It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 221

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, it's Joe Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change. Dance with the breakdowns.

Starting point is 00:00:22 The embodiment of Pisces' intuition with Capricorn power moves. So I'm like delusionally proud of my charge. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would.

Starting point is 00:00:50 That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young.

Starting point is 00:01:08 Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? Abel has to be made to fit. You look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh, my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:01:45 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Starting point is 00:02:24 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 Dick Adapit here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. And I'd be here once a most acute places where everything is falling apart and one of the most acute attempts to put it back together again. We're just going to get right into it with me to talk about a potential Brent Strike that there is significant organization going on for right now in Minneapolis as a reaction to

Starting point is 00:03:08 the federal occupation is Tara Raghavir, the director of the Tenant Union Federation. Tara, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Mia. So, okay, let's rewind a little bit. Can you talk a bit about what the specific conditions of the occupation and also just sort of the preoccupation world for tenants got us to a point where there is, essentially the largest registrate we've seen in a century being organized right now. Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, thank you so much for having me. And I am recording live from

Starting point is 00:03:42 the Twin Cities, where we've been in a really intense organizing drive now for many weeks. And of course, the people of the Twin Cities have very ferociously fought back against this federal occupation for nearly three months. But I appreciate your question, because I think actually to take us back a little bit is critical to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in now. So the first and most basic thing to say is the rent is too damn high. Yep. People cannot afford the rent in any corner of the country. You know, it's been true for many years now that a person earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any American county, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural. And as our rents go up, the conditions of

Starting point is 00:04:28 homes get worse. So what we have taken a saying these days is that we're paying higher rents than we've ever paid for the worst conditions we've ever endured. And I know you know that as a tenant and as a former tenant organizer, but so many of our people are living this reality every day. And, you know, I organize, I'm based in Missouri and I help to found and organize with Casey tenants. And increasingly we're organizing tenants in places like Raytown, Missouri on the outskirts of Kansas City. And the stakes are so high. And I really want to make sure listeners are aware of this. All of us are aware of it. But just to put a fine point on it, when you get priced out of a place like Chicago, you might end up in a place like Kansas City. When you get priced out of Kansas City,

Starting point is 00:05:13 you might end up in a place like Raytown, Missouri. When you get priced out of Raytown, Missouri, there is no place else to go. And you're just stuck renting from the landlords of last resort, the people who are very keen to exactly how desperate the tenant condition is today. And then they exploit that by keeping us living in filth and hiking the rents at every turn. So that's some of the context that brings us into this moment. And that will be the context underlying every crisis following this one. And I think that's a really important thing to note because the story I'm about to tell you about what's gone on here is then also a story of possibility. about what might go on in every crisis that we encounter from this point on.

Starting point is 00:05:59 So we started organizing a tenant union, a Twin Citieswide tenant union at the end of January. And the reason for that is that the tenants of the Twin Cities had essentially been organizing unions for the two months preceding that as a way of fighting ice. Every building has a group chat right now. Every building has someone distributing whistles and zines. so that people get information about how to spot ice, what to do of ICE is there, people are organizing mutual aid to take care of their neighbors. That is essentially the work of a tenant union.

Starting point is 00:06:34 So all we've done in the last couple of weeks is add some kind of structure and formality to the way that tenants have already gotten organized under this federal occupation. Could I ask a quick question here about how the sort of citywide federation came together? Yeah. Because that's something I've seen attempted before, but it, is pretty difficult. Yeah. It's a great question.

Starting point is 00:06:58 And I think this won't surprise you that in a moment of crisis, it's actually easier than in other circumstances, unfortunately, to get people organized. So a process that might have otherwise taken months to sort of align all the various entities organizing tenants in the Twin Cities took a matter of four and a half days. That's astonishing. Yeah. I have ever seen anything like this move.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Right. And that's not to say it was easy, right? It took a lot. And, you know, it took a lot from us as the Tenant Union Federation, but more to the point, it took a lot from tenants here who have been organizing in their own formations for many months preceding this crisis. So there's a local organization we're working with called Inculino-Sunitos. They've been organizing for 10 years.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And they have a base of mostly Latino and Somali tenants. all across the city. Then there's a crew that's been organizing in South Minneapolis, the South Minneapolis Tenants Union. Then there's tenants who have been organizing in St. Paul. Then there's tenants who have been organizing autonomously in their properties and forming tenant associations and marching on the landlord. So what we tried to do as quickly as possible was kind of assemble all of these forces and really focus ourselves on the project of building something that was bigger than some of its parts that could create the potential for enduring power out of this moment. And the thing that we said in those four and a half days of sprint,

Starting point is 00:08:27 as we tried to assemble this force, is the tenant union is good for protection today and power tomorrow. So this is just an experiment, right? We actually don't know what's going to come of this, but it's an experiment that I personally feel extremely invested in. Yeah. Because I, like you, have lived through many moments of uprising and activation in the last several years. And unfortunately, more often than not, that uprising and that activation eventually evaporates. And the tenant union offers one potential vehicle to hold some of that activation into the future and to channel it into real and enduring power. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:09 There's another aspect of this before we get into what's happening right now that I was really interested in, which is how did the sort of connections and organizational bonds with labor unions start happening? Because that's another really cool feature of this that's pretty unique. Yeah, totally unprecedented. And even I, my mind is kind of blown, right? A sort of contextual piece that's important is that the people of Minnesota are built different. There's a longstanding alignment, partnership, relationship among organized labor

Starting point is 00:09:46 and between labor and community organizations here that, sort of doesn't have a comparison anywhere else in the country. And I might be speaking out of turn, but I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen this depth of alignment among organized labor between labor and community. And so that context is really important to understand, because then I think in this moment of crisis, labor is much more open to a call from community groups and from tenants, then they might be in other types of situations. So, you know, we really leaned on the local relationship and the depth of relationship between groups like Inculinusonitos and these, like, labor tables that have existed. And, you know, further important context is like groups like SCIU Local 26

Starting point is 00:10:38 were leading the call for this general strike day on January 23rd. And there was this incredible table of labor leadership that came together to sort of lead that day. Can you explain for our listeners, when you're talking about like a labor table, can you explain what that is? Yeah, I mean, essentially, as far as I understand it, there's just a really regular conversation that labor leaders are having together. And these days, I think more often than not, it's not just labor, it's labor. And then they've pulled in partners from community groups and tenant unions and some of the

Starting point is 00:11:15 like resistance formations as well. And that also is remarkable, right? I'm saying this as though it's just kind of like, you know, fact of the matter. It's amazing that labor leadership in a context like this is in touch enough that they understand who's leading some of the decentralized autonomous resistance work and is not only aware of that, but pulling them into these kinds of war rooms that are now existing and, you know, they're talking on an almost daily basis as far as I understand it. So the ask moved pretty quickly. I think we brought a vision and a strategy to some of the closest

Starting point is 00:11:53 labor partners. And their willingness to join in on the strike drive comes from an intense clarity about the stakes for their members. Any of these unions include membership that cannot make the rent on March 1st. And so they're not taking this lightly, right? This is a big risk. They're sticking their necks out for something that is a total moon shot. We don't know whether or not we're going to be able to pull it off. But what we know is we needed to try for some additional leverage that we didn't have a couple days ago. Yeah. I'm astonished by effectively every part of this because every fourth thing you say is like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. But yeah, how fast this came together is astonishing the willingness and speed with which labor is mobilizing. And

Starting point is 00:12:54 is sort of is astonishing and yeah I don't know this is this is really cool yeah and I guess the next thing I wanted to ask about outside of sort of the how did this organization come together is what are the specific demands being made yeah so there's three main demands related to the strike drive one is ice out and a part of that that I feel like you'll be interested in is ICE is and the federal government is pretending that the reason for the invasion is economic. They're like, this is an economic intervention. ICE is here to fix the economy by deporting a bunch of people who are taking your jobs. Part of what we're trying to do is highlight what is the reality, which is that ice is bad

Starting point is 00:13:46 for the economy. ICE has devastated the economy. We're trying to heighten that contradiction between what they say. say they're here to do and what is actually occurring. And so we will demonstrate if we authorize a strike what actual economic disruption looks like if tenants exercise their economic power. So that's one thing. Ice out. Ice fully out. There's all this talk about a drawdown now, but there's still ICE agents here kidnapping people on a daily basis. The second thing is a statewide eviction moratorium. And this has been a demand for the last two and a half, nearly three

Starting point is 00:14:23 months, the governor has not moved on it. The state legislature has not moved on it. Eviction court is running, quote, unquote, as normal during a time, well, there are 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So demand number two is end evictions, no evictions under federal occupation, and frankly, not for a long time until something resembling real recovery is possible. And then demand number three is real rent relief. And the real is important here, because it's not enough just to get tens of millions of dollars that we would then be expected to apply for and turn around and give to the landlord. So when we say real rent relief, we mean tens of millions of dollars that come with strings attached. If landlords benefit from what is effectively a bailout

Starting point is 00:15:10 because of how bad ice is for the economy, then they should be accountable to a higher standard of tenant protections. So one, ice out, two, eviction moratorium, three, rent relief. are fairly moderate demands, and they remind me a lot of a series of both demands and also just the way that policy works between the initial parts of the pandemic, where there were a lot in a lot of cases, there actually were like eviction moratoriums that, you know, were never enforced as strictly as the letter of what they said, but was a thing that was implemented in conditions where suddenly people just literally couldn't work because massive external. force. Totally. Yeah, a lot of what we're working with right now is groundwork that was laid during the

Starting point is 00:16:00 COVID-19 eviction crisis or the early years of it, right? The bill that we introduced in the state legislature this week is literally modeled after the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act that we wrote back in 2020 to try to get rents and mortgages canceled when people couldn't go to work and couldn't leave the house because of the pandemic. And I think that's actually an important thing. Again, to keep in mind because crises like this will continue happening under today's conditions, right? We're hurtling towards deep and encompassing authoritarianism. There's escalating climate catastrophe. We're going to be in this situation much more frequently and at higher degrees of stress pretty much for the rest of our lives. So it's good, actually, for us to start learning

Starting point is 00:16:50 from the work that we did five years ago and applying it here to like borrow and steal from our past selves to build from something rather than start from scratch. I wish we didn't live under these types of, you know, cascading crisis. But that's the situation we're in. And I've been feeling so often in the last month that the only touch point in my life I have to this moment is the early months of the pandemic. Yeah. And I think that gets at the depth, seriousness of the crisis in a way that I feel like is not understood outside of Minneapolis. I mean, I think, you know, like my connections, I'm from Chicago, my connections in Chicago, there was a lot of that experience. But even in Chicago, it was kind of, there were places that

Starting point is 00:17:39 were like that, and then you could go like three neighborhoods over and everything was sort of operating normally for the most part until the next sort of raids came. And that, I feel, I feel, like, I don't know, it seems to me from listening to you talk about this, that that's been the catalyzing force for all of this is that it is just constant crisis everywhere. Yeah. And I think you're right that people outside of the Twin Cities maybe don't understand the depths of the devastation, but just to put a fine point on it, conservative estimates show over $47 million in lost wages among people who have not been safe to go to work in the last three months. Yeah. $47 million in lost

Starting point is 00:18:20 wages. I just had a conversation with a dad yesterday whose kids go to a school where there are 80 families where the parents have not been safe to go to work. They haven't been safe to take their own children to school. And so the other parents in the school have been organizing support around them for the last two months. And they just did a round of calls through all those families this week. None of them can make March rent. Right. So even if we're living under a supposed drawdown, The crisis is still so alive. And I think that's also why you see organized labor lining up alongside us in this strike drive. They know, like, Local 26 has 200 members that cannot make the rent on March 1st.

Starting point is 00:19:05 So I think that that sort of like economic side of this story is not really known, felt, or understood outside of the Twin Cities right now. But everyone here knows and feels it because they've turned their lives inside out for the last three months. to organize millions of dollars in mutual aid. But here's the thing is we cannot go fund me our way out of this scale of emergency. Yeah. It requires state intervention. And that's what we're calling for. I want to come back to that, that 47 million number for a second.

Starting point is 00:19:37 Because I think when we hear numbers like that, we're used to hearing them in the context of, you know, state agencies or multi-billion dollar companies. And this is not that. this is not a situation where these people have billions of dollars and you're losing some fraction of that. This is something where every single one of those dollars matters so acutely. It's not $47 million coming from Google. It's $47 million coming from people like you. And that is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis. Yeah. It's a huge crisis and one that kind of ludicrously, leaders at the state and city level have suggested that everyday people should solve.

Starting point is 00:20:29 $47 million for everyday people is enormous. You know, through extraordinary efforts, the people of the Twin Cities have organized something in the neighborhood of $6 million in rental assistance for their own neighbors, like mutual aid style. Yeah. $47 million or $50 million, $75 million is nothing for the state to. figure out, right? At the city level, there's, you know, something to the tune of $60 million pot that's funded through sales taxes that goes into the maintenance of the downtown infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:21:01 They pulled some of that money just this past week to support small businesses. Yeah. What about the people, right? What about the people who have had to scrounge together what they can to take care of themselves, dip into their savings, put together funds to take care of their neighbors, that can't continue like that forever. And it's ludicrous that they've been asked to do that until now. So, you know, the strike drive is really about making that point in public that the state needs to intervene. We need solutions. We need some level of commitment from the state, the governor, the state legislature, and from the cities in order to protect people to keep them in their homes for now and to make them whole in the long run.

Starting point is 00:21:57 I think the other element of this, too, and something that I remember dealing with doing tenant organizing, is that on a very basic level, this is the most brutal possible time that you can be evicted. It is February right now. It is going to be early March, which is whether that can just kill you. And on top of that, on sort of political level, we're very used to talking about eviction as like a kind of process that we're used to happening. but it's like, no, we're sending a bunch of people out into whether that will kill them and then also just into the arms of a federal occupation. And it's the only metaphors I could think of is it's like, yeah, you're evicting people into the hands of the Gestapo, which is one of the most evil things that can even possibly be contemplated.

Starting point is 00:22:46 Yeah. And yet it's just what business as usual has been. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to even find the words to describe, the evil. And as you said, it's not dissimilar to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic before there was a vaccine. Eviction courts and states like mine in Missouri were just open. Yeah. You know, the courts were open in my county starting in May of 2020, a full year before we had a vaccine. And people were being evicted into the streets during a time when we were told to stay home in order to protect ourselves and our neighbors from a deadly virus. So it's a really

Starting point is 00:23:23 similar thing. You know, the quote-unquote business as usual of state sanctioned violence, and every eviction is an act of violence, the sort of normalcy and the mundanity of that violence is practiced every day and in front of our eyes right now. And I think that point about mundanity is important to draw out, right? Because I think what we've seen in the Twin Cities in the last three months is really visible in your face state violence as the ice agents have come and pepper sprayed and beat people up and of course shot and killed people as well. The day-to-day violence of eviction is actually harder to mobilize people around because it's so boring. It's so bureaucratic. It's so taken for granted that the state treats us like this, that the state exists to

Starting point is 00:24:15 protect property over people and their lives and their needs. And that's an interesting thing to think about in this moment, too, where there may or may not be a drawdown of the federal agents, but the longstanding economic impacts of this invasion are here. And it'll be an interesting test of people's solidarity and focus and endurance to continue showing up in the months after the agents go away. Assuming they do, which is also Yeah. Yeah. Assuming they go away, right? But I, you know, I have faith. I have more faith than I've ever had in my life that the people of the Twin Cities who have so righteously fought this invasion are showing up and will continue to show up even after a time when the agents are gone, assuming that happens. And that's a critical test. That will be a turning point because we live in a world where this mundane violence actually does happen all the time, even outside of crisis. Yeah, and the ability to turn the sort of rupture in these moments of crisis into an actual change to the way that everything works. I think to some extent is the thing that we failed to do after 2020 and is the thing that sort of, you know, the foreclosing of the possibilities of the uprising and of the mutual aid from the pandemic is what allowed the sort of monsters that rule our world today to sort of tear the,

Starting point is 00:25:44 their way through. Yeah, exactly. So I know that you have to go very soon. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know and are there ways that people outside of the Twin Cities can support you all? Yeah, absolutely. We are running phone banks now through March 1st to increase our numbers for the strike drive. So depending on when this airs, it would be amazing for folks to join those phone banks. They can sign up at twin citiestenants.org. There's a link to sign up to join the phone banks. Tenants, wherever they are, should get organized and should get trained by the tenant union federation.

Starting point is 00:26:23 We've got our big union school training. It's a virtual three-month training coming up this summer. There will be more information to come on our socials and our website in the next couple of weeks and months. And they should follow along. People should follow along on social media. We're learning a lot. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:39 And we're going to be sharing a lot of those lessons in public. And I think an important note to end on, perhaps, is that this is not a vibes-based organizing drive. This is not social media only. We're believers that words mean things. And when we say we're running a strike drive, we mean that shit. So we're running a really intensive organizing effort. That may or may not work. You know, we are trying.

Starting point is 00:27:05 We're trying something big and unprecedented. And part of that attempt and part of that attempt and part of the, our seriousness is also acting with extraordinary discipline. So we will not authorize a strike if we are anything less than ready to be on strike, depending on the situation with our demands and whether or not they're met. People should stay tuned because I think in the way that this plays out, we will also be modeling some of what we're learning in real time around what it takes to exercise both vision and strategy and discipline as a collective in this kind of new territory. Yeah, and this is quite frankly one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to cover on this show, those fucking rocks.

Starting point is 00:27:49 Love it. And yeah, I hope it goes well for you all and I hope you fucking win. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Mia. Of course. Thank you for coming on. And yeah, to everyone else out there, I don't know, I was just some random college kid when I started doing this.

Starting point is 00:28:04 So you too can do tenants organizing and you two can do incredible things when the moment calls for it. 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.

Starting point is 00:28:40 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives.

Starting point is 00:29:15 and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chartside view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, This episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Starting point is 00:29:55 In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain. a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.

Starting point is 00:30:24 I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, doubt the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single. single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Lettby, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

Starting point is 00:30:52 you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rows rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after? after the show made even bigger headlines.

Starting point is 00:31:17 It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant.

Starting point is 00:31:33 This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast where Robert Evans is slightly adjusting the levels on his microphone because I am in New Orleans traveling. And with my friend and city resident and former guest of the pod, Carl Casarda.

Starting point is 00:32:20 Carl, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Robert. It's great to be back. I mean, we've done a few episodes in the past on different podcasts, and it's always, I don't want to say a treat, but it's good to work with you because some of the topics, of course, are pretty rough. Yeah, and you and I have talked, I think primarily in our previous episodes about both, like, digital security and then guns. Like, we've talked about people getting into shooting. We've talked about, like, kind of what's responsible and irresponsible when it comes to training and firearms advice. And today we're kind of starting by talking about guns in a different context, which is the fact that,

Starting point is 00:32:54 specifically they are often used as an excuse by law enforcement, like the fear of some, the fear or the reality of some men being armed as an excuse for killing them, right? We can talk about the killing of Philando Castile in July of 2016, who was a black man who was stopped by the police and a legal license concealed carryholder and was shot during that traffic stop because the officer panicked. But the case that's right now on people's minds is the case of Alex Prettie, who was killed by Border Patrol earlier this year. was wearing a gun during a confrontation, but he was just filming. They stripped him of his weapon, and they shot and executed him in a case that has actually drawn criticism from gun rights organizations

Starting point is 00:33:36 towards the Trump administration, which doesn't happen often. But I think the kind of point you brought up when you and I started talking about this was that what happened to Preti, you know, not only can you go back to other cases where law enforcement have shot people legally concealed carrying, as we talked about with Castile, but this is not a thing that is the result of the escalation of, of the Trump administration's use of Border Patrol and ICE, this is a longstanding behavior that Border Patrol agents have exercised and been exercising elsewhere for years. Like what happened to Preti is novel because he was a white guy in the middle of Minneapolis,

Starting point is 00:34:09 but it's not awful because Border Patrol shot and killed somebody and then justified it by saying he had a gun. Yeah, it's Border Patrol and really by that extension of all law enforcement in the U.S. because there's so many examples, it's almost hard to draw out just one or two. You can go on forever for this, but there's some real problem. ones that make a lot of sense. In fact, even here in New Orleans, right after Katrina, there were a family that were crossing a bridge trying to just recover some water and supplies. And a bunch of law enforcement officers jumped into unmarked vehicles, ran over on a bridge,

Starting point is 00:34:38 jumped out and with unauthorized guns, including AKs, unloaded on them. And it was called the Danziger Bridge shootings. I have a video on the channel about it. And this is where this gets relevant. They not only shot them, they chased them down from a moving vehicle and killed them in their back with a shotgun while he was running away. But they used the pretense of them being armed, even though they were not, by dropping drop guns and calling them ham sandwiches. So again, the pretext of there were guns, therefore we're allowed to kill them, is just an example of that right there. Yeah, and this is really interesting because first off, you get the gun rights people, or at least a chunk of the conservative gun rights people who will come out whenever someone

Starting point is 00:35:13 actually is carrying a gun. But the fact that this happens so much more often where the police just kill someone and say, because we thought they had a gun, is also, I mean, it's a human rights issue, But it is a Second Amendment issue, right? You've got this weird dichotomy. We're on the right, the existence of the second. Because it's often said that, like, oh, the presence of a gun, even though you have the Second Amendment means the police can kill you. But the reality is that the existence of guns in the country means that the police have

Starting point is 00:35:41 the ability to justify killing. And Border Patrol has the ability to justify killing someone for no reason. Which it really brings up a really interesting question because, I mean, the Second Amendment is literally the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is, now, we're right enshrined directly in the Constitution. It's the first is freedom of speech and the second one is the right to carry and bear arms. And so if that is a constitutional right, even in instances where you see like Alex Breddy, who is a legally licensed CCW holder, still can be killed with essentially no justice being delivered for their actions, raises a very interesting question about how is a right, a right,

Starting point is 00:36:14 when they can kill you for the presence of a gun, even when it's legally possessed and not even being used in a offensive manner, like even if it's just on you or they think there's one there. suddenly they can kill you and nothing comes of it. And that's the case with so many instances. I got a few more here if you want. Like Daniel Schaver, this is one in Mesa. This is not Border Patrol, but it's still law enforcement. It has the precedent of the problem.

Starting point is 00:36:34 2016, he was a Texas exterminator. He was traveling through Arizona and he was up in his hotel room and someone on the street saw him or thought they saw him messing with a firearm. Turned out it was like a pellet gun or something. He used to shoot rats. But they rolled up. They called him out of his room and in the very horrific video of screaming at him

Starting point is 00:36:51 and giving very inconsistent commands, along with another gun that was illegally modified, at least not authorized to be modified, where the dust cover on the Air 15 said, you're fucked on it. They unloaded on him while he was crawling on his hands and he was begging for his life, literally begging for his life in the video. And again, really nothing came of it. In fact, the officer that shot him landed up getting back on the force just long enough to give him essentially a life pension for the trauma he received for killing the man.

Starting point is 00:37:16 So the presence or the perceived presence of a firearm justified them killing him while was crawling on his hands and knees. You know, we've talked about the warrior cop ethos and guys like Colonel Grossman who have helped to inculcate this idea in law enforcement that you are in like dire threat of immediate death every second of every day as like a sworn law enforcement officer. And thus you have to react like this, right? Like you have to, you have to react immediately with lethal force. The instance of someone like reaches into a pocket or I can tell you how many times at protests,

Starting point is 00:37:47 I can remember one really clear time from 2020 where I was with a. group of people. They were promising to arrest all of us. And I was kind of talking to the police officer basically being like, look, per the mayor's most recent orders, like, we are allowed to be out here. Anyway, it was a whole thing. But one of the protesters who was just kind of standing behind me very nervous, like reached into his pocket. I don't know what it was to get a phone. And all of the officers tensed up. And I had to like, don't fucking go like keep your hands visible, man. Like we're standing in front of a bunch of, and you shouldn't have to do that, right? Putting your hands in your pocket shouldn't be a justification for a man pulling a gun and blowing you away with the authority

Starting point is 00:38:24 of the state behind him. But the reality of this situation is that like whenever I am talking to police officers, I keep my hands in front of me and fucking visible. Yeah, it's produced a situation in which regular American citizens, or we'll get into this too, the Tihona Otam Reservation members, Indian members, members of the tribe, you have to be as a civilian trained how to interact with these very dangerous people who have been given a ideology of like killology. You mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, who actually never shot on anyone himself, but was one of the seed crystals of this training mentality in which he espoused, don't be afraid to shoot. Not only thing that's going to happen is you might get sued, but don't worry about getting sued. It just gives you a little

Starting point is 00:39:02 break and some time off the force until you get it cleared. He's on video saying this stuff. And that mentality so imbued into all of the law enforcement agencies now presents a problem where the legal right of having a firearm is, I'd say, very questionable that it's a right when they have all authorization to kill you for the thought or presence of a gun. And it shouldn't be civilians, just regular people, that have to be trained how to deal with these dangerous agents of the state because they're the ones that are indoctrinated into this fear mindset when we're afraid too at this point because they can kill you and nothing seems to come of it. I think the thing when we were chatting about this kind of behind the scenes that you brought up

Starting point is 00:39:40 that was really interesting to me to emphasize was the degree to which this is not a training problem, right? This is not a lack of training problem. You hear a a lot on the kind of more moderate Democrat side of things about how, like, we need to be retraining these agents and that, like, the murder of Renee Good, the murder of Alex Pruddy is the result of, like, bad training on behalf of Border Patrol. And it's kind of part of this whole rogue agency thing. You get with Border Patrol and ICE that, like, because of the Trump administration and how they've flooded it with bad recruits and how they're not getting properly trained, that's why things have been so deadly. And when you look at the history of how Border Patrol has

Starting point is 00:40:15 worked on things like the Tihonimo Reservation. What you see is a whole bunch of cases that sound a lot like what happened to Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They're just not happening to white people in Minneapolis, right? Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of people who haven't had the experience of living near the border

Starting point is 00:40:31 because I also spend a lot of my life in Arizona near Tucson and therefore the Tihona Autumn Reservations right there and therefore have some insight into the things that go on right there near the border. And this is not new. The thing that's new is that it's being extended across the country and now into internal spaces, but the policies and the way the Border Patrol and

Starting point is 00:40:49 ICE have acted is by no means a new standard. For example, not only with firearms, but there are instances, at least two instances, if not more, in which there's verified video of Border Patrol agents intentionally swerving their vehicles to hit tribal members. It's on footage, not only car footage, but footage of the cell phone, being struck, one instance at least they were killed, another instance, they were hurt, and with that footage, even though it very clearly, the car swerved to hit them, nothing came of it. So it's hard to not see that there's something going on here. I don't think this is a training thing. I don't think they're training them to run over people, but there's some cultural maliciousness that's imbued into some of this that's hard to ignore.

Starting point is 00:41:27 Another example of that was in 2023. There was a T.O. member, Raymond Matia, that he was called for supposedly there was gunfire herd. And so Border Patrol shows up. And he's in front of his house. And he reached for his cell phone in his pocket, much like you just described. again, wow, there's a recurring theme here. And he was shot nine times, 38 rounds fired, killed. He had no gun on him. He was just a T.L. member, and therefore, it didn't really make any press.

Starting point is 00:41:53 Again, you see, this is a qualified immunity problem, right? And it does go back to that. And there's been some talk of, like, if you're going with the reforming ice rather than the abolishing thing, which is, you know, certainly something a lot of Democrats talk about. Like, I've heard some discussion of, like, well, maybe removing qualified immunity, at least for Border Patrol and ICE. And it's so much bigger of a problem than that.

Starting point is 00:42:16 Like, I certainly, I will accept any reductions in qualified immunity for law enforcement because that's where a lot of this starts. But even without that, if these go to court, if the officer in that specific shooting had gone to court for that specific shooting, I think there's a very good, if not overwhelmingly likely chance that he would have just been able to argue as in fear of my life, right? Everyone knows how dangerous police officers' jobs are. course. You know, if you reach into a pocket around them, you're signing your own death warrant. And some of my problem with this is the degree to which Americans, and maybe this is starting to shift,

Starting point is 00:42:51 but things are as bad as they are because for a very long time, Americans were willing to go along with the idea that police officers' lives were so dangerous and their jobs were so important that almost any violence they meet out is justified by the danger that they exist in. And I want to talk more about that with you. But first, here's some ads. And we're back. Carl, I'm going to hand back to Mike to you and we're going to continue our discovery. That's the challenge that I see with all these. And these are just, again, a handful of examples of which there are so many you can't even enumerate them all.

Starting point is 00:43:33 I mentioned the Danziger Bridge shootings in which two men were killed and there was really no justice came for that, although there was long trials. And almost, almost someone got in trouble, but not really. They all eventually got out with very little justice. Daniel Schaver was killed in Mesa. That guy got pension. Philando Castile, nothing really came of that. Paulo Reams, the guy hit by the Border Patrol SUV, nothing came of that. Another example, while this was a protester, Tortugita in 2023 protesting Cop City,

Starting point is 00:44:01 was unloaded on in his tent where they said he had a firearm. Again, another similar example, 14 times and was killed in the process. Hey, everybody, Carl here, and an important update to the podcast. Once it was released, we quickly realized that there was a mistake embedded in it, and it really kind of lies on me. We recorded this the day after Mardi Gras. That's no excuse. We were both a little tired, but at the same time, we had a conversation in which we discussed.

Starting point is 00:44:27 Should we just remove this from the podcast entirely? Just snip it out. And both of us came to the same conclusion that it was too important to leave Tortugita's story in the podcast, because the reality is they're not talked about as much as they should be, and what happened to Tortugita matters very much, and it should be kept in the public consciousness, especially since the body cam footage has not been released. But in this, I mistakenly used the pronoun he and him, and Robert followed suit just because we were kind of recording together in that time of space,

Starting point is 00:44:59 and this was recorded very live and raw and real. But Tortugita, the queer indigenous activist that gave their life fighting against Cop City, went by they, them. So please accept my apology and our apology for this mistake in the podcast, But again, we wanted to leave it in because it was too important and too significant to tell Tortugita's story than it was to snip it out due to this mistake. So hopefully you'll understand and accept this disclaimer and apology for this mistake and realize that was, of course, not intentional. Thank you. There was a bunch of actual body cam footage that's never been released to the public.

Starting point is 00:45:39 But at the same time, the autopsy of him showed that his hands were up in the position he was in when he got hit with those multiple 14 rounds. but we don't even get to see the body cam footage. And there was audio where the cops at least implied that one of the cops shot one of the other cops and that's what instigated the shooting. It's the kind of thing that like we don't know what happened in the shooting of Tortugita, right? We simply don't know in part because they haven't released a lot of the information. And right now the burden of proof is on Tortugita in this case or people who think he was unjustly killed to prove that he didn't. shoot the officer as opposed to where I would argue the burden of proof should be, which is on the agents of the state who shot somebody, right? Like, if you were going to say this kid pulled a gun and

Starting point is 00:46:24 fired on you, I want the proof. And it's on you to give me the proof. And if you, the police, do not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were in fear for your life and being attacked when you used deadly force, my assumption is going to be that you murdered a guy. And I think that's how everyone should feel, right? Like, that should be how we treat police violence in any society. Not just the United States. I mean, if you're listening to this in the UK or Germany and you're a reasonable person, I would think that your attitude should be, yes, if a Bobby or whatever the Germans call their police, kills somebody, he should have to prove that he or she should have to prove that they were an immediate fear of their life.

Starting point is 00:47:03 Which is not so different from anybody else, right? I can think of one police shooting that I saw a video of spreading on Twitter where like a guy was literally like sprinting around in traffic with a gun, like pointing it at people in traffic and got shot and killed. by an officer. And I was like, look, if I'd had a gun and felt like I could take the shot, I might have shot that guy too, because he was harjacking people at gunpoint and pointing a firearm and they're like, yeah, that's the case in which maybe you have to shoot a guy because like, he could kill someone at any second, right? And I'm not going to judge a police officer for shooting in that instance, but I wouldn't judge a civilian either. I don't have a different standard for them.

Starting point is 00:47:38 If you are a cop or a civilian and somebody shoots at you, you have the right to defend yourself, right? But you also should expect to prove that they were trying to hurt you. This is the challenge I have with all this is like you said, in any instance, that's a self-defense shooting. And in many instances, law enforcement are put in a situation where they're not necessarily even defending themselves, but defending the community or others. And therefore, they have justification. I'm not to say, here to say that every law enforcement shooting is not justified, many of them are. But in the instances where there are questionable circumstances of which many we've just enumerated here, even instances in which they have

Starting point is 00:48:12 body cams on, which is supposed to be, would validate their actions, but they won't release it to the public to see it. It draws a very significant question of the validity of these events and what they're doing and why they're, I would say, no better way to say than hovering something up. In fact, going back to Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, there's a video of him talking about law enforcement, which of course extends to ICE and Border Patrol as the samurai of the land. And, you know, that reference isn't really a good one, because when you know what the samurai are, that's a disturbing statement. But in his mind, he's making this point that they have these tools that are for life and death and the right to essentially kill and referring to them as samurai.

Starting point is 00:48:47 And I think that mindset is sadly very much permeating the law enforcement agencies of this country. Yeah, it's the myth of the warrior cop. And I think one of my frustrations here stems from just as someone like you, I carry a firearm regularly. And I think a lot about what would happen if I had to use it. And I think about not just the practicality of like, okay, am I trained properly to use this thing competently, you know. But what would the order of operations need to be if somebody tries to kill me and I successfully kill or injure them with a firearm? Well, I'm going to need to call the police immediately. I'm going to need to contact a lawyer immediately.

Starting point is 00:49:24 I'm going to hope that there are eyewitnesses there. I'm going to hope and seek to provide as much evidence that I possibly can that I had no other choice to do what I was going to do, right? Any civilian carrying a firearm responsibly thinks about the same things, about like, if I am in a shooting, first of all, there's the question of I need to defend myself, but then there is immediately the question if I need to defend myself in court. And police don't have that second part. Not really. Not in a way that matters. And this to me is why the Alex Preti situation, which was so visibly documented by multiple cameras is such a concern. Because in this instance, we see two officers unload on the guy. One guy shoots him at least once or twice, and then another guy unloads on him again.

Starting point is 00:50:04 And we have multiple video angles, yet the narrative from them is that this guy was attacking them, which is clearly not the case on the video. I mean, you can look at it from multiple angles. Whether or not you agree with his protest methods, he was not attacking anyone. He was standing between them, getting pepper sprayed and being beaten with pepper spray can, and then getting unloaded on. And at the same time, we now live in this situation where at least some parts of the firearms community or gun community, which isn't a community, owning a thing isn't a community, but we use that term, gun community. Like you said, some of these rights groups have said something, but the response to this is still disturbing to me, because

Starting point is 00:50:38 there's a lot of people saying, well, don't show up to a protest with a gun. Don't be in public with a gun. You can't bring gun. In fact, we saw parts of the Trump administration saying, don't show up with a gun. This man had a handgun and two magazines on him looking for trouble. Well, if he was, he didn't have the gun out. And by the way, carrying a handgun with an extra magazine is by no means abnormal. In fact, that's a normal procedure for most people that concealed carry. If you and I were hanging out on the street and we decided that we got into a fight with some guy, you know, Sheila Bluff comes out of the bar and starts swinging on us. And then not only do we punch him and knock him to the ground, you shoot him, and then I shoot him nine more times. And there's video evidence of that. We're going to jail forever. But we have

Starting point is 00:51:17 footage of these guys doing this, and really nothing comes of it. Part of, like, what I really want to get across to people is how bog standard this behavior is. The agents that shot Prattie were experienced veterans. They were not newbies. They were not proud boys who just gotten inducted into the force, you know, and tasked with doing vigilante justice, they were sworn law enforcement officers with decorated careers, and they were acting the way the average cop expects people to act in a lot of situations, or at least at least a significant chunk of the law enforcement community expects police officers to be able to act, right? Like, I don't know that I think most police officers are going to shoot a man who has been

Starting point is 00:52:00 disarmed when he's in the middle of a pile of guys who have their hands on him, but most police officers will defend their colleagues who do the same, right? That's almost more of the issue. It's not that the average police officer is looking for an excuse to shoot somebody. It's that there's enough of those guys on the force and all of their friends support them when they do it, right? And that doesn't exist on the civilian side of things, right? I think about, like, in Portland, we had a mass shooting that was stopped by a protester who was then, like, gave himself up to the police and was taken into custody, was initially charged with murder. And if there was, the knowledge as a police officer that if I shoot someone, whether or not it's totally justified,

Starting point is 00:52:41 the next few months of my life are fucked. Completely. I'm not getting time off to chill. I am having to defend myself and have some of the worst stress of my life. Maybe we'd have fewer police shootings, right? If they knew it was going to be a miserable situation whenever they drew their gun and fired on somebody. And I think you have to have that be the understanding. And I know, like, the counterpoint that at least police defenders will come up with is like, well, that might make them less likely to defend themselves. And like, well, then why are you calling them heroes if you're not expecting them to risk their lives for the good of the body politic? Right? We'll talk more about this. But first, ads. What's really interesting about this, and I would think, I mean,

Starting point is 00:53:34 I'm sure you have a really large amount of cops in the audience here, but here's the thing. Really everyone should be concerned about this. Even cops, even Border Patrol, even ICE, law enforcement in general, should be concerned about this because as this activity becomes, frankly, more common and more accepted in their ranks, that thin blue line being not one about solidarity, but one of silence and lack of justice, that puts them at danger too, because if a person or people are so afraid of the reality of the fact that they can be just executed in the street with no repercussions of it, it sort of gives civilians, well, it takes away our trust in the system. There's no due process. You can just die for nothing for having a cell phone in your pocket. it'll make some people more reckless in their actions when dealing with law enforcement because they're like, what do I have to lose? I'm going to die anyway. It's the same logical problem as if you're

Starting point is 00:54:22 like, well, armed robberies should have the same consequences as killing a guy. They should be very similar. Your life should be over either way. Well, then what's the reason not to shoot someone and kill them in a robbery? Leaving them alive just increases the odds they identify you. If you're looking at the difference between 30 years in prison or 50 years in prison for robbery and murder, why not just commit the murder, right? Like it's this calculus that's being forced on people. If you know any time the police take you into custody or start to move to put hands on you, you feel like there's a very good chance they're just going to murder you, then people are going to start making very different choices when they're physically in contact with the police. And that makes life a lot

Starting point is 00:55:02 more dangerous for everybody. And that's part of why this is, what we're seeing is just so fucking irresponsible. And historically, there's realities for this too, depending on what part of the community or who, you know, your demographic. If you want to go back to the past, whether or not you agree or disagree with like the politics or actions of, for example, the Black Panthers. The reality is because black men were just shot by cops with no justice being delivered ever, they started taking on strategies and policies that reflected that fear and concern. But now that's being extended to people well beyond that. When we see middle class, VA nurses with a license being killed the same way, well, this is what's been going on in

Starting point is 00:55:37 those communities for decades and decades. Well, before the Civil War. war, let's be realistic. And so I'm not saying that was right or wrong, but I'm saying it is a logical conclusion when you fear that the agents of the state can kill you and there's no justice to ever be had. Well, what do you have to lose? When we were talking about this early, you brought up something the Attorney General of Arizona had said recently on the subject of ICE agents who are not identifiable as law enforcement coming to your door with guns. I don't have the direct quote, but I'm paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of, if people are at your doors that are unidentified with masks in Arizona, the Castle Doctrine essentially provides you the right to

Starting point is 00:56:16 use force against them. And that is a very interesting statement to be made by someone as high in power of government of a state level at that point. But I mean, there's some truth to that. And the reality is when people aren't identifiable, it is very easy to show up. And I mean, we've already seen examples of people pretending to be ICE because it's very easy to put on some body armor, some camouflage and a mask, and look like these guys that are not identifiable. And therefore, when that is the case, how do you know what's there and what you're facing, even law enforcement in the first place? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:48 And this is Chris Mays, Chris with a Kay, who's a Democrat and the Arizona Attorney General. And as you said, the way that it was framed in this conversation was basically this is a disaster because if you have law enforcement agents that you can't identify, people absolutely. have a right to just start blasting in Arizona based on Castle Doctrine. And in fact, the interviewer in that, Rahm Resnick asked, like, are you giving people permission to shoot federal agents? And Mays said, like, the law does. Like, that's the issue. You know, how do you know? If some guys just in a mask at your door with a gun, how do you know? And the fact that you're expecting Americans, a jumpy country of paranoid conspiracy theorists with 400 million guns to see masked men at their doors

Starting point is 00:57:34 and show discretion? It seems like a bad bet to me. Yeah, this comes back to the point I was making. I don't think the attorney general was there saying, just go shoot federal agents. I don't think that was the point. The point was simply what I mentioned earlier, which is when you can't identify or you don't know what is going on, or you're in a situation in which these people are not acting in a reasonable manner, you don't know what you're dealing with. It's the same thing I mentioned earlier in which if you're that concerned or you don't believe that due process or justice is going to be served, your decision-making logic might very well change. And like you said, in a country where many people are armed, I think this is something that every side of this issue should be

Starting point is 00:58:11 concerned about, including the law enforcement agents, because they are at risk, too. As this continues, the risk to them increases, which will then be used to justify more force against civilians because it's a vicious circle. Well, that's a fun note to end on, Carl. I want to direct people towards inrange TV. You mentioned that you have a video about one of the shootings that we talked about. So I want to let you

Starting point is 00:58:33 kind of plug that at the end. Yeah, thanks, Robert. I appreciate that a lot. So inrange TV is my video project. It's about 10 years old now. You can just find it at inrange. Dot TV, which is my website, or you can just Google

Starting point is 00:58:42 in range TV on YouTube, and you'll find it immediately. The algorithm won't give it to you, but the search engines might. And the video that I'm referencing there, and there's a lot of them on there in regards to topics like this, historically speaking,

Starting point is 00:58:52 but the specific one about Danziger Bridge is right there. So if you go to in Range TV and type in Danziger Bridge, D-A-N-Z-I-N-G-R, you will find that 2005 shooting, which is just an example of so many of these that happened. And I do have some discussions on there about recent events about Alex Freddie and such as well. So, Robert, thank you for having me back on the show. I always appreciate it and I appreciate our collaborations. And hopefully somehow this stuff makes a

Starting point is 00:59:15 difference. Yeah, I hope so too. But at least I think it gives people something to like expect, right? Like to look at, this is kind of the cycle we're going to continue to see unless they pull back unless ICE and Border Patrol start using a great deal more discretion, like I think we've given people an idea of like where the future is trending, you know? And I, yeah, unfortunately, I'm not super optimistic about it right now, but, you know, tomorrow's unwritten. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

Starting point is 01:00:03 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 I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Wintersstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life.

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Starting point is 01:01:56 The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, doubt the case of Lucy. Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was

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Starting point is 01:03:15 This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by James Stout. Hello. Hi, Gare. What are we learning about today? We are going to be learning about a man named James Fishback.

Starting point is 01:03:55 Okay, good first name. Oh, yeah. I wanted to get someone kind of unbiased, but I now understand that you might be just kind of, you know, drawn, drawn to him. Yeah, I've come here to defend the James name. I don't think that defense will last very long. I Okay.

Starting point is 01:04:14 James Fishback is a former hedge fund analyst who's been worming his way into the political world of the new right during the past two to three years. Yeah, I'm giving up on that one already. Got no interest in defending this guy. If you're active on, you know, any kind of political feeds, whether that's, you know, short, short form video, blue sky, Twitter, you've probably seen a video or two of James. Fishback. But this episode, we're going to dive a little bit more into his background and his current political activities, which includes some things you probably haven't heard before. So James Fishback has tried to attach himself to a lot of, you know, various aspects of the new right. He attempted to attach himself to the presidential campaign of Vivek Ramoswami

Starting point is 01:05:04 back in the oldy days. Okay. Yeah. Remember when. But he did so just by like showing up at campaign staff events. He wasn't a staffer. He just kept appearing. He asked to like stay overnight at a hotel that the staff was all staying at for this campaign event in Florida and tried to build a personal rapport with Vivek over a few months. And eventually Fishback Outstate is welcome. He then pivoted to becoming what I would call a D-tier right-wing commentator and an advocate of Doge. In 2025, Five, fishback was a frequent guest on, like, news networks, CNN, Fox, and others, speaking as a quote-unquote Doge advisor. Huh.

Starting point is 01:05:49 A role that he never officially had. Great. Never actually worked with Doge. His quote-unquote advising was through adding Elon Musk on Twitter with random suggestions. Just, yeah. Just he's literally in their comments online. Correct. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:05 His Doge claim to fame is that he. came up with this idea of the Doge dividend, which is like a stimulus-type check that the government would send to people based on the savings that they found or created through slashing government agencies. Cool. So that was his idea that he added Elon Musk about and this idea gained some traction. And this kind of boosted his image as a quote-unquote Doge advisor and it helped him trick news agencies into boosting his public profile by associating him with Doge.

Starting point is 01:06:37 Eventually, this led to Doge official Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, having to clarify in July of 2025 that Fishback was not involved with Doge in any way. But he got a lot of traction off of this Doge advisor thing. Right. Back when Ramoswamy left Doge. Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that he did. Wow. How time flies. Before the inauguration, because he was planning on, and is planning. on running for governor of Ohio,

Starting point is 01:07:10 Fishback tried to put his name in as like a, hey, all become the co-chair of Doge, Elon, since my pal Ramoswamy is going to be busy, that also, you know, did not, did not work, obviously. Yeah. One needy guy.

Starting point is 01:07:24 He's just very, very needy, very clingy. Yeah, yeah. He's very parasocial. Yes, and after Katie Miller released a statement being like, this guy's not part of Doge, a fishback began lobbying Trump for the vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Really, no shame.

Starting point is 01:07:43 Based on his credentials as this patriotic America, first investor, right, who's worked at a hedge fund or two and tried to get his way onto the vacant seat, when that didn't turn out, obviously, Fishback set his sights on his home state of Florida, launching what I would call a Groyper-style campaign for governor. Cool. And this is what we're going to be discussing.

Starting point is 01:08:07 for the rest of this episode. I'm not like intimately familiar with the Groyper space, but this seems to be like the most kind of like beta behavior to constantly like notice me, I forget what, that's a word that begins with S. Pick-meys? No, yeah, it could be pick-mee, I guess. It's like a notice-me-senpai or something

Starting point is 01:08:26 that people say. I never expected you to say notice me, sem-bye. Yeah, I've, unfortunately, I've been on the internet too. that's what he seems right he seems like extremely uh yes yeah this this is like i think what would be coded as like beta behavior in the yeah and now he's kind of trying to do this with wentes and the groypers although at oh i see to this point more successfully okay he's actually more successfully ingratiated himself with the groyper space on uh tucker carlson interview he talked about how the twitter account sorry ex account a f news or a f post it's america first post

Starting point is 01:09:05 America First News, was a part of his like political radicalization towards the sort of Groyper style politics. This is like a news aggregation account that promotes far right nationalist talking points through, and like framing through various news stories. A lot of people used to share posts from this account, like not knowing its political orientation just because it was very active as a news aggregation source. Yeah, there are a few of those on Twitter. Like BNO News is another one that just aggregates from repost stuff. And Fishback has pointed to this as being a part of his like a Groper-style red pilling is the activity of this account. To get a sense of his kind of very Groyper online background or at least like a place within the new right,

Starting point is 01:09:51 I'm going to read a tweet of his from February 8th, 2026, quote, As Florida governor, I will refuse to let subhuman gestures spike our collective cortisol, not even once. Also, no foids or e-girls, unquote. How much of that do you understand, James? I got cortisol. I'm familiar. All right. Okay.

Starting point is 01:10:13 So, this is using the kind of currently trendy, like, looks-maxing terms, the jester, which has been used a lot since Clivoculars stream with Fuentes and Sneco at that club where they played the Kanye-Hall-Hittler song. Spiking cortisol is a frequent way that people in the looks-backing space will refer to. your stress being raised, especially like through politics, like through politics raising your stress. Okay. And foids and e-girls is just like misogynistic ways to refer to women coming out of like the in-cell space. Okay. So, you know, this, this post is, you know, kind of a joke, but it's also signaling to a certain type of person that, hey, I'm your guy. Yeah, my speak your language.

Starting point is 01:10:55 And it's also just really annoying, right? He's trying to be off-putting on purpose because that will drive attention to him from people who don't like him. And, you know, in trying to cover him, in this episode, you know, I'm trying to like ride that line of not just unnecessarily giving him publicity because he says outrageous things. But then also framing his rising profile within a certain like context, which is Groyper candidates popping up more and more frequently across the United States. Yeah. So in terms of Florida, Desanthus can't run for another term. He is term limited. The clear frontrunner to succeed Desantis is U.S. representative from Florida, Byron Donald's. Who has Trump's endorsement? Last month, Lieutenant Governor J. Collins also announced

Starting point is 01:11:39 a run for governor. But Fishback is not a non-player in this race. And his candidacy displays attention within the Republican Party between the former like Tea Party and classical MAGA wing, which is now the effect of conservative establishment, and this new America First Wing, which takes some of MAGA's originating principles to their far-right nationalist conclusion. I talked about this tension last year in the episodes about Nick Fuentes' interview with Tucker Carlson and this surge of Grapher-adjacent Gen Z staffers filling out the ranks of the Republican machine in D.C. Now, Fischback is one of the first candidates to draw a lot of attention by essentially running as a Gryper candidate. Depending on how well he does, it could indicate how successful this politics can be.

Starting point is 01:12:30 when presented in front of Republican voters. The primary election isn't until August. There's not tons of polling yet on this race, let alone from established pollsters. But as of late January, Fishback's most favorable poll puts him 15 points behind frontrunner, Byron Donald's, according to quote-unquote, patriot polling. Meanwhile, Donald's own sponsored poll

Starting point is 01:12:57 puts him upwards of 42 points ahead of Fishback, around the new year. So all this stuff is really out of date, and Fishback certainly has risen his profile since then, but we're still waiting on, like, reliable polls to come out. Yeah. But he's certainly getting a lot of headlines

Starting point is 01:13:14 and is doing a successful job in raising his public profile. Now, a part of Fishback's strategy to raise his public profile and, like, name recognition, both in Florida and nationally, seems to be just through generating controversy, very similar to how Fuentes did,

Starting point is 01:13:29 this or the more recent social ascension of the looks maxing streamer clavicular. Earlier this month, Fishback claimed that a fire was, quote, intentionally set in his side yard, prompting him to do a publicity stunt where he walked out of his porch, holding an AR-15-style rifle above his head, promising to shoot anyone who attempts to harm him and his staff. I will share a clip. I've seen this one. I'm excited to watch it again there. If you come back to this home and our staff, our volunteers are working hard. We're not waiting for the police. We're going to shoot you with an AR-15 sight-on-scene 556.

Starting point is 01:14:14 Yeah! That's what we're going to do. It's very simple. Shall not be infringed. It's just a bunch of words that he's saying, like, not in any particular order. 5-5-6. Yeah. It doesn't make much sense.

Starting point is 01:14:29 It doesn't, no. It's also 5.56. I guess people do call it 556. But, yeah, fascinating. 2, 23, 30 round. Well, he doesn't actually have a magazine in there, I noticed. No, no, Maxxie. The backside's folded down as well.

Starting point is 01:14:45 It's, for those familiar with such things, a straight out the box, Smith and Western MP15. It looks like he may have bought it quite recently. So this is one such incident where he tried to generate some kind of publicity through this, you know, very provocative gesture. But he's also done this through the language he uses. Fishback refers to frontrunner Byronald's, who is black, as Byron-Rone, which is just not his name, and has said, quote,

Starting point is 01:15:14 Byron wants to turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto, unquote. He's also used Charlemagne's nickname for Hakeem Jeffries, A-Pak Shakur, to refer to Donald's, and is called Donald's a, quote-unquote, slave to his donors. Jesus Christ. So yeah, a lot of stuff like that. Yeah. Fishback has proposed a 50% income tax on only fans creators, calling it a quote unquote sin tax. And one of his very first campaign videos was titled,

Starting point is 01:15:45 I'm running for Florida governor to make the trains run on time. Oh. Cool. So this has not generated tons of controversy and headlines. Yeah. It's, you know, caused some social media posters to be like, oh, look at this guy clearly doing a Nazi dog whistle. But then it's also signaled, you know, early, early in the campaign, signals to, you know, grapers and people in the very, very far fringes of the right has signaled to them that, hey, I'm going to be your guy.

Starting point is 01:16:13 Yeah. Which, in part, he's doing so that he can count on them to kind of do free publicity for him, right? Yeah, yeah. He wants to activate a certain type of overly online young male to be like a public spokesperson, to, like to just to boost his name recognition. And even if he doesn't win in Florida in this race, it'll at least help his career like nationally in some way. So he's,

Starting point is 01:16:36 he's counting on this like a Groyper block to do a lot of heavy lifting. And that's part of why he does some of these very, very like gross tongue-in-cheek stuff. Make the trains run on time. Come on, dude. Yeah, it's like a clumsy dog whistle, right? It's embarrassing.

Starting point is 01:16:53 There's no like a slight of hand here or whatever, you know. He's just kind of. blundering his way towards being like, look at me Nazis. Yeah. And like this video, he just talked about trying to bring back

Starting point is 01:17:05 the Amtrak to the Florida panhandle. It's like a one minute video. Yeah, cool. It had nothing to do about actually like making trains run on time. It's about trying to return Amtrak to a certain section of Florida. Fischback has promised

Starting point is 01:17:19 to, quote, divest every penny from Israel on day one, unquote, which would include 385 million in foreign bonds invested in by the state. And he's opposed to adopting anti-Semitism definitions in schools that make it, quote-unquote,

Starting point is 01:17:36 against the law to criticize Israel. Yeah, this is where the hard right and the soft right... Yeah, I bet. I'm sure it's Israel you're concerned with here, buddy. Yeah, no, I bet. I'm sure. He's not doing this out of, you know, principled stances of Palestinian solidarity. Yeah, and he just wants to do anti-Semitism, like the old-fashioned way. Yes.

Starting point is 01:17:58 And this can be displayed during a campaign event at the University of Central Florida, where Fishback discussed how to make lunches in high school cafeterias more healthy. Important topic. What's with the Pop-Tarts in the Broward County Public Schools in the cafeterias? I'm not saying that the test scores are a result of the Pop-Tarts, but if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set up our kids for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeteria. And that, that is on Gentile, okay?

Starting point is 01:18:39 Everyone's really excited to hear that, hey. Yep. Wow, yeah. I mean, the crowd is like... They love it. Yeah, but it also looks like they just arrived from like a Southern Florida beer pong invitational tournament. Like, it's a lot of like frat boy type.

Starting point is 01:18:56 Yes. It's a lot of the people who are, who consumed like the Manosphere type content online. Yeah. Short clips of Nick Fuentes probably aren't regularly. tuning into his like three-hour live stream on Rumble, but engage with his content through short clips online. Yeah. Same thing with like Sneco,

Starting point is 01:19:12 clavicular, right? It's, it's this type of, this type of influencer, which has right-wing politics, but they aren't like super invested in politics. It's,

Starting point is 01:19:20 it's this mix of like post-in-sell, male influencers that combine right-wing politics. And it's a very common form of like entertainment for these people that we see in the background on this video, right? It's a lot of, like, 18 to 22. Yeah, it's like, it's mostly white men, yeah, from like traditional college age.

Starting point is 01:19:41 Speaking of schools, in 2022, a Florida school district cut ties with Fischbeck's debate organization after a female student came forward with allegations at Fischbeck, quote, initiated a romantic relationship, unquote, with her while she was working for his student debate organization when she was 17 years old. He was 27. Jesus. The student claimed in a protection order request that after joining the debate organization when she was 16, fishback, quote unquote, systematically cultivated a relationship with her by increasing, quote unquote, opportunities for personal interaction, and that fishback later, quote unquote, explicitly directed her to keep the relationship a secret while she was working for his school debate organization. Jesus.

Starting point is 01:20:31 After turning 18, she moved in with Fischback. The two were briefly engaged. Fishback denies the student's characterization of the relationship timeline. After the girl broke up with him, Fishback allegedly sent hundreds of unanswered texts to her over several days. This information comes out of a harassment case that was later dismissed. The case wasn't about the legality of their relationship, importantly. It was about harassment.

Starting point is 01:21:01 after the two had broken up where these details emerged. Yeah. His debate organization, this is some kind of like plastic turning point. Yeah, they kind of, it was a Florida-based debate organization in high schools to encourage debate. It was active around 2022. It was bought by another company a year or two ago, but in 2022, a district ended cooperation with this organization after.

Starting point is 01:21:30 after news came out about this relationship. Yeah. It is interesting considering the amount that Fishback and Fuentes and these guys will talk about the Epstein files and then have this in your... Yeah, inappropriate relationships with underage women. Yeah. That work for you in your high school debate organization.

Starting point is 01:21:52 Yeah, that gives me the ick in a substantial way. Also, kind of not that surprising. from this kind of area of the right, but it's still gross. Yeah. It's time for an ad break, but we will return to discuss Fishback's reoccurring campaign rhetoric and his promises as governor. All right, we're back. A big part of Fishback's campaign is targeting H-1B visas.

Starting point is 01:22:36 He promised on day one as governor to fire as many H-1B workers as he can, and to quote-unquote incentivize companies to hire Americans again. Here's a radio appearance where he discusses this. On the first day in office, I would fire every single H-1B who works at a state agency. Number two, if you have a state contract with Tallahassee, I don't care if it's serving meals or serving up IT tech support. You have 24 hours to pick. As President Reagan said, Drew, now is the time for choosing. You got to pick.

Starting point is 01:23:06 Do you want your $50 million a year state contract from Tallahassee? or do you want your 50 or 100 H1Bs? You pick, you can't have both, there's no negotiating and you have 24 hours. That's how we create a culture that stands up for the dignity of American workers. That's an interesting approach. You can't get H-1B jobs,

Starting point is 01:23:26 like not for the federal government, but for state government. I cannot imagine that especially in Florida, there are very many. Well, he's not just concerned about H-1Bs. Fishback is also railed against student visas, as a threat to the American way of life, and has falsely said that Trump plans to send 200,000 students from China to Florida's public universities,

Starting point is 01:23:50 which serve only about 430,000 students. So it'd be like 45%. It's not real. It's just not. That's just not true. This was proposed as an idea, not Florida specifically, but this was proposed in spring of 2025 as a negotiating tactic with China over tariffs. this isn't a real thing.

Starting point is 01:24:11 Since then, Fishback has promised to raise tuition on all foreign students to $1 million via executive order. The governor cannot legally raise state school tuition via executive order. These are just words that he's saying. Also, like a lot of these state schools,

Starting point is 01:24:29 having a certain number of students who are paying a higher fee, be that the non-US or out of state, like it's integral to their budgeting, right? Yeah, they're not making it on in-state tuition. Fishback has talked about all this in an interview on Tucker Carlson's

Starting point is 01:24:45 internet show last month, where he said that a child, quote, from Shenzhen, who doesn't know what Florida orange juice tastes like can't possibly in an economic sense. But I think, I mean, not to sound gay,

Starting point is 01:24:58 but in a spiritual sense does not represent our state and our heritage, unquote. Tucker replied, that's the opposite of gay actually unquote that's a hell of a exchange of words again

Starting point is 01:25:18 like I'm like like a little lost here yeah this is this is a sizable faction of the new right of the of the of the of the of the groopers who are filling staffer positions at heritage and in DC yeah like this is the sort of media

Starting point is 01:25:32 environment like linguistic environment that that they are coming out of yeah and the pearl clutchy reaction is not useful here, right? I'm not because like, who cares, right? This is, this is obviously embarrassing. This is like a man in his 30s trying to sound like a kind of homophobic 18 year old who's kind of only homophobic via like linguistic reflux. This is like embarrassing cosplay. Yeah, it's very cringe. I can't even find this stuff offensive. Like, this is, this is just, it's... No, it's sad. Like, the primary, uh, sentiment I feel is like vicarious shame.

Starting point is 01:26:06 for this guy and his desperate search for attention. Now, a core component of selling fascism to people is that they were promised a future that's now been taken away from them because of some group of people that are the enemy, right? This is like the dream of finding a subservient wife, a cushy, full-time job, buying a home, raising 2.5 kids in a safe and secure homeland. But because of, quote-unquote, them,

Starting point is 01:26:34 this dream is no longer possible. Through the years, we've seen different versions of this, targeting Jews, feminists, Palestinians, Muslims, Mexicans, Central and South American immigrants. Now, during Fishback's Carlson interview, he elucidated on like an updated version of the 21st century version of the American dream that was stolen from Gen Z. Gen Z was such an important part of the president's victory last year. Yes. and they feel betrayed by a lot of these Trump advisors and what they've chosen to prioritize and not. I can see why.

Starting point is 01:27:11 And when I've met them and I've met them where they are at their universities, whether it's UF a couple weeks ago, I'll be at FSU and just a couple weeks from now, their number one frustration is that, look, they don't want to be lectured anymore. They got a degree. They got good grades. They got good test scores. They didn't study gender studies or,

Starting point is 01:27:32 black intersectionality. They did the STEM thing that Republicans told them to do. Yeah, learn to code. Learn to code. And now they say, you know what? Amazon, Google, FedEx? No, no, those jobs aren't available for you,

Starting point is 01:27:45 you pesky Americans. You want paid time off. You want to go to church on Sunday. We're going to give those jobs to an entire new class of foreign serfs known as the Indians and the Chinese. And we're not going to even interview you for those positions.

Starting point is 01:27:58 They don't even pretend that the Chinese or the Indians are smarter. They're not. They don't speak our language. They have no skin in the game. They're not smarter, actually. They're not at all. Oh, I know.

Starting point is 01:28:05 And so the issue then becomes, do we actually have a labor market that is utterly rigged against American citizens? The answer is yes. I think this is a really interesting exchange on a sort of slide that's happening on the right beyond talking about, like, illegal immigrants. What's really interesting to me is that like the first real immigration, like, restrictions that were part in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act. right? Yeah. And we have circled all the way back to essentially a very similar argument.

Starting point is 01:28:38 Yeah, the slide from talking about illegal immigrants in like the far right space to really honing in on student visas foreign workers, I think is an interesting pivot. And this new version of the American dream of like, you know, STEM jobs, learn to code, that's now been taken away. That's no longer accessible because so many young Americans aren't getting hired because they're adamant about going to church on Sunday. Something that's not true. That's not real. Yeah, that's not a real thing. First of all, young Americans are not in large numbers going to church on Sunday, nor is their hiring discrimination because they don't want to work on Sunday. These things aren't real, but it taps into a certain feeling that someone in college might have right now,

Starting point is 01:29:21 especially in the wake of like AI vibe coding of they were told that there's this like life track where you can work in tech. And now there really isn't many tech jobs open to people. And they're trying to turn this situation into this fight against legal immigration. Yeah, into fascism. It's funny to see Carlson repeating that the learn-to-code thing, as if that was like a serious piece of career advice given to people. That has been a meme for, I don't know, close to a decade. Yeah. Like, everybody knew there was bullshit. It's literally like that the phrase is a joke. Fishback later says after this little rant that, quote, our North Star should not be a free market, but a free people. He's okay if the market's not free.

Starting point is 01:30:04 It's okay if we're going to be restricting which types of workers are allowed as long as we have a free American people. So his strategy for winning this race appears to be through appealing to homeowners and prospective homeowners through tax cuts and downpayment assistance. But then also really trying to engage Gen Z voters, looking at the success of previous politicians, including Trump and how much of his victory was related to the Gen Z vote. He's really, really honing in on trying to activate young voters in Florida. He's planning to visit every single state college and state university and talk about these issues. As a social media stunt, he's going on a statewide waffle house tour, visiting all the locations in the state. Great.

Starting point is 01:30:47 And through this, he continues to talk about these beliefs on legal immigration. In an interview with a local magazine, Fishback discussed his belief in the quote-unquote great replacement, stating quote, you can't make America great again with Chinese, you can't make America great again with Indians, you can't make America great again with Haitians. So when I speak about the great replacement, I speak about legal immigration programs that for far too long have been overlooked. A legal immigration has been a primary concern for establishment Republicans, but each one of many legal immigration programs by definition take spots and slots jobs away from American citizens. My campaign is the one that stands up and says America is for.

Starting point is 01:31:27 Americans. And so we have to stop apologizing for that. Yeah. A little slight move there with the America is for Americans. Yeah. In reference to Germany, Germany for the Germans. I'm sure he knows exactly what he's doing. Oh, most certainly. Yeah. Like, this is the obvious next place. They have made so much political headway with racism. And like the obvious direction to keep going therefore is to be the one who's willing to lean a little bit further into racism, right? See if that can get you a little bit further, a little bit more popular. Yeah. It makes sense in that, in that way.

Starting point is 01:32:07 That's why I find his candidacy really interesting. Regardless of how well he's going to end up doing in the primary, he is trying to Trojan horse something into, not even Trojan horse in a way, he's kind of just openly trying to pull something into Republican politics. Something that's been like festering in the sidelines for a while, you know, stuff that Nick's been advocating for a while. There was that fight around H-1B visas about a year ago. And he's really honing in on this as a potential future for the party.

Starting point is 01:32:35 And we're going to see how successful this is, like in part, right? There could be other factors that make his campaign not do very well beyond these sorts of politics. But this is the first time you've really seen these deployed at this scale, I think. And he's counting on the Groyper support. And this is what Nick's been talking about for a while, trying to run candidates like this as much as possible. in 2026. We'll talk more about Fishback's relationship with Fuenes and the Gropers after this ad break. All right, we're back. In my episode last year about the right-wing fallout of Nick Fuenes and Tucker Carlson's brief friendship, I discussed how Fuenes was making threats and promises

Starting point is 01:33:26 to deploy his Gryper fan base to influence elections, both in 26 and then in the Republican presidential primary in 2028. And after that news cycle had peaked, Fuentes continued to really hammer down his promise and threat to various candidates that if they do not adopt sufficient America-first messaging, he will deploy his fan base across many different primary states to influence the election through support and harassment. And I believe that Fishback is attempting to hold Nick to this promise. On a podcast appearance last year, Fishback said that Nick Fuentes, quote unquote, broke the internet by speaking truth to the deranged maniac,

Starting point is 01:34:12 Pierce Morgan, in an interview. I do love how Pierce Morgan is now like an avatar of woke for the, Nick American, right? For the biggest interview of the year, Nick Fuentes and Pierce Morgan were Nick made very, very clear. We are done with the pearl clutching. We are done with the white guilt. We are done with this pseudo religion that attacks us for just wanting to exist in our own country,

Starting point is 01:34:39 to buy a home, to get a job, and to benefit from all the things that we were promised. There he is again, talking about all the things that we were promised. Yeah. And us, right? Like, he's a 30-year-old hedge fund guy. Yeah. Like, he got all the things. No, he did get the dream that he is saying no longer exists.

Starting point is 01:34:58 Like, that has been his life. Yeah, yeah. And he's just trying to cash. she's not eight now. No, but through this interview, he just keeps talking about Fuentes and glowingly refers to the Gryper fan base. I'll tell you the truth. I found the audience of young men who follow and watch Nick Fuentes to be actually incredibly informed and insaneful and very patriotic young men. I'm going to be completely honest. I probably shouldn't say this, but I think Nick's following is actually really impressive. There's a lot of young men who are patriotic who are well

Starting point is 01:35:27 informed, who know our history, which is why they are so frightened by the current path that we are on. Having a candidate talk openly about the Groyper's in this way, I think is super interesting. This is one of the first cases, and I don't think it'll be the last, where Nick's fans and Nick himself are, like, openly referred to in a race like this. Yeah, it's interesting, again, like super duper surprising to me, how easily the Overton window is moved to the right right now. And there's a whole, like, network of the, like short form, a long form video places to do that, right? That are kind of set up to incentivize that almost.

Starting point is 01:36:10 He doesn't have any particular genius that allows him to do it, right? Like there is a system in place, both with like, Fuentes, kind of outside of the electoral politics overton window and then all these places that straddle the lie, right? Like Tucker Carlson, et cetera, et cetera, where that exist to bring these further right discourses into the admissible discourse of electoral politics in this country. Yeah, and a fishback as a largely unremarkable candidate is counting on a group of probably hundreds to thousands of young men to do free campaign work for him by telling them that they're good, smart little boys.

Starting point is 01:36:50 By complimenting them, he is counting on his success being contingent on this groper army of Gen Z Internet users. To him, these are like a valuable. political block. And like that's the thing that I find interesting about this. Yeah. They used to be like pure poison, right? Yeah, yeah. But now, now they're seen as like a, as like a possible asset. Yeah. And Fishback knows that there could be some drawbacks by going this extreme. A few days ago, Fishback walked through Miami's nightlife on stream with Manosphere influencer Sneco, who asked Nick Fuentes if he would endorse Fishback as governor.

Starting point is 01:37:30 Oh, he said yes. Nick Fuentes has endorsed James Fishback for governor of Florida. Oh, gee, that'll really help. Let's go. Wait, it won't. Never mind. He's voting for Byron. No, Nick Fuentes is voting for Byron Donald's. But that's a bad name. Byron Donald's? Does that even sound like he could be a governor? So there, you can see that he knows that it could have some possible negative effects, but he's willing to play in this like irony, irony zone while still very clearly embracing Fuentes and and the Groypers. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:02 And, like, on this stream with Sneak is, like, indicative of a few things. After Fishback talked about Goyslop at that school event,

Starting point is 01:38:09 you know, he said afterwards, like, he wasn't aware of, like, the offensive connotations. Where the fuck else is he getting that word from? Which is ludicrous.

Starting point is 01:38:16 It's not true, right? This has been, like, a 4chan term forever to talk about how, like, the Jews are poisoning Gentiles with food to make them, like, subservient, right?

Starting point is 01:38:26 That's what the term means. He knows that. And he continued to use the goyslop term on Sneko's stream. And after jaywalking on this stream, Fischback joked, quote, the headline will read tomorrow, Florida gubernatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer, referring to Sneco. Great. And based on the most recent polling we have on this race, Fishback's youth-centric strategy does seem to be getting its intended results. In a University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab poll,

Starting point is 01:39:00 from the middle of February, Byron Donald's is up 31% to James Fishback at 6%. About a 25% gap, which is kind of in between the more fishback-friendly Patriot polling numbers and Byron Donald's own internal polling. A sizable gap, to be sure, but not one that is insurmountable. What's really interesting about this poll, though, is the youth numbers. For ages 18 to 34, James Fishback is at 32%. whereas Byron Donald's is at 8%. He's massively ahead among youth.

Starting point is 01:39:37 Meanwhile, Byron Donald's tactics to address Fischbeck's connection to the Groyper's has been a little odd. I'm going to read a statement from last week, quote, Dear James Fishback, I heard you crashed out when I told the truth about your stupid, anti-Semitic BDS plan that you stole from Kamala Harris, just like you stole your whole gimmick from Nick Fuentes and Zoron Mamdani. You're no racist, you're no groiper, you're no anti-Semite,

Starting point is 01:40:10 you're what people hate about politics, performative slop, unquote. So Byron Donald's approach to addressing Fischbeck's ties to the groopers are not to actually attack him for these ties, but to say that he's a fake groyper, that he's not actually one of them, that he's stealing his policy ideas from Kamala Harris and stealing his gimmick from Fuentes and Zoron Mamdani. Quote, you're no anti-Semite, you're no racist. So basically attacking Fischback for not being a real enough racist?

Starting point is 01:40:46 And Donald isn't the only one linking Fishback to Zoran Mamdani. The Conservative magazine, The Spectator, released a positive profile on Fishback last week with the headline, is James Fishback the right's answer to Zoron Mamdani? The similarities seemingly being that he's behind in the polls in a race that could be very influential for the future of the Republican Party

Starting point is 01:41:11 while gaining a lot of traction among youth and having a savvy online element of the campaign. And so Byron Donald's response to Fishback's popularity online, the popularity among young voters, is to compare him to Kamala Harris and Zoran Mamdani, and claim that he's not actually a real racist, that he's not actually a real Groyper, I do not believe this is going to be an effective line of attack or damage his numbers among the young, especially male supporters that he has. Because Fischbach already knows that he

Starting point is 01:41:46 has the Groyper base in his pocket, and that's why he's able to make jokes with Sneco about how no, no, no, Nick Fuentes is actually supporting the other guy. He is secure enough. in his Groyper support to jokingly distance himself from Fuenes as a strategic move. Because he knows the Grypers are already going to be doing free labor for him to boost his chance of winning. He already has them. Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, he's relying on social media exposure from them.

Starting point is 01:42:17 And then he can even say other stuff to conventional media and it probably won't matter that much. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, he's still getting profiled by major outlets like every week. and it's going to be a long race. He wants to eventually debate Donald's, like, in a televised debate. Unclear if that's going to happen. Yeah. But as of now, that's kind of the current state of his candidacy, his strategy to overcome the gap

Starting point is 01:42:41 and polls. And I will be keeping an eye on this race, specifically because it does relate to what I was talking about last year in terms of this wave of Groyper-friendly candidates, expected to try to get into the Republican Party in the next two to four years. Yeah. The election is November of this year. November is the general. August is the primary.

Starting point is 01:43:02 Okay. Yeah. So I guess the kind of Republican primary in Georgia is the big deal. I mean, Florida, sorry. Yeah, yeah. The primary race in Florida is going to be the one that I'm keeping the most track of. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, don't be surprised if you start seeing fishback pop up and more stuff in the next few weeks.

Starting point is 01:43:20 Yeah, great. Well, that does it for us today at It Could Happen here. Yeah. Now it's time to end the podcast to lower the collective cortisol. 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.

Starting point is 01:43:53 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. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men.

Starting point is 01:44:29 Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving. and different perspectives, and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, This episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

Starting point is 01:45:24 The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain. a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in,

Starting point is 01:45:55 to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single. single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Lettby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.

Starting point is 01:46:27 He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton, After the show, made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here.

Starting point is 01:46:49 This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said.

Starting point is 01:47:06 and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I just want you to know our nation is back. It is the Golden Age of America. And we're going to talk about this year's State of the Union by President Donald Day Trump. And I've been saying our nation's back since way before it left, honestly. So I'm glad to see that we've caught up.

Starting point is 01:47:46 But back to one, sir. You know. It's a transformation like no one has ever seen before a turnaround for the ages. We're going to do it better and better. Better and bigger and brighter and whatever B word he can decide to include. We just keep winning. So you're getting some idea from this about the tenor of the president's state of the union speech that we all just listened to.

Starting point is 01:48:11 Yeah. It is like 8.30 p.m. at the end of a long work day that was already long, before we listen to the president. 11.30 p.m. for for Gare. Yeah, 11.30 p.m. for Gare. But I don't actually believe in time zones. I think that's a conspiracy. But we'll talk about that later.

Starting point is 01:48:27 So in terms of like first responses to the state of the union, I think mine was Trump spent a lot more time focusing on the achievements of other people, like literally handing out a bunch of awards. Yeah. And less time as a percentage of the speech, actually trumpeting things that he did and his own successes. in a way that I found kind of telling. And I think this merges with the fact that he did not mention ICE by name during the speech.

Starting point is 01:48:53 So I kind of saw this as a recognition by him and his people that, like, there's some face that needs to be saved. And we've got to try in this speech to kind of minimize our least attractive attributes and maximize the positive, you know? Yeah. Yeah, my take was that he was trying to simulate empathy and try to keep hold of that Republican crowd. and try to endear himself to them as much as he could, despite the state of things. Yeah. Yeah, and trying to associate himself with a lot of acts of heroism or military valor,

Starting point is 01:49:29 which is classic strongman stuff, right? Like the, you know, we're achieving a time of national greatness. Here are some examples of masculine virtue, blah, blah, blah. We saw the U.S. men's ice hockey team. I really hated that. 12 minutes in. Yeah, 12 minutes in. Because we just keep winning, our country's winning too much.

Starting point is 01:49:51 We're winning so much that we don't know what to do. Yeah. And here are a bunch of those winners. And I did find that kind of surprising, too, like how quickly they got brought in and how much of a, like a lot of the length of this was just him announcing people who had won something or were about to win something and everybody clapping. Yeah. It's the most medals that we've seen.

Starting point is 01:50:14 in a state of the union address. And I wonder, because I know one way in which these get quote unquote rated by news agencies, is like how much percentage of the time was it standing ovations? How much percentage of the time, how many times they have to stop for applause? Maybe he's trying to game that system? Amazing. That's pretty funny. It was really easy to take notes because of how much applause there was in between single lines,

Starting point is 01:50:37 he said. Not just applause, right? There were a large period of time when people were chanting USA, USA, or, Charlie Kirk's first name. Weird. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it started off with some more like statistics of, of dubious origin, but the economy and various other things.

Starting point is 01:50:57 He claimed that fentanyl was down 56% that was the strongest border security ever. There's been no illegal aliens admitted to the United States in the past nine months, zero. Well, that's a tautology, right? Like, when you were admitted, that means you have been processed or released into the United States. So by definition. Have there ever been illegal aliens admitted to the United States? Yeah, that it's not what admission is, right? It's like saying there were...

Starting point is 01:51:22 It's like being like no bank robbers have legally robbed a bank. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, no, I guess you're right. Yeah, no fish have walked under my orders. And Robert, you mentioned you wanted to say something a little bit about the fentanyl thing he brought up. Yeah, I mean, I love fentanyl, obviously. Big fan of the stuff, you know. I don't like to use it, just like to read.

Starting point is 01:51:43 about its study. It uses it. No, that's a joke. It's a bit. Don't do fentanyl folks. Please. And actually, people aren't doing as much fentanyl, which has nothing to do with the Trump administration. So when he was like, there's 56% less fentanyl getting into the country, I just, I knew that was wrong because first off, I remembered reading that during the Biden administration, there had started to be like a significant constriction of the international fentanyl supply market. So I looked it up, and I was, in fact, accurate in my recollection. I found a pretty good article hosted by the University of Maryland's Medical School by Carl Hill, which notes that in 2003, the journal Science published an article by a Maryland criminologist that argued that

Starting point is 01:52:24 the drop in overdose deaths that had started to be noticed in 2023 was driven by a collapse of the international fentanyl market supply chain. And you may note, 2023 is when Donald Trump was not the president. Yeah. For this article, we were trying to understand why fentanyl overdose deaths after rising rapidly for a decade in mid-2020, suddenly turned down. And in 2020, suddenly turned down. downward. Peter Reuter, professor of public policy and criminology from the University of Maryland, told the Baltimore's son, where you're reasonably sure that something has happened to the precursor chemical supply from China that was a significant cause of the downturn in fentanyl. So again, what he's saying is the supply constriction happened in 2023, and it doesn't seem to have happened

Starting point is 01:53:01 because of state-side U.S. policy. In other words, the contraction of the supply had nothing to do with us stopping fentanyl at the border and everything to do with an issue somewhere in China. Now, there's been a couple of theories as to this, including some international laws that have altered, like, the way these kind of, some of the chemical companies in China have to work. But the gist of it is that this started in the Biden administration and has nothing to do with border policy. It's purely a result of the actual physical supply of fentanyl, and that constriction began in China. Anyway, that's what I had to say. Yeah, I think it's worth noting. I'm not quite sure whether at 56.

Starting point is 01:53:34 No idea. It could be seizures that they have seized a lot of fentanyl. I'm not quite sure where that came from. Like, there were a number of statistics, which I couldn't track down, right? The 19 billion of fraud in Minnesota by Somali people. There was what I loved. He made a note that 2.4 million Americans have now, ascended, wasn't the word he used, but gotten...

Starting point is 01:53:58 They've been lifted off of food stamps. Lifted off of food stamps. 2.4 million Americans are off of food stamps. Yeah, and he specifically lifted off, as Gairn noted, which would insinuate that, like, their circumstances improved and they no longer needed food stamps, that's not true. Yes, yeah. We simply introduced, like, work requirements and other restrictions

Starting point is 01:54:17 that kicked 2.4 million Americans off of food stamps. Kicked people off of the foodstime program. Yeah. We pushed people into starvation because we... We lifted them into starvation, Garrison. We lifted them into starvation. And this was his line right before he started talking about how we're winning so much and brought the hockey team.

Starting point is 01:54:39 That was the segue. It was talking about how there's millions of people who now can't get food stamps and look how much we're winning. Quote, we're winning so much we don't know what to do. That's my big problem. I've also encountered that.

Starting point is 01:54:55 What to do with all the victories? But no, there's a few others. I mean, he's talked about, like, you know, the lowest inflation in five years, which is continuing, you know, continuing trends that have been going on for the past like three years, right, inflation.

Starting point is 01:55:07 gas prices, mortgage rates did this interesting line a short time ago we were a dead country now we are the hottest. Hottest! The hottest. And then he said hottest again. And then he had a really beautiful line of pros.

Starting point is 01:55:21 Our new friend and partner, Venezuela, has given us barrels of oil. Our new friend and partner. He called out Delsey by name and was like she's doing great things for Venezuela. We're going to do great things together. Like a bizarre. Really a current.

Starting point is 01:55:37 Like, then I think that it goes to show like how he understands foreign policy, which is in a very transactional way. It is not about an ideological disagreement. It is about having someone who he feels is personally loyal to him and owes him the position that they have. And that's, I think, what he's going for in Venezuela, right? He didn't mention the amnesty, but he, at one point, brought down a Venezuelan man whose niece was in the audience to reveal that her uncle had been released from prison. I will be eagerly awaiting news on that man's ongoing immigration status. So bizarre. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:56:15 There was a lot of this like really weird political theater. And so much of it that there just wasn't seats for all of them. And so there were these like awkward open door moments that were just, just unnecessary. But that's what he was going for tonight. Metal, metal, metal. A lot of medals. A lot of medals.

Starting point is 01:56:36 A lot of medals. We've got the list, right, the whole tri facto. We got the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the Medal of Honor. Presidential Medal of Freedom? Sorry, presidential Medal of Freedom. A Purple Heart. Yeah, we gave out a Purple Heart. And Olympic Gold.

Starting point is 01:56:52 Oh, yeah, many of those. He, like, had this, like, strange moment where he's like, I would like one of those, but apparently, like, it's not... Yeah, for the Medal of Honors. You could only get them in the Army. Maybe they'll open it up. Maybe they'll open it up. And if they do, I'll be the first one in line. Sir.

Starting point is 01:57:10 Yeah. What? He did tout that we ended DEI in America, just like one of the annoying talking points. That means nothing. Yeah. Whilst ICE were not mentioned by name, there was a lot of border chat, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:57:29 Especially at the star and then a few times towards like the middle end. Yeah. And one of the things you did pretty consistently, was talk about horrific incidents, often involving the death of children, sometimes in front of their parents. Yeah. I just want to highlight a couple of those. The first one, he talked about Delilah Coleman, right, who was injured in a crash with Big

Starting point is 01:57:52 Rig, the driver as which was not a US citizen, but did have a work permit, a work permit issued by the federal government under Donald Trump. And this has been a claim on the right. This guy was undocumented for some time, right? and that California has been giving CDLs to undocumented people. In this case, that is not the case. I'm interested in what happened to the Coleman family. I understand they've been through like a horrific thing, right?

Starting point is 01:58:17 Their daughter, it looked like she was going to use of her legs. She's now relearning to use her legs and to walk, which is great. But previously, they had met with the person who was driving the vehicle that caused their daughter this horrific injury. And they had explicitly declined to politicize it. saying that they weren't interested in doing that. So I don't know what happened here to now Trump proposing a law which Delilah's law, he's calling it, right, which would, I'm trying to remember if he said stop non-citizens or undocumented people or illegal aliens, use his parlance from getting CDLs, obviously. I think illegal aliens. There are states which will give you driver's license without asking for documentation for the very obvious reason that people in this country have to drive.

Starting point is 01:59:02 large parts of this country are set up around driving. You cannot exist in some parts of America without a motor car and it is better that people get a license and insurance than that they don't do that. He said, barring any state from granting commercial driver's license to illegal aliens was his framing. Yeah, that's his normal framing, right? I have never had a CDL in this country and I've never gone through the application process, but I would assume one would first need a federal work permit, right, as one would for any employment. Well, you need a driver's license. Yes, you would also need a driver's license.

Starting point is 01:59:35 Let's start there. You got to have a driver's license to get a CDL. Yeah, there's a background check component. It looks like to the CDL. One of the lines that he used right before this call to action was that illegal aliens cannot read road signs. Yes. Yeah, that's how we introduce the section of like, yeah, they're all through this country,

Starting point is 01:59:56 driving around. They don't know what like a warning is. sign is or a stop sign. Obviously, lots of people come to this country and are perfectly capable of speaking English. There are also people who are born in this country who don't speak English. Well, we just, we don't have an official language. Just to say, a lot of people can't drive very well in this country. Yeah. As an L.A. driver, a lot of you people don't know how to merge. And it has nothing to do with what language you speak or your citizen status. Okay. Like, this is a pointless remark to make, in my point.

Starting point is 02:00:30 It's just, it's a policy that they can make. Right. Yeah, yeah. Didn't he sign an executive order officially making English the official language at some point early on? Yes. No, I'm just, I'm trying to remember if that was a case or not. Yes, yes. Okay.

Starting point is 02:00:46 The other claim that I thought was interesting was the hiller of this young woman in Charlotte, right, who is killed... The train stabbing incident from last year. Yeah, Irina Zarutka. And Trump claimed that the man who killed her had come in through an open border.

Starting point is 02:01:07 I am not able to find any evidence that this person is an immigrant to the United States. I have not found that reported anywhere. Yeah. His father appears to have at least resided if not been born in the United States. His name is to Carlos Brown Jr.

Starting point is 02:01:23 And so assuming that the decoenix, Carlos Brown, who is resident in the same place, is his father. Therefore, I would assume that he was born in the United States and had citizenship through birthright citizenship. I have no idea about his father could well be a citizen too. I'm just trying to research things in a hurry. I have not seen it reported anywhere. Zero reporting about this man being an immigrant,

Starting point is 02:01:44 including from right-wing outlets who used this horrific incident to stoke, like, racist crime panic narratives last year. Yeah, and that may not have been the goal. It may have just been more. traditional, like, race panic. Yeah, that was what it was. They used it for racialized crime panic. This comment by Trump, inferring that he is an immigrant, may have been an unscripted ad lib

Starting point is 02:02:06 that he just did. But from what we could tell, this man was not an immigrant. Yeah. No, it's just like a guy did a bad thing. Nor was he released early from custody, by the way, which is part of the narrative that the right was using in the reporting around this was that this guy was, like, released early from prison and he did serve the entirety of his sentence. He may not have been released early from his sins, but you're released early from your sentence

Starting point is 02:02:31 of not listening to us. Here's some ads. I hated that. That's one of the worst ones. Yeah, well, too bad. And we're back. Array. So in the start to middle section where he was still kind of talking about the economy

Starting point is 02:03:01 before the entire pageantry performance. took over, he started talking about the tax cuts and the one big beautiful bill. Yeah. And he had this fun line about how all the Democrats voted against these tax cuts. And this made all the Democrats stand up and applaud. That was kind of funny. But then he talked about this mom who was homeschooling two kids. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:23 Who also works as a waitress during the night shift on top of her husband, who also, you know, works full time and how these tax cuts have gotten them to. take an extra $5,000 home each year, right? This is the no tax on tips thing. And this story of this mom who's homeschooling kids and working at night and a full-time husband was framed as this like triumph of the American economy. Yeah. It was hard to interpret this as like a massive economic triumph when you're talking about a mother who's not only doing labor at home by schooling her children and then also working nights and a husband who's also working full-time.

Starting point is 02:04:04 That demonstrates how difficult it actually is to exist economically, especially if you have a family in the country right now. And his kind of twisting of this scenario to support his notion that he's helping the American economy I found to be quite interesting. And that's mostly what the Democratic response

Starting point is 02:04:23 by Governor Spanberger was about. It's like how it's pretty clear to most Americans that it's actually been quite economically challenging based on his wildly unstable trade agreements and tariffs, which have caused a great deal of economic instability in this country. Yeah, there was a feeling during the Biden administration, especially with like Pissaki, right? The Biden administration was somewhat gaslighting people,

Starting point is 02:04:48 as they struggled economically. Sure. But Trump has not diverged from that policy, right? No. And obviously now the Dems are calling it out. Talking of budgetary issues, Did anybody else catch that the Democrats have frozen funding to DHS who would like to be out there helping people shovel their snow? I missed this.

Starting point is 02:05:08 I missed this shoveling snowline. Yeah, I didn't catch that either. Really? I caught it. I caught it. Okay, I thought it hallucinated that for a minute. Yeah, yeah, you did not hallucinate it. Maybe that flooded the banks of, like, Garoni's nonsense filters, and we just shut down for a second.

Starting point is 02:05:22 I don't know. Yeah, that one, like, I actually went back on the live stream, and that was one of the few moments. Where, uh, yeah, I wondered what heck he was talking about. Yeah, I'm sure he's going to be deploying FEMA. FEMA, yeah, right. FEMA to New England to help shovel this snow. Yeah, great. I'm sure that will be received well.

Starting point is 02:05:41 Yeah, that was one of the more insane ones that I, that, I just, it really took me a, a second to work out what on earth was happening. But yeah, I believe that that was maybe a FEMA reference. No, I won't be happy until Homeland Security investigation agents are shoveling snow. ERO. Honestly, and make them do it in every state, even the ones without snow. Just get out there and pantomime it with a shovel, you know? We got sand in California.

Starting point is 02:06:07 We'll find him some work. Shovel some sand. I think the most interesting portion of the State of the Union address was when Trump talked about his tariffs, specifically because just days ago, Supreme Court struck down his tariffs as not being legal. This will get discussed more in executive disorder. tomorrow. But I found this to be quite interesting because Trump acknowledged all of this and then discussed how he is going to keep doing the tariffs anyway right in front of the justices,

Starting point is 02:06:42 just openly talking about defying a Supreme Court order in front of them. And the camera kept going back and forth between the president and the justices as they just like sat there, it's a completely blank face as he's talking about defying their order. And this is like real, real peak constitutional crisis stuff. He kept saying it's an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court. Mind you, there was four of them there. They all stayed stoic. And some voted for him.

Starting point is 02:07:06 Some voted against him. So it was a mixed bag. But he was basically like, it was like, you know, when you do something wrong and the teacher lectures you in front of the class. It was very much that. They didn't really give him much of reaction. He was talking about all countries and companies want to keep the deal talking about tariffs.

Starting point is 02:07:24 And it's saving our countries. and this is such an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court, but that it doesn't matter because he's going to keep doing it. We're still doing the tariffs. Yeah. We've talked a lot about it. You know, there's going to be a certain point in this administration there where it's going to come down to a Supreme Court ruling

Starting point is 02:07:40 saying that something he's doing is illegal and he's going to keep doing it anyway. He's already flirted with this in the past year. There's a few kind of more minor moments where, if not fully breaking a ruling, was bending it to a near buckle. Yeah. But, like, I think this is the most blatant incident so far. of the president just blatantly ignoring and defying

Starting point is 02:07:59 as Supreme Court ruling. And then he talked about how, you know, ideally tariffs will take the place of income tax. Which, sure, man. Good luck with that. Yeah, cool. He had a bit where he was like, we've worked out a new and totally legal way to do it.

Starting point is 02:08:14 Is that when he mentioned that congressional action won't be necessary for the new tariffs? I think so. Yeah. There was some new and established. That's really chill. I mean, because that would be the legal way

Starting point is 02:08:25 to do it. That is, that's the power that Congress has. Yeah, yeah, that we have the need to work it out. Like, we've got that one covered. Oh, my God. Do you want to talk about the rate player protection pledge? Yes, sure. Yes. The idea that tech companies will have to provide their own power to the data centers popping up around the country, lowering energy costs for, for residents of these neighborhoods. Yeah, and this is relevant for a couple of reasons. He's talking about allowing basically the issue is that all of these data centers have increased electricity costs for a lot of Americans, and he's claiming we're going to put that on the tech companies by allowing them to make their own power plants. Like that's probably, he says by making them responsible for like

Starting point is 02:09:15 funding the power that their data centers cost, but specifically the way this is supposed to work is by letting them build power plants. Is that explicitly laid out in this plan? Because the way he said it certainly was unclear. I mean, he said they're going to have power plants. The direct statement was like tech companies will be operating power plants that they're using to fuel these facilities. And that's like in line with lobbying Silicon Valley has been doing for years to make it easier for them to create small nuclear reactors. Like this has been for the last like several years, Silicon Valley interests, including like Kero's power, have been pushing, to make it a lot easier regulation-wise to operate small nuclear plants.

Starting point is 02:09:55 Like, that's definitely what he was referring to. Hmm. That's great. I feel good about that. Yeah, I mean, there's a good BBC article on it from, like, 2025 with the title why big tech's nuclear plans could blow up, but it features like a lot of quotes from guys at AI companies and at Google talking about like, small nuclear reactors can provide 24-7 clean energy near data centers, according to Heider Raza.

Starting point is 02:10:20 an expert in AI and energy use at the University of Essex. Right. Like, there's a lot of these quotes that have been going around for years. So when I heard Trump say they'll have their own power plants, that's what I read it in the context of. Okay. And he just, he says big tech companies. He didn't list out, like, who.

Starting point is 02:10:37 Yeah, he doesn't. Who that would be. Yeah. Because it's just like not a thought out plan. It's just something for a headline. Yeah. This is like the kind of conclusion of years of lobbying for small nuclear plants on behalf of like big tech companies.

Starting point is 02:10:51 And I'm not against the idea of more nuclear power. I am against the idea of letting open AI. Yeah, be the ones who have operated a power plant of any kind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And having it in the state of the union is something of a signal by him to them, right?

Starting point is 02:11:05 Like, they are like his constituency. Yeah, I think it's also, as Gare noted, it's like a nod to the affordability thing. Like he's had to deal with that a lot because people can't not notice that things are getting more expensive. So he's promising your power bill will go down because I've, done this thing. Yeah. Talking of getting more expensive, he spent a while talking about fuel prices, like how he'd gone around and he'd seen like 185 a gallon gas and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 02:11:32 Like I thought it was interesting that clearly they understand, right, again, it shows that affordability is something that they know they're weak on and he's trying to, trying to, I guess, reinforce the areas where he feels stronger within that and not talk about the ones. He doesn't, he talked about home prices, talked a lot about his Trump savings accounts. Yeah, the Trump accounts for kids. There was an infomercial vibe, the state of the union. He plugged a couple different Trump. Trump, Trump, RX and Trump accounts. Yeah. And he talked a lot about, like, I think, Robert, you got the transcripts in front of you. If I'm not mistaken, he said that with a small investment, they could be worth $1,000. A hundred thousand dollars. A hundred thousand dollars.

Starting point is 02:12:13 By the time the person is 18. Yeah, the website describes it as we're building a long term financial security for millions of children by creating tax advantage investment accounts for U.S. citizens under the age of 18. It asks you to fill out a form. And then it says, get $1,000 for every American child born between January 1st, 2025 and December 31st, 2028. The account is fully in your child's name and you are the sole custodian until they turn 18. No contributions necessary, but you can deposit up to 5,000 per year for maximum growth. That's what the website says. And like, if this is, I guess to start off, this was like real. If it was real, then.

Starting point is 02:12:53 Like, I don't have a problem with the idea. Like, it's, okay, sure. But that's my immediate question, especially since it seems like the big thing that he was harping on is that like this was funded in large part by like a six something billion dollar donation by the, by the, by the Del's. By like Michael Dell. Yeah. And so first off, I've used Dell computers. So I was immediately like, oh, this doesn't seem like it could be good. But yeah, I don't, like, I don't know enough about this program to really know, though.

Starting point is 02:13:22 It's just like my, it's a Trump thing involving money. So I'm on edge. But what are we actually looking at here? Yeah, so I'm just trying to work out the, the amount of interest it would take for that 1,000 to turn into 100,000 in 18 years. If I just plug it into the inflation calculator, yeah, even at 16%, that's not doing it. Well, if they put that 1,000 in Nevidia stock five years ago, then it's certainly possible. I think that's part of these accounts is that it's like tied in with stock investments. It seems like it doesn't sound like it's just like a high yield savings account.

Starting point is 02:14:05 Right. The other Trump branded service that was advertised infomercial style during the State of the Union address was Trump RX, which is essentially Trump's version. version of Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs website to get prescription drugs at very close to the cost of manufacturing, something that Trump reiterated multiple times,

Starting point is 02:14:28 that he did not name the Trump accounts or Trump RX himself. Yeah. Sure. Is this the part when you tried to use a woman's IVF story for propaganda? Yes. Yeah, I really disliked that. Yes. He did.

Starting point is 02:14:43 One of these like, one of these people, people either brought in or sitting, sitting high up in the pews. He tells a lot of these little stories throughout the state of the union. He talked about a woman who was trying to do IVF and the drugs were very expensive and now thanks to Trump RX, it's less money. Well, it's just obnoxious because Trump said that he was quote unquote the father of IVF and claimed to be able to provide resources for people that want to pursue IVF and he has not fallen through on any of those promises. He signs some executive orders that did fuck all and it's still an absolutely outrageous cost to do IVF and he's done nothing. He's done nothing. Yeah. So to use it as

Starting point is 02:15:30 propaganda, I find it to be extremely offensive. Well, yeah, sure. But there's a lot that's offensive about the propaganda he does in this, like about the things he uses for propaganda, all the murders and like that's 100%. That's all this is. I just didn't want to. I just didn't want to. I I just didn't want to skip over that because it's not going to get as much of a headline as some of the other horrific things he did, but it sucked. Yeah. You know what else sucks pretty hard, Robert? Ads. Not the ads for this podcast.

Starting point is 02:15:56 Oh. No, absolutely not. No, I was thinking something's very different. All right, we are back. One thing that did get both chambers applauding, to the surprise of Trump, because both for the Democrats applauding and a little bit of the Republicans, is he talked about the stop in. insider trading act, which would somehow, I need to look into the actual bill itself, but restrict to Congresspeople from doing insider trading. And this did cause a lot of applause on the Democrat side and some applause on the Republican side. And Trump remarked on both being interesting

Starting point is 02:16:44 and I made an Nancy Pelosi joke. She was there. They showed her later on. She was there. In terms of disruptions to the Democratic side, Al Green did a little protest thing at the beginning. And then during the section where Trump was talking about, the Democrat DHS shut down, he told the room to stand up if you believe that protecting American citizens is more important than protecting illegal immigrants or something to that effect. Yeah. The role of the government is to protect American citizens, right? Like, yes. Not illegal immigrants. And this caused a shouting back and forth between Alana Omar and Trump, which lasted for quite a while. I wasn't able to hear very much on the news feed.

Starting point is 02:17:31 I've not seen much reporting on it yet because we are recording this literally minutes after. She shouted that he's killing Americans. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Accurate. Which he is. That is. That is a solid retort when you're talking about the DHS shutdown and standing up for American citizens. as American citizens are being gunned down by the DHS.

Starting point is 02:17:53 That is a fine retort a retort that was mirrored in the Democratic response, which we might talk about an executive disorder tomorrow. He mentioned trans people kind of one time in the speech, close to the middle. He talked about how a school socially transitioned someone without telling parents.

Starting point is 02:18:13 This kid ran away from home and then a left-wing judge refused to return the child home. And this person, who was at the time a trans guy was sent to an all boys state home, but is now a proud young woman with a scholarship to Liberty University.

Starting point is 02:18:30 Yeah. And this woman who was part of this little performance did this like zoomer finger gesture bit. Yeah. The Haley Bieber hand gesture. Yeah. I'm hip with the kids. Yeah, I'm not.

Starting point is 02:18:43 I didn't know what you're talking about. It was annoying. Like, we need more normal D-transitioners, but if you are, you just never are never going to show up anything like this. No. Yeah, yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:18:52 Yeah. Who wants to have the president of the United States talk about your transition? You know what? When Joe Biden gets elected again, I'll show up. I'll show up at the State of the Union. And Joe Biden gets elected again. I think it could happen. You know, stranger things have.

Starting point is 02:19:12 Yeah. But, you know, Trump's line after this was, you know, talking about how there's all these transitions happening without telling parents. and then quote, we must ban it, and we must ban it immediately. Whatever. And the trans stuff was all was all in relation to minors transitioning without parental approval. That was Trump's framing for the entirety of the transition stuff. It wasn't expanded beyond that.

Starting point is 02:19:35 He did go off script to be like, these people are crazy during that. Yeah. When the Democrats didn't applaud for his trans comments, he did, he did start talking about how, you know, deranged the Democrats are. He said, shame on you. Shan, like got like a kind of a. chant going almost. There was a lot of shame stuff back and forth in this section. Same thing during the like the stand up of you believe that the role of the governments to protect American citizens. Yeah. Those were the most like out and out fascist moments of, of this whole thing. Yes. Like that,

Starting point is 02:20:05 in my opinion. Yeah. We got a Kirk moment after this trans thing. Talked about this renewal in Christianity among young people thanks to one Charlie Kirk who was martyred for his beliefs. Yeah. They, you know, trotted out Erica to do her like stick that she's been, perfecting for the past like six months. Surprisingly, no, like, fire or sparkers or, like, anything. It was hard to recognize her without the fireworks. Then after this section, after the Charlie Kirk Christianity section, after the St. Kirk section ended, it really became a military pageant for the rest.

Starting point is 02:20:43 It got very metal gear solid for the final, final, you know, 45 minutes where he brought up a whole bunch of people and gave the medals, as we've discussed, and then recounted the Maduro extraction. Yeah. In an extremely metal gear solid style. You talked about, you know, the bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities. He talked about bombing drug smugglers and remarked that we, quote, seriously damaged their fishing industry, unquote, which is a little joke about how the people that they blew up might have just been fishermen, not actually drug smugglers. Well, and a joke about how, like, the fishing industry has collapsed because people are too scared to get murdered by the U.S. to go fish so they support their families. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:21:28 In addition to the fact they were already struggling to afford fuel. Like, I know Venezuelan fishermen. Things weren't going great for them. Talked about how Hamas had to dig through piles of hundreds of bodies to find some of the slain hostages to return them as a part of the negotiations between Trump, Hamas, and Israel. and boasted that he had ended 10 wars and Marco Rubio looked a little soulless. Yeah. Marky Mark. I took a little bit of a note on Marco Rubio

Starting point is 02:21:58 because he said he will go down as the best ever secretary of state and it seemed like he was really throwing his support towards Marco versus Vance tonight at the State of the Union. No, because Vance is now in charge of the war on fraud, the totally real thing. Yeah, yeah. That is happening, which Trump announced as J.D. Vance's new role is to be in charge of the war on fraud.

Starting point is 02:22:23 Great pick. Jadie Vance, war fraud. But do we want to talk a little bit more about this like Metal Gear Solid, Hideo-Kajima military pageant finale to this speech? Yeah, well, I know about Hideo Kajima. He tweeted in support of the FDF and then deleted it, sad. Yeah, well, you live by the tweet, you die by the tweet. A lot of this was kind of textbook fashy stuff, not to like, you know, overly belabor the point, but the bringing out of the survivors and victims of crime, the parading of military heroes, right? Like, you can just go to Robert Paxton's book, which I have just over there, but I'm not going to read from it right now. Anatomy of fascism.

Starting point is 02:23:08 Yes, the anatomy of fascism. And you can start checking off the list, and you see so much of it here, right? Yeah, I mean, a mix of, like, you know, war veterans, World War II. Trump had a lot of this to 1776, the fact that the 250 anniversary of the United States is coming up. Yep. And then the national betrayal and the scapego group and him being the renovation. Like, we got it all, baby. Yeah, his speech read like he looked at, Paxton has these motivating passions of fascism. And it looks like he kind of went down that as a checklist as he was, as whoever wrote this was writing it, right?

Starting point is 02:23:41 Like, it has almost everything from that. The glorification of martial valor, like I said, blaming of a scapego group. Like, I alone can bring this nation back to Great Nurse. Yeah. Things that, not new. Fort Bragg is back, James. Yes.

Starting point is 02:23:57 But a different brag. A different brag. Yeah. They found another guy called Bragg, which he didn't mention. Fort Bragg is back, but it's a different brag this time. And I'm sure it's just a coincidence that's the same as the first. But no, Robert, I think you're totally right. That, like, he started off by, you know, you have to adjust the economic

Starting point is 02:24:16 stuff at the front because he ran on so much of it, but they want to get through that as quickly as possible. Then in order to try to coax this, like, you know, patriotic spirit, it devolves into this ceremony of like military greatness, of like returning to military greatness, something that, like, was lost. Now we have redone, you know, this was the most successful military operation in decades. I had foreign leaders calling me to congratulate me on it. We took down the Chinese and Russian defense systems. This guy's leg was ripped apart by bullets, but he still landed the chopper. Like, so much if it becomes about, you know, the heroic moments done by other people

Starting point is 02:24:53 to kind of pad around the actual fractured state of Trump's America. And waving the bloody shirt is a phrase you hear. Like, it is a phrase you hear associated with fascist movements. It's literally referring to, like, a thing that happened during the rise of the Nazis, right, as a result of, like, the murders of some of their street fighters. But that's, I mean, like, he's doing very much a version of that here, like, including the fact that while he was talking about this attack on Venezuela and the guy who got injured piloting the chopper, he spent like a lot of time talking about blood, like sloshing around in the bottom of the of the flight deck, of the aisle, the aisle or whatever. The aisle of the Chinook, the blood was streaming down. So all of the, all the special forces in the back knew that the pilot was injured and that they were all at risk. Very bloody. Very bloody speech. general. Yeah, a lot of blood mentions.

Starting point is 02:25:47 There's, similarly, like, the Lake and Riley sections of his State of the Union addressed last year were very similar, and he was trying to, you know, play the hits in terms of how much that stuff, that stuff played well among his base last year. He was trying to recreate that in a few moments. When one of the instances you have is, you know, someone who was socially transitioned who now isn't, and someone who was injured in a car accident, you know, not a murder, those are two of your instances. It's starting to get weakened a little of it. He tried to use the Kirk assassination as one of these instances and then one one instance of a stabbing that was a murder. Those were the bloody shirts that he was waving as well as the

Starting point is 02:26:25 National Guard. And Jared Kushner. Oh yeah. Kushner was out there. Mention him by name. I think more than once. It's always a jump scare for me. Yeah. He may have mentioned Kushner more than Vance. Yes, definitely. He barely mentioned J.D. Vance, which is very interesting. Yeah. Is anybody else have any thoughts? Nope. It's over. I'm glad. Yeah, let's be done with this.

Starting point is 02:26:51 Let's be done with this. It was too long to begin with. I wish we were finished with this State of the Union as soon as Al Green was. There's a reference to him getting kicked out for the second year in a row. Yeah, he's made a happen. I would have planned dinner for halfway through. We're like, don't worry. I'm not going to be there long.

Starting point is 02:27:08 Like, I'm going to get kicked out immediately. Don't worry. Why not? And, you know, if we decided there's more to talk about, we'll mention. on ED, but for now, that's all we got. The Save America Act, he did mention, which we need to cover in depth very soon. And we will.

Starting point is 02:27:21 Yes, we will. But for now, bye. Bye. Median women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

Starting point is 02:27:45 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 and I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:28:06 Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives, and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership.

Starting point is 02:28:43 He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want to chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny baby. is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

Starting point is 02:29:26 Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict? A villain. A nurse named Lucy Leppi. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, doubt the case of Lucy Lettby,

Starting point is 02:29:45 we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in, to ask what really happened when the world. decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Lettby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

Starting point is 02:30:18 Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. he became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here.

Starting point is 02:30:42 This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

Starting point is 02:31:09 Listen to Love Trapped 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 is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what this means for you. I am James Stout and today I am joined by Sophie Lichtenen and Mia Wong. This week we're covering the week of February 18th to February 25th. We'll also have a segment by one Garrison Davis added on later. They were out in the field covering a story, which will be an episode coming out soon. Yeah, they were inside the capital. Not the United States capital.

Starting point is 02:32:01 Yeah, yeah. Zeran Mamdami, I understand, he's going to pardon them, and it will be fine. Oh, my gosh. Should be like four people who actually believe this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please don't take to the subreddit. Garrison has not been arrested. So up to a couple of small things, I guess.

Starting point is 02:32:20 Last week, the Georgia State Elections Board voted to reprimand Elon Musk's America PAC for mailing absentee ballot applications pre-filled out with votes information during in 2024 elections. That violates state law. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't, they did this thing. I don't know if you remember this.

Starting point is 02:32:38 They didn't indicate, like, it wasn't a ballot. It wasn't from the government to vote with. It was from Elon Musk. What? That's so unhinged. Yeah, he was really on one back then. It'll be interesting to see how he approaches the midterms with his America party. Wow.

Starting point is 02:32:56 Skodas did say that USPS is legally immune for intelligence. intentionally misdelivered mail. They're basically saying, you know, and this was a five to four decision, and it happened on Tuesday, February 24th, that the U.S. Postal Service can't be held liable for intentional failure to deliver mail. Unhinged decision, by the way, that the actual, the actual story behind it is this black woman who was renting property out to people, and all the, like, the people were pissed about it because they're racists. And so they were doing shit, like, intentionally not delivering bills and stuff. They were, like, locking their mailbox. boxes with like locks that no one had the keys to because the post office people were just putting

Starting point is 02:33:34 locks on it and it got ruled that they have immunity for this. Wow. It's bizarre. Yeah. I mean, all of this just feels like it's being targeted for voter suppression, but. Yeah. That's a bigger story. Yeah. But it's also another case of Supreme Court says racism fine. Yeah. Many such cases. Yeah. That's the doctrine. The other thing was this, this week has part of the DHS shutdown, Lewandowski and Noam decided that they were going to shut down TSA pre-check and global entry. So those, if people aren't familiar, are like expedited processing. One is for getting on the plane as you go for security there. And the other one is for when you arrive in the United States and nuclear customs.

Starting point is 02:34:20 This lasted for like minutes. It seems to what I have intervened. Yeah. I think global entry. is still paused. There are other ways in which having a global entry can exploit your entry into the US still. But the pre-check thing did not last very long

Starting point is 02:34:39 because that would have probably pissed off all the wrong people, right? Yeah, and also make lines even longer, which is... Airports are already a nightmare. Come on. Come on. They would have gotten killed by their own congressional staffers. Right, right, right.

Starting point is 02:34:56 You think Ted Cruz doesn't have TSA pre-check? Please. The idea that like, okay, so we're like, A, they're forcing all the TSA people to work anyway, right? Because they're essential employees. But B, like, if you can find a way to make those people work less, let's say by having a group of people who have been pre-cleared so the TSA people don't have to spend quite as long checking them, that helps, actually. Like, this is not a cost-saving measure. This is clearly to try to punish people and put it on the Dems. I simply have TSA pre-check just so I don't have to take off my shoes.

Starting point is 02:35:28 And because it brings me great joy when I get to. ditch people who do not have it. Love ditching Robert Evans at the airport. Every time we travel together, it's a battle of who we'll get through the line first. And one time it was him and he was like, ah, ah, you know what, I deserve that. A previous job bought me that PSA pre-check. And I've had it for years and wow, I love not taking my shoes off. That's it. That's the only first for me.

Starting point is 02:36:03 I'm like, wow, gets to wear shoes. First world problems. Oh, yeah. Let's talk briefly about Mexico. Yes. Oh, God. Drobatic tone shift. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:20 Well, you might use your pre-check on a trip to Mexico. Wow. James, transition. Wow. Yeah, that's a transition. That's what we do here. I see. Yeah, professional. podcasting. The Mexican military killed El Mencho on Sunday. El Mencho's Ligo name is Nemesio Osueira Cervantes. He was, of course, the leader of the C.J. NG., which is, I guess the English translation would be like the Halisco Cartel New Generation. The Spanish acronym is

Starting point is 02:36:49 how it's generally used. He was also the most wanted person in Mexico. The operation was carried out by the Mexican military. I've seen some reports that they didn't notify local law enforcement, so he wouldn't be tipped off. Nelmentro is reported to have died on a military flight after the raid, so I've been injured in the raid and then died on the way back to Mexico City, where he was obviously going to be treated and then questioned if he survived, I guess. In response, more than 250 narco bloquios. Naco-blocos, if you're not familiar, are roadblocks that are generally made up of vehicles that are carjacked. They're often like buses, and then they're set a blaze.

Starting point is 02:37:31 They're set at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of the road, right? So it makes a roadblock. So more than 250 of these were set up around the country. This is a relatively common response. The most, I guess, like serious response we've seen to a government action before was called the Kulia Khan Nassau. Kulia, which is in a lower cartel. This one they're calling the Menchaso, right?

Starting point is 02:37:52 using like the same etymology, I guess. There have also been attacks on Mexican National Guard troops, killing more than two dozen in 24 hours following the raids, more than 60 civilians. I've now been reported to have been killed, including a pregnant woman. Asked. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:11 This all like, it's folks in Mexico who are going to suffer, right? Like it's everyday people trying to get on with their lives. Another of the things that happened is the Banco Bienestard. So like well-being bank, I guess I would translate that as. It's a bank that exists to bring people into the banking system who would otherwise be unbanked. It's a government initiative in Mexico. So a lot of branches of that bank have been burnt down.

Starting point is 02:38:37 This is part of a tendency on the part of Scheinembaum, right, to repudiate the previous policy of hugs, not bullets, and to go after organized crime in Mexico more violently, I guess. It seems like the country's security forces have been leading the charge against a casino law cartel. And this maybe indicates that it's the military who are going after the halisko cartel. So the two branches are pursuing separate missions against different entities, right? It remains to be seen if there was any U.S. involvement. I kind of take issue at the knee-jerk suggestion that there has to have been U.S. involvement. Like the Mexican government is more than capable of doing state violence.

Starting point is 02:39:22 It has done so for a long time. Yeah. You know, the Mexican government is capable of acting on its own. Not everything that happens is about America. I don't want to cover this in too great of a detail. It's not really a beat that we report on other than this, this is a relatively major occurrence in Mexico. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:39 Mm-hmm. And Gare is going to plug in now. Future Gare. Tell us what you got. Hello, Garrison Davis. here with Sophie Lichtenman for a special segment about the Super Bowl commercial for Ring, the doorbell owned by Amazon. Yep.

Starting point is 02:39:57 During the Super Bowl, Amazon's ring doorbell aired a commercial showing off a new feature called Search Party, which was advertised as a way to locate lost dogs by automatically searching through footage captured by ring cameras in the neighborhood to track a pet's movements. Ooh, who picked the name Search Party and who thought that wasn't? creepy. Search party is interesting because it makes you think of like a crime scene. Yes. That is a brain link that they may not have intended.

Starting point is 02:40:26 Let's play. Yes, please. The audio from this commercial because as Sophie discussed before we started this segment we're unsure of the overlap of it could happen here listeners and Super Bowl watchers. So here is the ring commercial

Starting point is 02:40:41 audio. It's 30 seconds. This is Milo. Hetzer family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for

Starting point is 02:40:58 a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone. For free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.

Starting point is 02:41:14 Join the neighborhood. Uh, no. Also, when did they launch this? Do we know? It's launched. I'm pretty sure Search Party is launched. I just don't believe that dog a day bullshit.

Starting point is 02:41:25 It launched in late 2025. Okay. And I can't speak to this a little bit more, actually. Sure. Because I saw this feature early when I was in

Starting point is 02:41:35 Las Vegas, actually. Right. This commercial, this intends to portray a heartwarming unification of a dog and its owner. But in effect, the ad sparked public backlash.

Starting point is 02:41:48 including from politicians like Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and Privacy Rights Organizations. And among Normies, because this ad accidentally demonstrated the technological capacity to turn every neighborhood ring camera into a web of surveillance that AI can use to locate anything based on a picture. As I said, I saw this feature unveiled at CES last month.

Starting point is 02:42:15 And I talked about it on Better Offline. At CES, the... AI search functionality was described like this. The owner of a lost pet can upload a photo and post a notice in the ring app. Then Amazon will utilize ring cameras in the area to search for matches. And if a match is found, the owner of the camera can share the footage with the owner of the lost pet. But the public display of this technology during the Super Bowl has stirred trouble and bad headlines for Amazon. Senator Ed Markey said that the ad, quote, exposed a scary truth. The technology in its doorbell cameras can be used to hunt down a lost pet or a person.

Starting point is 02:42:52 Americans oppose this creepy surveillance state, unquote. And the Privacy Rights Organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a statement that the ad was, quote, unquote, disguised as heartfelt, but actually, quote, previewed future surveillance of our streets, a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything, human, pet, or otherwise, unquote. Now, these concerns are in the wake of high-profile ice raids, targeting neighborhoods, and a recent announcement that Ring was going to partner with the police surveillance company

Starting point is 02:43:28 Flock, which operates large-scale integrated camera systems that allow police to tap into a network of surveillance in urban areas through cameras and license plate readers. Now, Flock claims that they do not give federal immigration agencies direct access to footage. And that may be true. That doesn't mean that won't change and that they don't have capability to do so. Well, and that doesn't mean that CBP and ICE can't acquire that footage in other ways. 100%. And currently right now, a 404 media report from last May showed that local police working with ICE used Flock's camera network to

Starting point is 02:44:11 track immigrants as a part of ICE and Homeland Security investigations. So they are getting access to this footage, even though they aren't directly tapped into the Flock network, because they can work with local agencies in states that do not have sanctuary city policies. And in states that maybe do, because police may not be always following those laws, ring, not flock, says that their footage can be requested by local law enforcement and users can decide and whether or not to respond, though Ring is also subject to warrants, subpoenas, and court orders,

Starting point is 02:44:45 requiring some footage be handed over to authorities. Following the backlash to the Super Bowl ad, Ring cancelled its partnership with Flock in what the companies describe as a mutual decision. The deal would have allowed ring owners to directly share footage with the Flock network. Now, all of this happened around the same time that the FBI was able to access recorded footage from Nancy Guthrie's Google Nest camera

Starting point is 02:45:14 as a part of that kidnapping investigation. Despite Guthrie not having an active recording subscription. So this too sparked privacy concerns. Cash Rettel, FBI director, said that the footage was recovered from, quote, residual data located in back-end systems, unquote. This was footage that Google records and stores for free on a temporary basis, usually for a few hours, before it is quote-unquote deleted.

Starting point is 02:45:42 So if you have one of these Nest cameras, Google will store a few hours of footage for you to look at for free and then says that it's going to be quote-unquote deleted. And Nest owners can pay a reoccurring fee to keep that footage accessible on the Google Cloud for longer. Guthrie did not have such a subscription. So this data that was recorded was marked for deletion. But data deletion is not an immediate process. It just marks a piece of data as being okay to write over with new data, which means until that happens, fragments of that data can be retrieved and pieced back together. But this can be tricky and take a lot of time.

Starting point is 02:46:23 And in this case, it took Google over a week for a very high profile case. And they're still working behind the scenes to retrieve even more footage from this nest camera. It's not easy. I think this sort of privacy concerns for this case do not reflect largely for, I think, most people's concerns because the specific way Google stores this footage in the cloud is also unique to the Google Nest system. Ring doesn't do it in this same way. They also ended up outsourcing this to like private security retrievers for data retrievers as opposed to doing it internally either with the local sheriffs or FBI, which. Says a lot. Yeah, not surprising. And yeah, there's always a concern with these sorts of, you know, doorbell cameras that the footage can be subpoenaed, right?

Starting point is 02:47:14 But that process also takes a long time. I think there is a difference between the sort of flock style immediate access and subpoenaing footage or having to piece together fragmented footage in the case of like the nest storage system. But this is the current situation with the ring and flock deal. That fell through. ring does partner with Axon, the body cam company. Similarly, police can send requests to ring users and they can voluntarily send the footage. If they choose not to, if police really want that footage, they can try to get a court order that may or may not succeed depending on the details of that case. My question is when you were at CS, what were they highlighting there? Was it different from this commercial or was it a similar campaign?

Starting point is 02:48:02 It was very similar to this commercial. It was like a section of the large, like Amazon room. Like, Amazon has a whole suite. A suite in this hotel, but it's not like a hotel room. It's on the convention floor, but they have like their whole, whole like kind of ballroom section. And Amazon Wing. An Amazon Wing of the convention. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:48:21 And this was one of the many products. They had a few other surveillance products like a security camera tower. It's powered by solar that can like roll around. also was planning to integrate into these webbed surveillance networks. But since this ad and the negative backlash, which led to the Flockdale coming through, there still has been reports from 404 media about internal discussions among Ring to use search party for crime, to quote unquote stop crime. And there's still ongoing discussion on the various ways to apply this technology.

Starting point is 02:48:55 In an internal email acquired by 404, the Ring CEO said, that search party could be a tool to help, quote, zero out crime in neighborhoods. So the capabilities of using this to track humans are very known among the people at Ring. I think it's really interesting how quickly this partnership was dissolved with the backlash from that Super Bowl ad. It seemed to be almost instant. It's pretty quick. Which shows that when something's really bad and you pointed out, sometimes that can work to stop said bad thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:49:30 But yeah, search party creepy. Like the law enforcement still wants to use it, potentially be helpful with certain things, maybe, but it really just seems like they're trying to do like normal people surveillance. Yeah, and then putting it with this, you, heartwarming package of helping find lost dogs. If you want to locate a lost dog, the most efficient way to do that is by having your dog microchiped.

Starting point is 02:49:54 That is still the most reliable method using this, integrated camera network as a way to coax people into submitting into a system like this by waving the lost puppy banner is a little bit insidious. Leave the dogs alone. The dogs don't want to be surveilled. My dog doesn't want

Starting point is 02:50:12 to be surveilled. She surveils my house. Stop trying to take the dog's jobs. We're going to go to a quick ad break and we'll be back. And we're back. And I just wanted to follow up on something that was kind of overlooked from the State of the Union, which was, you know, kind of a throwaway discussion about IVF.

Starting point is 02:50:44 And I just wanted to give some information because I think it's worth talking about. For those of you don't know, IVF is incredibly expensive. According to I looked at the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as an article from CNY Fertility. That says the average coughs of IVF is often quoted at $12,000, but that is just the price quoted by the fertility clinic. for like their base package. And I have several friends who have gone through this and the costs are outrageous. Many other necessary expenses on top of that $12,000 is around $20,000. And for most folks, on average, IVS doesn't necessarily work the first time around for a lot of people. You're spending somewhere between 30,000 per round to 50,000 to 60,000 per round. And, you know,

Starting point is 02:51:37 despite infertility being a medical diagnosis and IBF being the best medical treatment for that, a 2018 analysis of the IVF insurance market by Mercer found that 74% of Americans do not have insurance coverage for IVF. And, you know, just from speaking with friends, even if they do, it's still outrageously expensive. Yeah. So we're looking at a cost of about somewhere between depending on insurance or without insurance. And that's not even including the medical cost. that's not including the downtime cost of not working. That's not including if you're just doing egg retrieval and the cost of storage.

Starting point is 02:52:12 But these expenses are outrageous. And it's been a heated topic for many folks on the far right. And just for an example, I would like to play a clip from Charlie Kirk talking to two, sorry, sorry in advance, two girl twins that, you know, I actually, when this video originally dropped. It was a discussion with a bunch of my friends, so I kind of think it's worth sharing. Just to see how he did a topic it is, because I want to talk about how Donald Trump has addressed it and how that changed. So here is an interaction between two girls that were IVF babies talking to Charlie Kirk about IVF. And I think it's just really interesting to hear that extreme thinking from that side. Hi, Charlie. How are you? Good. How are you? Good.

Starting point is 02:53:02 Hi, so my name is Paige and this is my twin sister, IVF. Alex. Okay. We have two older sisters that I also IVF. Okay. So this is about IVF, of course. So I'm particularly neutral on the topic. I don't want to have like a forced opinion because like my entire family has kind of become a product of IVF.

Starting point is 02:53:22 Are you guys Syracuse II or just IVF? Just IV. Yeah, just IVF. But I watch your videos and so I've noticed that in one of your videos, you do mention that you do mention that you you are okay with IVF, but you're morally against it. Is that true? Yeah, it's a little bit deeper than that, but I have a lot of problems with IVF, albeit while acknowledging the fruit. I'm glad you're both alive. And so that must be celebrated. So it's a very, I'll explain the difficulty, but please continue. Okay, my, like, part one of my question is just, as someone who was conceived

Starting point is 02:53:55 through IVF, why should I also be morally against it? Good question. Okay, so as a pro-lifer, first and foremost, we have to have an issue with the discarded fertilized eggs that happened during IVF. That's why you guys are twins. It's because during your creation process, if I can be provocatively blunt, you lost a lot of your siblings. Yes. Am I correct in saying? So for our older sisters, they had six embryos in their batch.

Starting point is 02:54:26 Two came out, of course. But for us, there were three and then two came out. Yeah. And so that's my first problem, is that it's. definitionally is saying like we're going to discard life to get to life. I have a problem with that. I do agree, but in a certain way, oh sorry, so in a certain way those embryos like say they weren't going to become anyways, but at least we were trying because they were going to be raised in a house where we are pro-life and we really wanted to be able to have kids and cherish that. But by taking

Starting point is 02:54:54 that loss, they were able to have at least us out of the three. At least they could have the one. So it's kind of, I don't know where I'm going with that. I understand what you're saying. So there's a pro-life way to do IVF, which is only implant the eggs of which the children that you actually want to raise. And so, by the way, you have a lower likelihood of working because in your case, it would be maybe two or three. For example, the way that the IVF doctor will sell it is like, look, here's six embryos. You'll be lucky if one or two implant to the uterine wall. let's see what happens.

Starting point is 02:55:30 Now, in certain cases, four implants of the uterine wall, and you get quadruplets, right? Right. Which is what happens. I find that to be a little bit creepy, to be honest, that a doctor can kind of call shots

Starting point is 02:55:43 on what life is going to live and not live. I think you're a little bit creepy, does this guy understand what an egg is? I guess, like, ideologically, obviously, no. But, like, what? How does he think that? Yeah, so that was like an extreme side of things. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:56:01 That opinion of you're killing your siblings and, you know, that sort of thing. I just find it the beginning of that video, I talked about it with a lot of my friends when I first came out. I just thought it was so interesting where he's like, well, I'm glad you're alive. Yeah. But you're immoral. Is such a such an unhinged stance. Yeah. Meanwhile, during the Trump campaign, sorry, in advance, Donald Trump's voice.

Starting point is 02:56:32 Kurt Trump back to back. I should get hazard pay. After listening to it for like two hours last night of the... Yeah, Trump deeply pivoted. We're going back to like about a month before the election in 2024. But he deeply pivoted on IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively halted IVF treatment in state by declaring that frozen embryos are legally considered to be children. Jesus Christ. This decision led to a temporary shutdown of IVF services at major clinics due to liability risks.

Starting point is 02:57:06 This is, you know, from Johns Hopkins Public Health website. Yeah. And so that started a big discussion and split lots of different people on different political sides about the topic. Yeah. But, yeah, Trump pivoted an IVF and this is what he had to say. That's what this is about. Oh, I want to talk about IVF.

Starting point is 02:57:26 I'm the father. I'm the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question. What? The fuck. Yeah. Also during the campaign trail, in an interview with NBC News, this is the most important clip of it. He said the following. Well, as you know, I was always for IVF, right from the beginning.

Starting point is 02:57:44 As soon as we heard about it, it's fertilization, and it's helping women and men and families. But it's helping women able to have a baby. Some have great difficulty, and a lot of them have been very happy with the results, as you know, and what we're doing, and we're doing this because we just think it's great, and we need great children, beautiful children in our country. We actually need them. And we are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment. So we are paying for that treatment.

Starting point is 02:58:15 All Americans who want it? All Americans that get it. All Americans that need it. So we're going to be paying for that treatment, or we're going to be mandating that the insurance company pay. So either the government will pay for it or the insurance companies will come up. Under a mandate, yes. That did not happen.

Starting point is 02:58:31 He campaigned on that. And just giving that false hope to people struggling with infertility who can't afford the, like I said, 30 to 60 to God knows how much thousands of dollars is pretty sick. It's particularly weird when I understand this is a thing that Lick's party's not united on. But like they've gone after not having to pay for other reproductive health care. Right. And like specifically, I'm talking mostly about abortions here, right? Like that insurers or employers would not have to pay for it. That that's a demand that you constantly hear on the right. Like, I guess this is such a strange issue for them because I guess it's one of the few areas where there's still like some division where they haven't all just like fallen into line on it. Right. And right after he was elected, it was in the middle of February 2025. You put on an executive. order that said, end quote, to support American families is the policy of my administration

Starting point is 02:59:25 to ensure reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable. Okay, so he's already gone back on the promise for money campaign, but that didn't stop him

Starting point is 02:59:41 from doing this. We're going to have tremendous goodies in the bag for women to the women between the fertilization and all of the other things. that we're talking about, it's going to be, it's going to be great. We're joined today. Horrible word.

Starting point is 02:59:58 Fertilization. I'm still very proud of it. I don't care. I'll be known as the fertilization president that that's okay. That's not bad. That's not bad. I've been called, I've been called much worse. Wow.

Starting point is 03:00:19 Yeah, you have. That's, uh, yeah. I didn't expect that one today. I'm sorry. It's so insane. And then back in last October, they put out one of their White House fact sheets. You know, fact sheet. President J. Trump announces action to lower cost and expend access to in vitro fertilization,

Starting point is 03:00:41 IVF, and high quality fertility care. And per the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, you can read this on the White House website, but this summary pretty much covers it. It's that the Trump administration's IVF initiative contains two key components. The first is a true. Drug pricing agreement with a pharmaceutical company, EMD Serrano provides discounts on the list prices of select IVF medications. These medications will be offered at a lower cost to eligible users through a government-operated portal, TrumpRX.gov, and preliminary federal estimates from

Starting point is 03:01:12 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services suggest potential savings of up to $2,200 per treatment cycle for medications alone. So TrumpRX.gov launched this month in February 2026, it's a government-hosted website that serves as a facilitator and points Americans to drug makers direct to consumer websites where they can make purchases. It also provides coupons to use it pharmacy. And it seems basically like a government version of good RX and is very similar to Mark Cuban's cost plus drugs, which has a lot of the same medications with similar discounts, including the same kind of medications for fertility. And per ASMR again, this move alone does not make IBF attainable for. most patients. Ritility drugs represent only one portion of the overall cost of care, and patients without good insurance coverage continue to face significant out-of-pacet expensive. Trump has repeatedly promised to make IVF universally successful. This announcement does not fulfill that promise. Meaningful progress requires policies that ensure all Americans who need medical assistance to build their families and access that care. Also, by the way,

Starting point is 03:02:17 you can't use your insurance with Trump RX. So, yeah, it's a either or. Yeah. Great to note. He specifically brought this up in last night's State of the Union during one of his what I call a propo. I think back to like the hunger case what I call a propo, which is when they like bring people out. It like dates back to like Reagan and when they bring people out to be like, and this person here. But it just was such a bizarre thing to bring up. And you know, Trump's State of the Union was the longest of all time. Yeah, I think so. And he spent a total of five minutes on health care alone, and this was part of it. I'm here tonight is the very first customer ever to get that big discount, and it is big. Catherine Rayner, for five years she and her husband have struggled with infertility, and they turned to IVF. One drug has been costing Catherine $4,000 to purchase.

Starting point is 03:03:19 But a few weeks ago, she logged onto the... Trump RX website and got that same drug that cost $4,000, got it for under $500, a reduction of much more, actually, than $3,500. Catherine, we are all praying for you and you're going to be a great mom. Really creepy. Yeah, imagine having the president talking about how you've been boning. Like, what a fucking, how you're having trouble. Like, that's a difficult thing for a lot of people to talk.

Starting point is 03:03:51 Like, I've had friends who have gone through IVF as well. Yeah. thing that happens when you're in a 30s. But it's a hard thing for people to talk about, let alone to have it talked about in front of the whole fucking country. Fertility and infertility is such a personal thing. And it's really, to use that woman's pain to promote your drug discount website.

Starting point is 03:04:15 It's repugnant. Yeah. And she's still paying 500 bucks a month. Like that's a lot of money. She's unreal. 100%. While that's not as bad as 5,000, that's so much money. And it's like, while any discounted fertility related drugs is good, this is not what was promised. IV is still ridiculously unachievable for most people.

Starting point is 03:04:37 He is not the father of IVF. And this is fraudulent advertising, just a way of like trying to promote his like artificial empathy to a wider audience. And it's despicable and fertility issues do not need to be played with like that. That's what I had on that. It was like a very big throwaway comment, but I thought it was worth talking about because there's been like a linear lead-up to what that was. And I think it's important to talk about. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:05:14 Anyways, James, you have more to talk about. Yeah. So going back to Congress before the state of the union. Senator Blumenothal's office published a couple of documents from two anonymous whistleblowers, which show changes in basic training for ERO. ERO are enforcement removal operations, so they're one of the branches of ICE. You also have HSI and then ICE administrative stuff. HSI home known security investigations.

Starting point is 03:05:43 The ERO are the people who are supposed to go out and detain and remove people, right? That is what they do. The documents show, quote, cuts of more than a dozen significant practical examinations, which potential ICRO officers no longer must undergo. In fact, the cut is 16 out of a previous total of 25. So there are now just nine of these practical exams, whereas before they were 25. The exams remove include, quote, judgment pistol shooting, determine removability, encounters to detention and detention to removal, as well as criminal encounters.

Starting point is 03:06:20 So these are like exams that would test the knowledge of the potential would be ice agent on these issues, right? So you just don't have to know that anything for? Yeah, well, you can, you do an open book test. It's open book? Multiple choice. Yeah, it is now. Yeah. In some cases, there isn't a greater practical exam at all.

Starting point is 03:06:41 It's just past, fail. Is it open book multiple choice test? Yeah, to determine your understanding of the law, right? becoming a testing lib now. I guess I should caveat all of this by saying, like, the people who killed Alex Pretti and René Good were exceptionally well trained.

Starting point is 03:07:01 They had been trained for a long time. They had been in DHS for years. It didn't stop the murdering American citizens industry. I'm not saying that. Like, I'm not Joe Bidening this, but this is still notable. There is also the wholesale removal of some classes. These classes that have been removed include

Starting point is 03:07:20 the use of force simulation training. That's like a late, they watch a video and they have like a laser pistol. That's how they simulate use of force there. Well, they used to, I guess. Also, the training on the legal structure of the United States government, ERO authority and use of force. It also shows a huge reduction in the overall training, which we also heard from Ryan Schwank, we'll get to in a minute,

Starting point is 03:07:43 but he was a former lawyer with ICE who testified to Congress. Todd Lyons previously told Congress that the FLETC, that's a federal law enforcement training center in Georgia, had been moving from five, eight-hour days to six, 12-hour days. So although the number of training days for ICE agents have been cut, the number of training hours was the same. They were just going to get through it with their grind-set, I guess. But the whistleblower documents show that they're still appearing to do eight-hour days.

Starting point is 03:08:14 The number of days has been cut, and the number of hours of training in each day has remained the same. There are some longer days, but mostly those are people who have to make up the PT test or like some nights to seem to go later with practical stuff like First Aid and shooting. But the bulk of the days continue to be eight hours. There are now 42 total days versus 75 before. Some of this was already public, actually. In certain like forums and subreddit, ERA officers have been posting about like the faster training.

Starting point is 03:08:48 course for a while. The documents show a target of 4,007 new officers in fiscal year 26. They would aim to have commissioned 4,000 new ICE officers by the end of September. We also heard from Ryan Schwank, who testified to Congress, and they published some excerpts from his testimony, which I'm just going to include here, a couple of quotations. Quote, I am duty-bound to tell you that the ICE Basic Immigration Enforcement Training Program is now deficient, defective, and broken. And another quote here, without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty and do not know the limits of their authority and do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order. And finally, ISIS lying to Congress and the American people about the steps it is taking to ensure its 10,000 new officers faithfully uphold the Constitution and performed their jobs.

Starting point is 03:09:40 Schwank was hired in 2021 as a assistant chief counsel for the ICE officer principal legal advisor. He also serves as a resident attorney at Dilley, which is a detention center for families and children. And at some point in this past he was a private practice immigration attorney. What? The Lord. This is not like a particularly woke guy, I would say. And like none of this is to suggest that like it would be okay for there to be thousands of rights officers if they were better trained. It still wouldn't.

Starting point is 03:10:09 But it does show that the state is building a force of people who don't know what an unlawful order is and what their rights are. are and what their obligations are and what the rights of the people who they are detaining are. And talking about the rights of people who are being detained, I want to talk about a development in the case was the unaccompanied Guatemalan children. People remember that over Labor Day, the Trump administration tried to deport these children,

Starting point is 03:10:38 and they tried a number of, like, credit lawyer shit, like, just really, like, silly, like, I don't know, these legal arguments, which was kind of superior. to get away with it, and they were prevented by a restraining order, right? If you remember, like, the judge Sparkle, Suanan, who was the first judge who issued the restraining order, but they did so in the middle of the night over Labor Day weekend and sent one of their attorneys to the airport to prevent them. Christ. Yeah, they truly, like, last minute stuff.

Starting point is 03:11:07 The class for that TRO and the injunction was, quote, children from Guatemala who are or will be in the custody of defendants. The O-Will-B leads to the next part of our story, right? A lawsuit is now alleging that CBP is flouting the injunction by returning children when they first enter custody before they're sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. So they kind of tried to previously make this argument that, like, they were with OR, they weren't with IIS, they weren't with DHS, they were with OR, right? So the Office of Refugee Resettlement is a distinct entity. So they'd sort of tried this like, oh, there's nothing we can do to stop the Office of Refugee

Starting point is 03:11:47 And that had not worked, right? The suit also alleges that, quote, defendants are using misinformation, coercion, threats, and fear to persuade children to relinquish their rights and sign paperwork reportedly accepting a form of expedited voluntary return. This is common across DHS, right? In my reporting on Dilley, for instance, Primrose told me that the forms for voluntary repatriation

Starting point is 03:12:12 are present, like, all day and all night in their room. Like, any time it gets too much for you, any time they're too hungry, too tired, too stressed, too scared. You can sign that form and you're on a plane and it's all over for you. You're going back to wherever you fled from. Included in the case is a claim by an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center that unaccompanied children have been given a document that, quote, completely misstates or at least dramatically misrepresents the immigration laws

Starting point is 03:12:38 that apply to unaccompanied immigrant children. And it conveys to vulnerable children threats that are, quote, in clear contravention of the entire system implemented to protect and promote the safety and best interest of unaccompanied immigrant children pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. So what this is suggesting is that these young people are being provided with essentially, it's not legal advice, but it's misconstruing the rights that they have to be protected, right, and so that they are not being advised properly of the protections that they have under law. I'm going to keep an eye on this one because I think

Starting point is 03:13:19 I don't love the phrase unaccompanied mine is when we talk about this because these children are often accompanied. There are people who are with them who care for them on their journey here. Right. I've seen this firsthand. It just means that their immediate family are not with them. But like we saw in the State of the Union last night, right? When the Trump administration talks about migrants, it wants to talk about people who kill children. Right. Like that that is the thing that they or hurt children. That is a thing that They trusted out a couple of times last night.

Starting point is 03:13:47 It is not the migrants who are hurting children in this instance. It is the government. These children who came here on their own to be safe with very few options, right? And either their parents couldn't look after them or the parents aren't around anymore. There is not a more sympathetic case, right? There is not a clearer example of people we should be looking after as a state or a community or a nation or whatever. And the fact that they're trying to turn these children around and boot them back to the dangerous situation, they came from is really morally appalling.

Starting point is 03:14:18 We'll keep reporting on it because I think it is a very important thing to shed more light on. Absolutely. It's horrifying. Yeah. Just on a basic moral level, like being the person whose job it is and apparently doing this job of trying to construct fake legal arguments so you can fucking deport children. Like, what the fuck? Yeah. It's just so evil.

Starting point is 03:14:44 Yeah. It's horrible. Like, they, you know, I've spent a lot of time with migrants. I've spent a lot of time with migrants with children. I've known plenty of children who are traveling without their parents. Yeah. And the things that they go through just to get here are horrific. And the things that they are going away from are probably worse.

Starting point is 03:15:03 And to think that those kids could be booted back to the places that they fled within 72 hours of arrival before they're transferred to ORR, right? after months, potentially years, is, yeah, it's genuinely appalling to me. Like, few of these things shock me, but they still disgust me. And I really hope that this is something that will continue to get coverage, not just here, but elsewhere,

Starting point is 03:15:28 because, like, these are the most egregious wrongs that the immigration system does. Yeah. Let's take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some terror talk. Oh, what's that? Oh, is it the dulcet tones of someone who isn't Joe Strummer singing the worst clash song? I love how consistent in you are with that, James.

Starting point is 03:16:20 Is it a worst clash song? It really pisses me off. Like people, they think, oh, the clash, and then they go, no, the song that they played while they were fucking bombing Iraq in 1991 that made Joe Strum a cry and wish he hadn't written it. Yeah, appalled. Listen to other clash songs, please. Oh, God. Speaking of clashes, we have finally learned the results of the log-awaited Supreme Court case about specifically the tariffs that were implemented through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Starting point is 03:16:55 Those have been struck down. So this is the retaliatory tariffs. This is the Liberation Day stuff. The ones on Canada and Mexico. Some of the tariffs are still in effect. get to that in a second, like, for example, the aluminum and steel ones, et cetera, et cetera, are still in effect. I'm going to be doing a full episode about this case and about what's going on with tariff policy now, because it's very convoluted and weird. But what's important for our purposes here is that in a lot of ways, this is a very narrow ruling in that

Starting point is 03:17:32 It is just specifically about this one act, IEPA, and what it specifically very narrowly says is that IEEPA does not give Trump the authority to do tariffs. What it doesn't say anything about is his ability to use other acts, and we're going to talk about that in a second to do tariffs, and it also doesn't say anything. And I think this is actually very important about the completely unhinged state of emergencies that he's been declaring in order to be able to use a EPA. And that's also going to be very important in a little bit because because there's no ruling on that,

Starting point is 03:18:14 he's probably going to be able to do some of this stuff with other tariffs. So basically immediately after this ruling Trump imposed a 10% tariff across the board using Section 122 of the Trade Act in 1974, so he implements it at 10%. And then the next day, he says it's going to be 15%. The current rate as of data of recording on Wednesday, the one that's actually being assessed at customs is 10%, because he hasn't signed an executive order to actually lift the 15%.

Starting point is 03:18:43 It's all very weird. It's all very sort of extremely chaotic. So right now, the 15% hasn't gone through. But I want to talk about this Section 122 thing that he's using right now, because this is a significantly, less broad authority than the authority he was claiming before. So, okay, first off, it's worth noting that Section 122 has literally never been used to enforce terrorists before.

Starting point is 03:19:13 For reasons we'll get into in a second because it's very weird. And it's also going to be very, very difficult to do the kind of Calvin Ball tariff policy Trump was in implementing, where he just sort of says a thing and a tariff appears. So the thing about 122 is that instead of the thing that Trump was going to, doing before where he was just tweeting out a tariff rate for an individual country because he was mad at them. Section 122, it only allows you to set a flat tariff rate for every country in the world and the maximum tariff rate is capped at 15%. The other thing that's notable about this is that section 122 tariffs also need to be approved by Congress after 150 days, at least in theory.

Starting point is 03:19:58 The Cato Institute, interestingly, is arguing that Trump theorists. could just extend it for another 150 days after the first one. But this would be a huge mess because there's no way he can win a tariff vote in Congress. There's just absolutely no way. Now, the other important aspect of this that's very weird that I think is going to become a very large sort of point of discussion in the coming weeks is that section 122, so I've read this section. It says specifically, quote, it can only be used to levy tariffs, quote,

Starting point is 03:20:31 whenever fundamental international payment problems require special import measures to restrict imports, one, to deal with large and serious United States balance of payment deficits. Now, that's vague. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, but here's a thing, though. Here's a thing. So I tried to write a version of this where I tried to explain balance of payments and what a balanced payment deficit is.

Starting point is 03:20:55 I'm going to do that in the other episode. It's too convoluted. but what's really important about this is that Trump has been complaining about trade deficits and the state of emergency is over trade deficit. A trade deficit is not a balance of payment deficit. But balance of payments is an accounting identity that has to do with, like it's literally like the sum of all exchanges between everyone of the U.S. and everyone outside of the U.S. So you by definition can't have a deficit in it because it's the accounting identity.

Starting point is 03:21:24 It tracks both sides, right? So if someone in the U.S. is sending money to someone, it tracks. both the fact that the UyS. person set the money and the fact that the other person got the money? So you can't have a deficit because it's always one to one because it's tracking both. So you're saying the limit does not exist?

Starting point is 03:21:40 Yeah, it's unhinged. And like, you know, and specifically for the U.S. Right. It is possible to get into trouble with balance of payments if you can't just print your currency. Like if your currency is on the gold standard, you couldn't theory get in trouble

Starting point is 03:21:56 here. Now, a notable thing about the United States is that we are not on the gold standard. So we literally, even if you use definitions of balance of payment where you could theoretically have one of these problems, the U.S. cannot have a balance of payments crisis. It cannot. It definitely cannot have one of these, right? And the thing about this, right, is you're going to hear a lot of people talking about how the U.S. is a balanced payments crisis. If the U.S. was having the actual serious balance of payments deficit right now, there would be riots in the streets. And that's not an exaggeration.

Starting point is 03:22:29 This is normally what happens. Normally balance payments crises are a country owes a bunch of money and they straight up do not have enough US dollars to pay that off. And when that happens, things happen like suddenly there's like 500 person lines outside of every gas station because there's not enough money to import gas, right? Like you can't import food. It's like like that is what happens when there's balance payments crises. Right.

Starting point is 03:22:53 This is like Sri Lanka in 2024. And like that's the kind of thing where you get a balance of payments crisis. and people burned down the presidential mansion. Like, we don't have one? This is not happening. So there's already becoming an attempt to be like, oh, the U.S. is a balance, payments deficit. There's a crisis.

Starting point is 03:23:06 No, no, no, no, no, no. Nonsense. You're going to hear this a lot. It's complete nonsense. And it's one of the things that makes me look at this and go, okay, this is the immediate one that he picks, but like this is not going to survive in court because the specific line here where it says

Starting point is 03:23:20 fundamental international payment problems, like we don't have fundamental international payment problems. Like, we pay, all of this gets paid. every year. It's funny. In the executive order, it says the U.S. sometimes has international payment problems, and no, it doesn't. It has never had international payment problems.

Starting point is 03:23:37 Like, on any kind of real scale, the closest thing you can do is look back at periods where the U.S. was again on the gold standard, and even then we were fined. Like, it's complete gibberish. I'm pissed about this. I'm annoyed that I have to go back to

Starting point is 03:23:52 balance of payment stuff. So this is probably not going to hold up when the inevitable next lawsuit goes under. However, comma, there are a couple of other trade authorities that he can use that they've been talking about using, and some of them have been used already. So broadly, we've been talking about like two kinds of tariffs on this show. We've been talking about the tariffs that are on a specific country, and those are the ones that are basically gone. We'll get to the one exception to that in a second. And then there's been the ones that are on goods. So if you remember, like, there was a tariff recently on like vanity cabinets.

Starting point is 03:24:27 And like, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that one. Yeah. Really weird niche things. Oh, James. Wait, wait until I talk about what the legal authority of tariffs on kitchen cabinets was. There's a special constitutional exemption for those. It's so bad.

Starting point is 03:24:45 Wow. Okay. So, so this is the section 232 of the Trade Act in 1974. These are these specific tariffs. And these ones are supposed to be tariffs on goods in response to threats to national security. So it's... Yeah, hang on. Join the dots for me.

Starting point is 03:25:03 The price of implanted cabinets are being too low. Is it a threat to national security? It's funny because this is the one the legal experts think actually can potentially survive challenges because it's national security, but it's like,

Starting point is 03:25:21 okay, like I get our Supreme Court, the fact that this ruling was six to three is frankly ridiculous, given that again, Trump was pretending he had legal authority to issue tariffs in a bill that literally never says the word tariff and had never been used to raise a tariff before. Okay, so like the Supreme Court was like, okay, well, that's nonsense. And even I, who is extremely cynical about the Supreme Court, do not think that you can compellingly argue in front of a court.

Starting point is 03:25:44 And this probably won't even go to the Supreme Court, like, that you can compellingly argue that it is part of the national security interests of the United States that American cabinet makers mildly outcompete foreign cabinet. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's a weird one. I mean, yeah, national security and, like, terrorism are the magic words when it comes to the Constitution. Yeah, but in this case, okay, like, really?

Starting point is 03:26:11 Seriously, with a straight face, it's going to walk up there and go national security to write half your fingers. Yeah. They've done some wild stuff in the courts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting to what, like you say, you were saying,

Starting point is 03:26:27 like how much they'll get past the court. It was interesting to watch the Supreme Court justes in the state of the union, just like, uh, oh yeah. Just grimacing through it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Starting point is 03:26:38 He was so mad at them. They're usually pretty stoic, but there was a serious grimace action going on. Yeah. Yeah. There was no attempt to hide that particular face, right? Yeah. I don't know if we've ever had a, a sitting president like scold the Supreme court in a state of the union

Starting point is 03:26:56 in that way. I think maybe it is possible FDR did it. Yeah, I was going to say I can see... The FDR did try to pack the court at one point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was at least funnier. Or at least back in the day

Starting point is 03:27:11 when they used to like fight on the floor of Congress like something back then. Those were the days. So there's one more trade thing I think we're talking about here in terms of where more tariff authority can come from. And that's Section 301 of that same terror fact. And this is the one where... So a lot of the tariffs on China are actually still in effect.

Starting point is 03:27:36 Because a lot of those tariffs are actually from the first Trump administration. And then Biden continued them because... Yeah. They hate China. I quite seriously do not have any better explanation than that. Yeah. But Section 301 is specifically for, quote, unfair trade practices.

Starting point is 03:27:57 Yeah. No, like unfair. It's such a strange word to use in legislation, right? Like, what do we mean by that? Well, so like, in the original context, it was like supposed to be an anti-protectionist thing. Okay. But it's also like, yeah, people are like, oh my God, it's unfair. Like, the Chinese companies get money from the governments. And I'm like, all of you get fucking money from the government all the time.

Starting point is 03:28:22 What do you talk like? Yeah. And like, are they talking about, like, it's unfair that wages are lower in certain countries, you know? Yeah. And it's just like, like, you look at this and it's like, okay, the U.S., the entire U.S. agriculture industry. Like, all of the corn grown in this country is grown because they pass an ag bill every single year that does subsidies that are literally illegal for like any other country to have because they specifically got agreements carved out of the free trade statutes. It's absolutely ridiculous. But, you know, this is the one that he's been able to sort of use so far. far. So I think this is going to be the one that's going to be leaned on once the Trump people sort of remember they have it. But the problem with using 301 is that there's actual bureaucratic

Starting point is 03:29:05 steps you have to do. Like you have to like convene a bunch of trade authorities and you have to have like a specific anti-competitive practice. Okay. So this is also, I think, going to be very vulnerable to legal challenges except probably on China because you actually have to go through and designate what the legal practices are, and I mean, usually the process takes months, even when you're moving quickly. So there's also, I guess, what I would call the sort of like the secret dark mode option, where they just start doing the nightmare or stuff. This is something that, I think it was Haslett. One of Trump's officials talked about this last year is potentially using the Smoot-Harley

Starting point is 03:29:49 Tariff Act. Like the 1930s. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, the one that is very famous for exacerbating the Great Depression. Yeah, the one I learned about in high school. Yep.

Starting point is 03:30:02 Yeah. It's also, the other thing about this, right, is this act is not on the books anymore. Okay. Because, well, so, okay, so I've seen conflicting explanation to this. Some people are just confused.

Starting point is 03:30:14 I think the explanation of it that I've seen is that it was superseded by sections of the 1974 trade act. Okay. So it's not even clear if this is in a fact. But this is in theory, like the sort of like dark maga, like we're reaching into the bag and pulling trade authority out of something button they could reach for. Right.

Starting point is 03:30:32 Yeah. Which they've done before with like Title 42 and stuff, right? Yeah. Title 32 is to stop people with tuberculosis. Like back in the day, that was the idea behind it. And they pulled it out in 2020, right? And then Biden, just like this Harris, kept it for much longer than Trump. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:30:48 But I think, I think this is, and this is, I think, actually, very significant moment for the Supreme Court. And I think central bank independence will eventually become this if and when this gets to the courts. But tariffs are sort of the red line for a couple of the Supreme Court justices who normally side with Trump just specifically because, A, I mean, it just says in the Constitution that tariffs are specifically a thing that Congress does. So you can't just be like, oh, they gave me the power to do this unless they like

Starting point is 03:31:18 explicitly said it. But then B, it's, this is the financial red light, right? Like, this is the point at which you're fucking with the money. So this is the point where the Supreme Court was like, you know, we've let you just make up laws in a whole bunch of other cases.

Starting point is 03:31:33 But this is, this is the actual limit of it when it comes to authority that really significantly like destroys the American economy. Yeah, like, the economy has more rights than people do. Yeah, absolutely. This is the way that it's always been. I also want to mention one closing thing on the tariffs is that the Supreme Court didn't answer the question

Starting point is 03:31:53 of if people are going to get their money back and how the refunds are going to work. Sure didn't. Nope. And I think it's because they couldn't get agreement on it because this ruling is kind of a mess in that it's like this weird, fractured coalition of justices or like parts of them agree on part of it

Starting point is 03:32:10 and there's like parts of the opinion that are agreed to by a plurality of the corp and not a majority. It's very weird. But yeah, they have no idea how this is going to work. There's already lawsuits going on to get the money back that have been in place already. So presumably some kind of redispensation is going to happen and it's going to be unbelievably chaotic. Okay.

Starting point is 03:32:29 But we will keep you updated on how American trade negotiations go. Yeah. Okay. We reported the news. Put a trans girl on your couch. Oh, actually, okay. I have one also really bleak update. on put a trans girl on your couch,

Starting point is 03:32:49 which is we actually got numbers. Well, they're technically not the first numbers we've gotten, but we got actual good numbers on the number of trans people who've moved, who've like fled their state. Like just from mid-20204 to mid-20205, the statistics suggest that it's 10% of all trans people, which is 400,000 people.

Starting point is 03:33:09 I think that's likely an undercount, and that's just the first half of 2025. Yeah. That is a humanitarian, crisis. Like this is an internal migration crisis, right? These are internally, these have become internally displaced people. Yes. And yeah, it's hideous and the least that we can do at this moment is putting trans people on your couch. Yeah. Because the violence that they are fleeing is intensifying. Yeah. A lot of people actually reached out to our email. Our email is cool zone tips

Starting point is 03:33:41 at proton.me. And that's mostly for things that you know that we should report. on not for just like general episode ideas. If you're trying to be a source for us or have some tip of something that you've become aware of this and being reported, it's not for like Robert should do this episode on bastards. It's not. I just want to emphasize once again that it is not.

Starting point is 03:34:04 There is a, if you want to do that, go to the bastard subreddit. There is a section for that. Thank you. But a lot of people had reached out to be like, I want to do this, but I don't know of anyone.

Starting point is 03:34:16 And obviously, I don't want to be like posting online, like trans folks come to my house because that seems like weirdo behavior. So that's something we will try and aggress like in a more general kind of mutual aid focused series of episodes that we'll work on. But those people, it is good that you are trying to do something. Yeah. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Starting point is 03:34:52 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. Hi, it's Jill Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. Today, I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change.

Starting point is 03:35:29 Dance with the breakdowns. The embodiment of Pisces intuition with Capricorn power moves. So I'm, like, delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Best. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would.

Starting point is 03:35:58 That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

Starting point is 03:36:33 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?

Starting point is 03:37:13 Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 221

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