is also the case. The one account that people know was his was banned for shooting and killing two embassy employees. There's reasons given in the ever-lengthening Something Awful ban list when somebody gets banned. Obviously, again, I don't think there's like a causative thing. Him being on Something Awful didn't cause him to shoot to him being like him being on something awful didn't cause him to shoot two people. But him being on something awful was a natural part of the progression that led

to him being the kind of like toxic online asshole that he was. And sort of an evidence of that is that one of the last things he had done online before the shooting was he had gotten briefly onto Blue Sky and then gotten in trouble for repeatedly harassing Will Stancil, who's another annoying asshole on the internet, who was also a something awful goon, who was raised in this same chunk of the internet and who became a similar kind of asshole

just with wildly different politics. And these two hated each other. And Elias threatened to murder him over the internet. Because he's like again that these guys... He's that type of guy. He's that type of guy which doesn't mean again which doesn't mean this is why he did a shooting or anything to do with that because there's a lot of this type of guy and almost none of them commit acts of terrorism. It just like his background makes complete sense for the kind of guy that we can see that he was online.

The last thing I'll say about this is that, beyond this like senseless loss of life, which is like an issue in and of itself, obviously, this also contributes to further loss of life in the way this plays into like media capture, right? Now we have a whole week where the news cycle is dominated by two people getting murdered in the streets of DC. And this does not help the Palestinian people currently being killed by Israel. The exact same day that this happened, Wednesday the 21st,

93 people were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip. And that type of stuff does not really get reported anymore, because that's how like media capture works. Americans are really good at getting desensitized to this in a large scale media environment. But stuff like this only serves as a distraction and fuels Israel's own motivation for their continued actions. Talking of media capture, Garrison, we have been captured by the advertisers in this show. It's true. There you go.

Mm hmm. in this show. It's true. There you go. Mm-hmm. And we are back. Another big news item from last week was the passing of the big, beautiful budget bill in the House. We'll talk more about this bill as it churns through the Senate, but first our co-host Mia Wong has a special report on how the bill targets trans health care. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the budget bill that's currently working through a bunch of processes in the Senate that's been passed by the House. I am Mia Wong.

And with me to talk about how this budget specifically is unbelievably bad for trans people is Maddie Kastigan from Maddie Kast and Mira Levine from the Free Radical. Glad to have both of you two here. You've both been doing a bunch of journalism about this stuff specifically and what people can do about it. First, can you explain what is going on in this budget with the ban on trans health care using Medicaid? Yeah, absolutely. So the budget bill, also known as House Resolution 1, is this year's reconciliation bill, which is Congress basically deciding next year's budget and how they're going to allocate all their funds. This time around, Republicans decided it would be a great idea to push through.

So what it was at first was an intense limitation on what Medicaid to cover, essentially just humongous Medicaid cuts. And this is what I began investigating first. Me and Maddie were talking about it a bunch. She's the one who took me off to it. They started off by implementing huge cuts to Medicaid that would result in millions of people losing access to their healthcare, not even just trans people. Shortly after they announced these cuts, for instance, ADAPT, a group of disabled activists, they are famous

for being the ones who climbed up the steps of the, I believe it was the Capitol building in the 90s to raise awareness and help get the American Disabilities Act passed. They staged a protest on the United States Capitol during a hearing for this bill where Republicans were just talking about it and praising themselves. Multiple activists got arrested. They're all fine now, apparently. Apparently they weren't treated too bad either, which is good to hear. But what ultimately happened is more and more came out and it came revealed that not only would disabled people be affected, but basically every marginalized group. Poor people, of course, being what we were focusing on, given the beat. But this will impact essentially

everyone, especially if you're low income, especially if you are a person of color, you are more likely to be impacted just by virtue of this bill and how sweeping it is. And Republicans implemented a ban for gender affirming care for minors on it. It was a very milquetoast ban that at the time was projected to pretty much get overturned in court right away if we were to pass. They didn't stop there though. They quickly evolved it and they tried to implement it into a sweeping ban on gender affirming care for all ages on Medicaid and for any health insurance received through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

And ultimately, this led to a lot of panic and a lot of people assuming that their care is going to be taken away immediately. That wasn't what was going to happen. The minimum effective date that's currently in the bill is 2027. I'm telling people to prepare if it passes for 2026 because there's a decent chance Republicans will try to expedite it because it passed through the House, it passed through committees in the House, it was sent to the Senate. And I think it's well give to Maddie to talk about kind of what next

steps for that are. Yeah. So like my was saying, there's a lot of really, this bill is tremendous. They could talk for hours about it, but focusing on the trans parts, there's a ban on Medicaid funding, and there's also a ban on including trans cares and essential health benefit and ACA plans. And the thing about both of these provisions is that normally with reconciliation bills, they're supposed to be focused on budget items, not policy items. So for example, you couldn't say, hey, weed is legal everywhere now or something like that, or raise the minimum wage, which Democrats tried to do in 2021 and they failed because there are rules regarding how this

process works. And so what we argued in our article was that there's a possibility that, you know, if activists and advocates reach out to their senators and advocated to point out that this part of the bill is completely against those provisions, against those procedural rules, the Senate parliamentarian could rule against it and basically strike that portion of the bill without it ever even becoming law and you know that would save people a lot of stress and anxiety and You don't worry about the court battles and what happens with scrimmety versus US which is a Supreme Court case That's going to be ruled on on gender affirming care soon

So what we've been telling people and you know including listeners for your show is that people really need to reach out to their senators every single day email call and ask them to vote no on this bill on HR1 and specifically mention the trans healthcare aspects. And if you want, there's templates online on our website, or you can just ask them, hey, we don't think this bill is good. We want you to challenge specifically the parts that are attacking trans people. And I can confirm with you, I can't share too much information, but I can confirm with you that we are making real legitimate progress on killing this provision. And the more people we have calling in every single day, the better our odds are. But there's still more ways to fight back.

And I want Myra to pick up on how people can fight back on the ground. Yeah. So in addition to reaching out to your senators, of course, to that, there's an email template, Maddie wrote up a great one. It tells you everything you need to do. You can even leave a phone call with a script. It takes like five minutes, but more long term is this is not going to be the only attack on gender affirming care. It's not going to stop here. This is just the latest attempt that they're trying to do. Ultimately, we

cannot rely on the government to give us essential health care. We cannot rely on the government to protect us and give us what we need because fundamentally, the government and the laws that it aims to uphold are about protecting the rich, protecting the powerful, protecting the wealthy. The law is functionally something that gives police power to act as essentially an occupying army on the state and to persecute anyone who deviates from what those who are disproportionately rich and powerful decree. And we need to start focusing on building long-term solutions. Everything we can do with legislative activism is important, but ultimately it will not save us because there will be more attacks down the line.

They'll keep coming and they only need to win once. We need to welcome that every time. But there are long term solutions. My beat at this point is essentially just telling everyone to get plugged into your local mutual aid network. Get plugged into people doing work on the ground in your state, in your area, who are focusing on a plethora of different issues. Bit of a self plug here, but I wrote an article, for instance, last month, where I interviewed a seasoned activist in the Twin Cities,

who told me just a lot about the history of radical praxis in the Twin Cities, who told me just a lot about the history of radical practice in the cities, especially in light of the George Floyd riots, and especially in light of corporate pride, frango capitalism, whole nine yards. I recommend reading it. It's on the free radical.org. Check it out. But beyond, of course, my own writing and my own interviews, there are so many people doing work that doesn't get covered because it either isn't palatable to mainstream news audiences or it isn't seeking coverage for a variety of reasons. In every single major city, this I can guarantee, there are people doing work.

Most of the time, it's not going to be able publicly visible, but they are there. I would recommend that everyone who is not currently plugged in get started with something that is much more entry level and something that is much more like meant to be kind of for everyone who may not be willing to do more in depth and more crazy tech stuff. Food not bombs is the great thing I recommend for everyone to check out. Not every city has one, most do. Every state has one. Beyond that, there are plenty of local mutual aid groups in every single locality. And if there's not one directly by you, there's probably one in your nearest major city. I would specifically recommend, I'm a bit biased here, but I would

recommend focusing on ones that are decentralized and non-hierarchical, ones that don't revolve around centralizing power and placing that power in the hands of people who are either good at smooth talking or who have a lot of money. Ultimately, the way forward for people of all different marginalized groups, not even just trans people, you know, undocumented immigrants, black and indigenous people of color, low income people, disabled people, and so forth. The way forward is by recognizing that our issues affect all of us. Attacks on trans health care are not limited there. Inevitably, let's say they ban trans health care overnight.

They're going to come for intersex people next. They're going to come for gay people next. They're going to come for everyone. So I would just say get involved in your local groups and reach out. There are resources out there. If you need some, check out the foodradical.org. I recommend a ton of them. Thank you. And yes, our website for Maddy, Maddycast is madycast.com. And you can find our templates for contacting your senators there. Thank you so much for helping yourself and helping your community. Yeah, thank you so much for helping yourself and helping your community. Yeah, thank you so much for that. I want to close on, I want to read, to write a real

line for fucking Namix Manifesto from Andor. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere and even the smallest insurrection pushes our line forward. And one of the arguments that Namik makes here that I think is just true is that in order to maintain their holds, these people have to win a hundred battles across a hundred fronts. You know, but this means that there are so many different things that you can do to resist them and to make sure that this fucking budget they're trying to pass to make sure that everyone in this country suffers and specifically the trans people cannot use the health insurances that we need. Use Medicaid, use the Affordable Care Act to pay for stuff. This stuff can be resisted in so many different ways. You can, as we've talked about, you can call your senators, you can yell at them, you can make their lives miserable until they agree to not do this. And then also you can join your local midway groups, you can join local activist groups, you can

start getting serious organizing other ways. You can, again, like we've talked a lot about unions and the role of unions and trying to struggle on this show. We've talked about we've talked about so many things. I'm going to do a one second plug for the episode I wrote last year called you already know how to organize because you do already know how to organize. And yeah, none of the things that are happening here are inevitable. They can be stopped. And there are so many different ways for you to start stopping them. Yeah, so we're back and we're talking about Gavin Newsom and particularly the intersection of the governor of California and Donald Trump, which is a lot more shameful than you'd expect.

So if you remember a little earlier this year, there was a big brouhaha publicly, because a California transgender high school athlete won at the woman's eight feet triple jump. This is an 11th grade transgender athlete from Yoruba Valley High School near Riverside, California. And she won the division three girls long jump and triple jump and placed seventh in the high jump at her Southern section championship. A few weeks later, there's going to be, I don't think it's happened yet,

a championship meet that she qualified for as a result of this. And when this happened, it was immediately leapt on by the Trump administration and by right wing media as evidence of this thing that they've been trying to push for forever, which is that trans athletes are a threat to women's sports, right? Now, this is something that, number one, there's just not a lot of, and this is also something that,

like, I think something like two-thirds of Americans, when polled, say that they don't feel like trans athletes should be competing with, you know, quote unquote, naturally born women in women's sports, right? Like this is a thing that the right has built a lot of support for because they have made this a political issue for so long and they've been largely successful in that. The state of California and California lawmakers have been pushing back against this. There have been state bills in order to allow these girls to continue to compete, but Gavin Newsom has not expressed the same degree of support. And this kind of largely came out earlier this month when he had a meeting with conservative

personality Charlie Kirk on his new podcast. As Newsom said, Kirk pushed so hard on the topic that Newsom said he felt like he had to address it. Here's how Newsom characterized it. And then he asked me, tell me that's not fair. And I looked at him, I said, you're right, that's not. And so it wasn't some grand design. And I know, I know that hurt a lot of people, but respectively, I just disagree with those

on the other side of this. Now this brought a backlash against Newsom. He was attacked for flip-flopping because again, like the California Democratic Party's position on this has been to defend trans athletes, but Newsom kind of flipped as soon as he was in a room with Charlie Kirk. Now Newsom will argue that he also tried to stick up for trans athletes to Charlie Kirk. To be clear about that, this is exactly what he said to Charlie. Completely fair on the issue of fairness. I completely agree. So that's easy to call out the unfairness of that. There's also a humility and

grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression. And the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with as well. So both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think you know is inherent in you, but not always expressed in the issue? And first all, there's no decency inherent, Charlie Kirk. And second, there's also a humility and grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide. What does that mean?

What does that mean, Gavin? That's not a sentence. Also, like, I made my living exercising for most of my 20s, right? What is that? What's that mean? What does that mean Gavin? That's not a sentence also like yeah I like I made my living exercising for most of my 20s right like your professional athlete on the sports Yeah, like and then I've done all kinds of other shit where I still got paid to race my bike right like yeah Sports are unfair. It fucking sucks. I coached people who worked way harder than me They trained super hard, they slept well, they ate better. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they were not able to get to the same level.

That sucks. But like sport is inherently unfair. The idea that like the only difference is like this like your XX or XY chromosomality is nonsense. Like, especially in high school sports, kids will develop at different times. That is unfair. Some kids will excel and then other kids will get better. The function of high school sports is not to find who can go like higher, faster, stronger, it's to teach people to play nicely with one another and to communicate inclusion and excluding trans kids is completely

contrary to that. Yeah. And that's like, yeah, I think that's a great point, James, is that like, number one, this is all being entirely made about like who places how, which is always going to be based largely on things that like people can't control because like, people's bodies are different, you know? Yeah, and they develop differently. Like there are people who are beat up by graces when I was a kid who have won stages at the Tour de France. Yeah. Like if our bodies develop differently, that's completely normal.

Yeah, and it's this again, the thing that should matter here is not treating a community of people hatefully, which is the entirety of the reason the right has made this an issue. It has nothing to do with fairness. It has nothing to do with sports. It's entirely about hurting a group of people hatefully, which is the entirety of the reason the right has made this an issue. It has nothing to do with fairness. It has nothing to do with sports. It's entirely about hurting a group of people. Yeah, if these people gave a single shit about women's sports, they'd have been there when women weren't getting paid the same. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same TV coverage. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same prize money. And they were mostly making fun of women's sports at that point in time.

Yeah. Now, I do think one thing that's funny here is that when people asked rightly, like when California legislators were pushing to like protect trans athletes, why didn't you bring up that you felt this way? And his answer was, I didn't have a podcast. I wasn't having that conversation. I was out there on the campaign trail

in the big blue bubble, on the big blue bus, and the big blue crowds having big blue conversations. And then he went on to say that basically the backlash to him agreeing with Charlie Kirk on this blue bubble on the big blue bus and the big blue crowds having big blue conversations. And then he went on to say that basically the backlash to him agreeing with Charlie Kirk on this has convinced him, I always thought the right overstated how judgmental my party was and I'll be candid with you. I have a deeper understanding now of that critique than I ever, ever, ever understood. It was like, now that people are angry at me, I believe there's a problem with my party

being judgmental. Yeah. Now that I've faced a consequence for my shit, I hate trans people even more. Yeah. It must be so hard to be Gavin Newsom. It's got to be tough. And betray your constituents to get the approval of a millennial right wing podcaster who goes around. Who still hates you.

Touring college campuses to debate 17 year olds I must be so hard for you. It's gonna be tough gotta be tough Gavin He did say in his podcast that his his kid likes Charlie Kirk not surprising Maybe this is yeah, just a ploy to be a cool dad. Yeah, I'm not surprised He sucks at being a dad Gavin used to mix you'd wants to be a cool dad Yeah, it's embarrassing reminds me that a Jakeapper just said his kid's not really into politics. He's just into World War II and gaming. Great.

A part of World War II, Tapper! Curious. Curious. Many such cases. Doesn't his kid want to be a cop? Is that Jake Tapper? Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like Jake fucking Tapper's kid.

Yeah. So look, earlier this week on Tuesday, President Trump shared a truth social post. A truth? Threatening to, yes, he re-truthed a post threatening to withhold federal funding from California over the participation of this high school trans athlete in the upcoming California Interscholastic Federation State Track and Field Championships. Right? And he said that under the leadership of radical left Democrat Gavin Newscum,

California continues to illegally allow men to play in women's sports. The governor himself said it is unfair, Trump wrote. First off, the fact that Gavin agreed with Charlena's podcast did nothing to change the rhetoric around him. He's still radical left Democrat Gavin Newscbe because you can't make these people unhappy because it's not about fairness. It's about hurting people, right? You can, you can fight this. The governor of Maine has been-

Yes, I wanted to talk about Maine, yes. So Trump made this same threat to the state of Maine when the governor of Maine refused to stop allowing trans people to compete in women's sports, and the administration attempted to freeze funds intended for a Maine child nutrition program. No more food for your kids because woke. No more food for poor kids because woke. And in response, the governor of Maine was like, all right, let's fucking go to the mat. And they filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Agriculture.

And the Trump administration settled, they backed down. They agreed to stop freezing the funds if Maine dropped the lawsuit, right? Like as soon as Maine sued, Trump backed down, right? And rather than attempting to do that, even though there's ample evidence that the administration backs down, and to be fair, nothing against Maine, California's got a lot more weight to throw around. It's the fifth largest economy on the planet. They have some fucking heft behind them.

And like, Newsom clearly has no moral principle other than advancing his own career and personal power and wealth, right? No. But like, even if that is the case, it's so easy to be like, yeah, I'll fight him on this. I'll fight for the trans kids and get some like resistor points. But he's just too much of a fucking coward. The first rule of fighting these people is don't give them anything. Don't treat them like people. They're monsters. They're scum.

You fight them every step of the way, right? Like it doesn't matter what you feel about the issue. You never give pieces of shit like this a win. Yeah. Right? That's just not the way you fight them. This is the problem with people like Gavin, whose entire politics is just chasing the zeitgeist. Yeah. So then when you interpret the zeitgeist as like swinging against your previously held progressive DEI woke LGBTQ plus values.

Yeah. Then you just go along with that swing and you would actually don't even care about getting this getting this points anymore because you think the culture is going in a different direction. And all you care about is being in the cultural zeitgeist. You don't actually stand for anything. Like you're just you're just nothing. Yeah, everyone can see that as opposed to understanding what Governor Frey of Maine understands, which is that no you stand there you accept that the zeitgeist is a screen door and it's going to bounce off of you and

back in another direction if you stand for something, right? Gavin decided not to stand for something. And immediately after Trump made that tweet threatening to withhold funds from the state of California and the Department of Education has opened Title IV investigations into leagues that have allowed trans athletes, including CIF, which is California's high school sports governing body. Right after Trump made this most recent truth, the CIF released a statement saying that it had made the decision to pilot an entry process

for the championship that's coming up that will alter the way they hand out awards. It will expand qualification opportunities for biological female student athletes is the exact way that they have phrased this. And basically what they're going to be doing is giving an award for biological men, biological women and then trans competitors. So there will be like three long jump awards. It's like a segregated scoring field. Yeah. And it's it's I guess you could say it's not as awful as trying to ban people.

But also, it's kind of like you're not even taking any kind of stance here. It's not it's just it's nothing. It's nothing. Now, Newsome spokesperson, Izzy Garden, said, CIF's proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness. The governor is encouraged by this thoughtful approach. And I should note here, this has done nothing to actually calm the right or get conservatives to back down, right? No, because they don't want trans kids competing at all.

They don't want trans kids in public life. They don't want trans kids existing. Yes. And so, like, conservative Californians are still angry. You can't take them for their word for it. They don't care about fairness in sports. This is all about just eradicating transgenderism from public life. Like as Michael Knowles said at CPAC, like two years ago, like that's what they actually care about.

Yeah. And there's, you know, there's been a bunch of statements. Some Democrats and the legislative LGBTQ caucus have been like, well, Gavin's, you know, otherwise been a good ally, you know, for LGBTQ people. And I don't agree with this is something that assembly member Chris Ward said basically I don't agree with this particular move, but he's been a good ally for a long time Has he though has he though? Yeah, I mean when it's convenient to him, I guess I prefer caucus member Alex Lee said that Newsom was quote just commenting on how he personally feels He mentioned it on his dumb podcast. He never intended it to be a policy direction announcement.

Hell yeah. It is a dumb podcast. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you should be concerned that he has a dumb podcast where he demerizes trans people. Like, he signs vetoes all the time. Again, I found a KCRA ad article on this that quotes Republican Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez,

who wrote a bill that would have banned trans athletes from competing in girls' high school sports earlier this year. This is what she said about CIF's rule chains, pilot policy. It's incredibly weak. We're angry. We're pissed at this. How every day that goes by, no one is protecting our girls. This is inexcusable.

We need to have something done. Governor Newsom needs to pick a side, do something, do the right thing. So again, this gets you nothing with them, right? It benefits you not at all. There's another quote I want to read here from a state Senator, Scott Weiner, who is the leader of the Senate Budget Committee and again, a member of the LGBTQ rights caucus. Trump is now targeting California just like he targeted Maine, threatening to withhold federal funds if California doesn't follow his illegal edicts targeting transgender people.

California law protects trans people. That won't change. Main one in court. So will California. If there's only one answer to a bully, no. And as main governor Janet Mills said, see you in court. Sorry, I got, I don't know why I said governor fray earlier, but anyway, the point here is that you have Californian legislators saying the right thing.

And then you have fucking Newsom being like, no, no, no, actually we're totally we're totally gonna cave and in a way that won't even make the Republicans happy It's just frustrating to me that you do have Democrats trying to do the right thing here in California politics and Newsom absolutely having CIF do a runaround on them out of pure cowardice Anyway, that's what I got get him out of there get him out of there cowardice. Anyway, that's what I got. Get him out of there. Get him out of there. Fuck Gavin Newsom. We tried to, there was a recall, but it was not for the right reasons. Yeah, the last time we recalled a California governor,

it was a real mixed bag. Yeah. Speaking of a mixed bag. That's right. And we're back. Okay, we're back. We're back. James, do you want to finish us up here? I do, Garrison.

I would like that very much. I want to talk about a couple of things. I'm going to try and keep this fast. I know it's already been a long episode. Let's start with ICE agents have been arresting people in immigration court around the country and placing them in expedited removal proceedings. If you want to know more about exactly what the expedited removal proceedings are and how they work, you can go back to our episode, which will appear the day before you hear this. And that

will explain, and I talked to an immigration attorney there and explained a little bit more about how that works this includes people whose cases were not dismissed so previously it was reported that ICE was dismissing cases of people who had arrived less than two years ago and placing them under 240 expedited removal proceedings apparently they are also detaining other people I am not sure how that works I have not seen any any justifications for this to give me an explanation for it I'm not sure how that works. I have not seen any any justifications for this to give me an explanation for it

I'm not sure how much that matters anymore These people are going to have to fight their removal from detention Which is obviously going to be a pretty unpleasant experience right detention in these in these core civic or geo group facilities It's pretty bad. I'm aware of cases where I misidentified the person being detained, cuffed the wrong person. And I'm aware that there are spectrum services who are an ICE detention officer provider, officers, at least outside some of these facilities,

I believe also inside spectrum services. I've noticed been posting a lot of job adverts recently. This is something I sometimes keep an eye on, right? Like right before the end of Title 42, I saw they were advertising for ICE contractors to transport detainees, right? So this is sometimes a sign that bad things are afoot in the immigration world. I'm guessing in this case, it's either this or a plan to further expand detention capacity, which is also something the Trump administration has been talking

about, right? So they also have these various executive orders authorizing more budget and the budget bill authorizing more budget for detaining migrants. Secondly, the South Sudan case, right? We covered this last week, a DVD at Alvers is Gnome. We also covered it earlier in this week. If you go back to our episode, which aired on Wednesday, you can hear more about the sort of blow-by-blow timeline of that case. In the South Sudan case, Trump administration seems to have gone directly to the Supreme Court to try and get an emergency stay on the injunction which afforded due process rights to the migrants who

are currently detained in Djibouti. The administration asked for a stay of the court's injunction. The court's injunction had given them 10 days to assert their reasonable fear of torture and then a further 15 days to ask to reopen their case if the Department of Homeland Security determined that fear not to be credible. Supreme Court Justice Jackson has given the plaintiffs a week to respond to the United States, the DOJs call for a stay, right? So in practice, these people will still have that 10 days from the injunction to make their claim that they have a fear of torture, right? South Sudan has said that if these people aren't South Sudanese,

it will just return them to their country of citizenship. So if the United States can't return them there because they have a fear of torture, it just seems like the whole South Sudan thing is just an end run around the Convention Against Torture, right? That they're obligated not to return people to places where they will be tortured. Talking of returning people to places where they will be tortured.

Talking of returning people to places where they will be tortured. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has deported 20 people to Myanmar. This is according to reporting in Myanmar. Now I've also written about it on my page, Patreon page. I've linked both of those in the show notes, but it should be noted that Myanmar now broke the story and it's getting very little coverage in the United States. I can speculate as to why, but you probably don't need to hear me to sort of join the dots there. This is atrocious. Robert and I have both spoken to people with extensive experience of detention in Myanmar. And like, when we talk about the worst detention conditions

in the world, we get to a point where it doesn't really make any sense for us to say like A is worse than B. Right, right, that this is worse than Sednaya or whatever, but it's on like the level which was Assad's torture prison in Syria. Yeah, Assad's butchery for human beings. Yeah, like we're talking about that level. Yeah, like I mean, things that I have heard, people have been electrocuted to death, people are waterboarded, people have acid poured in their

mouths, bodies are found without organs, people are beaten to such an extent that their entire bodies are covered with bruises and contusions. Many times people will only know that their family member is detained when they disappear and then a few days later they get a call telling them to pick up the body. Conditions in Burmese Hunter detention facilities are atrocious. These people are currently being held at the Ong Ta Piai Interrogation Center. It appears that seven of the earliest, so this has been happening since March, it appears that some of these people have been released. The rest are being held by SAC, that's the Burmese junta, right, military intelligence units, who will almost

certainly torture them. Myanmar does have a temporary protected status, but I think I've seen a couple of posts about this, so I just want to clarify. The TPS doesn't apply to people who entered after the TPS was granted or to people who have committed certain crimes. We know that at least one of the men they returned had been convicted of a crime. Not all of these crimes are like particularly heinous felonies, right? You can do a certain number of misdemeanors and also be deported under a TPS. But I'm trying to find out who these people

are. I know that you can't download our podcast in Myanmar, which is a huge dub for us. Yeah. But I know a lot of Burmese people do listen. So if you have any particular insight into this, you could reach out to us. We'll drop the email address in a little bit here. It does seem very unlikely that these people were given a chance to make a claim of fear of torture, right? Because it would be a very easy claim to make given every major human rights organization on the planet has documented torture of detainees in Myanmar. I was just reading a report this morning about harassment of trans women in prisons in Myanmar,

but that same thing goes for cis folks, for straight folks, for everyone, right? No one comes out of there the same they went in. I can't believe that these people were given a chance to claim a credible fear because it would have been such an easy claim to make. They wouldn't have been returned there. So yeah, I wish this story was getting more reporting. I wish more people in the media in this country cared about Myanmar, but that's a drama I have been beating for four years now and I don't think shit's going to change anytime soon. So I guess all there is to say is that I really appreciate those of you who do, especially

those of you who listen to the show and take an interest in all things Myanmar. But yeah, if these people have been returned to a country that the US press was more familiar with, there'd be a lot more noise about this, but this is absolutely unconscionable. Yeah. Yeah, these people will be tortured. It would not shock me if some of these people died. Yeah.

Now this is, I mean, there have been cases so far of, I think at least seven of the people that have been sent over previously in the last like year or so by the US have been released from this prison. So it's not a necessarily a death sentence, but for a good number of them it will be. Right. Yeah. Especially since there are also Rohingya people who will be deported in the near future and presumably directly back to the same place.

Yeah. I mean, it's documented that people deported from Thailand are immediately conscripted and sent into the military, right? So if they get out of prison, there's a good chance that especially if they're men, that they will be, and women do get conscripted too in Myanmar, but there's a good chance that that will happen too. They've been conscripting a lot of Rohingya people. So yeah, the outcomes of this will be very poor.

And yeah, the only way torture stops in Burma is when the revolution succeeds and liberates the prisons. Like there is no reasoning with the Burmese hunter. Yep. That's about all I got. It's pretty fucked. Speaking of fucked, let's listen to the tariff song. There's no tariffs this week.

No. Fuck it. Well, let's just listen to it and then have the end of the episode. Just get some nice song. Let's just tariffs this week. No. Fuck it. Well, let's just listen to it and then have the end of the episode. Just get some nice song. Let's just listen to it now. We don't have time to listen to it. This is the end of the episode.

Wow. Garrison took it away from you. Complain to them online. The constant ageist attacks on the Clash have not stopped. Sorry fellas. All that money for nothing. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover,

the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways.

Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chaston. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to

everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the man who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. podcast. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the Away Days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.