It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 243

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Starting point is 00:02:28 CallZone Media. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Elia Ayyub, who is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer and researcher, as well as a podcaster with the podcast of The Fire These Times and from the periphery media collective.

Starting point is 00:03:11 And today he's speaking to us about the recent agreement between Lebanon and Israel related to Israel's continued occupation of the southern part of Lebanon and continued bombardment. So he's going to talk to us about what the agreement says, why there are so many problems and concerns related to this agreement. and how it fits into the broader regional war against Iran. Ilya, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me again. So today we are going to be discussing, as I mentioned in the intro, the agreement between Lebanon and Israel, the framework, which has been quite controversial.

Starting point is 00:03:48 So I wanted to just give you an opportunity to give a brief explainer. What is this agreement? So it's technically like a trilateral framework in the sense that it includes, well, legally anyway, the U.S. Israel and Lebanon. Ostensibly, like what it says it does is that it proposes some kind of future in which Lebanon and Israel, which have been in a de facto state of war for basically forever, to no longer be in that de facto state of war. The problem, which probably won't surprise, like the audience of this podcast, the problem is sort of in the details. Like, what is it that Lebanon

Starting point is 00:04:24 has signed? If you look on the website itself, it's on the American government's website. There are 14 points. It's roughly 1,000, I don't know, 300 words or so. And already you see what's absent, which is the terms like withdrawal and of occupation, any of that. There's basically no stipulation whatsoever that the Israelis have to leave Lebanon. And you will have people who support this zero. So technically that's not true because it says here in number two, the government of Israel and government of Lebanon committed to a reciprocal sequence process with clear conditions, whereby the LAF, which is the Lebanese armed forces, will restore effective sovereign authority over all of Lebanese territory.

Starting point is 00:05:06 And here is the grub, I'm quoting, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the idea of the Israel defense forces to progressively redeploy out of Lebanese territory. What it essentially says, and the various points we don't have to go through all of them, essentially confirm this time and time again,

Starting point is 00:05:27 is that Israel will get to define, will get to decide when an area that Israel is occupying, as in a Lebanese territory that Israel is occupying, when that area is officially disarmed, when it is no longer a quote-on-quote security threat. The Lebanese state has no say in the matter. There's no independent like UN-type mechanism that would determine that. It's just Israel that gets to define that. And what they're currently doing, which is what the Lebanese government has agreed to, which is part of the controversy that we'll get into,

Starting point is 00:06:01 is that they're creating these two so-called pilot zones, which are among the territory that Israel is currently occupying in Lebanon, in which they will allow the LAF, the Lebanese armed forces, to progressively assert its, I'm putting this in quotation, you can't see it, like assert is sovereign territorial control, but, and here again, is the kind of the devil in the detail, the Lebanese army cannot actually enforce anything that would still be the authority of the,

Starting point is 00:06:28 Israeli army, which again is the one that is currently illegally occupying southern Lebanon. So yeah, we can get into more of the details. But that's sort of in a nutshell why it's so bad. But I can get into more why it's bad as well. Oh, yeah, we'd like to talk about all the bad. So before we get into like all the bad, where does Hezbollah play into any of this? Well, unsurprisingly, Hezbollah opposes this. In fact, I don't think a majority of the political parties currently in the Lebanese parliament

Starting point is 00:06:55 support this, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of the, the reasons why I don't think this particular agreement, which is the latest of so many agreements between the Americans, Israelis and the Lebanese, at least at the official level. I don't see this lasting very long. Hasbalah has immediately said that this is a humiliation, it's surrender, its defeat, which is not that unusual. That's sort of how they've been talking about these negotiations for since they started really. And it declared this agreement null and void, which, you know, they cannot get more straightforward than that. Their main ally in, parliament, the Amal movement has also come out to oppose this, which is a big deal because

Starting point is 00:07:33 that's the Speaker of Parliament. Lebanon is ruled by this kind of Troika, so he's one out of three, which is a big problem for the other two. And yeah, I kind of genuinely don't see this lasting, but I am also worried about what can come next. I mean, the fact that Israel is, again, the unilateral, you know, judge jury executioner here obviously is a very big problem. But what other issues do you foresee with this agreement? I worry that the Lebanese government in at first having some, I think, understandable concerns over Iran's role in Lebanon, and we can get into that, has sort of either, I don't know how you would describe it, maybe overcorrected and gone a bit too anti-Iran, which in and of itself I wouldn't necessarily oppose. I'm not a fan of the Islamic Republic

Starting point is 00:08:21 to put it mildly, and I've always opposed Hezbollah for as long as I can remember. But the timing of doing what they've been doing, and I can get into it now, has been, I think, very, to put it charitably, very puzzling, but I think also like very, very short-sighted and frankly reckless and dangerous. This is all while Israel is bombing Lebanon, I should say. If this was in a context where there was no active war, I wouldn't have as big of an issue with it. But they've declared the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon to be personal and non-grata. They've taken down photos of the Ayatollah by the road to the airport and replaced it with Lebanon Awolan, which is like Lebanon first. They deported like members of the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,

Starting point is 00:09:05 and done a bunch of like other even like rhetorical things like the president would go on Twitter and say like Iran get out and stuff like that, the president of Lebanon, which again, I have 1,001 issues with the Iranian rule in Lebanon and including my issues with Hezbollah. But there is only one country that is currently actually occupying Lebanon, militarily and actually bombing Lebanon militarily with its military, I mean, and that country is not Iran. So the priorities of the government in wanting to distance itself from Hezbollah's actions, which I should say have been controversial from the beginning because Hezbollah took a unilateral

Starting point is 00:09:42 decision to enter the war against Israel, a decision that was not made with like the rest of Lebanon's approval. So it's been like controversial from the start. And that's what I meant by like the charitable interpretation. the Lebanese government sort of overcorrected. And instead, by attempting supposedly to distance itself from Iran, what has actually done is made us even more dependent on the United States than we used to be before. Right. So that's where the things you're describing under normal circumstances would be like, yeah,

Starting point is 00:10:12 like, why is Iran so embedded in a lot of these different countries in the region and why does it have such an interventionist role? But you're saying it's reckless in this context where the Lebanese government is basically making itself more at the mercy of actors like the United States and Israel by proxy. Yeah. As of now, like, and I really tried my best to look for some leverage that Lebanon might have, but as of now, I don't actually see any leverage that Lebanon has. It's basically we hope for the best. Like, I wish I could put it differently, but it essentially is under the hope that, like, the Trump administration is tired of Netanyahu, that it might force the Israelis to, to either

Starting point is 00:10:53 withdraw from Lebanon or to at very least stop the bomb. or whatnot, which I've seen no evidence of. And as of now, every time a so-called ceasefire has been signed, that even Hezbollah agreed to, the only thing that it's done is that Hezbollah would not respond to Israeli bombings. So the Israeli bombings have been a constant throughout this entire thing, ceasefire or no ceasefire. Since the agreement was signed, they've continued, they haven't stopped. As of time of recording, over 4,200 Lebanese have been killed since the beginning of this latest war, so not even since the beginning, since 2020. but since in 2026 alone,

Starting point is 00:11:27 because Israel does not discriminate in how they bomb. So to give you the example of those two so-called pilot zones, are they even inhabitable? As of now, I don't know. Because of the 54 towns and villages, Lebanese towns and villages that the Israelis militarily occupy,

Starting point is 00:11:44 at least 46 of them that we know of are either partially or entirely demolished. So what are those security zones? What does that even mean? But again, is the entire problem now, was that they get to decide all of that. And again, with all of my issues with Iran, the agreement that the Lebanese have signed with the Israelis,

Starting point is 00:12:03 I think is objectively worse than the memorandum of understanding that the Iranians signed with the Americans that actually also included Lebanon. Because at least in that MOU and that moment of understanding, it included the sentence territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon as well as a call for ceasefire, which was a nightmare for Netanyahu.

Starting point is 00:12:22 Let's talk about Iran more specifically for a moment. I mean, Lebanon has taken out the ambassador, has made all of these kind of rhetorical shifts away from the Iranian regime, obviously a display for the U.S. and for Israel. But Iran, how has it responded? How has the government responded? And how does this agreement relate to the MOU that Iran signed with the United States? So it's quite complicated because the MOU was signed just about a week or so before. So the deal between the Iranians and the Americans was signed roughly a dean or agreed upon. I don't know if they signed these things.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Roughly a week before this one, the one between Israel and Lebanon via America, the tripartite one, as they call it. One interpretation that I've seen is that by going directly to Lebanon, America actually managed to bypass these kind of bullet points that Iran was putting forward. So like, let's say Iran is saying, there should be a ceasefire in Lebanon and that there should be like territorial integrity and sovereignty and sovereign. In the meantime, the Lebanese state is saying to Iran, like, you do not negotiate on our behalf. So the Americans go to Lebanon directly, or rather Lebanon goes to the American. And they supersede it. They supersede this and they do a negotiation or they get the Lebanese to sign this latest agreement directly, which of course does not include Iran anyway. So the main differences between the MOU between America and Iran and the agreement between, let's say, Israel and Lebanon is that.

Starting point is 00:14:01 Israel had no parts whatsoever in the MOU. And if it had come to pass, if the Iranians had basically gotten what they were asking for, the Americans would have been forced at least legally to pressure the Israelis to leave Lebanon altogether. No ifs and buts, no negotiated exit, whatever that means, no making up pilot zones, none of that stuff. It would just be you've been doing this occupation illegally. You need to leave as simple as that. That's been the Iranian position, which is not a position. that most Lebanese would disagree with because it is just a fact.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Right. And it's interesting. I mean, obviously we don't want to speculate, but it is interesting that Iran made the ceasefire in Lebanon so kind of central to a lot of their demands, right? Yeah, it's not that surprising to me, I think, because they see this as saving Hasballah. So like it's almost like an easy thing to do. It doesn't cost them anything in a sense. It would have, of course, put pressure on the Israelis, which they're happy to. to do since Israel and America started the war against Iran in the first place. And it would give some kind of breathing space for their main ally Lebanon, which is Hezbollah. So in and in of itself, I don't think it's surprising that they included it.

Starting point is 00:15:17 Maybe they knew that Lebanon would reject it officially given their position of the Lebanese government, you know, thus far. And I can't know for sure. But yeah, in and in of itself, it doesn't surprise me that they went for this. because one other thing I should say that they were proposing in that MOU is a so-called deconfliction cell, the details of which are not entirely clear to me yet, and at this point may never happen anyway. But the way it's been interpreted that I saw is that it would see its influence in Lebanon restored. So there's also like a self-interest in all of that, but not in a militarily occupying way. So for me, it's not that the option has been either an amazing option or a bad option.

Starting point is 00:15:57 it's more like either we get the Iran option, which is not ideal but still functional or a catastrophic option, which is the one that we actually got with the Israelis. Right. And I mean, we've had some episodes about Iran. I've hosted a few people about Iran. And I think it bears repeating that their strategy, their ability to kind of withstand even this level of severe warfare in the latest escalation has depended on their allies in the region. and kind of the diffusion of Iranian power to non-state actors, essentially. Yeah. So what was the public reaction to the Lebanese government signing this agreement?

Starting point is 00:16:39 The Lebanese public reaction, to be clear. Yeah. The most immediate reaction on the street has been by, of course, by Hezbollah and its ally Amal in which they, you know, they burn stuff down, they yell, they threw stuff at the cops and stuff like that. The secretary general of Hezbollah, as they said, has they cleared and not in void and so on. As for the rest of the country, there hasn't been any kind of mobilization against it, but they shouldn't be interpreted as consent.

Starting point is 00:17:04 It's more, I think, in my view, that the Lebanese population as a whole has been exhausted by nearly three years of war now. And there is an appetite for kind of diplomacy. In fact, there's been a poll, a nationwide poll that was just released a few days ago that says that roughly 54% of the population support diplomacy versus 35% that support armed resistance. Now, the 54% that support diplomacy, which is just over half, it's not because they believe this is the best option. It's more that they believe, I think, this is my interpretation. It's more that I think most people genuinely believe that there are no other option. So it's more

Starting point is 00:17:39 like, I think, a reflection of how desperate the situation is more than anything else. It should not be confused with any kind of warming up towards Israel. And that same Paul, which again was nationwide, 87% of people in Lebanon identified. Israel as their main enemy versus 51% that identify America and 38% that identified Iran. And this is across sects. So usually when you see the reporting, you could be led to believe that it's only Shias in Lebanon that oppose Israel, but actually it is really a cross sect that Israel is a deeply unpopular state in Lebanon, which is not surprising because it's been bombing Lebanon for on and off decades now. Right. You've written about this for 972 Mag.

Starting point is 00:18:18 You have another article coming out, I'm sure, or it's already out. I'm not sure, but I will definitely link it in the show notes by the time. this episode airs. Is there anything you feel like we missed and that listeners should know? It's very difficult to know where things are heading in terms of the security situation in Lebanon. I would argue that kind of the specter of a civil war, whatever that actually looks like, is never too far away and hasn't been too far away for a while now. I don't think it's likely in the traditional sense of like multiple armed actors in the new future.

Starting point is 00:18:51 It largely because I think the population is really exhaust. exhausted, but the Israeli war on Lebanon has created kind of this fault line that's very, very difficult, I think, to overcome now. And it's not, again, a fault line between pro-Israel and anti-Israel. Both sides of this fault line are technically anti-Israel. It's more of like what the priorities should be for the Lebanese states. And it's created a sense for a lot of people who are from southern Lebanon that is currently, as we're speaking, still being bombed. it is giving the sense that the rest of the country is abandoning them. And this sort of grievances is quite literally what gave us Hezbollah in the first place.

Starting point is 00:19:29 Hezbollah was created in the mid-80s. This was a couple of years, two, three years after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon really started, which was not even the first one. It was the second one. It was just the biggest one. It would last for 18 years. And in those 18 years, this obscure group that did not really exist grew in popularity because they were the most effective one

Starting point is 00:19:50 thanks to the fact that Iran was backing them until they became the de facto kingmakers of Lebanese politics for a couple of decades after that. So the worry here is not even that I feel that like history would just repeat itself and whatnot. It's more that there doesn't seem to be any actual path forward that proposes any alternative to people from southern Lebanon, which is roughly a fifth of the country

Starting point is 00:20:15 in terms of both sides, more or less, and populations more or less. Those people have nowhere else to go. They will go back to their homes when they can. They go back to their lands if their homes are destroyed and they will try and rebuild, as they have done already in the past, if not once, sometimes more than once.

Starting point is 00:20:31 And if there isn't a solution for them that is just a fair solution that brings them justice that stops the Israeli bombings and permanently forces the Israelis out of Lebanon, there's going to be some force somewhere that's going to find a way to appeal to that population. and if they're not offered an alternative, they will seek that alternative, which again, is the history of Hezbollah in the first place. So as much as I oppose Hezbollah for very Lebanese reasons, like and as the Lebanese myself, because of sectarianism and authoritarianism and so on, that's a completely separate question for me than the right of people who are under military occupation to resist that military occupation, because that is actually a right that's guaranteed under international law.

Starting point is 00:21:17 And I'm really worried as now, and I'm not just speaking for myself here, that's virtually everyone I know, that the situation is getting to the point where essentially the Lebanese state is hoping that the Americans would just pressure the Israelis. And the way it's been happening as of now is that they would pressure them here and there a bit, but not much. And then the rest of the time, they just let them do whatever they want with American tax money, of course. If they don't actually force the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon, it can create like a, a whole different political beast in a sense that would be even more violent, I think. We're specifically talking about Lebanon, but this is the case in so many contexts

Starting point is 00:21:58 in the region, is that when the conflicts are unresolved, when the violence is unresolved, then it'll only perpetuate more violence. Everyone I know has been warning about that in every context in Palestine, in Lebanon. So it's extremely depressing. But thank you so much for sharing your insights with us,

Starting point is 00:22:21 and I will link Avia's work in the show notes. And, yeah, hope you all stay safe. Thanks, Jenna. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish,

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Starting point is 00:23:00 Open the free IHRRA radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. Hi, I'm Bob Pipman, chairman and CEO of IHard Media. I also led the team that created MTV, and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month. On my podcast, Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV, from the ground up. Those are powerful words. My.

Starting point is 00:23:30 Something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to math and magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or whatever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all?

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Starting point is 00:24:36 On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast.

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Starting point is 00:25:54 Welcome back to It Could Happen here. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart. and that's happening in a lot of places right now, but not every place also has things regularly, unfortunately falling from the sky. But that's life in Ukraine for a lot of people, including I guess today, every single day

Starting point is 00:26:14 because they're still under invasion from the Russian Federation, which I guess we're still calling it the Federation. Romeo Kukriatsky, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? I mean, I know it's not great, so I don't know why I'm asking. Yeah, uh,

Starting point is 00:26:30 Thanks for having me back on. It's been a while. Yeah. Yeah, like you mentioned, it's not great, especially for me personally. My neighborhood's been targeted by ballistics twice in the past two weeks, one of which hit a improperly stored munitions dump and blew up half the neighborhood. So that's been fun to deal with. I mean, we have other stuff to talk about, but I do want to just kind of talk about what life has been like. In terms of dealing with that, I mean, thank God, you have not been hit. Neither has your home, but like on a day-to-day basis, how are you all enduring, you know, so many years past when this escalated most recently? Honestly, I had thought prior to half my neighborhood being blown up that I basically

Starting point is 00:27:16 gotten numb to the bombing. Yeah. Turns out that's not true. Yeah, that makes sense. Turns out I was just completely lying to myself. Yeah. I have mortal dread pretty much all the time. every night. I am

Starting point is 00:27:30 desperately checking every single monitoring channel I have access to and praying that the Russians aren't going to shoot us. And if they do show us, I then have to think, hey, should I wake my wife and son up? Should we go down to the shelter? Is there any point? We live in the 15th floor. So

Starting point is 00:27:46 we'd have to walk. What if a missile hits while we're in the stairwell? Yeah. And it's a little tiring. It's a little tiring to constantly live your life with the feeling that you may die at any goddamn moment. I'm not even in the military. I am pretty much constantly afraid for my life and, of course, the life of my family and

Starting point is 00:28:09 friends every morning after a mass attack, I have to call or text every single journalist works for me, make sure that they're still alive. Yeah. And so far, everything's been clear for five years, but you really have to wonder how long can one's luck last. Yeah, it's like you were talking about, you know, the moment you start to feel like, you know, maybe I've hardened

Starting point is 00:28:34 or maybe like I've gotten past the point that this can affect me is the moment where something, you know, happens. I feel so awful. Like the constant state of like panic, fear, arousal that everyone has to be in over there because they're just shooting missiles

Starting point is 00:28:50 into your home every day is just, it's hideous. Yeah, it's not great. I haven't left the country, since the start of the full scale. Yeah. And to be quite honest, I'm not sure how I would do once this threat is no longer above my head. It's hard to imagine going to sleep and not wondering whether I'm going to wake up in the next,

Starting point is 00:29:11 like the next morning. It sounds a little absurd, but then I think someone about 300 kilometers away has made a decision to lob multi-hundred kilogram warheads at the general. area of where I live within two to three kilometers. That is not a large radius. No, no, it really isn't. No, I mean, ballistic missiles often can go thousands. Like, that's so easy to build something that you could just fire blindly into a city at this point.

Starting point is 00:29:42 That's why war looks like this for most of the people involved in it, right? Like, for all the movies are about the guys, like, kicking indoors and shit on the front lines. The vast majority of everyone's experience of war is shit falling on you from the fucking sky or exploding in traffic or something like that, right? Like, that's the reality. I'm fucking sorry, man. Yeah, and in Kiev, honestly, we don't even have as bad. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:07 Here's Sone, they're just doing a human safari. They've been doing that for, I don't know, like six months now. The front line is right over basically the river. And they, the Russians just send drones to hunt people in the streets just for fun, you know, funsies, for the lulls. So as bad as I have to be here, sometimes I read the stories I'm publishing and I'm like, man, thank God I don't live in that place. I don't know anyone from that city.

Starting point is 00:30:35 Everything becomes so relative after a while. I mean, it's the only way to stay sane, even though your situation is objectively unreasonable and impossible. You kind of naturally just look over to whoever's got it worse. I mean, which says something beautiful, I guess if you'll let it, but, you know. I guess that's one way of looking at it. Fuck, man, I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:30:56 I brought you on here today to talk about some of the political changes that have been pretty massive, that have just just hit the Ukrainian government as the result of the sacking of Mikhailo Fedorov. But that also feels like we should talk about that some. I just, I don't know, talking to you reminds me of how much I even let myself over here focus on war in terms of stuff like that, right? these like moves by governments and moves by forces, which by default means excising the majority of what's happening from your mind. Because in some, I mean, sometimes it's just too big to think about otherwise, right? But like it's...

Starting point is 00:31:34 No, that's exactly right. Yeah. Whenever there's any sort of domestic political intrigue, I am just overjoyed. I'm ecstatic. Yeah. Something. I know a lot of people wanted to be war correspondents and like be there in the trenches. And I have a lot of friends.

Starting point is 00:31:49 my buddy Dylan Burns, I saw a clip of him just getting shelled last week, somewhere I think on Zaporizia front. Yeah. That wasn't what I wanted to do. I became a journalist because I love politics. You know, the envy, the pettiness, the ebos, all the little, like, garbage bullshit that makes up the experience of human politics, that's what calls to me in my dark little shriveled heart.

Starting point is 00:32:15 So whatever I have the chance to engage and just. Domestic political bullshit, I feel overjoyed. That is fantastic. Well, good. Okay. Well, let's talk about some domestic political bullshit because there's been a wild train of it in the last couple of days. I'm just going to let you go after starting this off.

Starting point is 00:32:35 But like kind of what prompted this is on July 15th of this year, Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, fired or dismissed Mikhailo Fedorov, who was the Minister of Defense of Ukraine. And Federov, he'd been the president's social media market. initially, right? Like back when he was campaigning, way before his involvement in the military, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah, he was a, not just social media. He was the young, like, IT guy. He was the IT guy. He did all the IT infrastructure from SMM, from social media, to the actual physical infrastructure itself. That was all fed off. He was, like, the IT dude for the

Starting point is 00:33:14 Zelensky administration. Yeah. And he's only had the position for about six months. was appointed in January, but it's been an incredibly popular six months, right? He is widely popular in Ukraine. There were large protests following his dismissal, and he got a lot of credit for his use of drone warfare, and particularly some of the promises he was making, and some people would say some of the promises that he fulfilled about drone warfare, right? And one of the issues that he had is he kind of clashed, as I understand it, with an older general, Siersky, who was much more of a conventional

Starting point is 00:33:49 weapons guy. I think like the big fight that Bordelis came over like a fight over munitions, right? Federov was canceling an order of artillery shells or something like that and it kind of embodied the greater conflict between them, it seems like. Yeah, that's basically right. Federoff prior to taking the ministry defense position, like I said, he was the IT guy and he had

Starting point is 00:34:09 the Minister of Digital Transformation. Because we have a whole ministry set up to digitize our government. We've got the Dia app. and a couple of good results from it. So he had a relatively high-level popularity compared to the typical Ukrainian official coming into the MOD position. And he became popular, or I guess his popularity grew

Starting point is 00:34:32 not so much because he was doing drones. Like the transformation to drones occurred pretty much from the start of the fulls game. Right, yes. Every single unit has been ordering and begging and getting drones however they can since literally the full scale started. However, what Federoff promised to do and what he did,

Starting point is 00:34:52 which is what won him a lot of accolades with the common soldier, is he said we would actually get you drones. Instead of, you know, you having to go through 15 layers of bureaucracy and procurement to maybe sign up for a list where you might get delivered something in four months somewhere. We'll set up a simple direct system where you can request the equipment you want and you'll get it. Well, it's not quite as simple. He developed some gamification crap, which you can get into later.

Starting point is 00:35:21 I'm not a fan. That is really interesting. But yeah, yeah. He's tried some really fascinating stuff. Yeah, he's tried a lot of things. And it has worked. People have started getting drones. Like, I know guys in the front who had complained previously that they were unable to get equipment,

Starting point is 00:35:37 even though they're posted, they're deployed, they have a mission. And commands just like, oh, we don't know where your drone is. that started to be resolved. However, in order to do this, you need money, right? To buy drones, you need money. Right. So the ministry defense controls the actual monetary flows. They have to actually sign off on whatever the request from the general staff or the military is to purchase this or that equipment system.

Starting point is 00:36:04 Right. The way it typically works because the ministry defense is a civilian institution and the military is obviously a military institution, typically speaking, in wartime, civilians are intended to defer to military expertise, right? So if the army goes, we need, I don't know, 100,000 155 millimeter shells. The Ministry of Defense is not really supposed to say, you know what? No, we think you need this instead. This is the kind of the crux of the conflict here, is that Federoff, seeing these requirements, from Siersky, like you said, he's a very conventional guy, a very conventional Soviet general.

Starting point is 00:36:48 He grew up in Moscow, went to the Moscow Red Army Academy. To be quite honest, he's pretty much a Soviet general through him through. My understanding is he has a reputation for accepting pretty gnarly casualties. Fair or unfair, he's gotten that reputation. I'm not like an expert on his record. Yeah. Absolutely, yes. He has that reputation.

Starting point is 00:37:08 And like you, I'm not a military guy. Yeah. I'm not an Army expert. I've never studied strategy or tactics aside from meme posting. So I have no idea how, you know, true or not true it is. Obviously, you can look at the loss records of the units that Serski is that to personally favor and you can see that they are higher, but are they hired because they are simply being used more often? Like, it's a war. There are going to be casualties. There are simply no way to remove that fact. Or are they higher because his commanders are incompetent in throwing away human meat. You know, you've got people

Starting point is 00:37:42 that'll say one way, you've got people to say the other way. But regardless, Serski would continue to request these kind of conventional munitions. And according to Serski's version, at least, Federoff will just completely ignore this and by whatever he wanted them in street by. Typically, this was drones. There was a funny meme I saw of Siersky complaining to Federof with a text the buzzing of your stupid drones are hurting the infantry to advance to give you a sense of how Ukrainians viewed this oh man that's beautiful i really love that mean really that's beautiful that's going in a history book from the fedorov side what they say the the conflict is which knowing how ukraine works i tend to believe them right is that in federal

Starting point is 00:38:46 he's attempts to move these cash flows from buying conventional munitions to buying drones, he started stepping on a lot of toes in the general staff. Right. Because this is Ukraine, because this is defense procurement, if you want to buy something from a domestic supplier, the chances are that supplier is owned somehow via shell company connected to some general or some highly placed military officials. That's just the nature of the game. obviously let's say if the general staff requests a hundred thousand shells and they source

Starting point is 00:39:22 half of it from a Ukrainian firm there's a good chance that there's a lot of generals that are going to be building themselves in uvilla after this if however you don't put that order in and instead buy you know drones from the 500 or 1,000 different garage manufacturers which is how the drone industry works here that money is not going into people's pockets and those people get upset. Those people start complaining that you are not a team player, that they can't work with you, that you don't listen to them, they stop taking your calls, et cetera, which is exactly what we saw in the conflict between Federov and Serski on the reporting of it.

Starting point is 00:40:01 So that's basically the gist of it, is Federov tried to use his own judgment and stepped on people's toes, redirected money, and Siersky and the general staff were not fans. I doubt Searsky cared really all that much. However, he needs to keep everyone happy. And the officer class is very heavily involved in this. Creating military salaries, even officer salaries, are not great. No, and there's a lot of corruption and procurement, and a lot of allegations of corruption and procurement,

Starting point is 00:40:31 which is not something any military doesn't have, to be honest. But, yeah, that makes sense. So finally gets to the point where Serski went to Zolensky and said, look, you have to get rid of this guy, I can't work with him. Then Fedorov separately went to Zelensky and said, look, you have to get rid of this guy, I can't work with him. And then Zelensky goes to a private meeting with his party in parliament and says, hey, well, they both said they can't work with each other.

Starting point is 00:41:00 And I kind of need them to work with each other. So I should fire them both, but I can't fire Sersky yet. So instead I'll fire Fedorov. And that's what kicked off this whole shabang. How much do you buy? because the Times had a piece recently that was kind of, I mean, quoting some insiders alleging that this was partly to do with Zelensky being jealous of Fedorov popularity. And I've heard rumors of that before.

Starting point is 00:41:24 That has not seemed to be like the most, I don't know, believable answer. So I was kind of surprised to see the Times give so much credence to it. But, I mean, do you feel like that's credible? Is that something you hear a lot? Or is that, where is that coming from, I guess? I mean, I have considered this a lot because it has been something saved before. Yeah. When Valeris Illusioni was made to step down as top general and he was replaced by Siersky,

Starting point is 00:41:50 a lot of the kind of speculation why this move was made was because Illusioni was very quickly becoming the most popular political figure, public figure in Ukraine. And then we saw Budanov, Karel Bodhanov, the head of military intelligence, who is now Zelensky's chief of staff, when his star was rising. and Zelensky had to fire your mock. He took the country's top spy, basically, and put him as chief of staff. Now you don't hear about Podanov at all,

Starting point is 00:42:22 except for some unflattering rumors on anonymous telegram channels. So there is kind of a pattern you can see with Zelensky seemingly defusing popular people around him so they are no longer in a position where they can be so popular. And in Solutioni's case, he recently announced that whenever we do have presidential elections, he does plan to stand to them, right?

Starting point is 00:42:50 So he has, in fact, directly declared he will be politically opposing Zelensky, whenever we get back to normal politics. So how do I say this? I am a cynical bastard. Right. I will believe the worst about anyone, especially a ego-driven TV star slash politician. it is not difficult for me in my citizen. Oh, God, yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:13 To look at a man and say, huh, you know what? He probably doesn't like being outshone on the stage. Yeah. At the same time, I like to hope that Zelensky has the understanding that we're fighting a full-scale war and that his ego is unnecessary and detrimental to the war effort. But the truth of matter is, I have no idea. It certainly can be construed that way. Let's say that I don't think construing events that way is unfair to Zelensky.

Starting point is 00:43:44 I think that's a reasonable interpretation based on the actions that he's taken and based on, you know, the rumors and so on that come out of the office of the president. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense what you're saying. I don't have trouble believing that. Now, one of the things I have noticed is I've kind of read into Federov, and I'm wondering, and this is we're kind of are veering into some military theory here. But it is something that concerns me when I kind of look at some of the allegation. about what he believes. And I'm not sure if this is entirely fair to him, but it seems like his critics within the Ukrainian military

Starting point is 00:44:16 seem to believe that he basically is a believer that drones and robotics can handle a huge amount of the fighting load, right? And that this is like a major solution to the manpower crisis to the extent that is sometimes accused of believing that they can handle much more of the load than is really realistic. In a way that sometimes sounds similar to me to what some people said about like Air Force,

Starting point is 00:44:38 generals in kind of the post-World War II period where there's this big understanding that all we need is air power. That seems to be like the allegations against Federov. He's saying all we need is drone power and robotics and we can kind of use that to fill in every gap. And there's a very reasonable critique that that's not sufficient. Now, I don't know if that's fully fair to Federer, but it seems to be like that's how he's being characterized certainly by his opponents.

Starting point is 00:45:01 Having listened to him speak, I'll say that the characterization is a little bit off. He might honestly believe that drones and robotics have to completely replace human warfare. But it's not like he lives in a fantasy world where he understands that that's a possibility that we can implement right now. Right. It's more that he faces the banal mathematical fact that we cannot match Russia. We are a much smaller country. It is mathematically impossible. Add into that the general unpopularity of mobilization, the whole busification stuff.

Starting point is 00:45:35 The fact that no one trusts our aging Soviet officer class to value their life or contribution. If they are drafted or join the military, all of that together leads Federov to the, I think, pretty obvious conclusion that the only possible thing we can do to even start to match Russia in manpower is heavily embraced robotics. Now, I do want to say a couple of things. Federov is a libertarian in the American sense. Right. And he's very young. He's 35. He's literally my age. Jesus. And this was back, I think, 2017 or 18. He ran as part of, we had a tiny libertarian movement called the 510 party, which their idea was a flat 5% that tax, flat 10% something else. I mean, it's stupid libertarian shit. I didn't ever pay much attention to it because I always asked them how old their girlfriend is and if they need to use the car seat. is my opinion of libertarians there.

Starting point is 00:46:34 Yeah. And again, he is. So he may very well believe that this is the case that humans need to be taking out of, or what's the military euphemism? Humans have to be taken out of the kill chain. Right, right, removed from the kill chain. Yeah. I love the term kill chain.

Starting point is 00:46:51 He may very well believe that he is good personal friends with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. That's very true. Obviously the Omni Surveillance Corps headed by. the erred devil himself, Peter Thiel. So there's a lot of red flags. One of the first statements he made after getting sacked was that he's already gotten a bunch of offers from different Silicon Valley companies. Someone close to him said that.

Starting point is 00:47:15 Not that he hasn't taken. No, no. He said that during the briefing. I was listening. Oh, Alex Carp has already called me and offered me a job. Oh, he said Alex Carp. Okay, great. Great.

Starting point is 00:47:26 I'm just remembering from a news article, right? Now, that said, I wanted to be fair to him because one thing he always was. also gets a lot of credit for is over the last six months, which was not in his position for long, but it's been a reasonably good six months compared to some of the previous couple of years, right? The front has stabilized in a lot of areas, and there's been an incredibly successful campaign to damage Russia's oil refining capacity that's taken out a quarter of it, right? And those are seen part of why he's so popular, I would imagine. There's a debate as to how much credit does he deserve for both of those things. Both of those things have happened, right, over the last six

Starting point is 00:48:00 months. Yeah, exactly. And the hope was that if he was allowed to complete his reform, so the next big thing that he had planned to focus on was ground robotics, ground drones. The hope was that if he had actually been able to implement plans, we would see the same kind of sea change away from human soldier, really human infantry, into robotic soldiers, just as we saw drones replace the sniper team, the artillery team, the mortar team, you know, so many of these kind of fundamental roles that we thought a modern military, modern combines armed military needs, turns out you could replace all of them with drones. We don't know if that's going to be true for ground drones, but that was going to be his next project. And it definitely helped bolster his standing,

Starting point is 00:48:51 let's say, when he goes, well, first off, I'm getting you the drones. And second off, we don't don't need to throw away Ukrainian lives on worthless meat assaults to win back half a kilometer of territory. We can use easily replaceable robotics instead. Yeah, that's a very hard thing to argue with. I mean, especially given how it's functioned. You know, it is worth kind of noting that he was brought in as well to solve the manpower crisis and that that certainly has not been solved. Although, you know, he was in there for six months, but that still continues to be a significant issue, even with the advent of a lot more robotic fighters, which is, you know, proven successful in certain areas of the front,

Starting point is 00:49:45 certainly, but it continues to be a pretty contentious and mobile front in some areas as well. Yeah, exactly. And the fact is, we still have, I don't know, maybe let's say another 10, 15 years to reach the Terminator feature where you just, you don't need human infantry. It is a lot of liability if you have flesh and blood guys on the battlefield. We're not quite there yet. You still do need flesh and blood meat sack humans to do things. So, mobilization is obviously a thing, but I got to say, every single minister of defense we've had since the start of the full scale has had the brief of reforming mobilization.

Starting point is 00:50:27 So he is hardly the first guy to fail up. Right. The general staff was given the brief of reforming mobilization. Zolanski himself said that the office of the president has the brief of reforming mobilization. Federov during his kind of exit press conference that he gave after being fired, he said this a very interesting thing. He said that in order to do mobilization form in Ukraine, we need a new social contract. The fundamental social contract between Ukrainians and the state is seen by the average Ukrainian to be broken. Because of the continuous and

Starting point is 00:51:03 constant corruption scandals because of the seeming, you know, Soviet indifference and callousness towards human life. All of these factors make the Ukrainian populace not especially want to die for the state. It's not that we don't want to die for Ukraine, but no one wants to die for the Ukrainian state. And this is the fundamental issue. And until that is addressed, there is no solution for mobilization except for greater repression. Right. Like round people up even more use greater force. That's the only thing you can possibly do. There is no soft handle to fix that. It's not even really a question of money. Because if you think that once you're drafted, they're going to throw you in the back of a van, driving to the middle force, stick you there for two weeks, not teach you anything,

Starting point is 00:51:57 yell and beat you, then drive you to the zero line and leave you there. That's what the average Ukrainian man thinks is going to happen to them if they're drafted. And the fact is we have lots of stories exactly like that. So it's not exactly an unfounded fear. And until that's addressed, until the Ukrainian state can, you know, possibly tell the Ukrainian people, look, we care about your lives. We are doing this because we are doing this to survive, not because some general wants an extra badge or an extra bill or something.

Starting point is 00:52:29 And at that point, mobilization reform can't start. But without that change, you're not going to see anything. No amount of bureaucratic wrangling or raising salaries is going to result in any kind of mobilization bump. Well, man, is there anything else you wanted to get to today?

Starting point is 00:52:44 I think that was a really good point to make. I'll say this, that the, we did see that the protests didn't pay off. So I think that's the one aspect of this we haven't talked about. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a very good point. Why he is actually doing this or why he is actually taking steps to remove Serski is because of the protests.

Starting point is 00:53:08 So we didn't even get to that. So much because that just happened hours before we recorded this. But he has announced that Serski is now being removed. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Just happened.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Sorry. It was always going through case once. Serski's name. was out in public. Right. The country's top general cannot be this controversial. He cannot be the guy everyone is talking about derogatorily in a nation war. You just, you need to have the trust of both the people and the troops and Serski once this scandal had reached the level. It was clear that he no longer had the Jews to continue. But again, the reasons Zelensky made these changes is because of the process. So we learned about Federov's dismissal late at night, I want to say,

Starting point is 00:53:48 in the 15th. And then that evening, a couple of, I think it was one ex-volunteer, one ex-soldier, posted that we, everyone should gather out on Twitter, I think. And then that gained steam. That was the start of the kind of five-day protests. I don't know if they're going to continue today now that Serski's been replaced, but they've been happening every single day this week. And again, people came out first to kind of keep to protest federal's removal, to say, hey, keep Federov. Then it became clear that Federalov himself had refused to continue to work with the Zelensky team. He pretty much told Zelensky that I don't want any job. I wanted the job that I had, but since you made that no longer possible, I don't want to work for you. Once that dynamic became

Starting point is 00:54:35 clear, the protests shifted more towards trying to get Serski fired or to get him to resign than to get Federov back in office, which is unlikely to happen. But the protests have been, first, First off, they occurred not just in Kiev, but pretty much in every major city, even the frontline cities, even in Zeparisia, in Harkiv. One of my journalists was in Harkiv and did a report from their protest. And these are people who are getting air bombed during the day, and they're gathering in the center of the city in protesting. The scale of it, the speed of it, and the general societal agreement is really what gave these protests their steam. The same with the pro-Nabu process that we saw a couple of years. backer last year. The same kind of dynamic, same kind of protesting class. Let's say it's younger

Starting point is 00:55:24 people, you know, from 18 to like 30, typically more liberal, more progressive. However, we come out in protest not for, I mean, sometimes we do come out for gay rights, but currently it's more to correct our government's personnel choices than anything else. Right. Yeah, I mean, I guess it is positive that it matters still, you know, which is certainly in some ways a legacy still lingering of the Mideon, right? Is that the government's not going to ignore that? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:58 I wouldn't just say it's positive. To be quite honest, I cannot think of a single other Democratic country on the planet that is as responsive to the undifferentiated random cries of the masses than you can. There's this huge negative to that. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, I say it like this. And it might sound like I'm saying this derogatorily, but I'm not.

Starting point is 00:56:19 No. I think, quite frankly, pretty much all liberal democratic nations in the 21st century have almost completely abandoned the democratic part. Right. Either people vote for local parties that simply don't matter and all the decisions are made in boardrooms that they have less than zero impact in. They got in protest and nothing happens except some kids get beaten up by cops and then nothing fundamentally changes.

Starting point is 00:56:43 That is not true in Ukraine. We have seen multiple times where protesters go out with a concrete call and the government heeds that call. It doesn't simply ignore us. It doesn't just beat us up. It's fundamentally democratic in a way that I have not seen any other country in the world replicate so far. Yeah, that is very much worth continuing to note and acknowledge.

Starting point is 00:57:05 Although, as you said, a mixed bag because the voice of the people is not always correct about aspects of strategy and governance, as a lot of places have learned. Yeah, exactly. All right, man, well, do you want to plug anything before you come out here? Tell people where they can find you? Yes, I am the managing editor of the new voice of Ukraine, which is Ukraine's best and premier English language daily use site. You can read us at English.nv.u.ua.

Starting point is 00:57:35 Really easy to remember. That's English.nv.u.uA. and listen to Ukraine Without Hype, which is a podcast from myself and my colleague Anthony Bardoa. And you can find us wherever podcasts are listened to. Just search Ukraine without hype. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Romeo, for showing up again. And we'll be back tomorrow with something else.

Starting point is 00:58:06 Canadian 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. 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 IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pipman, chairman and CEO of IHard Media. I also led the team that created MTV,

Starting point is 00:58:42 and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month. On my podcast, Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up. Those are powerful words, my, something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Starting point is 00:59:17 Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. in the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

Starting point is 00:59:48 Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened.

Starting point is 01:00:02 We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the I-Heart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them.

Starting point is 01:00:20 Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love,

Starting point is 01:00:43 and opening up about our creative process. How did any of the sketch? made. Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the I

Starting point is 01:01:16 Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the show. My name is James. We're starting again because I forgot to press the record button. And I am very lucky to be joined by Wendy Fry. And we're going to talk about a piece that Wendy did for CalMatters about the Fed's DHS buying detention centers in California. Hi, Wendy. Welcome to the show. Hi, James. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Okay, so let's begin, I suppose, by summarizing this article. We'll link to right, right, and I think everyone should read it. It's a really good piece of reporting. But can you explain, like, what is happening here with these two detention centers?

Starting point is 01:02:00 Sure. Yeah. Thank you so much. So last week, Corpic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country and the nation, a publicly traded company, announced that they had sold two of their properties to the Department of Homeland Security for a billion and a half dollars. And those two facilities are two of the largest immigration detention facilities in California. Otai Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County that has a capacity of just a little under 2,000 beds. And then the other one is the newly opened California City facility up in Kern County. And that one's just a little bit bigger with the capacity of 2,500 beds. And we learned the details about the sale through this filing with the Security Exchange Commission. Like I said, because it's a publicly traded company, they have to make some of the information

Starting point is 01:02:48 about this deal public. And we learned that the federal government paid $739 million, I think, for Otay Mesa. And then the other one was, I think, about $730 million for California City. And we've done some additional reporting, too, since that article came out. And we just last Friday, we're talking with the San Diego County appraiser, the assessor's office. And Kern County found out that the last appraised value on these properties was about a quarter of what the federal government paid for them. So the last appraised value, I think about $160 million for O-Tymeasta. I don't have the exact number, but around that. So they paid maybe four times. And of course, the praise value, we have to take it sort of with a grain of salt because

Starting point is 01:03:32 it's not the market value, but it would be very hard to figure out what the market value is on a property like this because there just aren't very many of them. Both places are these huge sprawling federal prisons that don't get sold very often. So it's hard to figure out what the market value is, but those are the last appraised value. Yeah, sure, not much market for giant prisons, I suppose. So, like, best to guess. Yeah, not much to compare it to you as far as the sale, right? Right.

Starting point is 01:03:55 And on the federal government side, on Corsific side, they said that this whole thing went through a very rigorous process of governmental review and that everything is above board there. Yeah. So, yeah. Of course, they'll say that, yeah. So these facilities, like, they spend a lot of money on them, right? And they have a lot of money right now.

Starting point is 01:04:13 They're sitting on a giant pile of money. Actually, before we talk about what they spent on them, People will remember when President Biden came into power, him saying he was going to end private prisons, right? So we should just, I guess, begin by explaining how that didn't include immigration detention and how these places have, like, as you say, they haven't just continued. But in the last two years, I guess, they're trying to expand immigration detention capacity, right? Right. Yes. So in California, particularly, California state officials have tried to ban private prison companies from operating within the state. California. And the Ninth Circuit didn't, didn't uphold that. Like the California passed a law, Governor Newsom signed it. It ended up in court, GEO group and Corsivic, the two largest private

Starting point is 01:04:57 present companies who are fighting against this. And they won. The Ninth Circuit upheld that California can't ban these facilities from operating. But they have pushed back a lot. And California lawmakers are trying to write a series and pass a series of laws that would require, you know, more of the tax revenue from these companies to be, you know, absorbed by the state and disincentivized, basically, financially disincentivize these private prison companies from operating. And that is one of the reasons why DHS in a statement that they put out, Jason Sweeney with ICE told me, you know, it's financially infeasible. It's become too burdensome from their point of view for the private prison companies to operate in

Starting point is 01:05:40 California because of all the oversight and because of all the, you know, pushback. California officials have tried to do and have done as much as I can basically on. Let's talk about this new attempt to grow detention capacity, right? Because their previous attempt was these warehouses, where we spoke to some folks in Social Circle on this show, Social Circle, Georgia, a while ago about that. So can you give people who haven't been following this little synopsis of why they've moved away from the putting human beings in warehouses models? Sure.

Starting point is 01:06:14 So the spending bill, the federal spending bill that President Trump signed last year included just the insanely unprecedented amount of money for immigration enforcement. More than even the entire budget of the entire federal prison system, right? It includes about $45 billion just for detention capacity alone. So they poured a ton that like you said, they're sitting on just this huge pile of cash that they have to spend. they have to do something with that money. The plan at the beginning of the year were, as you mentioned, these warehouses, right? That they wanted to, from their perspective, sort of more intelligently design both the tension capacity and the deportation machine. I think I'm not 100% sure which DHS officials said this.

Starting point is 01:07:03 I think it was Tom Holman in Phoenix, but it could have been another DHS official. But basically, they said they wanted to design the, quote, Amazon Prime. for humans. So like they want to make this as fast and as efficient as possible. They want to have a capacity to sustain up to 100,000 people on any given day. And they have a ton of cash. Cash that they've never even seen before, right? So buying up this billion and a half dollars of real estate in California is feasible to them. And they've signaled that owning it rather than leasing it or having Coursivic run it is more beneficial to them in not having to comply with the oversight. the different inspections and laws that California officials have tried to put into place that allows,

Starting point is 01:07:48 for example, inspectors with the California Attorney General's office. And there was a 2024 law that California passed that would allow local health inspectors to go in and do a health inspection. San Diego County is the only place where they've actually tried to do that. And the private company pushed back. So they've said, DHS have said in their statement that, you know, owning this rather than another their entity owning it gives them the upper hand as far as avoiding some of this oversight and the federal courts have upheld that actually.

Starting point is 01:08:20 Right. Let's dig into that a little bit, right? A lot of people have started paying attention to immigration detention approximately halfway through January in 2025, right? Right. And if you had been paying attention before in California, you would have known that thousands of people were detained without food, water, or shelter in the open air for months. Not like an individual duration stay was most like a week, but the practice continued.

Starting point is 01:08:48 In Hacumba, right? In Hacomba and then in Sanisidro. Yeah. In at least three places in Hacomba. I believe there were also other OAD sites that we didn't find. At least I didn't know about it. And then they'd also happen in Arizona as well. But at that point in time, there was not a great deal of inspection by the county.

Starting point is 01:09:10 I saw a Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman person once. Their visit didn't seem to result in any changes. But has California committed on why they suddenly care about, I guess, the conditions migrants are detained in when they didn't seem to care in a way that mattered three years ago? Right. They certainly weren't coming out in statements and pushing back as hard as we have seen them push back against the Trump administration. That's true. I have asked, like, top California officials that in an interview I did with the California Attorney General Rob Bonta, I did ask him. I was like, this is my really hard question for you is, you know, it didn't seem like you were pushing back in this same way when, you know, there were babies sheltering in porta potty, right? Oh, yeah. One night in September, I remember a lady breastfeeding a baby. The baby was shivering, which, like, it's not a good sign when babies are shivering. And, like, I was warming up milk in the camping stove.

Starting point is 01:10:10 in my truck and my friend was cycling toddlers in and out of like a little warming station they built. Like I've been through the Darien Gap and that's still some of the worst shit that I've ever seen. It was horrific. Right. I remember thinking like where is the UN? Like where is like the Red Cross? Like this is a humanitarian crisis out here. And it was in such a remote area. It was so it lacks so much visibility both from the media and you know public officials. So we did talk about that at one point. And and Bontas were response was, you know, we had a working relationship with the Biden administration that wasn't controversial or wasn't adversarial in the way that our relationship is with the Trump administration.

Starting point is 01:10:51 And so we could work on that stuff behind the scenes. Now, I know you were out there. Anybody who is out there would say nobody really ever saw the results of that collaboration or that work, right? And, you know, it is a concern for sure that it does seem like California politicians do you get more bang for their buck in, in upholding. the immigration policies of the Trump administration, when it's important to note that a lot of this infrastructure, including especially a lot of the AI infrastructure that are being used to surveil, people who are against these policies,

Starting point is 01:11:22 and the Palantir, the AI technologies that is being used right now to find people and detain them without making the headlines in quite a high-profile way, as we saw last year, all that was put into place by the Biden administration, right? And so it is important to note that for sure, that a lot of these systems that now the Trump administration is able to utilize were handed to them. Let's entertain the idea that we have a midterm election and a presidential election, and they are conducted in a way that we kind of are accustomed to with elections and the results are respected. Let's imagine we have a Democrat in 2008, and we tend to do the math there.

Starting point is 01:12:13 The feds will still own these two giant detention centers, right? The way that immigration, in my experience, works is like it only seems to move in one direction. I guess, like, this is why this is such a concern. They're saying themselves, DHS is saying themselves that this is a deliberate strategy to make their detention build out more permanent and harder to roll back with the changing political wins, right? And so they're acknowledging that, that that's what they're trying to do. That's not great.

Starting point is 01:12:45 Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so it's from their own mouth, right? Yeah, deeply concerning. I wonder, though, like, previously they've had a practice of moving people out of San Diego County. I guess a practice is the wrong word. There is, like, a number of incidents that I'm aware of where they've moved people away from their lawyer in San Diego County, right, to a detention facility like Dilley or somewhere in Texas or somewhere like that. I guess I would make that impossible it did it's the same as it was before. It would just be from a federal prison to a private.

Starting point is 01:13:15 prison maybe. Well, it's a less favorable federal jurisdiction, right? A district. So in San Diego, I would say probably it's a more favorable outcome to go before a federal district judge in San Diego for a possible habeas petition and to slow down the process as far as being deported, right? I think that that probably happens faster in a federal district in Texas than it would here. Yeah, yeah. I have heard a lot from families about family members being moved out to, you know, these very remote. I mean, there's been an effort for a long time to make sure that these facilities are set up in very remote areas of California and in other parts of the country in remote areas that are hard for advocates, hard for attorneys, hard for journalists like me to get to to report what's going on in them. You know, it's like six hours to get to California City. As a drive, I've made way more times than I've want to now at this point, right?

Starting point is 01:14:09 So, you know, it does. It does impact the amount of resources that people can be connected to. It is the biggest expense that ICE has is moving people around the country. I remember Senator Padilla did say, like, it seems sort of illogical the way they're moving, like they're moving people from California out of California while they're moving people in other places into California. And it seems illogical the way they're moving people around. But the impact of that, I don't know what their purpose or their intention is of doing

Starting point is 01:14:39 that, but the impact of is it really disorients people, right? It's like, where am I? What am I doing? What are the rules here? How do I get my phone card set up? It takes them days where they're kind of pushed back on their heels, trying to figure out what the system and the guards and the new place where they go. And then, like I said, it definitely makes it harder for people when they get moved around to these different facilities. And it's something that we're definitely seeing happen a lot more. Definitely hearing it from a lot of families in L.A. They have concern about people being moved. way out to California City, which is like in the middle of the Mojave Desert, right? It's hard for families to get out there.

Starting point is 01:15:15 Yeah, yeah. It's like something Kern County, I think, right? But like it's a hike from anywhere, from any major population center in California. It's a long drive. Yeah. It's like an hour and 40 minutes from like the farthest eastern community in L.A. Like Chirla, they have an office in like Eastern L.A. And I think it was like an hour and 20 to an hour and 40 to get to that office from California

Starting point is 01:15:38 City. So it's just remote. It's in the middle of nowhere, you know? Yeah. And if you think about where would I put a place that's in the middle of nowhere where I'd have the least amount of oversight, right? Like that's the place. Like that's definitely where you would pick.

Starting point is 01:15:51 Yeah, definitely. Compared to like Otai Mesa Detention Center, there are many bad things about what happens there, but like it is relatively close. People can get to it. There are almost always people there, like outside if someone is released or people protesting what's happening there.

Starting point is 01:16:05 Like you say, like it's hard even to do things for someone to get money on their phone card or like someone I've reported on many times on the show was detained at Dilly and like it's difficult to work out how to like put money on their commissary so they can buy food because the food they get is absolutely awful and things like this and every time you move that that's different again right like it's I was talking to an individual in El Salvador and and they were saying that you know they were moved around maybe nine times before they were deported. And each time they got to the different facility,

Starting point is 01:16:39 it was like, where am I? And who are kind of the leaders in this place? Or like, who do I talk to? Because I need to get this worked out. And sometimes they wouldn't even be able to get the phone card set up before the next time they got loaded back on a bus to go somewhere else. Yeah. So even let their family know where they are.

Starting point is 01:16:56 And that's why it's so concerning that ICE is going around opening facilities. Like we had one facility open. I think also in Kern County, it's like right next to Golden State. annex, so it's like kind of part of that property. But they didn't tell anybody, right? Like nobody knew that this facility was open until we reported on it opening. And, you know, if you're a family member and you're looking on that ice detainer, you're trying to find your family member, if we have these, you know, almost like black site

Starting point is 01:17:22 ice detention facilities opening up that nobody knows or running, how are you going to find your family member if it's not even listed there in the facilities, right? I mean, there's been a lot of reporting about how sometimes people are disappearing into these systems. But that's one of the reasons why California has tried to set these laws to say, like, you have to give the public a certain amount of notice before you open a new facility so that people are aware that it's coming and they can have an opportunity to, you know, say, go to the California City Council meeting and make their opposition known. But we've seen both ICE and the private detention companies have in some cases been able to find ways around

Starting point is 01:17:58 those rules. Yeah. One of the, I guess, the interesting things that we have seen, in the last maybe six months even, maybe somewhere that, mostly this year, right, is like communities coming together to oppose these things and data centers. Right. Or like across a wide swath of American politics. A lot of the folks organizing in social circle and not people who I think would generally identify

Starting point is 01:18:23 as progressive politically, but they were opposed to all the local consequences as well as the like abuses that happen in these detention centers. Like it's definitely getting harder, guess for them to build from scratch detention centers, right? That's correct. I mean, some of these, when at the beginning of the year, when they had the warehouse plan and they were planning some of these mega detention centers, which, like, they were trying to hold, you know, 10 to 12,000 people, which is crazy, more than Rikers, right?

Starting point is 01:18:52 Right. Yeah. Like, the largest would be the largest facility anywhere. And, you know, they were talking about even making their own wastewater treatment plants, bringing in their own services because the cities where the local municipalities wouldn't be able to handle the influx of people, of employees, of, you know, the roads, all the different services. And so I think that's one of the things that people are realizing is that these properties have an impact outside of just the people that they're detaining, right? They have an impact, a ripple effect on the entire community. And I think people are becoming aware of that now. Yeah, definitely. And it seems like yeah, they're trying to do other things. And I don't know.

Starting point is 01:19:31 They sold some of those warehouses are a loss as well, but it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of how much money they have. They have to get rid of $45 billion. So they really aren't stressing the losses. You know, it's a weird problem to have, but they feel like they have to spend this $45 billion. Or it's kind of like use it or lose it if they don't buy the next. I think it's three years that they have. So I think we will see them buying more properties for sure. I think they really have their eye on Adelon.

Starting point is 01:20:01 I set a script that scans the SEC to automatically alert me if any of those companies sell anything, right? Oh, cool. The other thing to keep in mind, too, about this is, you know, the federal government doesn't pay local and state taxes. So where they go into these small cash-strap cities like California City and say, hey, you're going to get $2 million a year in tax revenue from this facility opening. And that's kind of how they convince or like they try to win over the local politicians with, if, hey, we need this money, we need this facility to lower our water bills and stuff like that, then none of that is going to, it's like a bait and switch, right? They're not going to be getting that $2 million tax revenue anymore because, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:43 other than the income tax of the employers, maybe that might. But yeah, so that's another, you know, part of it. Yeah, yeah, bait and switch is a good way to describe it. Like, people think they're getting one thing and they end up getting another thing. You talked about the employers. Like, when these facilities change hands, will it then be like federal employees? or will they still be staffed by CoreC Civic? Yeah, so that's the interesting thing is the federal government is going to own the real estate,

Starting point is 01:21:22 but CoreC has said in its SEC filings that it expects, it thinks, that it's going to be keeping those contracts to continue operating the facilities. So the contract for California City runs through August 2027, the one for Otai Mesa is supposed to end in 2029, but there's an option to extend it another five years. And my impression is that ICE is quite happy with the way CoreC Civic is running these facilities and Geo Group is running these facilities. So that would mean the same guards, the same medical directors, the same kind of operations

Starting point is 01:21:56 and day-to-day at both facilities. And they plan on keeping their existing management contract. Now, they acknowledge in the SEC filing that there's no guarantee that they get to keep it. But it sounds like that's the deal that they've worked out and negotiated with the federal government. Sure. Like even when they've done these, like they stood up that one Camp East Montana, they call it, which is still run by a contractor, even though it's on Department of Defense gland. And the conditions there are atrocious from what we saw with the Inspector General report. And it doesn't seem to be a concern. Yeah. That's the one outside of El Paso? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:33 Bliss. I've seen it. The tent camp. Oh, okay. outside of purple. Yeah, the white temp. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it seems like they're violating their own rules, right? When they have these rules, they have these set of standards that they have set up. And that's the first thing where Civic or GEO will say is like, hey, we follow all the federal standards that are set up for us, right, for detention standards. Yeah. But it seemed especially with that one that you're mentioning that they violated all their own standards and setting that place up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that place is particularly egregious, like even among the immigration detention facilities, some of the stuff in that inspector, General's report was genuinely shocking. I thought I'd lost the capacity to be shocked by this stuff. But yeah, lots of terrible things have happened.

Starting point is 01:23:13 Like, I think you reported on the Mongolian person, right, who used sign language and was detained for, I think, months without an interpreter, if I'm remembering correctly. Right. Yeah. He had never gotten a chance to even tell his story on how he'd cross the border because CBP had, like, really confused his story. He was telling them about his sister. thought that that it was his daughter.

Starting point is 01:23:37 And they were using like a, I don't know, AI, some kind of online translation thing that was not even close to what his actual story was. And yeah, he spent months without able to tell anybody what happened to him. And, you know, finally, yeah, after we did our story, like, finally, the ICE attorney was trying to set up like a relay team of translation. Yeah. But the federal judge was just said, like, doesn't he have a right to participate in his own proceedings? Like doesn't, isn't he, shouldn't he be an active participant in the proceedings against him, right?

Starting point is 01:24:10 Yeah. And not just a bystander in that. And then so then he, the judge ruled that they had to get him an interpreter. I guess they decided it was too hard to do that because they let him out fairly quickly after that ruling. But yeah, I mean, some of the conditions that we've heard about just, I mean, obviously, I think everybody's heard like overcrowding, really severe lack of access to medical care. Yeah. The horrific food.

Starting point is 01:24:31 We've been hearing about how bad the food is for decades now. in there. Yeah. You know, smelling moldy waters, particular problem in California City. And just sometimes just like kind of the retaliation that people face for if they try to bring an issue up or if they try to, you know, advocate for somebody else. They feel like oftentimes they say, they tell us that they feel like, you know, they get sort of retaliated against for that.

Starting point is 01:24:57 You know, Mesa Verde is one of the, have one of the most egregious violations that we've ever heard of like the hunger strike, the hunger strikeers gal got dragged out. got dragged out and according to them, you know, beat up or handled very roughly and then taken to Texas and force fed with a tube down their nose, right? Like, yeah, there's definitely been some very egregious things that have happened inside these detention centers. And that's why it's so important for people to be able to, you know, especially the Congress members or and the local state inspectors, it's very important for somebody to be able to get in there and see what the conditions are like inside. Yeah. This court case doesn't matter anymore. With this new

Starting point is 01:25:34 development, right? The court case, at least it matters in other detention facilities, but not in Otai-Mesa, specifically in San Diego County. Yeah, it's going to remain to be seen, I think. Like I said, the federal courts have upheld that, like, state can't overstep their authority and like step on federal authority to carry out immigration enforcement, right? Yeah. I think that those health inspectors, they already have done their health inspection. So they already did one. And the report, I think, is coming out at the end of July. So there will be that. But, and then I think my understanding is San Diego County plans to fight. That's where I thought they were going to appeal it, yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:06 Yeah, they're going to try to pass the issue in court to see if they can continue going in there and doing their inspections. But like I said, you know, the courts haven't tended to rule that way. And DHS thinks, like we know from their own statement that they think that this will sort of put an end to the different inspections and oversight stuff that the state and the local officials want to do. Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty bleak, pretty big outlook for immigration.

Starting point is 01:26:33 detention, which was not really a great outlook to begin with, I guess. Yeah, but it's not come 100% decided. I guess still is an open question, whether these inspection laws will survive the federal ownership or not remains to be seen, I think. Right. Yeah. You said they had plans for other locations. I'm guessing they have plans for geo-group locations as well.

Starting point is 01:26:53 Do you think this is their plan going forward to try and acquire all of these private immigration, they have the money to, I assume? Yeah. I think everything points to yes on that. I think CoreC Civic said in their statement that they are already in talks with ICE about selling more of their facilities. Geo Group has said on earnings calls that they would like to sell their facilities. And like you mentioned, you know, DHS definitely has the money, thanks to that massive appropriation

Starting point is 01:27:23 from the federal government. So, you know, really they've already said that it's kind of their preference to outright own them rather than lease them or have a private company operate them in California. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we will see more of it. And I'm definitely, you know, trying to monitor it as much as possible to see when that happens. I wonder if this also changes the legal environment for people who are either protesting or, like, they're in a sort of mutual aid capacity for the migrant. Sometimes people can hear migrant shouting from inside and they can hear them, like, asking for someone to put money on their phone card or what have.

Starting point is 01:28:00 or just describing their conditions relating them. Will it being a federal-owned facility? Do you think that changes? Because it's legal to stand outside a thing, right? But if it's a Fed facility, maybe it's even harder. Yes, I do think it will change. I do think we'll see the federal government trying to crack down harder on protesters that come.

Starting point is 01:28:18 You know, in Ote Mesa, they had the people were putting information about how they were being held in bottles and throwing the bottles over the gate. I do think for sure that the federal government, government will operate differently now that it's federal property. Another thing that's very interesting, you know, they already hold people who are not immigrant detainees in California City. So they have a section of that facility that are like, people who are in the custody of the U.S. Marshals already. So there are already people in there who

Starting point is 01:28:48 aren't immigrants. I wonder if we might see more of an effort to detain more people in these facilities who are not immigrants, right? Yeah, yeah. Because they have promises made. to CoreC Civic and Geo Group, that they are going to try to give them a certain population of detainees per day, right? Right. So that's another part that remains to be seen. Yeah, that's also super concerning. Yeah, it really is super concerning of where it could all go, right?

Starting point is 01:29:15 Like, especially you see, you know, the federal government calling protesters, domestic terrorists and stuff like that. It is really concerning. Yeah, and we saw that in like I was in Minneapolis in like late January. and the same thing happens there, right? They have their federal building, it's called the Whipple Building, and they do immigration detention there, but then that was also where people who were detained

Starting point is 01:29:38 for protesting against that immigration, those immigration actions were taken, right? They used the same facility, and there's a certain kind of menace to that, right? It's really alarming where it could go if you think about it, right? Yeah, it's really concerning. This is one of those things that's where little people can can do much about, right? It's a like willing seller,

Starting point is 01:30:01 willing buyer kind of situation where unfortunately, like there's pretty few means for redress. Like I hope California is successful with being able to inspect them. At least that would be something. And I know there are lots of really good groups doing work to keep people out of detention,

Starting point is 01:30:17 to help with habeas, to improve conditions in detention, etc. So like people can help out those groups if they want to. Yeah, it does seem like this is a particularly kind of bleak area of immigration enforcement right now. Right.

Starting point is 01:30:33 And especially since, you know, one of the first things that Trump did is shut down the mechanisms that people can appeal or report. Like, you know, when you have a complaint about something that's happened to you within immigration detention, you complain about it either to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. There's another DHS and both of those have been shut down right now and not funded right now. So those mechanisms with which you can get any oversight from within the federal government right now are not operating. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:05 It's OIDO the other one. Yeah, that might be it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've seen them precisely once. Wendy, if people want to follow your work, you've done lots of good stuff on California. CalMatters does some really good reporting. You had great reporting about the operation return to sender, for example, back when that was shocking. Thank you so much, yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:26 How can people find you? Yeah, that's right. So all our stories are there on calmatters.org. Thank you for that. And then our Operation Return to Sender documentary is on YouTube. So you can find that there. We did a lot of work to show kind of what Bovino was saying and what was actually happening on the ground.

Starting point is 01:31:44 So that's a really good one to watch. Yeah. And you guys published also in Spanish, right? Yes, we do. More recently, we started translating more of our stories into Spanish so that folks who want to read it in Spanish can find that. there too. Yeah, that's great. That's super nice. And I speak flu in Spanish. If people need to contact me in Spanish, I can communicate there too. Nice. Yep. And there's a contact link for you on the website.

Starting point is 01:32:08 I'm guessing if people want to talk to you about some of this stuff, right? Absolutely. Or, yeah, I can just share my email for sure. It's Wendy at how matters.org. And I am always hoping to hear from people so we can do more in-depth reporting about what's going on inside these facilities. So, thank you so much for that opportunity to share that. Yeah, of course. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for taking time to talk to us. Anytime. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.

Starting point is 01:32:43 And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pipman, chairman and CEO of IHard Media.

Starting point is 01:33:10 I also led the team that created MTV, and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month. On my podcast, Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up. I want my! Those are powerful words, my, something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to math and magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Starting point is 01:33:47 Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and Iheart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California. to Hawaii? My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your

Starting point is 01:34:13 entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone's... Watches Women's Sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports.

Starting point is 01:34:38 On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years,

Starting point is 01:34:56 but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO, rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

Starting point is 01:35:15 How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here.

Starting point is 01:35:34 You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. I thought he was going to write. I thought you're all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.

Starting point is 01:36:00 For the past few weeks on executive disorder and some regular episodes of this show, most notably the DSA Red Scare, I've been covering the ongoing battle for the future of the Democratic Party, spurred on by a recent wave of electoral victories by DSA in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and most notably New York City, where last month the DSA doubled their block of socialists in office. This episode is another installment in this informal series, and this time we are going straight to the source by talking with the co-chair of the New York City chapter of DSA, Grace Mouser, in an interview where we talk about everything from from the chapter's electoral strategy to their theory of power,

Starting point is 01:36:43 and what organizers can learn from New York City DSA's recent string of success. So without further ado, here is my interview with Grace Mouser, co-chair of NYCDSA. To start on the most like broad picture aspect, what is the Democratic Socialist of America if people are not super familiar with like what the organization actually is or what the point of the organization is? Sure.

Starting point is 01:37:14 Thanks so much for having me. So DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, is a political organization. Legally, we're a nonprofit. We're a 501C4, which enables us to engage in a lot of different types of campaigns, including electoral campaigns, but also we're very involved in labor work,

Starting point is 01:37:38 and we often partner with union, and with rank and file workers for both internal union reform purposes and external demands. We do issue-based campaigns. For example, in New York City, our immigrant justice working group ran a very successful effort to conduct Know Your Rights trainings earlier this year that trained over 5,000 people in the city. So we do a lot of different types of things, including social things. We have like book clubs and softball leagues and things like that. The run club is a very formidable political group in this city.

Starting point is 01:38:15 The run club is very popular. It's true. It's true. They've really taken off. And how we are structured is that there is a national DSA, so national organization. And then there are, I believe, over 200 chapters all across the country. New York City is by far. the largest, I think for more than twice as large as the next biggest, which is LA.

Starting point is 01:38:44 And the chapters engage in localized work, but then we also tried to have participation from chapters on national campaigns and questions. I would say we're not a party, not usually Americans, that some people are, call us a party or think we're a party. We don't have a ballot line, but we do run people in primary elections, usually in Democratic primaries, because we want our members to select and endorse candidates that they think will represent not only their interest with the interests of a broader working class space. And then we want people who are elected to actually collaborate with DSA and other outside organizations in a real and serious way that the Democratic

Starting point is 01:39:35 party simply does not encourage and sometimes even even tries to stop. So obviously within the name of DSA, there's democratic socialism and socialism more kind of broadly. What does DSA mean by socialism? I mean, I've seen multiple articles, specifically in the Atlantic, really, really concerned about what socialism means and the quote-unquote Trotskyist tactics at DSA is, is employing. There's been a whole bunch of whole bunch of media coverage, being scared of, you know, communism and socialism. But what does like DSA mean by socialism? So DSA is what we call a big tent organization. There are a lot of different ideologies that are members embrace. Some people are more social democrats that you

Starting point is 01:40:25 might find to be the standard in some European countries. Some people identify as communists, for example. So what we mean by socialism, we try to make really concrete and demand base. We're looking at things like universal health care, passing bills like Medicare for all. We are trying to make housing more affordable by expanding the role of government in the housing market through things like what's around Momdaney just help do freezing the rent. we are trying to make universal child care free, right? Like public education, as it currently exists, is functionally socialist, right? It's the government providing free education and childcare for millions of children.

Starting point is 01:41:15 And for some reason, it arbitrarily starts at five years old. We're saying, what if we had that, but a little bit sooner? So we try to center our demands on these really material ideas. One, because it enables not only leftists of all different stripes, but all sorts of people to come in and identify with these ideas because they know it would help their lives, but also because winning these things will take a very long time. So my day to day is not so much concerned with or the economy should look like in a hundred years, but what we can achieve in the next five, ten, twenty years.

Starting point is 01:41:58 And, you know, even if I'm not a communist, but if I were, we're not going to be communist than 10 years, right? So what matters is actually making people's lives better now and using the government to do that, which, you know, American politicians, socialists and not have done for many decades before. You were talking about, like, how DSA is organizing to, like, see what the country could be like in, like, five to 10 years. And I think something that people might not be aware of is the past work that New York City DSA has done the past five to ten years, right? I think people certainly saw or were drawn to DSA around the election of Zoron and maybe this most recent, like, slate win. But this has been kind of a long-term project of like building power and experimenting with

Starting point is 01:42:47 electoral strategy and canvassing and like this specific path to victory. So could you speak a little bit? how NYCDSA has achieved, like, this winning streak, especially like in the past year and like the buildup to that winning streak. Definitely. New York City, DSA really got serious in 2016, both because many people were inspired by Bernie Sanders. And then many people were horrified by the ultimate victory of Donald Trump

Starting point is 01:43:19 in that presidential election. In 2017, we took on our first electoral races in the modern era. There was two city council races. We lost both of those, but we did learn a lot. And we gained a new member, or on them, Doni, via one of those races. But something we learned is that we could certainly run field campaigns, and by field, I mean canvassing and door knocking. But we also saw that, hey, actually, a lot of the skills,

Starting point is 01:43:51 that are required in other parts of the campaign, like communications, political maneuvering, fundraising and budgeting. These are also things we think that our members can do. And we really tested that out in 2018. We endorsed AOC that year, but in some ways, the bigger chapter project was Julia Selazar, state Senate race, where we had members not only on staff, but also basically helping in a volunteer capacity almost every aspect of that race. And we won. So from there, we learned that we could teach ourselves and begin to replicate the skills of not only canvassing,

Starting point is 01:44:35 but all these other skills that the political class and the consulting class in particular want to believe that they have a monopoly on that they're so hard to understand that you simply must pay them tens of thousands of dollars. So we have built out from there. We have now 16 socialists in office at the state legislature level, not only in New York City, but also in Mid Hudson Valley and in Buffalo. And we have four city council members and now three Congress members. Some of those came posseron, but most of them came pre-seron. And it was just really nose to the grindstone kind of work, knocking on a lot of doors, replicating skills, fundraising from small dollar donors. And we lost some of our races. I think we've probably lost a little less than half of the races we'd won.

Starting point is 01:45:32 But we took some big swings, but strategic swings. So these kind of skills developed over time and really form the foundation and the backbone of Zeran's campaign. So for many, Zeran seemed to come out of nowhere. But his first campaign event, his field launch, in December of 2024, when no one had really heard of him as a serious candidate, had 500 people at it, which I would guess is bigger than any other candidate had at any point in the race. And that's because DSA members knew him were really excited about what this meant and also knew exactly what kind of work would be required to make this race successful. And it was work of basically building out huge infrastructure and knocking on millions of doors so that we could talk to voters.

Starting point is 01:46:29 Yeah. One of the most impressive things is this sort of like parallel campaign structure that that DSA has developed that you don't need to. go through the regular channels of like consultants, the sort of like inside baseball of politics. And people often get very confused about like what the word like party means, right? Because party in Europe, it's something very different than what it means in the U.S. But in terms of running in primaries, the DSA often has to go up against the party infrastructure of the Democratic party establishment itself.

Starting point is 01:47:01 And the fact that DSA has been able to, especially in the past two years, like out-organize the local political establishment. has been like one of the most impressive feats. And like I've been able to see this in person. I'm in Brooklyn in the, you know, the past two months. I had multiple DSA canvassers come to my door. I received a truly absurd amount of mailers. There was, you know, people canvassing on the sidewalk, you know, all the time, you know, same thing, same thing in Ridgewood and Queens. A lot of canvassers there, especially going into the mayoral race. Something that's stuck in my mind a lot is I used to live in Atlanta, some like friends of friends, people I didn't know, but people I kind of loosely in

Starting point is 01:47:39 of were paid to do canvassing for the 2024 presidential election for the Democratic Party. They were basically just operating kind of like a scam. Like they did not actually do any of the work. They basically sat in like a parking lot and scrolled on their phone.

Starting point is 01:47:52 And something that makes the DSA's form of canvassing so different is that the people who are actually involved in it actually care about the political project, right? They're actually like invested in these candidates, invested in, you know, putting forward this like working class politics and are not just getting a paycheck from the DNC. And that changes the way that they do canvassing on the ground.

Starting point is 01:48:12 I know this is something that you refer to as like the DSA difference. Could you briefly touch on like what the DSA difference like represents? Yeah, it really for for me, it starts from the endorsement process, which is very long and quite rigorous, but also extremely democratic. And because of that, people really feel bought in to the races that we endorse. I mean, if you come to an endorsement forum, it's said over and over again, if you would not personally be interested in canvassing for this candidate, do not vote to endorse them. And that's a kind of an easy standard we try to share with members on top of a lot of strategy and data consideration. And there's a lot of things that go into it.

Starting point is 01:49:01 But for is that? Like, will you go to this? If not, how can we expect others to? That initial buy-in, that initial ownership that members have over what races we've run and why really extends then into the entirety of the campaign. So our campaigns do have staff and, of course, larger campaigns have more staff. But we also have a practice of really elevating volunteers who show capacity and interest to be more engaged in strategy.

Starting point is 01:49:38 So canvassers are also strategic actors. That's sort of the first rung of engagement. I mean, canvassing could just be like, oh, go out and do this. But we really actively seek to create a feedback loop between canvassing and other parts of the campaign. So not only is canvassing data, of course, very critical and tracking ID, progress and things like that, But we also teach our field leads to lead canvases to solicit feedback and to systematize that feedback. What are you hearing on the doors? Did you meet anyone interesting?

Starting point is 01:50:17 Should we follow up with that person? And I've seen in real time our messaging overall changed because of feedback that canvassers are getting on the doors. From the next rung, if a canvasser is really great and excited, we often encourage them to become a field lead. These are pretty intensive and high responsibility jobs. So these people manage logistics, they run trainings, they move materials around. If there are problems or questions that come up during a canvas or after, they're the first point of contact for these volunteers.

Starting point is 01:50:56 They're really quite skilled leaders. And we try to create as many of these people as possible. And that's kind of the next run of engagement. From there, it sort of varies from campaign to the campaign, but on most of the campaigns that I've seen, you have robust volunteer teams around all of these functional areas. There's a fundraising team who are trying to execute not only comms and digital strategy,

Starting point is 01:51:27 but also peer to fear. fundraising and house parties. There is a communications team who, yes, works closely with staff often, but is drafting and helping produce a level of content that, you know, if you're a state assembly race and you have two staffers, it's pretty hard to produce as much content as you might want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's research who are helping do opo and helping figure out what stories we might be able to place in the press. So these areas, that can be pretty opaque in some ways and are not often a visible part of the political process.

Starting point is 01:52:06 We really try to open up and invite people into. And then we talk openly about that in our debriefs and also in our endorsement forums themselves. I guess something else that people might not be fully aware of it. There's kind of like two ways of like fielding candidates. Candidates can be DSA endorsed. And then you can have DSA members who then run for office. And for the people who are more kind of like outside of the organization, but seek, seek a DSA endorsement.

Starting point is 01:52:34 If they secure it, they then get access, right, to this, to this, this whole, like, on the ground, like, organizing network. And that can be very appealing. But there's certain things that endorsement is, like, contingent on in terms of, like, platform. As you said, it's a pretty, it's a pretty intensive process, actually, to get a DSA endorsement. After the series of victories near DSA has had the past few months, has that affected, the size of the membership in like any like notable ways? Is it like is that grown the amount of on the ground volunteers like whatever the next campaigns are?

Starting point is 01:53:15 Oh, absolutely. I mean, of course we are we are subject to like macro political trends, right? We see large jumps when there's a presidential election like we saw it in 2016. I saw it again in 2020 and then 24. But, you know, not every campaign results in a huge. membership boost. I think they do all result in a large capacity boost because even if we're not gaining new people numerically, we're expanding the skill set of people who are there. But last year, certainly we gained a lot of members between the time that Zerran announced his campaign in the fall of

Starting point is 01:54:01 24. And now we've almost tripled in size in New York City. And between the primary elections this year, so June 23rd, and today, so about a month, we have gained over a thousand members. So we are obviously helped along by like high profile wins too that the media is really interested in covering and then we get kind of more eyeballs on our ideas and more interest in the project overall. So there are some wins that result in a lot of members, but every win I think expands capacity and even losses expand capacity because we're teaching people these skills and we're able to better replicate ourselves for future cycles. I'm sure as most people are aware, we're right in the middle of like a huge debate right now over the future of the Democratic Party

Starting point is 01:54:58 and you know this debate's being waged online, it's being waged in the newspaper, it's on TV, news TV, and most importantly, right, in the primaries, right? And then eventually the general elections. You know, it seems like every week the Atlantic has a new article out about how scary the Democratic socialists are. As I mentioned, I think today they put out a brand new article about like the secret like Trotskyism. of DSA. I saw that, which I mean, all these articles suggest to me that they neither understand DSA nor do they understand the history or ideology they're comparing us to.

Starting point is 01:55:37 Yeah. But it's been really interesting, especially after the wins in New York and Colorado and Pennsylvania, hopefully in Wisconsin. But this past month, we've seen more and more like establishment Democrats join people like President Trump and Fox News in effectively declaring war on the DSA and like the left wing of the party. And there's this idea that you see in the Atlantic, Washington Post,

Starting point is 01:56:03 that communists and socialists are taking over the Democratic Party. But I think for a chunk of the people listening to this show, their concerns are probably more of the opposite, that by running as a Democrat, these Democratic Socialist candidates risk being captured and like brought into the very party establishment that they're trying to oppose. I guess I'd like you to speak on, like, what is the nature of the DSA's relationship

Starting point is 01:56:27 to the Democratic Party? Yeah. I mean, the thing about the Democratic Party that I think a lot of media and political pundits miss is that there's no one to have a relationship with, right? Like, the Democratic Party is three boys in a suit. Like, there's no one to talk to. That's why they can't act like a party does in Europe. I mean, of course, there are electoral and ballot reasons for that as well.

Starting point is 01:56:54 But the Democratic Party does not really organize either voters who are Democrats, right? Like, no one has ever attempted to organize me as a Democrat because I am a registered Democrat, nor is there really a serious effort to organize Democratic elected officials as a block and move in the same direction. Like that infrastructure simply doesn't exist. So I feel like the risk of being captured is only a risk in so far as DSA does not try to keep our own people organized and acting as a block, which is very much central to our project. And in New York City, for example, we have weekly meetings with both our state legislators and our city council members. And now we have regular meetings with administration officials as well in the mayoral administration

Starting point is 01:57:55 that try to keep us all on the same page when we have a big project that we're moving on together like Tax the Rich was this last legislative session. We do really active organizing in those meetings. Like, okay, have you talked to your colleague about this bill? Will they move? Do we need to pressure them some way from the outside? or do you think you'll get somewhere in internal conversations? So to me, I don't feel worried about being captured by the Democrats

Starting point is 01:58:28 because the Democrats don't have the infrastructure to capture people. The people who can capture you are like moneyed interests, right? Big corporations. Yeah. And sure, sometimes they act through the Democratic Party. But for us, that's such a clear red line that they don't feel super concerned. concerned about it, the more complicated questions are not so much of capture, but of when do we compromise, right?

Starting point is 01:58:56 Sure. We could be a block of people who vote no on every budget, right? Every state budget, every city budget is politically compromised. It's not enough. They never tax the rich enough. They never fund public services enough. Yeah. It's never good.

Starting point is 01:59:14 But if we always say no, then can we get any? any wins, what kind of wins are the, you know, the non-reformist reforms we might be looking for. And deciding that collectively doesn't mean our choice is always correct. But I think it's much more likely to be correct than if we let even someone who's a committed Democratic socials kind of go out on their own and try to make those decisions by themselves. The collectiveness and the connection to DSA, I think is the biggest. barrier to the capture that people are worried about. Whereas if we just say no to everything, if we ran his third party, I think, well, if we ran his third party, I don't think we'd ever win.

Starting point is 02:00:01 But if we just say no to everything and our orientation is as like a morally upstanding group that doesn't achieve anything, I think we lose our credibility not only in the eyes of like the political class and of other politicians, but in the eyes of voters. Right now, we can look at a voter, have a conversation on a door about how we are a different type of politician, because look at what Zeran has already done. Zeran froze your rent. Yeah. We are the group behind Zeran. Don't you want more people like him? And if Zeran hadn't frozen the rent, that would be a much harder conversation to have. No, it is really easy to point to the like the delivering of goods. be like, yeah, this is what we are about.

Starting point is 02:00:47 And this is actually, you know, improving the lives of workers. And, like, that is what matters. What else is this whole project for? I can understand that, you know, people are concerned with, like, the idea of, like, holding politicians accountable, right? Holding politicians accountable to this, you know, working class platform that they're running on, that they were elected to represent, that the organizing put them into office to fulfill. But I think one of the biggest ways to do that is through a mass membership organization

Starting point is 02:01:14 like DSA, because not only does it provide, you know, campaign infrastructure, which could help them get reelected if they stick to this vision. But it also provides this sort of like, like social bond, this internal process to stay being tethered together while they are serving or occupying a seat of power. And once you're occupying a seat of power, there is obviously constraints on that power. And there's going to be contradictions that arise. And I think a lot of people, especially online, view those contradictions as like a bad thing. That's like a reason to not engage in this project. Alternatively, I think those contradictions are actually very often a good thing.

Starting point is 02:01:53 Like this, that is a sign that history is in progress, that we are actually moving forward and we're going to seek to resolve those, like over a time. And dealing with those contradictions is good in the sense that we have to deal with them. We actually, we are at a point in our strategy where this is something to be dealt with as opposed to not engaging in this sort of strategy like at all, right? and the power that a politician has that is running on a working class platform, their power comes from the working class, and the DSA is a manifestation of that, and DSA can be an anchor. But I think there

Starting point is 02:02:23 also is these questions of like this long-term vision, right? Or if DSA candidates are just going to have to, like, administer capitalism in a more equitable way, or if there really is like this the kind of bigger vision to increase the power of the working class towards some sort of, you know, ultimate class struggle for socialism? And I guess, like, is that like, balance in their heads between this sort of like equitable administration and like this ultimate class struggle. Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, thinking about how we actually permanently change power structures and not just kind of mitigate harm, I think is one of the things that separates a socialist from oppressive. Some ideas that I'm really excited about that I would point to that

Starting point is 02:03:10 that do some of this. This didn't pass, but I think something like the Pro Act. Absolutely. Would that expand and makes it easier for workers to organize themselves and empowers unions is part of that structure and central to what Democratic Socialists want to do? In fact, right now, actually in New York City, there is a bill held by city council member Tiffany Caban, who's a DSA member and a city socialist in office called the Delivery Protection Act, that would functionally make it extremely difficult for Amazon to consider last-mile

Starting point is 02:03:51 delivery workers as individual contractors and force them to be employees of Amazon, which, one, makes sense. Like, it's crazy that all these people in Amazon trucks that you see all the time are contractors. when functionally they're not, everything that they have to do is controlled by Amazon. And doing that, we're partnering with the Teamsters on it

Starting point is 02:04:16 because doing it would make those workers unionizable. And that's a huge workforce in New York City. So that's kind of a labor example. Another piece that I'm really excited about. So yes, Suran froze the rent. That's an extension of government power in the market. But one thing that is really promising is that the administration is exploring how to legally recognize and empower tenant unions in a way that workers unions are recognized. So that

Starting point is 02:04:51 tenant unions actually have bargaining rights with a landlord. And we don't have all the answers for how that would look. But that's, I think, another example of a type of reform, a type of policy that is explicitly socialist and is actually trying to permanently change the power relationship between tenants and landlords, just as joining a workers union changes the power relationship between a worker and a supervisor. So I'm not saying we have the perfect answers across all policy areas. And certainly there are policy areas that socialists will advocate for and give, behind that I would consider more progressive because our country and society is a very harsh

Starting point is 02:05:43 environment for many people. And mitigating harm is in fact something good to do. But it cannot be the sole thing we do. And backing these types of non-reformist reforms, ideas that change power structures is central to our work. Yeah. I think this sort of tension between this sort of more like social democratic administration of capitalism and like just pushing for you know like the revolution or something is of false dichotomy and oftentimes

Starting point is 02:06:16 it can resemble the this is bad because I'm referencing Twitter but there's this old tweet that's like don't siege Leningrad take it immediately like don't build working class power just do the revolution but if you look at like where the labor movement

Starting point is 02:06:34 in the U.S. is right now We are so behind where the movement was in the 20s and 30s that allowed workers to extract the new deal. We have a long way to go to be able to really threaten capital in a serious way. And these minor social democratic policies, rather than being a release valve, could in fact provide workers more autonomy and the extra time needed to organize and keep building power. like another thing from Zoran's rent reforms is that the administration is advancing a new rule that landlords could only request proof of income or a credit check

Starting point is 02:07:14 but not both in apartment applications and like that would be huge for people right and there is there's ways to do small stuff like that well also you know in a bigger sense trying to just increase the amount that our society is socialist right that's through public ownership of utilities and key industries, commodifying necessities of life, like housing or food and democuturizing the workplace. I've been yelling about the protect the right to organize act. In my personal life

Starting point is 02:07:41 a lot lately, I've been kind of just like evangelizing about the pro act, because that that is something that like, if that gets passed, that would be one of the biggest boosts to working class power that we've seen in probably decades. Yeah. And I mean, having Claire Valdez is a labor organizer. Like that was her first organizing experience. And there's no one like that in Congress right now. You know, so I don't know that her first move will be the pro act, but it's certainly top of mind for her. That kind of relates to one of the last questions I want to get to. But first, let's do one last ad break.

Starting point is 02:08:28 Okay, we are back. How does the DSA actually, like, communicate with and relate to a broader working class base, like a broader, like, working class coalition, right? because if this is the politics that DSA is about and this is the class that DSA is trying to, like, uplift, what exactly is like the nature of the relationship between DSA and the working class? DSA is striving to be a multiracial working class organization. I would say that right now, the majority, if not entirety of our membership, not only in New York City, but also nationally are our working class.

Starting point is 02:09:07 we embrace a pretty broad definition of that because the only way you get class solidarity is by refraining from nitpicking who is middle class, who's working class, who's working poor, and like separating the interests of those groups and recognizing that basically anyone who relies on their own labor in order to live is working class and they have a lot more in common than the people who live off of their own wealth and that we should be united in basically fighting the interests of the uber wealthy who run our lives and run our economy. So I would say we're already a working class organization, but we want to become one much bigger and also more diverse, more people in different types of industry, more people from across different demographics. It's

Starting point is 02:10:04 trending that way over the last couple of years. But we need to get more of the people who vote for our candidates to also take the plunge into becoming a member and into actively organizing to better their own conditions. So I'm excited about how things are heading in that direction. It's also true that becoming a multiracial working class organization in the U.S. is notoriously difficult, you know, a country that's divided violently, not only by class divisions, but also by racial ones. So we have a, we have an uphill battle, but I think we're moving in the right direction. And voting trends show that, too, like Claire Valdez won a majority of Hispanic election districts in her area. Darya leads to one a majority of black election

Starting point is 02:10:57 districts in her district. So I think we're seeing that these ideas have more and more mass appeal. Yeah. As voters are looking, especially at establishment Democrats, who are really just continuously failing to stand up to Trump. And more people are saying, maybe we need to try something different. What's the socialism all about? There was an article in your Times, by the time you're listening to this, like a few weeks

Starting point is 02:11:25 ago, looking at like the voting data from the last June primary. And it showed like the divisions in voter behavior between like DSA candidates. and either progressive or establishment candidates was not largely divided by race, but rather by age. Yes. And I think that is another significant factor in this. And we're also notably holding on to millennial voters.

Starting point is 02:11:47 I mean, trends show that unlike previous generations, millennials tend to stay fairly left as they age, in part perhaps because millennials aren't really gaining wealth as we age. The capital system has nothing to offer them. Yeah. So, yeah, why? Why would you make like the fiscal conservative turn? To close out a few weeks before the June primary,

Starting point is 02:12:16 Canary Mission started getting very scared of the DSA. They put out this big, this big post on, you know, the slate candidates. But one's something that I found to be more interesting, rather than just like, you know, talking about who these candidates are, They focused a lot on like the organizational structure of New York DSA and how quote, New York is the testing ground. The machine is already being built. The machine doesn't stop, unquote, which sounds kind of cool. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:12:46 They made it sound like cool. If you ignore all of the like horrible evil parts of the Canary Mission write up, they kind of make New York DSA sound pretty cool. How it has all these members, almost like 100,000 volunteers, all these field leads that coordinates with, candidates once they get into office and maintains that connection, helps them, helps them stay accountable. It's funny, too, they treat it like a big secret. Like they're revealing something when, like, I literally just told you the same thing, right? Like, it's not a secret. But, you know, considering stuff like this and the DSA momentum we're seeing across the country and the reaction it's getting from the GOP, the president, and the Democratic Party establishment, what can organizers

Starting point is 02:13:28 and, you know, chapters around the country learn from New York City? DSA's electoral strategy? Or like what's something that I think New York DSA is doing that you would like more people to kind of understand or you'd like you'd like people to like, you know, learn from or like take something away from what we've seen in these past few campaigns? Yeah. One thing especially after Zeran one that I noticed

Starting point is 02:13:54 is a lot of people were really focused on his charisma and his communication strategy, which Zeran is certainly charismatic, and his communication strategy was really strong and very intentional. But to me, his communication strategy would have not gone anywhere if one, he hadn't been saying something real that people resonated with. I mean, people are not totally fooled by an empty charismatic vessel. I mean, otherwise, Jack Schlossberg would have won in New York 12, I think.

Starting point is 02:14:34 But also, there was an extremely robust yield strategy that meant when someone saw a video was inspired or interested, they could immediately find something to do to act on that feeling. And often they could find something to do basically within a mile and within a week of where they lived and what day it was. the core of the Zran campaign was not communication, it was field. And building up that structure and that muscle can take a lot of time. You know, it's hard to jump from zero to a mayoral race. But it is possible if you build out the kind of deep ownership from like an endorsement process and also a culture of not only valuing volunteers, but really like,

Starting point is 02:15:27 depending on on volunteers the campaign doesn't work if volunteers are expendable if volunteers are treated as like an incillary nice to have it only works if volunteers are both treated and truly are essential and that kind of creates a culture where people are valued where they become friends where they keep coming back where they talk to their friends and family about the campaign or things spread out from there. So what I would say both to DSA organizers and other parts of the country, but also just general organizers

Starting point is 02:16:09 who are interested in in replicating some of the success, I think culture is really key, centering people who are not staff, who are not the politicians, making sure that the experience of the campaign is actually built around the experience of a campaign, of a canvasser and moving up from there. And that's how you get a campaign that is not only accountable to the people who are building it,

Starting point is 02:16:36 but that's really fun and positive and grounded in people and place and not just in like kind of ideas and videos and things like that. So, yeah. Yeah. No, there's a real material aspect. It's not this just like idealistic kind of abstract thing that you're participating in or you believe in. It's a real, like, material process. It's a real engagement. One of the funniest things I've seen recently is that there was a Wall Street Journal article where they sent one of their,

Starting point is 02:17:05 like, hit piece writers to attend all these DSA events. And the write-up is essentially, yeah, I had a great time at all these events. Everyone was really nice. I saw that. Yeah, there was, like, one of our incoming assembly members, Eapasar, DuPach was, like, given a shout-out because he, like, remember someone's name. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know, organizers remember people's names. That's a central part of our work. Where could people learn more about DSA or New York DSA online or by any other means? So, yes, if you're in New York City or even near New York City, you can go to Socialists.N.Y.C. There you can see. I joined DSA. You can look at our events calendar, which is robust. We're at a point where we have basically at least three events every single

Starting point is 02:18:07 day that cover a wide range of geographies across the city, but also interests. There's a run club event on Friday, if that's of interest to people. If you're not in New York City, there's almost certainly a chapter where you live. You can go to DSAUSA.org to join, but also to find your chapter, find out about national work that's going on, especially as it relates to like the ongoing imperialist wars we have that's often held by national DSA. So definitely encourage everyone to check those things out. Thank you, Grace, for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Canadian 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

Starting point is 02:19:08 Podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast and I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pipman, chairman and CEO of IHard Media. I also led the team that created MTV, and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month. On my podcast, Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the

Starting point is 02:19:45 untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up. Those are powerful words, my, something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to math and magic stories from the frontiers of marketing on the IHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or whatever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and Iheart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.

Starting point is 02:20:21 So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi.

Starting point is 02:20:49 You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 02:21:07 Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch,

Starting point is 02:21:24 our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning. breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea?

Starting point is 02:21:42 We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. Are you fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody? I thought he was going to write.

Starting point is 02:22:02 I thought you're all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bradley Whitford Hot. This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Starting point is 02:22:30 Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Sophie's also here. Sophie is also here. Allegedly. We were talking West Wing before this. Sophie has been excommunicated. Sophie said something that Robert will not let us repeat. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:22:46 We legally can't repeat it. You'd all go to prison and we would be right to send you there. West Wing as in the TV show. Yeah. This episode we're covering the week of July 22nd to July 29th. James, some small things to start. Yeah, let's do it. So today on the day that we are recorded,

Starting point is 02:23:02 which is 29th of July, the United States and Saudi forces conducting strikes inside Iraq at what they are calling Iran-backed terrorists. It comes after an Iraqi national security advisor earlier this week suggested that Ukraine was responsible for strikes inside Iraq, which is a thing that isn't true. Iran again attempted to target U.S. bases in Jordan today, but at the time of recording the U.S. military reporting that missiles were all intercepted. Iranian strikes on Kurdistan have continued, and Reuters is reporting that Iran is soon to receive Chinese shoulder-fired man pads. It's man-portable air defense system. Women can use them too,

Starting point is 02:23:46 probably not in Iran. But part of what Reuters is saying is a recently signed deal between the two states. China, of course, denying it. But that would be very interesting, right, considering that it was a shoulder-launched madpads that shot down the jet that triggered the massive Cesar mission a few months ago. Yeah, it's always funny when something comes around like this in the history of like military colonialist adventures overseas. You know, it wasn't so long ago that we were sending manpads into Afghanistan and the Soviets were going, oh no, all of our helicopters.

Starting point is 02:24:19 Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it's just beautiful how cyclical nature is. Yeah, here we are. Finally, I want to talk about the TPS temporary protected states for Haitian people. So a few weeks ago on our Supreme Court special, we spoke about the court. case that effectively ended this protected status, right? And it is set to expire this week. We know that this will impact as many as 350,000 people are going with a number from Haitian Bridge Alliance there. A lot of these people are going back is not an option. It's not in any way

Starting point is 02:24:52 going to be safe for them or they just don't simply have a place to go back to there. Many of these people will have US citizen children who therefore will not lose TPS, right? But it's unclear what exactly? I mean, I think the administration probably doesn't give a shit what happens to their children. I'm going to keep reporting on this. There are already rumors of ICE raids targeting Haitian people. I'm going to try and get some folks on from HBA or one of the other advocacy organizations. But I'm going to wait a little bit just to see how things play out in the next couple of days. But I'm afraid whatever happens won't be great. The House approved the $1.15 trillion, $27 National Defense Authorization Act,

Starting point is 02:25:30 and a 216 to 212 vote largely on party lines, though six Democrats voted in support. The version of the bill that passed includes Section 219, which expands cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, specifically the co-development of military technology and joint training and information sharing to deploy jointly developed technology. The budget contains 750 million for these U.S. Israel joint programs. the bills currently stalled in the Senate. Court documents revealed that last October, the Trump administration canceled nearly $8 billion of clean energy grants

Starting point is 02:26:10 by explicitly targeting states whose electoral college votes went to Kamala Harris in 2024 or who have two senators who caucus with the Democrats. That is Georgia. And lawyers for the Department of Energy just explicitly laid this out in court, saying that's how these grants were selected was on these political lines. Yeah, incredible. Last Friday saw the White House press correspondence dinner take two.

Starting point is 02:26:40 President Trump delivered a rambling monologue with what were supposed to be jokes to very tepid reactions from a largely friendly audience. Once again, Trump joked about running for president in 2008. Wolf Blitzer presented an award to the Wall Street Journal and their reporters, for their reporting on the Trump-signed Epstein birthday card, sparking a $10 billion defamation suit from the president. As Wolf Blitzer presented the award, Trump laughed from his seat on stage

Starting point is 02:27:12 before shaking hands with all the winners. The dinner, which ostensibly is to celebrate the free press in the First Amendment, took place the same week that the Trump administration subpoenaed New York Times journalists, their spouses, and one of their moms following Times reporting on the security capabilities of the Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The DOJ withdrew those subpoenas last Thursday after pressure from a federal judge. But that was not the only instance of press freedom coming under attack from the government just this last week.

Starting point is 02:27:44 On July 22nd, the non-profit newsroom Breakthrough News reported that they received a congressional subpoena from the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee demanding, quote, internal communications, financial records, and more. A letter to the outlet from the House Committee said they were, quote, unquote, disturbed by the outlet's connection to, quote, Chinese Communist Party linked organizations, unquote, and the committee was investigating connections between, quote, unquote, tax-exempt groups and foreign nations. This was, of course, following the State Department's left-wing terrorism summit that we

Starting point is 02:28:21 covered last week, and parallel to Mark Rubio's crusade against Cuba, and what he sees as Cuba-aligned left-wing organizations. The People's Forum, a PSL-linked, left-wing anti-imperialist protest organization and community space in New York City, which was named in Rubio's Cuba Report, was also subpoenaed by the House Committee. The People's Forum was one of the organizers

Starting point is 02:28:46 of the humanitarian aid trip to Cuba earlier this year. I've got a fun thing to talk about. All right, let's do it. What's fun? There's an article in The Guardian. that just came out July 28th, that is about this new company based out of Austin called Campus Guardian Angel,

Starting point is 02:29:02 which is taking lessons from the Ukrainian war and applying them to U.S. public schools. Specifically, in Ukraine, they've seen a lot of luck in stopping breaches of areas of like the front of trenches and stuff using waves of small drones. Oh, I've seen this video.

Starting point is 02:29:18 I know what you're talking about. I haven't. Hit me with it. Come on. I want to see this. These are waves of drones that can launch mace and pepper balls and have like, they've got glass breakers

Starting point is 02:29:30 so they can fly through windows? They want to fucking send a drone swarm to stop a school shooter. Yeah. Well, the thing is with a drone swarm, it can't be a coward, which has historically been an issue for the cops, right? It is true.

Starting point is 02:29:44 This could work better. The problem is that in terms of actually stopping school shooters, this actually might be a lot more effective than calling the cops. I'm not going to say, I don't think it's possible that this could work.

Starting point is 02:29:54 Yeah. But everything about the press around this tells me this company is also billing itself as a way that like school administrators can use drones to fuck up kids who misspave? Sure, no, I can see that being a... That's kind of what I'm expecting, right?

Starting point is 02:30:09 Yeah, yeah, you're going to get maced by a drone. I want to read a quote from the article here. They could be flown from thousands of miles away and support two-way communication through an embedded speakerphone allowing the company's response team to engage verbally with a threat or communicate to teachers and school staff, campus guardian angels website stated.

Starting point is 02:30:25 This allows our team, team in our op center to communicate to law enforcement officers verbally with messages such as follow me and I'll take you to the suspect or open the door and we'll go in and clear the room and I'll tell you what you see. And it's the whole thing about going after the suspect that I'm like, I can see this also just these drones being swarmed after some kids smoking pot or somebody who's like a suspicious looking backpack to some shitty AI like visual identification system that because you can't have a guy on the cameras at all times. I don't know. I don't think this is going to wind up saving as many lives as it is causing drone-related assaults in public schools.

Starting point is 02:30:59 But I guess we'll see. Fascinating. The video's great. Yeah, I want to see the video. You should look up the video. Campus Guardian Angel. Let's get a live reaction. Yeah, Campus Guardian Angel.

Starting point is 02:31:10 There you go. When I hear that phrase, the first thing that comes to my mind is pedophile. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking when I hear some. Okay, watch video. The first active shooter suppression service. I'm sure that's true. All right, here we go.

Starting point is 02:31:24 Got a couple of cops. Yeah. It's still blurry. I still can't quite. It's still, wow, it's having a long thing. Okay, here we are, here we are. Yeah, this does make me think about what if the latency is bad between the camera and the drone operator flying an armed drone through a public school. Okay, we're here.

Starting point is 02:31:40 We're watching a bunch of news clips. A bald man is giving a talk. That's the Navy SEAL who runs the company. Okay, I see. Okay, wow, the drones are moving down the corridor. Fuck me! Here they come. They sit in some little boxes.

Starting point is 02:31:58 There's a cop. A cop has a gun. Oh, there's someone in a balaclava. He's surrendering to the drones. He's down. Surrendering to the drones? They took that right from front footage of like Russian soldiers surrendering to drones so they don't just murder.

Starting point is 02:32:13 These guys, okay, this guy's playing a shooter. He has a BB gun. A couple of drones have got him cornered. He's not shooting at them, though. Cowards. Cowards. Okay, here's someone from Seminole County Public Schools. So the drones live in a little box and it opens.

Starting point is 02:32:26 And I like that they've done blue lighting. It's like a white box with blue lighting. It's very gamer coding. It's a little drone carrier. Yeah, a little drone box. Here he comes. He's breached through the window. Whoa, they're fucking up a dummy.

Starting point is 02:32:36 That's the cliff, yeah. Look at it go. They've missed a few times, I notice. If you look closely, yeah, way off. He's fucking way off. All right. I don't trust these drones about this. They're like, what if there was a child nearby?

Starting point is 02:32:50 No, literally. That was my first thought. It was like this just makes it easier for cops to shoot people accidentally. Or an AI drone to shoot someone by accident. They're going after the same dude again. He's running away. Oh, he's cornered. He's gone to ground.

Starting point is 02:33:04 He's surrendering. Wait, it's probably guys that couldn't pass the cop exam that are the ones flying the drones. Yeah. In this POV, it looks like someone's manually firing because the drone has like a crosshairs in its video. Now we're seeing the drones POV. They're coming out their little box. that's the Navy SEAL in through the window

Starting point is 02:33:24 and he's surrendering as the shooter again he's surrendering they haven't really engaged with the hypothetical of what if the shooter doesn't surrender to the groan

Starting point is 02:33:32 oh there's flying laps around him whoa they took out the whole dummy the whole dummy fell over okay yeah that's the clip wild stuff

Starting point is 02:33:40 well and they can strobe them as well I guess wow there's a lot of cops in tactical gear none of them have gone in they've sent the drone in instead yeah that seems realistic okay yeah the guys

Starting point is 02:33:50 the guys like baffled by the number of targets and just lives down, surrenders. This is great. I can't see this being used to harass teenagers for doing things that every teenager does. So I wanted to talk a little bit about an article that just came out very recently on the New York Times about a metadata center in Louisiana. Now, obviously, I've talked about data centers a few times. In the fairly recent past, I did a dedicated article on the fight against or the different

Starting point is 02:34:17 kind of grassroots activism campaigns against new data center construction. one of the ones that is not really in any danger of being canceled through local protest is a massive Facebook data center in Richland Parish. It was originally planned to be like a $10 billion data center and has now ballooned to like a $50 billion project. Facebook was not originally planning to construct in Louisiana. They were taking bids back during the Biden administration. I don't think the state was really on the map. But officials particularly in the very poor county of Richland Parish had a problem, which is that they had least 1,400, 4408. acres to Toyota to build a factory, but Toyota had decided not to around 2006, I think in part because

Starting point is 02:34:58 the factory was proven to be uninsurable because it's a floodplain. So basically they were like, we're not going to spend billions of dollars in a factory we literally can't insure in a place that's famous for having infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes. Yeah. So Richland Paris had a problem. The area was already economically depressed. And Intergy, which is a Louisiana state power company, also had an issue, which is that they were not making enough money. So their CEO, Philip May, decided he wanted to put Louisiana through as a dark horse contender for this massive fucking meta data center. And they wound up winning.

Starting point is 02:35:32 And they basically wound up winning through promising to be corrupt on behalf of meta. There was a bill being pushed at the start of 2024. Because like the thing, they offered meta a bunch of incentives. And the only thing they couldn't offer them was like a tax break on the different kind of materials you buy when you're building a data center. And everywhere else that meta was consistent. considering had already offered those. So in April of 2024, Richard Nelson, the state revenue secretary, was kind of helping to shepherd through a bill that was a tax rebate for fiber optic equipment,

Starting point is 02:36:00 and they just wound up changing it two months to a massive tax rebate for data center equipment. Amazing. Super fucking corrupt. But also, here's the thing, nobody in Richland Parish really cares, because these people are incredibly fucking poor, and Facebook is bribing basically the entire county. There's some sort of local law they have that if there's, there's like an overfunding in county tax revenue, then like teachers get a bunch of money. And so because of how much money Facebook is pumped in, a bunch of teachers in the parish got like a $50,000 bonus. And that's like the lowest level of what is effectively like legal bribery going on at every

Starting point is 02:36:35 level of life in the parish. So there's no chance, really, that anyone is going to protest or stop the construction of this. People are enthusiastic because META has turned a fire hose of money on one of the poorest counties in the United States. The problem is that, as I've said, the project is really. really obviously fucking doomed. Again, it's uninsurable because it's in a fucking floodplain.

Starting point is 02:36:55 And the actual, like, text of the arrangement that Meta Inc. Basically gives them the ability to bounce and leave the project within, like, four or five years, leaving Intergy and a bunch of other Louisiana interests on the hook for this entire massive project if, say, a hurricane comes through and renders the entire site inoperable. So it seems like that's kind of thing that's going to cause a massive problem and, like, destroy the local economy at some point. But there's so much money being slalomed out to people right now that I don't think anything's going to stop that. So I guess we hope that the obvious thing doesn't happen, but I kind of think it's going to. Anyway, Louisiana. Nice. Let's talk about

Starting point is 02:37:35 the public charge rule. So the Trump administration has announced that it will do away on September the 18th with the DHS rule on public charge determination. That rule came into effect in 20. 2022, so under the Biden administration. They're not making a new rule at this time. They're taking away the old rule. So what we will have to go off now is the text in the Immigration and Nationality Act, and presumably they will issue some guidance soon, right? Whatever guidance the issue is likely to be more restrictive than what we had in 2022 rule, right? They did publish a public notice about this last year, so we knew that this was coming, that they had planned to rescind this rule.

Starting point is 02:38:17 And we should talk about what public charges. We can go back to the 1999 guidance, and that's what was clarified in 2022 for a definition. That guidance says that someone who is likely to be, quote, primarily dependent on the government for subsistence as demonstrated by either the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalisation for long-term care at government expense can be inadmissible to the United States or ineligible for permanent residency. This doesn't apply to some permanent residency applications like SIJ, special immigrant juvenile, green card applications, TOU visas, asylees or refugees, some other categories, including those in the Violence Against

Starting point is 02:38:58 Women Act. Public charge has generally been understood to mean cash benefits, right? So SSSI or TANF would be the ones that, like, would be generally understood to be that if somebody received those DHS, I guess it would be USCIS, could find that they would be inadmissible. Somebody who is found inadmissible for this reason previously could post a bond and still be admitted, right? Just the bond is basically saying, I'm not going to be like a burden. on the United States state, right? Yeah. We're not exactly clear

Starting point is 02:39:33 what they're going to do next, but we can look at the DHS presser for some clues, which says, quote, aligning immigration with law and congressional intent that aliens of the United States to be self-reliant and not dependent on taxpayer-funded

Starting point is 02:39:47 government benefits. This could be really bad, right? There are a lot of different benefits people take advantage of to include free school meals, to include things like SNAP, to include WIC, right, to include rent-controlled housing even, right? Like, they could draw this.

Starting point is 02:40:07 I think what they're probably going to move towards is a sort of looking at the whole case thing as opposed to a looking for specific things in the past. Another thing that we should understand is that this is forward-facing, right? It's not just have they use this, it's are they likely to? an extremely broad interpretation of this could be very bad for people definitely looking to adjust their status right so this is something we will keep an eye on it's not ending yet i just want to reinforce that it's on september the 18th

Starting point is 02:40:38 for people who are in these proceedings this is something you should discuss with your immigration lawyer if that is pertains to you i will include links to all the government press releases and the uh federal register pieces about this if you want to read it yourself should take a break yeah i think so And we're back. I want to talk about Texas. And normally that's not a hopeful thing when I say I'm going to talk about Texas. In fact, about 80% of the time when I come on to talk about Texas,

Starting point is 02:41:18 it's because either someone in Texas committed some sort of horrible violent crime or everyone's getting excited about an election and I need to tell them not to because it's Texas. This time I'm here to tell you there's an election in Texas you might want to get excited about. the election between Ken Paxton and Tala Rico. Fuck, what's his first name? I want to say Tommy, but, or James Talley. James. The election between Ken Paxton and James Talley.

Starting point is 02:41:42 I know. I can't think of about that fucking Gryphter. I can't stop. Every time I hear his name. But no, James Tala Rico is not a grifter. James Talleyco might be a U.S. senator in the very near future because Kyn Paxton is not doing too well. And if you aren't Texan the name Kim Paxton may not immediately conjure dread and

Starting point is 02:42:00 disgust, but it should. I would be hard pressed to name a more scandal-ridden, corrupt, and evil elected leader in the United States, and that includes Donald Trump. Before we get into Paxton's latest race for a U.S. Senate seat, I want to tell you a little bit more about Ken. Friend of the pod, Ken Paxton. K-Pax, as we call him. I don't think anyone actually saw the movie K-Pax, so that's not really a joke that's going to land, but... Did know that it was a movie. It was a movie, James.

Starting point is 02:42:25 In 2008, when Paxton was a new Texas House member for McKinney, where my mom used to teach, the AP reported that he and another state representative had been accused by ethics watchdog Fred Lewis of greasing the skids to settle a contract with Watchguard, a company that made in-car video systems that record video directly to DVD for like the cops and stuff. Paxton and Byron Cook, two state representatives, were both found to have disclosed ownership in Watchguard, but in Paxton's case, he didn't disclose his ownership until well after his 2008 personal financial statement was filed. Shortly after the deal was made, watchguard net earnings increased year over year by 250 percent, and Paxton and, sold their shares of the company for an undisclosed amount, but a lot of money.

Starting point is 02:43:06 Paxton denies any knowledge of the company's state contracts and claims he did nothing shady. However, per the barbed wire, quote, Paxton claimed he had no knowledge of the company's state contracts at the time, which he would have been required to disclose with the Texas Ethics Commission under state law. However, Associated Press reporter that Watchguard's website boasted that the company was held by an influential shareholder group that includes three state representatives. Perfect. You hate it when you're dry snitched on by the company that bribed you?

Starting point is 02:43:32 Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, after coming under scrutiny, Paxton shifted his investments, including those in Watch Guard, into a blind trust. A blind trust is an account managed by a third-party trustee without the beneficiary's knowledge to prevent a conflict of interest. However, the journal uncovered text between Paxton and the trustee, who is a friend of his concerning stock trades in 2020, a violation of the blind nature of the agreement. Paxon received $2.2 million from his investment. So that's more like a see-through trust. Yeah. Yeah. It's more of a see-through. trust, not so blind. It's more just you're committing a series of crimes. So he's going to get charged

Starting point is 02:44:07 with securities fraud for this. Uh, and that case is going to wind on for a while. But not long, you know, kind of actually in the middle of this whole process of corruption in 2013, when he's a state senator, he's entering the courthouse, like state courthouse. Yeah. And a lawyer who'd just been ahead of him in line at like the metal detector leaves behind a thousand dollar montblank pin in the metal detector tray. And Ken Paxton steals it. And he's on video stealing it. Like the Dallas Morning News gets access to the video and publishes it. It's really funny.

Starting point is 02:44:43 What a series of events. In like 2014, Ken runs for and wins Attorney General of the State of Texas. And his opponent in the campaign Justin Nelson runs video ads using the footage. It is really funny to have Top Koff be like the most corrupt criminal in Texas politics. I'd like really dedicated to it, you know. Just the big grids. Lazyest criminal, too. Just seeing an opportunity and taking it without a second thought.

Starting point is 02:45:10 It's really beautiful. Yeah. Now, despite this, Paxton was still narrowly elected, thanks in part to spending twice as much as his opponent on the campaign. Yeah. In 2022, Paxton faced a primary challenge from George P. Bush, one of the C-list Bush's, a nephew of the most recent former President Bush.

Starting point is 02:45:28 Huh. This would prove to be one of Paxton's easier vicarious. even though he had been charged with and was still under investigation for securities fraud, as well as at this point a separate federal investigation for alleged corruption in favor of an Austin real estate developer. I'm going to quote now from an AP article by Thomas Beaumont. Quote, Paxton responded by portraying himself as a Trump-era Republican and Bush is the heir to a privileged political legacy. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:53 Pro-Paxon organization spent more than $20 million, about twice as much as Bush and his allies. The race went into a runoff in which Paxton defeated Bush by 34 percentage points. So just a pancing On behalf of George P. Bush One of the worst ass-kickings In Texas state political history It's beautiful stuff Yeah, I mean this is a very clear

Starting point is 02:46:13 Sort of like neocon Versus the new like mega Republican Party matchup In which the neocons have just no No ground to stand on Well and it's also just like Purely on like the shallowest basis Of like what sounds good to a dummy George W Bush

Starting point is 02:46:27 Dubya is a nickname that's trustworthy George P. Bush B-Bush? Nobody wants to be-bush anywhere. It's just a bad idea. I do think 20 years of war in the Middle East have maybe like drop the value of George X Bush stock of their being of George Bush anywhere in the name of the president.

Starting point is 02:46:48 It's in 20. It could say 30 if we're doing George Bushes, I guess. Guys, we're talking about Texas. I mean, even there. Yeah, even in Texas. A whole lot of people from Texas died in wars that really we didn't need to have. I mean, even when Texans were voting for him, people had a tendency to say the man was all hat, no cattle. So I'm not super surprised about this. But anyway, Paxton beats Bush handily in the primary, and then he runs against Democrat Rochelle Garza in the general.

Starting point is 02:47:16 And Garza entered the campaign with a 300-page opposition research bio on Paxton, but also faced a really difficult quandary, which is like, what can you say about Ken that voters haven't already heard and evidently decided they don't care about, right? Yeah, yeah. This is like the same thing with Trump, right? It's his like... Yeah, how do you attack this guy? He has all of this stuff that's fucked up that we all know about. Yeah. That like, is it worse just retreading all this same stuff?

Starting point is 02:47:42 No, and it just wasn't, right? She loses two, not by as badly as George B. Bush, obviously. And Paxton continues to cling to office and scandal. Now, in the years after his victory, his wife divorced him, citing the Bible. He was impeached by the state house, but then acquitted by the Senate. his fraud case ended in 2024 with a judgment that he paid $300,000 in restitution, but through it all, he maintained enough Republican support to squeak by. I mean, because he's been very powerful as the Attorney General of that state and has done a lot

Starting point is 02:48:14 to help the Republicans in that state and like a lot of really ugly stuff has been done at the behest of and the help of Paxton. Yeah, he's wielded his power. And I'm leaving a lot of that out. I don't mean this as a comprehensive look at his past. We're kind of doing a greatest hits. I'm going to have to do a BTB on the fucking. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 02:48:31 K-Pax deserves it. So in that AP article, Thomas Beaumont interviewed two Paxton supporters, David and Nancy Lap, who are retired conservatives from Woolworth, Texas, or Wolfram, Texas. And quote from that article, they described him as a conservative warrior who has been a victim of persecution. He's had his share of scandals, and almost all of them have. So it's not necessarily disqualifying anymore, said David Lap, 76. He's a flawed person, no doubt about it, but he fights for traditional American values. Oh, man.

Starting point is 02:48:59 He added that, nowadays, as long as he's a lot of it. long as you're not in jail, they'll elect you. Which is very true. Yeah, yeah, that's not a wrong statement. But also, you'll elect him, David. Yeah, yes. They, they. You're making a choice.

Starting point is 02:49:14 Now, there is much more to the tale of Ken Baxter's scum and villainy, and this isn't an episode of B-TV, so I'm going to save us some time and just discussed arguably his worst and most famous call as attorney general. Kin was elected after promising to be tough on crime and attacking his predecessors and opponents for being weak on crime. And then in 2025, a Waco attorney named Adam Hoffman went on trial

Starting point is 02:49:35 for sexually abusing his son's best friend during multiple sleepovers from the age of six or seven up to age 10. Jesus. The victim initially told a forensic interviewer

Starting point is 02:49:43 he believed Hoffman had ejaculated over 1,300 times in his presence. Fuck, Jesus. Hoffman denied the allegation, although they did like a seaman, they looked for seaman

Starting point is 02:49:52 and didn't find any, so like, I don't know, but also he could get a clean stuff. Who knows? Hoffman denied the allegations and called the boy a liar. The jury wound up deadlocked, so the judge ordered them to keep deliberating, and long story sure it becomes a mistrial. Because the victim did not want to testify a second time, Paxton's

Starting point is 02:50:09 prosecutor struck a plea deal with Hoffman. So Hoffman, plea is guilty, but the plea deal includes no jail time or registry for as a sex offender for Hoffman. So that's pretty fucked up. And obviously, it's Paxton's people doing this, but Paxton's the attorney general. Yeah. So this really grosses a lot of people out. And the case becomes a major avenue attack. when he undergoes a primary challenge by John Cornyn earlier this year in the Senate race, right? Yeah, he challenges Cornyn, the incumbent, for Senate. The attention around this caused critics of Paxton to look into other cases, per the Texas Tribune. Quote, for instance, attack ads from Corny's allies highlight the case of a man originally charged

Starting point is 02:50:47 with child sex trafficking, who received a deal for a probation sentence. And Judge Roy Sparkman brought up another case in open court last month, noting Paxton had also taken over a murder-for-hire case that he oversaw, which resulted in a misdemeanor, plea at a four-day jail sentence. And of course, Paxton still beat Cornyn. So you could be forgiven for being like, what could take fucking this guy out, right? At this point, what could matter? And I'll be honest, I was really hesitant to have any hope about this race until extremely recently. But within the last few days, a bunch of new polling has come out that makes this look not just competitive, but winnable. The most striking example of evidence, you know, in favor of that would be a recent Texas public

Starting point is 02:51:29 opinion research poll that showed Tala Rico leading Paxton 45% to 40, after multiple other polls had consistently shown a nail-biter of a race. Now, TPOR is officially a non-partisan research group, but it is run by a Democratic strategist, so there's reason to suspect some favoritism here. The Texas Tribune, and a separate article had this to say about the survey. Quote, the group surveyed 1,48 likely voters between July 15th and July 17th, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Of those poll respondents, 53,000, percent voted for Donald Trump and 42 percent voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, making the sample only slightly bluer than the 2024 electorate, which favored Trump by a 14-point margin in Texas.

Starting point is 02:52:09 Trump carried Texas by 5.6 percentage points in 2020, two years after the last midterm held there during his presidency. And a recent New York Times-Sin a poll from June found an overall tie in the race 47 to 47 percent, with Tala Rico winning about 5 percent of Republicans. The most significant data from this recent batch of polling that has been hopeful, though, is that Tala Rico seems to be doing really well among non-college educated voters, which is traditionally like the strongest group for Paxton. That's the group that has carried him over the line consistently.

Starting point is 02:52:40 And from that same article, quote, perhaps the biggest outlier was Tala RICO's lead among non-college educated voters, who favored the Democrat by nine percentage points, 45% to 36%. He led by one percentage point among those with at least a bachelor's degree. I don't want to suggest that the other races in Texas are going to go, this well, right? Ted Cruz is currently about 18 points ahead of his opponent, Colin Alred, right now among non-college-educated Texans in 2024. Man. Yeah, like, so I don't have a lot of

Starting point is 02:53:11 faith that this is going to extend past Tala Rico versus Paxton, but there is evidence that, like, Paxton's longevity with the specific group that's carried him past the line is at its end. Like, maybe there's just too much scandal for him to stand up next to someone who seems as, like, relatively squeaky and nice as Talarico. Now, there's other things to credit Tilarico's success for. One of them is that he's doing a lot better than Paxton in terms of, like, money right now. As of the most recent disclosures, Tala Rico's campaign is about $21 million on hand. Paxton has less than eight.

Starting point is 02:53:42 And if you remember every other election I've gone or every other campaign of Paxons I've run through here, he usually had like a two-to-one advantage in funding over his opponents. So the fact that that's kind of falling apart for him, too, suggests this might be a really winnable race. Now, there are some reasons to doubt that, too. Most polls I've seen show a number of undecided Republicans large enough to close the gap or a tie between the two candidates led by Paxton. And if that group all breaks for kin and historically they're likely to, things could be really close or wind up in favor of Paxton, right? One of the polls found about 14% of voters of all political stripes are unsure of their picks.

Starting point is 02:54:18 And among undecided voters, it looks like Paxton has the most room to grow. About 19% of that blocks that they lean towards a Republican compared to 10% to lean towards Tala Rico. but most of them were just totally on the fence, or at least that's what they said. So a lot is going to depend on how those people break. I'm not saying this is definitely going to go Teller Rico's way. But if you're talking about like, what is a race where maybe the Democratic Party might want to actually invest money in? I'd say here, this thing seems winnable.

Starting point is 02:54:45 And I don't say that about Texas races often. It is a very particular matchup. Paxton has a lot of unique vulnerabilities. Taylor is also doing very well in polls for Latino voters up like 45. points ahead of Paxton. That will be very crucial, especially considering ice. That's going to be a big factor in this race.

Starting point is 02:55:05 There was an ice killing in Texas just a few weeks ago. Certainly, a lot of funding could come to Paxton towards the end of the race. Sure. The campaign finest ratio could change dramatically over time, but I do wonder if the sort of strategy from the GOP right now, which is to paint Tala Rico very early, on is it's like, you know, woke gender ideology maniac will kind of run a little bit hollow

Starting point is 02:55:32 now that Trump is in charge and Republicans control all branches of government and the sort of economic issues that can not be blamed on like woke liberals sending, you know, money to sex changes in prison. It's going to be an interesting race, very close. Another close race. Next Tuesday, the Michigan Senate primary with I see Israel in my dream. dreams, Haley Stevens versus Dr. Abdul al-Said. They had their last debate on Monday. LCAid continually hit Stevens for her corporate funding, $60 million of outside spending, $46 million of APAC funding. And the moderator was really going after Stevens for this too, asking if all this APAC funding will result in Stevens, quote-unquote, doing their bidding, referring to APAC and

Starting point is 02:56:26 with the pro-Israel lobby. Kind of interesting. And she also lied about receiving funding from the local utility company during the debate. So early voting for that's already started. The primaries next Tuesday. We'll cover that on next executive disorder.

Starting point is 02:56:42 Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race also had a debate on Tuesday. Had not seen that yet, but she is really pulling ahead in polls right now. But that primary is still a few weeks away. But to stay on, the topic of evil Republicans. On July 21st, Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed domestic violence allegations against Republican representatives Max Miller and Corey Mills, saying, quote, well, the key word there

Starting point is 02:57:11 is allegation. And then said that the House Ethics Committee would shake things out. Of those two reps, Max Miller of Ohio is facing re-election in the midst of escalating legal issues, including restraining orders, a defamation case, and a custody battle. Max Miller's ex-wife, Emily Morano of the America First Policy Institute and daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Morano, has accused Max Miller of abusing her and their daughter. While investigating suspected child abuse, Marano told Bay Village police that Miller yelled and held a gun to her head after she turned on the lights to change their baby's diaper. Jesus.

Starting point is 02:57:55 According to a police report, Marano told police, but another domestic violence incident from earlier this year where during a custody exchange, Miller, quote, grabbed and threw her against the wall, which resulted in an obvious grab mark on her upper arm and bruising to her stomach

Starting point is 02:58:10 and side where she hit the wall, unquote. This alleged incident also was in front of their daughter, and the police report later states that Marano's daughter told her, quote, Daddy Kill You. Marano and Miller were married in 2022, and Marano filed for divorce in August of 2024. After telling Miller that she wants a divorce in June of 24,

Starting point is 02:58:36 Marano alleged that he threw hot steaming water at her. In a recorded phone call, Miller admits to what he refers to as the water incident, after his wife said on the call that he abused her and, quote, poured a steaming hot water on her neck. On the call, Miller said that the... quote-unquote water incident wasn't done with, quote-unquote, intent to hurt his wife. Marano told police she moved out of the house because she was, quote-unquote, scared of him. All of these allegations came to light earlier this year after Marano discovered her two-year-old

Starting point is 02:59:11 daughter's collarbone was broken after the child came back from Miller's house this past February. This prompted of cascade of investigations and back-and-forth court filings, which eventually made their way into news reporting. A Bay Village police report investigating suspected child abuse stated that a child protection specialist found that the two-year-old's broken collarbone was accompanied by a bruise that, quote, appears to be in a handprint and appears to have been inflicted. According to another police report obtained by Mother Jones, Marano recounted her daughter saying, quote, Daddy's house is scary. Miller, of course, denies all claims. of abuse or domestic violence and has theorized that the broken collarbone was possibly caused by

Starting point is 02:59:58 a seatbelt. Why is a kid wearing a seatbelt? Shouldn't they be in a car seat when they're two? Yes, this was part of the investigation because Miller said this. And he had to show police that he had properly installed a car seat. Right. After news outlets reported on disposal and child abuse allegations. Miller filed a defamation suit against his ex-wife, and this is not the first time Miller has used a defamation suit to shut down allegations of abuse. In 2021, Stephanie Grisham, a former white House press secretary in Trump's first term, wrote in the Washington Post that her unnamed boyfriend from 2019 to 2020, quote-unquote, got physical with her, that their relationship, quote, unquote, turned abusive, and that her ex-boyfriend had, quote, anger issues and a violent streak.

Starting point is 03:00:49 These claims were later included in a book, but earlier that year, Politico reported that Max Miller, quote, pushed Grisham against a wall and slapped her in the face at his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her, unquote. Max Miller sued Grisham for, quote, libelous and defamatory false statements made about him. But he dismissed the case in 2023 after agreeing to a settlement. Though Grisham is now suing Miller for breaking the settlement's NDA,

Starting point is 03:01:19 by publicly claiming that Grisham fabricated abuse allegations against him while defending himself against new allegations of abuse by his ex-wife. Max Miller's abuse allegations have been a sort of open secret in Washington for a while when George Santos was dealing with his whole thing a few years ago. On the House floor, he referred to Max Miller as a woman beater. Huh. And talked about how he didn't want the Republican Party to just turn into repeating media attacks against each other as he was being kicked out of Congress.

Starting point is 03:01:51 Wild. He is running for re-election in Ohio. Yeah. And Miller has maintained support from Republicans in Congress. And it's been backed by the president for years. Let's go on a break and then discuss some more news. All right, we are back. And I want to update people on the Iranian-American Legal Defense Fund versus Rubio case.

Starting point is 03:02:28 we spoke about a few weeks ago. So I have reached out to Public Citizen about this, and they haven't got back to me. I'd love to do an interview with them. I have worked with them before and some access to med stuff, so hopefully someone from Public Citizen will listen and reply. But we have learned a lot from the new filings in this case. One of the things we learned was the people were required by ICE

Starting point is 03:02:48 to meet Iranian government officials, the very people they had fled to the USA to be safe and protected from. it seems that the person who met them was introduced as a consul, but Iran obviously doesn't have a consulate in the United States, right? They have the Iranian interest section, which is in the Pakistani embassy. This person had information about their cases. In other cases, they were told they had to take calls from the Iranian interest section, and they wouldn't be allowed to return to their housing pod until they spoke to them on the phone.

Starting point is 03:03:18 In one of these calls, the Iranian officials said they had a transcript of the person's credible fear interview. That is wild, right? So the credible fear interview is when people explain why they fear going back to where they have fled, i.e., what it is that they think the Iranian state in this case is going to do to them. So what the credible fear interview will have detailed for these people would have been their participation in Gena Amini protests. I saw that in several of the testimonies. I've also spoken to dozens of Iranian migrants who participated in those protests, were arrested, released and realized that they were going to be arrested. again and fled or fled before they were arrested. Or their participation in the Christian faith. You see that in a lot of the testimonies in this case. If the Iranian government have them rank down,

Starting point is 03:04:05 they were Christians, they were distributing Bibles, they were evangelizing. It is absolutely not safe for these people to go back. Some of these meetings actually appear to have occurred right here in San Diego, the Otai Mesa Detention Center facility. People were bought to the Iranian government official, and the official then sat down with them

Starting point is 03:04:24 and tried to persuade them to return to Iran. The official had a list of names of people who they were going to meet and they read it out. So even some people who weren't there, their names were read out. So it looks like the officials either selected these people or were told by ICE who these people were. One of the people named the individual was Mr. Mehrabadi, and he threatened that they would be sent to quote Africa. So this is the United States doing either its chain refalment

Starting point is 03:04:50 or it's sending people to third countries, deportation, right? We also see a lot about the current state of the asylum system in these declarations. One person attests that she has been and will be tortured in Iran. The judge responds to her that everyone gets tortured in Iran. In their interview with the quote-unquote consul, one person said they were told by the consul, even in the US, if you are political, the same things can happen to you, which is very clearly a threat, right? The regime agent also knew when her husband was being deported and to where? So he had that information before he met with this woman.

Starting point is 03:05:30 In another case, someone testified then, ICE agent said, I will force you, this is my job, and this was with reference to signing self-deportation papers. They cuffed the woman and then, quote, he literally forced my finger print by forcing my finger to a stamp, and then on a paper, no matter how much I tried to take back my finger, which is pretty wild. It's not the first time I should add that we've heard

Starting point is 03:05:53 allegations that are doing exactly this. So many of the people in this document are women who have stories exactly like the Iranian women I met in the Darien Gap. Many of them also say they took that route. They went from Iran to either Venezuela or Brazil and then traveled north from there. They also give details of their detention conditions, which are predictably appalling, right, with one writing, quote, water here smells very bad and we are always itchy. We all have red dots on our skin that have also gone away on my body after I started antibiotics. And then skipping a bit, the dental care here is unbelievably dangerous. Any happening with teeth and they only extract. The doctors here have already extracted three of my teeth and have told me they will extract

Starting point is 03:06:39 another three more when my antibiotics were over. I have always taken care of my teeth. They also talk about the, I was just quote from one of their, one of their statements here, this disclosure, and then I'm adding this of asylum information to the Iranian government, returning to the quote here, has materially increased the likelihood that I will be detained, interrogated or tortured or killed if I ever returned to Iran. Another said, when I saw him, talking about the Iranian consul, I was disgusted with the US government by forcing us to be with agents of the regime, which I told my pod manager. Many of these people have been in detention for more than a year, right? It seems like most of these people entered in

Starting point is 03:07:19 2025. A member of staff at the Iranian interest section also called the Iranian American Legal Defence Fund and informed them that United States State Department had approached the interest section to ask for help getting rid of Iranian detainees. That's a quote that lasts getting rid of. The Iranian official said they met monthly with ICE to select individuals for deportation and the ICE provided their asylum applications to the Iranians at these meetings. They said they met with someone of Indian descent with a Georgetown degree, who is described as the general director of the Middle East section. The meetings stopped when the war with Iran began,

Starting point is 03:08:03 but apparently they still deliver documents, or at least they were delivering document in March. This call from the Iranian interest section to the IALDF is wild. It involves this Iranian official. official recounting, for instance, that on the first deportation flight in September of last year, two people cut their wrists with razors, presumably attempting to end their lives rather than go back to Iran. It also details how in many cases the United States can't get the people's travel documents together because they fly via a third country to Iran, right? There's no direct flights between the US and

Starting point is 03:08:37 Iran. And so these flights end up not being as full as the United States no doubt hopes. He also says that the clothing and state of the detainees was so poor that the Iranian government official purchased some clothing from Costco with his own money. He also said that at no point did the United States ask Iran to guarantee their well-being in Iran. The official kind of posits himself as intervening on behalf of the Iranian people

Starting point is 03:09:06 to make sure they're treated correctly, right? Which is how generally one would expect the consular administration of, of a state to intervene on behalf of the citizens. This, though, is different because these people are fleeing the very government that he represents, right? I will keep covering this. I will also link to the court listener page where you can read these testimonies. They're all handwritten.

Starting point is 03:09:28 They can be a little harder to read sometimes, but there's some really shocking and upsetting stuff in there. Forgive me if you've talked about this already. Maybe this would help for some listeners too. How does this relate to the asylum laws that the United States has? Like, have they been denied asylum in so-called immigration courts? And this is the process for removal. And how is that actually, like, decided? Because, like, these people seem to have, like, in the testimony,

Starting point is 03:09:53 you're reading, very credible fears to the point where they're attempting, like, harming themselves to avoid going back to this state. Yeah. So it seems like most of these people entered after Trump came in with his day one, effectively, like, Southern Border crossing asylum ban, right? And so they are having to fight their cases from detention, which is what they are doing. In some cases, they are already appealing

Starting point is 03:10:17 because the government has found that they don't have credible fear or that they're otherwise not eligible for asylum. The reason the IALDF knows about these people is that that is what it is doing as a non-profit group is helping them fight their cases. Sure. It shows a pretty fucking bleak situation.

Starting point is 03:10:33 People do still get asylum. I hear about it occasionally. I hear from friends in the community who do court accompaniments that they occasionally have a success still. But with the way that the Trump administration is purging the ranks of immigration, quote-unquote, judges, that's getting less and less likely. So, like, these people are in that system.

Starting point is 03:10:55 Many of them are either in ever-spirling delays, right, because we have fewer and few of these judges because they're getting purged. More judges are coming on board now. Or they're already appealing, going through the CAT process, convention against torture process, right? These are the sort of asylum claims that are like in the bullseye of what an asylum claim is, right? All of these people in there, I didn't want to read them out because I don't think there's any reason to traumatize people. Nearly all of them detail torture.

Starting point is 03:11:23 Most of the women detail sexual abuse. They talk about the horrific things they went through on the way here to, like, this is like front and center of what you would think a textbook asylum case would be normally. And there are exemptions for some Christian minorities, a religious minority. minorities from Iran who are largely Christian people, right, in some of these visa bans. But these people didn't come that way, right? They didn't come by applying for a visa. They came across the southern border. Like, it's very possible that one of the people in this case is somebody I met in the

Starting point is 03:11:52 daring gap, that the timing would line up. It's been really fucking upsetting for me reading these things. Thank you for that context. Earlier in this episode, we talked about attacks on the First Amendment as a part of the Trump admins crackdown on the left. But before we close, I want to go over a novel case of state repression against an Atlanta-based activist. This is a first-of-its-kind case, focusing on an extreme privacy feature of Graphene OS, an open-source operating system for

Starting point is 03:12:21 Android phones. This feature is known as a duress password, a special code that when inputted into a phone's locked password screen triggers a wipe of certain data on the phone. Last November, a federal grand jury indicted an Atlanta activist for allegedly wiping the data on his phone after being detained at the airport upon re-entering the country in January of 2025. U.S. attorneys say this was in violation of Title 18, USC section 2232A, that is, the destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure. The short, single paragraph indictment reads that the defendant, quote, did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone for the purpose of preventing and impairing the government's

Starting point is 03:13:15 lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control before and during the search for and seizure of property by Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team Supervisory Officer J.C. That's the name of the officer. Last week, this case has, had its first hearing, which was focused on a motion filed by the defense to suppress evidence and statements for violations of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. According to the motion, the FBI Atlanta Joint Terrorism Task Force coordinated with CPB to question and search U.S. citizen Samuel Tunic as he was returning to the United States from the Dominican Republic because of his associations with the defend the Atlanta Forest

Starting point is 03:14:03 movement, or stop cop city, which we have covered on this show. Basically, after arriving at the airport, CPB put Tunic in secondary inspection, where their tactical terrorism response team, quote, proceeded to question Mr. Tunic, search Mr. Tunic's body, and all his belongings, and insisted that he provide the password for his phone. Despite Mr. Tunick's request to speak with his lawyer and not engaged any further questioning, the officers insisted they could question. to Mr. Tunic and search his phone to determine whether he had child porn. Evidently, this was a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr. Tunic's connections with the defend the Atlanta Forest Movement, unquote.

Starting point is 03:14:48 A journalist Timothy Pratt reported the Guardian that during last week's hearing, it was revealed that, unbeknownst to Samuel Tunic, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watch list, and that a Homeland Security agent circulated an email three hours before Tunic arrived back in Atlanta, containing his name and photo, and indicated he was being investigated for, quote-unquote, suspected terrorism activities. I think it is important to mention that Samuel Tunic, to this point, has not been charged with terrorism and does not face any charges directly related to protest activity for defend the Atlanta forest or stop cop city. According to the defense's motion, Tunic early and repeatedly during question.

Starting point is 03:15:33 so that he would not speak without his lawyer. But the officers ignored these requests and never Mirandized, Tunic. The motion states that the officers told him, quote, because you're refusing to talk, which is you're right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we're looking for. After officers demanded his phone password a second time, Tudok asked again why he wasn't allowed to call his lawyer, and the officers responded, quote,

Starting point is 03:15:59 when it comes to immigration and customs, right, It's a whole different ballgame and we have search authority we don't need a warrant unquote. I'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice if this is something you are concerned about then you should seek out legal counsel

Starting point is 03:16:15 I'm just going to give you my best understanding of it this is a civil situation well it's also a criminal situation for him now but like when you're entering the border these these are civil proceedings and so that's why you're generally not Mirandized

Starting point is 03:16:29 depending on where you're you enter the United States and what circuit you are in. They can inspect your telephone. My general understanding is should you refuse to unlock that telephone, you can expect to leave without your telephone. The general way that they do this is for them to put the phone on airplane mode and then search it because they are searching the device that is entering United States, not the remote cloud stuff that is not on the device. because they are inspecting a thing that is crossing the border, right? And that is within their purview in most circuits in the United States right now as federal

Starting point is 03:17:12 immigration officers. And then the other thing I would add, at some point, I think we're going to see a Supreme Court case about it and this might be the one, right? That's very possible, yeah. Or be it that there'll be other elements to this case, right? Like, as you said, like, who destroyed the data that was on the phone is something that's very much not legally clear to me, right? Did graphene destroy the data? Did the BP agents when they entered that passcode destroy the data, right? Or did the person destroy the data? Yeah,

Starting point is 03:17:39 this case is a whole bunch of legal gray areas. This is the first time we've seen a case about a duress password. The exact way this interrogation went and it introduces a lot of questions on when exactly this regular border patrol questioning turned into an actual interrogation based on allegations of a crime with this mention of child sexual abuse material. And all those things could possibly trigger different legal statutes in various court cases. Now, the motion says that officers explained to Tunic

Starting point is 03:18:12 that he would have to give over access to his phone, quote, whether it was done with his cooperation or not. Eventually, Mr. Tunic provided a password to his cell phone and e-reader, according to the government, when the CPB officers entered the password on his cell phone, quote, the screen went blank, flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart, unquote. After this, another officer entered the room to conduct a pat-down, which the attorney did not consent to, but they did anyway. Then a DHS agent arrived with three other individuals to conduct another interview,

Starting point is 03:18:46 which Tunek did not consent to and pointed to his attorney's card. To quote from the motion again, quote, the agent explained that he was seizing Mr. Tunic's electronic devices and that they would be returned to Mr. Tonick after 30 days. Notably, the DHS agent explained that Mr. Tonick was, quote, not under arrest, but once these gentlemen are done with you, pursuant to your entry into the country, you're free to leave, unquote. So this motion to express evidence argued that the border questioning became, quote unquote, custodial in nature when Mr. Tunick was not able to leave, was never informed of his rights, and was denied

Starting point is 03:19:24 access to his lawyer. And so any, quote, evidence obtained from his phone or lack thereof should be suppressed as fruits of unlawfully obtained evidence. The specific statute that he's being charged with, 18 U.S.C. 2232, refers to, quote, the government's lawful authority to take such property. So this motion is arguing that the exact way this property was taken was not lawful. Yeah. To quote from the motion again, that's what I think we'll expound on this. quote, CBB officers introduced themselves to Mr. Tunic and explained that they were looking for people who are pedophiles. Officers justified their questioning and demands to search Mr. Tunic's phone by stating that they had to confirm whether he possessed child porn. The government's reports do not indicate any suspicion whatsoever that Mr. Tunic was in possession of child porn,

Starting point is 03:20:15 but rather that their purpose in detaining Mr. Tunic and seizing his belongings was to investigate his ties with the defend the Atlanta Forest movement. Toenick's unmarandized statement, the alleged wiping or encryption of the contents of his phone by providing agents for the specific password, is testimonial in nature. Mr. Tunic had not been charged with committing a crime in connection with the defendant of the Atlanta Force movement, but law enforcement seemingly took advantage of the relaxed constitutional protections at the border to try to dig up evidence, unquote. And the motion states that circuit courts have contradictory rulings. if this sort of search is permitted. If you can search someone's phone at the border, not to actually intercept digital contraband,

Starting point is 03:21:00 but to fish for evidence in an unrelated criminal investigation. Now, something that may come up if this goes to trial, is technically using Graphene's stress password, it does not delete all of the data on the phone, but rather the phone loses the ability to access its encrypted data. Graphene OS wrote on X the Everything app, quote, Our duress pin slash password leaves all the encrypted data on the device intact. It only wipes keys in the hardware key stores, the secure element, and encryption metadata.

Starting point is 03:21:34 It's an ear instant, and then it powers off the device to wipe RAM, unquote. So basically, it wipes what the phone needs to decrypt its contents and read the data. Though Graphene followed up on Twitter, quote, we doubt that's legally different from wiping data, unquote. So this technicality may or may not actually matter to the court, but this might not be a sort of get out of jail loophole that I see some people online presenting it as. Graphene OS further explained that the duress password wipe should be legal,

Starting point is 03:22:09 not because of this quote-unquote tech loophole, but because the defendant, quote, wasn't being investigated for any actual crime, wasn't under arrest, wasn't read his rights before being. interrogated, was it under oath, etc. Adding that it's, quote, near impossible that they get anything of value if the phone was in before first unlock with a strong passphrase plus second factor fingerprint unlock setup, unquote.

Starting point is 03:22:32 Whether or not this dress password was used, it is very unlikely that federal authorities would have been able to break into a phone running the graphene operating system. Yeah. That means that the device has been fully turned off and has not been unlocked since being turned back on. Similarly, it is very hard to break into an iPhone running iOS's lockdown mode with a complex alpha numeric password before first unlock. The combination of all those things can make it really hard to break in. We saw that right, Reese, with a reporter from a get who, one of the broadsheets, whose phone was using lockdown mode that they've said they couldn't open, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:23:13 I guess I will just say that if people want to know more, about border searches and telephones. I would suggest going to Electronic Frontier Foundation's page, eFF.org. They have a great deal of information, and you can find a lot there. It's currently the Southern District of New York, which is the one that requires a warrant. But there are various other degrees that we don't have the time, nor is just the place for us to go over. So, yeah, EFF is always a good source for this shit. Yeah, but like James said, this is a case that could become Supreme Court precedent over time. This is invoking a bunch of legal gray areas. The motion here to express evidence probably won't be decided on until at least October. So this is going to go on for

Starting point is 03:23:58 quite a while. This is another new frontier in digital privacy and how that relates to the law, which the Supreme Court has taken up a lot of cases on recently. So this could become a very influential case going forward. So I wanted to go over some of these details now. And we will certainly be covering this in the future as this case progresses. Yeah. The outlook hasn't been great so far, I would say, with this. Like the US versus Belmonti Cardoso was the most recent case. That was, I think, this week or last week.

Starting point is 03:24:33 Again, not the place to go into this, but I will include a link in the source notes if you want to read about some of the case law. I think that does it for us today. sick. Add it could happen here. Oh, good. Yeah. If you would like to email us,

Starting point is 03:24:49 it's CoolZone Tips at Proton.me. I'll include the legal fundraiser for Sam Tupnik's case below. We reported the news. The news reported. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 243

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