It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 220

Episode Date: February 21, 2026

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  - Canada's Latest School Shooting: What We Know - War Tourism in the Siege of Sarajevo - The History of the General Strike: Shanghai 1925, A Chinese Minneapolis - Executive Disorder: Do Americans Hate ICE & Trump Now? DHS Shutdown, Shooting in Rhode Island 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: Canada's Latest School Shooting: What We Know https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/terror-without-ideology-the-rise-of-nihilistic-violence-an-isd-investigation/ https://archive.ph/9ACYN  https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=posts_search&author=jesseboy347&limit=10&sort=desc https://www.adl.org/resources/article/tumbler-ridge-shooter-had-interest-gore-and-guns  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/world/canada/tumbler-ridge-shooting-suspect-social-media.html  https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/florida-man-with-ties-to-wisconsin-school-shooter-accused-of-mass-shooting-threats/3603745/?amp=1  https://www.wisn.com/article/research-details-colorado-teen-shooters-online-idolization-of-madison-school-shooter-others/66130619  War Tourism in the Siege of Sarajevo https://www.icty.org/x/cases/dragomir_milosevic/trans/en/070222ED.htm?utm_source=copilot.com https://sarajevotimes.com/prosecution-in-milan-opens-case-against-giuseppe-vegnaduzzo-first-suspect-in-sarajevo-safari-investigation/ The History of the General Strike: Shanghai 1925, A Chinese Minneapolis Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor: https://libcom.org/article/shanghai-strike-politics-chinese-laborFrom War to Nationalism - China’s Turning Point, 1924-1925 Executive Disorder: Do Americans Hate ICE & Trump Now? DHS Shutdown, Shooting in Rhode Island https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-shares-fall-after-fda-refuses-review-new-flu-vaccine-2026-02-11/ https://x.com/atrupar/status/2021953022213902763?s=20 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/16/mamdani-taps-ex-biden-official-to-audit-nypd-other-agencies-for-sanctuary-law-lapses-00781624 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh7DPSP65JA https://www.instagram.com/p/DU1zLiWjDVx/ https://www.wpri.com/target-12/pawtucket-shooters-gender-identity-tied-to-past-family-disputes-court-records-show/ https://x.com/WCVB/status/2023544634216005773?s=20 https://www.wpri.com/target-12/pawtucket-rink-shooters-son-set-fire-to-black-church-in-north-providence-in-2024/ https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/hutchins-texas-ice-facility-warehouse/287-11ce4a39-65f4-41c5-bb8c-cf5afca83168  https://democraticleader.house.gov/media/press-releases/leaders-jeffries-and-schumer-deliver-urgent-ice-reform-demands-republican  https://democraticleader.house.gov/media/press-releases/leaders-jeffries-and-schumer-statement-republican-counter-commonsense  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/noems-use-coast-guard-resources-strains-relationship-military-branch-s-rcna258904  https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/chaos-kristi-noem-homeland-security-f095ac95 https://ohss.dhs.gov/khsm/dhs-repatriations  https://ohss.dhs.gov/khsm/ice-detentions  https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/immigration-enforcement/monthly-tables  https://www.heinrich.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/heinrich_introduces_legislation_to_redirect_excessive_ice_funding_to_new_mexico_law_enforcement.pdf  https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2024-Democratic-Party-Platform.pdf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people? Because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast, Selective Ignorance with Mandy B, unpacked black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more.

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This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last Friday, I teamed up with Lance from the Canadian-based politics show The Surfs to talk about the tragic events of last week in Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia. On Tuesday, February 10th, an 18-year-old named Jesse Van Rootslar killed her mother and stepbrother in their home. then took two guns and went to Tumblr Ridge Secondary School, where she killed five students, one teacher, and finally herself. Two other kids were critically injured with gunshot wounds, but have survived. The shooter did attend Tumblr Ridge Secondary School years ago, but dropped out.

For the past three to five years, it's kind of unclear. Jesse identified as a transgender girl. Tumblr Ridge is a very small town with just 2,400 residents, in northeastern British Columbia. This was the worst school shooting in Canada since 1989. The sequence of events during this incident were very similar to the Leloush shooting in Canada 10 years ago, where the gunman killed two family members at home before going to a school. During our conversation, Lance and I discuss the spread of misinformation,

how the online writers tried to weaponize the deaths of these people, for their own political agenda, and how the shooter's online activity shows a growing fascination with mass shootings this past year. Here's that conversation. I'm sure everyone knows that right now Canada's a nation in mourning. And I also did probably want to start this out by reading the names of the deceased, because it's one of the things that the families have been asking for. So the victims from the Tumblr Ridge Secondary School shooting are Abel, Wanzah, who is 12. Ezekiel Schofield, who was 13, Kylie Smith, who was 12, Zoe Benoit, who was 12, Takaria, Lampert, who was 12, Shanda, Evangua, Duran, who's 39, Emmett Jacobs, who was 11, and Jennifer Jacobs, who was 39 years old.

So I guess I'll start with Gerson. How have you been processing and or tracking the story since it happened? Yeah, pretty horrifying incident that happened last Tuesday. Very soon after it, happened. There was like right-wing narratives trying to use the deaths of of these children and family members for their own political agenda. And I started tracking that pretty soon and then also trying to like verify as much information about the actual circumstances of the shooting and who the shooter was, you know, around that same time. Things have gotten pretty clear now a few days later. But I mean, it's been a nightmare to sort through all this stuff, especially all of like the political opportunism being done by, you know, a variety of right-wing influencers

and, you know, quote-unquote news agencies. Yeah, I was doing the same thing, like right after the event happened, I noticed that there was a lot of, for people who don't know, right-wing online operatives like the PLEB reporter and Juno News and Cat Canada. And these are all very popular right-wing social media accounts on Twitter in Canada, or at least based in Canada for their origins, but then they usually get retweeted, quote, tweeted and amplified eventually by the far right in the U.S., which has a very corrosive effect. And I think, but like by the time we're talking about this right now, I saw that like Donald Trump Jr., the son of the president of the United States, is doing an entire, I assume, blowed out of his mind, Rumble special on the shooting, just uniquely going after trans people the entire time. Like for a small little town of what, like just over 2,400 people, it has to be. beyond like a shell shock to first have to go through something this horrifying and then deal with

the international right wing apparatus. Yeah, and they're going through the motions, right? Like, this is not the first time. This won't be the last time that they try to do something like this. It's not getting as much traction, I think, as it used to. There's a lot of other stuff happening in the States. Around the time, like, news was breaking in the States about the shooting that happened. It was Wednesday during, you know, Pam Bondi's Epstein hearing.

So there's been a lot of other stuff happening. So I don't think they've gotten as much concentrated attention on this as some of the online right has wanted to or, you know, like the Matt Walsh types, lips of TikTok, that sort of thing. But they're definitely giving it a go. It's gross, right? It's gross to use the deaths of all these people. Yeah, absolutely. Not to mention the way the entire thing's being framed is abhorrent. I mean, obviously, you know, we're speaking from a perspective where we don't want to vilify an entire.

group based on one, like, you know, horrifying monsters actions kind of thing, right? Because that doesn't happen in the other direction for cis people. And that's what you got to be quick to point out. But I feel like the Matt Walsh's and the lives of TikTok have, and it's a horrifying thing to say, but like they're perfect narrative, right? It's kind of like in a twisted way, something they're actually quite pleased about it almost seems. Yeah, they make a lot of money off this.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. They profit off of human suffering. And they try to spread as much of it as possible. The first aspect I was trying to look at this story from was what it was early. What are the families themselves asking for? What does the town need on terms of support, that kind of stuff? And you move on from that.

And then immediately it was, well, now there's just an overwhelming, very apparent right-wing mechanism gearing up. And it's going to be kind of devastating for a country like Canada that doesn't really have maybe or isn't as used to having the eyes of the world from the transphobic, you know, side of the internet. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about Jennifer Strang, the mother of the shooter. Despite being a self-described conservative libertarian, Jesse's mother publicly supported her transition, made posts in support of trans people. In July 2024, she shared a LGBTQ pride graphic reading, Good People Don't Spend Their Time Harassing Marginalized Communities. And wrote, quote, as a conservative leaning libertarian who lives in the North and loves living in a small town, I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true

hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bullshit online. Makes you look dumb. Evolve. I normally don't say anything. I normally don't go on shitbook to see the keyboard warriors, and I know I can't control or shield my kids from everything. But please, for the love of fuck, can you get your shit together so we don't have to bring our kids up in a world full of hatred? Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate? Please stop the bullshit, unquote. So pretty soon after this shooting, based on an early active shooter report, describing the shooter as a quote-unquote female in a dress with brown hair, online right-wing accounts started trying to identify who this possible shooter was by looking at trans people

in the area of Tumblr Ridge. They misidentified one person who is a relative of this shooter, but put out photographs of them, claiming that she was the shooter. This person, is now having to like lock down all of their accounts and is scared to go outside due to the horrific wave of harassment they're facing. What is wild about that aspect of the story is I've seen accounts like the PLEB reporter who popularized, you know, publishing that photo. But I think Rachel Gilmore is the one who also pointed out that there was the misuse of a photo in an actual CBC radio broadcast image thumbnail as well, which it is also kind of just

shocking to hear because these are again innocent people who might have targets now put on their back because they're being directly identified as some kind of a mass shooter or monster. And then in addition to that, like now I'm wondering how much of this is going to be something that they're capable of containing, especially considering that it's being still proliferated. Like I saw an account called Bricks News, which I assumed would be about Bricks, you know, the economic lines between a number of different nations and instead was publishing the false photo of, again, a completely innocent person.

And sadly, like, I think at the time, 17,000. likes, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions, it's really dangerous. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's part of the intent here. You know, places like Kiwi Farms trailblaze a lot of this, quote unquote, early research. And the point is to cast as large as possible to damage as many trans people as they can using horrific events like this. The cruelty is part of the point. And, you know, blame gets laid at a, you know, a combination of like trans-enabled mental delusion, SSRIs and hormones. saying that those things are causing the shooting

well before we have any evidence to determine what types of medications someone could be on who they actually are or any possible motive. One kind of crude thing that I've seen a lot is right-wing accounts like end-wokeness, allegedly Jack Posovic, saying that the shooter, quote-unquote,

gunned down 35 kids to make it seem like a massacre of such a large magnitude, right? The number of kids that have been killed and other people as well, Obviously, it's like horrific. 35 people were not shot in this shooting, though. There was 25 people with non-gunshot-related injuries as a result of the incident.

And that is the number that people are framing as being, you know, total number of people shot, which just isn't true. And then they also very quickly start sharing, you know, unsourced graphs. I'm sure you've seen stuff like this, right? Saying that, you know, trans girls make up the highest demographic of mass shooters per capita. You see these things go all over the place. By the world's richest man. He's sharing that a lot online right now.

Yeah. I mean, and this has been a thing for the past three years, right? This is something they've been doing well before any actual incident can be even used to create data. They've created fake graphs that show this. There's factors that get people

to believe these sorts of things, right? There is certainly a selection bias that determines which types of shootings gets like a lot of media attention. And the other issue that I've talked about a lot in previous shootings is there's a lot of different definitions of a mass shooting. You know, a mass shooting versus a mass killing versus like a school shooting, right?

All these are different terms. Even the term school shooting can be used to refer to a variety of very different incidents revolving around gun violence, right? There can be gang-related violence at a school. There can be shots fired as an escalation of a physical fight. Students bringing guns to school and accidentally firing them, which happens more often than what you would think, like as someone who just brings a thing. gun in their backpack, not intending to do a shooting, but it accidentally fires it into school.

This happens multiple times a year. There's shootings that. I didn't know that. Dormitories, right? Those get counted as mass shootings at like, you know, a college dormitory. It's interpersonal violence. There's, you know, neighborhood shootings that affect but aren't targeting the school, like drive-by shootings.

Or even something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which some people have categorized as a school shooting because it was on a college campus, right? But these are all very different types of violence. These aren't like, you know, intentional, you know, mass shooting violence where someone who's trying to shoot as many people as possible and then usually kill themselves, right? That's a different thing than a lot of these other things that I mentioned. But they all get lumped under this one label of school shooting. And all these different, you know, data collection criteria could produce very different stats.

And depending whether you're measuring your injuries versus deaths, you know, specific weapons, like knives versus guns, and how many years are being sampled or if there's connections to other violent activity, there could be very, very different results in how you categorize, you know, mass killings or mass shootings. The mass killing database has 631 incidents in the United States since 2006, of which about one to three, it's kind of unclear, one to three, are done by people who have been reported as transgender, which is an underrepresented sample size. The violence project has one transgender mass shooter in their database of about 195 mass shootings. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, which also meant,

measures, gunshot injuries, not just deaths, fewer than one in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade, have been identified as transgender. According to a Gallup poll for 2023, about 2% of Gen Z identify as transgender. And if you also count like non-binary people, it brings that up to 4%. But you can have all those stats on hand, if that doesn't really do very much. Once you're arguing about statistics and like semantics of terms when kids have died, you're kind of already starting to lose the emotional battle, right? Like, I can say all of that, but, like, that's not actually going to be helpful, right? Like, fact-checking doesn't work to dissuade disinformation. And when you're dealing with such an emotionally charged incident, like kids being murdered,

having to read off a paragraph like that just doesn't really help, right? Parents just want to know, you know, why this is happening and what can be done to stop it. And all they know is that, you know, since 2023, there has been a series of shootings done by young people who either attempted to or did transition genders, right? That's what they know. And they want to know, you know, why is this happening and how to stop it. Yeah, one of the things that I've tried to push up against because you are getting a lot of Americans who are pushing that narrative right now is to point out, because I've seen people saying, like, this epidemic of trans mass violence is a scourge. And I think they're blending Canada and the U.S. into one nation because I was like, just to be clear, this is the first mass shooting committed by a trans person in Canadian history.

ever. And there's a lot of trans people in British Columbia. Yeah. Well, across the country. I mean, it's one of those things from like, this, this is not an epidemic of which like, oh my God, you have a high probability of being hurt by a trans person in your life. It couldn't be further from the truth, right? Like, the stats are still overwhelmingly in the other direction. You're more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence if you're a trans person than if you're a cis person. Yeah, no, that is another problem here is, is, yeah, a lot of these, you know, data collection tools aren't counting violence in Canada. These are all stuff based in the states. But for, you know, the culture war, it's not that hard to, you know,

move that border up 500 miles to include things that are happening in Canada in a rhetorical sense for, you know, your Matt Walsh's, your end-wokenesses, even, you know, your Fox News anchors, right? Yeah. This thing that people are talking about, on the right, about this, you know, epidemic of trans violence, what this is also done is created like a counterreaction from trans influencers to whenever something horrible happens like this to blame these other groups like, you know, 09A or 764, right? This has become something that's also now been very consistent. You know, there is a kernel of truth in this. This is based on a real thing that has happened before. But the invocation of this

has often, you know, expanded greatly beyond its actual, like, can you explain it for people who are completely unfamiliar? Because I remember, like, even a year ago, I had to start reading up, I'm like, what is, what is all this? Satanic cult rituals with participation requirements of self-harm and all this stuff, like, okay? Yeah. So you see a lot of people now when there's news coverage, you know,

a lot of trans people who have, you know, accounts online, you know, talking about how, quote unquote, satanic Nazi pedophiles have groomed another

vulnerable queer kid into doing a mass shooting. There's a viral tweet on, semi-viral tweet on Twitter right now that reads, quote, fuck anyone talking about trans

and not Adam Wathan. This includes the cops and the media, like the CBC and BBC, unquote. So, yeah, What are they talking about here? You know, Adam Woffin, satanic Nazi pedophile cults, I said, you know, 09A, 764, right?

These are originally, you know, 09A is this older group, but as contemporary internet lore, it is seen as this neo-Nazi, occultic organization that grooms people into sexual exploitation or into doing violence like mass shootings. 764 is an extortion ring that operated mainly on telegram and discord, which tried to get kids to do self-harm, produce blackmail. And Roblox, too. Is that true? Yeah, they're active across a lot of places, but like the organizing hubs were on Discord and Telegram. And they, you know, attempted to get child sexual abuse material out of these kids and then used that to blackmail them to get even more material and then also encouraging self-harm and acts of violence. These have been real groups historically.

they are getting cracked down upon pretty heavily, at least in 764's case. O9A is not really a real group anymore, arguably, but it exists as like lore. And there has been no instances of a 764 affiliated people doing public acts of violence. So in this case, there's been people who have, you know, trans people online or, you know, allies who have said that this shooting is another one of these instances where these online groups of, you know, Nazis and pedophiles, have, you know, groomed someone into doing violence. And they have produced some evidence for this. There was a Twitter account that allegedly belonged to the shooter that had a profile picture of a Sonanrad on top of a trans flag, as well as the face of the Christchurch shooter.

This account had posts glorifying white supremacist mass killers and promoting the idea of creating a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest. This was a Canada-based account. But in reality, this was actually just another Nazis account who changed their username to match that of the Tumblr Ridge shooter. And this was an attempt to troll people and just spread disinformation. And this even fooled the ADL

whose research standards have dropped dramatically the past three years. But a few days ago, the ADL put out an article where they credited posts made by this Twitter account to the Tumblr Ridge shooter and claimed that a quote-unquote preliminary investigation showed that the shooter had showed interest in white supremacy. But this was not their real account.

This was just someone who also is a fan of mass shootings, like the shooter was, as we'll soon discuss. But this was someone who was just trying to troll other researchers on Twitter and see how far their disinformation can spread. This is the consequence of an organization like the ADL doing preliminary research based on Kiwi Farms posts by not actually verifying the information.

I mean, the fact that I think they're actively pursuing Hassan Piker more than Elon Musk is pretty much all I need to know in terms of where they're prioritizing, you know, the search for racism. Yeah. I can get into the actual, like, online footprint of the shooter, which we do have a decent idea of, actually. Well, we should, before you get to that, because I think that's what everyone is kind of interested in, I just want to wrap up that last part. So just to be clear, when you were mentioning those groups, you know, 764, etc. there is no actual history of the shooter having been into Nazi, the occult, that kind of stuff. Based on their presence, they have not been active in like specific 764 communities or have showed interest in like, you know, white supremacy, neo-Nazism, or, you know, the occult pedophile Naziism of 09A.

This is not observable in the online for print that they have left, which is, which is not to say. the online footprint they have left is, you know, normal and good, if anything. It does point towards, you know, significant factors that are causing kids to do shootings like this. And we can trace it to a number of shootings that have happened. But the 098-764 thing is more so like a meme at this point, that people similarly deploy the same way that, you know, the right deploys, you know, this epidemic of transviolence. This has become like a countermeam to say that every time a trans person does something bad, it's actually the fault. of 099 and 764.

Right. Because there has been incidences in the past that could point towards that. Yeah, there could be suggestions in the past and certainly when 764 was more active years ago,

I mean, a lot of the kids they were grooming for child sexual abuse material were a lot of queer kids because those kids are uniquely vulnerable and are looking for a community. But, I mean,

that is the majority of kids affected by 764 are people who have been groomed into self-harm or producing a child sexual abuse material to circulate among, like, the organizers of these, of these groups. So it turns out that there isn't really a connection in those two directions. You're correct in pointing out there, there's a counter push. Like I did the same thing with Charlie Kirk, right? Like, I remember when the first image of the Charlie Kirk shooter being in a groper,

hippie, the frog style jumper, I was like, oh, this has to be a groiper, right? Like, this is immediately where my brain went because they do have a history of targeting that community. So, you know, you can understand why there's a pushback. Yeah, and I think people feel like they understand ideological violence easier, like violence caused by political ideology and are uncomfortable with the increasing amount of horrific public violence that is seemingly linked to no political ideology. It's much more like nihilistic and scattershot. And that's like uncomfortable. It's harder to understand like the causal forces producing that rather than just saying, you know, oh, it's another Nazi, right? That's that's easy. And at this point, sadly, even. easy thing for people to understand because of, you know, a very high number of neo-Nazi mass shootings that happened in the past 10 years. But it is not 2017 anymore. And the circumstances that are inducing shootings like this have changed. Can you talk about that? Because like you said, it's a conversation that people don't want to have. Is it because we are uncomfortable with the

conversation itself or because there's not enough information available yet to truly understand what is leading these super online shooter slash nihilistic, you know, deep in the memes. style stuff. Yeah, I think a mix of both. It is both an emerging phenomenon. So people have to observe it for a certain amount of time to see the pattern. And then also, it's, it's uncomfortable. And it sucks.

It sucks to be in these places and like, look at all this stuff, right? Like I've been, the past few days, I've been looking at, you know, these horrible forum posts and reading about all kinds of like, you know, bad stuff. And it sucks. And no one wants to do that. So I think it's a mix of factors. But yeah, I do want to talk about that. That's the kind of the, I've kind of like two sections that get into that.

The first one based on her actual online footprint. The second one on more like, you know, basic societal forces I think is getting people to go so far to the social like margins. That pushes them to places like where the shooter hung out online. So in 2021, Jesse's mom shared a link to her kid's YouTube channel where, quote, he posts about hunting, self-reliance, guns, and stuff he likes to do, unquote. This YouTube account shared the username as Jesse's Reddit account. The earliest posts from 2019 were about Roblox gaming.

Then in 2021, Jesse started posting about firearms and shared a photo of her Chinese SKS, which is kind of like an AK-47 style gun, which she used for hunting. Around 2023, she started posting about, quote-unquote, starting a MTF transition soon, as well as her phobia of needles. The police say that she started transitioning before this, but the earliest indication we have from her online activity plus this around 2023. On other posts on R slash trans, she asked for advice on girls' clothing, what to expect from HRT, and talked about body dysmorphia. Her very last gender-related post on Reddit still refers to herself as pre-HRT.

Jesse made a single post on R-slash trans guns in October 2023, sharing a video of her firing a Desert Eagle handgun at a shooting range. At this point, around the end of 20203, almost all of her posts switch to being about

psychedelic drug abuse. Asking how to vape or smoke weed without leaving a smell on the house, being scammed by an online psychedelic seller in Canada, and asking if you can get high off drinking the urine from a drug addict and asked on Reddit if it's safe to do 5MEO DMT alone after she returned

from the quote-unquote psych ward. She was admitted to a psychiatric facility after attempting to burn down her home with a count of aerosol while on three grams of mushrooms. Jesse also said that she was diagnosed with ADHD, autism, major depressive disorder, and OCD, and was prescribed a mix of different SSRIs, as well as an antipsychotic for sleep. In one comment on one of her multiple Reddit posts asking about trying 5MEODMT after being arrested for arson. She wrote, quote, it is a wonder I'm still alive, yet I am, speaks volumes, but how much I've been trying to keep breathing when all my effort goes towards keeping alive, unquote. Her Reddit activity drops off in April of 2024. This could mean that she just stopped using Reddit

around then, or that she has deleted a whole bunch of posts. She did scrub some of her online activity prior to the shooting. Now, in the aftermath of the shooting, the police have said that they made multiple mental health-related visits to the shooter's home the past few years and had previously confiscated guns from the home, but the owner of the guns, it's unclear who exactly, successfully petitioned for their return. And Jesse did have a miners' firearms license, but that expired in 2024. It's unclear if the guns that were confiscated were the same ones used in the shooting. Jesse has posted a number of different photos of guns, and we still don't know which exact ones were used.

We just know that there was a long gun and a handgun recovered. So though the shooter's like Reddit activity ceases in early 2024, her online presence moved to darker corners of the internet, which demonstrated declining mental well-being and a growing fascination with mass shootings. The past year, Jesse was active on an internet fore called Watch People Die, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

It's the website to host footage of real-life gore. Yeah, I was like, is that what it sounds like? It is. Okay. Yeah. You know, like snuff. Like, real gore is hosted there and shared, as well as a lot of, you know, like edits of mass shooter footage, of people filming themselves doing mass shootings that then circulates.

This forum is way more of like a social orbit around this recent wave of mass shootings than 7-6-4. is. And no, there is some crossover. You know, there is some 764 people who are also, you know, active on this form, people who used to be 764, because that group is also, you know, not really what it used to be. But this form is its own thing. Rather than being linked to, you know, explicit Nazi groups, you know, the occultic 09A or the child's exploitation rings like 764, the shooter's verifiable online footprint suggests much more of a nexus of involvement with what I've been calling the school shooter fandom. They call it TCC or the true crime community. And in the past two years,

we've seen an increase in shootings based on this like neo-columbiner variety, right? People doing copycats of other school shootings. The abundant life Christian school shooting in December 24 by Columbine cosplayer Natalie Semintha Rupnow, who the right falsely labeled as trans. There was also the Catholic school shooting in August 2025 by Robin Westman, who did at one. point attempt gender transition, but later regretted it, and originally planned to attack an LGBTQ music venue. Westman was similarly obsessed with mass killers and wrote the name of Repnau on one of their rifles. Last April, a 22-year-old man in Florida was arrested for threatening to commit a mass shooting on Discord. The FBI believes that he was in communication with

Samantha Rupnau prior to her shooting, and they both discussed with each other plans for their mass killing attacks. In September 2025, a 16-year-old named Desmond Hawley shot two kids before killing himself at Evergreen High School in Colorado. He also idolized Samantha Rupdown, replicated her selfies and was active on the same forum Watch People Die that Rupnao herself was active on.

So Jesse was on this forum. But Jesse also displayed other traits similar of the TCC group. Jesse created a mass-shooting simulator game on Roblox, which was set in a mall where you act out a shooting killing people in the mall. I'll talk a little bit about this forum specifically now, right?

This forum essentially exists to desensitize people to extremely violent content that glorifies mass killings. Jesse's very first comment on Watch People Die was on a compilation video of mass shooter footage

and she wrote, quote, I appreciate this post. She also commented on another thread of mass shooting footage, quote, I love these first person perspective type videos when a shooter records his or her own actions, it's always heat, unquote.

The most worrying comment is something that, you know, if police were aware of, should have been caused to prevent this from happening. It came about five months ago. In a thread on Watch People Die about the psychology of watching gore, she wrote, quote, I find it addictive. It's hard not to watch violent content. I'm just drawn to it. I don't think much of it, though to say it doesn't affect me as likely naive.

I'm sure maybe subconsciously it does. It just doesn't feel like a big deal. I'm drawn to substances too. It's easy to get high and just to zone out into videos of this stuff. Does it impact my mental health? Eh? Mine's probably already fucked. I tried to stay away from watching this type of thing before

because it really sucks me in, and it's a massive useless time dump, but I never really saw any benefit. I think the R words in the comment section are more bothersome mentally than the videos, so I try just not to interact with dorks. And these types of sentiments are not uncommon among people who regularly engage with this type of content.

I think it's an unusual thing to ask you, but at this point it almost seems as if like the two biggest things that are often blamed for mass shooting that I have to push up against and I have been doing my whole life, drugs, and in the other case,

hyper online radicalization, right? The history that you're painting here kind of seems like someone who needed a variety of help. I'll reiterate that in like a sec. Okay. Yeah, I mean, as I was reading this,

this reminded me a little bit. There was a shooting a few years ago at a Fourth of July parade, the Highland Park mass shooting. The sort of like writing that Jesse did in this post reminds me of, bit of the writing done by this other mass shooter.

Talk about getting sucked into like violent content or this like this like idea of like, it like beckons you further into the concept. It's like almost like hypnotic. Very similar writing done by this other other shooter. So one other post, I'll reference that she made on this forum was a video of a father hanging himself in front of his children. And she claimed that her stepdad, tempted the same thing, trying to kill himself in front of her when, you know, she was just a little kid.

And she wrote, quote, I wish his bitch ass would have died on the noose then and there, probably better than beating your kids, unquote. So obviously, you know, this person had, like, longstanding issues that at certain points seemed like better, right? Like around 2021, they seemed to be doing better, right? They were, they were making, you know, YouTube content about guns and hunting and felt like they had more of a, had more of a stable social outlet. And then around, you know, 23, with, you know, this, like, abuse of psychedelic drugs leading to this mass shooter obsession. It's, like, a pretty clear picture of, like, a mental spiral.

Two months before, Jesse's own shooting, she did visit the Watch People Die profile for Samantha Rupnow. And if we're going to talk about, like, causal factors, right? And especially, like, in reference to, you know, this idea that, that parents have where, you know, there has been a sequence of trans people doing shootings. You can argue about, you know, the per capita percent rates are like stats again, but that doesn't go so far. But at a certain point, I mean, we have to all be comfortable, or maybe comfortable is the wrong word, but we have to like, you know, realize that like as more people, you know, transition, right? Gender is not this, like, immutable thing. As more people attempt transitioning,

there's going to be some trans people who do bad things. This happens with every social group of people. To borrow from sociologist Mark Worrell, who wrote about the social phenomenon of mass shootings, like destruction of others is the means towards another end, the desire for self-destruction that the self was incapable of inflicting in isolation. A lot of mass shootings and with suicide, or trying to get the police to kill you through suicide. Like a public shootings like this have a very strong suicidal component. And some people might not be able to do that themselves, so they need to create a social context

in which they feel like they can. And at least in terms of the states, and to a smaller degree in Canada, these shootings exist as like this like cultural ritual, this like ritual of destruction of the self. And destruction of the self can include the social apparatus that makes up the self. And for like a young person, that's what?

That's their family in school. the two things that were targeted in this shooting, right? This network that makes up, like, my sense of self as a 17-year-old, 18-year-old. That's going to be my family, which is, you know, for Jesse, that's her mom. She's been separated from her father for a while, as well as her stepbrother. And then also this is school that she used to go to, right? That's like the sort of, that's the network that makes up your idea of the social. And like I said before, like as the trans community grows, there's going to be,

some overlap between antisocial, you know, mentally unwell individuals who act out a mass killing as a suicide and disintegrated and socially under-regulated people who try transitioning as a way to ease tensions, both internally and externally. And if anything, I think transitioning can often be maybe one of the healthiest ways to attempt to relieve some of these tensions. But, like, being trans is like a marginal position in society, right? And the people, people who commit school shootings and suicide through mass shootings are at like the very, very extreme end of social dysregulation and like marginal isolation. And some people in those latter categories will also try transitioning as a method of social regulation. And in Jesse's case,

like considering all their posts about like mental health and drugs, never once is being trans cited as like a point of their distress. Like that's the thing that's causing them the distress. It is it is a method of relief, at least according to their own writing on Reddit. Like, the cause of the distress are all these other things. And, like, people can blame mass shootings or mass killings on, like, any number of specific factors, right, such as access to weapons, whether that's, you know, knives, firearms, bullying, substance abuse, mental health, and lacking mental health services and, like, mental health oversight.

But, like, the common base factor across, you know, most of those things is that there's, like, social disintegration and deregulation happening. That's like a failure to balance like egoism and altruism, right, a healthy individual sense of self, as well as a place of belonging within a larger social group. Like, we need a mix of freedom and available structured paths for social life. Ritualistic outbursts of suicidal violence against society happen when these things are extremely unregulated and someone falls out of the social fabric. And like marginal class, classes like trans people can be particularly affected by social disintegration and deregulation. And like, it's important to note here, like, this isn't caused by some like vague medical

condition like genotaphorea. Like that's not causing the violence, right? Prescribed estrogen. It's not a causal force in this. We don't even know if Robin Westman or or Jesse was even on estrogen. We don't know. But these things aren't causal. But, you know, these are social positions. that include, you know, these larger social factors that affect large populations, one of those populations can't be trans people. There's a lot of social disintegration that affects cis men currently. They do a lot of shootings. Majority is so. Yeah, the overwhelming majority. You can also graph these things on class lines. Lots of people who go and do public shootings, either themselves or their families are suffering

from economic instability or people in like the middle class as well, which has this other problem in like Durkheim's methodology of suicide, which I'm kind of pulling from a little bit here, is like this, the sense of like overregulation can also produce an unhealthy balance. So it's either, you know, very over-regulating people, you know, like Elon Musk has too much freedom, has too much, too much, like access to like money and possibilities that he's then a very dysfunctional person. This can happen with some probably like, you know, like middle class kids as well that can produce violent outburst. But a lot of the time, it's, you know, lower middle class or lower class conditions that can lead to violence.

And sometimes it does not go to the extreme of doing, you know, a mass killing. It can often just result in like petty crime, which is, arguably, a more healthy method of regulation compared to something like a mass shooting, which is like, you know, the most desperate, the most marginal, like, active suicide that we could, like, envision as a society. I just wanted to specifically say when it came to factors, you're distinctly not saying that video games were in any way responsible. And I know you're not, but I just like, people should know that when you mention Roblox, people like, I had, I think my mom and someone else asked like, oh, well, what's the storyline for Roblox? And I was like, it's like asking what's the story for Minecraft, right?

I was like, yeah, I was like, these are world building. It's, it's similar to seeing someone basically trying journal out their thoughts, right? I think in that she was building these mass shooting simulators. That wasn't her being influenced, I say, by some kind of like template that Roblox. block said. That was her showing, yeah, creating something to express something else. Yeah. And that sort of like, like, like, cosplay or replication, very common among this, you know, growing community of, of the true crime community, the school shooter fandom, which, which attracts a lot of people in marginal populations, right? The fact that Samantha Rupnau is like one of the first like, you know, cis female

school shooters, like is notable here. And like a lot of like the early like Columbine fandom on Tumblr was, was young girls. The fact that TCC is attracting like a wider net. And, like, than just cis males, I think, is interesting. But it points to these other social forces. I think condensing it down to being, like, a certain mixture of SSRIs and HART is what's causing this. Or psychedelics, right? For that.

Yeah, or psychedelics, right? I mean, like anything, these things can exist within a healthy equilibrium, right? Psychedelics can be a very healthy tool for people to deal with, like, mortality. PTSD or a bunch of things, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely, right? whether that's MDMA, ketamine, or like mushrooms, like mushrooms are being used to treat people who have cancer, right, to help them get comfortable with the idea of their own mortality.

These things can exist within a healthy equilibrium of the social, but they can also exist in an unhealthy, non-equilibrium, right? And I think the types of ways that Jesse was writing about psychedelics online, I think, demonstrates a very unhealthy use of these drugs, especially as, like, you know, a 16-year-old. Right, well, it sounds like self-medication, it sounds like unsupervised medication, and it also sounds like something

that was most likely acting as an accelerant, right? Like, if you already have a host of other problems, if you are introducing a very large amount of incredibly powerful, like, you know, psychostimulants into, you know, what you're ingesting every day, then it's going to have potentially very, very dangerous outcomes.

Yeah. Again, these are largely correlating factors, not causal forces, right? The causal forces is this like social disintegration and deregulation of which, you know, abuse of psychedelics can do a lot of damage to your sense of self and your sense of self within like a larger community. And the fact that I think like specifically, you know,

lacking mental health services, lacking like oversight of these things in terms of like a policy outlook, like these are things that we as a society should be putting more work into if you actually want to start solving this problem. I mean, you can get into, you know, larger things about, you know, like the alienation of like quote unquote late stage capitalism, which, you know, also can be a factor in this.

Another accelerant, right? I think a lot of these are accelerants, right? Every other thing that you've been listing, and it seems to me like, you know, this compounded upon this, which compounded upon this, and eventually led, you know, someone to looking up more and more extreme content. Yeah.

Well, one thing that I do want to mention, which I've kind of seen discussed, is like this term like radicalization, saying that, you know, she was like radicalized into this like violent content. This is more like a semantic note. I'm not sure how useful like the term radicalization. is in this case, if anything, I think she was, like, desensitized to horrific acts of violence

through repeated viewing and was in communities that encouraged this sort of thing. I think that's the way that I'm framing it as opposed to, you know, radicalization makes you think of, like, politics and, like, ideology. Right, right, or not Naziism or white supremacy or something like that, right? Yeah, and it's like... A higher calling. It's not that they're getting, like, politically radical. It's that they're dropping out of the social fabric and desensitizing themselves to this concept

of like, you know, horrific, like, societally targeted violence. I know now that, like, obviously the right wing is decided that they're uniquely going to be attacking trans people. I'm not sure if you're aware of the shooter's father's statements that were just made recently. The father intentionally uses terms, like, I am the biological father, refers to her with he-him pronouns, says that he was allowed to raise her, that she was taken from him. Part of me is also really fearful that this is going to be maybe the future of the Matt Waller, Slips a TikTok circuit, right? Here we have the case, like the number one horror story that every right-wing, you know, personality always talks about, right? Or that Elon Musk perpetuates.

Yeah, exactly. But this is somehow negatively impacting their children. No, yeah, that is a good thing to keep an eye on. I haven't, have not seen that. In terms of, like, you know, your analysis, and I appreciate it, by the way, a lot, I hadn't thought of it in those terms in terms of, like, disconnecting from the social fabric itself. Is there things that can be done? Like, is the recommendations beyond like obviously, you know, late-stage capitalism, mass alienation. And not solving that tomorrow. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to solve that on a stream. No, you have to.

On Friday the 13. Isn't it called? It could happen here. Let's let it happen. Come on. I mean, yeah, like, there's a lot of things that we can do, like, even just increasing, like, social services, right? Like, like, funding social services can be a thing. Like, what, what can we do to, strengthen the social fabric, right? Give people available paths for their life. You know, that's through, you know, education, free college. Make life actually feel like you have a way to exist within a social matrix.

Canada already has, you know, compared to the states, fairly restrictive gun laws. There's are a factor, but there's even mass killings like this that happen, you know, in Europe where people find other means of enacting them besides guns. Or Japan, it sits swords and knives oftentimes. Yeah, right, yeah. So, like, these things have some, like, based social aspects that are going to be the things that, you know, solving is kind of more challenging, rather than just, you know, taking away guns, making drugs that are already illegal harder to get, right? These things aren't going to actually eliminate this problem. But, I mean, funding social services can be an aspect of this, having more comprehensive mental health care, you know, free health care check-ins, you know, if that's a big thing in the States, Canada has that to some degree. But still, there's, obviously, room for improvement. But I mean, yeah, solving these larger social problems, that's like, that's the question

of the 21st century. Yeah. And, and I mean, you know, based on the story that you're telling and the research you did, it does really seem like this is one of those cases where this doesn't happen often, but when you see it get to that end state, this is pretty much, right? The patterns become a lot more evident. The obsession with prior shootings, the mental health episodes, and now combining that with a very, very prolific psychedelic drug use.

And then here we are. I mean, this person should not have had guns, right? At a certain point, their guns were taken away, or guns in the house were taken away. If police knew about their activity on these forums, I'm sure this wouldn't have been returned. So there's certain things like, you know, parents being more aware of these sorts of, like, online spaces, the school shooter fandom, you know, picking up signs of, you know, social isolation, how much time your kid is just spending alone on the internet. and you might not be knowing what they're doing. Solving that's, you know, hard because because the solution for a lot of, a lot of, you know, states is just like increased surveillance on platforms like, you know, discord, age verification.

But those types of, you know, guardrails don't exist on a forum site like Watch People Die, right? You can have a very, you know, safe, regulated Discord, which just pushes people to, you know, even more niche, even more dangerous parts of the internet. You know, Watch People Die started as a Reddit page that was, you know, taken down like seven years ago. now it's a far less regulated you know thing that that kids are spending a decent amount of time on but you know being aware of you know the risks of this type of like social isolation you know is also also a start and ideally we do not have a forum site you know dedicated to glorifying mass killings but banning a website is not so simple it's easier set than done you know figuring out a way

to take that down right we same problem with you know like eight coon or like you know eight chan back in the day, porch and, and eventually kiwi farms. But this one seems blatant to the point of illegality. And I know you don't have time for me to start a whole topic, but how does that exist? Aitken's also illegal, right? They host a lot of illegal content there. Finding a way to take it down is still tricky. You know, so a lot of websites host illegal stuff.

Just because it's, you know, illegal does not mean it's going to be solved. Like, the legal pathway there is tricky. But isn't the rule of thumb typically that if a lot of those companies that provide them with the necessary like DDoS security, their like through line seems to be as long as it's not illegal, right? Like if you're not running a child porn, or sorry, child sexual abuse material website,

if you're not running like an assassination or cryptocurrency like drug site, you're fine. Like, but that just does, in practice doesn't work. I'm, I'm unsure of the current hosting situation of watch people die. But I wouldn't be surprised if they went to the same kind of loopholes by registering at like a certain foreign country

with has, that's very loose guidelines. Like, you know, that was the thing with like Ait Kuhn for a while. But yeah, I'm actually unsure the current like setup that watch people die has. I've been talking about, you know, TCC and the school shooter fandom increasingly the past two years and it's really tragic

that it is something that I've, that is, you know, a pattern that is continuing, right? This is like the, really the main force across these shootings. Whether you're, you know, a cis girl, cis boy, trans girl, trans guy, whatever, whatever demographic, you know, racial, you know, there was the

Antioch school shooting in January 2025 that was done by this like black, ironic neo-Nazi similarly linked to TCC as well. Like, whatever the demographic is, the through line that we're seeing is this is this just like nihilistic obsession

with like the act of school shooting and this like fandom that is developed around it. Do you find the media picks up on that at all? Like, no, you've done a lot of research into it. Do they reach out to you? Like do they ever say? Every, every once in a while, But it takes them time. It took them about three years after, like, the peak of 764 to start reporting on 764.

And now there's 764 articles all the time. But it took them about three years to, like, catch up to it. I would not be surprised if in a year and a half we get tons of articles about TCC. But a lot of legacy media is very slow to this sort of thing. My own Internet presence also exists kind of in the margins. My monitoring is in the margins. but those margins can have, you know, very, very destabilizing social effects. But it does take a while.

I mean, same thing with the FBI, right? It took them years to get on top of 764, even though people were, like, reporting this stuff in like 2019, 2020. But before 764 was even that organization, there was previous iterations called like CVLT, but like, you know, that style of thing was a problem for years. And the FBI did not really get on it until much later. and the media then followed suit. Right.

I do appreciate... And I just don't have trust in, you know, the current... The current American law enforcement and apparatus to really be on it right now. You know, I can't... I'm unsure of how that works in Canada at this point, but certainly, certainly I don't think Katch Patel's FBI is going to be, you know, on this one super super well, even though they, you know, been trying to, you know, push some stuff like the Nileist Violent Extremism label, which does cover stuff like this.

But I know this is controversial, but in my opinion, it almost feels as if Cash Patel is actively trying to push narratives that will benefit this entire story that we're talking about in the opposite direction, right? Like, if you're trying to push a narrative that Charlie Kirk's shooter, and we're not going to change topics, but I'm just, you know, bringing this up because you mentioned Cash Patel, you're trying to push that narrative that he was, in fact, trans or inspired by trans ideology or inspired by furies or furry culture, et cetera. They've tried everything. And now we're at the point where it's like the loosest of connections. It's like, well, there may have been a lover who is or is not, may or may not be trans or non-binary. We're not sure. But that's enough. We got it.

Catch Patel will push the story. I mean, yeah, this administration comes out of the same kind of network of influencers who try to grossly use horrific events to their own ideological advantage, including to, you know, attack groups of people that they find to be bad. It's wild because it turns out they're all pedophiles. They're all part of an elite group of... insiders. So let's start talking about the upscene files for the next time. My brain is simple to. I know, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Where can everyone find you and your incredible work outside of listening to the amazing

it could happen here podcast? Yeah, well, I mean, I occasionally post about Yahoo on X the Everything app at by Shonin type. I'm trying to post more about Yahoo on blue sky. There's just not as much of it. But, you know, maybe I should be. be the change I want to see. Is it not friendly, the environment? It's more so that there's just not as many Yawi artists on Blue Sky. A lot of Yawi artists are shockingly Japanese, and Japan has a very large presence on XE

Everything app, at least at the moment. I know some of their, like, AI image stuff is pushing people to other platforms, but it's slow. But yeah, I'm on, I'm on those two places. I also occasionally post photography at Instagram also. by Shonen type. And I suppose if you enjoyed listening to me getting informed by the only information you heard here today, you should check out YouTube.com slash at the surf times where I post videos.

And this one too will be there. Hey, you can look at, yeah, me in a black turtle neck. Talk about sad things. There you go. If you enjoyed the audio version and you want to see the visual version of it, head on down to YouTube.com slash at the surf times. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a ton of fun. Well, actually, it was sad, but it was very informative. Yeah, that's the, that's the needle I try to thread. Absolutely. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.

I'm Minaleklamo. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America is out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almemata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history,

Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die. In 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina-26 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Boen, hi, Matt, hi,

Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underwomen. way, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.

And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the sixth bureau on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone.

Welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Mink. I'm here with James and Giorgio, and we're going to be talking about the documentary, Sarajevo Safari. Yeah, hi, Mick. Thanks for having us. Hi, everyone.

Good to be here. Georgio, do you want to introduce yourself? I am Georgio. I am a Bosnian genocide researcher. I'm also the founder of the educational tool voices from the Drena, which is a new educational resource on the genocide in eastern Bosnia in particular, which allows researchers to follow the events of the genocide through a simulated social media style news feed. So the words of the survivors and the perpetrators come to life via the medium of social media. I'm also a member of the fantastic mutual aid group, Lambeth Mutual Aid in South London. You can follow us on Instagram at Lambeth Mutual Aid. And you can follow me on the hellhole that is X at Georgio.

Con. Con is K-O-N. Not con as an economist. Yeah. that's, I think, the key information. Okay, great. Then, we're going to do the following. I've prepared roughly one page of context here. For those of you who remember, a few months ago, it was announced that the Italian prosecutors want to try and find the people who participated in the Sarajevo Safari.

And we'll be talking about a documentary that highlights and tries to shed a light on what happened there. The main accusation is that the army of Republica Serbska, which is an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, that they charged lots of monies for tourists to come over and shoot at civilians, which is, yeah, obviously horrible. Yeah, horrific. Nowadays, Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two parts, which is like the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Serbsia. And the Republic of Serbska, which is essentially the territory that the Republic of Serbska army gained during the war, because I don't want to be there any confusion as to who the parties are. But it's pretty much two entities living in one nation state. Yes.

So after I've given some context on what happened during the Balkan wars, which led up to this event, we're going to be. talking with Giorgio about the documentary. Unfortunately, the documentary is not available with English subtitles. So I'm glad we were having you with us, Giorgio, to illuminate us a bit more. I also want to preface that obviously it's not a thorough history of what happened there. That would be way too much information to condense into one episode. Also, while this episode will focus on the plight of the Bosnian people, I do want to note that pretty much every side in this entire conflict did horrendous things, committed atrocities, and I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention that.

So we're going to start with, like so many things, the Second World War around the formation of Yugoslavia as a communist state, with the Serbian city of Belgrade being the center of power. The Balkans were a major point of conflict during World War II, with a lot of different. parties and state actors trying to gain control over the region. Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania as some of the main actors. A variety of alliances and other entities were formed, which will later be used in ethnic and ethnic nationalist discourse as a way to highlight the specific ethnic grievances. As a federation, Yugoslavia contained multiple ethnicities, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Muslims, which would later become the called Bosniaks, and that's how I will be referring to them.

So at the end of World War II, Joseph Tito would be the dictator of Yugoslavia, and he would try to counteract all this ethnic descent and friction by promoting something that he called Brotherhood and Unity, which sort of put Tito on a pedestal as a father-eastern. figure under whom everyone from all the different factions and ethnicities would be equal as Yugoslav people. This was only partially successful. The friction was never really resolved. And after the death of Tito in the 80s marked the beginning of the end, it coincided with an economic crisis that sort of made all the different republics where all the different ethnicities were centered beholden to themselves.

became a bit of a free-for-all. So after that point, like ethno-politics and ethno-nationalism became the focus of all politics. Just to be really concrete, like with ethno-nationalism, we mean like a form of nationalism that is based solely on ethnicity, not on citizenship or participation in a community. It's a lighter version of the blood and soil politics that became very synonymous with a certain German period of time. So what happened with this ethnic-centric discourse is that perceived and real grievances became central to almost all politics, most notably, but not certainly exclusively under Slobodan Milosevic, who came to power late 80s in Serbia. Ethnic rhetoric would be

the focal point for his politics and in a sense of power. You would say things that would turn into slogans and with that captured a vital part of the animosity that a large part of the Serbian population would feel. Phrases like, a weak Serbia means a strong Yugoslavia, hinting at the decline of Serbian power and the way they perceived this sort of slow fracturing that Yugoslavia was going through. Another one was in response to a Kosovovary Serb who was allegedly beaten by a Kosovovary Albanian. and Milosevic said, no one should dare beat you, meaning that by virtue of being Serbian,

they should be granted some sort of additional status or some sort of untouchability because they were ethnic Serbs. These examples serve to make clear that the changing and growing public opinion among the Serbs was that the only way for them to be secure and safe was as a national state controlled, by the Serbs. So the whole idea was that they would control the entirety of Yugoslavia and that their ethnic group would be in control of the majority of the political institutions that were present there. As I think you both can imagine, this did not go over well with other ethnic groups. Yeah. So we're just not very keen on being part of a federation controlled by the Serbs. In March of 1998, the Croatian War of Independence started. And later that year, Slovenia,

did the same. Both these instances sparked the war already with Serbs. Bosnia and Herzegovina followed later. A referendum was held in early 1992 on whether or not they were going to secede. They chose to secede. And in March of that year, Serbian forces attacked Bosnia and claimed towns and terrain that they deemed to be Serbian territory. Near the end of May, the Yugoslav people's army attempted to gain control over the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, but filled to do so completely. At this point, the battle became a prolonged siege that would last until February of 96. Just to add a little bit more about the location, geographically speaking, defending Sarajevo was really difficult. The city lies between several

mountains, which made it very easy for Serbian forces to set up artillery, ordinance, and snipers. These would have very long lines of sight and greater range due to the elevated positions that they were set up in. If you look at a map of Sarajevo with like the terrain, I have for Google Maps or something, you can see how much elevation there is all around the city. Roads and passes leading out of the city were blocked by Serbian forces. And once they had full control of the airport, there was little to no way for food medicine or reinforcements to be deployed there. Within the city itself, Serbian forces also controlled a majority of major military positions, with additional snipers being positioned around them.

Multiple areas became incredibly dangerous to cross our approach, particularly the main road leading towards the airport. It became known as sniper alley. And I think it is in this context that we should start to discuss the documentary in allegations. So, yeah, anything to add from either of you. Yeah, it might serve to explain how in the greater European political landscape, entities on the right, I guess in the global north generally, began to sympathize with actors in the former Yugoslavia, right? And how, like, maybe we can draw some lines between them based on their definition of nation, what they consider a nation to be. If that's something you'd like to explain to people.

Yeah, absolutely. I think what's really important to stress is that when it came to Bosnia, and it's still the case to this day, to a lesser degree, the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks, found themselves at this very peculiar intersection of oppression, in which you had the Western European right framing the war. against Bosnia as a restoration of Christian Europe. This was what John Major, our John Major was talking about it, who was then the Prime Minister of the UK. It's also the kind of language we heard from Mitterrand in France. And to some extent in the Clinton administration, after Bill Clinton read that horrendous book, Vulcan Ghosts by Kaplan,

And his administration's rhetoric began to change and sort of framing this as this inevitable, you know, clash between these perpetually fighting tribes in the Balkans. You know, the legacies of that rhetoric are still heard in today's journalism. You know, I can't count the amount of times in even left-leaning, supposedly, Western journalistic publications. I've seen the word Balkanization being thrown around. You know, and this is what I'm talking about in terms of the intersection of dehumanization, exoticization, and oppression

that particularly Bosnia and the Muslims of Bosniaks have found themselves at. And so you had that on the one side coming from the right. And by the way, the Serbs nationalists knew this. they tailored their rhetoric so, so, so effectively to present this case of, we are fighting Europe's battle against Islamist extremists. But at the same time, you had the Western European political left, and by political left, I mean your Marxist-Leninists,

that sort of tradition within the political left, in Western Europe, sort of buying into this co-opting of anti-fascist discourse from the Milosevic regime. Yeah. You know, Mick referenced the No One Shall Dare Beat You speech in Kosovo, which was actually in response to a, at best, hyperboised, at worst, fictitious claim that the Kosovo Serbs were facing this institutional. violence. And that co-opting of that rhetoric that the Milosevic regime did so well as these anti-imperialists fighting against the, you know, evil axis of the West did kind of work to some degree when we're thinking about the response of the political parties on the left in Western Europe that were very sort of anti-any intervention. And we can have a conversation about, you know, NATO intervention.

and how problematic that was. But this very black and white thinking, very black and white rhetoric coming from those political actors in the West, of, well, this is nothing to do with us. Don't buy into the rhetoric that there are bad things happening. You know, everyone's doing bad things. Therefore, we shouldn't do anything to put any pressure on the Milosevic regime. And so the reason why I'm bringing this all up is because if people can understand that,

then it becomes more understandable how Bosnia was left to burn, how the Bosnian Muslims in particular, who are being targeted by Serb forces and Croat forces, both on the basis of their religious and ethnic identities, they found themselves completely abandoned. And obviously, that abandonment really is embodied in the arms embargo that served none of the victims. It only served the Yugoslav army, which was effectively funding and sponsoring the Serb forces who were committing genocide in Bosnia.

And of course, the Croat forces had the Croatian regime funding them. So this arms embargo, which was supposed to be this, you know, for want of a better word, neutral stance for the world to take, was not neutral at all. Of course, as we know, there's no such thing of neutrality, blah, blah, blah. But this was really how it became possible for such a high number of people, the vast majority Muslim people, to be killed whilst the genocide was being televised. Yeah, that's super important. You brought up Bill Clinton reading that book. I thought of putting it in there, but I didn't want to besmirge Bill Clinton's good name here. but essentially what that book does is it's sort of,

correct me if I'm wrong, it's sort of puts forth this clash of civilizations kind of rhetoric where these two people are so different, are so different, they will always inevitably clash and fight and kill each other as sort of a biologically determined factors, almost. Yeah. I mean, we see a similar sort of thing.

I mean, there are specificities to Palestine, but we see a similar sort of thing with the sort of liberal, humanistic rhetoric of let's view the what's happening in Gaza as beyond ethnic labels. You know, we're going to see the humanity behind everyone. And, you know, I saw as a German comedian who was putting up posters of Palestinians who had been killed. and Israelis who had been killed and removing the ethnic labels and just putting human killed. And it's going back to this, what you're talking about in terms of

here are two communities that are always fighting each other and we lose sight of everyone's humanity as a result. And if they would just stop fighting, if they would just, you know, stop for a second and look beyond the labels, then the world would be a better place. And it's all, in my opinion,

tied up in the same illogic as that. book was getting it. They sort of, I don't see color approach, but to conflict. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, a similar narrative that's deployed in Syria and Myanmar, actually. Like, it's a go-to response of neoliberalism when they have absolutely no understanding of a situation beyond that there is conflict there and people are dying, right? Like, it's a very easy response for anyone with a politician or an NGO or who wants to write a

shit book. it's very easy to do that and to sell that narrative. It's very appealing to people who don't know fuck all about it. Yeah. Yeah. And I also want to add another thing because nowadays, Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two parts, which is like the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Serbska, which is essentially the territory that the Republic of Serbska army gained.

during the war because I don't want to be there any confusion as to who the parties are but it's pretty much two entities living in one nation state yes this was also like a recurring theme when I was in Bosnia from my master thesis that there is a deep sentiment with the people but also politically that Bosniaks were left to their fate because Bosnian Herzegovina is the only Muslim majority country in Europe. And there is a very deep feeling of like the reason that we were left out in the

cold that we were abandoned is because it was a Muslim majority country. And I think that is just a very important thing to highlight because that is also a starting point of the vilification of Muslims by virtue of being Muslim, that sort of ideological war of the West versus the Eastern Muslims that sort of started to coalesce around that time? I think, I don't know if I'd say it was the start, but what I would say is the legacies of Europe's obsession with the Ottoman Empire really came to the fore in Bosnia, because a lot of the rhetoric and the discourses that were being produced by Serb forces. hinged around this idea that we, the Serbs, are finishing the job that we started in the Balkan

wars of the 1800s and 1900s. We are finishing the job of getting rid of this remnant of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims in Bosnia. And in fact, you know, I always go to a piece of footage from the 11th of July in 1995 when the general of the army of the Republic of Serbska, Ratko Mladic, who is serving a life sentence for genocide, his forces entered, they invaded Srebrenica, Srebrinza had fallen, and he says to the camera, we have come here to take revenge on the Turks. And I think that really embodies what I'm trying to say here, which is that these legacies of this clash of civilizations that was sort of prominent in the various wars against the Ottomans came back and they were redeployed, they were reactivated by Serb forces in particular,

but also Croat forces to a lesser degree. And, you know, I go back to what I was saying before, John Major saying this is a painful but inevitable restoration of Christian Europe. On some level, on some level, Western Europe was buying into it. on some level. So, yeah, I don't think it was the start of the vilification of Islam, but I think that it was intertwined with previous legacies that were reactivated. Yeah. And this was very much like the zeitgeist at that time, right?

Like Huntington's writing clash of civilizations. It seems like a lot of the response in much of the world to the end of the Cold War was to create another enemy, and that became Islam. That's sort of the discourse after Fukuyama, sorry to mention Fukuyama. But like people didn't want there to be, apart from him, like an end to the conflict of how to organize our societies because that's a ludicrous thesis. And so they're very much, I think a lot of the sort of fear that plays such an important role in politics in many of our countries was remobilized.

in this orientalist packaging towards Muslim people that, as you say, built on centuries of bigotry. My only engagement with the conflict when I was much younger was somebody who I knew through cycling had previously been a football hooligan. I think that's probably how he would describe himself. There was a great deal of exchange in fan violence, I guess, would be the academic term

between the former Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe, which is interesting and not a great way to learn about things. I mean, what's interesting is that there has been a direct connection between the far-right nationalist gangs, the paramilitaries, that's committed atrocities and some of the Serbian football clubs and in particular the ultras in those clubs, because those football clubs were the sort of gateway for mafia bosses to transition back into normal society.

So, yeah, it's a very interesting area of the broader conflict. Yeah, I think at this point, we should get back on back on track a bit. Yes, let's talk about the thing we came to talk about. Yeah, we're going to talk about the siege of Sarajevo and the documentary Sarajevo Safari. But first, we should experience the prolonged siege of advertisements. And we're back. As we said, before we left to besiege your ears with advertisements, we should talk about this Sarajevo Safari.

I guess maybe should we just begin by summarizing the, maybe allegation is still the correct word? I don't know. The events that are documented in the film, let's say that. Yeah. So the Sarajevo Safari documentary was a, is a documentary that was made by Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanich and it

presents long-standing allegations that there was a form of war tourism taking place during the siege of Sarajevo in which affluent non-Bosnians were paying very high fees to shoot at civilians

from sniper positions being held by the army of the Republica Serbska. These allegations and the narrative of the documentary is presented through witness testimony, including an anonymous former intelligence agent. And the film and the sort of the testimonies that are part of the film claim that this war tourism or this safari, this hunting, human hunting game, effectively, business was a sophisticated, organized and secret operation.

One of the most shocking allegations that the documentary brings to light is that these non-Bosnian forests, for want of a better word, would pay even more money to shoot at children. Now, in total, I mean, we don't have exact figures for various reasons that are very complicated. it's estimated that over 11,000 people were murdered in Sarajevo from these snipers. So the fact that this documentary is presenting these allegations that it wasn't just a Serb affair and that there were other nationals taking part in these crimes is huge. It is huge. Yeah. So that's kind of the gist of what the documentary is trying to put across.

cross. Obviously, there's more that I could say about the context and about sort of the context of the of the case that has been taken up in Italy. But, you know, we can we can talk about that as we go along. Yeah. I think one of the allegations is also that there's like tourists from like the United States, from Canada, from Russia and also from Italy. To not go down to rabbit hole, it's I just want to ask you a Georgio because I first heard about this film when I was in Sarajevo. And back then, well, my first instinct was this has to be some sort of conspiracy theory. And that is partly to do with the person I interviewed back then and the way it was presented to me during that interview. But also because I don't think any of us is shocked at the atrocities and the crimes against humanity of war.

but this somehow feels like another level. So what was your first impression, Bosnian genocide researcher, to something like this happening? My first reaction was, I mean, I don't want to take away from the gravity of the documentary. I was shocked but not surprised. So it is shocking that, that this sort of spectacle of violence was happening to that extent.

In the same way that it's shocking, that the concentration camps of Omarska, Ternopoli, Kera Term, all of those concentration camps were being televised and were still in operation. I mean, yes, eventually the international pressure shut them down, but it took a long time. That is all shocking. It is shocking that the peace agreement that brought a formal end to the conflict legitimized simultaneously the political project of the Republic of Serbska by recognizing the entity. All of these things are shocking. So for me, the allegations of the documentary fall into this broader, abject failure and complicity of the so-called international community in the crimes that were being committed in Bosnia. So that is why I'm not surprised.

It's shocking. The content is shocking. The fact that it was able to happen is not surprising. And I think the documentary speaks to the broader complicity of so many layers of society in the atrocities that were being committed. You know, let's be real. Let's be really, really blunt here. the countries from which the tourists came are not the only countries that are implicated in the atrocities of the war and genocide in Bosnia. You had far-right volunteers from Greece who were being trained by Ratko Mladic's army who were in Srebrenica on the 11th of July that the Greek state has never investigated.

You had banks in Cyprus that were allowing Milosevic to funnel his money into them during the embargo. You know, there are so many states who on some level have played a role in the atrocities that have not held themselves or their nationals accountable. So, yeah, that is my reaction, if that makes sense to you guys, you know. Yeah. Like we live in an age where they get most people's thoughts that directly transcribed to their social media profiles at all times, right? And I think it is probably easier than it has ever been for us to bear witness to a genocide. As multiple genocides are occurring, like at the time that we're recording, right? But obviously, that's the most, I wouldn't even say, the most well documented,

is the one that certainly gets the most social media attention is the one happening in Gaza for pretty obvious reasons. People are probably better placed now to understand this in the context of a genocide than they would have been five years ago even, right? The project of a genocide has happened so in the open. And then they have seen nations which claim to be opposed to these things and institutions which were created to stop genocides do nothing. So I think it's probably easier than ever for people to understand the dehumanization that happens and the way that these things progress.

But I wonder, like, it's just such a, like you said, Mick, like it's one thing to go to war, right? And it's another thing to have war come to you. Like, I have traveled to report on wars. But the, as you said, like, war isn't trying to be violent. and in this particular war, acts of inhuman violence happened often and from a great deal of actors, right? But, like, it's one thing when it's your community that is under threat, your family have been killed, and then you respond with violence. Like, it just doesn't make it right, but that is how war is.

It's another thing to pay, to hop on a flight and go and shoot a child. Like, that is particularly craven. So I wonder, like, it seems like the cases, uh, the prosecutions are mostly focusing on people from the Italian far right. Do you have an idea of like this was for them part of that project of like doing a second Reconquista, right, for one of a better term, like purging Muslim people from Europe? Or if it was simply the thrill of killing other humans? I think it would be remiss to try and detach the thrill of killing humans from who those people. humans are.

That's my honest opinion. That's fair. I think, you know, I know less about the granular details of these people from Italy, from the far right, who were going to do this. But if I think about what I know about the Greek far right volunteers, where we have a bit more information to go on and why they were going to Bosnia, this was all about fighting the Turks. This was all about helping our Christian brothers, the Serbs, in their fight against the Muslims. And I suspect that it wasn't too dissimilar

in the political imaginary of the Italian far-right. And not just the Italian far-right. I mean, as we said, from all the other countries where they were coming from. So, yeah, I think there was a friend, that was behind a lot of this international participation that the Serb nationalists were very aware of, and they were very deliberate in the discourses that they were producing. I'll give another example.

When I was working at the Memorial Center, I was reading the transcripts of the Assembly of the Republic of Trabuqaska during the war. in those transcripts, I can count on one hand the amount of times that Serb nationalist officials referred to Bosnian Muslims as Bosnian Muslims. They were, in the vast majority of cases, referred to as either Turks or Islamists or terrorists or even Ustash, who, for anyone listening who may not be aware were the Croatian-seal-aligned regime that took control of what is today Bosnia-Herazina and also what is today Croatia during the Second World War. And so, you know, discourses, they are produced for a reason.

And I know I'm going a little bit, you know, sort of Foucault and whatever. I don't like talking in that way, but I will try to keep it as accessible as possible. when people produce discourses it's to create not only a sense of what is true and what is false, but also it's to create this feeling of truth. It's what feels right. So, you know, it felt right to so many members of the far right to take up arms and hop on a plane or whatever and go to Bosnia to fight. you know, without questioning what actually the war and genocide was about. It felt right.

And so that's how these discourses, that's what they served, to create this feeling of, this is the truth and this is the right thing for us to do. Yeah, that was a very long-winded answer. I apologize. No, Tito, and it reminds me a lot of the discourses that we saw in Myanmar preceding the genocide of the Rohingya people, right? very rarely did we see them referred to by that name or as of them being natives of Myanmar, right, or them having been never centuries.

They're referred to as terrorists. They're referred to as Bangladesh. They're referred to as illegal immigrants. They're often referred to as members of the Islamic State for Iraq and al-Sham, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of those last two words. But it's important, I think, to see these commonalities because we should be able to identify these things. and then like see how dangerous they are. Yeah, absolutely.

You know who doesn't produce discourses that make people hop on flights to other countries? I'm not sure we can say that these days, but let's hope. Yeah, that's true, but we had to think of something, so I guess this will do. Yeah. Can't have golden pivots all the time. We are back.

Should we talk a little more in depth about like this practice of human safaris right or at least their allegations that are made so well i am i am curious georgia because i was still reading into this a bit earlier today and one of the testimonies that popped up during the trial of drachomier milosovic not slobodon not sure if they're related to be honest probably not but there's an American called

Chong Jordan who testified that the International Criminal Court he led a volunteer fighter fighter unit during the siege but he also says that some of the people he worked with also had seen tourists in other areas

and Mostar is named specifically is there any more detail in there about this happening in other areas of Bosnia or other places? Well, about Mostad in particular, I am not sure because I've not heard myself of those allegations. Obviously, there was the Greek volunteer guard who were in places like Srebrenica, but also Wichikrad. They went on after the war to become, well, actually, sorry, I'll correct myself. Even at that time, they were part of what later became Golden Dawn, the far right.

Now criminal organization was a political party. So, you know, you had that happening. In terms of tourists, non-combatants, I am not aware of other places where it was happening on a large scale. like in Sarero. So yeah, I'm not perhaps best place to go into more detail about that. But I will definitely talk to my contacts in Mostar about any allegations there. Yeah. I guess one thing that I want to ask is like we're seeing a very limited prosecution, right, in Italy.

And I think maybe also in somewhere in, like, is it in Belgium or the Netherlands? I thought I read that there was another prosecution. Not to confuse those few countries make, sorry. But for the people who survived the genocide, right, what does this, you can't speak on their behalf, of course. But like, on the one hand, it is some very small move towards justice, but at least it's a movement. But on the other hand, right, like the deaths of their family members are being played out

this documentary and it must be very difficult to understand just how like I don't know casually life was taken during this genocide yeah do you think it helps healing like I guess I'm struggling to phrase that as a question but you know like I'm interested to know how this this this lands from that perspective I guess the general mood among survivors in Bosnia is that no one cares about what happened to us. These films that go on to get awards potentially and they know the filmmakers get a pat on the back

and all of that, they sort of, there's a lot of cynicism around that. And we saw this in particular in regards to Kovadis Aida. I'm not sure if you both watched that, but that recent, when was that, 20, 21, maybe, a few years ago, which for anyone who hasn't watched it is a film that depicts the genocide in Srebrenica. And, you know, and that won some awards, I can't remember the titles of them. But, you know, the sort of response among, particularly the Bosniak community, was one of mixed emotions.

Yes, on the one hand, it was, you know, something that they were willing to support. You know, they would hold screenings of the film. They would, you know, collaborate with the director. But on the other hand, there was this sense of, okay, and now what? And I think from the conversations that I've had with Bosniaks and from the articles that I've read in response to this documentary, there's a similar sort of mood of, yeah, this is really important. and we have been making these allegations for a long time or we've been aware of the allegations for a long time.

Why is it getting attention now? What's going to happen now? Can we trust that the Italians will, that Italy will actually carry on with this investigation and that justice will be had? And also, you know, the notion of justice is so fraught in Bosnia as well. I think that to sort of to imagine that we are on this path towards, you know, this linear path towards absolute healing and absolute justice and reconciliation,

I think is a sort of a notion that comforts a lot of Western NGOs is not necessarily reflective of reality on the ground. So, yeah, I don't think I would be connecting this with any sense of healing at this stage. Yeah, I think that makes sense. It can be easy to see it as like, while it's out in the open now and people have watched a film about it right now. You know, like, I think a lot about the the genocide. These are Yazidi people and how, like,

it essentially just has been, like, what, 12 years ago now and it's been entirely forgotten by most people. Many of those people, you know, I have been to where they are in terrible conditions, in refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, right? And yeah, people are aware of it. Every now and again, someone writes something about it. But like those people are no closer to any form of healing.

You know, that they still can't even, in many cases, have not returned to their homes. I mean, this is the thing in, you know, particularly in the Republic of Tsarska entity. You know, Bosnia actually are living in that entity. They face material precarity on an everyday basis. They face threats. They face genocide triumphalism every year when the Republic of Sarska celebrates the founding of the entity. All of these everyday violences don't go away because of a film. And I think that Bosniaks that I have come to know in living in the entity of the Republica Sarska really carry that sense of we're dealing with.

shit every day. Every day we are facing material battles and we're doing it alone most of the time. So yeah, it's very difficult to put an optimistic, hopeful twist on these things. Yeah, I remember, I was one year later than you were there. I was also at the memorial in Srebrenica slash Potocari. And I remember, I'm not going to name a name, but There was someone who was living in the area who spoke to us. And someone from my group wanted to film that. And I remember that the man was very, very adamant that, hey, I do not want to be filmed. I already need to walk these streets.

That is enough. You should have asked for permission. I also remember, like, put in posters when walking through Srebrenica. And he owns on certain windows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also want to cut in with something else because after James mentioned that other countries were prosecuting as well, I quickly googled something. Apparently Italy has already named a suspect in the investigation. Oh, interesting.

Yes. Now 80-year-old man. Yeah. Yeah, who was a truck driver. Yes. This is something that had not come up when I was writing and everything. I had assumed that this was something that was extremely, I don't know, expensive, I suppose, just because it's so fucked up.

And that, yeah, like, once it was someone who, if they're 80 now, would have been 50 at the time. So someone who was not young. And I had a relatively working class profession. Like, that just isn't the profile I had in my head. And I just wondered if you knew any more about developments in the case that might, like. I mean, to be really honest, I don't have much more to contribute in terms of that, the suspect and what this, what's going on. Yeah. You know, I think it was they, he was summoned to testify last week.

I think he were going to testify on the 11th or maybe, maybe the 9th, I think maybe the 9th. But I haven't heard anything beyond that. So, I mean, in terms of what you were saying about the profile of the suspect, I mean, yes, on the one hand, it goes against the whole idea that it was wealthy tourists only. But let's also remember that in terms of domestic participation, there was a lot of capital to be gained by serving the Republica Serbska project. I mean, you had everything from civilian, Serb civilian truck drivers who helped to deport civilians, Bosniak civilians. You had Serb civilians who were hired to dig secondary and tertiary graves, mass graves. There was an array of positions capital that was created for people who had very little. and I think that's important to bear to bear in mind.

Obviously, that's what that's in reference to the domestic to the participation of civilians within the former Yugoslavia. What the story behind this Italian truck driver is remains to be seen. But that's where my mind goes when you were talking about, you know, his profile. Yeah. I mean, there are things to be gained internationally through that same participation in that same project, right? like not necessarily like from the Serbian project but like in terms of one's status in groups in terms of like social capital on the right I guess we shouldn't ignore that I don't maybe it should just remind us that like especially these struggles can all seem so disparate right

but they're not like the struggle against a domestic right in Italy was obviously the same thing as the, or at least, you know, shared, shared an enemy with the attempts to fight back against his genocidal violence there. Yeah, I think it is important to keep in mind that I think when we all initially thought of the type of person who would do something like this and pay money for this, we all had an image in our head of the type, that type. And I do think it's very important to then take it to account that it can also be everyday people who can be capable and willing to do something like this. Yeah.

Also, another suspect who is not named, but is mentioned in this article. It's from the Starejo Times, just to be transparent, is a banker. So it fits a lot better with like the image we had in our heads. Yeah. Yeah. something to add about the documentary's context. One of the people who testified in the documentary is a man called Erdin Subashich, who was a former Bosnian intelligence agent.

Now, the reason why I'm bringing him up is because he actually says, I believe he says it in the documentary or he may have said it in a subsequent interview. I'll double check. He has said that himself, and the Bosnian intelligence agency first informed the Italian intelligence service about what they believed, what they had evidence was happening in terms of the Sarajevi. They first informed them in 1993. And then a few months later, in March 1994, the Italian intelligence service informed them

that the matter had been closed. So that's just some interesting context to sort of. think about in terms of perhaps some of the skepticism and cynicism that Bosniaks have about where this is going and the potential could change that could come as a result. Yeah. Are there projects in solidarity with the people and the descendants of people who survived this you think people can engage with? I think that I would encourage people to follow Bosnians for Palisians for Palisians.

Palestine on Instagram because what they are doing is that they are being very intentional in highlighting the commonalities between the violence against Palestinians and what Bosniaks in particular endured during the war and genocide. I would also point people towards a very interesting grassroots. I don't know exactly. what they are in terms of are they they're not an NGO I don't know if they're an association or just a grassroots initiative they're called it's a Bosnian

title they're called Ostra Nula O-S-T-R-A new word N-U-L-A and they are based in the Republica Sartka entity but they are a group

of young activists from all ethnic backgrounds, all of the three major ethnic groups in Bosnia, that's Serb, Kroats, and Bosniak, who take an explicitly anti-capitalist approach to their work. So they are very interesting. And the fact that they're doing what they're doing to fight against the corruption of the Republica Tsarska authorities and ethno-nationalism, and they're doing that within the entity, I think it is really quite extraordinary. So you can also follow them. on Instagram and keep up to date with what they're doing.

I mean, there's always either a march happening in solidarity with Palestine or there was recently a reading of names of all the murdered children of Sarajevo alongside all of the murdered children of Gaza in the recent wave of the genocide in Gaza. So there's a lot of very interesting stuff happening, which people from all around the world can at least follow on social media. and if you're in or around Bosnia, then of course you can meet some of these people in person, which is great.

Yeah. Yes, for closing thoughts. I was pleasantly surprised to read that they have suspects. So I'll take this win, and I also feel I should have seen this earlier. But, Georgia, thank you for coming on and having a chat with us about horrifying stuff. Thank you for inviting me.

Our pleasure. Yeah. Let's go pets of poppy. Yeah. You're going to feed my chicken. All right. Canadian women are looking for more. More into themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages. of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in Malik Lamoma. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated and black America was out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an

unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almermata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King's senior, and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people would die. In 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it. It should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Bowen-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina-26 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Kirkie. Hi.

Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS. and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the sixth bureau on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, podcasts about things falling apart, and how to put them back together again.

I'm your host, Mia Wong. Over the course of about a month, the general strike went from a... pipe dream that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen until potentially maybe 2028 to something that happened here. We saw a one-day general strike in Minneapolis, and everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for general strikes. It's become a demand. It's become a tactic and it's become a term that is on the tongues of people who never would dare speak of it before.

And on this show, we are going to talk about the history of General Strikes, how they happen, how they're organized, how they succeed, how they fail, and what the contemporary history of the tactic looks like. Now, when I originally planned this first episode, I was going to do a overview of about 100 years of history of General Strikes to try to get us roughly to the modern era. And then as soon as I started, well, not as soon as I started writing that, deeper into the process than it should have been, I realized there was absolutely no way I could cover 100 years of General Strikes in one episode. what I kept coming back to was one specific strike, a strike that most of you have never heard of. It's the general strike in Shanghai in 1925, what became known as the May 30th movement. I want to begin here because intellectually,

most of you have never heard of it. Emotionally, you already know everything about it. Now, I have written about this strike before. It was, in fact, the first thing I ever wrote about for Behind the Bastards, an episode about a Chinese warlord named Zhang Zhong Chong. But about a quarter of those episodes were about what became the May the 30th movement. And so I am going to recap a little bit of what I talked about in that episode and talk about some different stuff.

And yeah, we're going to get you introduced to how you get a general strike and, you know, how the course of these things can go with a strike that will look shockingly familiar to anyone who has lived through this year, which is to say this is a strike that starts when an occupying army has taken over a city and starts fucking killing people. So a little bit of background about what is going on in China in the 1920s. The 1925 is in the middle of what is called

the warlord period in China, which is a period where, go listen to the bastards episodes. The short version of this is that after the 1911 revolution that had overthrown the Chinese imperial system, China became split between a bunch of warlords, composed out of different sort of parts of the armies.

Now, also in this period, large parts of China are under the direct control of foreign occupiers. These are countries like Japan, the UK, France, Russia. I think there's an American concession sort of in there somewhere. And these countries just own parts of China. And for our purposes, they also own parts of Shanghai. And these things, both the territories they occupy, and sometimes literally, you know, the occupation is they own a rail line. When I say they own a rail line, it's not just a company or even the country owning the rail line. They physically own the territory.

So it's theirs. Like this rail line belongs to Japan. And so the land around the rail line belongs to Japan and they can enforce their laws in it. And this is how it works also in Shanghai. Inside of these concessions, there is an armed occupation. and in Shanghai there are British or friends or Japanese police and military personnel there who do law enforcement and will just kill you. Where, my dear listener, have we seen this before I leave that as an exercise to the reader? Listener? Yes, I guess you're the listener.

Now, this state of affairs came to a head in May 1925 when a Japanese form. was meeting with Chinese union organizers and what was basically supposed to be a contract negotiation session. There's a team of Japanese foreman and business people there and a group of of Chinese union organizers. And the details of what exactly happened are very, very sketchy. But a brawl broke out and the conclusion of the brawl was that a Japanese foreman killed a fairly well-known local union leader. Now, the police had also arrested several of the workers who had been in the negotiations

and continued to hold them even after a massive demonstration for the Chinese union organizer who had been killed's funeral. So on May the 30th, protesters gathered outside of a police station run by the British to demand the release of their comrades. This set off a climactic confrontation that changed the face of Chinese history forever. The British open fire on the crowd killed 10 people and wounded 50 more.

Now, half a decade ago, when I first wrote about this for Cool Zone, I read a quote from the great Chinese author Anarchist Bah Jin. This is quoted from author Waldron's book from Warden Nationalism, China's Turning Point, 1924, 1925. And I want to return to it now for reasons that I think will immediately become apparent. This is about a student who witnessed the killings. At the entrance to Yunnan Road, he saw the child who had been killed a short while before. He thought, about half an hour ago, the crowd was marching peace for,

towards the police station to ask the police to set free students who have been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human beings endowed with reason and human sympathy, that human blood flowed in their veins. They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed their human nature.

But reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people. For this, there was no precedent in Chinese history. The imperialist oppression that had endured for so many years ached like a deep wound in his heart. He struggled inwardly.

He felt the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted to spill his blood to sacrifice his young life that he might show that not all among his people were lambs, that allowed themselves to be led without resistance to slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the people. the murdered child, his eyes shone with fire, his whole body began to burn as though on fire, his heart be violently. You, dear listener, understand this.

When I first quoted this passage in 2021, it was about George Floyd. Now, it's about Renee Good and Alex Pretty. You understand the horror. the suffering, the rage, the overwhelming fire to do something. You understand that they are like us, and you understand why they fought. What followed was the largest to that point general strike in the history of Shanghai. 200,000 people walked off the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes. The strike spread to almost every major city in China, in some form or another.

Massive student protests began. Tire cities rose as one. 250,000 people went on strike in Hong Kong. Students, workers, business owners, and gangsters stood precariously as one to drive out the armed men occupying their cities. In an instant, the world changed. Things that were impossible the day before suddenly began commonplace. People flooded the streets. They were attacked by cops.

They fought back. And for three months, they held on. Now, this was a much rougher time than even contemporary 2026 America. We are in a little bit going to get to the part where a bunch of people's heads get put on spikes by the government. And, you know, unlike 1925 Shanghai, for example, American cities are not contrary to the beliefs of a significant portion of the American conservative population run by networks of organized crime who control every facet of political

life and also economic life and also social life to the extent that if you were a union organizer in 1920, Shanghai, you are effectively a mob organizer, both in the sense that you probably have to belong to one of the organizations and to the extent that the people you are actually organizing this time are like, you're organizing the mob guys who bring in workers to serve as the migrant worker population. This is also actually an important aspect of the strikes in 1925, which is that much of the labor population in Shanghai are migrant workers, have been brought in from other parts of the country by organized crime. Now, obviously, that's not, that is not really how migrant labor works in the United States, but, you know, to some extent, the pressures of the labor

discipline are very similar in that, right, the threat that has held over the heads of migrant workers is that armed men will come in the night for you. And right now what we are witnessing is the armed men coming into the night. But, you know, as much as I talk about, you know, as much as I talk about sort of the differences between these movements, I think the immediate question for our purposes is, are there things that we can learn from this movement? And I think the answer is yes. But in order to get to the, what can we learn from this?

We have to talk a bit about how the movement collapsed. So I said that the movement held on for about three months. That was in Shanghai. the history of some of the other cities is different, and we kind of don't have time to, for example, divert talk about General Strike in Hong Kong, where the primary method that people used was they simply left the city and went back home, which solves some of the problems we're going to be talking about in a little bit. But, okay, in Shanghai, what happened to this movement and why? did it fall apart? So I think there are roughly three factors, and I think the first two are actually

more important than the third one, which might be surprising when we get to them. But the first two factors were people being able to eat and the pressure that that put on the unions and secondarily betrayal from the business elites that they had allied with to get the strikes to work. And the third is pure repression, and the scale of the peer repression here is astonishing. I mean, some of the, like, one of the guys who runs this strike is just executed by the state. Again, I'm promising we're going to get to the heads on pikes in a bit. But the repression isn't what killed the strike. It was the problem of how do people eat, and it was the pressure from the business elite.

So we're going to talk about the business elite first. Now, when I say the business elite here, in the early days of the movement, and this is a tension that's going to sort of haunt the Chinese Nationalist Party for its entire existence until it splits from the communist completely, and even later than that, they're in a very, very uneasy alliance with left-wing students, workers who are rapidly becoming left-wing, because this is also a city that was not enormously politicized until now and suddenly becomes politicized in ways that seemed impossible like a few years before. But there's a, there's a tension between them because initially these sort of patriotic business owners are really,

really pissed off that the foreign occupiers are murdering people in their city. And sort of nationalist and communist leaders are able to sort of broker alliances with them. And they're able to broker alliances with organized crime, which is less important for our purposes. I cannot emphasize enough how important to organized crime people are in the history to the extent that like Chiang Kai Shek, who you may know as like the leader of the nationalist party and the guy who's eventually going to run Taiwan after losing the Civil War. Chiang Shack was an organized crime guy. Like, he was in the Green Gang.

So, like, you know, very important to their story, less important to our story, but they act in a very similar way to the business owners, which is that in the beginning, and this is something that we saw in Minneapolis, too, between their one day general strike, which is that a lot of business owners, either out of, you know, just actual genuine rage and grief over just the raw fucking horror of these monsters grabbing people from their homes and shooting people in the streets. Cooperated to shut their businesses down for the day.

Now, obviously, there are other business owners who do this because they are... Producers, am I allowed to say that they looked outside and were like, it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing, right? You know, they saw what was going on and we're like, okay, maybe my workers aren't going to show up,

or if I don't publicly support this, it's going to get real fucked for me because everyone else around does. And that meant that there was a lot of cooperation from businesses. But we also saw very quickly after, like, a whole bunch of businesses and, like, sports organizations to, like, sign a thing that was like, ah, we need to restore order.

do do do do maybe end the occupation but also please stop causing disruptions protesters. Now, in the Chinese case, what we see as the strike goes on is that the business elites began to see the strikes themselves and the marches and the fighting with the police and particularly the fact that they were also not making money and they were also putting their own money into keeping the strikes going as a problem because they are business people and the only thing that they really care about fundamentally is making money. There's a Marx line I wish I had here

about what the national character of Britain was and it turned out that its only fundamental principle was land rent. And that's like this, right? Like at some point these people are like, okay, well, given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation.

And this is something that in cross-class movements like this, specifically if you are trying to do a general strike, you're eventually going to have to deal with this, which is that a lot of particularly large businesses, and some small business owners will fall in line with this too, right, will eventually get to a point where they're like, I would rather keep making money than, you know,

not have my neighbors taken away, and that is unbelievably fucking bleak. But that's, you know, like, that's one of the things that killed. this general strike in China. And eventually, in the face of this, right, we come to the second problem, which is that people needed to eat. So the Union Federation that's set up had been just sort of giving people money so that they could eat, but they eventually start to run out of money and they don't really have a way to organize the sort of production movement and logistics

of providing everyone with food without relying on the bank rolling of those business owners. you know, this becomes a problem because it means that they're suddenly getting attacked by portions of the workers who aren't supposed to be their base because they don't have food. And those people also just start, like, walking up the Chamber of Commerce meetings

and walking in and beating up the Chamber of Commerce people for not paying them and then, like, eating the banquet food for the Chamber of Commerce is a great story in the book called Shanghai on Strike by Elizabeth Ferry, who's a renowned scholar of Chinese labor history, about this.

Very funny. There's lots of absolutely wild stories from this strike. One of the sort of recurring themes of this period of union organizing. And again, this is a really rough time, right? Imagine like gangster movies, 19, like, 20s, New York. And like, that's Shanghai. But like the gangs are way, way, way, way stronger. So, like, the way politics works to a large extent is that people beat the shit out of each other

and, like, haul hits on each other. and the city is, technically speaking, it's run by, like, what is a warlord army. And then beneath the warlord army, there are all of these organized criminal organizations. But, like, you know, the unions have this thing called dog beating brigades. Where, um, dog beating brigades?

Like, if you, like, publicly started scabbing, you very publicly were standing against a strike, like the dog beating brigade would show up in the middle of the night. And it was just like a bunch of guys with half. And it would just, like, beat the shit out of you. And this was just like a normal thing that was happening between these strikes. So this whole period of Chinese history is nuts. It's wild.

There's so much shit going on. That's just, I don't know, they had the dog beating brigades. I guess in the American context, we'd call them, like, the scabby beating brigades or whatever. But, you know, it's a rough time for everyone. but what they kind of don't have without sort of business owners they're never really able to sort of seize control of production

and repurpose it towards you know keeping everyone fed and I will say this is something that actually I think we are better at than they were in the sense of we are better at running the logistics of getting a bunch of people food

and the stuff that they need to survive and something we can look at in Minneapolis where and this is obviously coming from people's money, but a lot of the organizing in Minneapolis is about getting people who can't leave their homes food. We've also seen in the last day or so, tenant and labor union leaders are talking about a rent strike in Minneapolis, which can help people, you know, not get evicted because they can't go to work. But it's also something that if you're going to do a general strike, yeah, you probably also have to do a rent strike. But if you want to keep a

general strike going, and this is something that we're going to get to a lot more, in later episodes. The Seattle General Strike is a very large example of this. If you want to keep this thing going, you have to take control of the places where you're working and, you know, have them provide the food for people and have them provide the resources that people need. But in this sort of context,

almost everyone who's involved in this, this is their first general strike. What really happens here, right, is that the unions are forced to call off the strike. They get minor concessions in exchange from the, the foreign bosses. But what it does is politicize the entire city and it politicizes all of China in a way that is going to shape all of the politics in the country forever, I guess. Like, it's the thing that creates modern China is the politicization that comes out of this period.

You know, it's what sort of transforms Chinese politics or something that was purely the almost purely the domain of warlords into something that's now the domain of the nationalist and the communist. And obviously, you know, the military conflict is a large thing in this. that we don't really have time to get into, but, you know, this period transforms the entire politics of China, right? People who had never thought about politics before, people who had never, you know, who had never, like, heard the words imperialism or, like, heard the words like militarism, right, are suddenly in the streets talking about it, and they're talking about General Strikes, and they're talking about how can we run these occupying armies out. And I want to sort of mention

how this whole thing ends, right? Which is that people keep organizing and they keep fighting. And one year later, in 1926, the first of the uprisings begins. Now, the first uprising, and these three uprisings were all sort of like hauled by the Chinese Communist Party and their unions.

The first one fails horribly. And the warlords put the heads of workers they'd killed on pikes. They have these squads where there's two guys at broadswords and a guy with like a sheriff's badge effectively. who go door to door, and if they find someone

who they think had handed out leaflets, they would execute them on the spot. This is the kind of repression they're dealing with. And they did it again. They tried again in 1927.

And that one failed. And the second time, by the way, it's worth mentioning, was supposed to be a general strike coordinated with an uprising and they fucked up the coordination of it.

But it did also. The second one was a 300,000 strong general strike. And the third try was an 800,000, in strong general strike. And they stays the attraction and they run the warlord armies out of

the city. And for a sort of brief, glorious moment, Shanghai is in the hands of its workers. And their subsequent betrayal and slaughtered by the USSR and Chiang Kai Shack, mostly Shack, the USSR

is also at fault here for telling them to keep allying with Shankajek and the Nationalists. That's a story for another time. But I think to close, we are used to thinking that the times that we live in are unprecedented, and in some ways they are. But people have fought our struggles before. People have fought and died and won to stop the reign of men with guns over our cities. And if we learn the lessons of both their time and ours, If we use that knowledge to act in the moment of crisis, we can win.

Conscience, history, and the cries of the suffering demand it. So let's go win the war. We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark.

In this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in Alec Lamoma. It's 1969.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almemata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr., and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die.

1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yin-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast, and the lead-up to the Milan Quartina,

at 2026 Winter Olympic Games. We've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway,

and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.

This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. and that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS

and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week, February 11th to February 18th, some small news items up top. Last week, the FDA declined to review a new flu vaccine from Moderna. In February 12th, Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge has concluded, and quote, significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week, unquote. Soar and Mamdani has ordered a new audit of city agencies to ensure compliance with

sanctuary city laws in New York, and Stephen Colbert says that CBS refused to air his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Telerico, citing the FCC's equal time rule, despite this rule historically having an exception for late-night talk show interviews. Last month, FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened to enforce the rule regardless of the well-established precedent that excluded talk show interviews. And finally, the owner of a warehouse facility in Hutchins, Texas, has said that they won't sell or lease the building to the federal government as a detention facility. The city's mayor and council all opposed the project. Seizure by eminent domain is still possible. Yeah, and I guess with that, there's been campaigns in a couple of other small

traditionally conservative rural areas to not lease facilities for ICE. And it's still a little unclear. and I suspect it's kind of column A, column B, how much of this is, you know, nimbism and how much of this is resistance to ICE specifically? Yeah, we covered little of that in the episode I did on Social Circle, which is in Georgia last week. But I think it's fair to say both. Yeah, and obviously when I say nimbism, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's bad to have this in your backyard, but like their issue isn't a moral one in some

cases. Yeah, in some cases, I think in some cases it's their little column A, little column B. Yeah, it's hard to tell. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting, for instance, hearing in Southern California, right, a town called Dolsura, pretty small town. Maybe you've heard of it from when the KKK did Border Patrols there back in the day. But the Border Patrol are trying to build a big new facility there and have been for some time called New Brownfield. There has been local opposition to that among people who are very, like people who I have spoken to who are otherwise conservative. And like some of it is, yeah, I don't want this changing. the character of the town. I don't want a giant detention center that would eclipse the population of this very small town.

Some of this also, like, I don't want them to be locking up people out here. We have a nice life out here. And, you know, we have lots of fields and horses and space, and it seems like it would be really fucked up to have people detained out here. Like, I think that nimbie impulse can sometimes, like, can still combine

with even people who are not, you know, abolitionists. They don't want to be confronted with the horrors directly next to them. Yep. And we'll talk a little bit more about the numbers, like ISIS polling numbers, like how popular they are with Americans. But one of the things we've seen this year

is that they've been shedding support even from Republicans. So like, you know, whatever debate we have here, that's like certainly not a non-factor. Definitely. I think it's now time for us to talk about the biggest news story this week, which is that Shaila Buff was arrested in New Orleans

during Marty Gras after getting into a series of fights. Who? He was in the movie Holes. Oh, yeah. He was also in a different production called Holes, but not based on a book. He was in Holes. Yeah, it was in both holes. So, I don't know who this person is.

I've never, yeah. He's a child actor who was very popular during the, like, early 2000s. And has gone, he played the Indiana Jones' son in the rebrand. boot event or in the new in the fourth Indiana Jones movie god and then he is he is he has he has since kind of fallen into madness and disrepute uh he's a spousal abuser he's repeatedly assaulted people in public um he showed up on that webcam white supremacists were drinking milk on once for reasons that are still to this day somewhat unclear to me and he got into a fight in marty graw which is just just just a fun little bit of news my favorite part of this is that he assaulted a guy he was

repeatedly restrained by members of a bar. And whenever they would let him go, because they just wanted him to leave, they didn't want to call the cops. He would then continue to attack the guy he was assaulting until they were forced to call the police and have him arrested. And I've been in Mardi Gras over the last few days. And let me tell you, getting arrested by the police during Mardi Gras, not easy. I don't have a lot to say about that other than I was surprised by the number of very political floats that I saw, particularly at least one that was entirely paper-mache ice guys in a very, like, non-flattering way. There were a lot of, like, costumes and a number of, like, references on floats. There was a couple of pretty hideous caricatures of Trump on floats,

and they all got, like, a widely positive reaction. And I find this interesting, and I'm bringing this up, because the research that I've largely been doing for the EAD this week is trying to get a handle on, like where Americans are polling right now and how popular or unpopular is the president and his agenda because like we you see articles every week about like Trump's polls hit a new low or the most recent article that I think it's Gallup is no longer going to be doing presidential like popularity polling but I wanted to get a look at like how the actual like parties and their agendas are holding up and it's a pretty shocking gap between September, October, like fall. of last year and today. So in September of 2025 per U-Gov, the Democratic Party had about a 64% unfavorable.

So like 64% of polled Americans didn't like the Democratic Party. And a little less than 34% of Americans had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party. And if you actually look at the graphs for those that U-Gov presents, they're basically making like a wineglass shape, right? So what that means is unfavorability is moving up and favorability is moving down rapidly, like at the time at which those polls were taken in September of last year. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, neither party was popular, but the Republican Party, the wineglass shape was a lot more muted, more like a shot glass. 55.4% of Americans pulled by UGov expressed an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party, and about 42.3 expressed a favorable opinion. You can compare this to October,

2025 polling by Pew Research, which showed something similar. 64% of Americans were frustrated with the Republican Party. 75% of Americans reported being frustrated with the Democratic Party. 49% of Americans polled replied that they were angry at the Republican Party. 50% reported being angry at the Democratic Party. Similarly, Republicans, 36% of Americans felt hopeful about the Republican Party. 28% of Americans felt hopeful about the Democratic Party. about the Democratic Party, and then 27% of Americans were proud of the Republican Party, 16% Democratic Party.

Those are pretty bleak numbers for the Democrats coming in the fall of 2025. Like, that is kind of black-pilling stuff, right? Yeah. This was, in the fall of last year, pretty rapid change from where things had been about four years ago. For example, in September of 2021, about 64% of Americans had expressed frustration with the Democratic Party as opposed to 75% four years later. So that's all fall of last year. Now, between when the polls that I read to you came out and now, we've had to cut several major things happen, one of the more significant was the long shutdown, which was disasters for

Republican favorability and for Trump's own favorability. And we also had a significant, I mean, obviously in L.A. and in Chicago, ICE had been doing very terrible and very like, you know, I guess I should say, like documented crimes, like horrible things that were spread widely on social media. But that has also accelerated massively in the first couple of weeks of 2026. And what we're seeing now in more recent polls taken in late January and anywhere from like kind of early January to late January and early February is a significant reversal. So NBC News's decision desk co-related a bunch of different polls like Daily Mail, Marquette, Street Journal, Yahoo, UGov, Fox News, Emerson. And over the last month or so, you're looking at an average spread of all of these polls of about negative 19.9% favorability for the Republican Party

and about negative 12.8% favorability for the Democratic Party. So when you think back to those numbers from last fall, that's a pretty dramatic change. And it kind of correlates to a dramatic change in Trump's own favorability, which has gone down by about 12% per the average of those polls that kind of aggregated by NBC Newsdesk. Their article notes, quote, Ipsos polling released in late January, found 51% of Americans say Trump's immigration policy is on the wrong track. Amazingly, just a year ago, Americans said Republicans have a better plan policy and approach than Democrats on immigration by a 22-point margin. Now that advantage is down to five points. So while Trump is underwater with immigration, his and the Republican Party's policies towards immigration are still

more popular than the Democratic Party's responses to immigration, but they have also collapsed in terms of like the gap between those two things. Again, 22 point margin to a five point lead is a pretty dramatic narrowing. And one of the things that has come along with this is an increasing agreement among Americans that ICE has not only gone too far, but neither to be, if not abolished entirely, then severely curtailed. And a lot of Americans, a shocking amount, currently support abolishing ICE entirely. A PBS News NPR Marist poll released recently found that a majority of Americans feel ICE is making the country less safe and has gone too far. Six in 10 Americans disapprove of what ICE is doing, only about three in 10 approve of it. So by a two to one margin,

Americans disapprove ICE's operations to like approve of their behavior. This is a very like political breakdown about 91% of Democrats disapprove of ICE. 60% of Independence disapprove of ICE. Meanwhile, 73% of Republicans approve of ICE. But even that number has has dropped fairly recently, right? In fact, the percentage of Americans that believe ICE hasn't gone far enough dropped from 18% to 12% over the last year. year and only about 22% of Americans feel like ICE is doing a good job compared to 26% of Americans a year ago. So we're seeing like pretty unequivocally Americans rejecting the Republican tactics on immigration and they tend to be blaming ICE for it, right? Like that's one of the things

that's most interesting to me is that both ICE and President Trump have seen the most dramatic collapses in public support, which suggests to me that, like, Americans are kind of tying these two things together. Currently, per UGov, as of January 24th, 2026, more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it. Now, this is not mean a majority of Americans support abolishing ice. I've seen some people misstate that. 46% of U.S. adults, as pulled by U.Gub, somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. 12% are not sure. 41% somewhat or strongly oppose abolishing ice. Yeah.

That's still pretty striking. Yeah. It's a plurality, right? Maybe now will be a good time to talk a little bit about like where the Democrats, different Democrats or different wings of the Democrat Party are on abolishing ice because I think it's one of these areas where like the further up the party you go, the more detached from that public opinion you get. So maybe we'll start with the Kim Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House.

Here's him on the Joy Reid show on the topic of abolishing ICE. Why not lead and say abolish ICE? Because what you're telling us is you want our taxpayer dollars to pay for a lawless, massed, armed agency to continue terrorizing our cities. And I'm trying to figure out how you, as a leader, can be telling Americans that their taxpayer dollars should be going to ICE. I don't understand anything that you just said. I spoke English.

I don't understand anything that you've just said to me. when I've made clear that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not brutalize or kill them. That's the whole reason we're in this fight right now. That's the whole reason the DHS is getting ready to shut down. That's why. You agree with me and joy. Abolish ice. That is, listen, I'm going to use the language that I want to use.

You can use the language that you want to use. You can see Jeffries visibly. kind of tense when the phrase abolish ice is used, right? Like, he's, yeah, he wants nothing to do with it. His immediate response is to go to affordability. I do want to note that when he was previously asked if he would use the appropriations process to rain in ice, he did exactly the same thing. But why not use the appropriations process to rain in ice, leader, Jeffries?

No, what I'm focused on right now, Chad, is to make. life better for the American people by extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which by the way, a lot of folks in this institution believe was not possible, but Democrats made clear before the government was shut down, that we were in this fight until we win this fight on behalf of the American people. Cancel the cuts, lower the cost, save health care. That's our objective. There he does the same thing, right?

He goes back to affordability, which is something the Democrats have done for the last year and a half, right, when asked to, like, take a strong leadership stance on ice far too much of their leadership has instead, like, tried to deflect or affordability. I do want to note that, like, they are now doing exactly what he was deflecting from there, right? Yeah. And that was only less than a month ago. It's interesting because it's like this cowardice on, like, specific terms and messaging. Yeah. Even though they are using the preparations process to try to rein in ice. Like, that is, yeah, that is what they are doing now. But it's like a complete, complete cowardice

or not actually like trying to like use public pressure to your advantage at the moment like yeah he's doing the thing and almost like failing to it's not that he's doing the thing

as many of us with which he did but like he's failing to take the easy win yeah because of like you say this like institutional cowardice or like these it's like there's some kind of red line

rhetorically for Jeffries and other like leadership Democrats that they will not cross and I have to believe that some of that comes from what they see as like the long legacy of 2020. You know, like perceptions that the Democratic Party is like too far to the left is too extreme or something. Yeah, that they, that like specifically the perception that they are like attempted to abolish the institution of policing, which was not really anything that they had, that was not in their policy platform, right? There were not Democrat leaders saying we're going to do away with the cops.

In fact, Biden was talking about how we need to fund the police, not defund the police in 2020, right? Yeah. But nonetheless, like, there seems to be this real, like, it's very hard for them to break that rhetorical boundary. It's not entirely just Jeffries on this. Seven Dems cross-party lines are late January to vote for a DHS funding bill. So we got Representative Henry Kweller of Texas. The worst Democratic congressman. Yeah.

Oh, shit. What a fucking asshole. I hate that guy. Texas stems hit different, and specifically like Rio Grande Valley, Democrats are a different breed. God, he sucks so much. There's Jared Golden of Maine,

Mary Glucent Camp Perez of Washington, Laura Gillen, Don Davis of North Carolina. Laurie Gillen is New York. Tom Swozy of New York and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas. This is not, it is not a position

that he's unique to Jeffreys, right? Like, there's this idea that, like, perhaps there needs to be some reform of ICE, but abolishing it would go far too far. Other Democrats have introduced an act which would essentially move funding from ICE to local law enforcement. So it would take that $75 billion budget allocation to ICE

and move it to local cops, right? This is called the Providing Useful Budgets for Localities to invest in COPS by substituting six appropriations from federal enforcement to yield results act. Holy shit. No wonder these people's favorability is like negative one trillion percent. Yeah. Good Lord.

It's what we call a acronym in that they have started with the word public safety and then made a really horrendous attempt to turning that into an acronym. There is also like a wing of the Democratic Party, right? on the left, which is more forthright about abolishing ICE. Here's a clip of AOC talking about why ice should be abolished. And this is at an event in Queens. Yeah. ICE is a very young agency relative to many others. Enforcement of people who committed crimes that were undocumented or had visas.

Used to be under the Department of Justice. And in the Department of Justice, if someone wants to come to your house, you need judge you need you need an entire judicial process you need a warrant to ensure that your constitutional liberties are are respected you need all of it what they did was that they took ICE out well they took immigration enforcement out of the DOJ which had very tight reins on what you're allowed to do they take that they put it into this new agency that they put at the time which is the Department of Homeland Security first of all in what world does FEMA belong under the same umbrella as

It makes no sense at all. No sense at all. And what happened is that once you take that enforcement piece out of that agency, they then start to answer to nobody. Even though ICE technically, statutorily, their responsibility is just supposed to be on immigration enforcement. They are now expanding their data collection to U.S. citizens, to everyone on this soil.

They are waving these phones around and saying that they're implementing facial recognition technology to a centralized database. We have to fight this tooth and nail. We need to defund it. We need to not allow this to be collected by private companies. A lot of what we need to do is not just revisit Section 702. We need to abolish ICE. And we need to have comprehensive changes to that data. One thing I do want to note about her statements is that during the appropriations process,

she did give statements about how she was pushing to defund ICE as an agency. And this did cause a reaction from some, I'll call them overly online leftists, claiming that AOC had like changed positions from wanting to abolish to defund. This is some sort of slide. And then she then had to follow up was saying, well, currently the way to restrict ICE and lead to abolishing it is through defunding it. So that's what we're doing through the appropriations process. No, my position has not changed.

I still think that the agency should be abolished. Yeah. Yeah. There's a broad issue we had, which was that at the end of 2020, as a result of all of the federal agents that were in American cities and had been videoed brutalizing citizens in places like Portland, there was a lot of anger about DHS in particular. I wrote a column for Business Insider about, like, look, this agency even is going to remain under Biden,

But if we don't cut the legs out from under the entire agency, it's basically set up to be the president's secret police. And broadly speaking, the Democrats didn't do anything to stop it. But I also, like, I guess where I am on this is I think it's kind of counterproductive. At this point, the failures of the Biden administration, I think, are quite manifest in what the Trump administration is doing right now. And what I want to focus on is the fact. that we've had in the space of several months, Americans become more than twice as likely to

support abolishing ICE, which is both a fragile coalition because the fact that the number has changed so rapidly means that it could potentially change back. Like, I don't feel solid in counting on that to be the permanent state of affairs, but it introduces an opportunity. And it's an opportunity to build support to destroy this agency. And I think it's probably too much to hope for DHS as a whole and anything close to the near term. But the fact that during the Biden administration so much got punted on, I don't know. Like we're past that. We have the opportunity now. Yeah. We have the anger now. I do, I retain my worry. And I would say almost one of my biggest political fears is that 2026 and 2028 go well for Democrats. They do again what happened under the

Biden administration. Yeah, and they leave all these things intact. But one of the big differences that we have at least right now is that at no point was abolishing ICE polling the way it is right now during the Biden or the first Trump administration. Yeah. And I think we have to take advantage of that. There's momentum right now. Like this is a crucial time. Like we're talking here in terms of like abolishing ICE moves us back to the 2003 norm, right? Like, what it doesn't do is fix the fundamental issue here, which is that there are not legal pathways for people to come to the US and there need to be.

And, like, I think, like, now is the time for people who are involved in democratic politics, right, to agitate for, like, a genuine reform package. I don't think we will ever see support like this again for legalization of undocumented. people for dreamers, right, or people who are impacted by deferred action for childhood arrivals, which is a policy that became place under Obama. Like now is the time for substantial immigration reform. I say this knowing that this will not fix a problem. Like more than most people,

you know, I have seen the horrors of our immigration system firsthand. But like, there is a moment right now that we could change things for the better. And I share Robert's worry that if Democrats get like an easy win, even in the midterms, that we might not get that. And like what we saw under Biden was a big pointer to what we're seeing under Trump, that essentially the DHS was almost impossible for him to control. Yeah. In that he acquiesced to OADs, he is still responsible for them.

Like the buck stops with him. He's president. I'm not certain that he planned it. but nonetheless it continued to happen for months and months and months under his presidency, right? Like, it was very obvious the way this was going to go if we got another Trump presidency. And if they do that again, we're just setting the table for things to get worse again. Right. And I think James, the task before us is twofold, right? Because on one hand, we have to reform the system by which people gain legal acceptance to live in

this country. And that also includes, I think, there needs to be a push for some sort of federal law that will make it impossible, or at least much harder, to reverse these acceptances and to do things like nullify or cancel green cards in permanent residency like the administration is doing right now. Like both we need increased pathways and we need increased resilience to promise people that, hey, if you go through all of these hoops to become a legal resident or a citizen, or whatever, it can't just get pulled away the next time a Republican wins office. Yeah. And then on the other side of things, you have this vast, uncontrollable militant agency

built as the armed wing of the presidency that has to be destroyed because it can't exist in a democracy. Yeah, it's not compatible. And then you have, I mean, I would extend that to DHS as a whole. But it's my same issue with like, if we can defund ICE right, now, I'm always in favor of taking away some of their money. That's not the extent of what I think should happen to ICE. It's just, like, it's a salient, right? Like, you have to look at it that way. Like, it, it's, it would be as if you're, you're like, well, it's not worth winning the Battle of

Stalingrad because that doesn't give us Berlin. It's like, well, but these are steps. You know, you try to damage and reduce the agency's power and ability to function while you're continuing. Yeah. And I guess the worry about that, too, is that if you do defund ICE, if they, because we've had some Trump has made a couple comments about worrying that like we need to reduce kind of the tempo at which ICE is operating because it's bad for them. So that is kind of one of my concerns that maybe if they if they pull back on the throttle a little bit, the the rage will decline enough that there's not this kind of motivation behind abolishing. But I feel like that's just a fear you kind of have to eat as opposed to not trying to stop and reduce.

the harms the agency does in the immediate term while you're working long term for abolition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did want to talk a little about other numbers because immigration is obviously a major issue for American voters. It's an issue people pick who they're going to vote for the presidency on. It's one of them. But it's not the main one. As a general rule throughout most of modern political history, the kind of the top issue for Americans is the economy. And if the economy is bad, it is very hard for your party to stay in power. If the economy is good, it is a lot easier for your party to stay in power, right? Like, these are fairly basic facts of political life in the United States, always with some caveats, but that it bears looking at how do Americans feel about the economy

and who do they blame for the fact that they feel badly about the economy? And per Politico, which carried out a recent survey, about 46% of Americans say the cost of living is the worst they can remember it ever being. This includes 37% of people who voted for Trump in 2024. And Americans pretty like significantly agree that this is a Trump problem. Inflation, the fact that they can't afford things is on him because he's the present. Again, 46% of Americans say it's Trump's economy and his administration is responsible for rising costs. Yeah. And this is true both among Republicans and Democrats. which is very interesting to me.

A percentage of Americans, based on the vote in the 24 election, 53% of Harris voters in 2024 say the cost of living is the worst they've seen it. And again, 37% of Trump voters in 2024 feel the same way. So that is, it's an example of something that we've talked about and wondered about on this show a lot, which is like how much does reality break through the fever swamps? and this is suggesting that like to a pretty solid degree that actually Trump is, I still think he's got a floor of somewhere around 30% of Americans who will follow him into the pits of hell even if it means shoveling themselves into it. But that number used to be like 40%. Right. And it does seem to be declining. This is being treated as a five alarm fire among the Trump White House, which is interesting me for a couple of reasons. You know, anytime you talk with.

especially people on left about, but also increasingly a lot of Democrats about the midterm elections and the 2028 elections, I think you have to deal with as people saying, but are there going to be elections, right? And, you know, it's, I don't dismiss those concerns out of hand, obviously, in part because the administration is talking right now about having ICE agents and polling places, right? You do have to acknowledge that as a concern. But at the same time, I think if you're looking at this rationally, you have to note that the Trump administration internally is acting as if there will be elections and that those will be competitive elections. They are worried about the economy.

They are worried about their polling. And they are taking actions to try to mitigate the worries that they have, which they wouldn't be doing if they were already sure there's never going to be another election, right? And that is important to remember. It doesn't mean there's not a danger. It doesn't mean they won't try shit if they lose. But it does mean that they are treating these political issues as political issues that they

have to deal with via messaging. There was an article in Fox News recently about Trump's team huddling to decide on midterm messaging. I'm going to quote from that now. The meeting, which was confirmed to Fox News, by sources familiar with the gathering, was hosted by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief Chiefs-Blair, who was steering Trump's political strategy. According to sources, the message during a slide presentation by Chief Polster and Chief Strategist and Strategist, Attorney Fabrizio, was that the economy will be the top issue in the minds of voters, and the White House needs to spotlight its efforts on easing affordability. The meeting was held as the GOP works to defend their control of the Senate and their razor-thin-house majority in November's midterm elections. Republicans are also dealing with the president's continued underwater approval ratings and a slew of surveys, including the latest Fox News polling, that indicates Americans are pessimistic about the economy. And publicly, the administration's claim is that Americans are happy with the economy.

The economy is the best it's ever been. Look at how good the Dow is. It's over 50,000, right? Yeah. But everything we're hearing internally, like all of the reports that from people inside the administration about like what's going on day to day is that they're wide awake and worried over the fact that their economic numbers are completely fucking dog shit. Now, what does this mean for the midterm elections? Well, very few people that I have found who are like credible analysts don't expect the Democrats to retake the House, right?

meaning most credible analysts do think the Dems are likely to retake the House. That said, there's fairly few people who expect a 2018-style Democratic blowout among, like, the professional poll watchers and stuff, which is, if you remember, the Democrats flipped about 41 seats. There's a couple of reasons for this, right? And I found a good article in The Hill that's kind of analyzing, like, why we should. shouldn't be expecting some of the exuberance that you're seeing on social media about like early elections and how bad Trump's numbers are is maybe making people overly optimistic about like flipping all of Congress to Democratic control. Yeah, which is not currently the likeliest outcome.

And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of them is that as unpopular as Trump is, and I've hit on that quite a lot. The Democratic Party's overall favorability is about 33%, which is nine points lower than the Republican Party's favorability. And, you know, depending on the poll, five to ten points lower than Trump's own favorability. This is based on a Marquette Law School poll, right? So Trump is very unpopular and so are the Republican Party, but people don't like the Democrats. The Democratic Party as a whole, people like individual Democrats. A lot of people like their congressperson.

A lot of people like whoever it is they want to see as the presidential candidate. You know, you can look at, you know, you've got folks who really like Mamdani or really like Pritzker, but as a whole, voters, including Democratic voters, don't feel very positively towards the Democratic Party. In many cases, more negatively still than they feel about the Republican Party. That's started to turn around. But if you're kind of hoping that there's going to be like a full-on switch that makes it immediately possible to successfully impeach President Trump, that is extraordinarily unlikely to come in 2026, right? Which doesn't mean that it's unlikely to have a good result. Republicans lose.

of Congress is a good result, right? There's just a lot less, I mean, there's a lot less, even if you're kind of taking the unfavorability of the Democratic Party out of it, there's a lot fewer seats up for grabs right now. In 2018, and when that, you know, the Democrats flipped 41 seats, there were 75 competitive races. This year heading into the midterms, there were only 18, right? There's a lot less that can flip, and I don't think Republicans are likely to lose control of the Senate, right? And the polling shows things being pretty razor thin there. Democrats

have about a 4% advantage, according to economist UGov polling right now in the congressional midterms, and there's a three-point margin of error. So you're looking at like a lead, but not enough of one for a complete fucking blowout, right? There has been some more positive data, like kind of right before we came on to record this. I looked at some charts. by focal data that was kind of breaking down midterm voting intention by groups and looking at likely voters. And this is always kind of a little bit like voodoo, right, in terms of how you're trying to like, well, how likely is a likely voter and how do we like factor in? Realistically, are they going to show up in any way? If you're kind of assuming that like people

who self-report as likely voters will only actually vote about a third of the time, per this study, Democrats are ahead by about seven points. in a generic House ballot. So, you know, that's kind of where we are right now. I think we're looking at a midterm season that's going to go well for the Democrats, but I don't think we're looking at a midterm season that delivers us from the Republican Party

being able to ram through legislation. I think our kind of best case scenario is one in which they have to give major concessions because the Democrats have, you know, flipped the house at the very least. And that's big. But I don't think, I don't think Trump's going to get impeached

starting January of next year. Yeah. The one thing I will say about the polling data is that, so obviously Democrats tend to perform better in special elections because to vote in a special election, you have to be a higher interest voter. And that also special election cycles get driven by immediate, like, anger over stuff.

And there's a bunch of different factors. that drive special election turnout. And also the Democrats have been absolutely obliterating the Republicans in all the special elections that have been happening recently. And even in the cases where they're losing, they're losing by very small margins in places where Trump was winning blowouts. Yeah. So I think if you want to be optimistic, I think that's the case for optimism.

But also, yeah, like we're not going to have all of our problems magically solved by the midterms. Yeah. Yes. To specify on that what you were saying, there was. a special election in Tennessee, and Republican Matt Van Epps beat the Democrat Afton Bain by nine points,

but Trump had won in 2024 there by 22 points. Yeah, and like a few, we talked about this on the show, but like last year there was, there was an election in like a special election in Western Iowa that Trump had won by double digits and the Democrats won by double digits. And that kind of thing shouldn't be happening.

It sure shouldn't, no. It is. And, you know, so that's, that's the optimistic case. And, hey, like, I, I've just come in saying, like, hey, don't expect Congress to be completely flipped. But, like, you know, it's, the times are crazy. Who knows what else? Who knows how many more people ICE is going to murder? Who knows, like, what other, like, how bad the economy is going to get?

We might have invaded Canada by then. Like, who knows? Yeah. Anything's on the table. Anything's still on the table. We're just kind of looking at shit from February. Yeah. And some of this shit will depend on, like, what atrocities they commit in the weeks and days before the midterm election, right? We see surges around certain the killing of Renegu, the killing of Alex Preti, right?

We see those things shift public opinion dramatically and the ongoing snatching of immigrants and deportations and sending people back to places where they'll be tortured and killed. like that's kind of the background. It makes people angry, but like it's these specific actions, which seem to shift public opinion dramatically. All right. So on that topic, I guess, we should talk about the quote-unquote shutdown and specifically the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, right? I guess the first thing to clarify is this isn't a government shutdown

and the sense of the shutdown we saw last year, right? That lasted like 40-plus days. Right. It's a partial shutdown. It's a partial shutdown. What's happening right now is that Democrats are holding up further funding for DHS until the administration agrees to some concessions that they have asked for. This is unlikely to impact ICE and CBP a very great deal for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the tax and spending cuts bill, right in 2025 bill, funded them to an absolutely, like, unfathomable degree. I think 65 and 70 million respectively.

More quickly, it will affect other agencies under DHS. Those include Transport Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard. Some TSA workers will be working that they will likely not be receiving pay. This is pretty common, right? They're deemed as quote-unquote essential workers,

and that means that they will be expected to need to work, what we saw last time was that as the shutdown dragged on, people were calling in sick or not coming into work because they were taking other jobs, right, because they had bills to pay. The reason this is happening is because Democrats successfully managed to get Trump to separate DHS funding from another spending bill,

which passed through and funded the rest of the federal government. They are demanding an end to masking. I should clarify specifically, like masking in the sense of law enforcement officers wearing gaiters over their faces, a return to officers displaying their name, badge, and ID number, increased oversight of detention conditions, coordination with local law enforcement, an end to the detention of US citizens, targeted enforcement and not roving patrols, and a unified use of force and uniform conduct policy for CBP and ICE. And then an end to raids using Form 215.

I'm just going to note here then moving forward going to refer to that using its, it's that name and not call it an administrative warrant because an administrative warrant kind of implies the action of a judge, but these are forms

that are filled out, right? It is not the same early aspect as a warrant, unless a judicial warrant. The Republican counterproposals so far have shown pretty little common ground on this aside from overbody cameras where Noam did implement

body cameras. As I said, ICE and CBP will continue doing what they do, right? I was at the border on Saturday, and I saw tons of CBP patrols. They do not seem to have slowed down with their wall construction. That may, over time, slow down. They won't be paying, like, the workers week by week on those contracts. They will be paying a contractor who might be paying a subcontractor, so that would take time to slow down. The things that will slow down are things like the oversight functions at DHS, potentially administrative and hiring functions, things like that, right? But the actual, like, on the ground patrolling, most of those people are deemed as essential

workers. So it seems unlikely that we will see, for instance, fewer CBP patrols at the border or fewer ERO-ISRA agents, like tasked with doing these ongoing raids. So, yeah, talking about DHS, I want to talk a little bit more about. the Coast Guard. I think it's likely that some people won't be aware that the Coast Guard is an element of the DHS. They're also a branch of the military, they're the only branch of the military that's under the DHS. Yes. So they're considered veterans, but they're not under the DoD or the DOW, as you can now call it. The NBC has a piece suggesting that there is, I guess, a split in the

Coast Guard between lower ranks and higher ranks. And specifically, they're talking about feeling that Coast Guard is moving away from its core mission, which is search and rescue. They highlight one incident in February of last year when a Coast Guardsman went overboard, and a Coast Guard C-130 was detailed to participate in the search for that Coast Guardsman, right? It had previously been detailed for a deportation flight, but it was retasked to assist with the search. According to the piece, quote, Noam verbally instructed the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, to pull the plane off the search and rescue mission so it would not miss the immigrant flight

of part of DHS's so-called alien expulsion operations, according to two U.S. officials and the Coast Guard official. As a result, what happened is that local Coast Guard officials in San Diego scrambled to find two C-27s that could fulfill that deportation flight in doing so that freed up the C-130 to then go return to participate in the search, right? They did continue searching, I believe for 190 hours, but they never found the missing Coast Guardsman, right? You cannot and will never be able to conclusively prove that all of this back and forth with this C-130 had any impact on that, but this incident has clearly had an impact on morale. And it suggested general shift in priorities away from search and rescue and towards doing more border

enforcement, right? Under Nome, 750 flights have been redirected for their regular work to instead deport migrants. this comes after she removed a high-ranking Coast Guard official from her house so that no could live at the house. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. Hold on, she kicked the Coast Guard person out of their house? Yeah, this was last year.

What? She moved with like very short notice. She moved onto a... Holy shit! Yeah, she moved onto a base. I miss this. Yeah. With Lewandowski, right?

That might be the case goes. There was like a few people in like the, the... cabinet or orbit. Yes, yes. I thought you meant like they were cohabiting. Oh, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah, okay. Beautiful domestic life. Yeah, okay. I was, I was, I don't want to doubt you, but that would have been a news to me. Yes, a number of Trump's, like executive officials, are living on bases more than as usual. I think the millers maybe do as well, but yeah. She also purchased two Gulfstream jets to fly her around. Unlike most government jets, which tend to be return to what's called a sterile state after use. That just means that they go back to being

completely clean. They're like a generic jet. They're not your jet. Nome prefers to keep some personal items aboard the Gulf Streams, but one of these items, a heated blanket was left behind after her jet broke down and she had to switch planes. Coelhoendowski reportedly shouted at the Coast Guard flight staff and demanded they turn around before attempting to fire the pilot who refused to do so. Jesus Christ! I need my blankie. I need my blankie. Turn around.

Yeah, I think she'd had a rough week, I guess, wanted the blanket. These are absolutely just like the softest fascist that have ever ruled a country. Like, turn off plight around because I left my baby blanket. Yeah, right? Like, oh, God. Fortunately, I guess they de-escalated that one.

And it continued to flight blanket free. You're going to fire in the pipe? Yeah, I think it is interesting to look at Coast Guard's morale, right? Coast Guard's traditional mission has been search and rescue and then the interdiction of, like, drug vessels. And they have been doing a great deal of border enforcement stuff and removal stuff. And it is obviously, like, people who have been at Coast Guard for a long time, not what they joined the Coast Guard to do. I will just say that there are very few areas in which the United Kingdom has worked shit out, but the lifeboats are one of them.

They are mentioned in mutual aid. The Royal National Lifeboat Institute has an article on Kropkin on their website. Incredible. And it is one of the really genuinely good things about Britain. By contrasting they are not part of our government security apparatus. Yeah, because that makes no sense. The entire agency of DHS makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah.

It's just, yeah, there are better ways to do this. I mean, it makes, again, it makes a lot of sense as the president's private army. Yeah. For our final segment in this episode, some tragic news. On Monday afternoon, February 16th, two people were killed in a shooting at a hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, before the shooter died by suicide. Three others were shot, but survived their injuries. In the aftermath of the tragedy, people across the right and the left have both used this shooting offensively and defensively in the culture war because of the shooter's gender identity and

far-right conspiratorial politics, even though evidence points towards this being targeted domestic violence. The deceased or the shooter's ex-wife and eldest son, and the deceased ex-wife's parents were critically wounded but survived, as did a family friend. The shooter's other son was on the ice playing hockey while the shooting took place. Ordinarily, we would not talk about an incident like this in the news because there's a lot of domestic violence shootings

that happen across the United States every week and not all of them become national news stories. This is news because of its weaponization in the political culture war. But under most methodologies, like this incident would not even be categorized as a mass shooting. Yeah.

Because less than four people died. It does qualify under the gun violence archive criteria, which counts injuries, not deaths, in which this would be the 41st shooting in the U.S. this year. But after the shooting took place, right-wing accounts and influences started using this as a part of their trans mass shooter narrative. On Monday night, the Pawtucket Police said that they believed the shooting stemmed from a family dispute. The shooter was 56 years old with six kids. About 10 years ago, the shooter started identifying as a transgender woman and used the name

Roberta Espicito. The legal last name is Dorgan. They're not Hispanic. Oh. Uh-huh. The shooter was divorced about five to six years ago. Dorgan's ex-wife

lists the grounds for divorce in the documents as, quote, gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic, and personality disorder traits. Then she crossed that out and instead wrote, quote, irrevocable differences which caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage, unquote.

The shooter was extremely active on Twitter, made anti-Semitic and conspiratorial posts, and frequently interacted with a large assortment of mega influencers, as well as far-right neo-Nazi and conspiracy theory influencers like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones. Dorgan also shared pictures of a massive, like Essie. tautenkov tattoo on their right arm. Yeah. And wrote on Twitter, quote, post-op trans to the right of Hitler.

And quote, you can be pro-LGB and pro-Trump, unquote. From looking through their Twitter, it mostly appears to be someone who is suffering from extreme mental distress. It's hard to, you know, chart how much of the political beliefs that can be displayed on the Twitter are, like, genuinely held, versus how much they relate to longstanding mental health issues

this person suffered from, which I'll get into in a sec. I'm still a little hung up on the name. The name also, I think, relates to just this person's very, very not well. Okay, they're just trying to piss people off, like with... Correct. I think everything about this person can be seen as an expression of like antisociality.

Yeah, I'm just trying to... Politics, their presentation, the name. Now, while right-wing news agencies and influencers have used this horrifying incident of domestic violence for their trans-mash-shooter narrative, framing every trans person as at risk of randomly becoming a mass killer, while ignoring this shooter's own extremist politics. People on the left have blamed this tragedy

on the shooter being a, quote-unquote, far-right Trump supporter, or a, quote-unquote, Nazi grope. And this is in part a defensive reaction against the rights zone, like, misleading and non-sourced claims about a statistical epidemic of trans violence. But laying blame on Make America Great Again and the MAGA movement

doesn't really get us much closer to understanding this violence. We're so used to defaulting to this partisan culture war like ideological explanation for the cause of public violence, whether that's, you know,

for the right trans ideology or neo-Nazism. Even though both in this case and the shooting in Canada last week, which I talked about a few days ago on the show, this was like antisocial, unstable and self-destructive individuals who killed family members and then created a deadly public situation

leading them to kill themselves. Despite Nazi tattoos and Twitter posts, this hockey game shooting was not ideologically motivated violence. This was targeted interpersonal violence against family stemming from extreme mental health issues. This goes beyond right-left politics. This shooter just seemed to be drawn to anything seen as extreme or anything that produced

to anti-social effects. The daughter of the shooter briefly spoke to local news on Monday, saying that the shooter was her father and that the shooter had, quote-unquote, mental health issues and was, quote, unquote, very sick. The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence said in a statement Monday night, quote, while details are still emerging, we know that violence within families and intimate relationships can have devastating and far-reaching impacts. Domestic violence does not stay behind closed doors. It affects children, extended family members and entire communities, unquote. Yeah.

I mean, I guess if you want to do analysis of it, it's that, like, the thing that's actually a predictive for violence is domestic violence, and this is another really horrible domestic violence incident. But... Yeah, it's pretty tragic. Yeah. Interestingly, there was some news that came out today, which was Wednesday, that one of the other sons of this shooter was arrested a few years ago,

in North Providence for setting fires to a black church which did appear to be ideologically motivated violence. Police found notebooks inside of this person's home, filled with hateful writings, quote, gunned down everyone that isn't white. If one is white, spread the gospel,

always give our bloodline a chance, unquote. So this incident of arson in a black church is definitely ideologically motivated. Yeah, it's no good. extremely normal country. This person was sentenced to six years in prison. Oh, wow.

So the person, that's the son of the... The son of the shooter. One of the sons of the shooter. Yeah, because they had several sons. Yeah. Just a pretty tragic series of incidents with this family. I do find it really disturbing that... The thing that you mentioned,

where people just kind of drop into a channel when it comes to responding to a tragedy like this. I find it really upsetting when I see it from, like, like left and progressive organizations that promote firearms training or like I I just find it really kind of disappointing I guess to see people dropping into these same kind of callous and dismissive responses yeah it's just something that's been weighing on me recently like I am a person who owns guns but it's still I don't know I'm disappointed I guess yeah all right well we reported the news put a track

Girl on your couch. Yeah. And if you have some news that you think we should report some tips, you can do so by emailing Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. Do you have someone that you would like to be a guest on our show or a topic that you think Robert should cover from behind the bastards? We will make another email for that. But you could just not email the tip line.

If you're a publicist and you email, I will block you. 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, coolzonemedia.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.

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