It Could Happen Here - National Guard on Subways and Other Crime Panics

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Mia and James discuss how Democratic lawmakers are using national deployments and rafts of anti-crime laws to run a crime panic fueled authoritarian crackdown.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

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have you been pregnant? Or have there been pregnancies? So... I like, have there been pregnancies? Yeah, that was what I was like, what? It's like the officer involved shooting of human life she like she walks up to the thing right and she she she puts the like she puts the meds like like she's about to ring them up right and then she stops and then turns and walks with

another person starts talking to her boss and then comes back and then asks me if they've been pregnant so i was like what it's like i am not passing i'm just wearing i'm just wearing like jeans like a mask and just like a random coat i is so it's been a it's been a time yeah achievement in the world of health care where they can simultaneously uh like ask you for being pregnant and then make you fucking labor unpaid for half a day to obtain your like basic hormone therapy or whatever it is that you need like i've my favorite is when the health insurance makes me uh this is a podcast about health insurance and how we hate it i hope you're enjoying it when they're like hey we need a

doctor to confirm you still need the insulin what the fuck do you think has happened if i cured this shit you would have heard about it i didn't at home pancreas transplant didn't bill you guys for it you're welcome yeah with with me is james who is from a country that is more normal about health care but is now here yeah Yeah, it's a country that... Well, normal's not the right word, but it's less shit, is the correct word. Unless you're trans, in which case it's about a toss-up. I was going to say, yeah.

A country which has a different approach, at least has accepted the fact that if we're going to have the state pay for sending bombs to kill little children in Palestine, it should also pay for my insulin, which I think is a good place to start i guess yeah there's an ideal combination there um no we no one is yet reached uh this is this is this is the task of international socialism etc etc yeah yeah i will accept the necessity of the state only when it funds insulin not bombs

yeah but we are here to talk about another incredibly violent state bureaucracy and the people who run it we're going to be talking about a series of very bizarre and incredibly authoritarian crackdowns that uh democratic well governors city councils many many such cases yeah have have been have been invoking to nominally crack down on crime a thing that is down everywhere and has been down everywhere for a long time yeah i know many such cases it's great that uh that democrat like local politicians are now doing everything that we were warned that republican president would do four years ago yeah it's really fun and i mean this is one of these things so so the place we're going to start is uh new york governor holtrol holtrol i don't i think that's how you pronounce your name holtrol

yeah i don't know new york keeps going through politicians faster than I can learn how to pronounce their names. So, they're going to have Andrew Cuomo IV in power by the time this episode goes out. There'll be two new kings of England. The secret sibling. Oh, yeah. We're not making a podcast about the royal family

nonsense. We don't care. Nope. This is the best that you're getting out of that. Hootrol has deployed 750 national guardsmen to stand outside of some subway stations that's a tongue twister try saying that one five times as fast in the mirror to like do bag checks and generally just sort of stand around and be intimidating yeah it's great uh i'm sure it's what those people signed up to do i'm sure they feel fulfilled and i'm sure everyone in new york feels safer and happier as a result of random people in camouflage being uh standing around a subway yeah and we're going to get into

the sort of emotional effective aspect of this because that is ultimately what this is about but i i think okay there's a there's a lot of sort of interesting aspects of this so okay there's been a lot of talk about what the sort of precursors to this are and i'm gonna ask you about because there's a lot of national there's a lot of very weird absolutely dog shit national guard deployments that have happened yes yeah yes there are i have uh yeah yeah we can get on to that yeah but i think i think that the most immediate predecessor to this that that leaps to mind is something i talk about on the show all the time because everyone else seems to have completely forgotten it i refuse

to let this be memory hold which is the time that my previous shitty mayor ordered a bunch of in 2020 ordered a button this is in february 2020 so this is this is pre-uprising put just started putting SWAT teams on subways oh great they immediately did the thing the SWAT team does which is they started putting SWAT teams on the fucking red line they immediately shot a guy for no reason like i think i i if i'm remembering correctly the the thing that originally they said it was fair evasion and it wasn't fair evasion it was the guy walked from one train car to another train car, a thing that millions of people do every day. Yeah, and capital punishment for fair evasion is also wrong and bad.

Yeah, luckily, this guy somehow survived. They shot him in the back. But yeah, they also tased him a bunch of times and then shot him. Right, good, yeah. Bad. However, thankfully, this guy survived but yeah but this is something that that happens you you this is something that you know with the current crop of right-wing mayors have been doing and you know the 2021 ended with such a fiasco that even even like chicago's machine well it wasn't really quite the machine but like even chicago's

right-wing democrats were like okay we probably shouldn't do this unless the SWAT teams have their like start the killing moment but you know i and so that that's like one sort of predecessor to this and the second one is i wanted to actually ask you specifically about the the federal national guard deployments on the border because i think yeah that's the part of this has just been like disappeared yes exactly again those have been like completely overlooked and kind of memory hold by uh most apparently like since since biden came to power like there's there's the texas state deployment right which we're all very familiar with they get cheated out of their their benefits uh they they tend to die um from suicide from bringing their own

firearms on deployment or uh getting drunk and driving around they've had like higher casualties than they've had in deployments to iraq in in their uh the texas deployment right the federal one is different i see these dudes often it's nearly always dudes i did of course women could be deployed in that capacity but i haven't seen them and they are for the most part like scared kids with firearms guarding prison camps full of children uh like i had one of these guys go to draw his pistol on me the other day because i was trying to alert him yeah i mean like i guess like it's better in that situation that like it's not my first time having someone draw a pistol on me and i can tell him to sit down and stop being a dick but this uh in this case right someone had had was was experiencing cardiac distress and when i'd gone to the nearest person who i can do right like i can't call an

ambulance and have them come in there i have to go to either get bp to radio or in this case national guard so but what they're doing is in addition to like guarding these uh open air detention sites on and off is they are conducting kind of surveillance along the border so often i'll see them with like surveillance arrays cameras uh i assume also like listening to radios and stuff like that and they're not actually like interdicting or arresting migrants they're not supposed to be anyway but what it's supposed to be doing is that they're kind of having that surveillance capacity and i guess protection when it comes to the to the oads um but yeah they are everywhere like i see these people all the time

down here in uh you know certainly in the eastern san diego county border and i don't and they're all in rented vehicles as well which is weird that they haven't got their uh humvees or whatever it it must be a significant expense and obviously border crossings are not decreasing thanks to them being there right they they you know they mostly like cruise around i was out doing a water drop on sunday and you'll see them cruising around the dirt roads and then obviously people therefore just avoid the roads it doesn't make it doesn't reduce migration like everything else it just makes it more dangerous and but yeah they've been here for a while it's one of these things where you know they're they're doing okay so like the the guys in New York just basically seem to be

standing around doing bag checks whereas those guys are doing a lot more but i i think there's the one of the things that's been happening here and this has been this is you know this is not just i the focus has been on on the like the republican texas deployments right but this is something that both the republicans and the democrats this is from what we're seeing yes and the federal government have decided that you know the thing that we are going to be doing is what are what are and i mean active militia deployments like that's insane like that that is a level of that is a level of authoritarianism that is no that that has become effectively normal right like there was there wasn't i mean there was kind of an outcry against the the subway stuff but like it hasn't stopped like as best i could

tell like they're still out like yeah like it enough nothing none of it stopped it that we've been you know what the thing that we've been forced to accept is not even not just you know because we've already been forced to accept the sort of the militarization of the police right but now it's just straight up the total militarization of society to the extent that, yeah, we just have a bunch of soldiers wandering around doing random security checks and doing surveillance and holding people in these open-air prisons. Yeah, exactly. And deployed way outside their state often right like i think some of the people here from missouri or illinois like some of the less kind of insane are you are you know the people who mistake me for i guess for a member of the cartel judging by that guy's actions or like some ridiculous somehow a threat to him

you know that we can talk to them and you know it's it's a very bullshit mission i think most of them would agree like further east they're just like standing around by the border wall in the baking sun in the desert just just yeah doing security theater but with as you've said real consequences yeah and it's like the thing that is happening is these people have realized that the national guard if you are a senior enough state official is just your private army you can do whatever the fuck you want with it and this is the thing that they're doing with it and i i think we should you know it's worth your private army. You can do whatever the fuck you want with it. And this is the thing that they're doing with it. And I think we should,

you know, it's worth looking at what the sort of justification for this is. Which is probably also, I neglected to mention that there were a dozen Republican government governors who have deployed their national guard to the border, right? Like with not, not as part of the federal deployment,

like to your private army thing and i believe the north dakota it's funded by a private individual like a private individual is covering the state's cost to deploy them to the border like this is nuts yeah fully insane like they're serving as a fucking pmc yeah but i mean we're seeing you know very explicitly we're seeing this fusion of like personal state and corporate power and that's being used to just deploy a bunch of guys with guns to a bunch of random places. And, you know, like, it's worth mentioning that, like, crime rates are down, they're down year on year, they're down, like the broad trend is down, they're like like outrageous like i think it's almost like 50 or something from the 90s right yeah and likewise the ratio of people crossing the border to agents to process them is is much lower than it was in the 90s you know we we have more border patrol agents we have a more militarized Border Patrol. They have all these assets that were previously seen

only as like, I see a Black Hawk all the fucking time. We call it the Scrap Hawk. It's like several Black Hawks. It's like it's not any particular sub-model of Black Hawk. It's like the surviving pieces of several Black Hawks. But yeah, they have a lot of kit that you would think would be military kit. Yeah, and you know so i

i was i i so when i was reading about this i was like okay so i'm trying to figure out how many crimes are actually happening on new york subway system but i'm gonna read this paragraph from reuters because it is it is outrageous there were 38 robberies and 70 thefts, including pickpocketing on the subway system in February, compared to 40 robberies and 98 thefts in the same month last year, according to police data. There were 35 assaults, the same number as for February 2023. About 90 million trips were taken on the subway over the month. Now, that is nuts. The the subway including pickpocketing right you're at about a hundred yeah yeah like a trivial a trivial number of incidents 90 million trips

right this means that like per trip your odds of being pickpocketed are almost literally one in a million this is this is about the same odds you have of being struck by lightning you are 17 times more likely to get killed by a bee or a wasp sting than you are like pickpock like pickpock not even robbed pickpocketed on the subway right so there's i i from what i could i think there was three killings on the new york subway in february yeah there was a shooting i think today or yesterday wasn't there yeah yeah but this is the thing so these things get a lot of of attention right but again 30 million trips we're talking like maybe three maybe four people getting killed a month so that's like one in 30 million rides yeah someone gets shot that is outrageously safe like that is bafflingly startlingly safe but this this sort of brings us to well okay the

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All right, we're back for the ads. We're bringing you, actually, amazingly, advertisements. Part of what part of the whole thing that's happening here, because, you know, one of the big drivers of what's been happening in New York and the reason everyone thinks the subway is unsafe is New York's media market. And very, this is a bit like, you know, so like the media market in the US is not good, right? But very specifically, the New York media market is absolutely batshit. They are nuts.

And this is one of these things where, you know, you may have like a one in 30 million chance of getting killed on a subway. But every single one of those 30 million like incidents, like all those 130 million is every single one of those is like front page news. Right. Because this is, you know, this this is both part of the part of the actual sort of conservative politics of these media organizations they are you know new york media market is dominated by a bunch of right-wing tabloids and a bunch of newspapers that are normally not right-wing but are yeah and so you know there's this sort of breathless coverage of every single time one of these attacks happen and this is one of the things that hutchrell very much like literally says about this you know and like we're at a point in this sort of crime cycle where enough journalists have been screamed at by people who are like the crime rates are all down that the journalists have to include in the article a thing that's like the crime rates are

down right this took like four years of just screaming at them and eventually it worked but you know like kuchel's like asked about this and she goes yeah well it's it's about people feeling it's about like the feeling that people have people have, because they don't seem safe. To fight a space policy. Yeah, yeah, and, you know, this is one of these things where, like, this is, like, how insane the New York media market is over this stuff has had, like, an actual substantive political impact, and this is something that, you know, the Democrats embrace of this sort of, like, especially in New York, this, like, tough on crime thing has gotten to the point where literally eric adams has to be the guy who's like no no no actually hold on like

it's the new york is safe please stop panicking i got my bag got my police funding already please stop like fleeing the city in terror yeah it's amusing though that's similar to what's happening in san diego uh another city Democrat council and mayor, right? So we have this Todd Gloria, terrible mayor, serial bullshitter. And Gloria, in his State of the City speech, was saying we should be locking up criminals, not laundry detergent. This was his big line that he was very proud of. I have successfully purchased laundry detergent that was not incarcerated since then.

But I think he was talking about Target, I guess. Apparently he's legislating for the interest of Target. But you have then his opponent in the mayoral race, who's a former Marine cop, Republican guy, being like, yo, I think we fucked up on our homelessness policy. We're just like, criminalizing this is not just the answer. We've got Gloria just being like, no, lock him up. They're trying to push this is this continued like uh this California bill that um will force

incarcerate people with mental illness right um against their will just yeah it's yeah it's it's up it's fucking I mean it's not bizarre because like I think so many democrats and and like certainly publications here have really leaned into like suburban griev so many democrats and and like certainly publications here have really leaned into like suburban grievance politics yeah and uh you know like fix the potholes and make it so i don't have to see poor people is it's their entire ideology but it it's still i know it's just kind of i don't i'm struggling for the words here it makes me really fucking pissed off the people who showed up to one or two blm marches are now out there like barking for a second border wall and machine gunning the unhoused yeah and you know and this has had a especially in new york

this has had an actual this has been having a substantive like electoral impact one of the stories that kind of got buried in 2022 is that you can actually if you look at the electoral map in 20 in 2022 you can actually literally see where the new york media market ends because all of the districts in the new york media market became significantly more conservative and this is this is and this is not a joke this is literally this whole tough on crime shit is literally the thing like and in this new york media market this this is what cost the democrats the house because basically everywhere else in the country there was okay so like like red district shifted red yeah every single district that was contested like all of

the sort of like purple like districts they all went they all shifted to the left because of abortion stuff but then specifically a bunch of the likes what are supposed to be like very safe blue districts went red because they were all because all of them were doing this insane tough on crime stuff and those seats like the the seats they lost in new york are the reason the republicans have control of the house so like you know this isn't working for them electorally but they never they're still doing it because it's their ideology and we're going to get into a bit more about why about that that part in a second but before we do that i want to talk about i think another one of these things that has gotten kind of lost in the shuffle which is do

you have you heard about the the giant like dc crime omnibus bill i've heard about this yeah yeah like i will say i'm not familiar with it other than like hearing that it's bad yeah so okay so so in in dc the city council passed this enormous sort of like giant set of like omnibus set of like policies are supposed to be there like keep dc safe crime omnibus thing i okay there's a couple things to note about this one is that it's actually not as bad as it was originally going to be because there was so much like uproar because i mean the original one like had provisions that was like banning masks at protests and shit and it was like it was really bad and it got like nuked

um but it's still really bad and there's a lot of it's a lot of really weird kind of grievance stuff like there's this provision specifically that's supposed to be about like like targeting quote quote uh organized retail theft which is one of the insane this is yeah this is one of those like storm in a teacups that has been going for a while now yeah but i mean there's also kind of like there's just their standard police stuff which is it they're trying to expand pre-trial detention um which they did uh one of the the absolutely insane ones that have been declared unconstitutional but apparently it's just back now is allowing police chiefs to designate certain areas quote drug-free zones

where yeah sorry people can't see i'm uh i'm so i'm confused basically what it lets it basically what it lets you do is it it lets the cops just harass a bunch of people even more than they already do um like mostly mostly what it does is just when you declare one of these areas, it's where all the black people are, and then the cops just have, cops have, like, an incredibly increased ability to just randomly stop people and search them and attack them for shit. Stop and frisk law. Yeah, so there is a thing that, like,

part of the mask provision stayed in force, which is that they're making it basically it's like wearing a mask with the intent to commit a crime is a crime which the thing is that lets the cops like determine right your intent so like yeah

it's one of those laws like they do this a lot with gun laws they pass gun laws that don't make anything that wasn't already illegal illegal they just make it so that if they if you if you're if you're caught you're going to prison for longer now yeah this this actually there are there are provisions like that in this too there's also a bunch of random like gun provisions there's other like more nuts ones like there's there's one where uh cops can arrest you so if if they're trying to cite you for not paying a toll if they they they claim that you didn't pay a uh you didn't like pay a transit fare um you have to give them your full name and address and if they don't and if you don't they can arrest you which is nuts this is so like don't disrespect me on the train in front of everyone

laura isn't it that's what that is there's another one there's another one which is like i i don't i don't have another way to describe it other than this is the uh this is the how to get away with murder bill which is this is so one of the things that they're doing is letting cops review their own uh helmet footage before uh police inquiries it's great ah this is this is the get the narrative straight yeah bill do they also get to edit it uh i don't well okay so here's here's the thing about that quote unquote no-unquote, no. However, comma, these things mysteriously vanish, time mysteriously

disappears. Yeah, there's also, like, a whole thing about, like, there are certain groups of people who the cops can just, like, force DNA collections from. Oh, wow. Which is, it's a lot less broad than it used to be, but yeah, it's still a provision in there. But yeah, this is a nightmarish bill that they've been able to pass and you know i think

it's worth thinking about why this is actually happening which is that all of this stuff all of these are sort of long range reactions to 2020 right this is this this was the sort of strategy after 2020 for rebuilding legitimacy of the police and you know and also now rebuilding sort of rebuilding the i don't know psychological capacity i guess yeah to you know i mean just deploy a bunch of troops on u.s soil right yeah sort of building up that tolerance yeah and and you know like this all of this stuff is sort of born on you know on on on protest crackdowns on one of the things that's also sort of worth noting about this is all of this stuff i mean the dc crime bill been in the works for a long time but

the the subway stuff is all stuff that happened like pretty quickly after the Aaron Bush and Elsof immolation. So a big part of this has been the sort of the, the democratic ruling class kind of losing their minds after watching how widespread 2020 was watching the extent to which they were forced to like, you know, like, like there are democratic politicians in 2020, like talking about, like, I mean, there, there, there are like 2020 like talking about like i mean there are like elected people talking about defunding the police there are like they're all remember the

weird like that whole like kneeling thing in congress they all did oh yeah yeah the picture of the morning can take with yeah yeah Yeah. That was a powerful instance of cringe. Yeah. But there, there's a lot of like, you know, there's, there's this,

this sort of memory of that has been, has been sort of drilled deep into, into the democratic party. And so what, what, what has been happening? Like, like,

you know, and what's been happening in, this has been happening in blue States very explicitly. Is this, is this strategy of hyper militarization with the explicit like not explicit sorry with the implicit but not very well concealed goal of putting everyone back in their place after 2020 and that is extremely grim i mean i think i don't know i i'm i'm glad glad the DC stuff isn't as bad as it was originally. Cause the, the original one,

we're just like straight up a bunch of fascist shit. This is also fascist shit, but like not as unhinged as the original bills were. So, right. You know, it's like, like the,

the tide of this stuff isn't inevitable. Right. But also very, very powerful factions of of of the democratic party have decided that this is the thing that they want to do and it absolutely sucks and you know and and this is you know and this is in in a similar way to sort of the stuff on the border being bipartisan i mean at some point i'm going to do an episode about the absolute shit show that's been happening in chicago where yeah like a kid

got fucking measles in in one of these in one of the migrant shelters in pilsen in chicago um and now the mayor's like evicting a bunch of a bunch of people from the migrant shelters jesus you know so like there's a bike i mean this is a thing like in Chicago, I mean, there's just outside of like, you know, we're like outside of just like basically every like Walgreens or just on street corners. There's a bunch of refugee families like just sitting out there in the cold trying to get some money because there's fucking nothing for them here. And this is a bipartisan, you know, this is a bipartisan political project. Yeah. You know, just sort of sheer terror inflicted on the most vulnerable people in society. Yeah, it's really depressing to hear that just because I know that, like, you know, I see people here and then they get out and my friends see them and we take them to the airport and my friends feed them and look after them there and they get on their planes and we hope for the best for them

you know and then then yeah they just go to some other city where some other dogshit democrat who lied four years ago is gonna do everything they can to make life as hard for them as possible yeah the good thing is you have to vote for them or you're voting for fascism. Woo. Woo. Hooray. How sad. Yeah, that's what I got today. We'll be back tomorrow with something. What are we back tomorrow with? It will be a podcast. It's tomorrow, Friday.

Oh, yeah. Tomorrow's Gaza Day, so it's not getting any better for you. Yeah, lucky you. Lucky you. Tomorrow we'll be hearing from our friends at parkour gaza it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

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