The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3584 - Kimmel Silenced; Tracking ICE Abuses; Trump The Mafia Don w/ Austin Kocher, Dan O’Sullivan

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

It's Emmajority Report Thursday on Majority Report On Todays Show: In order to protect an illegal merger and please the King, Disney indefinitely suspends Jimmy Kimmel after he made a factually correct joke about Trump's callous response to Charlie Kirk's death. FCC Chair Brendan Carr initiated the hit on Kimmel through comments on Russian funded podcaster Benny Johnson. Political and legal geographer Austin Kocher joins the show to provide updates on ICE activity and abuses. Check out Austin's great work on Substack here as well as the Immigration Enforcement Dashboard Dan O'Sullivan, co-host of "The Outfit", a podcast on how organized crime defines America joins us to discuss Donald Trump's mafia style of leadership. In the Fun Half: We are joined by Brandon Sutton and Matt Binder. Kash Patel is so easily goaded into admitting he knows how many times Trump's name appears in the Epstein files. Kash acknowledges that he will answer questions about Trump's would-be assassin after the trial, except that there is no trial as the shooter was taken out at the event in Butler, PA In line with every other Conservative leader Benjamin Netanyahu attempts to co-opt Charlie Kirk's death for his own interests. Candace Owens is ready to go to war over who succeeds Charlie at TPUSA. The right-wing fissures are spreading in the fallout of Kirk. The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/majority CURRENT AFFAIRS: Use code MAJORITYREPORT for 30% for a year on any subscription of your choice. SUNSET LAKE:  Head to SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code “Left Is Best” (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/

You are listening to a free version of The Majority Report. Support this show at join the Majority Report.com and get an extra hour of content daily. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Thursday, September 18th, 2025. My name is Emma Bigeland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Alston Coker will be back with us to talk about tracking ICE's rogue deportation regime. And later in the show, Dan O'Sullivan, co-host of the outfit, joins us to talk about Trump and his Mafia Don tactics.

Also on the program, ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off the air after local TV affiliate conglomerate Nexstar complied with Trump's free speech crackdown in an effort to get its monopolistic merger approved. The move was met with wide condemnation from non-fascist politicians and media figures. the house shelves Nancy Mace's resolution to censure Ilhan Omar for daring to say what Charlie Kirk did in life it would be nice if the other members of the squad were coming to her defense a little bit more I'm not seeing that too much and I don't like that maybe I missed it Trump prepares an executive order targeting liberal groups and says he'll declare Antifa, which stands for anti-fascist, a domestic terrorist organization.

Telling on yourself, buddy. Trump's troop deployment within the U.S. reaches 35,000, a 75% increase from July, and that may be an undercount. Democrats are posturing like they'll shut down the government. Senate Republicans need 7 to 8. Democrats to fund the government for a few more months. Another poll shows how public opinion in the U.S. on Israel is shifted. Half of U.S. adults say Israel has gone too far. Bernie Sanders calls Gaza a genocide for the first time following the UN's declaration.

Saudi Arabia signs a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan, another U.S. allied nation seeking alternatives. A Louisiana immigration judge orders the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, which he will fight. RFK Jr.'s anti-vax quacks at the CDC are meeting to reconsider recommending the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, one of our safest and most effective vaccines. And lastly, Representative Ronnie Jackson, Republican, former doctor of Donald Trump, calls to mass institutionalize trans people. Pop another pill, Ronnie.

Yeah, Ronnie. He's been holding off on those media appearances because it was so obvious whatever the hell he was on. But it's the trans people that are the danger here. Psycho. All this and more on today's majority report. Cheery little intro there. The hepatitis B thing, I was almost like about to start screaming a bloody murder at the beginning of the show when we were reading that stuff this morning. It's, it's, it's insane.

And I mean, Bill Cassidy, Senator, Doctor, who knew better was the deciding vote on getting this insane man to be the head of Health and Human Services Secretary, health and health. human services. And he was up in 2026 down in Louisiana. It's not that far in history when they had a Democratic governor. I mean, he was a mansion-type Democrat, extremely corporatist and centrist. But there's a possibility to have turnout and punish a guy like Bill Cassidy for what he has done to public health in this country. More broadly, it's a lesson for all sort of medical and scientific folks some of whom supported this Trump administration

and the sort of anti-woke agenda, you can see quotes of people at different sort of institutions who had their funding slash being like, you know, I thought we were going too far with some of the gender stuff, but my research is now being impacted. You have to understand, like,

what politics are. You can't be sort of apolitical and then all of a sudden you get propagandized on some weird thing and you're supporting a fascist administration. And I'm not afraid. to use that word. This is an anti-fascist show. Welcome to the majority of point. Hello. Snowy for VA 11 says as a pediatrician, the hep v. vaccine has prevented countless

miserable and painful deaths. Right, but you got to think about the downside. But have you as a physician been scanning airports for children's mitochondrial deficiencies? Because that's the science that this administration's interesting. That's easy for you to say a pediatrician, because you don't have a worm in your brain. They're fat. What more do you need? All the kids are fat. They're unattractive.

You might take the medal for best in the office. Sam kind of veers into Alex Jones territory with his. Yeah, and I got to lower his mic volume. Someone's got to rein that guy in. Okay, so biggest story, obviously, of the day, really, is that last night, ABC took Jimmy Kimmel off the air. And the context of this is that Next Star Media,

the largest owner of local TV stations in the United States already, including stations affiliated with ABC, Disney owns ABC. They basically came out with a statement saying that they will not air his show on their ABC affiliate stations indefinitely.

And just coincidentally, let's pull up that tear sheet. Some news from last month probably has nothing to do with it. Next star CEO praises Trump administration as local TV giant announces $6.2 billion merger with rival. Let's read the first few paragraphs of this. There's Trump. Trump looking very happy. Please. Showing off those neckflare.

holds. Next are the largest owner of local television stations in the United States announced Tuesday that it would be acquiring rival Tegna in a $6.2 billion mega deal that would reshape the landscape of local media as the Trump administration seems poised to loosen regulatory limits. Now, this was in August, so last month, this article came out. In fact, seemingly alluding to the presumption that Donald Trump's handpick Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr would approve the deal despite current restrictions in place. Next, our CEO, Perry Suk, heaped praise on the administration in his company's announcement of the deal. The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field. Can we talk about the metaphors they use here? Like expand reach. These are supposed to be business people, but they get all poetic and talk about things like level the playing field. You are a billion-dollar monopoly media organization run by fascist. What do you mean expand your reach? already are the largest conglomerate in the country, but they were limited.

I mean, we don't even need to read the rest of that. He just is sucking Trump off. But they, the, let's pull up my tweet then here just to explain. So, um, this deal is really reliant on, uh, Trump's FCC changing current regulations. It's not just, I mean, look, they're going to greenlight all attempts to create monopolies, it seems like. Remember all that talk that they would be antitrust partners, like, in

the way that Lena Khan was? Well, JD Vance might be interested in Lena Khan. Oh, because Josh Hawley once said something fiery in public and then just capitulated to Donald Trump on everything in private. So, broadcast industry analysts, this is CNN, said all the deal talk is premised on pending action by the FCC

to loosen the government's limits on broadcast station ownership. Currently, through a regulation known as the National television ownership rule, companies are capped at reaching 39% of all U.S. TV households. Station owners say the cap must be raised so that they can survive in the digital age, and they believe FCC Chair Brendan Carr, a top Trump ally, agrees. And it's quite clear that he does. Carr recently called the station ownership caps arcane and artificial and opened an FCC proceeding to review the matter. Now go to the next image. What this would do? It would

obliterate that previous rule. Next star, the largest station group in the country also has a major merger before the Trump administration, its proposed acquisition of Tegna, creating a mega company with 265 stations in 44 states and the D.C representing 80% of U.S. TV households. The current rule, as if we don't have enough consolidation in the media sphere enough, is you just, you can't do 40%. You can't be in 40%. percent of households, one company. This is too much of a monopoly. The Trump's FCC, and by the way, this guy, Brendan Carr, cut his teeth underneath

Ajit Pye, the FCC head under Trump 1.0, who helped kill net neutrality in the first Trump administration. They are convinced that he's going to do it. I mean, that's not just like a raising of the rule slightly. You're just obliterating it and allowing for complete consolidation of local TV stations. So, speaking of that guy,

Brendan Carr, this is what he said on the Benny Johnson show yesterday about, I guess it was really Jimmy Kimmel, and his reaction to this is

it's just emblematic of this incredibly authoritarian free speech. And he is absolutely thinking of these companies Next Star and, et cetera, when he's making these comments. A hundred percent. Should we play the monologue joke first and then this? Let's play this first. And then we'll show you what Kimmel actually said. There's actions that we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters

themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, listen, we are going to preempt. We are not going to run. Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC. If we continue, you're the FCC. Yeah. And find for what? Right.

Right. Well, that's what we're going to get into Kimmel, who said nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. If we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion. So I think, again, Disney needs to see some change here. but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it's time for them to step up and say, this garbage to the extent that that's what comes down the pipe in the future

isn't something that we think serves the needs of our local communities. But this sort of status quo is obviously not acceptable where we are. Our local communities. That's what he cares about. That's why he's basically, I mean, his line there is indistinguishable from the CEO's statements about what they want to do. he's loving this like Pi

who I believe was very much in the revolving door wouldn't he come from Comcast this is the kind of thing where I want to make sure

I have it right Verizon sorry Verizon he came from Verizon same thing you know the car is looking to cash out

in the corporate world eventually and giving these conglomerous everything they want, especially when they suck up to the president by taking Jimmy Kimmel off air,

they have a mutual kind of beneficial relationship right now. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, and make no mistake, the executives in these television channels, they're not doing this entirely unwillingly. And that's the truth of any of the law

firms that are bending to Trump or Columbia and the Ivy League's bending in Trump, they're conservatives at the executive level that are willingly complicit in all of this. In part because they've probably wanted an excuse to take out late night shows before that's caused problems with them politically because God forbid comedians say how they feel and also because they have large staffs and these are like productions that are staples of television that, you know, have rich histories but have a lot of, you know, overhead for them.

But because they like basically deal to the majority of the country, um, They're not right wing. Right. Right. And so this is what Kimmel said. See what you heard that was so inflammatory that he had to be taken off the air for that. This is called... Indefinitely.

Yes. And misinformation, what he said here. And, yeah, we'll get into it. Content. We had some new lows over the weekend with the Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger pointing, there was...

grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this. I condolences on the loss of your friend, Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. yes he's at the fourth stage of grief construction that's a really good joke that was a really good joke and um there's this um lie going around by the fascist that want you to eulogize charlie kirk that what he said

there was wrong in any kind of way he's not he's not wrong that um we don't know much about the ideology of the shooter but it's a lie to say that he's left wing which is what all of these folks we're doing immediately after we don't have anything to base that off of what they're basing that off of is he is a uh a kid born white kid born to a republican family um pictured often with guns and then turned out to be gay that's being gay or bisexual whatever that is is not left wing no ask peter teal ask dave rober exactly as the treasury secretary the violence thing I would say comes more to from this part of his life where he was

taking pictures with guns at a young age and taught that that was the way to deal with it. But specifically Kimmel is referencing what everyone saw, which is the governor of that state, Spencer Cox, say this right in front of the FBI director who's fumbling this and tripping all over is

you know what. This is what Spencer Cox had to say. You know, this bad stuff happens. and for for 33 hours I was I was praying that that if this had to happen here

that it wouldn't be one of us that somebody drove from another state somebody came from another country okay so that is what Kimmel was referencing when he said that phrase and they are lying in order to use any pretext imagine to crack down on free speech.

Because there is an emergency about violence that happens in this country and the lies that happen after it. And it's things Republicans do. Ted Cruz will play in the fun half, still lying, saying that the guy who shot up people in Minnesota was saying that he was a Wall supporter. Walls put a Republican in a city position or in a state position. And that's how he's repaid when that guy goes effing crazy. Actually, it's a good lesson for Democrats, don't put Republicans into any kind of position because they're going to make a list of abortion providers and Democrats and shoot them up. And the Republicans like Ted Cruz will lie about it. There is an emergency about how we react to these things, but it is entirely on the side of the right wing.

And I don't even think that what Walls appointed him to, it was like some business advisory, small business panel that every kind of governor does these things of local business owners and having some sort of summit or whatever, the idea that he has any association with walls, but you would probably have like 30% of the country if they've heard about this story at all, believing that, because the right wing keeps saying it over and over again. And that's what they're trying to do to get out ahead of the story. First, the bullets were trans. Oh, no, turns out the bullet casings just have TRN or whatever listed on them, right? That was the acronym. Yeah, that was not even the right bullet. The one that Stephen Crowder was put around everybody. Yeah, that's just the name of the manufacturer.

Exactly. It was a 9mm which doesn't go in a fucking hunting rifle. But they got that from Crowder. Then they leaked it to the Wall Street Journal that republished it.

And clearly they probably got some verification from somebody in the government that is eager to put that misinformation out there.

Then they were saying the shooter's definitely trans, definitely trans, definitely trans. Oh, no. Oh, no. Has a roommate that's trans. Might have had a relationship with the roommate

that is trans. And how can we find a way to fit our narrative into this horrible killing as a way to justify the authoritarian crackdown that he's been preparing for? And they've been trying to do this by trying to get people to provoke violence against ICE officers or whatever. They're trying to make it to give them any pretext when they're sent. these people into our cities to McCarthyism to crack down, exactly. Never waste a crisis. Right, and when they talk about

and find any crisis. Yes, yeah. And why is Benjamin Netanyahu going on over the top to talk about Charlie Kirk over and over again? It's because he is desperate to own this as well and to martyrize Charlie Kirk as a supporter of Israel to use the same tactics that the

Trump administration is trying to do, to manufacture consent for a far-right agenda, to get ahead of the story and make it something that's convenient for them. Because they do not care about free speech. Let's be abundantly clear. This is multiple direct attacks on the First Amendment already throughout this administration, including the detention of folks like Mahmoud Khalil and others for their speech. Romaya Osterk as well, and more. When the Wright talks about free speech, it's because they want to say the R word,

they want to use anti-translars, they want to say racial slurs on the internet, they want deregulation, and they want to be re-platformed, whether they're a Nazi or a Groyper or whatever freak that they, flavor of freak that they are on that side of things. They want to be able to go on their social media platforms

and say what they want to say, but everybody else you make a light joke about Charlie Kirk we're canceling your show the thing about Republicans why they were so upset about cancel culture is because they were fucking jealous and now they're trying to use state power to do it

and that's fascism they are using it they are they are I'm sorry yeah but like I mean and corporate America this is how liberalism is failing and collapsing before our very eyes because you can't have free markets and free rights in this way.

Because corporations are siding with their bottom line here. They want these corporate mergers. They want to consolidate. They will throw all of our rights under the bus to do so. And that's how Trump is currying favor with them as he crashes the economy because of tariffs or whatever. I'll give you whatever you want. Just go along with my agenda. And that is the definition of what fascism ends up being.

this merging of state and corporate power it's happening right before our very eyes so um and and the militarism of nationalism the anti of fascism the nationalism there you know we're we're witnessing and living through it right now oh and just as an aside Trump wants to declare antifa anti-fascist is what that stands for as a domestic terrorist organization in case you weren't getting the picture

Mahmood Khalil also voted to be deported to Algeria, or what are they saying? Or Syria. Yeah. This started before Trump was in office this time. And a guy Blagoiavism, a good Chicago, a tweeter on Twitter. Zionism was the hardened tungsten tip of the authoritarian projectile that was fired into the American institutions. It was liberal piercing. And I'm sorry.

like all this stuff is is part of it we've been we've had a McCarthy we've been in a period just as bad um I mean yeah I mean in certain ways like like what's going on right now the deportation machine the alien sedition act being ruled out and um and people were like questioning whether Hannah Einbinder should have used her opportunity to say something about ICE or Gaza at the speeches, absolutely everyone needs to. This is an absolute emergency. It's going to look fucking weird to people

in history, all the people that are acting normal about all this stuff. Yep. That's exactly right. In a moment, we are going to be speaking to Austin Coker, but first, a word from some of our sponsors.

When the majority of reports started, Sam talks about this all the time, People were asking for merch, but we kind of do things slowly here. It's tough to get that all set up. But we have our show. We've got to record. We've got to read a bunch before the show.

It's overwhelming. And every day it seemed like, though, according to Sam, back in the day, people were asking about merch. And they found a solution, basically. And that solution was Shopify. Finding the right tool not only helps you out, it simplifies everything and it can be such a game changer. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify.

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He's been doing this for a while, like the majority report, and is one of the more trusted writers on the left. Great writer. He also has a show, Current Affairs, says, YouTube channel. People should check out as well. But beyond Nathan, they have all these other great writers there. I keep citing that piece on the Gaza Death Toll that I've been sending around, passive aggressively to family members, as I like to do.

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Trey-Jose-Jose-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-J-ch-ch-ch-tch-ch-tch-oh. We are back and we are joined once again by Austin Coker, political and legal geographer, studying immigration enforcement, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. And you can follow him on his a great substack that helps track deport. and ICE and their actions. Austin, welcome back to the show. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Anna.

Of course. So you are doing work, great work, documenting, helping, you know, tally these deportations, getting data together. It's extremely difficult to find, like, comprehensive data on this. But you just announced an immigration enforcement dashboard that uses the deportation data projects data to create kind of visualizations of the deportation efforts and the numbers that we're looking at here. Just speak a little bit about that project and why you undertook it and what some of the

challenges were. Sure. So despite this administration's claims that it's going to be the most transparent administration in history, the Trump administration has choked off crucial data sources about how much immigration enforcement activity and deportations are happening. That's basically put a bunch of pressure on civil society and researchers like myself to find more ways to get the data and make it more public so that everybody has access to the same objective data and not just talking points and spin coming out of the administration. So what we've done and launched today was we took data

from this amazing group from Berkeley University, the deportation data project. They use public records requests and litigation to get the government to release detailed data about all of these immigration enforcement efforts. And it's been really a trove of data. Reporters have used it. Researchers have used it. It's incredible resource. But they're huge data sets. And so it takes technical expertise and programming ability to really get in there and understand it. And I'm just a huge believer. And I want everyone to have access to data. I don't want to have technology or or expertise barriers get in the way. I believe in the democratization of knowledge, as I know,

the majority report does, and it's part of why you exist. So what we did is we took that data. We simplified it a little bit and built some interactive dashboards so that anybody can go to Enforcement Dashboard.com and look at that detailed data. Right now, we just have the ICE arrest data up. We're working on some of the other data sets. But this is the data set that I've been getting the most questions about

So it's public today and we hope people will use it and use it to understand both the scale of what's happening right now in our country and also start to think about ways to use this data to inform how they might push back. So what is the data showing here? What are what would you say over the past few months has been the theme? And what can you like not include in your research? is being still hidden from researchers in terms of numbers? Yeah, it's a great question because more data is being hidden than ever. So absolutely worth talking about. The overall finding is that there's been a meteoric rise in ICE arrests across the country.

Certainly, we've seen a lot of reporting on what's going on in Southern California, where ICE has been essentially targeting taco trucks and day laborers and other places where immigrants live. and work normally in relative peace. But actually, Texas and Florida, we've seen the most arrests in Texas and Florida, as well as targeted arrests in other places across the country, which you can see in the dashboard. We really haven't seen the number of monthly arrests like this.

It was well over 30,000 arrests in June alone, up from, you know, a fraction of that a year or years past. Certainly there are a lot of arrests during the Obama administration as well, but we think this is probably at a historic high. The other thing that the data shows, and now for the first time people can go and see for themselves, is that that spike in arrests in May and June was driven entirely by the arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions, which runs counter to the message that the administration has been putting out there. Now, this data only relates to arrest by immigration and customs enforcement. It doesn't include arrest from the Marshals Service. It doesn't include arrests by, you know, sheriff's offices and police departments who have signed on to 287G, which effectively gives them immigration enforcement authority.

It doesn't, you know, it doesn't include those arrests, unfortunately. So there still are a lot of other arrests out there. There's other ways for people to get put into the deportation system. But this is a pretty good indicator of what ICE specifically is doing. And it also helps us to understand, okay, with this new information, influx of $150 billion to the Department of Homeland Security, what is that now going to look like? I mean, this is now a budget larger than most militaries in the world. And we can start to, you know, as we will, we will track as closely as we can how that funding gets used and what

it will look like in terms of arrests across America. So let's pull up this dashboard now. We just, again, people can go to Enforcement Dashboard.com to see. But you have contract 291,668 total arrests starting in September 2023 onward. But there's also, you show this by state, monthly arrest. This is also helpful because you can see how much is escalating under the Donald Trump administration and keep going down. There, that's monthly arrests, I mean, what, it hit its peak in around June or May, Alson? Yeah, that's right in June. It went down a little bit in July, mostly that isn't because of the good graces of ice, you know.

Right. It's causing it's actually from lawsuits. It's judges restricting what judges have said as unconstitutional and lawful approaches to enforcement. That has been overruled, so we expect that arrest will go back up. That's part of the dip is because of lawsuits. And you see how in terms of state arrests, they're targeting clearly if we could just put up the graph of the map of the U.S. down there, you can see that they're targeting the most

populous states. I guess it would be interesting to see too, you know, proportionally, but a population-wise. But there it is. California. I mean, Texas, Texas is deportation central right now. now. Yes, that's right. And there's a lot happening in Texas, certainly a lot happening in Florida as well. So, yeah. I mean, there is a sense in which the administration is selectively targeting what it views as democratic centers. So, you know, Chicago, Los Angeles, other places. But in, in reality,

when we look at the full scope of the data, you know, ICE really has the most cooperation in places like Texas and Florida. So that's, in some ways, that's naturally where they're going to be able to facilitate the most arrests. So what does that cooperation look like versus, say, you know, Pritzker or Hockel or even, you know, Newsom, their responses and how have they been able to throw some sand in the gears? If not, you know, obviously it's difficult because they are federal law enforcement. Sure. I mean, it's a, it's a complex. legal landscape when it comes to what you can and can't do in terms of restricting immigration enforcement. And, you know, conservative legal activists have been more proactive

than ever in trying to challenge some of those state and local laws under grounds of unconstitutionality, which is, you know, interesting. But, you know, states like Texas and Florida, ICE has tremendous leverage because there's so many counties and police departments who have signed on to what I know that you are aware of. the 287G agreements. Well, we had you want to talk about that, but maybe if folks missed that part of the interview, you didn't mind expanding? Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's always worth reiterating because it's such a technical sounding term. So 287G agreement is a policy where local law enforcement agencies can sign an agreement with the federal government, with ICE, basically, and get the authority to do certain kinds of immigration enforcement. Basically, it means that, you know, your level. local cop, your local sheriff, you know, the enforcement, you know, the school safety officer at your high

school could actually have the authority to do immigration enforcement. It's not just ICE officers anymore. Now, I've studied this particular program for my entire career. It's part of why I got into this work back in 2009, 2010. And we've never had more than, you know, 140, 150, 287G agreements in the country. We now have today, in middle of September, a thousand. We actually have a little bit more than 1,000 287G agreements across the country. Massive meteoric rise in these 287G agreements. And now half of them, 500 of these are the most aggressive type, which is called a task force model. Basically, it means that, you know, it's not just in the jails where people are booked into jails. Cops can actually do this kind of enforcement on the street. So there's

500 of those. This was a task force that was actually so controversial that there was an investigation into Maricopa County, a sheriff several years ago, Joe Arpaio, who was notorious. Sheriff Joe. Yeah. He's the one that basically abused the program so badly they terminated it. Well, this administration has brought it back with vengeance. It is in many ways very controversial because your local police department should be, and we know that it is not the case, but in an ideal world, a source of trust and community service. So if you're an undocumented person, you are very unlikely to seek out police help. And that's a real problem for a community because you are in fear that they will just deport you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I saw this talking to, you know, police officers in North Carolina and Georgia, Ohio over the years. You know, there's police officers who they do see themselves as the front line of providing protection and service and community relations. I talked to a female officer in Raleigh, North Carolina, several years ago who, you know, her whole job was working with victims of domestic violence. And she said, you know, it's really hard. She was at the time in a 287G County. She said, you know, it's hard to get people to work with me and talk with me so that we can take appropriate action for these women when they're terrified that them or even their partners are going to be arrested, detained, and deported. You know, these are working class people who can't afford to have, you know, their whole income taken away just because of, you know, someone's civil violation from 20 years ago.

You also have been tracking ICE detainment and treatment of pregnant women, including this horrible case that you wrote about, about a woman named Iris Dayana Monterezzo Lemus. I'm sorry, I'm not a good Spanish speaker. but she miscarried in ICE custody and she's not the only one if you don't mind just telling her story and speaking a little bit about this complete epidemic of pregnant women being mistreated, malnourished given no medical care and ICE detention.

Yes, you know, it's a consequence of this rapid escalation and immigrant detention combined with the total evisceration of oversight and accountability what it means is that, you know, ICE is arresting more people, arresting more people indiscriminately, and that just means that there's more women who are pregnant, a postpartum, or lactating, who are in ICE custody. And these are women who are obviously extremely vulnerable, as well as if they're pregnant. You know, their baby could also be vulnerable.

So Iris is just one example of many, several cases already this year, of pregnant women who have been arrested. They're not supposed to be kept in detention. There's policies in place that require the agency to consider releasing these women. There's also requirements in case in place that ICE report to Congress on how many pregnant women they're detaining. They've refused to follow that. They've stopped releasing those reports. And so in partnership with the Women's Refugee Commission and Zane Lacani there who runs that

program, you know, there's a real need to understand with the lack of data from the federal government, there's a real need to say, hey, look, if you're a real need to say, hey, look, if you're an attorney, if you're a medical professional, if you're an advocate, if you're a clergy member, and you are aware of someone, if a woman or someone is pregnant, postpartum or lactating, that's the legal, the three sort of legal parts of that. Please let us know. Please go to Detentionpregnancy tracker.com and submit a confidential report so we can understand how many people are affected and decide, you know, hopefully what the next best actions are to take. But, you know, It just shows you there's, you know, when we talk about detention numbers being at historic highs, arrests being a historic highs, sometimes, you know, and I'm a numbers person, but I'm also well aware that the numbers in some cases sort of lead us to be sort of ethically blind in some ways. Well, it's 60,000, it's 70,000. You could lose track of the humanity. But within those numbers, there's every, you know, every single one of those people, you know, they're a person with a story. And there's a lot of vulnerable groups. And pregnant women are definitely at the top of that.

And Iris is one of those stories, obviously. I mean, her father, the baby's father that was forced to relocate to Guatemala and they didn't even basically tell him about her whereabouts and they just sent her there and she miscarried and he found out afterwards he was supposed to have a boy. That's right. Yeah, he didn't even find out until, you know, he thought he was going to have. a son and by the time he got that information, his son, his, you know, his partner had miscarried and his son had passed away in detention. And for Iris, like so many others, Iris's story, it's not because they didn't know she was pregnant. They knew she was pregnant. And she complained to the guards. She complained to the medical staff and said, look, this isn't right. And this is this is a

mother who has other children. She knows what her body is telling her, you know. And it's a good example of how we don't listen to women when they raise concerns about their body. and about their pregnancies. Especially if they're not white women. Especially if they're not exactly. And that's Irish historian. So sadly, yeah, she miscarried. It's, you know, I'm not a medical professional.

So, you know, I don't know this for sure. But, you know, I'd like to think that with proper medical care, that miscarriage could have been prevented and that family could have been a family. And as you say, you know, as if that's not tragic enough, Iris was deported. and her husband, a U.S. citizen, has left the country. And I can tell you, because I'm, you know, I'm in conversation with a lot of spouses of immigrants these days because I've been doing some work with American Families United, Ashley Acevedo, who runs that organization. They work with, you know, the spouses of immigrants and try to help this, you know, provide support for them.

And working with them has meant I've heard so many more stories. I, in some ways, I had no idea just how big of a problem this is. is just how many U.S. citizens are being harmed right now and are saying, look, either our family is going to be separated or me and or my children. Now we have to relocate to another country so that we can have a family. So, you know, one thing that I've really learned, Emma, is that, you know, in so many of these cases of deportation, we're not just deporting immigrants. We are deporting U.S. citizens as well, not because we're putting U.S. citizens on planes all the time, although we've we have probably done that.

We're also forcing U.S. citizens to make a decision about where to live in an unfair way because there's no other path to citizenship. And a lot of people out there, I know that, you know, you've probably heard this as well as I have. A lot of people think if you marry a U.S. citizen, you automatically get citizenship, and that's just not the case. I mean, they're explicitly, you know, targeting people on that basis, although I would like Donald Trump to remember that he still has a watch. who came from a different country and married a U.S. citizen, but I don't think they talk that much.

Just got to make a little bit of a joke about how upsetting this all is. You wrote, you are also doing great work, kind of tracking spikes in detention in terms of population, at a variety of these different camps, prison camps, across the country, including this Fort Bliss ice detention facility that is particularly frightening. Can you speak a little bit about what's happening at Fort Bliss? Yeah, certainly. So Fort Bliss is a military base. It was one of the sites of Japanese internment, by the way,

just an important historic note back in the 40s. and, you know, many people would say it's become that again. So Fort Bliss, it's one of the first cases of a military base being used to house immigrant detainees. I think many of us have suspected that the administration would go this route for a while, and now they have. One of the things about hidden data, by the way, Emma, is that the administration, well, ICE does put out detention data, but they don't actually tell you the total population in individual facilities. So my colleague Adam Sawyer came up with a really clever way of figuring out actually what that data looks like using the weird kind of calculations that ICE provides the public. So we have that other project at Detention Reports.com that allows us to say, okay, really, what are the populations like at these facilities?

And Fort Bliss has just exploded to obviously not having anyone to having well over 1,100 now, I believe, and we're probably going to see that. continue to grow. You know, one thing I would just say, I know it feels like I'm naming a lot of websites, Emma, that we have for these different projects. But, you know, what I would say is that we're at a place right now. It's, you know, September 2025. We're, you know, nine months into the Trump administration. You know, what I've really tried to do and what I really try to work with other partners on is figure out, we can't just always be reactive, right? We have to be creative. We have to find ways to expose what's going on. We have to find new data or we have to find creative use of data. And that's really what we're trying to do with all these projects is not create

projects for project's sake, but try to find ways to narrate what's going on to the public and make things more legible to people. So that's what we tried to do. And Fort Bliss is absolutely an example of that. I think, you know, with the funding coming down the line, we'll need to continue to track what's going on in these facilities so that we know what's going on can can you speak about what you anticipate with this massive increase in funding for immigration enforcement it is going to be they're going to have 45 billion dollars for immigrant attention alone um i think that the big ugly bill uh had it at what 10 times the did it increase by 10fold the ice budget yes yeah okay so insanity um i mean it's

Dwarfing the FBI, for example, just to give people a sense. Like, what is your prediction about what that increase in funding is going to mean on the ground? Yeah. So one of the major logistical challenges for the Trump administration achieving this mass deportation project. And, you know, I've written about this before is it's not that they, it's not a lack of desire for, you know, detaining and deporting people. It's all of these logistical barriers. They don't have enough bed space to meet what they want to do. They don't have, they don't feel like they have enough officers and enough people to do everything.

This budget basically gives them everything they want. And so with that amount of funding, they won't necessarily, probably, they won't necessarily build new facilities from scratch because that takes too much time, permitting, zoning, all of that contracts, all of that stuff. Instead, what they'll do is they'll take that money to reappropriate existing facilities across the country, whether it's National Guard centers that they can, you know, build tent facilities very quickly. It might be prisons. You know, we've actually had a decline in our national prison population. So there are some facilities that have available beds. So they may well start

putting people into, you know, prisons designed for people with criminal rather than civil convictions. And probably finding creative new agreements with county sheriffs across the country, you know, they've, in the past, it's not just this administration, they've turned things like old Kmart's into, you know, into temporary, temporary, you know, facilities for holding immigrants. They could, they could do that as well. And, you know, we're probably going to see places like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, you know, places where the governors and the politics that are favorable, we're probably going to see even, even more of these facilities. And I would imagine lots of private contracts.

too. Lots of private contracts. Very lucrative private contracts that will go to folks, organizations, companies that people like Tom Homan have served on the boards of and been advisors to and been paid by. So it's, yeah, I think there's a lot of stories still yet to be written about the kind of racket that this represents. Austin Coker, political legal geographer studying immigration enforcement assistant research professor at Syracuse University. You can follow the substack also check out the deportation data project and all of the other tools that austin spoke about throughout our conversation thanks so much for your time today really appreciate it thanks for having me anna of course and we'll put a link to that down below

wherever people are listening to or watching this quick break and when we come back we'll be talking to dan o's Sullivan Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be. And back. We are back and we are joined now by Dan O'Sullivan, co-host of The Outfit, a podcast about how organized crime explains America. Dan, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much for having me. I love the show. Appreciate it. Thank you. I am fascinated right now. I've been thinking a little bit about like the FBI, the CIA, connections and somewhat to the mafia in history, to mobsters, their roles in trying to pull them into assassination plots against Castro and also just like generally the McCarthy era, given what we

are living through right now. How in your kind of study of some of these mobsters do you see some shadings of history repeating itself in the current moment, if at all? I mean, it's a great question, and we can really, it's interesting how many aspects of mob history we can sort of pick and choose from to talk about the current moment with Donald Trump. I mean, we have Trump the builder and his father who are literally, you know, were built up with the mafia construction rackets, partnered with them in New York, going back to the early 50s. then we have the modern day sort of gangsterism with Trump, the crypto deals, you know, the shady money flowing in from overseas into places like Panama and Germany where Trump is part of this really modern kind of global criminal financial market. So, but you hit upon quite a relevant one now in terms of, well, you know, for a long time,

J. Edgar Hoover said there was no mafia in America, right? And instead was focusing his energies on suspected communists. And I think we're seeing some similar things happen where just the most venal types of corruption and crime are obviously completely ignored in favor of going after, you know, what some college student said about Gaza or, you know, obviously what comedians are saying on television, right? And interestingly, even though there's a, there's definitely precedent for that and how the FBI and authorities approach things, I also see a lot of reminiscent behavior of extortion, of protection obviously on those tactics. Roy Cohn was his mentor. Like, if we're talking about the McCarthy era, Roy Cohn is, and there's a piece in Rolling Stone that I

covered yesterday about Stephen Miller and how much of a role he plays in the administration and he's he's been referred to as Trump's Roy Cohn I think Trump in the article I may be misremembering may have said he's my Roy Cohn or something like that or people around him I'm paraphrasing either way the parallels are clear and Cohn's connections as a mafia lawyer

are fascinating when you play in when you when you tease this out and obviously a virulent anti-communist McCarthyite who bragged about executing the Rosenbergs. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a fascinating thing. So obviously Roy Cohn was chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee of Joseph McCarthy that was responsible for a lot of the Red Scare. He was chief counsel on the Army McCarthy hearings. But he also, in later life, as was depicted in the movie The Apprentice, was not just Donald Trump's lawyer, but lawyer to, depending on the source, either two or three of the bosses of the five families of the mafia in New York.

And so, and this was not just a casual relationship. Roy Cohn was an emissary from the underworld to these more respectable figures, whether that's George Steinbrenner, who owns the Yankees, or Donald Trump, who much has been made of the fact that Donald Trump built Trump Tower entirely out of concrete. without a steel frame. And that may not sound interesting or significant, except for the fact that concrete at that time in New York was controlled by a fixed-bid club called the Concrete Club,

sort of orchestrated by the five families, particularly by Fat Tony Salerno, street boss of the Genovese family, who the journalist Wayne Barrett, his sources insisted Trump met with Salerno to work out the concrete buy. for that project at Roy Cohn's townhouse. So we're talking about direct links between the mafia and Donald Trump. And this goes back to Fred Trump, his father. I mean, journalists like Michael

D. Antonio and Wayne Barrett wrote about this, that the mafia was partnered on some of the outer borough projects that Fred Trump built in the 50s. So interestingly, the victim in that was the federal housing authority, which they soaked for overcharges. So we were left holding the bag on that one. you know that seems so out of character for the trumps right um i mean that that's amazing i did not know uh that that was the case and how direct that link was it also sheds new light i think on some of trump's connections to figures like felix satyr uh to uh to uh russian like criminal operations and in a sense you know his admiration of vladimir putin or kind of enjoyment of him can be explained in that way as well, going back that far to

Russian, you know, money connections, or at the very least, maybe they don't, didn't know each other at the time, but like, those are the, they're swimming in the same waters, basically. Well, that's right. And I think a crucial connection point there, besides, you know, many of the things you could talk about from the Mueller report and all that. But something I find really interesting is the bank that Donald Trump turned to in the 90s was Deutsche Bank, which is, you know, I mean, I don't say this lightly, maybe one of the most nefarious banks on earth. They take anybody's money, basically. That's their reputation, and they've been caught doing illegal things on criminals' behalf. There's a great book about it, I think called

Dark Towers by a former New York Times editor on Deutsche Bank. and how they do this. There was a great investigation on WNYC about this. And really, the issue here, not that it's ever been proved conclusively, is that it sure seems like Deutsche Bank, which has, I believe continues to have a presence in Moscow, which is rare among Western banks, was aiding Russian gangsters and oligarchs in getting their money out of Russia, which they want to do for a variety of reasons. So while that is happening with Deutsche Bank, you also have Donald Trump relying on Deutsche Bank for these really mind-boggling loans, which he defaults on, which he should not be getting, right, to overpay for the Durrell golf course in Florida, you know, to finance these projects that are never going to be profitable, including with guys like Felix Sater, who's a former mob-associated boiler room operator who turned snitch on them.

can we prove that it's Russian money being laundered through these projects? Not in those cases. They can, though, in Panama, of all places, where there's another deal. Donald Trump builds a project there. It really doesn't build it, actually. He's just licensing his name for it. It's going to be something for Ivanka to build or manage. She commits fraud.

I mean, it's just, like, definitive. She's lying about. Wait, his wife or his... the daughter? It's easy to get confused on that point with her, but it is the daughter. Okay, got you. And it's going to be her little project to run. And that one, you can prove that there are Brazilian and Colombian partners involved in,

clearly in the drug trade and in laundering drug profits involved in that, and Russian gangsters also laundering money in that project. And Reuters did a really good investigation of it. So, you name it. I mean, this is, you know, from cradle to grave, Donald Trump's been involved in these kinds of international gangster activities. That brings me to this curious comment from Mike Johnson. A few weeks ago at this point, in regard to the Epstein files, he walked this back, but I, my theory on this is what we call a limited hangout, because this could, it may not be true in the Epstein case, but maybe what he said, here is true in the case of what you're talking about here, Russian money laundering and

Felix Sater, just a theory, but here is what Mike Johnson said a few weeks ago. He's not saying that what Epstein did as a hoax. It's a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Marilago. He was an FBI informant. What? He tried to sneak that in there. He was an FBI informant. Dan, I'm curious to your reaction, but also, if you can just tell people the type of person that typically becomes an FBI informant? Like, is it because you win a patriotism contest? It's when you were a Boy Scout.

You get a, it's the top badge that you can earn. I mean, let's look at it this way. An FBI informant of this sort is the lowest person in the underworld, right? So you're the, you're kind of the bad guy to the other bad guys, you know? And it's because you got caught for something, right? Look, I don't know if Donald Trump ever informed on anyone to the FBI. All I know is until relatively recently, he was never a convicted felon. A hundred percent, and you just laid out all of the illegal activities that he was participating in.

It would make sense. So, I mean, look, we do have a culture of impunity. I know that we never punish any rich guys. But, you know, I mean, Wayne Barrett had him on. on mail and wire fraud, I think, like in the 70s or 80s on this property on the west side of Manhattan. So anyone who wanted to prosecute him could have and should have years ago, I think it's probably a mix of influence and just inertia that, you know, these guys never seem to go to prison. It is just interesting, though. I mean, because when we're talking about the mafia and the mob, that was a very kind of.

common practice of creating FBI informants, I believe, although you're the expert here, Dan, I should maybe ask that as a question, because that would be a part of the theme here. Peter Thiel is, I believe, confirmed to have been an FBI informant. So this is not, it is not implausible by any means. And I will say another thing, you know, to take an example from Boston of Whitey Bulger. You know, Whitey Bulger, the Boston mob boss, Irish mob boss, revealed to be an FBI informant for decades. I mean, why did he do that? He did that to get rid of the Cozenostra in Boston in Providence. He did that to eliminate his rivals who were going to eliminate him eventually. Is that really above Donald Trump? I'm speculating here. But, you know, I would not be shocked,

you know, that he shopped other rivals. Absolutely. So when, You're looking at, like, this new kind of criminal economy in the modern age involving a lot of crypto, involving shady money from overseas. What stands out to you as, like, a unique feature of it? And, like, in keeping with the theme of Trump kind of using and absorbing mafioso tactics, I mean, the tariffs are a number one thing that we could also, like, talk about in his presidency. He's using that, like, a shake. down. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's so true. And the one that's been on my mind, you know, the most recently that I think is really interesting is what he's been doing to the colleges and universities and now TV networks, right, which is a protection racket. And, you know, what is the logic

of a protection racket? Everyone knows, all right, you pay the gangsters such and such money or we throw a brick through your window, right? But I think it's actually more complicated in that. The best definition I've heard of a mafia is an organization that sells protection. That is essentially like a state within a state and its own kind of government. And what I find so interesting about Trump, not just with the tariffs, you know, but also with the universities and stuff, he's often doing it in that way. He's not using the full power of the state.

He's almost using his own personal power to do this. Well, it's interesting, considering he's the president, that he wouldn't appeal to that rather than his own sort of loyalty and acolytes, you know. And I find that very mob-like, right? And that what he's doing to these universities is doing essentially a protection racket where if you pay the racket, you're not just paying the money. That's half of it. You're also conceding the idea he has the right to ask that from you. And I think that is even more valuable in a sense because he doesn't have the right to ask that. But he does if you grant it, you know, this is so unprecedented.

And because you've conceded that, you're never getting out now. The guys who paid, the deal with extortion like this is once you pay, you're never getting out. You think you can escape now, it's not happening. The guys who don't pay, whatever short-term costs they bear are worth it to not be in that guy's pocket. And he's doing it with corporations in the United States, too. And he rewards them. Like in this, we open the show speaking about the TV conglomerate, the local TV conglomerate Nexstar, making this call on Jimmy Kimmel, right, as almost like a tribute to the Mafia Don president, a show of faith. And in turn, basically, they are rewarding them by reportedly changing.

obliterating like FCC anti-monopoly guidelines to allow for this merger with their biggest rival and then it would comprise a monopolistic takeover of 80% of local TV stations. I mean, this is, it just is so clear what's happening here, which is, you know, there is, in a big premise of our podcast is there is no line between legitimate and illegitimate business. right? And it's just this murk. And if we look at, you know, the kind of countries that mafias thrive best in are sort of partial democracies. They're not full-on autocracies. They're not very healthy, clean democracies. They're ones with a mix of those characters, you know, characteristics. And so I think we're in one of those, it sure seems like, because

the awarding of government contracts and of the goodies to a favored a favored few, this is just a much larger version of that Concrete Club in New York I was talking about, where it's just eight concrete contractors. That's who you have to buy from. Those are the only guys you can buy from. And by the way, you're going to pay an inflated cost for low-quality stuff, but you have no other choice. And, I mean, it also incentivized, you know, this monopoly stuff and like taking his hands off the wheel of anti-monopoly law is also, too, about consolidating power in the hands of people that are nice to him and suck up to him.

Well, look at the only show in town. Who's getting TikTok, right? It is David, David Sachs, Mark Andreessen. Like, I mean, these are double-dealing guys who are just his cronies. This is just the modern-day version of, you know, Mayor Daley steering all the insurance business in the city to his son's firms. You know, this is, well, and we could talk about Don Jr. and Eric, I mean, playing an important role in this, too. We didn't even get to the cryptocurrency piece of this racket. Right. I mean, again, I mean, literally, it reminds me of that, that scam from Mayor Daley or Senator Aldamato of New York, all business would go through his brother. Like, again, this is a common tactic in corrupt, mob corrupted politicians. But now we're just doing it with whoever wants to dump money in the coffers of the Trump family.

In this case, I think the United Arab Emirates, there was that great story in the New York Times about $2 billion in cryptocurrency purchases going straight to these Trump companies in exchange for these AI chips. I mean, that's just as clear a pay to play as you could find. you know um how do you view the like kind of new the the tech mafioso types and comparing that to you know the golden age of the mafia um when they were at their heights um a lot less cool no um yeah they're not going to be making uh you know movies or shows like the sopranos way less fashionable Yes, yeah. Although they are making the social network, too. And I saw Ike Barronholz is, I believe, playing Elon Musk. I think that was him. Maybe not. And it's going to work, I think. He kind of looks and sounds like him. Oh, no, that's great casting. Listen, they, in all seriousness, at least the mafia would tip a lot when they go out. I don't think these guys are glad handing everyone with a 50 when they walk around, you know?

I think in all seriousness it, you know, look, I despise the mafia. I do think with organized crime back in those days, there was an expectation at least that if you're in that life, there's a strong probability you're going to be killed or go to prison. And that did color a lot of their behavior, like in how they had to live. What's really scary about these guys to me is I think that they think that there will never be any repercussions for anything they do. And that they're close to getting it to a place where they're running everything, you know, where there is this kind of tech autocracy that maybe isn't so outlandish to imagine happening, you know. And that's really scary. But, you know, but we can also take heart from, you know, Italy of a few decades ago was really, really, you know, racked by violence.

and the Cozenostra seemed just an implacable fact of life. And it was dismantled in large part. Now, there are other problems in Italy still. Other mafias that are powerful in Italy still. But the Cozanostra is a shell of itself in Sicily. And as one of the main prosecutors on that said, you know, the mafia has a beginning. It has a middle. It can have an end.

So I try to turn to that when I feel really despairing about stuff like that. Well, it underscores why we need to prosecute. I mean, we need to prosecute these, these, these Trump people. We need to. I mean, once God help us, if we get power back, this is a result of impunity. And it's impunity, I, in my view, that started with the Iraq war, with letting those guys off the hook, with letting Wall Street off the hook. I mean, when you talk about their being not as much of a distinction as people would like to think between organized crime and just like regular capitalism, that that's a prime example of. it for me. It incentivizes criminal behavior from the top down. I think it's why things like prosecuting insider trading or these relatively minor crimes are so important because they are kind of speed bumps on worse behavior. And the fact that Donald Trump never had any of those is an outrage and is directly linked to what we have now. I mean, you know, again, Al Capone famously they got him on tax evasion charges, right?

it turned out you had to pay taxes on a legally earned income, which is kind of funny. You know, and that actually brings us to another important point, I think, which is taxation is a really important part of this, of solving this dilemma, that these guys need to pay a lot more in taxes for a lot of democratic reasons, not even criminal ones, you know? exactly um and i guess could you shed light on like the dynamic of or the organized crime you know kind of these informal economies that they're created and they were you know the irish mafia too i mean there was also uh jewish uh mafia's like newer immigrant groups that came into the united states more at the the start of the 20th century were subjected to you know racist immigration laws as well and were discriminated against

and then they so you create these informal economies almost like I mean in many of you ways it's hard not to view like Israel a little bit as an outgrowth of a little bit of a you know

a group that got empowered in many ways by the military industrial complex here in the United States and we built that up but you also have the Italian mob and, and the Irish mob, that, like, that is the natural kind of, it seems like, outgrowth of gatekeeping capital and the economy for racist ends. That always is going to be the case.

And you could see that in gang activity or whatever in the United States with other groups that are discriminated against. Yeah, I mean, look, I essentially view. you know, the signers of the, the framers of the Constitution as, you know, the first mob summit, really. I mean, this is, this is all the big shots from each area of the country coming together, like in the godfather where they're, you know, they're all assembled there. Later immigrant groups will scramble to get the best things that are available to them, right? Because they're locked out of that Boston Brahmin high level control of things, right?

So the Irish, you know, obviously the famine, I mean, I'm O'Sullivan. This is where I come from. And my grandparents came relatively late in the 1950s, but a century before they're coming to escape the famine. And what do they get? They get the urban political machines. They get basically the next best thing, right? They get the civil service of cities. And that brings immense amounts of power.

And they are essentially gangsters, right? Jews increasingly emigrate to the U.S. after the assassination of the Tsar in like 1880 or 81. And they get some of the next best things, obviously anti-Semitism, extremely strong. And then Italians, by the time they come in more towards the turn of the century, you know, there's not as much left for Jews and Italians. And, you know, you have cases of extortion within the Italian community that's, called the black hand commonly. You know, you have this criminality that is hard to penetrate.

And it eventually metastasizes into this marriage of the Cozenostra and some of the other mafias from Italy and American business, right? I mean, this is explicitly what Lucky Luciano and what his mentor has modeled themselves on, guys like Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, you know, running it like a business. And that's how they built it. I mean, bring up Lucky Luciano, we have an I.M. Maddie Moran says the Meyerlanski organized criminal syndicate was also instrumental in the early wars of Zionist conquest during the founding of Israel, which I had kind of forgotten about. Yeah, that's an interesting thing too. Yeah, Mickey Cohen, the mob boss in Los Angeles, also, you know, sent money to the, to the Yeshuv in Israel. So that, you know, I mean, you know, Israel today is, is interesting.

A lot of definitely, I mean, that's an understatement of the year, but, you know, a lot of Russian language criminals with partial Jewish heritage have used the right of return to get an Israeli passport, sometimes live there. And so, you know, it's a great, you know, great way to move through these international circuits, you know, with some latitude. Well, really fascinating stuff, Dan. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and I can't wait to check out more of your show, The Outfit, podcast about organized crime, and how it explains America, even more. After our interview, I hope everybody checks it out, and we will put a link to it down below wherever people are listening to or watching this. Dan, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was great fun. And it's on YouTube, too, right, Dan? It is on YouTube as well, and anywhere where podcasts are found, in fact. Oh, very nice. All right. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, guys. With that, we are going to wrap up the free part of the show and head into the fun part of the show. Although, that was a pretty fun interview, at least by my estimation.

It's fun to learn about our leaders. It is. As a reminder, this show relies on your support. So if you can, please, whether join the Majority Report.com, you can become a member, and then you can IM the show, and maybe your IMs will be. read, including this funny one from J.R. in Philly. I just think Mike Johnson was confused by Trump's

female body inspector t-shirt when he said he might have been an FBI informant. I mean, he was wearing the tee. Do we have Brandon? But while we're pulling it up, Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning? Yeah, Left Reckon, we had a giant

show, talk with Brian Muir about Bolsonaro getting put into prison. we had three guests and now I always blank in the moment to plug it but go check it out a huge huge show

Tom Nisha John talking about Venezuela oh yes and actually I do really need to plug this on YouTube our most recent video on Left Reckoning

which is by the way very close to 50,000 subscribers on YouTube our most recent video is thank you Brandon with Professor Tom Alter and this is a really on sort of theme today

but people should go check this out especially if you're in texas professor fired for socialism talked about tom altar here who was speaking on a at a socialism conference uh on zoom and some nutcase carlin borsenko who is like a reuben guest but like especially lunatic one who said like hitler went to heaven uh real psycho uh clipped part of his speech and got him fired even though he's a tenured professor got him fired for basically saying the Democrats are capitalist party absolutely ridiculous uh had nothing to do with charlie kirk by the way it's just you know the mccarthyate period we're in right now i mean we need to stop talk about joseph McCarthy this is the stephen miller trumpite um uh red scare as opposed to you know the even the um

the McCarthy one wasn't the first red scare in this country but we're in it again folks well uh check that out and we have been there with us But first, Brandon, what's happening on the discourse? Well, we've been going strong basically every morning, Emma. And so, yeah, I'm just honored to have such a lovely audience that chooses to spend their AM or if they are in other parts of the world, perhaps PM with me. And so, yeah, yet this morning we took a look at Cash's performance in front of Congress, you know, how much I love alliteration. I think he did a great job. I think he's very convincing.

And frankly, if I ever needed someone to lie, let's say, about my inclusion in some sort of international criminal organization, I would choose Cash Patel because I've never seen anyone. You like that Brett Kavanaugh, frantic, angry delivery, hair trigger, temper thing. That's that's what you want. Yeah, I like the, I like the evasive way in which he asked, he answered questions by like speaking around the answer in very obvious ways refusing to say certain words. sort of hunched over the death, like with the Green Goblin. Like, I like that. Yeah, I would get Tim Robertson first, but then I would go Cash Patel. Yeah, fair enough.

All right, check out the discourse, everybody. Hello, Matt Binder. What's happening on your end? Hello. Check out Leftist Mafia tonight at YouTube.com slash Matt Binder. And we'll be talking about a lot of things, I'm sure. So there you go. I'm sure.

And your newsletter, I've got to remind you. Right, Disruptionist.com. I'm going to be writing in there more. I just have been, it's been busy. It's been busy. Yes. You are father of three, so everybody's got to give Mathinder a lot of grace. I didn't get to do a show last night like I usually do because I took my kids to see NYCFC play at Yankee Stadium.

Yeah, it was a great game, by the way. So I have no idea what's going on with Jimmy Kimmel because I was at the game when that all happened. you go to have you seen zoron's attempt to try to get FIFA to refuse to use dynamic ticket pricing and set aside some tickets for locals because they're not doing that even though they've done that everywhere else in the country i did and i think it's i think it's fantastic i think i think people who have uh pooh-poohed the idea don't understand how much really for any big event not just the world cup but especially for something like the world cup how local communities are impacted by this, so the least they should get is the ability to attend the event that's impacting their life and their neighborhood and their community so that they could partake in what it's bringing to their hometown. It's insane. I mean, the way ticket prices and ticket master, I wish we had Lena Khan to keep going after them, the way it's gotten out of control, like the greed is just so insane. and it's because, like, these events have become luxury items for wealthy people to pretend like they have some sort of culture and personality.

I mean, that's what concerts are now. That's what sports are now. And it's the equality. Exactly. This is the broad economy. Like, the spending is all upper middle class and above rich people. Everyone else is fucked right now. And that's, of course, so all the economy is going to reflect that

and is going to appeal for the people who actually have money to spend. Right. I mean, you used to be able to get good tickets, good seats to a WWE show for like a hundred bucks even. Like front row for a hundred bucks, which means even higher up is super cheap. And then UFC's ownership formed TKO with WVE and bought it from the McMahon family. And then just this past week, the TKO leadership was saying, and I can't believe they said something that made Vince McMahon of all people sound good. And that was they on the record said, yeah, we're raising our ticket prices.

So like front road seats would now be like thousands of dollars. And like the noise bleeds would be hundreds of dollars. And that's because we can make that much. Vince McMahon was leaving money on the table because he was too concerned at pricing it for families. They made Vince McMahon sound good. If you're making Vince McMahon sound good, you are beyond. Yeah, beyond evil. All right. Well, we'll talk about these kinds of topics and more in the fun half.

See you on the other. See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking on the majority report. Wait, look. Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday. I think you need to take over Sam.

Oh, no, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it was offered a twerk, sushi, and poker with the boys. Twerk, sushi and poker with the boys. Who's offered a twer? Yeah.

Sushi and poker with the boys. What? Twirl. Sushi and poker. Uh, Tim's upset? Twirl. Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys.

It was offered a twer. Sushi and, and, ah, that's what we call the biz. Twit. Twirte, sushi, and poker with the boys. Right. Twerp, sushi, and open. We're going to get demonetized now. I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean.

Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Dwerp. Ugh. Sushi and poker with the boys.

Oh my God. Dwerp. Wow. Sushi. I'm sorry. I'm losing my fucking mind. So it was offered a twirth. Yeah.

Sushi and poker with the boys Logic Twerk Sushi and poker with the boys boy boy twir I think I'm like a little kid I think I'm like a little kid twirl I think I'm like a little kid

Add this debate seven thousand times A little kid I think I'm like a little kid I think I'm like a dude twirl I'm losing my fucking eyes Some people just don't understand So I'm not trying to be a dip right now But like I absolutely think the US

should be providing me With a wife and kids That's not what we're talking about here. It's not a fun job. Go, Joe. Twerp. Sushi and poker with the boys.

Take it easy to. Twer. Sushi and poker. Things have really gotten out of hands. Sushi and poker with the boys. It's an illusion. Twer. Dilluded.

Sushi. You don't have a clue as to what's going on. Live YouTube. Sam has like the way to the world on the shoulders. Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore. It was so much easier. When the majority report was just you, you were happy. Let's change the subject.

Right. Rangers and Nick's going to. Now, shut up. Don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's kind of be buried the hatchet. Left is best.

Trump. Violet twerk? Don't be foolish. Don't fucking tweet me and don't get shit. The way that I've just cucked, all of these people. Love it. That's for my hardest, so I wrote my honors thesis about it. Oh, sorry, good.

She wrote an honest thesis. I guess I should hand the main mic to you now. You are to the right of the non-form policy. We already found Israel, dude. Are you against us? That's a tougher question. I don't have an answer to you. Incredible theme song.

I'm bumble. Emma Viglin, absolutely one of my favorite people. Actually, not just in the game, like, period.