It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 79

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, It's happening to you here right now. Bad things, good things, all sorts of things things because today we are talking about the ultimate in bad good things donald trump's indictment uh and very brief arrest uh garrison davis james stout uh how are we all doing today how are y'all feeling this week we did it joe mission accomplished time to time to pack up yeah dark brandon has come for trump uh finally so i figured we would wait until you know a few days had gone by there were a lot of when the initial indictment was announced we didn't even actually know what all the charges were um there was a pretty long period of time that we didn't know what the

actual crime at the center of this was. But most of that is now relatively clear, as are kind of the earliest stages of the fallout to the Trump indictment. So I feel like now is a reasonably good time to talk about it. More may have, you know, occurred his trumpets would basically bribe people to not write bad stories about him. You know, it's a hush money thing. My assumption is that basically everybody at that level of wealth and prominence does versions of the same thing. And these, in fact, are not crimes on their own. You can bribe somebody not to say a bad talk about a bad thing you did to the press. Where things get illegal is that Trump made a series of payments, primarily these hundred and thirty ish thousand dollars in payments to Stormy Daniels to to buy her quiet.

And then he had to falsify company records or his people falsified company records to disguise the payments as legal fees. Bragg is arguing that not only is this a crime, but it's a felony crime. Because he did this, he falsified these records to disguise these payments in order to further additional violations of the laws. And those additional violations of the laws, the actual like core crime here is that disguising under New York law, disguising these kind of payments in corporate records is a crime. It's typically a misdemeanor, but it's a felony if the business records were intended to obscure a second crime. And in this case, the second crime appears to be the use of funds to advance his presidential campaign, And thus, like the payments that he was making were basically counted as part of like

the limited amount of money you can spend, you know, financing your campaign. And he violated that, right? That's the gist of it, as I understand, like what's actually being argued here. Yeah, that seems to be about the size of it. And just for people who aren't familiar, Brag is Alvin bragg right the uh

yeah manhattan da manhattan da okay yeah what's really concerning about this is that if they can arrest trump that means they can arrest any one of us that's right all the money that i've paid for people to hush up stories about me including stormy daniels you know um? No, it's like people, there's a lot of talk about like, is this a weak case or a strong case? None of us are lawyers. I go kind of both ways about this. One of them is that Alvin Bragg is a guy who, you know, whatever he believes about this case is also a prosecutor that is a political position. Prosecuting someone and failing to get your man is bad for your career.

And if that man is the president who you indict for the first time in living memory, that would be really bad for your career. So my assumption is that Bragg, at least, believes he's got a really strong case. Otherwise, because this is a tremendous risk for him, right? Now, obviously, can Trump wriggle his way out of it? Well, Trump is extremely good at wriggling his way out of things, and he has all of the money in the world for lawyers. So I think it would be foolish to say it's a slam dunk either way. people who are saying that like this is a weird thing to prosecute him for, I guess. But, you know, it does. I can see the logic that this guy that Bragg is kind of going with.

And it's do I think this should be a felony? I guess I I don't care as long as it does some damage to the man and causes him some like consternation, which is like the question, right? Is this actually going to harm him? Yeah, I think that is the more debatable question, right? Like it's just going to harm him or help him. There's a lot of talk about is this a political prosecution? And my general response to that is, well, like nearly all prosecutions are political, right? Like even something that wouldn't seem like, like a decision to go after a rapist. Well, it could harm my ability to like move forward in the ways that I want to in my career. So I the fact that now this is political in perhaps a grander sense, I have no doubt that the fact that this is Donald fucking Trump and everything that's happened since 2020 has happened, that he has he has been a party.

And I have no doubt that that all factors into this. happened that he has uh he has been a party and i have no doubt that that all factors into this um but i i just don't see that as being like the fact that finally a prosecutor is uh is making sort of a political prosecution of a man at the top of the hierarchy is not something that concerns me terribly yeah i don't think like i don't i i'm more concerned that this seems to have propelled him to the front of the republican race and that he's getting a bunch of donations off it than i am about any any potential consequences like of the actual indictment it is certainly an interesting political move for DeSantis to back Trump on this and not comply with extradition.

Not that it would ever get to that point, but that is still a move that DeSantis made on purpose, which is an interesting political move considering his future candidacy. And it is, let's talk about that a second, because obviously 34 felony counts sounds like a lot that is in fact quite a few felonies um but the at least the coverage i'm reading is like it's basically unheard of for someone to actually do jail time for this as a first offense which i

don't know whatever like does that man not it's absolutely breathtaking that he doesn't have a single crime on him given that he's essentially a career criminal. Well, there, there are continuing, like there's pro like the potential for prosecution still from like that call he had with the secretary of state of Georgia, which we'll talk about a little bit.

Yeah. I think there are a few sort of more serious. There's a number of things that, yeah, this may not be the last Trump criminal indictment that we see. Oh, God. We can only hope. We can only hope.

Because it only gets more funny from here, and that's the only reason to hope. Well, unless it doesn't. I'm seeing a lot of panic from some people, certain folks in the progressive and kind of center left media sphere who were like, this is just handed Trump the nomination. This might've just handed Trump the election. From what I'm looking at and from the polling I'm looking at, I mean, I think there's a good chance this helps. I mean, I think the polling certainly supports the argument that this will help him cinch the nomination. I don't really think that was super in doubt before, although he has definitely gained on DeSantis since all of

this whole process started. There is evidence, I'm looking at a 538 article right now, Trump's indictment might be making him more popular among Republicans. But kind of the point that's actually made is that the group that's getting more likely to back him is his base. Yeah. Like maybe it's people who were softer on him because he didn't back the J6 people. Maybe some of them are just folks who kind of drifted away because it's the years in between a presidential election and that's a natural thing. So it may have galvanized his base. He's certainly, he's raised four or five million dollars.

He's claiming seven now. He's claiming seven. I mean, that seems real possible. It's possible, yeah. He is saying that a significant chunk of it, I think like 20% might be more than that now, were like first-time donations. That is what his people are claiming that is not, I have no way of knowing if those numbers are legitimate. What we can say is that the polling that we're seeing nationally does not back the idea that this is causing a sea change in the likelihood of Americans to support Donald Trump. About 69% of Americans, according to a very nice,

according to an economist, you go of poll, say that in general, failing to report having spent campaign money on payments in order to keep someone silent about an issue to affect and affect the outcome of an election is a crime. About 90% of Biden voters back this while about 54% of those who voted for Trump in 2020 said the same, which is interesting. Now, that doesn't mean they also think that this is what Trump did, right? They're just saying they think that that is a crime. About 57% of Republicans, according to that same or according to a Yahoo News YouGov poll, about 57% of Republicans and Republican leaners said they would support Trump in a head-to-head against Ron DeSantis, who received 31%. That's an increase in support for the president by about 10%. But DeSantis has only gone down by like 8%.

So you can see like he – basically what's happening is that this is causing people to flock from DeSantis to him, which is not kind of evidence that we're seeing like a broader national sweep. Quinnipiac University, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Marist Poll kind of broadly supported the idea that investigations into Trump are popular among Americans, more popular than not, at least. About 56% of Americans say the investigations into Trump are fair. About 41% say they're a witch hunt. Independents are pretty split on the issue, but obviously, like Democrats Democrats wildly supportive, Republicans very much against. Most college-educated adults come down on this being fair, as do most Gen Z and

millennial people. Adults without a college education, white evangelicals, and those in small towns are most likely to call it a witch hunt. An NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist poll shows a plurality of Americans, 46% believe Trump has done something illegal related to those investigations. Another 29% say Trump has done something unethical but not illegal, while only 23% say he's done nothing wrong. Overall, 57% of Americans say that criminal charges filed against Trump should disqualify him from a presidential bid. 38% say it should not. That would be an area where I actually agree with the Republicans. I don't think that having charges against you should disqualify you from running for president. But man, I think if you are a fucking murderer, you should be able

to run for president. People have the right to run for and vote for whoever the fuck they want. And I think that that is a strong core belief of mine. I'm not going to vote for whoever the fuck they want. And I think that is a strong core belief of mine. Not going to vote for Trump, but I think the fact that he's getting charged with a bunch of felonies should not, if he was in jail, he should be able to run as people have in the past, in my opinion. Yeah, Eugene Debs, famous Trump president.

And I'm kind of more interested actually in, I think the Republican response is fairly predictable. Like all of this, we could have called that, you know, the moment they said they were indicting him. The Democrats, like I'm, look, I don't think the Democrats are ever going to do anything useful that will really change material conditions or make things much better for working people in this country.

But the fact that it gives them the option to pivot back to like orange man bad as their only campaign as their only promise as their only sort of uh principle which like they put forward as as a reason to vote for them is still bad i think like it prevents even the modicum of accountability that we have for all the shit that the Democrats have done and all the shit that they haven't done in the past, what, like three, two, two and a half years since the election. I think that's so much broader of a problem than just dealing with this set of charges. I am sympathetic to the idea, if you just kind of look at history, that you can't let people do the kind of shit Trump did and not try to fucking go after them and not hammer the sons of bitches.

Right. And this is this is not, you know, they went after after the beer hall putsch. Hitler was jailed for like a year. So it doesn't mean that like slaps on the wrist don't necessarily have much of a protective effect. But I don't know. I am so torn on this. I mean, obviously, it's really funny. I think if this is kind of the start of a series of prosecutions that's going to make this guy's life hell and that might actually even force some consequences for him, then I think that's broadly speaking a good thing,

as long as it doesn't disqualify him from the presidency, which I think would be a bad precedent. But I don't know. I'm broadly on team, yeah, man, fuck him up. We know this guy would have, Yeah, man, fuck him up. Like, we know this guy would have, and in fact has promised to if he gets into power again, use the state, use the Justice Department, remake it in his own image, and destroy his enemies. So I'm not against the idea that, like, well, the Dems – I tend to agree with you on most things, James. Like, I don't believe the Democratic Party deserves to have an easy election right now because they've failed. I mean, this is the week where we're getting the announcement from Biden that he's essentially taking kind of the soft answer to the GOP attack on trans people participating in sporting

events. We were also about a week out from his most recent announcement on, or maybe actually it's been more like a couple of weeks, on the border shit. We just had that horrible fire over in Juarez like a week or so ago. The Biden administration has let a lot of people down in a number of ways. There's some of the drilling shit that's about to start up again. And Alaska is really unsettling to me. So I, I agree with you. I don't like the idea that they can make this be an orange man bad election again. And I'm hopeful that some of what we've seen, you know, particularly like the most recent election in Chicago, you know, maybe, maybe there's kind of at least room at the state level for a lot more progressive to edge out kind of centrist dims and force some consequences that

way. But I, I also am worried about, you know, this, this authoritarian who threatened to jail and murder a bunch of people I care about. And like, I want, I want him to spend the rest of his life tangled up in that shit. I don't know that that's what this is going to be. You know, maybe they'll, they'll fail miserably here. But I don't know. I do think the kind of panic that you're getting from some people that like this handed them the election, I'm not seeing evidence that that's the case. I think that maybe if this had happened in like 2016 or even 2020, sure, you might get something like that. But at the point we're at now, I just don't think new people are coming to Trump in numbers.

Yeah. And it very much makes sense for the liberal state apparatus to try to defend itself from what it sees as like an insurgent reactionary factor, right? Like that is how they view Trump and Trump's political power. So it makes sense they will use their own powers to try to resist that from gaining control again. Whether or not you believe the state apparatus should exist at all or how valid you view its existence, it makes sense what they're doing. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I am, I mean, honestly, I am surprised they committed to it because there is, in part because this is a tremendous risk for Bragg and the people around him, right? If this fails, which it very well might, you know, obviously that could have

consequences for everybody, but, you know, it could have really serious career consequences for this guy. And I am surprised that you've got someone willing to kind of throw the dice here. And I'm hopeful that maybe that inspires, especially since this case, by the way, since I'm sure people are curious. No one I've looked at who knows more about the law than me expects this to hit trial quickly. Again, Trump has all of the money in the world, and this is like probably going to be a pretty winding process. process. Outside of just the normal problems of like a rich man is being accused of a series of crimes and has many lawyers, the Secret Service has a lot to say and when and how the actual trial part of this commences, and that has a chance of extending it. So my hope is that as this kind of winds on, maybe the fact that Bragg was willing to kind of take a shot in the dark here, so to speak,

that Bragg was willing to kind of take a shot in the dark here, so to speak, inspires some of these other prosecutors who have been, you know, poking at Trump to take a swing and maybe with enough swings, you know, it'll be like that, that guy we had on Troy Hurtubies and his bear armor suit. You know,

you get a bunch of bikers to surround him with two by fours and just swing until they're all broken and he's on the ground. It'll be like that scene from avengers endgame and all of the george soros da's are gonna absolutely not led by george soros i have never been angrier at you right now than bringing up that fucking avenger scene um yeah so did y'all watch trump's video response oh the one that played on all of the news stations except for msnbc yeah yeah uh we should talk about i actually did not watch no i attempted to avoid that as well actually but um well i watched it yourself to that for us, Robert? I sure did. And I have a summary of the most salient parts.

First off, I think that MSNBC made the right call. They kind of summarized what was going on, but didn't just let him speak uninterrupted for 15 minutes, something like 20 minutes. Talking of interrupted, Robert, would you like to be interrupted by some plugs for goods and services? Absolutely. I thought you would, buddy.

Donald Trump is a master spokesman, and these are master products. Get your gold! We're back! It's been such a glorious, glorious time. Everyone's everybody's really feeling powerful today. Mighty. Anyway, Trump.

So I don't know. I watched this fucking thing. I guess my overall sentiment would be kind of boring, right? This is not the level of energy or the degree of kind of like manic violent undercurrents that like his American carnage speech had, or even that like some of his more recent speeches in front of crowds have had. I don't see, there's so many people I've watched have takes on this who are like, and one of the joys of Twitter is you'll see some guy who's, I don't know, an analyst at some newspaper be like, wow, Trump was really low energy. He seems frightened. I'm telling you, this is a scared man. He's worried about these charges.

And then someone else with almost the same CV at a different place will be like, wow, Trump seems angry. He's about to lash back. Everybody better be ready for his counter-strike. And honestly, I just thought it was kind of perfunctory. He certainly didn't seem low energy, but he didn't seem like he had much to say other than kind of meander over some of his some some talking points that are at this point, mostly pretty lukewarm. He kind of runs through at the start of this a laundry list of right wing talking points that like the Democrats spied on his campaign in 2016, that he was subjected to fraudulent investigations from the Russia and Ukraine stuff to the impeachments to the raid on Mar-a-Lago. And then he broadens it by talking about how the FBI and the DOJ relentlessly pursue

Republicans. And I was kind of expecting him to lean more into the I am your vengeance shit that he's been doing lately. He doesn't really as much as I had expected him to in this. He kind of like dips his toes into it. But I think he's so focused on what's happening to him that he doesn't push that as much as I was kind of expecting. So this is what comes after him ranting about the DOJ and the FBI relentlessly pursuing Republicans. He then kind of goes into the election fraud claim stuff again. He gives a bunch of lies there about the election and about there being like ballots stuffed and all that kind of shit then he like pivots straight from that to talking

about how twitter purportedly worked with the biden family to hide information about hunter biden this is like debunked twitter file shit yeah um update on the twitter files matt tabibi has just left twitter because it won't let him post Substack. Substack. We do know, obviously, like they did stuff like say, hey, please remove this video that shows Hunter Biden's penis. But also like that's not number one is not supposed to be stuff that's on Twitter. That's kind of like crossing the revenge porn line. And, you know, both sides made requests that things be removed. Trump claims, and I'm not sure where he says that there's like a like somebody calculated this, but I haven't been able to find who made this calculation that if Twitter hadn't intervened against him, he would have won the national election by 17 points.

And then he's like, and that's I didn't even need that many. You know, you could have dropped that by 16.8 and i still would have won um which is not true really uh again it's all just lies um it goes on he compares the united states to a third world country because of the 2020 election uh he calls alvin bragg a soros-backed prosecutor which he does a lot um it's not true uh but brag you know people are using soros-backed as like um at least a lot of the nazis are are are really leaping on that one yeah they've gone back to soros like yeah they did the three parentheses for a while like um dos santos mentioned Staris at least twice in his thing. Twice, yeah.

Yeah, it's a big, big one for them. I mean, I think it is a good move on their part to frame this prosecution as election interference. Like that is a smart move for them to funnel all of this via that narrative. Yeah, it helps keep the election fraud lies going. It also helps because there's been a number of like, you know, Chesa Buden who got booted in San Francisco recently is one example. But we've seen a number of like progressive prosecutors get elected by kind of dim and, you know, center left coalitions. And that's allows them to kind

of connect this to one of their more successful talking points was is the purported like horrible violence in the streets of cities like San Francisco and whatnot, the like surge in crime and liberal, you know, cities with liberal prosecutors. Again, it's all bullshit, but it's not a bad tactic for tying into like, well, let's make a link between this thing Trump is claiming that's hurting him

and this thing that people see every night on like Fox News that has been a pretty durable talking point for the right for several years now. Trump makes, there's a weird line in here where he says that like

even the rhinos and the democrats agree that the case against him is bad um i'm not sure i mean you know i i suspect he's just kind of like looking at at twitter chaff there um he then kind of derails a bit by talking about afghanistan and all of the military equipment and lives lost in the same breath. And then from that, he kind of, one of the things that comes up over and over in this is him talking about how embarrassing this time is for our country, how all of our enemies are laughing at us, et cetera. Like that is a, I mean, he's been making that point for a long time,

but it definitely, it's one of those things I think is a little bit of a window into the man's thought process because he clearly thinks, and perhaps, I mean, it must have a degree of resonance with his base, but the idea that like America has been embarrassed because he's facing charges and because of, you know, Biden's failures as he sees it over in Afghanistan and elsewhere, like embarrassment is a big thing he tries to get across in this that like, you know, Lady Liberty's been caught with their fucking skirt up or something like that. It's a, I don't know. It's interesting to me that that's such a focus for him. There's a couple of fun lines in the part about the military. He talks about how it's woke at the top, but under him, it was able to defeat

ISIS in four weeks, which, man, it took years. Like, we know it took years. I was there for some of it. A large part of that was not Americans at all. No, no. And a large part of it was not Americans at all. There's a weird moment where he talks about the investigation over his

call with Zelensky, and then that call where he tried to force Georgia's Secretary of State to discard votes that he's being investigated for, where he's like, this is one of like the most beautiful Trump moments of the whole speech. Cause he's like, you know, that perfect call I had with Zelensky, I told you all it was a perfect call where my call with Georgia's secretary of state was even more perfect. It was the best call anybody's ever had. Nobody had a problem with it. Lots of guys were listening in and they all thought it was great. It's just,

he can be such a funny man. It's not even insane. It's just like, I don't know. Nobody, nobody else talks like that. Nobody else describes a phone call as perfect, right?

Like a normal, and this is maybe there's a degree of Trump's success. You can describes a phone call as perfect, right? Like a normal, and this is maybe there's a degree of Trump's success you can see in this, but like no normal person being accused of like having attempted to interfere with an election during a phone call would describe the call as perfect. You know, a normal politician would refute the claims against them, would say, you know, I never did this. I never did that. You know, this is taken out of context or whatever. Trump's just like, it was perfect. But you don't remember the last perfect call I told you about that people thought might've been a crime, even more perfect. This is the most perfect phone call anyone's ever had. Yeah. Then we get a long derailment about the Biden, like, you know, the classified document

shit that got him raided. He talks about how Biden, like, you know, the classified document shit that got him rated. He talks about how Biden's possession of classified documents was like the worst that anyone's ever done and was criminal because he was just the vice president. But the president's allowed to do it. But everybody does it. But the way Biden did is the worst that anybody did it. Yeah, it's like, I don't know.

It's there's it's not, it's not an interesting Trump speech. Um, I don't think he's like panicked or anything. I just kind of, I don't know, maybe he's just sort of like checking off a thing on the to-do box, but it's not, it's not one of the, it's not one for the speech books, right? Or for the history books. I don't know, the speech books, that's not a, that's not a term. That's not a thing at all. There is a really fun moment where he's like kind of late in the speech in between him complaining about Letitia James. He like points to his sons and he's like, I got two great sons, sons both doing really great. And then he's like, and then as an afterthought, he's like, Baron's going to do a great job too someday. He's tall.

What an amazing father. Talking of tall, did you see that they faked a mugshot of him and made him six foot five? Who faked the mugshot? The Trump campaign faked a mugshot of him to sell merch. And then just added like several inches to his, a man with no insecurities. Ben Shapiro moments.

Trump a legalist arc. I'm not saying there's nothing to be concerned about in the right wing reaction here. It is worth kind of looking at the response that has occurred has largely been fucking nonsense circus shit right at most of the big rallies particularly in new york that have happened as a result of this there's been more press on the ground than anyone on either side of things yeah um it's not it's just so far not pulling people out you know do i think there's a chance of, you know, isolated terrorist attacks

as, you know, by people who see themselves as defending Trump or democracy or whatever? Certainly not a zero percent chance. But in terms of like things that I think are likely to have a mass destabilizing effect, I'm not seeing it yet. And I think a lot of that's due just to the fact that the Trump supporters who are kind of have the highest potential of being convinced to do that shit are all scared as hell, both of the feds and of each other. The sheer number of them that have like turned on each other during the J6 investigations, like has, it means that whenever there's talk about doing another big series of rallies, it devolves in a lot of these online places into like, well, you know,

this is probably being set up by the feds. This is probably a honeypot to trap us, which is, I don't know, it's not a situation I would say you should rely on lasting forever, but that does kind of seem to be where we are right now. One other aspect of the right-wing response that I think is worth mentioning is some of their propagandists and political people have made the promise that since now there's been a precedent set for indicting former presidents now now they finally are able to go after democratic politicians whenever they want and yeah i i just i just uh am worried that they're gonna threaten us with a good time yeah yeah and it's it's also like it's not just threatening us with a good time, because we have seen in Tennessee right now, they're forcing two Democratic legislators out for their support of gun control.

And like, you know. Specifically two black Democratic legislators, not the white lady who did the same shit. I'm not, you know, in line with most of the Democratic Party on gun control, but what is happening here is anti-democratic bullshit. Like that is, it is authoritarian happening here is anti-democratic bullshit. It is authoritarian. It is completely fucking unacceptable. And people ought to be out in the like, a lot more ought to be done. And I think probably a lot more like I don't, that's one of the thorny questions that actually does concern me. Like, what do you do in a situation like this? What kind of leverage do the feds even potentially have? It certainly doesn't look like they're in the mood to do anything now, because I think that's the kind of thing we're going to see a lot more of in red states in order to erode what little resistance it lists.

And that's really concerning. They're not going to go after someone like Obama, which, frankly, somebody for the amount of battle yeah yeah yeah yeah there should be charges against the man there should be charges against bush uh uh you know the doves um there should be some charges against clinton fuck it go after them all right yeah yeah you won't dig up george hw bush put him on trial as a corpse like that one pope like Like, I'm on board. But no, they're going to end up going after just, like, small, like, minority politicians who are, like, fighting for, like, reasonable things, you know? And who are doing things to actually jam up the works

of kind of the march of far- right authoritarian laws in the red states. And, you know, I am sure that as that picks up pace, they will point out what's being done to Trump as a justification. But like people should be aware that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it because it looks like it's going to work for them in Tennessee. And they did it in Tennessee for reasons that had nothing to do with fucking trump yeah um right yeah if you want to talk about like what fascism is a big part of it is that weaponizing of the state apparatus right yes against opposition against your whatever your scapegoat group and like that does concern me for

people living in in red states absolutely absolutely I'm not saying there's nothing to be worried about from the right. I'm just saying at the moment when I'm looking at like the way I kind of conceive of a threat matrix, I don't see us in a more dangerous position as a result of Trump getting charged. And I think an argument could be made that it's a positive move. I really hope we get another nail gun guy. Oh, man. be made that it's a positive move i really hope we get another nail gun guy oh man yeah that fucking dude who tried to who tried to solo the fbi with a nail gun maybe the next girl come in with like a jigsaw or a uh yeah no no no i think i think ladders i think it's it's it's time for like a ladder mob um that that's that's what i'm excited to see ladders and like simple pulleys

it's getting pinned to a building someone 20 feet away with a ladder make a make a trebuchet judge it's it's a the gauntlet has been thrown down yeah let's let's let's have a continuing series of competitions to see who can build like the most effective medieval siege equipment i want to see some can build like the most effective medieval siege equipment i want to see some fucking scorpions up on the hill you know yeah i'm gonna do is it greek fire turkish fire when you yeah yeah i mean that really that's a boy that's like the hummus debate james you don't want you don't want to land on let's just call it cyprus fire and we can be fine um i don't know where where you guys get any other thoughts on the trump

arraignment indictment arrest etc uh no it's very funny i did enjoy seeing that guy fall off his tall bike that was a highlight of the week for me yeah there was a good video from the uh the new york protest of a guy falling off a tall bike yeah Yeah, shout out to the skateboard. Oh, I will, I will, let's see. I will send a few things to the chat, the signal chat that I feel like people are worth seeing. This is what I spent most of my day doing, is sending people these memes. I think it's important that...

Is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the biggie crown saying, tell Donald I want him to know it was me, Garrison? Yes, it is. Oh, no, you're joking. If I actually see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I'm, for fuck's sake. Garrison. An Uruk-hai with a pussy hat.

Oh, God. Looks like brunch is back on the mint you boys that one i do appreciate yeah uh there was there was a good one that was like um uh it was like the jailer dropping off trump in epstein's cell. All of the lights go off. And then from the corner, a man in a dark cloak says, Brandon sends his regards. What a wonderful time for memes. Well, everybody, that's our episode on the Trump arrest. We figured we should talk about that,

uh, to answer the question that so many people ask me, are we closer to having a civil war? I don't know, man, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like this, this has moved the needle on that at all.

Um, the national divorce is happening any day now, any day now, I swear. Like, I, I, I think the thing that's worrying right now is,

you know, not just kind of the low level series of exchanges of terror attacks and shootings and murders and stuff and just street violence that I do think is going to kind of continue to be a problem up through 2024. we've been talking about in terms of red states pushing for these increasingly really violent laws aimed at doing direct physical harm to small groups of people that they consider to be their enemies for whatever reason of identity. That is like the increasing criminalization of groups of people in red states, the flight of folks from those states, the fact that you are kind of seeing the country settle into two blocks that have wildly different legal systems that are often opposed to each other, that's a conflict that is absolutely happening. There's no denying that it's occurring. This is not a debatable thing. And I don't see the feds having any idea of how to fix this at the moment. We'll see where

the elections go in 2024. The fact that Wisconsin, that their Supreme Court election went well, means a lot. It means that that's one state where the process that we're seeing happening in places like Florida and Tennessee, that is a significant amount of people protected from that. And it also means a lot for the 2024 election. But we are in a really rough place still. I'm not like thinking we're at the edge of 1776.2 or whatever the fuck the right calls it these days yeah 1865 or whatever robert evans is going to personally be the next john brown yeah i i hopefully not um but uh i am i am i think i'd be really good at uh uh being a terrible farmer um i i'm already yeah yeah yeah yeah you know that picture of john brown like leading the troops terrible farmer. How's your beard? Eh, eh, eh.

That picture of John Brown like leading the troops will remain one of my favorite pieces of art that I've ever seen. He's got a hell of a beard in that one. I don't know. I think the threat, you know,

continues, but broadly speaking, what's happened to Trump is either good or neutral, but certainly funny. And that's, I think, a good point to end on for the day. Great. Brandon sends his regards. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide

if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about

their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real

people. I swear to God things can actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Okay, everything's recording my my cat is grooming herself so now's the time now's the time okay great we should just use that as our intro okay good i mean i'm fine with that whatever okay let's do it that's our intro that's the intro shireen's

cat is grooming herself and that means that this is It Could Happen Here. And I am James Stout, and I'm joined by Shireen Younis. Yes. And not her cat. She's just rowdy, and I have to really sometimes plan recording times around her schedule. And it's just the way my life is now, and that's fine. That's the attention she deserves yes none of this is as important as your cat but it's a bit of a serious one sadly um so i want to

talk more again about the border something we've spoken about a little bit um and something i kind of want to keep coming back to because things haven't really got any better in fact they've potentially got worse so where i want to start is last month, and we're recording this on, what, the 4th of April? So just over a week ago, I think. The 28th. The 28th, was it? Okay, yeah, what's that?

Yeah, a week ago. A week ago today. A fire in a detention center in Ciudad Juarez killed 41 migrants being detained there. More than two dozen other people were seriously injured and every single one of the about 100 people detained in the migrant detention center was hurt in the fire.

The reason that every single person was hurt became clear in a video obtained by Texas Public Radio and later confirmed by the government in Mexico. It shows two people dressed as guards rushing to the camera frame. You can see people in the cells just really pulling and kicking and beating on the bars. The guards sort of run up to the doors, but they don't really appear to make any effort to open them or to let the people out of the cells. Instead, they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill the corners of the cells. Gradually, the smoke fills up the whole screen until you can't see anything else.

And the men in the cells are left to die. It's horrifying. Yeah, it's one of the worst deaths that's available to a human being. And the fact that people who are already incredibly desperate and have taken huge risks to get there and died literally yards from the United States border. It's almost kind of unfathomably cruel. But what is in a way crueler is this statement made by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said the tragedy illustrated the dangerous rifts in traveling north. he said the tragedy illustrated the dangerous grifts in traveling north and he cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling incidents in san antonio in the southern mexican state of chiapas

these cases he said are a reminder of the risks of irregular migration but what we're talking about here isn't a consequence of irregular migration really right because these people weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or cartels uh They were in the hands of the Mexican government when they died. And for him to blame this on irregular migration, I think is very indicative of the way the Biden administration has approached migration policy, which is to try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility for the cruel things that it's doing, for the consequences of its policies and its actions, which I want to get into more.

I don't want to linger on this fire too much because, A, it's unfathomably awful. And, like, I don't think we need to spend hours and hours going over something for people to know that there is no situation in which the government should burn fucking 40 people alive uh like um it's inexcusable um we know that like it was the shelter was set up in 2019 uh and i want to get into why this shelter that which seems to have been a pretty terrible condition to begin with was set up in 2019 why people who claim to the united states to try and have a better life a safer life

ended up in a shelter in mexico and how we've created a system where people keep dying at our southern border right some of this will be stuff we've covered before people have listened to the other stuff i've done on the border people have listened to the butterfly sanctuary episodes they'll be familiar with some of Biden's border policies. But I wanted to address these. Did you see that they lowered the death toll from 40 to 38, I guess, after hospital visits? Like that's the one part that I've read

that is nice so far. That's nice. Yeah, that is good. I've seen 38, 39 and 41. I wasn't sure what the exact... So 38 is the newest one? Right now I'm reading 38 after... It was 40 and it was lowered to 38.

Okay. Wow. Two people were reanimated. Yeah. I mean, it's just like... They're probably in terrible condition. Yeah, yeah. They're having life-changing, if not...

It's just terrible. Yeah, and access to care for those people i mean those people may have access to care right because what happened was high profile and within the news but like generally access to care for people like i have seen i have seen a person die because they don't have access to their medicines that are very cheap and very easily available um like again like we are talking feet like i could throw a tennis ball into the united states from where it was standing uh and that's because this system treats people like numbers not people um yeah yeah the migration center is like a like a big jail

you know what i mean it doesn't even i don't know yeah it's like an old-timey fucking western jail with people crammed into cells um with with you know like legit bars on the walls so shelter conditions in mexican detention are often very poor and those conditions have been exacerbated by something called title 42 people have probably heard about title 42 a lot there's a lot to say about title 42 but very briefly it's a trump era public health policy that invokes a public health rule to push asylum seekers out of the u.s and into mexico regardless of whether or not they might legally qualify for asylum this shelter was stood up as a consequence of something called the migrant protection protocol um people call it the migrant persecution protocol because that's more accurate but i was going to say, wow, doing a great job with that.

Yeah. People enjoy being wrong about Georgia Orwell, but this shit is perfectly Orwellian. Oh, yeah. To call a policy which kills little fucking children the migrant protection policy is dark. It's often called remain in Mexico as well, which is what it does. It requires people called remain in Mexico as well, which is what it does.

It requires people to remain in Mexico while their asylum claim is processed, despite the fact that this might not be a safe country for them and that this might violate various international laws and conventions on asylum. But the US doesn't subscribe to all of those. We're going to find out. as we're going to find out. Now, Title 42 has been through some legal ping pong recently, right? With Biden sort of trying to get rid of it, also defending it in court, a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it.

So let's explain a little bit of where we're at with Title 42 right now. It's actually set to expire on May the 11th. The Biden administration is rolling out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after may the 11th because they're concerned about like a large influx of migrants which i just want to point out was always going to fucking happen when you like pushed people just the other side of your fictional line in the sand and then at some point you're going to have to stop because at some point mexico is already the third most popular country in the world for asylum and you can't force this all on them um so since it was first implemented in 2020 the government has used title 42 to expel migrants from the u.s mexico border nearly 2.7 million times that doesn't mean you will see these statistics quoted constantly uh credulously

by people who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about and it really makes me angry that doesn't mean 2.7 million people right um because title 42 makes people cross more than once it creates this kind of loop where dhs right? Normally CBP or border patrol, sorry, picks people up and dumps them back in Mexico without processing them. And those people are now in a place they don't know. They don't have any family, they don't have any hope, they don't have any money. And all they do is kick their heels until they can find a way to cross again or someone to cross them again and sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer them unlimited crossings so they they'll pay someone to smuggle them across right and that person will say well you get unlimited crossings

like i didn't even realize it was i mean i didn't know it was so um like standard they're like okay this is gonna happen you're gonna get a limited cross you know what i mean like there's like they're expecting it to be this like perpetual loop yeah i mean they a few years ago maybe they wouldn't have done but another way that this is sometimes termed is catch and release which they're not fucking fish um you shouldn't do that to fish either it's not very nice to fish but um i mean it's dehumanizing yeah it's extremely fucking dehumanizing right and um what it does and what i've seen what i'm not it's not like a unique insight of mine is that it forces people to cross

in more and more dangerous areas like you combine that with a wall um and the fact that like it's very well documented that the trump administration wanted to maximize the amount of miles of wall that built and if you remember in one of the presidential debates, he made a claim about a certain number of miles of new wall he built. Yeah, he was just speaking out of his ass. I foiled it like the next day. And they were like,

they provide a number of different numbers, many of which relied heavily on repairing existing border fence. But they just went like hammer and tongs trying to build new sections of wall to include skipping areas where it was harder to build, valleys, mountains, that kind of thing. So what this wall does is it forces people through the areas where it's hardest to cross.

And those are the areas where it's easiest to die. And so these people are now forced to make riskier and riskier crossings to try and avoid getting caught or to wait in Mexico where they're at a very high risk of abduction or sexual assault, extortion or violence. And we'll come on to maybe a couple of those stories later from people I've talked to. The result of this policy is that border cities in Mexico are flooded with migrants, and often with soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace. Last month, the Mexican National Guard and the immigration authorities raided a hotel full of Venezuelan migrants in Juarez. Local news outlets reported that the migrants, mostly young men, threw stones at the officials and a brawl ensued, and eventually they called off the raid.

In another incident, authorities raided a church and dragged off a number of Venezuelan migrants stones at the officials and a brawl ensued and eventually they called off the raid in another incident authorities raided a church and dragged off a number of venezuelan migrants who had been given sanctuary there some were beaten and one advocate said they were essentially tortured this prompted yeah it's this is horrific right like a lot of so a lot of the young men in the it was all men in the detention center that caught fire. Most of them were from Venezuela, right? A place where I've lived in Venezuela. I have a lot of sympathy for those people. Yeah.

Actually, I found like a breakdown, I guess. There was 13 Hondurians, 12 Salvadorians, 12 Venezuelans, a Colombian and an Ecuadorian. So, I mean, even that's crazy. Like there's so many people from all of those countries it's i don't know yeah we'll see a bit later that there are certain um pathways like for venezuelan people there are some pathways um that don't exist for other people that they're not insufficient and they're they're uh how do i say this unfair uh

but but sort of they exist but yeah yeah, those people from those countries, we see a lot of Haitian people at the border here too. But yeah, that's a pretty common kind of like border mix up of folks. Unfortunately, often you won't see Haitian folks, that there are sort of segregations even within the migrant community. And often Haitian folks have kind of segregated out which is which is unfortunate like I thought the horrors one is kind of that's the population breakdown like when the Haitian border crossing be like somewhere else I don't think to say it's not dumb at all um I I don't know what the breakdown I know there are

Haitian people in Juarez. I know there are a lot of Cuban folks in Juarez too. And they've kind of... Some of them have stayed in Juarez and established kind of their own communities. And that's had some sort of... Some negative results for anti-migrant feeling in Juarez from what I've heard. I know there are a lot of Haitian folks in Tijuana.

A lot of the Haitian people come via Brazil where they've spent time preparing for the Olympics that were there and building stadiums and stuff. So a lot of them tell me they've come up from Brazil. And then obviously with increased violence in Haiti now, you'll see more Haitian people again. There's a decent Haitian community that also is established in Tijuana and that is their home now. I had no idea, to be honest. So now I know. I'll accept being a

little bit dumb so everyone can learn not at all not at all it's it's not very well reported on um and i think it's honestly people have stopped reporting on it since 2020 as well like since like orange man bad stopped being like the prevailing like mass media message uh no one gives a fuck about migrants anymore. There's a pronounced drop-off when I cross of people. And I don't know. There are some very good reporters, of course. We've spoken to some of them in Tijuana and in San Diego.

But yeah, there was a lot of parachute reporting on migration in the Trump era, some of it very bad, some of it by people who didn't have the language skills to be working there and didn't understand what was respectful or what wasn't and things like that. So I have strong feelings about how the migrant caravan in 2018 was reported on,

for instance. But yeah, you'll definitely see a ton of Haitian people. And Biden has gone exceptionally hard. I'll include a link at the bottom of a piece I wrote for NBC about Biden's anti-Haitian bullshit. But exceptionally hard, specifically against the Haitians. So you can find a tweet from the Haitian,

the United States Embassy in Haiti, where it's just got a picture of Biden. I think it says, don't come. I'm paraphrasing. Like a theificial account? Yeah, yeah. No, it's just got a picture of Biden. I think it says, don't come. I'm paraphrasing. Like a beneficial account? Yeah, yeah. No, it's wild. Like, you don't see this in other countries either.

Even, you know, they've made, like, they've made, there's a ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine, right? It's hard not to see that shit as racist. Of course, yeah. Of course it's Ukraine, yeah. Yeah, right, because they're the only country. Which is great. It's also great it's also

great but also you have to look at the like why did that happen right and if we can't like express like like russian bombs kill kids in myanmar too right russian bombs kill kids all over fucking africa and if we can't have solidarity with them and we can with ukrainian people then i'd like it's hard for me not to see that as to do with their skin color yeah and then that is bullshit um so yeah title 42 were ended may when the covid public health emergency order expires biden um said earlier on that he would end title 42 he then faced these lawsuits from conservative states but at the same time the biden administration fiercely defended title 42 in litigation brought by the acU and other groups challenging the policy. Even the CDC, right,

the CDC, Center for Disease Control, was like, no, this shit isn't necessary and it's cool. We should stop. The government has argued that public health concerns for letting migrants into the country due to continued threat of COVID-19

outweigh the possible harms done to migrants who return to cities like Nogales, Chiraguares, or Tijuana. You don't even need a COVID test to fly into this country now, I don't think. Right. My family come visit me. So the end of the emergency kind of makes that a moot point, right? Like you can't have a public health order to protect us from a disease, which you're

saying isn't a problem anymore. But the damage that this has done will take years to rectify and the backlog that it's created is already being used as an excuse to do more cruel and inhumane things to to people who are just looking for a fair crack at life and shereen do you know what won't uh build a wall around itself and force people to risk their life to get here you tell tell me, James. What is it? It is these silver coins that have Ronald Reagan on them, who probably outflanks our current immigration policy to the left. That's our guy.

Yep. Uncle Ron. Okay, we're back. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Or maybe it was a gold advert. I hope it was a gold advert, because I know that everyone enjoys us so much. Please don't message Sophie about the fucking gold over because i know that everyone enjoys so so much please don't message sophie about the fucking gold things we know yeah we know we know trust us we know yeah it's also it's just funny it's funny to me that someone is buying gold adverts and presumably none of our listeners

are buying gold and yet i have health care now i mean it must be working somewhere like you know what i mean like why how else would they afford to keep advertising? I don't know. Someone's doing something. It's like one guy doing it all. If you are that steadfast listener who buys everything we advertise. Thank you so much for our paychecks. We salute your dedication.

Biden hasn't really come up with a distinctive immigration policy of his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of failed to undo the damage Trump has done, created a two-tier system in which white Ukrainians get to slip the line

while black and brown migrants wait in terrible conditions. And for some reason he's gone as hard as fuck as he can to stop Haitians coming here, which the reason might

be pretty obvious to some of you uh oh and we're still building the wall but we're calling it a barrier now of course yeah it's totally different rebrand yeah yeah it doesn't have a little plate on the top it's a slightly different shape uh you can like if you scroll back far enough on my twitter you can find comparison pictures of the biden barrier and the trump wall but um it's like literally just like a glow up like a like a terrible horrifying glow up yes yeah the wall is having its little uh it's a freedom wall now or something but uh if you don't follow the butterfly sanctuary as well high value twitter account and sometimes stealing automatic rifles not stealing i should say but national guard leaving automatic rifles on her property that she should say, but National Guard leaving automatic rifles on her

property that she takes care of. But yeah, you can listen to our Butterfly Sanctuary episodes for more on the Biden barrier. But we're more than halfway through Biden's term now, and we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling a border policy on his own. At the same time, because we're more than halfway through his term, or perhaps just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies about being kind to migrants, he's trying to move towards the center, and the center of US politics is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun these days. So he's been hit pretty hard by the Republicans on immigration,

and it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty hard, largely on just shit that's made up, It's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty hard largely on just shit that's made up or misunderstandings of the number of interactions that Border Patrol has or willful or unwillful, I don't know. Many of the critiques are in pretty bad faith, but nonetheless, it's been an area where they've criticized him. And so he's trying to move towards the quote-unquote

center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed, move towards the quote-unquote center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed, or his administration has proposed, something called a transit ban. The transit ban, people might remember, and the initial kind of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller, a dude who looks like a lollipop and also a white nationalist. That's a great description.

His head is too big for his neck. He's shiny. Yeah. Yeah. That's not the only thing that's wrong with him. So this proposal would render migrants ineligible for US asylum if they cross the southern border illegally after failing to ask for humanitarian refuge

in another country they traveled through, such as Mexico. So unless you somehow come straight to the US, which you can't do because you can't get on a flight to the US without the correct travel documents, then you'd have to travel to another country, right? And they're saying that you should apply for asylum there. In practice, this would bar most non-Mexican asylum seekers unless you took advantage of one of the programs

that Biden has proposed to allow people in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with a U.S. sponsor under a humanitarian parole program where they apply from their home country and then get credentials to travel. So they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This might not be safe for some people to do in those countries. But they have a means to get here.'s metered i think at 30 000 a month those people from those same countries enduring the same conditions if they came here on their own and then applied to asylum as is their right under u.s law once they entered the country right and it's worth noting that like most people coming in that like want to apply for asylum so they will wanted to turn

that might have changed a little with title 42 but previously people were seeking to turn themselves in right and say hey i'm here to apply for asylum they can now be expelled under this legislation right so they if they don't use this or they don't have a u.s sponsor which kind of creates you shouldn't have to know someone in America to come here and avail yourself of basic human rights. Yeah, it's purposely getting people out of the group that can go in, you know what I mean? It's excluding people, but it's just by default. Right, thousands of people.

And this legislation now allows them to be for expedited processing and expulsion. If people do want to apply for asylum at the southern border they need to use an app which is called cbp1 that's just the craziest thing i've heard in a while sorry yeah it is i'm like i'm on another planet like what what i don't know it is incredibly powerful like lib brain yeah to be like don't worry we've made an app uh we've got you like it assumes that people have the app is not available in all the languages so people speak like of course not yeah like last time i was at the border like i had i worked with a colleague who spoke a romo uh i speak french he spoke haitian creole, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, right?

Like those are people I interviewed in an afternoon. You know, there are dozens of languages. So the app isn't available in those languages. The app is a giant clusterfuck. It doesn't work. It crashes all the time. Like you can find like little kids, little kids who come up from Tijuana to go to school who like can tell you 10 things that are wrong about this app uh but you

can also find people who make six figure salaries in washington you think is great right regardless it's a fucking app on a fucking device that is just like like i don't know i think it's just so lazy it's lazy and stupid i don't like it yes it is both of those things it assumes people have a cell phone which is yes very elitist yes exactly yeah like maybe your phone could get stolen um being fucking someone could book all these trying game like there's a million ways it assumes you've got fucking broadband connectivity you know wi-fi all these things it's yeah it's just insane like it's amazing how detached one can be from reality and still be the person in charge.

Yeah. What if no people in charge? So migrants crossing the border without documents can be subjected to expedited removal, as I said. The proposed regulations indicate that migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who generally cannot be deported due to strained relations with the governments there,

would face deportation to Mexico instead. Which fucking just again makes this someone else's problem. A dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive. They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organisations, including the United Nations Refugee Agency, unlawful and counterproductive and they joined thousands of migrant advocates and organizations

including the united nations refugee agency in imploring the administration to immediately withdraw the regulation so it's there's a period of public comment which is what's happening at the moment right so um he's found a policy which no one likes uh both from the right and from you know people are allowed to live with dignity so right that's that's hard to do that's hard to do well you're never he's never gonna fucking improve like i don't know what they're like tramplicants want but like it's some version of machine guns on top of a wall killing little children yeah and uh you could just be a decent person or you could try and placate fucking psychopathic fox news people so me Mexico is already the third most popular destination

for people seeking asylum in the world after the United States and Germany. In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay in the state where they apply. And that's resulted in large numbers of people being concentrated in places like Tapachula on the southern border with Guatemala. And that creates like an infrastructure issue there, right?

Which it's also worth like, I'm sure people are well aware that like, I wonder why all these countries have been fucking destabilized, right? I wonder if there was a country which helped do that for decades and decades. Why are they leaving their home? Like, why can't they go back home?

Like, you know what I mean? It's safe there. Yeah. If only The Clash had written a song about it for us to understand better. So Mexico granted 61% of asylum requests from January through November last year compared to 46% in the USA for fiscal year 2022.

That is an increase of a low of 27% under Trump, but it still suggests that more than half the people get sent back, right? And where the fuck do they get sent back to if they can't reliably go back to their home country safely? Mexico abides by something called the Cartagena Declaration, which promises a safe haven to anyone threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. The US currently observes a narrow definition that requires a person to have been individually

targeted that's a distinct thing right for limited reasons as spelled out in the u.n refugee convention but it appears that the biden administration has plans to retrain dhs agents and they're currently telling them or they seem to be proposing to tell them i should say to let migrants enter the u.s to pursue protection only if they qualify under the international convention against torture which is an absurdly high bar yeah like against torture wow yeah i mean i thought you were gonna say after all that no yeah it's a it's a ridiculously high bar like there are very real things you could be afraid of like i've spoken to people who's have escaped like forced sex work right who've had members of their family killed threats made

to their own lives none of those maybe the forced sex work is torture but um maybe some of those things wouldn't meet that bar but i think any reasonable human being right if you met someone in the street and they said hey so you know so-and-so killed my daughter and my father and my uncle and they said they're going to kill me you'd say like come into my house i'll look after you but there's a country we're saying fuck you you're on your own and yeah that's that's not how you be a good neighbor um a source on the inside of the administration recently has reported that the biden administration is considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families caught crossing the u.s mexico border illegally um so this is this is the thing that uh

that that all the people were very upset about with the no more kids in cages thing but we're fucking doing that again as well i guess we won't they likely won't do uh like separation of minors which which is what they did before right they took the kids away from their parents entertained them separately which is just fucking like i cannot imagine um it gets still it's just yeah it's just unspeakable trauma and like, just like for both, for everybody involved. I mean, like same with the wall though. Like it's just the same thing. The same thing is happening.

It's just like marketed differently. It's just like packaged in a different way and it's still fucking terrible. Yeah. Like I just, I don't know what you expect these fucking people to do. Like, and I don't know how you, how you expect someone like, even if you're purely self-interested and you're just concerned about like US security and like, you know,

making America great again or whatever. Like if you lock little children up, like they're going to fucking hate you and you can't blame them. Like it's, it's inhumane. It's, it's what dictators do. It's,

it's fucking unfathomable but it also like drives me like just insane to think about people that are actually there in in the flesh like that see people like like children crying or something and like just there's so much terrible things going on and no one does there's not enough i don't know i just i can't imagine doing that at least be like okay my job is this and i'm gonna continue i don't know i don't like it i don't like it no i don't like it either like this of all the things i've reported on and like i've reported on some dark shit uh and like being to some dangerous places etc like nothing has been harder for me to get over than little kids at the border like i have hundreds of stories about it but i can remember one little girl um this shit makes

me want to cry um i remember this one little girl who um she'd left her teddy bear behind and she wanted a teddy bear yeah and like this little girl's like living in a fucking tent right this is in 2018 when um when the like the midterms were happening so they were holding a large group of people right next to the border right they were staying in a baseball stadium and myself and some friends had gone to help and this little girl was just like the sweetest little kid like she came up she was holding my hand um and then i asked if she wanted to go on my shoulders she wanted to go on my shoulders you know and at this point the way that they were getting people to leave that area and go to another area was by cutting off their access to water oh my god they wanted

so like we were able to get some water and we were able to give them like as much water as we could buy on our credit cards and i asked her like what she wanted. And she said she'd had to leave her teddy bear behind. And it just fucking broke my heart. Like without like, you know, going into too much personal trauma details, like that shit kept me from sleeping for weeks. And I found it so hard to come back. It was like 2018 around November, I guess. And like go to like,

I remember someone was having some Thanksgiving thing and just, I just wanted to fucking shout at everyone and be like what the fuck is wrong with you anyway so I went and bought her a teddy bear it's especially from a from a child you know like their their experience and their perspective is just like just I don't know you see how raw it is yeah like I know no children shouldn't be treated by that full stop. Like we shouldn't be standing in the parking lot of a fucking Tommy Hilfiger discount store in San Diego, launching tear gas at little children in Mexico is,

is one of the, like the images of like what America does to people that will stick with me forever. It's yeah. I'm glad you were down there helping though. Like especially getting, carting their access off to water is like the most, like one of the most inhumane things, but then again,

it's all very inhumane. Yeah. And that time was difficult for everyone involved. That was also one of the most impressive. This is one of the times when large ngos weren't allowed to operate because of various concerns and legal things so the entirety of the aid effort for those people was done through mutual aid right through completely ad hoc mechanisms there were church people um people from various migrant advocacy groups in san diego

people from el otro lado who we've spoken to on the podcast that's how i met them for the first time a number of those people actually were surveilled by border patrol uh as we found out two years later and had warrants on them etc but everyone who came came like not because it was a job because it was the right thing to do and like there wasn't a day i was down there that there weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff um this is my friend and i uh someone managed to get us a projector from their workplace i don't know how they got a projector from their workplace i don't care uh and a bunch of dvds my friend used to be an electrician, and they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a nightclub in another part of Tijuana,

an old nightclub, old and massive. Thousands of people were in this big, kind of open-air nightclub situation. It was very strange. They had the women and the young children in one area that very clearly had been a pole dance room. Yeah. Anyway, and they had these bars that were like you know like a balcony area

so we went up to the balcony area and then me and a couple of these older um kids who with the migrant group were able to get like climb across the roof find some wires connect a projector um and uh do a little make a little movie theater for the children and i remember they were watching like beverly hills chihuahua uh sweet when i left and yeah they were watching like Beverly Hills Chihuahua It's so sweet when I left and yeah they were having like just

Those little gestures are so important though like it's Yeah I mean it doesn't fucking fix anything but if they can

have two hours of watching a film about a dog or whatever and be like not there Let them have that Yeah exactly

Yeah yeah they deserve that and they deserve a lot more than that but yeah it was those little nice things that made it bearable I guess but yeah exactly yeah yeah they deserve that and they deserve a lot more than that but yeah it was those little nice things that made it bearable i guess but yeah there was i still have like fairly disturbing recollections of lots of things i've seen on the border uh so let's just do a quote from joe biden um because we do we do love a bit of joe biden uh

my message is this. If you're trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua, or Haiti, have agreed to begin a journey to America, do not, do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally. Starting today, if you don't apply through the legal process, you will not be eligible for this new parole program. Anyway, Joe Biden could go fuck himself but

I think that I hope I hope that obviously lots of my little anecdotes have helped but we shouldn't see these people as statistics or numbers and we should see them as people so I've got a couple of interviews I've done and these are just ones I've went back to some notes and found so I was just going to read them out so I won't give their names just for their own security but sometimes

I've used pseudonyms on the publicies sometimes I have used their names when they're willing to use their names like it's their choice right

but it should always be their choice if you're a fucking reporter and you're filming children without their consent or their parents' consent in a refugee camp they're not just a spectacle for your story yeah exactly you can jog on and

i hope someone throws your camera in a river um so uh here's one i have three daughters aged 13 10 and 6 i've always had my own business selling food and i paid what we would call extortion money but with the pandemic i couldn't pay what I owe for three or four months. They said if I didn't pay, they would burn down my shop and me and my daughters would be raped and killed. With what little I had left, I left with my daughters.

It's hard to get work here. As an immigrant, there are some jobs, but not the sort that are for me. I have to try and be an example to my kids. One day I was juggling by the traffic lights

and some guys tried to pick me up. They said they knew where i lived and they would hurt me and my daughters so i didn't work for them they made me work in a bar i escaped but that's how i broke my hand i didn't want to go to the u.s but i need to leave this country now for the same reason i left my own and then i'll read one more uh we came from honduras to flee the violence we have come to this camp in the last few days but it's scary here we don't feel safe there are people coming and taking photos of children of the women men offer the women here money to go with them they try to get them to sleep with them there's a woman here filming us as well we found out she's a big activist for donald trump this was in 2021. Some people came

to snatch a child here. Between the group, we're working to make a security committee to protect the children because there are people who would take the children here. We aren't a caravan. We're just people from all over the world who have come here for a better future. We're asking Biden. We know it's complicated and he has a lot to sort out and we have patience. We know he has to make compromises, but please think of us here.'re in danger please give us a solution it's fucking heartbreaking yeah it is heartbreaking shit i wish there was like some kind of happy ending i could put on this or like i don't know um there are great things you can do with mutual aid groups um there's a group that I'm hoping to interview next week

called Borderlands Relief Collective in San Diego who do kind of a lot to help people crossing the border. There are groups like Al otro lado who you can donate to. The public comment is still available for the Biden's proposed new restrictions. So I guess you can comment on that if you think that will help

um i guess this is an area sometimes where talking to politicians might help uh because they make the laws uh that that affect people's right to kind of live with basic dignity but yeah i don't have a great solution to this especially like if people aren't in a place where they you know people here are struggling to get by i understand that not everyone can afford to donate of course yeah but yeah this is pretty bleak and just because it's not like being beamed into your living rooms anymore because orange man bad uh it doesn't mean that like it's still not impossibly cruel yeah it's i mean just because another old guy took over uh it doesn't mean like let's say the same things were already there it's not like they just poofed into thin

air like all the terrible things that were already happening that's what i don't understand is like people just assume i don't know what they assume i'm not gonna ramble on like that but it's just heartbreaking and you should donate if you can uh yeah donate do stuff shout at people um do whatever you think will will make a difference because it's pretty bad welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming live, not live, really not. I need to come up with a better bit than coming to you live, but coming to you from now fallen, apparently on fire, destroyed Chicago. So say the many oracles, soothsayers, and cops who live in this city who are now absolutely convinced that the city is going to descend into crime and chaos, etc., etc., after the cop candidate got absolutely where the worst people in the world got absolutely destroyed is Ali, who is one of my friends and is an election analyst. Yeah, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, Mia. Nice to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, because this is just very funny. It's extremely funny. I personally was really enjoying getting to read the Twitter tea leaves. You could tell kind of which aldermen were having meltdowns on election night.

Yeah, so I guess we could start with the stuff that happened in Chicago, which is that Paul Vallis, the butcher of the public education system, running dog of the cops, the hero of J6 people. I was just kind of thwacked in an election by Brandon Johnson, the sort of progressive candidate who I'm very excited. I no longer have to pretend that I like particularly much.

Yes. Now, as mia says uh paul valis um resident dino from palos heights a southwest suburb of chicago who conveniently bought an apartment in chicago exactly a year before the election which is how long you have to live in chicago to be the mayor um lost the runoff to Brandon Johnson, a black progressive who was on the Cook County board. About when all the results are done coming in in a couple of weeks, it'll be about 52% for Johnson and 48% for Vallis. As Mia says, this lets a lot of people on the left

no longer have to keep up the the charade of oh johnson's the best thing that has happened to us in sliced bread thank christ if you are like more of a uh like democratic party loyal progressive voter this is a very very good thing in your eyes yeah and i think you know i think there's something very interesting and kind of fitting about this which is that yeah one of the things we've talked about is that yeah like fred and johnson is the first like progressive tm mayor charles had since like i mean literally since harold washington who was the first black mayor in the 80s and it's very interesting also because a bunch of the reforms that harold washington who was the first black mayor in the 80s and it's very interesting also because a bunch of the reforms that harold washington did were specifically overturned

by paul valis yeah like he's the guy who did a bunch of educational reforms that fucking sucked that destroyed uh harold washington's stuff it's no it's it's really wild how like um chicago politics is analogous to to go really out there for a second uh is analogous to the state of hawaii in the sense that people never die the same people are going to be on your ballot for 50 years and you just kind of have to suck it up and deal with it but every every so often, someone good comes along, or at least someone better. And if you get them into office the first time, and if you get them to survive their first reelection campaign, then they get to be one of the people who's on the ballot forever and who never dies. And slowly, but surely, you can make Chicago politics less

shitty. But yeah, as Mia said, this is going to be the first progressive chicago mayoral administration uh since harold washington um and johnson won the same way as harold washington did on yeah the backbone of johnson's coalition just as with harold washington's was black voters johnson got about 80 of the black vote because in Chicago elections are usually more about race than anything else. Um, but in addition to the black vote, Johnson won with progressives in white and non-black communities of color, uh, as well as LGBTQ voters. And finally, fulfilling the dreams of the here's how Bernie can still win people from 2015, an actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters. The Chicago Board of Elections is, I don't think that anyone would call them great, but they do produce some

nice live statistics on election day as the votes are tallied. And voters under 45 had a turnout surge of, I think it was about 20%, whereas voters older than 60, the raw number of their votes actually went down. And this likely does almost entirely account for Johnson's margin of victory, that he was able to turn out young voters and that old people just stayed home. Yeah. And I think it's also, we talked about this in the episode we did about paul phallus but one of the things about the initial election was that like the fact that johnson made it out of the primaries at all with a a genuinely nightmarish like age uh like bracket of turnout in the first round is sort of a miracle but you know it got it got a lot better for him in in this one and that genuinely seems to have

like i i don't know like i i i know a lot of people who spent a lot of time like canvassing their asses off and it actually seems to have worked and i don't know i mean you know it remains to be seen the extent to which this was about like the fact that valis is like probably would have been the worst mayor of chicago in like we don't have to go we don't have to go back that far daily was mayor of chicago as recently as 2011 that's true but i i don't know daily yeah i mean it's not like chicago has good mayors, but I think he would have been – Okay, here's the thing. I think he would have been the most politically far-right mayor Chicago has had in a long time.

Oh, yeah. Like, he's just a Republican. Yes. Pretty, like – Yeah. And, you know, that fucking sucks. But he got clobbered. There's also – there's a really funny result I want to talk about, which is that.

OK, so. The part of Chicago, the neighborhood in Chicago where the Cubs stadium is, is right next to Boys Town, which is the fucking gay district. And if you go in and look at like, well, I say I say it's the gay Like a lot of, it's now the rich gay part of Chicago because everyone else got priced out. Well, it kind of is. No, it's not. Market Park is the rich gay part of Chicago. That's true. That's true.

Okay. It's more of a rich gay part of Chicago than it was like 40 years ago, like 30 years ago. Yeah. But like literally exactly split you can like you can like see in the data exactly split down the line the gays voted for brandon johnson and all the people and all the cubs fans voted for valis it's so funny it is it is extremely funny and i will give a quick shout out here to the chicago urbanist twitter account who made what I personally think is the funniest meme to have come out of the election

which is a bunch of like stick figures and just like black and white labeled valise voters running from a like steamroller, a pink steamroller with a rainbow

like wheel being driven by a bunch of gay people and the steamroller is labeled boys town it's really good like they i don't know like there there is this sort of a like this is sort of like this is the coalition that well i mean again we talked about this like this is this is the hair washing coalition like this is the coalition that if you if you're an elect electoralist like you need to produce something that looks like this if you want to have any serious chance of winning and yes yeah and the fact that it actually worked is sort of oh it's a goddamn miracle yeah it's shit never works people have been trying to do this for like 40 fucking years and it never works i mean people have been trying to do this

for 40 plus years but it's also like this is really the first election that i can think of anywhere um since uh barack obama's re- in 2012, where like, this is the coalition that actually put someone in like an office that got a lot of national attention and that mattered. Um, that's not to say that it like literally hasn't happened anywhere else. I'm just saying, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Um, but like in 2012, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected president of the United States with less than 40% of the white vote, a feat that has never since been repeated. Clinton got less than that and lost. Trump obviously won and Biden won because white voters swung left in 2020.

voters swung left in 2020. So like, this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people fail to put together and that Brandon Johnson miraculously pulled off. Yeah. And I think on the one hand, okay, this is legitimately kind of, because the result is not the thing that normally happens, it is legitimately an interesting question as to why this happened and like a sort of like legitimately kind of difficult like political science question. On the other hand, most of the people attempting to answer it have just, oh my

fucking God. Like if I have to read another New York Times article writing about this that's like just clearly cobbled together from three Wikipedia articles, like I'm'm gonna literally go insane. I think you, me and every other person in Chicago, you know, no matter if you were a Johnson voter or a Vallis voter or someone who stayed home, we can all come together in our hatred of that 538 piece that was dropped on the morning of election day. If you don't know what i'm

talking about you're lucky and i'm not going to tell you um if you really want i will i will give you a very brief summary of it which is that 538 no no no we don't know they did they did they did a racism they did a racism that's that's what i'll leave it at they did a racism and they were very wrong but they they basically did the four races white black latino and leftist yeah which is very funny but hopefully um i hope i'll take a stab at explaining what happened and hopefully it's better than most people's explanation but um i think part of it is that um as i mentioned earlier historically chicago elections have been about race and like this was no um exception this was much more of

an ideological uh break like the ideological lines were a lot clearer in this election than previous mayoral races um but the foundation of brandon john Johnson's electoral victory was the 80% of the of other things working in Johnson's favor. So like one, when it comes to the youth vote, I cannot really believe I'm saying this because when this was announced, it's not that I thought it wouldn't help. It's just that I wasn't sure that it would help enough. But Johnson got a lot of national progressive figures to endorse him including bernie sanders and his campaign literally flew bernie in for a rally uh on a college campus here in chicago and i think that genuinely did actually get a lot of young people to realize that there was an election that they should pay attention to which is why because like

like this happened like people fly in bernie a lot and it never matters but it like it mattered here which is sort of amazing absolutely like just a lot of this election was wild um i think the other thing that really helped johnson was that um a like chicago is a lot less white than it used to be which is not something that usually gets said in this day and age because Chicago is becoming whiter than it was like 10, 15 years ago. But Chicago was a lot less white than it was in the 80s when Harold Washington was elected. And so like there was more of a ceiling on Paul Vallis's vote than Harold Washington's opponents had, vote than Harold Washington's opponents had, which meant that Vallis had to be able to appeal to not just white voters who reflexively were against any black candidate, but he also had to make

inroads in Hispanic, Asian, as well as black communities in trying to get the black conservative vote. And he didn't, Vallis didn't do a terrible job here, but he just didn't do a job that was good enough. He actually probably won the Latino vote. It wasn't like a huge win, but it was a win. But the problem is that turnout on the Southwest side of Chicago, which is where the majority of Chicago's Mexican-American residents live, was just super low. Just like really, really atrociously in the tank. Like to the extent that like this is the kind of turnout that inspires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers to vote level bad turnout on the southwest side. So if Hispanic turnout had been on the same

level as white and black turnout, the race probably would have been a lot closer. Vallis also won Chinatown, which is something that got a fair amount of attention on social media, but Johnson was able to win the two other Asian ethnic enclaves in Chicago, which are the Vietnamese neighborhood in Uptown called Ajaan Argyle, as well as the Desi neighborhood on the far north side. And I don't think we can really say how Asian voters overall voted definitively because Asian voters in Chicago are pretty well diffused through the city. But it's very clear that like Vallis did not get the runaway win with Asian voters that Eric Adams, for example, did in New York City. Adams, for example, did in New York City. Yeah. And I specifically want to talk about Argyle for a bit because the fact that Johnson won Argyle is fucking insane. Oh, yeah. These are like like this is a community of Vietnam War refugees. Like these people are

hardline anti-communist. Like you go into these restaurants and they all have Fox News on. So like, yeah,son winning these voters is incredible yeah i mean like one of the most famous noodle shops there was a guy who was at january 6th like this is this is a like a a stereotypically unbelievably dog shit place for johnson and yeah and i'm i will say this about the china chinatown and this is something like i mean you just you can know this is something like i've been tracking for a while i mean just by like walking through it is that chinatown during the pandemic and kind of after it was happening a bit before has gotten just notably more fascist like oh yeah there's a lot of stuff there i mean the the the anti-homelessness

stuff is really really really intense they've been going really hard in the end that's the thing that kind of makes sense right like this this is a thing that you would kind of expect out of like yeah of course small business owners are gonna like go right like that's like that's that you know that that's the you can you you can you can find marks writing about this phenomenon in like 1848, right? Like this, this has been a thing since the beginning of time, but I don't know. It's gotten, it's gotten legitimately kind of scary down there. Yeah.

And like a lot of it also, I think was, you know, there's been a divergence between how the North side Asian enclaves like the Desi neighborhood and the Vietnamese neighborhood have responded to this kind of stuff versus Chinatown, especially on the other big social change that happened during the pandemic, which was the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. I think from what I saw, the reaction on the North side among these Asian enclaves was pretty overall supportive of the protests, whereas down in Chinatown, as well as in McKinley Park, which is a Hispanic majority neighborhood, but has a pretty significant Asian population, those neighborhoods had this really, really big surge of anti-Black racism in response to the protests. There were, quote-unquote,

neighborhood watch groups that got formed, and it was bad. And the Vietnamese voters on Argyle, even though they have Fox News on, like I said, though they're very like, you know, they have Fox News on, like I said, and they're really anti-socialist, anti-communist, there was a state rep. I am probably going to butcher his name for which I apologize, but I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced Han Nguyen, who is Vietnamese himself. And he won the seat last year in 2022. And like, himself and he won the seat last year in 2022 and like he's very progressive um so there has been this very sharp divergence in how the like asian neighborhoods in chicago have responded to some of the social events of the last few years once again my people the great nation of china has fallen into social imperialism I think the last thing that really should be talked about in the context of Johnson's

electoral win, and when we come back, we can talk about the city council, because that's also pretty interesting, is that something that if you want to watch elections, especially if you want to watch Chicago elections, something you should understand is that the the capital m machine in chicago is pretty much gone now um and brandon johnson's win pretty much seals this it's not that the people are gone or that like the you know logistical um operations of the machine are completely dead but the machine has now lost two elections in a row because as much as laurie as much as laurie lightfoot sucked and she sucked so much um she also was an anti-machine candidate um like she was like capital a anti-machine when she ran and brandon johnson is not anti-machine in the way that laurie was but

he definitely was not the candidate of like the machine so like they lost two elections in a row mike madigan has now been like indicted and he's probably going to prison for a very long time you should explain who mike madigan is because if okay if you live in illinois like you know who mike madigan is if you don't live in illinois mike madigan for my entire life for like the lives of people who are much older than me has been like the most the single most powerful political figure in all of illinois like he runs everything yeah like he has like an iron grip over everything that has happened in this state for like 40 years yes and he finally got uh indicted on some federal like charges of like i don't even remember what the charges were but it was very like

al capone-esque of like yeah we finally found something to nail you on so we're going to and so he got indicted last year and it is actually pretty impressive like how quickly his machine fell apart yeah like he just he didn't have an air ready to take control um and so it's not that like machine politics is gone from chicago it's more that instead of a machine there are now going to be a bunch of smaller machines um which is going to make it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have some say in the political process which is a good thing yeah and like the chicago machine fucking sucks ass i mean like we talked about sort of val like i mean valis was a machine guy right yes absolutely and you know

and he is like the thing about the the the the the machine has two values and it's corruption and neoliberalism and honestly like not even neoliberalism so much anymore it's mostly just corruption yeah i mean they've kind of i i would say i think they've gotten less ideological over the last 20 years like well like i think like that's like decade and a half but they yeah they they really they really fucked it like chicago was like the political machine and you know like i mean they're in large part responsible for the creation of obama's career and they've parlayed that into losing to like the least popular mayor in like a generation and then losing again to brandon like to somehow to brandon johnson and it's i don't know they've they've

they failed spectacularly and i fuck them they're awful and i yeah yes no absolutely yeah fuck these guys they've they've they've robbed they've robbed the working class for too fucking long yeah no fuck these guys good riddance the world will be better when they're dead yeah do you know what else the world would be better than if I you know okay that was that was that was not my that was not my best effort I apologize

for that but the world's question mark maybe better place if you buy these products and services question mark I don't know if I buy these products and services? Question mark. I don't know if I'm legally allowed to say that. We'll see. Anyways, here's some ads.

And we are back. Yeah, we should talk about what Johnson actually wants to do. Well, do you want to get into that or do you want to talk about the city council first? I think they actually overlap pretty well. So like we can let's let's run through what johnson says he wants to do and we can then talk about how much of that might happen um so johnson like we were talking about is definitely going to be the most progressive mayor in chicago's history in terms of what he campaigned on at least um this was a crime election like the dominant issue was

crime and johnson did not say the words defund the police in fact he actually explicitly said that he would not cut the police budget um but aside from like those literal words he very much is in line with the progressive priorities of de-emphasizing like using people with guns who go through like six weeks of training or whatever um so he wants to pass um a bill called treatment not trauma which is replacing cops with mental health responders for 9-1-1 calls about mental health crises he wants to pass another bill called the Peace Book Ordinance, which would expand restorative justice and violence intervention projects and programs in the city. And he also wants to pass an ordinance to put

significant restrictions on police department raids and the police department's actual ability to do raids altogether. There is a very infamous contract here in Chicago called the ShotSpotter contract, which is this dumb software that is supposed to be able to tell police when a gun goes off. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't. It just straight up doesn't work. So Johnson wants to get rid of that. He also wants to eliminate the gang database, which if you are from Chicago, you probably know what we're talking about is this very infamous list of about 120,000 people, 95% of whom are either black or Latino.

And they are on this list called the gang database more or less because one day some random Chicago police officer decided to put them on the list um it's very dumb it's very racist it's very blatantly unconstitutional and hopefully brandon johnson is able to get rid of it yeah and these and these are all things like you know as as much as we can talk about the extent to which like is you know as much as we can we can talk about the sort of the complicity of like mental health responders in the police system wherever the fuck like these things would all like make a lot of people's lives better and make the police weaker and you know i mean one of the

things about this election right is that the people who are actually affected by crime vote for johnson the people who are not affected by crime vote for Johnson. The people who are not affected by crime at all, all voted for Vallis. Yep. And part of the reason for that is that like, okay, if you're in a place like in Chicago that has a bunch of crime, you were dealing with like, you're dealing with the crime. You were dealing with a lot of people getting shot, which is fucking shit. And then you're also dealing with the CPD who are like function. Most of the time are functionally a cartel about about every like we're kind of due for another set of like prosecution for them like

roughly every like seven or eight years there's a massive series of arrests by the fbi or like the feds come in and like discover that there's like a giant uh there's a giant cartel operating out of the cpd we've talked about this. Discover in air quotes because everyone knows. Oh yeah. Everyone knows. And then, you know, the,

the, the, the Chicago police in particular are very famous for the code of silence, which is that every single person, if, if, if a cop commits a crime, every single other cop will cover for them.

I going right up to the, like the top of the ladder of the police chiefs and all the way down to like L dip shit, like, like beat cop yeah and you know and so you know like if you're a person who has to deal with these people and oh it sucks it fucking sucks and like awful there's chicago is kind of um in many ways not the ground zero but like a ground zero for a phenomenon where you have these poor neighborhoods of color who, you know, the people who live in these neighborhoods, they are

simultaneously over-policed and under-policed because the police don't bother to show up half the time when like they're theoretically needed, right? Like someone gets shot, you call 911 and the cops don't bother showing up for hours if they bother showing up at all. And at the same time, when they do show up, they often cause more problems than they solve. Like Chicago has really, truly horrific clearance rates of violent crime. And this is mostly because CPD just insists on maintaining this really awful balance. You know, if you do believe in police, you want there to be a pretty healthy balance between beat cops and detectives, right? Well, with Chicago Police Department, there almost are no detectives left.

Like, it's almost all beat cops. many resources that go into actually investigating crimes that can't be solved by someone just walking around or driving around in a patrol car. So these neighborhoods, like, you know, you go down to the South side or the West side, a lot of these, a lot of the residents in these neighborhoods would tell you because they're not leftists, right? So they would tell you that they want more police officers, but they don't want more beat cops necessarily. Like they want more detectives and they want officers who are actually going to care about them as people. Unfortunately, the Chicago Police Department is made up of fascists. So like, you know, low chances on that front.

But it's like that is the problem these neighborhoods are, is that like the police don't bother to care. And when they bother to show up, they often make things worse. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think the other thing that's sort of important here, right, is like you get a lot of, you know, like it's very easy for people to be like, oh, hey, look, actually, these people want more police. But it's like, you know, when you look at what there was a study taken right before the election that was talking about voters uh like what their preferences on like what their sort of opinions on crime are oh yeah yeah i know what you're talking about i think it was like only 18 percent of the people who said that crime was important to them wanted more cops and almost everyone we are part of it was like they like one of their big concerns was illegal guns and then

the other big concern was just like the fact that there's these places are really poor and there's no opportunities for people because it's like there's there there aren't economic opportunities there are so many guns just on you know just lying around in these communities. And obviously, that's a problem throughout the country, but it's especially bad in low income neighborhoods in Chicago. And the other thing was mental health, like, you know, and that's one of the other things that Johnson wants to do is he wants to reopen the mental health clinics that got closed down by rom or rom emmanuel who is a previous mayor of chicago who uh is currently being inflicted upon the people of japan as the u.s ambassador and you know um they deserve it this is this is what you get for siding with the cia you fucking fucking dipshits man like if the liberal democratic

party didn't want to have to get fucking have to deal with Rahm Emanuel, they shouldn't have taken all that CIA money. But yeah, like Johnson wants to, you know, reopen these mental health clinics. He wants to increase funding for public schools, which have very much not gotten the funding that they need in Chicago for the past several decades at this point.

He also wants to expand public transportation in chicago like there are a lot of proposals flying around for expanding the train lines and bus lines and bike grid um there are also um as me and i were talking about before we started recording there are a lot of lead pipes like water pipes in chicago so many fucking lead pipes yes and like chicago is like supposed to be replacing them it's proceeding very slowly johnson wants to speed that up there's like just very genuinely a lot of research on the books directly linking lead poisoning to a lot of social problems yeah um and so it's very much one of these things where it's like, you know, if you replace the lead pipes, crime will go down. Yeah.

And I want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure stuff for a second, because like, OK, in the in the last three years, Chicago's public transit system has just been fucking imploding. Oh, it's so bad. There are there are reasons for this, some of which I can talk about, some of which I can't. Partially it was the pandemic, and a bunch of the people who were supposed to be running the system fucking died because they got forced to work during the pandemic. But trains just won't show up. There are buses that are basically unusable because you're basically sitting there trying to roll double ones as to whether the bus will fucking show up at all. The wait times are enormous. Like, it's a real shit show. And like, it's substantively way worse than it was when I was in the city in like 2015, 2019.

Yeah, it's really, really bad. And it's atrocious. Yes. Yeah, it's really, really bad. And it's it's it's atrocious. Yes. The other factor that has to be talked about there is that like so the Chicago public transit system is not free like most systems like it is. It's expensive as fuck. Rider fares like it's very.

Yeah, it costs a lot to get on. Oh, comparatively, it costs a lot to get on the train or get on a bus. train or get on a bus um and one of the kind of uh like self-reinforcing cycles that has been playing out the last few years is that chicago also has a really bad homelessness problem and this is directly linked to the fact that the city just does not want to give people housing yeah um and so what ends up happening is that a lot of Chicago's homeless residents, especially in the colder winter months, they end up on the trains, especially the two lines that run 24 hours a day. And, you know, these are people who are really they're living in really, really terrible conditions. Like they don't have regular access to clean food and water, let alone like clean access to like like regular access to like hygienic facilities um and so ridership really plummeted on the lines where homeless people

started to like just go on in order to stay warm um and so you get the hit because rider fares are now down because people don't want to deal with being on the same train line as homeless people who, you know, frankly just don't smell that good or have mental health problems. And the city doesn't want to give these homeless people housing, let alone like even like smaller things like like access to bathing facilities or health care or anything like that um and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of now fares are down so there's less investment so more people abandon the system um and it is this thing where like this will this would get solved if chicago committed to giving homeless people housing. But that's just not where the city has unfortunately been.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, and what's been happening instead is like, you know, increasing anti-homeless architecture, like Chicago train stations fucking suck ass because they're all designed so that's impossible to sit on anything. Oh my God, there are only two benches in each station. It sucks. So many stations, like it's so bad. so that's impossible to sit on anything oh my god there are only two benches in each station it sucks so many stations like it's so bad like it's just awful like one of the things that chicago has is

they have these like you know it gets really really cold here in the winter so they have these like warming stations so that when it's like fucking negative 20 out you can be in the warming things but there's no they intentionally make it so there's no benches in them so you can't sit in them yeah it sucks it like it's you know it's they they have this really just like the the hatred of homeless people is turned basically into a war against all society waged by the city and it's atrocious the good news is that brandon johnson wants to pass an ordinance called bring chicago home which would um put a tax on uh property transfers for like i think it's like homes that are worth over a million dollars um that and the money from that tax would go entirely to funding programs for the city's homeless residents all the way up to and including

permanent shelter um or like permanent housing solutions so you know you know fingers crossed on that one um because that i think along with the public safety measures is really the thing that the city needs the most um and johnson also on the housing front um he wants to liberalize zoning laws which i know is a very big debate on the left at the moment about you know how we go about approaching building more housing um johnson very much is on like the pro development end of things he wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so that it's easier to build multi-family housing um in previously like single-family uh housing zoned areas um he does also want to pass just cause for eviction so like your landlord would not be able to throw you out just because yeah which is a good thing yeah

chicago's landlords are really shit they're terrible i i have across the board terrible yeah like i god like i have seen shit doing tenant organizing that is like like like like things that make me like have to control my reflex to vomit just remembering them like it's truly atrocious um but yeah uh the other thing and that something that will matter to you if you are living in chicago uh very much is that johnson wants to cap property taxes so um one of the things that's been driving a lot of reactionary politics in chicago is that property taxes here are linked to inflation um which means that if you are a property owner in chicago in the last couple of years your property taxes went up by like 15 plus percent um which understandably

made a lot of people mad um because you know if you if your taxes go up by that much that fast you at least wanted to be going to something good and under our previous well soon to be previous mayor lori lightfoot that absolutely was not happening yeah i was going to like cop overtime or some shit like yes so johnson uh is he campaigned on decoupling property taxes from inflation so they would no longer just automatically go up, um, which would bring a lot of financial relief to a lot of Chicago families. Um, and also he would basically like wants to pass a lot of taxes focused on wealthier residents, as well as big businesses to help fund some of the programs, uh, which brings us to the city council and how much of a chance he has of getting this passed, which is better than you might think

if you are familiar with chicago politics um something that surprises people who don't live in the city is that chicago is not run by progressives um there has actually pretty much never been a progressive majority on the city council um and there isn't there will not be a progressive majority on the new one that comes in with johnson he is going to be presiding over a minority government in parliamentary terms which i think we should use more often because i'm a nerd and i find it fun but um basically there are 50 members of the chicago city council they're called aldermen because we insist on having a city council that is the size of a state legislature here. And about 22 of them are going to be aligned with Johnson, more or less.

So he's going to be three votes short on a lot of things, at least from the beginning. He is going to be negotiating with the black political establishment here in Chicago, which is one of the smaller machines that is left in the aftermath of Madigan's indictment. And we are going to see how this goes. Some of those black aldermen are friendlier to Johnson from the get-go, partially because of ideology and partially because a lot of them just personally know him and like him um some of them are very against him for similar reasons like they either ideologically don't line up or they just dislike him on a personal basis yeah we should talk we should say a little bit about johnson's not like a some kind of like political like political outsider no he's been around he's kind of

he has like interesting relations with the old sort of like prepwinkle like uh labor machine yeah he he's definitely like johnson is definitely part of a machine um his relationship with like the old machine was very bad but he is definitely part of a machine that is tied up in like the institutional labor unions that have a lot of sway in democratic politics here uh including the chicago teachers union which like you know valis's whole stick during the runoff was that johnson would be a stooge for the teachers union. Um, and the teachers union really just like the teacher, uh, this is actually kind of funny because like the teachers union really just swept the board here, not just with Johnson, but with like a lot of the city council races

where they weighed in. Um, so if you are a member of the Chicago Teachers Union who does not approve of their leadership, buckle up, because the next several years they are going they're almost certainly going balls to the wall of like, well, if we can get a mayor, we can get a lot are kind of, eh. Yeah, they range from eh to shit. The Chicago Teachers Union got taken over by this group called Core, who are, like, a sort of rank-and-file, like, left-y, like... I think a good way to understand

Core is that, like, with the caveat that, like, teachers in Chicago really don't make that much money in the grand scheme of things. So like income wise, this is not lineup, but these people are very much like kind of resistance liberals on steroids. Like they're not going to be like front liners in a socialist revolution

anytime soon, but like they are definitely on the far left of the democratic party coalition yeah well and we should like they're not like like they are they are like i don't know i i have complicated feelings on them from the sort of an agris perspective they're like they're they're as good of a thing of like union people as like you currently have again we've talked about this this could change within and you very quickly but yeah they've they've been responsible for pushing a lot of things that are very good yes and they've they've turned the union into like i mean well it's okay so like one thing to talk about like they actually do go on strike which is the thing that a lot of unions don't like they go on strike they do they do political

things that are usually pretty good um and they are an actual sort of like they're an actual sort of class base for things getting better yes they are the chicago teachers union is definitely like a net good force in city politics um and something that also like ctu gets a lot of negative attention um even on a national level and so something that surprises people who don't live in chicago if they know about the teachers union at all is that the ctu is actually very popular uh among the city's residents like most like people love the chicago teachers union like when the teachers last went on strike the public was over overwhelmingly on their side uh which is why they won um and cdu also like their 2019 strike uh against lori lightfoot was very much like the

inspiration that touched off a lot of the teacher strikes that happened in red States over the next several months. Like they very much kind of led the way in some, in some areas. Like, so they are like, like Mia, I have complicated feelings about the CTU, but overall they're a good thing for city politics and like they make chicago a more

progressive place yeah and this has been true for like a while too like like to the extent that when like i think in like back in 2012 when core was like like back when core sort of first taken over was first doing their strikes like even the ctu people were surprised about the extent to which like when they went out like the streets turned into a party like people actually really do like them like i mean the cops don't but like fuck them like this people so the cops don't like them and to ctu's credit most chicago teachers dislike the cops yeah they've they've been they've been trying to get cops out of schools which is good because cops in schools are especially in Chicago it's really

bad the last thing I think we should mention about the city council before we move on to some of the other elections we need to talk about is one of the things that gets criticized about the left as an electoral force in places like New York or Los Angeles,

especially those two places, uh, is that it's very dominated by white people. Um, and I do want to provide the context for those of you who are not from the Chicago area. Like that's not true in Chicago. Um, the progressive movement and the left, like the leftist movement on an electoral level in Chicago is very much driven by people of color uh and you saw this in the city council election results almost every single seat that progressives flipped on the city council was in a black or brown ward and even the two wards like the two white majority wards where they flip seats the new alderman or alder women in both cases are people of color um so like this is just like context for those of you

who are not from chicago this is not a case of like white leftists gone wild um like this very much is a rainbow coalition not just in the sense that Brandon Johnson won the election off of Rainbow Coalition, but in the sense of the electoral left in Chicago is very, very much a Rainbow Coalition and has been very effective because of that. Yeah, it's very funny, too, because you see people like the sort of right wingers in Chicago, like constantly screaming about like lakefront liberals. And you look at like the actual base of left policy shit, and it's like, okay, Chicago is that the most progressive neighborhoods in Chicago based on their voting patterns are almost always the most racially integrated. Um, and that's not to say that like all of the racially integrated neighborhoods are progressive because that's not true. Um, there are some pretty integrated neighborhoods on the Southwest side that are like very conservative because a bunch of cops live there. Um,

but most of the racially integrated neighborhoods of Chicago are also the most progressive neighborhoods. And that like really just flies in the face of the whole like white lake front liberal narrative. Um, and is, is something to pay more attention to okay again it cannot be emphasized enough brandon johnson the progressive candidate is black he's running against a white guy there was a very large attempt to paint like brandon

johnson as like an out of touch like white liberal it was like yeah that was really weird. I think they just have I don't know, it was just this sort of ideological bankruptcy of the sort of capitalist establishment. They have nothing. Right? Yeah.

The only thing they have left is calling a black guy white. It's just like, shut the fuck up like nobody believes this shit anymore like and on that note it might be time for some ads yeah we are we are back from our ads i i hope you have enjoyed the destruction of the entire world uh yeah okay so we have talked about chicago for a long time because you're both from chicago it's very funny and it's very interesting but oh actually okay i'm realizing this there's one more thing i do the two more things i do specifically want to mention about brandon johnson that i forgot earlier one is that he you know it's genuinely unclear to me

whether this is a a real ideological belief he has or whether this is a thing that he said to not get called anti-semite because it was electorally expedient but he released a really really shitty statement on like boycott divestment and sanctions of israel oh yeah yeah like i personally oh yeah it was terrible it was really terrible but like based on what i saw from the aftermath of that um i'm inclined to believe that this was more something he was told to say um and the reason for that is because the reaction it got with the crowd he was in front of was like he was speaking with a jewish organization like the reaction was very like, okay, dude, but that's not what we asked you about. Um, like it was a response to a question about like, oh, you know, how do you

handle antisemitism? Um, and I think there are just, unfortunately, a lot of really dipshit consultants in the democratic party who hear the words antisemitism and think you have to talk about Israel, which is um really truly and ironically anti-semitic of them to think um like yeah i think he was probably told to say that um i'm not going to go out on a limb and i guess what his actual beliefs on israel haustein are um but i'm pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb yeah but like i like the but the actual consequences like he was acquitting like he was acquitting bds and anti-semitism he like go you should try to go find the clip somewhere because it's genuinely bizarre and shit and this is this

is the part of the episode where I want to remind people that like. When when when these kinds of people get into power, it is not as good as people think it's going to be like another thing. He very like he almost immediately, like right after he got elected, started trying to convince Biden to have the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which would be a fucking shit show. Yeah, this is mia from the future here uh two days after we recorded this the democratic party announced that the 2024 democratic national convention will indeed be held in chicago so yeah it's gonna suck that effort predates him like that's already been in the works like he definitely immediately came out and said like yes i'm in support of this yeah which is like some people don't understand why okay so like what the the thing that happens when when national convention comes to your city is that your city is occupied

by the cops and then like wherever the convention is happening basically turns into a war zone because anyone who comes out to try to protest them just gets like the shit beaten out of them yes and there's also usually a lot of anti-homeless policies they get rolled out in advance we actually we would this is it's it's not as bad as the stuff we talked about with lula in terms of the world cup but it's a similar kind of thing that you get with these kinds of candidates where they they do these sort of like giant they do these sort of like mega project developmentalism shit because they want the status that comes from it and the result is stuff that sucks and that you know nominally like like at least in theory like contradicts the rest of his platform right like this is going to be a thing that brings a

lot of cops into the fucking city he's in theory supposed to be trying to have policing done by like people who aren't cops um that's gonna suck if it works yeah so and that is that is your reminder for if you do live in chicago like me and i that just because brandon johnson got elected does not mean that you get to sit home um like if you are involved or invested in chicago progressive politics um just because you have a progressive mayor doesn't mean you get to sit back and relax you have to do a lot of work to hold these people's feet to the fire yeah like you're and like you're you're gonna end up fighting these people and it's gonna suck and you're gonna have to do it like if if if you if you believe in the things that you think that you claim to believe to and are not sort of just acting out of, like, you know, either, you're not just purely acting out of sort of candidate loyalty.

You are going to have to fight people that you helped get elected. And you're going to have to prepare for that. Start the five stages of grief now. Okay, moving on from that shit. Moving on. We need to talk about wisconsin um the other big election that happened on tuesday night uh was an election that flipped the supreme court of the state of wisconsin from a conservative majority and not just like lowercase c conservative

but like batshit insane christian nationalist conservative uh from a majority of those people to a liberal majority that is hopefully going to make life better for the people of wisconsin um so for those of you who are not paying attention to this which is likely even more than the people who are not paying attention to chicago because state supreme court races um most people if you tell them about those react with that's a thing uh yeah and i mean to be to be fair to be fair this is probably the most nationally prominent like state supreme court election of my lifetime that means that maybe four people know about it instead of uh one yes so on tuesday night uh janet protisawitz Yes. So on Tuesday night, Janet Protasewicz, who was the Democratic-aligned candidate, beat the Republican-aligned candidate, Daniel Kelly, who was himself a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, by 11 points, which is a really big deal because Wisconsin voted for Joe Biden by 0.6 points. So this is very much like landslide level territory for

Wisconsin, for Wisconsin Democrats. Um, it was very much a perfect storm. Like the areas of the state that have been trending towards Republicans experienced massive reversion back towards Protosiewicz. Um, and the areas of the state that have historically been Republican also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the single reason it happened, is because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought American gender dynamics back by a solid 75 years. 75 years um protest say what's successfully turned the campaign into a referendum on abortion rights um which is why she won by the margin she did there was huge turnout in madison milwaukee and college campuses there were multiple college campuses um i think where there were more votes cast uh in this state supreme court election than there were in the midterms last november um so this really was like every single thing that possibly uh could have gone

right electorally for the democrats in wisconsin did obviously with very, very like grim background context of the overturning of row. Um, but a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement that, you know, people, voters did not forget about Dobbs after the midterms. Like this is still an active force in national politics that is pushing people to the left.

Um, yeah. And I, I want to specifically talk about this for a little bit too because like i think the media has kind of has really i think fallen down on the fucking job here which is that like these people like because it's like all the people in the fucking media class are either like themselves are like hardline anti-abortion ghouls or they're people who this doesn't affect and you know so they just stop giving a shit after like a

couple of months because it's like oh whatever who cares but like this is a if you are living under this like this is this is like you can't fucking ignore this no like it is it is a it is an immense engine of death and human suffering that you know it's it's it's i mean this is the u.s right we live under a normal like we live under a lot of immense sort of engines of death and human suffering but this is this is a kind of engine that just sweeps through i mean it it sweeps across the sort of what you would think of as the quote-unquote traditional sort of – I don't know. Classifies it as the right thing, but it's the thing that kind of sweeps across the urban world divide in a lot of ways like it sweeps quite a lot across a lot of the sort of normal political divisions because the republicans have been like their their line on abortion has been hijacked by i want to say hijacked right this is what this is what this is what these people always wanted but it's it's been it's being set by a bunch of just deranged christian nationalists

whose opinion reflect maybe to like 30 of the country max not even that like the like the ruling of the judge down in texas on uh i'm going to mess up how to pronounce this and i apologize but um if a pristone which is an abort like a pill that among other things can induce abortions uh there was like a republican judge down in northern texas who attempted who like attempted to overturn the fda's approval of the drug the fda approved this drug in the 90s um and his ruling very much was insane like on top of just like the superficial insanity of trying to do this his reasoning was that you know this man wrote a ruling saying that the constitution guarantees fetal personhood which is a which you know would result in a complete and total ban on abortion nationwide under all circumstances and that's a viewpoint that is shared by less than 10 percent of Americans. So, like, it's just, you know, the Republican Party has gone off the cliff after they went off the cliff here.

You know, I don't know. I think this whole I think there's a lot of ways in which this entire sort of election election dynamics of this are really grim because the Democrats are the people who let this shit fucking happen. Right. Like for years and years and years and years, they just they you know, they used abortion as an electoral thing and then did fucking nothing to actually make sure that abortion would be that you know would be safe and they finally lost it and now it's like you know it's the thing that's like like it's it's it's the electoral issue that's coming to bail them out of their like electoral woes and that fucking sucks in a lot of ways but it also means i don't know like it's it's it's it's beating some of the worst people in the fucking world if we want to actually make sure that people have the ability to have safe abortions on demand we are going to have to do a lot of fighting that is not just showing up to these elections yes absolutely um but it is yeah no like like amia said it is really really just heinous that so many of the Democratic Party bigwigs who presided over the 50 years of Republicans saying they were going to do this and not taking Republicans seriously are it needs to be pointed out with this too, was like the Republicans the entire time were in every single way they

possibly could like outlawing abortion without literally outlawing it. And people just stood that like the party was just like, we don't give a shit. Like we're not, we're not going to like actually like fight this except for occasionally to run a losing candidate. Right. Like,

I don't know. Yeah, no, it's, it's insane. And like, there are, there are people in the democratic Party who were trying to raise the alarm. Those people were generally ignored. national level. We are seeing this electoral backlash and it is having the impact of like, you know, Republicans have been unable to effectively make the national conversation

about inflation or about crime or about trans athletes, which is also a losing issue for them. But God knows they keep trying. They have been unable to make the national conversation about those topics because voters are now looking at them like, but you're the freaks that took our abortion rights away. What's wrong with you? And in terms of Wisconsin, Protis Saywich being on the wisconsin supreme court is almost certainly uh she doesn't take office until august which is a really weird amount of time uh for her to have to wait like i don't know why wisconsin is like that but it is um but once she is in office um w Wisconsin should have restored abortion access, I would say almost immediately. Um, basically like as soon as someone can file a lawsuit over it, because right now abortion is currently illegal in Wisconsin under a law from 1849, um, that the only exception to the law is to save the life of the mother, which, like, I think people who are not personally impacted

by the possibility of pregnancy or the possibility of childbirth, I think really don't emotionally internalize what the language around some of these exceptions means. And it's like, if you are hearing the words like the only exception is life of the mother, that's really terrifying because it means like if you're going to be permanently injured as someone who's pregnant, but you're not literally going to die, abortion is not an option for you. If the fetus that you are carrying, you know, whether you wanted an abortion or not, if that fetus has some kind of fatal defect that is going to mean that your baby dies

within hours or days after being born and is going to be in pain the whole time, abortion is not an option for you. If you are pregnant because of sexual violence or because of incest abortion is not an option for you and it's it's like you know i am a cisgender man so like i can't personally understand but like i can only guess how terrifying of a reality that is um and the, you know, the only forward for like post 2024 hopefully we have a democratic trifecta again that can legislate abortion rights nationally and take it out of the ability take away the ability for courts to strike it down um there are some other ramifications for the state of Wisconsin that should also be mentioned. For those of you who live in Wisconsin, if I say the words public sector union law, you know what I'm talking about. The very infamous law that was passed by Scott Walker back in 2010, 2011, I think, that really restricted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions. And like this sparked a recall campaign against Walker, which failed.

on record she said it in a campaign appearance um because this race really just discarded all pretensions of like judicial impartiality yeah um but she said in a campaign appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law um so that law is probably going away or hopefully will be going away um wisconsin also has very gerrymandered uh state legislative maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down. Same thing with its congressional maps, which means that Democrats can probably count on two more seats in the House post-2024. And also, on a basic, like, do we live in a democracy or not level, in 2020, when the Trump campaign was filing all of its really idiotic lawsuits alleging voter fraud, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin was the court that came the closest to taking those allegations seriously. They voted by one vote to dismiss the case because one of the conservatives broke ranks and he has been hounded by the far right in Wisconsin ever since.

Wisconsin was one vote away from just throwing out the popular election results, like the popular vote results. So they're, you know, pro to say what's winning is literally an insurance policy for continuing to have the state of wisconsin be a democracy yeah which is good like i don't know that having having a state that is effectively ruled by a dictatorship that was about to attempt stall like a dictator's president um is good like i don't know this is my my lib take on this it is in fact not good when a bunch of people are ruled by just an open dictatorship so which is essentially what wisconsin you know, has been. Yeah. Barring Tony Evers' wins as governor in 2018 and 2022, like until he was in office, like Scott Walker presided over a single party dictatorship in Wisconsin. And so like, you know, which is part of also why Proto-Savage was able to win by the margins that she did, because, you know, Wisconsin is a swing state. It is reliably going to be close to 50-50, but especially on social issues, it has a liberal majority. And a lot of people paid attention to this race and they saw correctly the opportunity to dismantle the dictatorship that effectively has had control of Wisconsin for the last decade plus.

rule in in a place that's even like kind of not just like a 100 like conservative district i the results that they like the actual policies they put in place are fucking horrifying yeah it's bad it's like obviously bad but like you get i mean you get you get stuff like what happened in tennessee in the last week where they the state legislature expelled Democratic lawmakers for like engaging in the mildest of protests against like an open carry bill. just in a real cherry on top moment, the Tennessee state legislature only expelled the black legislators who protested and the white legislator who joined them, uh, survived her expulsion vote. Um,

because, you know, we don't want to be like the days of the Republican party, not wanting to be too on the nose about the racism are long gone. Yeah. Um, but yes so but overall good things happened in wisconsin on tuesday um and some of the really terrible things that were put into law in that state in the last decade are hopefully about to go away. Yeah. There were some other places, mostly in the Midwest, because once again, the coastal regions of the country let us down.

But there were some other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday. St. Louis, Missouri has had a progressive city council and there was a very strong kind of law and order challenge to that progressive majority based in the city's white majority wards. And after Tuesday night, it's pretty clear that progressives will continue to have a majority on the city council in Kansas City on the other end of the state of Missouri, we are probably going to get the most progressive city council that the city has ever had. The main left-wing group got all of its candidates through to the general election, which is on June 20th. And the main right-wing tough-on-crime group seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats. right-wing tough on crime group seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats um so you know once again the midwest is the engine of american progressivism and the west coast can

suck it yeah there is one more piece of good news which is that um in illinois there was a set of far-right groups that ran a bunch of school board candidates on the like anti-critical race theory, anti-queer, anti-trans platforms. And actually, I'll just say the names of the groups because people should know. These groups are Awake Illinois, Moms for Liberty, and the 1776 Project. Basically, these groups are, you know, if you went to the South in the 1970s, you had the Klan, and then you had the White Citizens Council, which was the supposedly more respectable face of white nationalism in the South in the 60s and 70s. And groups like Moms for Liberty and Aw awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups

like the proud boys. Um, and very, you know, fittingly with the analogy here, um, these groups are primarily, uh, run and staffed by conservative women, just like white citizens councils were down South about 50 years ago. Um, and thankfully these candidates almost all went down in flames um i think there is a a school board election in me and i's hometown which is very notoriously conservative for people in the area and even in that yeah in our hometown they've lost um and like these losses extended into downstate illinois too and like there's a

small city called quincy in western illinois where it's like this is a a place that votes republican routinely by like 30 points like a 65 majority and these far-right school board candidates lost in quincy illinois um so thankfully people saw through the bullshit and were like actually you people are weirdos and we're not going to hand you power yeah another thing that was very funny is carbondale which is like a very like this is like like this is this is this is a carbondale is a southern illinois ass town it is like not quite as far south tactically speaking as you can go in illinois but like it's close yeah i elected

their first trans person to serve in a city council anywhere in illinois so like they're they're getting clobbered in fucking carbondale like they they had a really just destroyed and i'm very happy about this because i you know a lot of kids are going to grow up in schools that are way less shitty than they were like even when i was there or like god help the generation before us was just like survived shit that like would have killed like me and most of the people i know like yeah yeah no the schools that me and i grew up in were not a great place to be queer or trans of any variety um but i mean this is also going to help because of i have i still don't know what

the Biden administration was thinking about this, but like the new, like rule that they're rolling out around trans participation in K through 12 sports through the department of education. Um, this got a lot of attention on Twitter in the last couple of days, um, because I'm going to be as charitable as I can here to all of the people involved. Um, but there was, um, a panic, uh, on, uh, in progressive circles on social media and especially queer and trans circles because the washington post decided to frame this rule in like the most like hyperbolic way possible and this is not me saying that the rule is good because the rule could definitely still be bad um but the biden administration is essentially from what I can tell, trying to include trans kids in Title IX protections.

The proposed wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs to be improved. But the outcome here can be good in the sense that it would ban blanket prohibitions on trans kids in k-12 sports and it would require exceptions to like it would require like any exceptions to pretty much be like you know you have to prove that there is a danger to like fair competition here which is the standard that title nine uses for um sports for cisgender men and cis or cisgender boys and cisgender girls so like can be good will you know if you are invested in this the public comment period on that rule is about to open it's definitely a place where you should speak up and say like hey the wording of this is a little shit like let's be clear here that the presumption should be that trans kids should be

allowed to participate in on teams that align with the gender they identify as um and thankfully because a lot of these dipshit school board candidates lost uh hopefully some of these school boards will be taking the right side of history here yeah go go go okay so i i'm slightly more angry about this than than you are because i i i i i i don't know i think there's a pretty glaring hole in this that lets transphobes just be like well obviously like yeah and i yeah i i think the wording is is vague and it should be made a lot less vague i i think it's bad i don't know i i i think i think the the the backlash to the backlash about that went too far of now there's a bunch of people insisting that this is in fact a really good rule and like no

like if if it's if it's if it's executed as is it is going to let a lot of people do a lot of franciobic shit yes um as is it is bad if they change the wording of it it can be better yeah so i'd go yell at biden until he makes it less shit absolutely in whatever capacity you have to do this uh yeah if you see him if you see him walking down the street yell at him um if you see him in a restaurant yell at him uh yes yeah very very genuinely like a it's always a good idea to yell at the biden administration about anything um but b especially go yell at them about this uh this can be done multiple ways you can reach out to your congressional representatives and tell them that you want the rule wording made better. You can go there should be soon a direct like form you can fill out on the Department of Education website where you can

provide your own personal opinion on the rule. But basically, go yell at the Biden administration and tell them to insert language into the rule that makes very clear that the legal presumption uh that must be overcome should be that trans kids get to compete on the teams of the gender they identify with yeah so uh yeah having now yelled about that for a bit uh yeah we should i think start wrapping up the last sort of bits of electoral news yes okay so the last thing i think we should talk about is probably denver um denver uh for uh those of you who do not know me and i which is probably almost i would hope almost everyone who listens to this. I will die on the hill that Denver is a West Coast city. Is it is not physically on the ocean, but the vibes rancid.

And like the rest of the West Coast, Denver let us down on Tuesday night. The mayor's election is going to a runoff between two candidates who both have pretty awful platforms on homelessness. And there is one that is worse. So if you are looking for the candidate to hold your nose and vote for, uh, right now, you know, see how it goes. But right now I would say that is Mike Johnson, not because he has anything good to say. He's he doesn't. But because his opponent, Kelly Brough, says that she would have homeless people arrested if they refused to leave camps in public parks. So she just fucking blows and she should be, you know, never be allowed anywhere near power.

power. The other bit of Denver news I think we should talk about is there was a housing referendum where the proposal was to turn an old golf course that is not currently being used into a housing development that would have, I think, 25 percent affordable units. And part of it would also be turned into a park. And in truly what I thought was the dumbest thing that happened on Tuesday night, the proposal lost. And the Denver branch of DSA was campaigning against this housing development on the premise that building more housing is bad if someone profits off of it and i definitely understand that profit listen like profiting off of housing is bad we also need more housing and denver especially desperately needs more housing um and somehow we got this incredibly stupid coalition of nimbys and like green space

environmentalists and the denver dsa that all came together to stop the housing development and mia i'm i'm sure you probably think a little differently about this than i do but i saw this and i was like what the hell man i mean okay so here's my I I know very little about this my my take is it if you have the opportunity to destroy a golf course and you vote no you are like as long as you're not literally building a prison camp like reactionary dogs the bourgeoisie destroy every golf course always a good you know that's actually that's pretty good that's that's a pretty good line i should start saying it to more people destroy every golf course you can um but yeah no this it was i think the most frustrating thing that i saw happen on tuesday night and i think it is

one of those questions that the left is going to have to deal with in the next couple of years is like all right we have a lot of cities that desperately need a lot more housing so how do we get it done if you you know without just turning it over to the real estate lobby because obviously that would also be really shitty um but the answer cannot be don't build more housing yeah i mean the thing i will say about this also is that another answer is uh like you know we've covered this on the show too like the other part of this if you don't want a city that's just like absolutely horrific you need to have a strong tennis movement and you need to you need to have a tennis movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control and move towards, like, actively, like, fighting to seize buildings from, like, from developers. And that's a thing that's happening.

Like, there are places where people are doing this. It can be done. Yeah. So, yeah, like, I don't know like i i feel like i don't know i'm not gonna go into my entire thing on the sort of nimby yimby debate other than saying that like increasing the power of tenants will give you a bet we'll give you the best options yes very very much uh tenant unions are good um yelling at

the biden administration is good destroying golf courses is good and abortion rights are good yeah and go fight for these things and things that aren't elections because every once in a while an election will give you a result which is the worst person on earth has been replaced by a slightly better person and you know i i do like to not be ruled by the worst person on earth but the the the the ideal political situation is the one where we're not like people cease to rule over us so yes no you gotta got to do the non-electoral work alongside the electoral work. You can't just be relying on elections to make things better. You got to be pushing for it all the time.

Yeah. Well, I say, yeah, I I am much softer on electoral work. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Mia would rather Mia would rather than everyone doing electoral work start doing better things with their time in her eyes. Because the actual composition of political power in the city and the city's class composition, the balance of forces between unions and employers, directly between workers and between employers. There are lots and lots and lots of things that are very, very important, even if you are an electoralist, that are mostly decided outside of almost almost entirely decided outside the ballot box and if you don't take that into account and you try to just run like the most well-engineered political campaign uh you're gonna end up like the 2016 democrats democrats yeah

yeah no everything that mia just said and yeah yeah I hope you've enjoyed the longest amount of time I will ever be caught talking about an election that doesn't involve a coup um yeah this is what happened here uh yeah thanks thanks again for having me yeah thanks for coming on and all of you go happen to someone. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know him. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get

on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough,

so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. My chickens just come to me. You don't catch them, you just have to... Focus them.

Yeah. It's love, not coercion and that is how you catch a chicken um which is not what this podcast is about is it robert no it's not no unfortunate uh we're doing the catching chickens episode next week but today uh we are joined by three guests we have ava uh mo and woad and they're going to be talking to us about solidarity with anarchist prisoners and how you can do that and why you should do that and why people have been doing that for a long time. So would you guys like to introduce yourselves and just tell us your names and any relevant affiliations and your pronouns? I'm Ava, she, her. I've been working with June 11th for about

a handful of years now and been doing prisoner support for almost 10 years now. I'm Maura Meltzer-Cohen. Everyone calls me Mo. My pronouns are they or Mo and I'm an attorney and I do a lot of work with political prisoners, people facing politically motivated prosecutions, and incarcerated people who need gender-affirming care. Excellent. Yeah, same point, Steph. Hey, my name is Wode. I use he, him pronouns. I've been involved in prisoner support for 25-plus years and enjoying anarchist-related activities for longer than that. So I think if we start off with uh perhaps explaining like

what june 11th is and sort of the history of it why why this is a day that people can show their solidarity with anarchist prisoners that would be great and just what if you want to talk about that yeah so june 11th um started as a day of solidarity with jeff loresores when he was serving like a 20, 22 year sentence for torching some SUVs. But eventually he was able to get his sentence shortened and he got out. And at that point, Marius Mason and Eric McDavid were in prison with 20 year sentences for eco-sabotage activity or, in Eric's case, being entrapped for such. And so it eventually changed to be about Marius and Eric after Jeff was released. And then Eric McDavid also got out of prison. And since then, it expanded to all long-term anarchist prisoners.

I wonder, obviously, we're in April now. People have a few months before June 11th and they might be interested in doing this. They might not know any people directly that are incarcerated or they might not have had any experience with that sort of in their close circles. So if we start with like how people can show solidarity like to incarcerated people, i think that would be great and so are there like things that people can do how can they do that like so that people i guess people who are incarcerated can can hear them or hear from them yeah i mean writing letters is kind of the classic go-to um there's also ways to communicate digitally or over the phone with

people locked up. You know, putting money on someone's books goes a long way. Everything is extremely overpriced in prison and monopolized by the corporations that provide those services. But, I mean, if you're looking for people, you have stuff in common with particularly political things, kind of carrying on the struggle and including their name in those activities is part of that. And if you are in communication with them, talking to them about those things, getting their input and helping them feel included in those struggles goes possibly the longest way. Yeah, I think that's such an important point, because when you're talking about someone, for example, who's been entrapped by the feds or whatever law enforcement agency was responsible for it, you're talking about a strategic pattern that the state uses to clamp down on resistance. And the efficacy of that strategy is entirely determined by their

ability to kind of break people and to break movements by both making people suspicious of each other and by, you know, locking up and damaging the people who are kind of most prone to action. And I think doing stuff like this, like not only helps kind of heal those, the distrust that is inherently planted by the state when they do stuff like this, but also helps the, the people who are kind of most targeted and who have suffered the most for the cause not feel like they're swinging in the wind, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. I think it helps mitigate the fear of repression and arrests and especially things like terrorism enhancements yeah when people know that like they're not they're not going to be alone when they're in prison even if it is for decades like there's going to be people supporting them and writing them and fundraising for them and like including them in their projects like the entire time yeah i would say too that anytime a movement or something becomes more effective um they become the focus of the state tends to sharpen on them and and the um a lot of the prisoners that have been supported around the june 11th day of solidarity were involved in environmental

animal rights uh activities um that were particularly effective and particularly around the June 11th Day of Solidarity, were involved in environmental amyloid activities that were particularly effective and particularly destructive in a positive sense, particularly like the ALF and ELF actions of the 90s, but on this very intense repression in the early 2000s that came to be called the Green Scare. Yeah, kind of our um our theme for this year is that that repression like doesn't work all these like movements and struggles and

activities continue um even despite that kind of repression like there's still you know activity in defense of the earth and animals and land defense and there's still like really militant queer self-defense and there's still a lot militant queer self-defense. And there's still a lot of like a ton of activity against police and against racist police violence and murder. And like as much of those, as much as those things are repressed, like it doesn't stop them and they just keep getting stronger. I think the only thing I would add to that is one of the most important things about doing political prisoner support or prisoner support in general is that the state really does work to criminalize politically motivated behavior and politically motivated beliefs, which functions pretty effectively to distract

from the central message of social movements, whatever social movement it may be. And providing prisoner support and continuing to keep people who are in prison apprised of those struggles, continuing to engage in those struggles, can really function to refocus on that central message, even despite the fact that state repression is a very effective drain on movement resources and a very effective distraction from movement messaging. That is super important. Like if we look at like the movement for Black Lives or the George Floyd uprising, however we want to kind of phrase it like the speed and uh like severity with which the state kind of cracked down on that and attempted to infiltrate it attempted to create suspicion attempted to create fear um was like i think most people listening might be familiar with that even if

they're not familiar with the green scare or like previous incidents and it's not um just like i know we have people listening in other countries this is not just a america thing right like british cops literally fucking married people uh in the like in the early 2000s it's part of their undercover situation um one of them also went to clown school which is funny uh that you know that is a charming story yeah it's one of the not to refer to the police academy that way yeah i guess they all went to clown school in a sense yeah so yeah we'll do we'll do our long promise clown block episode one day mo i know you uh have some insight into mario's case uh as his lawyer right so could you explain a little bit about about that case if people can understand like how a politically motivated

prosecution works in the uh supposed justice system that we have uh so just to clarify i represent marius now and i do advocacy for him while he is confined. I was not his criminal defense attorney. investigations that were going on at that time in the state repression that was focused on the movements against environmental degradation was deep and concerted and went on for many, many years. And that's sort of what we refer to as the green scare, right? The criminalizing of environmental movements. And I talk about criminalized behavior and criminalized identity a lot. So I'm actually just going to take a second and explain what I mean by that. Yes, please. to where law enforcement and the state are policing, monitoring, targeting identity rather than unlawful conduct.

And the criminalization of belief, similarly, it refers to the state targeting people on the basis of their beliefs rather than on the basis of unlawful conduct. So movements, social movements, there's a very long and well-documented history of social movements being criminalized by the state, even in the absence of any unlawful behavior. So the movements against environmental degradation were heavily policed, targeted, infiltrated, and many federal grand juries and setups and entrapments and successful prosecutions stemmed from that criminalizing of environmental movements. And Marius's case was among those. stemmed from that criminalizing of environmental movements. And Marius's case was among those. Basically, the state managed to turn Marius's former partner into an asset and effectively charged him, prosecuted him for several acts of politically motivated destruction of property, all of which

were calculated not to harm human beings. He pled guilty and was sentenced in 2009. Had the offenses to which he pled guilty not been perceived as politically motivated he would have probably gotten about seven years because the prosecution uh argued that his behavior was politically motivated which i mean i think is true um yeah he was was hit with a terrorism enhancement, which increased the severity of his punishment on the basis of how serious an offender he was then deemed to be. The prosecution asked for 20 years. The judge imposed 22. So here's an example of how beliefs are criminalized. At his sentencing, the judge and the prosecution both invoked and referred to what I think most of us would view as really unremarkable political behavior

in ways that really cast it as very sinister. And so Marius's contact with people who were on his support committee, who were engaged in various kinds of civil disobedience, about which Marius likely knew nothing, was cast as Marius being in continued contact with people engaged in crimes, which was a violation or would have been a violation of his bond conditions. And on the basis of that claim that Marius was violating his bond conditions by being in touch with these people, who again were engaged in what I think most of us would see as completely unremarkable civil disobedience, constitutionally protected political behavior. This was one of the bases on which the judge imposed this sentence that was even longer than the prosecution had asked for.

And there's a number of other examples of this kind of criminalization of routine political behavior, one of which is very significant, which is that when Marius finally went to prison, he started a reading group. And based on the content of the books that they were reading, he was transferred from a lower security facility pretty close to his family to a facility, and not just a facility, but a particular wing of a facility, which was the administrative segregation unit at FMC Carswell in Texas, which was much, much farther from his family and involved all kinds of extremely stringent conditions that I would argue were First Amendment violations. So, you know, we see not only the really intense surveillance and targeting of social movements, but the really disproportionate punishments and sort of retaliatory behaviors all the way down, all the way from investigation

through to incarceration and conditions of confinement. That's atrocious, obviously. incarceration and conditions of confinement. That's atrocious, obviously. So I wonder, when he received those, maybe perhaps we should first explain what a terrorism enhancement is, in case people aren't familiar. It is what's called a sentencing enhancement, and it allows, it authorizes, or in some cases requires a judge to impose a harsher sentence for behavior that's intended to, I don't remember what the exact language is, but it imposes a harsher sentence for unlawful acts that are intended to intimidate or coerce the public or public institutions. Okay. So that's what increased, like,

nearly tripled that sentence in that case, yeah. And was that specifically, like, because he'd expressed, like, anarchist ideas or just because it was, like, his actions were in sort of furtherance of the Earth Liberation Front kind of goals? I think it was explicitly because it was an elf associated action yeah right yeah it was part of this crackdown on on environmental

movements it's similar to what we're seeing in atlanta right now like right down to the terrorism enhancements what we're seeing in atlanta right now is actually a little bit more astonishing just in terms of first of all we're not really seeing necessarily a terrorism enhancement. There is a statute that criminalizes what they are calling domestic terrorism. It operates similarly, right? There's a predicate act, and then if it's politically motivated, you know, so you could, for example, potentially have something like politically motivated trespass, right, or politically motivated graffiti. And they could charge it as domestic terrorism. The enhancement is it is remarkable, but it is a continuation of the same kind of targeted policing efforts to chill social movements, efforts to disrupt social movements, to isolate people, to fractionate movements. uh social movements to isolate people to fractionate uh movements um it's the same kind of thing that we have seen um really since the beginning of policing in this country and that makes a lot of sense when you consider like the uh the role of the police within the state and the goals of some of these social movements right which we probably don't have to explain that in detail for people to understand what's going on so like with these people facing you mentioned a

couple of the other people who had faced political prosecutions and were incarcerated and then had their sentences reduced um maybe we could explain like how that was able to happen right because it's obviously like a desirable outcome i don't know the like the legal things that happened for that but it was like a it was like in the courtroom kind of a solution okay yeah i'm curious just kind of in general since you've all had more contact with these folks who are incarcerated and have been kind of the victims of this, this state violence, when they talk about like what is kind of meaningful to them in terms of outside connections, in terms of like, you know,

what we're talking about here what kind of stuff do they bring up as like having a positive impact on, on their mental health, on their kind of ability to endure what they're, what they're going through. First, I would say that communication is a big thing. Like being able to talk to people, to write with people. And, you know, a long-term like regular correspondence is great, but even just like little messages of solidarity can be really meaningful. Material support is always huge.

Like that's going to make somebody's time a little bit better if they can get stuff off a commissary you know buy enough stamps all those things but a thing that I hear a lot is like people want to see the the projects and the struggles that they're involved in continue so if that's like defense of the earth, if that's against the police or or whatever it is, like people like to see that because it's you know, it's not just about their own case. But, yeah, about those movements that they come from and or somebody is, you know, radicalized inside these things that they have committed to and been from participating in in a huge way, not entirely. and been rid from participating in a huge way, not entirely. But, you know, people like to see that continue and see victories, see like creative attempts and things like that.

That makes a lot of sense, I think. So for people, like I know, like I'll sometimes write to incarcerated people for like various things. And it can be quite difficult to like, to work out the process of doing that um and it can be especially difficult um it was especially difficult during during like the the worst of the covid kind of lockdowns and such and like you couldn't i was trying to write to a guy in one federal uh in tehot and uh they wouldn't let the person email

me because they claimed that the keyboard was like a high touch surface and this yeah right like and which people were getting covered in in this facility all the time uh but how how would folks go about like let's say they wanted to to write to Marius and just say like um you know we wanted to express the solidarity and and say sucks that this is happening to you or whatever how would they go about doing that there's a couple of things that are specific with marius that i i will want to tell you but you can go to if you google inmate locator bop you can search uh marius's name or the name of any other prisoner. And you'll basically end up with, it'll show you their

information, including where they are confined. And you can usually click on the name of the facility and it will take you to the website for that facility and show you how to send mail to the prisoner. There's also, if you go to nycabc.wordpress.com or any of the other anarchist black cross websites, NYC ABC is my home chapter. So that's the one I'm familiar with. But if you go to the anarchist black cross websites, there are But if you go to the Anarchist Black Cross websites, there are zines and I think a whole list that is pretty well updated of all of the anarchist political prisoners and instructions on how to responsibly write to people who are under increased monitoring and surveillance while they are being confined because retaliation against prisoners, even for things that the prisoners themselves have not done, is very commonplace. And so if somebody, while we very much want to make sure we keep in touch with people and give them news of the outside world,

including news about their social movements, one thing that can happen is that those letters simply will not be delivered. And another thing that might happen is that the prisoner themselves may face disciplinary consequences formally or informally just as a result of having been the intended recipient of that news so you know I would say as I often say discretion is the better part of valor in this instance I think you have to have a kind of a first do no harm attitude about this, where like at the end of the day, regardless of like your anger or your desire to talk about, you know, certain things, your primary concern here has to be not making things worse for somebody who's already in a terrible situation. And Serenare has to be not making things worse for somebody who's already in a terrible situation. Yes. And I would also like to point out that prisoner mail is monitored.

Oh, yeah. And so among other things, you might be making things worse for yourself. Yeah. So I would be cautious and circumspect about what you write to people whose mail is being read. The other thing is with respect to Marius in particular, unfortunately, in order to get mail to him, you still have to deadname him. And if you want to hear more about that particular set of struggles, I'm happy to talk about it. But suffice it to say for now that if you go to supportmariasmason.org, there should be some instructions about how to write to him. And I'll make sure that the support group puts up clear instructions.

But unfortunately, you do have to put his dead name on that envelope or it will not get to him. It's extremely frustrating. Yeah, it could be really annoying, especially if you're trying to look for somebody using the locator and it has a gender notifier and it's not the correct gender notifier. And yeah, that can be difficult. But like, yeah, it's an effort worth making, right? And it really can help someone who's going through a difficult time. Yeah, and people do have really specific interests apart from movement work as well.

And, you know, Marius paints, he sent me this incredible, he sent me a number of paintings over the years. I have one actually that I think I shared with you earlier, Sacco and Vanzetti that he made. He sent me a really great portrait of Jimmy Page once. He also recently sent me a beautiful scarf that he had knitted or crocheted, I guess. People have hobbies, people have interests, and they're happy to talk about those things as well. Yeah, that's what makes us like a whole person, right? And I think having a little bit of that helps you to keep that little part of yourself in what can be a difficult place.

So yeah, hopefully people can send crochet letters. I'm sure we have some keen crochet listeners. This is probably the part of the podcast where we stop and make ourselves amenable to capitalism by doing an ad break. I wonder, like, what can people do on Juneune 11th right obviously like people should keep on this ongoing correspondence i think that's really important and i was speaking to someone from the leonard peltier free leonard peltier group the other day and i know a lot of people write to

leonard peltier and like i know that that's a great source of like strength for him especially as he's like aging in prison i was wondering what people could do on june 11th like to sort of further discourse spread the word take actions to solidarity kind of things do people do june 11th activities you know actions in solidarity uh really run the gambit um you know it's been very popular to have like a barbecue or a benefit show, things to raise money. And then there's actions that have more in common with whole uh gambit of activities that you know people have participated in um i know with the um revitalization of of this as like an international day of solidarity um there was an interest in trying to uh think outside the box more you know it's it's difficult to like no one's going to reinvent the wheel. You know, it's difficult to,

like no one's going to reinvent the wheel or, you know, maybe that's as much as they're doing. But there's a variety of different activities. And last year's theme was sort of like doing something different than you might normally do to just diversify what is happening. One of my dreams for June 11th is for it to be an opportunity for you know our movement prisoners to be integrated into other things so it's you know it doesn't

have to just be oh this is like the prisoner support activity or like we're just going to write letters but you know people do things like art shows um like mo mentioned like a lot of people paint a lot of people write poetry and to integrate that into like maybe already have like you know a community around poetry readings or something like that and just to bring that into into whatever like little corner of the world or whatever kind of activities that we're already involved in for these things to like reference each other right like we reference our prisoners and they can reference these things that are happening outside that are like integrating them.

One of the things that since I've been involved, a lot of times we try to elicit or solicit statements from the people we represent. I have been to a number of really wonderful June 11th activities that have included an art show, a number of punk shows in various people's basements. And I think as just an individual, I mean, first of all, I think it's a great opportunity

to do community building, to do letter writing. But I think it's also something that even if you are, you know, relatively isolated, you know, you can just make a commitment, today I'm going to send five bucks to somebody's commissary. Yeah, I think I was looking back at one of Marius's previous June 11th statements. And one of the things he referred to was a civil rights attorney that he'd worked with was asked, you know, what does the movement need most? He responded, everything is everything, meaning, you know, anything, any advocacy that you do in one area will redound to the benefit of all of the rest of us and all of the legal effects of doing advocacy for Marius has had really huge benefits for other trans folks who are in prison who I've represented. And then doing advocacy for those folks has had really incredible benefits for Marius. So, I mean, I think it is materially the case that, you know, you struggle where you are, you do what you can on June 11th or any other day. And, you know, you move the needle.

Yeah, I think that's very, it's well said. Yeah, absolutely. really about like the increased risk of just kind of like falling to the back burner as there's new like waves of struggle and um you know new emergencies and crises all the time this is an opportunity to like um really take a moment to um to really focus on that memory um and so I hope with June 11th we can like kind kind of build bridges like generationally, you know, like I wasn't really around when Marius, you know, during the green scare and Marius got arrested. And it's something that I learned about and got involved in later. And I hope that, you know, with new people that we meet and new people who like we share projects with, we can tell them about our prisoners. projects with um we can tell them about um our prisoners and also you know where where i happen to live there's occasionally i meet somebody who used to know marius from you know 20 years ago and

so kind of in both directions like into the past and into into the future like yeah just trying to spread awareness about these people yeah i think that's important. Yeah, I think it's so important to look at this as part of a long struggle. And that's what you and Moira were both talking about in terms of it's building connections. It's kind of this like the sedimentary layer that creates the actual foundation for positive change. And we have, there's this kind of Hollywood brain thing. that creates the actual foundation for, for positive change. And,

you know, we, we have, there's this kind of Hollywood brain thing. I think we all have where, where we get bent out of shape when, when change doesn't kind of come and in the, the form of these kinds of calamitous moments and,

and kind of culminations of struggles and stuff. But it's, it's, you know, the process of winning is the process of like, part of it is the process of showing up for the people who are casualties, you know, who are being, who are suffering the most for it. And part of it is kind of the, the, the, the way in which that allows you to kind of build networks of solidarity that are the necessary foundation for continuing the struggle. Absolutely. I, I would say that in the years that I've been doing

this work, one of the most important parts of it is being really consistent in showing up for the people who are being horrendously punished, because that's the only way that everybody understands that they will be taken care of. Right. But speaking of winning, I do have an update, if you have a second on another june 11th prisoner eric king um yeah from my beloved colleague sandy freeman who represented him successfully uh recently and got a not guilty verdict uh for him after he was charged with assaulting a corrections officer, which is, I mean, if you know anything about federal indictments, a magnificent coup. So Eric currently has a Klan Act conspiracy and Bivens lawsuit pending against more than 40 state defendants. His team is trying to achieve release from the ADX via a writ of habeas corpus. He's not currently getting access to communications, visits, or programming,

but he is still strong and resilient. And his recent victories are an object lesson in the fact that we really can fight back and win. Please donate to his support fund and please uplift what is happening because this is the future for anti-fascists in the Bureau of Prisons. is the future for anti-fascists in the Bureau of Prisons. Nevertheless, we do continue to struggle and sometimes even to win. And I think our stories of triumph are not frequently enough told. And so one thing that we could do this June 11th is try to gather all of those stories and make sure that those stories do get told. I think it's really important like you said

to see these little victories and like not to see it as distinct from a broader struggle like if we want to do anarchism and build ways of taking care of each other outside of the state then we need to take care of people who are victimized by the state uh and like this is part of doing that we're proving we can do it by doing it right um and like robert said like we're not going to storm the winter palace necessarily yeah like we can build our power in different ways and this is a way of doing that i'm thinking of like in more international like cases i know for instance that um where i come from the british government fucking loves to put uh people who volunteered to for the YPG in prison or their parents if they send them money for food which yeah great country but I know that like all

over the world I can in Spain and Catalonia where I've lived like this is a thing too so are there any other like international cases that you want to sort of draw attention to um currently right now Alfredo Caspito in Italy has been on hunger strike since October against the particularly isolating and particularly repressive 41 East prison, what he calls a non-life in there. It's a prison that was primarily used against mafia bosses, but, um, you know, in the classic state misinterpreting, uh, anarchism has considered Alfredo a leader and, and, and particularly, and so locked him away, um, without access to almost any means of communication. And, uh,

and so he's, he's had a lot of health problems as a result of this. You know, he was originally locked in, um, for shooting a nuclear executive in the knee after some particular callous remarks from him following the Fukushima disaster. And that nuclear company has ties with, like, you know, the larger war machine, the manufacturing of, of weapons for war. And, you know, he's caught other charges while being in prison for previously alleged activities, including just being an anarchist, essentially kind of what you talked about straight criminalizing political sensibilities. You know, Italy has been doing that. Chile has been doing that

previously against people like Monica Caballero and Francisco Solar, who have been in and out of prison for years now and are currently facing more charges for allegedly sending bombs to

police training facilities and such down in Chile and in your own England Toby Shone is someone who got out recently after receiving terrorist

charges for allegedly being involved in an anarchist website called 325 and financing terrorism through accepting donations for their work and things like that. But he did not get convicted of that. He only got convicted of some minor drug charges. And so he's been released to kind of a halfway house now, but they continue to try to mess

with his terms of release because of his politics, because he's an anarchist and unrepentant. They continue to try to mess with him, essentially. On the website, June11.org, there's a page with information about a lot of prisoners, both in the U.S. and internationally. You know a little bit about them. Most of them, it has their address if there's a support site with more information that's linked to it as well okay that's a good

place for people to look anything else you guys wanted to get to to discuss like issues for incarcerated anarchist people or i guess other ways to support incarcerated people i guess i would like to remind your listeners that all prosecutions are political and that people who are locked away in, you know, the cages that are the federal facilities and the state and local and county facilities are all dealing with the same kinds of isolation and deprivations. And a lot of them have even less support than some of our long-term anarchist political prisoners. And so, you know, I understand this is a program about June 11th, and of course, I want to uplift June 11th. But I would also like to suggest that to whatever extent you can get involved in just prisoner support. I think that more support for more prisoners is always a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Be in the streets in whatever, by whatever means, fighting the society that makes prison a necessity is, is the longer game, right?

Yeah. You know, related to what Mo was saying, I wanted to mention another long-term anarchist prisoner, Michael Kimball, who is in Alabama. And just thinking about how supporting him has resonated to so many other people in prison in Alabama like the way that he has been able through the support of you know some of his friends on the outside then support like so many other queer people that he's with in Alabama and been able to like

collectively organize and like share radical history like you know they have a have a role in it too and and our support for them can like resonate far beyond just an individual yeah i think that's a great point yeah and other things to mention um we are we have a fundraising goal for marius this year of twenty five hundred dollars um we're trying to get some bookstores on board to you know have some june 11 stickers donate a little bit of money um so go to your local bookstore info shop red space etc nice is there any any other like resources you guys wanted to plug social media is anything that people can follow to find out um you can follow marius's support on twitter at at support marius um There's also an Instagram that I think is at supportmariusmason. I would also like to plug the concept of not talking to cops.

Smart. June 11th also has some social media presence. It's really only regularly active on the Mastodon account, and it's just at June 11-1, at June 11th. Yeah. That was fantastic. Thank you very much, guys. Really appreciate your time.

Thank you all. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Hello, podcast fans uh it's just me today it's just james and we're doing another episode about the border i'm joined today by emmet and david from the borderlands relief collective and we're going to talk a little bit about people doing mutual aid on the border, the situation on the border, and for those of you who live a long way away from it, and a sort of pretty shitty thing that Border Patrol did to some supplies which were left out on the border earlier this month. So yeah, Emmett and David, if you'd like to sort of introduce yourselves and explain a little bit about the roles you play, that would be great. Hey there, I'm happy to be here. My name is Emmett. I am splitting my time between being a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, being a PhD student, and trying to reconcile what it means to be living in this borderlands and being a part of a community that is

partially criminalized depending on who you are, where you come from, and also what it means for you to seek safety and freedom in your life. So I work in several organizing spaces trying to shut down different detention centers as well as supporting folks just supporting folks just making ends meet in San Diego and also supporting people keeping their lives and staying alive in this extreme borderlands that we live on. Hey, my name's David. My job, I work as a surgeon. I've been living in San Diego for about 10 years, and I've been doing humanitarian volunteer work in the borderlands, which we call doing water drops for something like six years. Got started with Border Angels and also did volunteer work with Border Kindness. Highly recommend that organization.

And more recently, have been doing water drops in a mountainous area between San Diego and TJ with friends. And we just recently found a name for our group and it's Borderlands Relief Collective. Great. Yeah. And I think maybe, I think if people think of san diego they think of like the zoo and maybe uh sea world uh and the beach and all that kind of shit so like can you explain what it's like i've spent a lot of time in in the area where you guys do water drops can you explain what it's like and why it's such a difficult area to pass through for people who are trying to move north? Well, yeah, San Diego, as you said, people think of the beach.

But actually, I think someone told me that San Diego County has some of the most diverse kind of ecosystems of any county in the so-called USA. We have high mountains where it snows when it gets cold out. We have low deserts where it routinely exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime. I mean, 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime. the summertime. And as far as the geography of migration, it really goes back to, you know, it's a direct consequence of federal border policy. I think many people will be familiar with the term prevention through deterrence, which is sometimes elaborated as prevention of migration through environmental deterrence. And the whole concept is going way back to Clinton administration, the areas of the border near cities like San Diego were increasingly militarized with high border fence, intense patrol by armed officers, and increasingly recently electronic surveillance.

of relying on the extremely harsh terrain of the deserts and mountains to form a kind of a natural detour. But they quickly found out within basically the first year or so of that federal policy that numbers of people crossing the border did not decrease. However, deaths skyrocketed. That's something we understood, you know, people in Washington, D.C. understood many, many years ago, but the policy persists. So the bottom line is people who are crossing the border from Mexico to the USA often resort to crossing in the most remote and dangerous areas of the border. So the area that we're going to be talking about, this mountainous region between San Diego and Tijuana, literally folks are going up and over the tallest mountain in the area, literally up and over the mountain of extremely arduous walk. and we come home exhausted and we look at our Gaia apps and find that we've only hiked a very small portion

of the actual total journey. And we're always humbled by just the resilience and determination of people who do this crossing. Yeah. Another thing I think people don't realize is that the amount of like physical, uh, just difficulty that people have to endure coming here is immense. And of course, the reason that people are willing to take those risks is because it's not like they come from a place of safety, right? And it's not, it's not, uh, it's not like they, you know, the reason

they're willing to take risks is because it's a risk. Being where they were is a risk. I think a lot of people will maybe have become more engaged with border policy during the Trump era. Certainly, like the legacy media narrative focused on the border very briefly. Like maybe it peaked around the midterms in 2018, I think. And then people have lost a lot of interest since then. So for those of us who live on the border, it's remarkable how little has changed, I think. Maybe it's not particularly remarkable

because I don't think we really expected it to. But can you explain what, if anything, has changed since 2021 and how things have sort of remained the same in many ways? and how things have sort of remained the same in many ways? Yeah, I think it's a really good question, and it brings up a lot of the political nature or kind of skewed identity-based conversations that exist in migration.

And obviously there's a lot of rhetoric that is quite hyperbolic around the so-called morality of people who are migrants in general and then kind of categorizing certain people as worthy or not worthy of entrance into the so-called nation? And kind of furthermore, what does it mean for people to believe any of those narratives and then support them at a federal political level? And as you were saying, during the Trump era, there was a lot of conversation in response to very, very hateful rhetoric from Trump and the administration targeted at certain people, but not from a deep place of really understanding or characterizing the conversation in general,

or speaking by the fact that in San Diego or in California at large, more than half of the farm workers who kind of create this city that we are, or the state that we are, and support the very backbone of the fact that we're all still having our hearts beat, our migrants, and that our economy at large, as well as just the fabric of our nation, is based on migrants and immigration. So for us to pick and choose what that looks like is not only missing the majority of the point, but is using as a talking piece, is really as a talking piece for certain identities to feel vindicated to spend money and support certain for-profit corporations.

For example, CoreCivic, one of the largest prison corporations, private prison corporations in the country, got $1.9 billion the previous year from the federal government. And therefore, like you think about the connection between these enterprises and stories about immigration are quite linked. So I don't have all the statistics in front of me about how this specific number of crossings has changed or the population has changed, but on the whole, nothing has really changed as far as the need goes. So thinking about four years ago, what were the specific crises that were occurring that were causing people to seek safety in the United States? Maybe some specific situations have changed and others have arisen.

And as more and more people are coming to the United States fleeing from climate-related disasters, as well as ongoing stability, it's not as if the U.S. has engaged in any real project to support people to begin with or understand the underlying causes. So from that standpoint, nothing meaningfully has happened from either administration to really understand or create policies that would support anyone seeking safety or from making decisions that are, quote unquote, aligned with U.S. best interests. It's never been a part of the conversation. best interests. It's never been a part of the conversation. It's more to basically capitalize off of people in their suffering, whether that be to be a storyline that US is helping people or is a savior of others, or is trying to crack down on armed bandits or or uh criminals who are crossing crossing this borderland i think it is worth like the course of example is really interesting because biden made a big

thing of like talking about shutting down like quote-unquote private prisons but it's still very much like funding the same things when they're not for people who are citizens of this country or. Yeah. And for those of those who aren't fully versed in, in kind of the, the, the basic relationship between private prisons and immigration, um, there are, is a relationship that, uh, between, uh, customs and border protection, um, and, uh, different prison corporations, uh, to basically, um, put people who are apprehended, who are not initially deported under Title 42 in detention while their cases are ongoing and investigated for asylum or refugee status. or refugee status. And so these prisons make a profit and can basically demand a certain amount of money from the government per person who is in one of their facilities. And there's

also a minimum that they will continually get money from the government, regardless of whether the beds are filled, but they have incentive to keep beds filled. So there is an economic relationship between these corporations and the government to basically put more people in detention. So that's a huge underpinning of this whole conversation is who is getting money and how does it kind of further the certain aims of corporations, but also agencies that basically get a larger amount of federal funding through apprehension of people. Right. Yeah.

Like Biden has funded DHS more than Trump did and like DHS's budget. Does Department of Homeland Security, of which Customs and Border Protection is a part, and Border Patrol is a part of Customs and Border Protection. It's a giant pyramid of of yeah people putting people in prison uh and it's also worth like reinforcing i think for people that like these people have done nothing wrong at the point in which they are incarcerated right like they have obeyed all relevant laws and are getting in conditions which we've decided are not befitting prisoners in the united states but are okay for these people. Not that anyone should be incarcerated, but yeah, there's still a two-tier system.

So can you explain a little bit about your efforts to do mutual aid and to do a little bit of kindness on the border and make things a little bit better out there for people who are coming north? things a little bit better out there for people who are coming north? Yeah, what we do, again, just is in collaboration with other organizations that have been around a long time, a lot longer than we have, Border Angels, Border Kindness in California, No More Deaths in Arizona, many other organizations. And it really boils down to we don't want people to die on the trails crossing through the borderlands. And that actually informs where we drop. Unfortunately, all of our recent new routes that we supply, they're directly because we know that people have died in those locations or required rescue. We work in very

close relationship with other volunteer organizations that focus on search and rescue and search and recovery. Search and recovery, meaning recovering human remains of people who have died. So there's a number of outstanding organizations that operate in California, Arizona, Texas. that operate in California, Arizona, Texas. These include Eagles of the Desert, Armadillos, many other organizations. Most of these are actually made up of volunteers who are first-generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And so when people die or require rescue, we do find out from our friends and comrades in these SAR organizations. And we build water drop routes directly around that knowledge. So, yeah, it really boils down to, yeah, we don't want more people to die making this journey. And so as far as what kind of supplies we tops, all kinds of cans of fruit, beans,

chili, whatever we think people may need. Of course, we tailor it based on the time of year. In the mountains in the winter, it gets freezing cold, lots and lots of rain. So we've been leaving waterproof ponchos, warm clothing. And the summer, of course, it gets scorching hot in the desert. People die of hyperthermia. They literally cook to death. That's where electrolytes come in handy. Sun hats, bandanas, baseball hats.

First aid kits. We leave kits full of medical supplies. And more recently, you know, just observing the kind of used items that we find on the trail, kids stuff, diapers, pacifiers uh you know uh we leave you know tampons um you know that kind of stuff um uh containers of infant formula so it's a it's a it's kind of an iterative process um just leaving what we think people need and um yeah that's that's kind of what we do and just so folks are super clear this is all like a an initiative among you and your comrades, right? You're not supported by any government entity. The government entity is kind of doing quite the opposite of what you're doing.

Yeah, correct. We are all volunteers in the sense that nobody is paid. We don't have any formal affiliations with any other NGOs, much less governmental organizations. Right. So maybe people are wondering, they might have been familiar with the court case in Arizona, or they might not be like, if what you're doing is considered to be like legal humanitarian aid or not. Are you comfortable talking about that?

Yeah. So I think that's definitely a gray area that we find ourselves really occupying. And I think that's a bit of this kind of propaganda machine is what does it mean to engage with somebody who is seeking safety and fleeing for their lives. There's a certain place where that's touted to be a wonderful thing if you're Catholic charities and are providing beds. And for example, I wanted to make that distinction between several kind of charity organizations who do receive federal money to be engaged in this conversation versus grassroots mutual aid networks and communities who are doing this because it feels like it's part of their community's mission, their family's mission, or it means it's part of them being true to themselves and true to what feels just in this very confusing world. So what we're doing is very explicitly leaving humanitarian aid supplies that are potentially life-saving in

areas where we know people need them we are not having any specific or hands-on or person-to-person engagement uh with anybody uh so there in arizona nomas muertes became part of a conversation about providing critical medical support. And that was a court case that really tested the limits of what does it mean to be in this gray area. And what was really important from the nuances in that conversation were what constitutes aiding and abetting or so-called aiding and abetting illegal immigration, which is basically, again, a very large gray area between are you enticing people to cross? Are you being paid as a smuggler to cross? Are you doing something which is encouraging people to cross?

None of which was activity that was engaged with Numas Muertes or us. But in their case, specifically providing medical aid crossed the boundary and they were raided. Their camp and their impromptu field tents where they were providing life-saving medical support was raided. And the finer points of that were that the outset being that the First Amendment protects humans in their religious freedom to practice whatever it be that furthers their religious beliefs and faith. And a very large point of their work was their affiliation and dedication to preserving human life, which, as we can imagine, for many folks listening to this or in general, that is very core to their belief system.

And so there are very clear protections in the First Amendment of preserving people's right to practice their religion. So that was a case that kind of established a lot of what we're working under is these basic protections to be humanitarian aid workers following basic belief systems. What we're doing specifically is leaving supplies. So leaving supplies, the most egregious thing you can basically say about that is that we're littering or that we're abandoning property. And so again, no mas martes, and in this larger conversation, it was established in the court that leaving humanitarian aid supplies that were with the intent of saving lives is not litter. So that was also a very big point which is saying no we are not just kind of going walking down the street and throwing out your bottle in the back of your truck

this is specifically with the intent of saving lives. And the third place is that we are abandoning something in this in this area that would be constituted abandoned property. And as we'll speak about maybe more in the future, our supplies are consumed quite rapidly and there is a statute in this state of is it abandoned property, it has to be left for more than 10 days to be considered abandoned property. So even if we are leaving things in these regions, it is not considered abandoned property. It's been less than 10 days. So basically, I guess, just to say that nothing we're doing is illegal

from any standpoint. And also the case in Arizona kind of helped make a distinguishing, kind of helped make a distinguishing uh make some distinctions between whether our activity is is also frowned upon in public land which it is not because it is constituting uh humanitarian aid in a place that is desperately needed right and i think if folks go out to like i mean most people aren't going out to like valley of the moon or what have you but like if you want to look for abandoned stuff there it's not hard to find and uh it's not you guys doing that like shooting barrels or whatever that you know like someone was shooting a barrel last time i was out there let's talk about how quickly those supplies are consumed because i think again that will be

like news to some people right like you guys are out there every week and like how much stuff are you dropping and how quick does it go yeah to tell you the truth we're still we're still uh finding out ourselves because every time we think we know the answer we're surprised by how fast it's being consumed the bottom line is it's being consumed as fast as we can leave the supplies. So Emmett and I and many other of the members of our organization, Borderlands Relief Collective, we also are active in Border Kindness and in the past with Border Angels. And so we're used to a certain rhythm of doing a water drop, circling back usually a month later, and we're happy if maybe half of the supplies have been consumed.

That's a good day. When we started doing water drops in this mountainous region, first of all, we were just blown away by the evidence of heavy foot travel. I mean, these are, even though you'll never find a hiker, a recreational hiker on these trails, they look like established trails. They're worn in trails. And when we started doing these water drops, there's just a river of discarded water bottles, water bottles, clothing, food wrappers, and just things that we have never seen before, that amount of human activity, literally on the top of a mountain, where you never would think, why would someone cross over a top of a mountain to get from point A to point B? So, like I said, we're still learning what the proper interval is. Some of these locations that we drop, we come back a week later and they're pretty much 100%

consumed. So yeah, we really, it's become apparent, we've been having a lot of discussions that we're very eager in trying to expand our number of volunteers, because the more we do this in this mountainous region over the mountain. And we know that this is just one of many paths that are used by people in this region. So really, we're finding 100% consumption every week or two at most of our drop spots. Yeah. So if people did want to, we could just get that in here. So if people did want to, we could just get that in here now. If people did want to help you and they're in the region, would they be able to, is there a way they could reach out?

Yeah, sure. We just, like I said, we just came up with our name after a fun communal decision-making process. And we just, a couple of days ago, did our first post on social media. So if anybody's on Instagram, just search for Borderlands Relief Collective and click on the email and send us a DM, get in touch. If you're anywhere near the San Diego, we'd love to talk to you um and definitely would like to expand the number of

volunteers so you spoke a little bit about like we spoke about this arizona case right where people got raided um i know you guys have also had some uh less than stellar interactions with uh cbp border patrol specifically um and they get really mad if i call it customs of border patrol because custom border protection uh so you guys had a thing uh i believe it last month now in march um do you want to explain a little bit about what what happened in the incident first of all yeah so as part of our so i think as we already talked about, we go out every weekend. And that's, again, we're all busy lives. Dave is literally a surgeon. And we're basically trying to find a time that we can get people together to go out there.

So we pick the weekends. And we have a changing number of people who are able to be out there with us. able to be out there with us. So as one of our normal water drop weekends, a route that starts basically at a road that is along the ridge of Otay Mountain, we start hiking down the south side towards the border. And I've established multiple routes along that path. And this one particularly is so slow going. You only go a couple of miles and it takes you most of your Saturday because of how steep it is, how thick the brush is. And also kind of, as Dave was saying earlier, even in the middle of day time with hiking boots, it's really treacherous. And we've spent a lot of time making sure that we're safe in the process of going there ourselves. So as we left our first drop and then a second and went down to our final drop and turned back, sorry, going back up the mountain.

And we came to our final drop and turned back and started going back up the mountain and we came to our second drop site and as we arrived we found something that was kind of really hard to process at first for us which was that every single item that we had purposefully put inside of a crate and we had counted and we had left as we do was scattered and littered across the ground. We had left more than 20 liters of water and every single bottle of water was opened and dumped out and thrown indiscriminately around this site. We had left, again, something like 20 cans of food, beans, tuna, condensed milk, fruit, and every single can had been opened and had been its contents thrown around the area.

We had left bags of socks and hats and those were covered in beans and fruit and again thrown into bushes so they could not be used. We had hand warmers because it's very cold and hand warmers are essential to kind of keep mobility. And every single one was diligently opened as if someone had really enjoyed taking time opening it and thrusting into the dirt. And that was something that was like so painful and just confusing, very demoralizing, as you can imagine, after just hiking that far. But more so, it felt so deliberate and hurtful. And initially, we were of course wondering what had happened. We've done this for several years, many years, and never had we seen something like this before. And it became very apparent that someone had deliberately destroyed our crate. Even the crate itself, this milk carton, was smashed in half.

The bottom of it was torn out. And that is something that's very hard to achieve. Milk cartons are not very light, thin plastic. This was someone who had actively put a lot of force into smashing a milk cart so that nothing was left behind. On the way down, one thing that I didn't say a second ago was that we had seen an agent on the trail, which was unique for us because normally they're just in their cars with binoculars looking from the road. So we had seen someone near the trail, but lost track of

them earlier. And we had kind of put it out of our minds. So after that happened, we had kind of put two and two together and were wondering if this agent had followed us down the trail to the site. And then while we had left, stayed behind and destroyed the goods. It seemed like the beans were still drying and the fruit was still drying in the goods. It seemed like the beans were still drying and the fruit was still drying in the sunlight so it hadn't have been too far from the time that we had dropped initially. And this is at a moment that there was five of us and trying to figure out what it meant for us to deal with this. Several, two of us including myself, raced ahead to try to interact with whoever has upped

the trail, knowing that they couldn't have been too far away. Not with any specific plan, other than just ask them what did they do and why did they do that, just in the sense of outrage, the sense of just like moral corruption, that someone would destroy this in a time that, that the CBP, as well as we know that people are losing their lives because of lack of access to these very goods that were destroyed. Yeah. So we raced,

raced back as fast as we could. It was about a 45 minute hike back up. And we were really breathless and almost as a kind of point of feeling sick to our stomachs because we were both outraged and also hikes faster than we should have. And just as we'd gotten back to our cars, kind of giving up hope that we'd interact with them, we saw two agents in their cars kind of pull away and we flagged them down and got in front of them and kind of motioned for them to come back so we could speak to them. And I'm not saying we're the most savvy people, but we basically ran up to them and said, did you destroy these, our supplies?

Which they acknowledged that they did. And only afterwards were we able to get our wits together to start recording them. And as you'll hear in the audio, they acknowledge the fact that they knew where our site was and they acknowledge the fact that they regularly destroy goods. And for us, the entire interaction was just so sickening. First of it, after a while,

there was five of them with their guns and their large guns out, as well as their basic intention to use intimidation, their sheer numbers, as well as this kind of perverse authority they have as the sole agents in charge of this public land. This is wilderness and BLM land in which they have no authority over us, use this this sense of just power and ability to cause harm to minimize anybody else being able to to advocate for themselves so we tried to stop them from from doing that and and kept asking them did you destroy our water and why did you do that and is

that within your job description because there was something very clear to them to us that they didn't even know what their legality was they kept kept trying to deflect it. The conversation saying, oh, migrants are leaving trash all the time and referring to people as illegal aliens with this kind of larger rhetoric of saying that they're trashing the mountainside, like it's their fault. And as we repeatedly asked them, did you destroy our water? And they repeatedly said, well, have you seen have you seen what they do? And then kind of also saying, well, yeah, we try to clean things up. We try to pick them up. But that specific site was too far. So we just left it. We just destroyed it and left it. Which, as on the piggybacking on their conversation about this trash and that we're littering,

and they're accusing us of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, they basically have nothing left to say about what their actions meant and their purview, their mandate of their jobs. And it was an act you could tell they were uncomfortable with because they were not within their job description. And we asked for their supervisor. They said they're going to get on the phone with the supervisor. The supervisor never materialized. And we can only assume that they had a conversation with somebody in a superior saying, back down. What you're doing is not correct.

And don't engage further. And since then, we've had a conversation with their superiors and with CBP offices to the effect of saying that this was not within their job description and they did not condone this activity. So kind of looking into that further, they were very much acting as individuals, but individuals within a culture of abuse and within a culture of of sabotaging humans access to life-saving supplies and that was nothing new to them that they said they had nothing they had never encountered somebody trying to oppose them for doing that It's not a bottom property. Yeah, it is. No, it's not a bottom property. Whose property is it then? Ours.

Did you pop it? Well, it was slashed by the time we got back to it. Okay, wait, wait, wait. How do you accuse that? Wait a second. Let me ask you a simple question. The creek down there with the water and all that, was that yours? Yeah, it was my water, yeah.

Was that yours too? Yeah. So it was your property. Exactly, and you bought it and you slashed it. And, is that yours too? Yeah. So it's your property. Exactly. And you bought it and you slashed it. And I'm wondering why you did that. You left your property behind?

We did not leave the property behind. We were going on a hike down there. While we were on a hike, we slashed all our water. You guys were going on a hike? Is it in your job description to slash water and open cans and dump food all over the public land and wilderness area? It's an abandoned property. But then you pick it up and carry it to your car then.

No, it's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It's a long hike. It land and wilderness area? It's abandoned property.

But then you pick it up and carry it to your home then. No, it's a long hike. Why would I do that? No, I'm like curious. I'm just curious. It's okay for you to record. We have jurisdiction to patrol within 25 miles of the border. And 100 people. And look for public property? Look for abandoned property.

We find private property all the time, but the illegal immigrants leave behind. And what do you do with it? We destroy it, we try to clean it up. That's cleaning it up? That's one of the things we tried to do. That was not cleaning it up. We either empty it out or we try to clean it up. That one was too far for us to bring back. So you decided to just trash the whole area?

So you decided to just trash the whole area? Like when they're funded and equipped and transported and armed by the state, then like it's not the same as individuals just because we've seen that in Arizona, right? Like people who are militias or what have you going out and sabotaging life-saving supplies as well. But it's still a little different when, you know, we have to pay taxes for them to go destroy water caches and these are people who regularly as we've seen on multiple occasions use helicopters to try to flush people out of uh under a tree that they fly within 30 feet of the ground and use the force of the rotors to force people out and up a hillside to waiting cars so their use of money and their use of force is definitely central to the tactics yeah yeah or

he's helicopters to fire tear gas into mexico and it did a few years ago but yeah it's certainly um and that intimidation is like if i think people, who don't live here might not be familiar with it. Like, I've been out down by the border with Kumeyaay people doing religious ceremony and had Bortak guys dressed like, you know, like Navy SEALs hanging out with AR-15s and plate carriers while people, like, burn sage and pray. It's, yeah, I mean, the militarization, if you somehow can't conceive to care of people dying in the

desert the militarization of the border still affects everyone here and it makes our lives less safe um there's a crime thinks crime think slogan that i always like to like use in these things which is the border doesn't protect you it controls you which i think is is kind of apt for this so now that they've trashed your supplies right and you found out they weren't supposed to uh i'm interested like how going forward does that mean that you can't use that route you can't drop stuff there anymore because you're worried about it happening again or because you're worried about them hanging out there to intercept people who are using your like supply cache on the contrary um we've learned from the examples

of other people who have been doing this work um emmet already mentioned um no mas martes no more deaths in arizona dr scott warren we've learned so much from their example where, you know, they were hauled into federal court and won. And so we've learned from from their examples of how to how to do this, as well as within here in California, the history of border angels. Border Angels. So back a few years ago, Border Patrol was slashing gallons of water in the deserts of eastern San Diego County, as well as Imperial County. On one particular day, the Border Angels volunteers found about 50 gallons of water slashed in the most violent way, of water slashed in the most violent way. And they knew it was border patrol. And so the way border angels responded was number one, to change their tactics, to start dropping supplies deeper in the backcountry, where the border patrol agents, you know, it's rare to find a BP agent that's motivated enough to really hike for too far away from their air conditioned vehicles in the summertime. So number one,

they were going farther away from the roads and highways to the actual routes that people are walking. Number two, they punched back hard in public using social media. Back then, it was Facebook. This is going to be right when Instagram was getting popular. But just getting the word out. Border Angels is an organization that's been around for decades. They have a big following, the word spread. And just like many bullies, you know, they kind of back down if you get in their phase, sometimes. So that was our experience with this practice of Border Patrol slashing gallons in the desert with Border Angels. So when this crime occurred on March 18th in the mountains, we knew we could not back down. So we went back a few days later.

That's when, as Emmett mentioned, we witnessed a Border Patrol helicopter for about an hour flying about, you know, it seemed like, seemed like you know 10 15 feet off the ground uh really really low using the the rotor wash to flush a flush human beings out of the brush as if they were hunting animals um and then we were back you know the next seven days later after they destroyed the supplies we went back with a good group, number one, to clean up this shameful mess these two Border Patrol goons left. We cleaned up all of that stuff and we left probably, what, three times the amount of original supplies. And on our milk crates, we actually left laminated signs that addressed one by one all of the accusations that these Border Patrol agents tried to make against us. So the signs say, do not destroy, do not remove.

This is not garbage. We are not littering. And this is not abandoned property. These are humanitarian aid supplies protected by federal case law, the 1994 Protection of Religious Freedom Act, and so on and so forth. so on and so forth. So we put those signs just prominently on the milk crates, you know, just to send a message that no, we're not going to back down, we are going to leave supplies. It is within our rights, and it is in support of human rights to do this. So of course, we have to be strategic about this. I mean, there is the danger, you know, we're always going back to the same place, you know, we're kind of, you know, blowing up the spot, as it were, you know, we're bringing heat to a route that's needed by people making a crossing. And so we are mindful of that, you know, we don't, we try to go to different places on different weekends and not try to bring too much attention to these paths. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I wonder like if people are, I was just thinking

for people to visualize the area, is there a place they could look up on like Google Earth so they could see like where this kind of stuff is happening? Are you comfortable? You don't have to give like an exact location, obviously. Yeah, actually, I mean, speaking of Google Earth, you mentioned Valley of the Moon. I mean, Google Earth is impressive enough. Anybody can just use Google Earth and zoom in all the way and just follow along the border, and you'll find thousands of footpaths.

follow along the border and you'll find thousands of footpaths. So yeah, it doesn't take much detective work to actually visually see these footpaths. But yeah, it's real steep terrain, as Emmett mentioned. The last couple times we've gone back to this spot where the two agents destroyed the supplies. Emmett has actually brought a mountain climbing rope just to make certain sections easier where we're kind of rappelling down this dry waterfall. So really, really steep, very loose trails, very easy to break an ankle. And it just, in that context, it really hits you. We see so many shoes and boots along the path and just have to kind of just pause and think, well, if this person lost their shoe, if the sole of their boot melted off and they're hours away from the nearest road, what does it mean?

How did they complete the journey? Did they complete their journey? So, yeah, a little bit hard to describe, but I guess anybody who's, I guess, kind of familiar with Southern California, steep mountains, loose terrain, kind of get the picture. Yeah, yeah. They can look up Valley of the Moon. There's plenty of pictures of the very intimidating border fence that they have there. It's like three foot high and rusty. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to address that you feel like maybe people don't,

Is there anything else that you guys wanted to address that you feel like maybe people don't, that people should know about the board that they don't, about the work you do that maybe is misunderstood? Yeah, I guess I want to maybe bring up some of what I think is hard to convey to people who aren't there and aren't connected to a community who is suffering because of this or who aren't maybe thinking along the lines of what it means to be a human in this space and actually be risking your life and coming up against helicopters and a federally backed militia who is

actively seeking to harm you. None of us in our group are claiming anything more than just witnessing what it means to be out there. But I guess what's been true for me and in kind of my conversations with my community over the last couple of years just trying to share this, there is so much pain that is being inflicted upon this landscape and there is so much harm that is actively supported by our nation while people are in some of the most intimate and painful moments of their lives leaving your home whether it be in another continent where you need to take a flight over to make this crossing, or whether it be hiking through Central America, starting in South America for

months before reaching this moment, or leaving your family and your community closer to the border. These are moments that anyone who is alive could feel the pain of and the misery of having to abandon all that you know and put yourself at the mercy of the desert and CBP's overly aggressive and harmful tactics. So beyond all of the cases and the politics, I oftentimes, as we're walking, just try to put myself in the position

of someone who is making these decisions. And as Dave was saying, we're coming across people's clothing, food, underwear, places they've slept. we're coming across people's clothing, food, underwear, places they've slept, and the amount of the poignancy of human desire to be safe, to come to a place where they feel like their lives can be protected, or that that choice is worthwhile, is something that is so lost in the numbers and the amount of people who die or what happens after it. And so for us, I think making it not about your political beliefs or the asylum process, but just the actual choices people half having to make very human decisions um that is something that is kind of

haunts us um and the feeling that uh all we can do is is leave water in a place that it might make the difference between someone in that position uh surviving or not um and and furthermore just living in a community where you know from, from the top of the mountain, we can see downtown San Diego and all of the luxury of this military town, all of the universities and all of this opportunity that we, we, we enjoy. to just water. Feeling how similar humans are to each other and our basic needs and how that's being taken from people is really harmful. And particularly, as you were saying, these are areas held sacred by the Kumeyaay people and have been places of migration for at least 10,000 years. These are places that were difficult to travel and that people did for similar reasons to survive, to be safe. And there is a legacy of Oyas, of clay pots buried in the sand for travelers that has been ongoing for thousands of years. And for our current administration and government to create this wall in this place of so much pain is just testament to just the insanity of our desire to protect border against something else, protecting the borders against something that we feel is harmful to us. Meanwhile, this migration is fundamentally how we survive and how we respond to these moments

of change in humanity and criminalizing that and causing hardship of that is just barbaric. I'll let you collect your thoughts and you can come back and make that statement because I think you do it very eloquently. But I want to jump on there and just kind of echo and elaborate on what you said. Yeah, we find lots and lots of physical items, but we also meet people on the trails. And that's a new thing. You know, I've been doing these water drops for some time now. But when you say what has changed under Biden, not much. There's more people crossing the border than ever. There are more people dying than ever. As far as a volunteer who spends most weekends out in the borderlands, the only thing I noticed is they stopped building Trump's 30-foot high fence and they started pouring all that money into

electronic surveillance where every single month we see more towers popping up all along the border with all kinds of very, very fancy military-grade surveillance equipment, as well as aerial surveillance. Lots of airplanes, helicopters. I'm not sure if they're using drones, but certainly there's a lot of aerial surveillance. I'm not sure if they're using drones, but we certainly there's a lot of aerial surveillance. But what we see as far as the human dimension is in the old days, you know, we see footprints. We see shoe covers, you know, which people wear on their feet to hide their footprints from Border Patrol. We see the empty water bottles and discarded clothing.

empty water bottles and discarded clothing. But now we're encountering people pretty much every time we do a water drop because the number of people crossing is so high. People are crossing in the daytime, whereas in the past, usually they would cross at night. So wouldn't you say, Emmett, like pretty much it's pretty much every time we go out, So, wouldn't you say, Emmett, like pretty much, it's pretty much every time we go out, at least one of our volunteers, if not the whole group, sees or even interacts with a migrant on the paths. And, you know, and of course, we respect their autonomy, their privacy. We don't engage with them if they don't want to engage with us.

But the thing that I'll never forget is about a month ago, we were out in this exact same area supplying the same path. It was a rainy day, cold. We were wearing our Gore-Tex insulated clothing. We'd done a water drop. While we were doing the water drop, we can see on the next mountain peak, a Border Patrol helicopter landing to pick up somebody who required rescue. And this is a case that we had been getting updates all night with Armadillos, one of the search groups. And thankfully, this person was found alive and Border Patrol was so-called rescuing him, another word for arresting him. And after we witnessed that, we hiked back to our vehicles. We hiked back to our vehicles. Just as we were getting to the trailhead, the exact same location where on March 18th, Emmett and other volunteers had this interaction with the two Border Patrol agents who destroyed the humanitarian aid supplies, the exact same parking spot, we pop out and start walking toward our vehicles and it starts snowing and two individuals come out of the mist and approach us and start talking to us in Spanish.

And talking to these two people, these two men, one young, one middle-aged, in the course of the conversation, you know, sorry, I kind of choke up when I talk about this stuff. Yeah, it's okay. But yeah, so this is the younger of the two was 16 years old and the older dude was his father. We encountered them as it was snowing. So of course, first thing we did is got them in our vehicles. One of our volunteers, avid hiker, had his backpacking stove with him and cooked up some tea and some, you know, gave them food and, you know, let them warm up. We gave them literally the, you know, Gore-Tex winter coats off our backs to warm up. And once the, you know, the dad was shivering violently, really, really showing signs of clinical hypothermia and talking to the younger man who was in better physical shape, he was

explaining that the two of them were hiking through the mountains because um his mother uh was already living in the usa they were trying to reunite with her and they had been in this mountainous region for the past two days and looking at them uh they're wearing hoodies, you know, like, you know, sweatshirts, sweatpants and sneakers in this. And anybody who lives down here in Southern California, you know, we've had a very unusual winter, lots and lots of rain. So it had been raining heavily over the past two days. And nighttime temperatures in the 30s. And these two men had been out there for two days, soaked to the bone. And that's why they approached us, because they were in trouble and they were asking

for help. So after they warmed up, we discussed the options. Of course, you know we we respect their autonomy um you know they have the option to try to continue going uh on their way with with supplies or if uh they felt it was unsafe to do so we were ready uh to help them the heartbreaking thing is you know they did ask us could we let them ride in our vehicles off the mountain and we had to explain that you know we were we were pretty much guaranteed to encounter border patrol agents on that road and that really it's not something that that we could do because you know that that you, that, that, you know, we, we could be arrested

and charged, you know, for federal felony crimes. But we said, look, you know, if you really feel you can't continue, we will help you contact, you know, call 911. But we explained that's, that's a hundred percent going to result in border patrol coming because as folks may know, patrol coming. Because as folks may know, you know, you know, in the USA along the border, you know, emergency medical response, search and rescue is unfortunately considered in the domain of law enforcement. So if you are a US citizen, or if you are someone from another country that happened to come here and have a visa or just be considered the good type of foreigner, you know, you're going to have a very impressive response with sheriff's sheriff's department search and rescue volunteer organizations. If there's any hint that you may be a so-called undocumented person. It immediately gets sent to Border Patrol. And you have, you know, Boar Star respond, the Border Patrol search and rescue group, which is a far cry from the civilian search and rescue folks.

So we explained to them, if we call 911, you're going to be apprehended. You're going to be arrested by Border Patrol. And after thinking about it and discussing, they said, yeah, we, you know, we cannot continue. on uh you're you're gonna be apprehended you're gonna be arrested by border patrol and after thinking about it and discussing they said yeah we you know we cannot continue we we're we're you know this is uh too dangerous so we did call 9-1-1 and border patrol did come and um frisked them and uh cuffed them and did arrest them. That's not the only time. Too often we have witnessed

human beings being arrested by Border Patrol. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important to give faces and names to these things rather than like Border Patrol will constantly talk about the million whatever encounters, right? They like to fucking inflate the numbers because it's often the same people.

But each one of those is a tragedy, right? a choice between risking their life in one place or risking their life coming to another place just so their kids can have a crack at growing up safely or so they can be safe or so they can experience like one-tenth of the things that we take for granted every day like that's an incredible human tragedy and and yeah they happen every single day every hour of every day at our border because of the things that our government does there. And yeah, it's important to feel that stuff because I think that should provoke in all of us a very strong reaction. It's pretty messed up that there's almost universal bipartisan agreement that it's fine and okay by people who have never been here and don't understand.

One other thing I want to add, and Emmett, you may have other things. One thing I wanted to really center is something we've referenced several times, the Kumye. You know, this is Kumye land. These are the indigenous people who have lived here since the beginning of time. The archaeological record goes back 10,000 years, but we know people have been here since the beginning of human time, really. And look at the map, this so-called border cuts in half traditional Kumeyaay territory.

border cuts in half uh traditional kumye territory uh when we do these water drops out in the desert or in the mountains you know these these paths that that people are using to migrate are often uh or in many many cases uh traditional kumye paths And we see evidence of that every time we do a water drop, especially out in the desert areas where it's a rare water drop that we will not find pottery shards lying in the sand or come across rock shelters, some with pictographs. And, you know, it's just, you know, very poignant juxtaposition of Kumeyaay cultural artifacts with modern day, you know, shoe covers, discarded water bottles. And of course, many people who do migrate are indigenous themselves. So, yeah, personally, you know, I view all of these border issues through the lens of history, culture, with the core truth that this is indigenous land this is kumye land and it had has always been and uh the modern so-called border is a very recent uh political um creation you know that you know mid-19th century you know before

that this was mexico and now now where we we call it the the, but this is all recent. And from my perspective, unless you are a Kumye, I really don't know how anybody can really get on their high horse and really speak with any authority about who belongs here, who belongs here, who doesn't belong here. Because the rest of us, we are all guests on Kumeyaay land. That includes every single Border Patrol agent. And that's something I always like to remember. Yeah, yeah. The border is very much like colonialism in action. And it's even, we're going to have some Kumeyaay folks, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, to talk about the desecration of Kumeyaayay burial sites by the border wall which is an ongoing thing like i haven't

stopped when the just i can't tell stories about it like i could in 2020 because you know orange man bad isn't a thing anymore but yeah like all across the border right not just here the yaki the tohonod um all all across the border native land. The whole of the so-called United States is native land. And it's not indigenous folks out there trying to kill people in the desert. Is there anything, Emmett, that you wanted to add? Yeah, I just want to say this. Well, I know we're going to ramble forever, so we'll stop rambling in a second. But I guess I really want to say, and this is coming from a very skewed white male's perspective, but I just feel like so much of these power structures that we're engaged with and us as a nation trying to find our identity. in this moment where climate and social instability is at its height. I mean, in my

lifetime, and I think in many of our lifetimes, we see this as a really precarious moment. It just feels so hypocritical to police people's sovereignties to find safety and to be in safety. You know, we have all of these ideals in our country around respecting each other's freedoms. And also as we are importing and exporting so many goods and also so much culture and so fundamentally intertwined with the lives of people from all over the world, for us to say what is wrong and what is right in this moment and for us to have this this moral authority to to put people in in in prison just for for for seeking safety for many years and of course i have many people i know and live with who have been in in who went were in detention for

for several years um for seeking that the the The amount of just how twisted it is that we are comfortable spending our lives as Americans never considering or never really critically engaging with this active pursuit, these actions to limit people's ability to survive. It feels like it really needs to be centered in this conversation. And again, this is coming from my skewed perspective, but I just, I really want to make the point clear, this is not about, this is not about these lofty ideals of what a country could be or who and who is not justified or useful in our country.

We make these arbitrary assessments of what's justified or what's legal and not legal. And very often those are just continuing the legacy of exploitation of black and brown people, the exploitation of landscapes, the exploitation of labor, the exploitation of people whose voices are not heard politically, economically. in Otaime Eastern Center, people who are detained are cleaning their own cells and their labor is actually being exploited as well. You can't distinguish the fact that there is the history of policing in our country and the history of prisons is specifically a project to continue white supremacy. And you can see particularly the differential policing of immigration currently and the differential way that certain people from certain countries are or are not valid to enter this country. And at the very least, be treated with respect and dignity in their process. respect and dignity in their process and that's what we see cbp uh every single day violating people's basic access to human dignity and access to life which are protected by all nations in in writing and very often not in practice yeah yeah i think that's well said like it's a very basic human thing it doesn't need to be like shrouded in constitutional law and like you also

said a capital flows very freely across across the border um but people aren't allowed to and yeah it's pretty messed up guys where can people if they want to support if they want to just send a kind word where can people find you uh on the internet i know the best way probably is on instagram we have an account borderlands relief collective uh reach out to us and i do want to give a shout out to our our sister organizations uh border kindness their water drop program program led by Jacqueline and James, has been doing tremendous work for years. Border Angels, which is kind of the parent organization of Water Drop volunteer groups in California. Our comrades who do search and rescue, as well as recovery of those who have died, including armadillos and aguilas, eagles of the desert. Very, very proud to be in this community of people who are trying to help people in the borderlands.

Yeah. Thank you very much, guys. That was really great. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here

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