It Could Happen Here - The LA Anti-ICE Protests

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Robert and Mia discuss the recent protests in LA against ICE atrocities and the terrifying response of Trump and the LAPD. Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/09/democrats-california-new-york-detention-facilities https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigrants-at-ice-check-ins-detained-and-held-in-basement-of-federal-building-in-los-angeles/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=828415694 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-los-angeles-immigration-protests-trump/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/paramount-california-home-depot-protest-rcna211650 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kv1lgdpkjoSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Not just LA, but largely LA right now, which over the course of the last couple of days, while we were off for the weekend, has broken out into a series of protests and cop riots that are kind of consuming national news. The federal government has activated the California National Guard and asserted federal control over them. Governor Newsom is kind of pushing back against that, although not in a way that I am convinced or I've seen any evidence of matters at this point. The United States Marines, a group of, I think about 500 from Camp Pendleton, which is down near San Diego, have been activated as well, which is a probable violation of posse comitada. So that was kind of

unclear to me the extent to which they're in theater at this point. Largely all of these actions have been ineffective in making the protests go away at this point. What sparked them was a series of ICE raids that took about 2000 people into custody and brought a bunch of Los Angelenos out in Paramount, California, who were met by the police, the LAPD, providing crowd control to Homeland Security, HSI agents. Yeah. And that's the gist of what went down. Things have just kind of escalated from there.

Yesterday, probably four to 6,000 people in the street, as opposed to 500 or so the day before, so things have continued to escalate. to 500 or so the day before, so things have continued to escalate and the LAPD and their police have had no real luck in containing the demonstrations. We'll see how long that situation lasts. But yeah, that's where we are right at this second more or less. Things are continuing to evolve today, will have evolved since. Yep. Yeah, by the way, we're recording this on Monday.

This will probably be coming out Monday night, Tuesday morning. Yeah. So who fucking knows what will have happened by then? This is like about 1 p.m. Pacific time when we're recording this. I want to start also by going back to that National Guard deployment because that National, the Federalized National Guard deployment is hideously illegal. Oh yeah.

Like unbelievably illegal. Like I cannot emphasize enough, this is Guard deployment is hideously illegal. Oh, yeah. Like unbelievably illegal. Like, I cannot emphasize enough. This is like constitution shatteringly illegal. Yeah. And the way this is being reported in the media is fucking hideous. They are just straight up lying about it. So OK, so Trump has not declared the Instruction Act yet. Right. No, they activated a directive that Trump signed, cited 10 USC 12406, which is a specific provision within Title X of the US Code on Armed Services.

That provision allows, or part of that provision allows for the federal government to deploy National Guard forces, quote, if there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. quote, if there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. So basically the claim being made by the administration here was that the federalization of the California Guard was justified by the fact that the people of Los Angeles, which at the point this was done was somewhere less than a thousand of them. 500 people. Yeah. And were an open rebellion because they had yelled at a bunch of ICE officers for a while.

That was the situation. Yeah. Well, and also it's worth noting too, even if there was a rebellion, which there isn't, he also can't use that section because it's in coordination with the governor. You can only do it if the governor is working with you and the governor, like Newsom is being a real piece of shit about this for again like the president the LAPD's been yeah Yeah, but it's like he's been sitting the LAPD out But he hasn't given permission for the federal government to like use the the California National Guard. They're just doing it, right?

this is like they've just stolen a state National Guard and Newsroom's response has been because he fucking hates protesters so much has been like And New Stream's response has been, because he fucking hates protesters so much, has been like, oh, this is bad, ooh. Am I gonna, like, do anything about the fact that, like, again, every single law about how the National Guard is supposed to be used has just been torn the fuck up? No, like fucking NPR and like a bunch of the mainstream media reporting about this has just been saying that, oh, well, he used this provision. And it's like, no, he didn't.

Like, he used this provision and it's like, no, he didn't. Like he did not. He explicitly every single part of the thing that lets you use this provision. None of the conditions have been fulfilled, which means he's not using it. He's just saying shit and doing it. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the activation of the US Marines is based on like Hegseth posted a tweet being like, I've got Marines ready in Camp Pendleton, which like there's absolutely no constitutional justification for,

especially since the National Guard had just been put in for deploying active duty U.S. Marines into this situation. Absolutely not. It's all super like for one thing, the situation that they're in right now in terms of like what we've seen from the National Guard yesterday was like, they're not very effective at this. Right? They fairly quickly after being deployed started using, you know, firing impact munitions at

the crowd, attacking the crowd in the same way that the LAPD had done. Nothing that was like, I would say an escalation beyond how the fucking cops were active. Right? But National Guard is bad at handling these kinds of things, right? Their force organization is not meant to be able to be split up into small enough units, the way the cops are in enough areas. Like they're, they're just not meant for this sort of thing. It's not how they're like meant to be deployed to counteract protest.

So you wind up just kind of keeping them in this big blob of guys who you don't have good, like they're sleeping on floors in Government buildings right now because the quartering act exists Yeah, which is amazing and because there's not much in the way of organization behind deploying them and they don't know they're not there I mean neither are the police generally well trained with their impact munitions But these guys certainly aren't and they freak out at the drop of a hat. Like they're like worse at it than the LAPD and the LAPD is, you know, not good at it, uh, they're just good at hurting people.

So you've just kind of got this large, brittle group of guys who you can plunk down in an area while protesters, uh, continue to gather in groups all around the city and the more stories of shit shit like a blob of national guardsmen fucking up protesters you get, the more people are coming out and the less controllable the situation becomes. And it seems like we're seeing the very beginning stages of people actually learning tactical lessons from 2020 and 2024 with the Palestine encampments. Yeah. Which is that like, yeah, like, if you concentrate all of your people in one spot, police departments

are very, very good at massing a whole bunch of people and rolling you over. And we've known this since 2020, if you are at a whole bunch of different spots at the same time, they're terrible at responding to that. And that's kind of what's been happening. Yeah. There's been a bunch of protests popping up in different places. It's been very effective at sort of like preventing that kind of like one giant sweep mobilizations that were like destroying the student encampments.

Yeah, and I'm looking at based on reporting from CBS News about 700 US Marines have been activated from the 29 Palms base near San Diego, which is per Jim Laporta, who's a defense reporter widely considered to be one of the worst bases to be stationed at in the entire military, are being deployed to Los Angeles right now. So that's just great. Yeah. Someone asked Trump, what would it take for him to use, to like authorize the deployment of the US military on American soil? And he said, that's just, that's up to me, which is not how any of this works.

Like that's just pure military dictatorship stuff. If Trump is just able to like, yeah, use the military, just do whatever the fuck he wants, that is just, that is the Constitution gone, that is the pretense of democracy gone. It is real bad. Now it hasn't happened yet, but there has been a bunch of extremely alarming other shit that's happened. So the cops arrested the president of California SEIU, which is the service workers union in

California, very, very large union, not a super militant one. No, and David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a particularly militant leftist. No, he's just like, he's just like a kind of like a Democratic Party labor guy and they just like arrested him outside of one of the initial protests where he was... Injured him quite badly too. Yeah, yeah, like beat the shit out of him and then he's still being held in a federal detention building. They're charging him with federal felony conspiracy to impede an officer.

And again, this is the head of of one of the largest unions in California. No, and they're justifying it in part based on the charging documents because they saw him texting on his phone outside and assumed he was texting to a protester to give them orders. Right, it's like fucking cartoon clown shit, but the actual effect of this, again, is that they have the president of one of the largest unions in the state like yes in a federal detention building. So I mean there's obviously been like unions are pissed about it. There hasn't been any kind of large scale mobilization from them yet. But if there was one possible thing you could do to actually get SEIU off its ass and like show up to shit, it's this. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. The reporting that I've seen so far has suggested that there is actually a kind of heartening degree of cross-union support for like,

holy shit, the feds just grabbing the president of a union is in fact bad. We're going to have to see exactly how that plays out, but he's still fucking in there. Maxine Walters tried to enter the facility to check on him This has happened with a bunch of different Congress people who have tried to enter Yeah, this one in LA and a couple of other detention facilities. They are all being denied which is Unhinged. Yeah, especially since they have oversight over facilities like this. Yeah other news from today That's just come out in the last less than a day

The government has deployed MQ-9 Reapers. I think at least two of them over Los Angeles. These are the drones that are that we were using overseas to shoot Hellfire missiles at people. That's not what they're being used for here. They're being used for surveillance. The last time this was done was in Minneapolis in 2020. Outside of their use for surveillance over the border, but there's MQ9s over an American city surveilling protesters. Right. Speaking of that, there's also just been like the threat of surveillance being used against protesters.

Kind of the most chilling example from yesterday was an LAPD helicopter flying low over a crowd, shining a spotlight on them and saying, like, I've seen, we can see all of you. We're going to come. I'm going to come to your houses later. Like you're all on camera and I'm cut like specifically I'm going to cut. We're coming to your houses later. Yeah, it's police state shit. Like he has police state shit.

Now do I believe that they actually have the ability to know they don't actually. But yeah, that said, like where if you're going to one of these protests, wear a fucking mask. Yes. Like, I don't know, like both for covid, but like also Jesus fucking Christ. Like you're flying predator trouts over these protests like wear masks. Good Lord.

Do you know what else wants you to buy masks? Yeah. The products and services that support this podcast, perhaps. all across the world. Live from the underground you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward underground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. Awaiday showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses.

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And we're back. Yeah, so I also want to talk a bit about the specific conditions that caused all of this stuff because I think the reporting on it has been really bad. So there were there were 2000 arrests from ICE on Tuesday, they arrested 2000 people on Wednesday. I think these are like national numbers. The numbers like very specifically in LA is at least several hundred people have been being held in just horrifying conditions.

You know, some of them are being held in federal detention centers, but they're also just being held in like the basements of these fucking buildings, because there's not enough room to hold this many people. You know, I mean, even the conditions in the regular detention center are terrible, but like the immigration lawyers who people were able to reach and talk to or talking about

hundreds of people in rooms designed for 30, there's no cots, they're sleeping on the ground, sickness is spreading, there's not enough food or water, conditions are fucking horrifying. A lot of the people who are in there, you know, the ones that we've been able to get any kind of contact with from their lawyers, a lot of these people cannot be deported because they are people who have been granted stay of deportation by the US government, which means they cannot be deported. But ICE has just fucking kidnapped them anyways. There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the buildings.

And there's something I remember from Occupy Ice in 2018 that's just fucking harrowing is that like when you're outside these buildings sometimes you can hear the people inside shouting and it's fucking harrowing and with these ones there's a bunch of videos if you can see that the people inside the buildings are trying to like shine lights out of windows so that people know that they're inside. It's fucking horrifying. And I, and I think just how bad this is, like how bad it was that like all of these fucking people in their fucking tanks just rolled up and started kidnapping people has just kind of been lost in all of this discourse about.

The protest is like, no, this is what was happening. Like this is straight up soldiers are just taking people on the night. Like that's what this is. Yeah. You know, and this has been happening all over. There was also a huge sort of protest sort of started at this Home Depot where, okay, so this is where this is where we get into the point where like, it's kind of difficult to see what's going on.

ICE claims that they were just staging a bunch of people. The Department of Homeland Security said to the BBC that there was no raid on this Home Depot plant and that they were just staging there. I don't believe that because these people lie for a living. It is their job. They are police. It is their job as a cop to lie to you. It is a constitutionally protected thing that they have, according to the Supreme Court, which is absolutely ridiculous. But I am pretty sure they're lying about that. But regardless, there's, you know, like their protest started up and then like the cops just started teargassing the people who were protesting this massive rage at a Home Depot. Now there was another kind of noteworthy event is when ICE showed up in force, they got,

there were kind of two different actions there was one down at a federal building where people attacked in the civil barricades at the same time as people showed up. To go after the ice caravan ice officers. Where pelted in their vehicles with a number of objects and again this is the kind of thing that like makes it a lot more difficult. I mean, that just appears operational, operationally to be true for them to crack down when they're, when they're expecting, you know, uh, action in one direction. And it comes in multiple at the same time. There was another instance earlier in the protest where ice officers were surrounded by a crowd and cut off for about eight hours while the LAPD refused to respond to them. And they eventually had to land a Blackhawk on the

street in order to resupply because they were out of like water and I think running low on munitions, which they then used with reckless abandon. So, yeah, there's also, as I'm looking right now, just about as about two hours ago, a US Marine AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter was filmed flying low over Los Angeles. So it looks like we've got active duty US Marine Corps forces in the city. Unclear if they're directly engaging with anyone. I haven't really heard of a lot of activity today. But yeah. Yeah. My guess is things will intensify, you know, as as the day goes on and as we sort of roll into night because of some people sort of start getting off work and when temperatures start coming down a bit. That's the open question, right?

As to like what's going to happen. The last couple of days we saw numbers escalate, but now it's Monday, people have work and there's more trees. It's like, it's not clear to me that that's going to happen. That this is going to be like a... Yeah, we'll see. I'm seeing a lot of early comparisons to 2020 and it's not clear to me that that's going to be like a. Yeah, we'll see. I'm seeing a lot of early comparisons to 2020 and it's not clear to me that that's gonna happen.

One thing to note is that kind of at the top so far, we've had four to 6,000 people out in the street in LA. Yeah, it's not very much. Which is not, you know, compared to 2020 numbers. And while we've seen some sympathy demonstrations, I mean, here in Portland, I don't think it got larger than 40 or so people. There was another, you know,

somewhere less than a hundred people in San Francisco that some, a good chunk of them got kettled the other day, but not mass demonstrations yet in other cities. Yeah, yeah. It hasn't like really kicked off everywhere yet. And it's also interesting because like these protests are kind of coming off of the back of a couple of like scattered

things. We talked about this on executive disorder, but there was a there's a very big confrontation in Minneapolis. Last week, there's another one in Chicago where they like attacked a bunch of Chicago alderman, which was a time that the way it's been going is like you get a giant raid and it pisses people off and there's a flare-up and the flare-ups have been getting larger but it hasn't been like a sustained thing. It's largely been reactive to these kind of large raids and you know that's not necessarily like the recipe for a sustained thing. However, comma, the Trump administration, their target goal for the number of arrests a day is 3,000. So like they're trying to intensify the number of raids they're doing and how sort of like aggressive and like militant they are. And I think that might be a thing that causes this to accelerate as we go, as we head into like next weekend. Because if they're still doing this,

right? Like if feds are, if suddenly like, like hundreds of feds are in Chicago again, and they're like grabbing people out of like Logan Square, right? Or, you know, they're they're trying they're doing this in like, in New York, they're doing this in like other places, I think it could start to escalate. But right now, it's still very much unclear. But right now it's still very much unclear. Yeah, I mean and that's where I stand too on this is like I don't actually know What's going to happen with this demonstration? but I think that you know one possibility is certainly that This continues to escalate and that you just get more and more people out consistently The other is that it kind of peters out from this point Yeah if it continues to escalate, then the state is, or the feds are in a situation where they have committed

to continuing the escalation chain, and there's not much for them to go once they've got active duty soldiers in the streets, but just actually shooting at people with live rounds, assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show of force. And likewise, there's not much else for people to do, assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show of force. And likewise, there's not much else for people to do, but either back down and stop coming out,

at which point the administration will take a victory lap and say that like, look, this works, and this will become their standard go-to whenever a city erupts, is immediately nationalize the state national guard, bring out live troops, right? That's what will happen everywhere. That's going to become the new norm. denationalize the state national guard, bring out live troops, right? That's what will happen everywhere.

That's going to become the new norm. Or people will continue escalating. And yeah, like in that case, the situation was like, do people escalate to deploying more force? Do they have that real option, right? Or does the kind of stress of responding with that sort of force, largely with soldiers, that this is not the primary thing they signed up to do? Do they start, like, stop obeying orders? You know, these are the kind of things that we would then be looking at to see, right?

Like that's kind of where there's a couple of different places it can go from here. You know, another possibility is that, like, if we see an instance of like, okay, in order to try and crack down on this, they authorize the use of deadly force against a chunk of demonstrators and people get killed. Then do you see this kind of thing erupt in cities all around the country like we saw in 2020, right? In which case, again, things get very,

because there's not a lot of the US Army, really. No. There are a lot of cops, but compared to the US population, there's not even that many cops, right? And widespread enough dissent like this, you know, would force some very difficult decisions from the federal government and from the administration, right? And that's kind of our best case scenario is that you get enough people out in

enough cities that like it is just crashing the U S economy, right? And there's, there's no real way to lock down the unrest. Um, and you start getting national guard refusing to respond to deployment orders as well as active duty soldiers, like refusing to respond, right? Like these are, these are the kind of thing that we're looking at in terms of like a potential best case scenario here. I don't know where things are going to head.

I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we hit that, that situation right now, but that we start to see like as this kind of Peters out, the administration puts out a victory lap and then we start to see, you know, demonstrations responding in other cities and maybe there's kind of a slower tempo of escalation here. But I don't know. I want to say that I, my hope is that they overplayed their hands here, but I just don't know that that's clear in part because we haven't seen the scale of mobilization by people that is clearly going to be impossible for them to respond to. Right.

I am still expecting that we're going to get a really large escalating series of protests this summer. It's June. You get to how out of it I am. It is June 9th as we're recording this, right? It is going to be a long, hot summer, right? Regardless of whether this is the one or whether it peters out here. I think it is absolutely possible that this peters out and this isn't the one. I don't think it's very likely that this peters out.

The Republicans take a victory lap and then we don't get more protests this summer. Yeah. At this scale or larger. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media.

A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better

Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott.. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug band.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast. Ah, and we're back. I should probably note very quickly that like, obviously one thing that happens when shit like this goes down is that you get people posting on the internet their thoughts about this.

One of the more prominent posters on Twitter in the new mascara has been the menswear guy who made a couple of statements that I don't entirely agree with about like, I mean, in general support for protests, but like I don't support, you know, violent protests, what I would call some kind of misinterpretations of the civil rights movement, but also like not something I would, I don't care that much if people are wrong on the internet. Yeah. I mean, he did have a straight up poster meltdown where he was like yelling about someone's

like breakup to say that they're insufficiently devoted because they didn't stay with this person to like keep them in the country. There is meltdown based shit, but like What matters, people meltdown, posters meltdown. What I think what matters is that like he made a post later, a longer one talking about the fact that he was undocumented, his family was undocumented because you know they came to initially Canada after the Tet Offensive and entered the US through a porous border and talking about the way in which being undocumented has like affected his entire life. And now the vice president and the DHS account put us in a picture of like spy kids of a kid with like a little like computer tracker thing on his eye. And JD

Vance made a post being like, basically we're going to deport the menswear guy for his posts. Yeah, which is fucking hideous. Which is, it's just like, again, another example of the ridiculous level of government repression that we're looking at here. Like where the federal government is like targeting themselves based on posts that make people angry. Yeah, well, specifically post on Twitter too. Like, and like that's also an important thing of like, if you're not on Twitter,

it is harder to get the eye of the state on you. If you are on Twitter, like the vice president can be posting fucking unhinged reply images to someone talking about deporting you like Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, is a is a horrifying level of repression The sort of mirror to this is the stuff we've been seeing on the ground, right? there's a video going around of a Like a pretty right-wing at like Australian round of a, like a pretty right wing, like Australian journalists who's just like talking about the protests. And like maybe 20 feet, their back turned to a police riot line.

It's more like 15. The guy at the end of the riot line just like turns and shoots her. Very casually, no protesters close to her, absolutely no question. No, no. No chance that he was aiming at someone else. Zero chance. No chance that he thought that she was attacking him him just shot a lady in the back of her thigh with an impact mutation for no reason The most unhinged part of this well

Okay, the most unhinged part of this was that they fucking did this the second most unhinged part of it was that her fucking Like her fucking outlet in the description of the video said that they appear to be targeting Crossfire? Yeah, like appear to be targeting a protest. It's like, no, they weren't. No, man. There's this really amazing thing with the American press where like they are incapable of objectively describing the thing that a cop does,

because if they describe the thing that the cop does, it looks like anti-police. That everyone can see. Yeah. Yeah. And so they have to just lie about it and be like, oh, it was Colin Crum, it's like, no, with your own eyes, you can see that the headline is lying. This is not questionable.

This is not an arguable point. This is not debatable. The footage is objective and obvious. You could just watch the video. It's like, okay guys, he just shot her because he wanted to, because he thought it was funny. Like that's why he did it, we know. Yeah, and like this kind of shit just continues to happen.

Like the press has learned nothing from 2020. That's why he did it. We know. Yeah. And like, this kind of shit just continues to happen. Like the press has learned nothing from 2020. They're still doing all the stupid snoggography shit. There's actually been shit the cops have done in this protest that I've never actually seen before, which is a new one. Because by the time I was like a few weeks into 2020, I had seen basically everything right. Like, I've been doing this for like fucking ages.

I've seen the cops trample people with horses before. I had never seen them trample a guy and beat him with the same person on a horse. Yeah. Beating a guy and trampling them with the horse at the same time. That's a new one. Good fucking God. That's also and I think it's actually is this worth understanding? Is it like that is the point of police horses?

Like the reason they have them is so they can trample people with them Yeah, it's to run people over with them. Yes. Yeah, and it's it's real fucking bad. That's that's Hideous and shit like this has been happening this whole time There's been a bunch of journalists who are really been really severely injured by impact munitions already Yeah, one guy who got shot in the skull with a few can tell it's a 40 millimeter round because of the indent that left in His skull. Yeah, those things are like the size of your fist and yeah They just they're they're massive and they're not they're not even meant to be fired directly when you're shooting at people You're supposed to shoot them up at the ground and bounce them into people. Yeah now no cop has ever done this

They don't use them that way. I've had them used on me. Like I'm sorry This this munition has never been used like that. No, no. A single time in history. And that's the general truth of riot munitions. And actually, I don't know if this guy was shot with a, with a, with a rubber or a foam round. I think they probably shot him with a grenade, which you're also not supposed to shoot at people. But again, they do all the time.

Which also kills people a lot. Guy very nearly died in Portland a few years back from that. Only his bike helmet saved him. Yeah. Yeah, like this is one of the most common ways people get killed in protests is by the cops shooting them. Yeah. Like tear gas canisters specifically, especially like in Turkey, this was a huge thing. Like a bunch of people got killed by getting hit with tear gas canisters.

Yep. However, comma, there has been a bunch of extremely funny and like pretty effective tactics He played using um one of which I've never seen before that is Fascinating is people were calling WIMOs, which are these like driverless. Yes. Yes Yeah so they would use the app to call one most of places they wanted to set up roadblocks stop police cars going through and Stop ice cars going through and then they would light them on fire and to set up roadblocks to stop police cars going through and stop ICE cars going through,

and then they would light them on fire. And they did this to so many of these cars that the LAPD called WIMO and told them to shut it down because they were like, literally, it's a self-driving flaming barricade. Well, and I think why people were doing it is in part because like the word started spreading that like the police were getting footage footage from YMO, right?

Yep. Yep. Yep. So they were like, well, these are surveillance machines And yeah, if you if they show up you like one on fire, there's this flaming barricade. Yeah Yep, and then people figured out that you could just like oh we could just bring these to places like this This is a self deploying flaming barricade. Yeah. Yeah And and the other thing that's interesting about it too is it's another one of these examples that you see in protests of like, people have this tendency to think of riots as these like really spontaneous things that nobody's like thinking about a lot. But the thing about why most is that like, if you've like walked in a city that has these

things these things have tried to run you over at least once Yeah, like there's there's surveillance angle There's also the angle that these things are trying to fucking kill you all the time And so and this is like, you know This is a very common like like first thing that happens in the riot is like People burn down the thing that has been trying to fucking kill them this whole time Yeah, and so this is this one except they figured out how to turn into flaming car barricades And so this is this one except they figured out how to turn into flaming car Yeah, so I don't know I guess we should end this with

Assuming things do kind of get get bigger or assuming things get bigger later Yeah, and you're watching this and either you head out soon and wind up, you know being in a protest or that happens later There's a couple of things to keep in mind. One of them is, especially as we hit the summer, there's always trade-offs when we talk about different kinds of body armor that you may or may not want to have, right? The two broad types are soft ballistic armor and hard ballistic armor. When we talk about ballistic body armor

that is resistant to bullets, the downsides to both of those are expense, no reliable body armor, and I'm talking about NIJ certified body armor, which you should always shoot for. None of that is ever cheap. Some is cheaper than others. Soft body armor is really all you need for riot munitions.

It doesn't stop the pain as much as hard body armor. I've been hit in hard body armor by impact munitions, by like foam rounds and stuff, and barely felt it. Whereas being hit with them in soft armor is still pretty painful. However, hard body armor, like the stuff that stops rifle rounds can shatter when hit by impact munitions. And again, because it's a significant expense means you might not have that hard body armor anymore.

The other thing to keep in count is that when you're talking about like armor for your body, if you're, if you're worried primarily about impact munitions, it doesn't have to be ballistic. Stuff like football pads, hockey pads works very well against soft munitions, right? Again, there's a huge trade-off and potentially a safety trade-off.

If it's 110 degrees where you are, like the danger of wearing any body armor and how much it slows you down and how the odds of it causing you to have heat stroke or whatever, can be significantly higher than like whatever you'd gain in protection. However, there are some things you should never go

into a situation like this without in terms of armor. One of those is a helmet. Again, there are ballistic helmets that are resistant to pistol rounds. There are no helmets that exist that will reliably stop rifle rounds. In my close range with a rifle, we're talking within a couple hundred meters, right?

Those don't exist. They can stop maybe a ricochet or a glancing blow. They're good for shrapnel. They're good for pistols. That's, that's what helmet, ballistic helmets are for. And those are great for police riot routes. A ballistic helmet is a really good thing to have if they are shooting rubber rounds or shooting grenades directly at people.

It is not, however, the only thing you need or the only thing that could provide safety. It's not ideal to have like a bump helmet or a bike helmet as opposed to a ballistic helmet. is not however the only thing you need or the only thing that could provide safety. It's not ideal to have like a bump helmet or a bike helmet as opposed to a ballistic helmet or like a bike helmet as opposed to a bump helmet. These are different things. A bump helmet is higher rated

than like a standard bike helmet. A motorcycle helmet is also pretty robust. A bumper, a motorcycle helmet is better to have if you're being shot at with non-lethal or less than lethal whatever you you want to call them, munitions. But all of those, any kind of helmet is better than your bare skull when police are shooting into a crowd. So wear something, even if it's a $10 fucking bicycle helmet, if that's all you can get, wear that. Don't go into a situation like this without a helmet.

Bring something like a fucking camelback or whatever that you can have on your back and drink water from regularly, as well as bottles of water that you can use to wash out tear gas. Only use water to wash out tear gas. Only water. Only water. And if you catch people being like, milk works, tell them you are wrong. Don't use milk.

No. Friends, comrades, lovers, your family. Yeah. We can be the generation that stops using milk for tear gas. You can do this. You don't need to make cheese in your ice. Only you, only you can stop milk. Only you can stop milk.

For the love of God, it doesn't work. We have inner power. And if somebody starts talking about, well, no, you know, actually it's just like if you eat something spicy and it comes to you, no, no, no, no, no, no, none of that's right. I'm telling you, none of that's right. Now, some people do use something called law,

which is like a mixture of, I think it's an answer or something like that. I forget exactly what's in law. And yeah, that can be effective, but don't use it. Just use water, use water, use water. Just use water. If you have some degree of like professional medical treatment and you decide law is better,

do whatever you want, doctor, right? But like, don't you listening, use water, right? Just water. Look, melt the ice into water, only use the water on your ice. Only use clean water, ideally from something like this. Anyway, whatever. When it comes to mace, water eventually will get mace out.

Mace is way different from tear gas. Tear gas with water, you can be back to functional in a couple of minutes, right? If you wash your eyes out, I've been tear gas like 200 fucking times. And I'll tell you, it never takes that long to get your eyes functional again. Assuming the other thing you want to notice that if you're going into a tear

gas situation, if you wear contacts, don't glasses only, right? Because you do not want to have mace or tear gas in your eyes. When you have contacts, it can cause permanent debilitating damage, right? They may need to surgically remove your fucking contacts, wear your goddamn glasses. You can, and I have worn contacts with like a full face respirator or a full face gas mask, but there are still dangers there, including that if you are wearing a full face mask or a gas mask or something like that, and the police catch you, they will pull that up and

mace you underneath your mask. It's happened to a bunch of people I know. If you're wearing contacts under there, you can get in very bad shape. There are easy ways to make glasses holders if you've got a spare pair of lenses inside a mask like that. Anyway, the other thing to note is that mace

is not the same as tear gas. Mace fucks you up for much longer. You are going to be out of commission for at least probably 20 to 30 minutes with mace in the best case scenario. Enough water will eventually wash out mace, right? It will eventually deal with it, but not on any kind of short timeframe, right? It's going to take you a while to get enough mace out of your eyes that way.

Ideally, you get to a place where you have access to something like a faucet or a hose and you use Dawn dish soap is the best thing to use that's going to remove the surface thing. There's a better thing for this, but I'm talking about if you don't have access to specialized things or like baby shampoo, right? Something like that. Ideally dish soap next would be something like baby shampoo, right? With, with a good amount of water. Now the very best thing for mace is a specific wipe that's made to be used for

this, and this does also help for tear gas. It's called Sudacon wipes. S-U-D-E-C-O-N. You can buy it off of Amazon right now. They're not expensive. You can carry a couple of packs. You generally want to like take what's in there in two different pieces and use one to kind of wipe away from your eyes

and then the other to clean your face up afterwards once you've removed the bulk of the material. Sudacon wipes are the best thing to use with mace. Anyway, that's a quick and dirty guide to what kind of stuff is useful for this. And as always, water, water, water. Yeah. And the one last thing I want to add is that there is one more scourge that you can end in this generation.

Stop getting kettled on bridges. I swear to God, don't cross the bridge. Do not. Don't be like, my action is we're going to hold a bridge. Every single time there's one of these goddamn protests, like 10,000 people get arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. It happens every time. The thing with bridges is that if the police cut off both ends, you are now

stuck on the bridge. Don't go onto the bridge. Simply do not. Like I'm not even going to give normally a speech that I give here is about like, oh, well, if you're on a bridge, make sure you onto the bridge. Simply do not. Like, I'm not even gonna give, normally the speech that I give here is about like, oh, well if you're on a bridge, make sure you can hold one side of it so you have, no, no, no, no, no.

Fuck that. No bridges. Don't go on bridges. We can stop. As a society, we have the technology to don't get kettled on a bridge. It is so fucking easy. You simply don't go on the bridge.

Yeah. Okay. And that's the episode for today, everybody. Use water. Don't get kettled on bridges. Yeah. Good luck, everyone. Good luck. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

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