It Could Happen Here Weekly 175

to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place called second. So the Trump administration has attempted to send three hundred people who it accuses of being members of a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how they get there under the Alien Enemies Act to a prison in El Salvador where they will be detained for a year at the expense of the United States.

members of MS thirteen, which is a Salvadoran gang. The Trump administration use something called the Alien Enemies Act to remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act we actually spoke about it in November of last year when we were looking at provisions of US law that the Trump administration could use for its mass deportation gender. This is when we spoke about the Trump administration in the past has been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United

States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole series about Title forty two on that. That's kind of the paramount example. Right. The Alien Enemies Act is a two hundred and twenty six year old piece of legislation. The last time it was used was to inter Japanese people during the Second World War. Right, that's a pretty shameful part of United States history, and it's great that we're going back there. So who are the enemies in

this case? Right, it's generally, like I should probably point out, the Alien Enemy Act is intended for like the people

you were at war with. Right, So, if the United States is at war with let's say Canada, and there are Canadian citizens in the United States and people who have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people that are individuals within that group are suspected to be spies or suspected to be like serving the interest in Canada not the United States, that they could be excluded or detained under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country, as it's the case here, and as we saw in

this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal. Right, This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have even a hearing. Right. These people were rounded up and booted out the country in very short order.

but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf of the Venezuelan state. By twenty twenty four, I thought to blame them for the protests after his election. People remember that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I covered that in my series on the Dariant Gap. If people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics of migration

to the United States. In twenty twenty four, Biden names that I were a transnational criminal organization, and then Trump named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled several cartels as ftos as well. At the time, there's a lot of speculation about why was it to allow for like drone strikes or co operations. I think we're now seeing that this was part of this large employ of deportation.

Fist would be the way you translate. It's iron Fist policy against gangs and against crime, and it has been widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into cells with more than one hundred people, but there are fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right, so they can't even all lie down at the same time. The bunks don't have bedding, they're just flat like metal sheets. They're four high, so you have to climb over other people

to sleep. For more than one hundred prisoners, there are two open toilets. That's the only access to a bathroom that you have. They might be allowed out for half an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave their heads and they all wear white. The lights are left on all day. As I said that, they're provided with no bedding, no contact with the outside world, very little access to anything other than standing in that cell.

There's two bibles in each sat. It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Like, yeah, this is completely inhumane, right, It's horrific. And for a couple of years now, bu Kelly has been doing like these media tours the of SICOT like using it to generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote, what will happen to you if you're a quote unquote

in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs. And as we saw when these people were sent to us ABAD or this tendency to use I don't know what you would call it, incarceration as a way of making content, it was was very much the case here, right, Yeah, I'm.

and is possibly even more bleak. Yeah, but yeah, we should read read this whole message and then and then we'll price skip around on the video and talk about what we're seeing.

one for US over time. These actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than forty thousand inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self sustainable. As of today, it costs two hundred billion per year. On this occasion, the US has sent us twenty three MS thirteen members

wanted by Salvadory Injustice, including two ring leaders. One of them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure. This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS thirty, including its former and

new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always, you continue advancing in a fight against organized crime, but this time we're also helping our allies, making our prisonessest them selves sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place. All in a single action. They God blessed Sarbador, and may God bless the United States.

I should probably just add that the US sent three million dollars to pay for these six million dollars I'm sorry to pay for the three hundred prisoners that intended to send.

Right MS thirteen Mara Salvastructure, it's what they're mess stands for being one of them. These like Mara Central American gangs have tended to use that in the past. This isn't really something that happens with Trend de Ragua as far as I'm aware of. Some people they've pointed to tattoos of trains in a document they get found from the Texas Department of Public Safety. They're pointing to stars as evidence that people were part of Trend de Ragua.

So I remember where Trend de Dragua does not have a policy of tattooing people specifically, because this is a thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members, right like, it would be silly to keep doing that once once it's become so clear that the state uses that. So the one sort of case that I've seen legal documents on of these people, the one name we have one of these people who's been sent is a man named Hersirees Barrios.

All of these people have stories of watching people be shot, the brutal repression of protest, state violence, economic collapse, persecution for supporting the opposition in the country, right, and this is one of those stories. The criteria that they used to identify him were a tattoo which had a football with a crown over the top and then the word Dios God in English underneath. Rais Barrios' lawyer says that this is an homage the logo of Reel Madrid, his

favorite football club. They have claimed that his evidence of gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The other criteria that they used is a picture of him throwing up the horns. I guess which I believe it means I love you in sign language, I'm not sure if I think an urban legend or of that's the case, and there are obviously different languages. But this is a hand gesture. It's especially common in the Spanish speaking world.

If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled up as if I was making it fist.

Even if they had been accused of a crime, even convicted of the crime, the United States is very unclear what legal basis they would be to then detain them in Thel Salvador, right, Like the United States doesn't have a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies. At the time of writing, this has been challenged in court. Right, a district court judge attempted to block the A district court judge did block these removals. Now he actually blocked

them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However, despite this, the planes didn't turn around. And I'm just going to quote directly from what the judge said here quote any plane containing these folks and it's going to take off or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States. And then it's another quote later. This is something you need to make sure he is complied with immediately. This didn't happen, right. The planes went from the US torn d Salvador. They didn't stop even

when the judge had given its order for them to stop. Now, normally in illegal proceeding such as this, right that the government or one of the parties may not agree with the findings of the judge, and they may choose to appeal it right, that's very normal. You still comply with the order, then appeal it right. You don't just keep doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think the judge was right. Like, that's in theory, not how

this works. Now in practice, what means does a judge have to force the executive to listen to him?

order is not the same as a written one. That's not something that's generally understood to be the case, and that because the flights were over international water, the order did not apply. This was then part of the foreign policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is particularly worrying. It's you effectively don't have your rights in international waters role like humans don't have rights in international waters.

I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate, but fightaling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason for this historic victory and just doing what the voters wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached. We don't want vicious, violent and tormented criminals, many of them deranged murderers, in our country. Make America great again,

Tom Homan. The borders are also told Fox News quote, I don't care what the judges think.

statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile, Musk complaints on Twitter dot com about a quote unquote judicial coup, and it mistakenly calls for sixty senators to impeach a leftist to judges. Now, of course, the Senate does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate requires sixty seven votes to convict it and remove someone from office once impeached. So, haha, we got you, We got you, Elon, you made a mistake, We win, not coing.

is a constitutional crisis. Like this is what it looks like. I don't know if people expect like fireworks to go off or like some confetti to drop and it to be like the separation of powers is gone, but if the government can ignore the courts, and that is what is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime.

These people, many of whom one of them was a musician, one of them was a football player, right Like, I've interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of fens word of migrants, and most of them, it will shock you to hear, are just people who don't want to live with the state on the neck, people who want to make a decent living for their their families. For what it's worth.

None of the Venezuelan migrants are met in the Dadian Gap or in the United States or have come to United States or my knowledge, just for people who are like wondering how those stories kind of resolve, they resolve with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions, either working for very little or unable to work at all, and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty bleak for them, it's pretty bleak for us to if

this is the duration that things are going. I don't ever have much more to say.

with your family this week. I don't know, like, I think it's really important to push back on the idea that these people have done any crimes, because they have not, that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable degree of evidence to be members of gangs like trend de Ragua.

that are carried out by Democrats. And one of the biggest ones of those and this is something that I think you can trace the violence here and you can trace the politics that it inspired directly to how we got to Trump being in power is the just continuous crisis in the US of governments doing sweeps of encampments

of unhoused people. And to talk about really one of the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does advocacy work for on house and disabled people and Alameda County, and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when yeah, this fucking got hintshit happens. So both of you two, welcome to the show.

that is deliberate. Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland, they're conducted by the Department of Public Works. They're city employees, they work nine to five, so accept in cases where they work over time, or when the city uses loopholes to get around posting notice and ends up doing a sweep on the weekend. They're usually happening when a lot of middle class housed folks are at work and not

out and about seeing what's going on. So a sweep, and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California, but I think it's safe to assume that these operate in similar ways around the country. Generally, what will happen is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a sweep has been posted in Oakland. There is policy that states that you're supposed to have received at least a week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice,

might not even know that it's happening. You might wake up at around nine am to a bunch of heavy machinery pulling up dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of sort of like heavy equipment. And then you'll have somebody from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know, making noise that your tent or your car or wherever you're staying, saying hey, this encampment is being closed down.

up and be like, hey, do you want services. If you say yes or have questions about what services are available, they may give you a sort of very vague rundown of whatever might be available that because they don't usually even find out what openings are available until ten am on any given day, so at the time that they roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet.

So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every sweep is a little different, but the commonality between all of them is that what the city is there to do is essentially to erase all signed that anybody ever lived there. So either you are able to pack as much stuff as you can and get it out of the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends

up in the back of a dump truck. There are other sort of specific pieces of policy and operational things that can vary from time to time, like, for example, they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which means that they're expected to store up to a cubic yard of somebody's belongings for ninety days at a storage

location in East Oakland. They rarely do this unless hounded to do so, and most of the time, the actual process as of going back and reclaiming your belongings from that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages to do it.

the seventies. But so there are certain requirements that the City of Oakland is obligated to follow in like certain provisions and offers that like homeless people are technically supposed to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons, like rarely ever are so for instance, like the bag and tag policy that Satya was just discussing, Like da've recently somebody did a pra request to see whether or not to say he was actually following faithfully following that policy.

And I think in like over a year there were I believe eight bagging tags that were registered in the city system. And that was in that same period there were like well over one hundred sweeps you know, I don't have the exact number on me, but or yeah, actually five hundred and thirty seven closure two instances of storing property. So you know that's people's their whole lives.

All their possessions like precious items that they they're able to hang on to are just yeah, destroyed and they never see them again.

use to continually justify the way that they operate. Is that in for example, city council meetings and Homelessness Commission meetings where city admin is questioned on their procedures because they get complaints, like the Homeless Commission gets complaints constantly of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting referred to housing, and so forth. And the justification that's constantly used is like, well, we're offering people service, says

every time, and they just refuse them. And I think that that is pretty much the number one mythology that is continuing to spur a lot of the like pro sweep discourse in Oakland specifically, and I'm sure in other parts of the country as well, and people are not like to be clear, most of the time, people are not actually being offered services. It's just not happening.

providing housing or legal services. Like there's a whole range of things that's out there, but a lot of the time like these are the only options that are available to people, and they tend to produce less than stell

the results. So, out of the twenty four billion dollars that was allocated to help homeless people in that same period of time, homelessness in California just like skyrocketed, right, So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting plumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of landlords

and developers. It is an issue that people on every side of the political compass like they like to use this point to their own ends, right, So Elon Musk talks about it, and like people on the left will talk about it. But I think like the experience that people on the street have is very different than any of these narratives that you tend to hear in the media.

the homeless industrial complex. There's a reason that most of that money is going into the pockets of landlords and developers and then sort of like these sort of large like nonprofit almost like conglomerates of like service providers. And it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it exists in this country is not to get homeless people into housing. It's to line the pockets of the people that are making the most money off of the real

estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness like escalating at the same time. It's because this is the feedback loop, Like, this is the way that our you know, economic priorities in this country are structured, are such that those two things are going to feed into each other because that money doesn't actually exist to serve the populations that they say that they're using it to serve.

What they do get to do is by claiming that that money is going into homelessness abatement, when clearly it isn't. They then get to spend a narrative where they say, oh, we've spent all this money, but the problem is just getting worse. That must mean that it is the fault of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly the services must exist to get them off the street. In reality, that's not the case at all.

to notify people that it's happening. The City of Oakland is required for the terms of this lawsuit back in I believe twenty nineteen, the Moralees lawsuit, and there was a settlement that resulted in the city being required to provide clear notices whenever they're going to close like a site. So yeah, this nonprofit providers was to like notify people

and try to get them connected with services. However, the services for the most part, like housing for people who are unhoused, is largely funded through the federal government and through this very like complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry. The coordinated Entry system is not something that the City of Oakland or Operation Dignity like that is not something

that they're providing people with during the sweep. So when the City of Oakland, like for instance, and one of the Commissions on Homelessness meetings, the city administrator Harold Duffy. He presented actually in response to a question about somebody's

wheelchair being destroyed by public works. Yeah, he gave this really like roundabout deflecting answer where he said basically that everyone who is at an encampment at the time of the sweep has like expressly refused services like shelter or housing or whatever, and that they kind of presumes that the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with,

which is just not the case. The Coordinated Entry System, it is a program that is first of all, like only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent supportive housing through the program. But also it is in such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're in that the wait list is like thousands of people long, and it can take well over a year before someone can get housing through that system. So it's just like

it's not true. They do offer people what are called community cabins, which are tough sheds.

in response to what they're like internal systems actually look like.

And what we have seen over the last six months to a year is not only this pattern that I'm I was talking about of like they're like people are consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused of refusing services just due to the conditions that they're living under, but also everything that Oakland has and that approaches like livable transitional housing, which is kind of laughable in this case because we can also go into like

the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in Oakland which are abysmal, but everything that they have that approaches livable transitional housing is full.

kind of he wasn't even approaching talking about services. He was approaching being like, Hey, I just here to let you know that this area is going to be closed down, Like there's so sweet that's going to be happening. So you guys have to be out of here. So that was what they led with. And then I prompted him because I was there chatting with one of the guys that he was talking to, so I prompted him. I

was like, do you have any services to offer? And then he was like, oh, you can go over to Saint Vincent de Paul, which is congre Get shelter in West Oakland with about four and nobody is guaranteed a spot is just a room full of cots, a lot of people refuse to go there because the conditions are so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping in a room full of a bunch of strangers with no kind of security, no guarantee of being able to

hold onto their stuff. People are only allowed to bring in like a backpack sort of stuff, I'm pretty sure. And you also have to it's first come, first service. You have to line up outside every single day, and you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even if you line up outside. So what we have is a situation where the availability of services varies from day

to day. I cannot think of a single sweep in the last year that I have been to, and I'm at usually multiple sleeps a week where there were enough

guaranteed spots available for every person being swept. So the implicit assumption at every single sweep and the Operation Dignity people know this too, like they know this, the implicit assumption when they roll up, and the assumption that colors even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're having with people, is that the majority of people are just going to have to figure out how to pack their shit up and find another.

Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many people as possible from their list of people that they feel obligated to offer services too because they know they don't fucking have anything.

reflective in the city's own publicly available data. So they actually publish like a list of all of the encampment suites that they've they do throughout the year, and in the Commission on homelessness meetings will report back to the Commission about like service enrollments that they've done through a certain period of time, and like from May to September they had enrolled I believe it was sixty people and to services like non specified services. And during that period

there was approximately eighty sweeps. And if you assume there's at least five to ten people at every encampment when they do a sweep, and usually it's more that is like nine percent four point five of people like getting enrolled into into services, and like of those, maybe a

smaller traction getting into shelter. And when they get into shelter, they just languish there, right, they aren't connected with case workers who help them get through this really convoluted coordinated entry process and like lengthy coordinated entry process, and so within a few months they're just right back on the street.

You know, it's just ridiculous. And unfortunately, because homeless people have very little, like I guess you could call it social capital, you know, the city can get away with a lot of this stuff they do, like blatantly illegal things that are against even their own policies, and nothing happens. And I guess maybe we should back up a little bit and discuss the city's policy.

But there's all a range of people. There's people that are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going out doing vigilanti shit and like destroying almost people's stuff on their own. And then you also have people that are well intentioned and really think the city is offering services. So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy.

That's the purpose their policy services, not to inform their actions, but to inform their pr So I think it would be helpful. Emma, how do you feel about if you want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's policy and then I can kind of give a breakdown into what that translates into on the ground.

The city is required by this policy to offer shelter. I believe it's a week for any person who's subject to one of their encampment closures. And also we mentioned the bag intag policy. So if somebody, you know, they are evicted and they move somewhere outside with the tent, they bring all of their possessions with them, they are provided with I believe three foot by three foot like

storage space. And this facility that is super inaccessible and kind of like, I don't even know if it's actually real, to be honest, because it's just like nobody ever. I've never heard of anybody actually like getting their stuff stored and getting back. But technically that is a possibility. However, the city will only hold on to it for so long before they throw it away. And then the last protection or provision is the city was until recently supposed

to provide people with shelter. So a few different Supreme Court cases are behind that provision specifically, and I think a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy framework that they were following until the Grant's Pass ruling, and I guess maybe we don't need to get into that too much, but basically, the whole idea of that policy was like, if somebody is outside the thing outside and the city suites them, they have to provide them

with some kind of alternative accommodation, because according to like the Ninth District Court, it was consideredly cruel and unusual punishment to penalyze somebody for being homeless without offering them some kind of temporary like accommodations, And so that was more or less the city's nominal framework for several years basically, and the degree to which they actually followed these policies, you know, they really didn't, except for in certain situations

where there are like, for instance, legal advocates who will file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep on the basis of like failure to provide an alternative accommodation. And typically those arise when there is a very large encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue. You know, a lot of the time, for instance, they'll be people staying on city or like California state land and the city will like force them to move because

of some development project that they're planning to do. And so in those situations when the media has kind of narrowed their their focus and begun like discussing some of this stuff and the local press, then like something like

that became possible. But after the Grants Past ruling this past year, the city was no longer like obligated under federal law to follow those policies, and in September of last year, the late mayor Shankal she issued an executive order that more or less like just totally rendered that policy framework irrelevant. So she put forth a new framework that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered

system of what are called emergency suites. So if for instance, a encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then it is a hazard to the public quote unquote, or if it's somebody has a tent that is up against a building of some sort, it's a fire hazard. And so in this tiered system, there's like different levels of

safety hazards that they're doing. And basically what that looks like is like a fire marshal and the city administrator will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody that's staying outside by their business. And with the fire hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without any prior notice, whereas the other two there is some

level of notice that they're technically required to provide. But yeah, so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it, they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own city resolution, but there is this provision that like, if for instance, they issue somebody like a no or a one hour notice to leave because of like a fire hazard, and like advocates can't make it there because they don't really know they know but knows it's happening. Then the

city can just do that and not offer people anything. Right, So these policies have the effect of disempowering our ability to respond to like a scheduled operation, Then the city can really just do whatever they want because nobody's watching what they're doing.

to commit to relationship building. Something that I've talked about a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks that are kind of involved in like sweeps response and crisis response in Oakland, is that the one thing that the city cannot take away from us, that we have

an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are so inefficient and so you know, seemingly bad at their jobs is not just the fact that they don't have anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street knows they're full of shit because they never show up

with anything real. And addressing house people in particular right, like, one of the things to get out of is sort of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh, like I don't have any housing to offer, therefore I can't do anything, Like I can't fix the problem, I can't fix the roots, so I can't do anything. In reality, all you really need to do is to learn to set that mentality aside and show up and like start meeting folks where they're at, Start meeting your neighbors where

they're at, start building relationships. You need to know, like if you live in a particular neighborhood to yourself, I need to know that if any un housed person within a mile radius of my home was disappeared, I would need to I would need to know, you know what I mean, Like I would want to know if that happens.

So if you go out with that understanding that you're starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are living outside in your neighborhood, ideally a lot of other people in your neighborhood too, you know what I mean.

But like, what they're banking on is right now, while while they're still trying to use a pr cover for what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses, people not finding out about the violations, people not being there, and people not having relationships that will remain strong even as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what you can do to start is start investing in those relationships.

Make sure you know what people's names are, make sure you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted. Hey, Becky used to be on that corner, you know, every couple days of weekend. Now I never see him anymore? What happened to him? And I think you can start there, and there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean, one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up at this point is direct on the ground sweep's response.

So we're still able to keep track currently of what their schedule is on a weekly basis more or less Like there's definitely operations we don't find out about until after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations we do still know about ahead of time, and so we'll show up. We'll make sure we get there before the city does, so like by eight am ideally right, Like we show up, talk to people, will be like what do you need? Do you need physical help moving

your belongings out of the eviction zone. Do you need to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody who said they were going to come help you. Do you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number of things really, but just like being willing to show up and ask questions about necessarily knowing what answers you're going to get, and being down to follow up and like do aftercare with people and chicken on folks and

like keep building those relationships. I think that those are the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to need to be doing in the future, because you know, what this he is counting on is that they're going to be able to successfully create a scapegoat. Right. They want to create like a faceless, nameless mass of people that they can pin all their problems on and then

incarce rate. And the best thing that we can do is make sure that they can't successfully do that, because we all have relationships to each other.

this response, just like network of community defense. And so I think that like all of those things are are so important, especially as the term regime starts to eliminate the very like modest social safety net that there was. And you know, before we end this conversation, I just want to emphasize that in Oakland, like a majority of the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence. They are non white, mostly black, and are homeless in

neighborhoods where they used to be housed. And so the gentrification that has happened, particularly in like West Oakland, and the like influx of high end tech workers that displaced them and moved into their family homes, they are the same people who are calling three one one to push the city to displace them again, but from a tent or a car this time. And I think it's it's just so so important that particularly like housed people try to tap into the networks of community defense that exist

in their areas. I'm sure that most cities probably have something comparable to Oakland, but with the measures that we're seeing, cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is about thirty minutes south of Oakland, where they basically banned or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can get one thousand dollars fine or for six months in jail for dating and a betting a homeless person. And you know, it's an extremely vague.

of imposing what you might have learned through like other sort of direct action organizing, because this is not that you know, like I think, yeah, first of all, just making sure that you're being you're organizing is being led by the needs of you know, homemost residents that are expressing what they need to you. But also on top of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves of legislation that are being passed around like anti homeless

laws and stuff. Don't preemptively obey, you know what I mean, Like, if you live in Fremont, don't preemptively say, oh fuck, I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen in Oakland with the particular iterations of anti homeless legislation that they've passed here is that just because they've passed legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet.

And what you need to do really is step up real hard and show them you can't enforce this the way that you want to, and they're going to push back. There's going to be this back and forth interplay that we've seen, you know, for example in Oakland with the safe works and ordinance, which we can probably get into another time because it's way too much to get into right now, I think at this point in the episode.

But it's a two way street. It's this fight that you have to play to show them just because you've passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in a particular way. You have to give them something to fight against, you know what I mean. So that's just the other piece, yeah.

So I would definitely suggest if you're feeling like any despair or like worried about becoming like black pilled or whatever, like, yeah, just try to tap in and focus on things that are happening in your community. It's good for you and it's good for the people in your community.

Like you're going to learn a whole lot more relevant life skills just hanging out in social settings with people in the street than you are in any other area of your life. So just go balls to the wall, just start hanging out, just like spend all your time loitering, Like just that's that's where we need to be right now. Is loitering in the street. That's where the organizing is happening.

we don't want to like inspire panic. That's not the purpose of what we do here.

do it. You shouldn't feel bad about it. You know, if you've got a job that is in demand in other countries and you know the process and can start the process to like get residency somewhere else and work somewhere else, and you know, make your life work that way, then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that. If that's what you decide is the right thing for you. That said, it's not, it's just simply not going to

be a realistic possibility for most people. What is more realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving from states where the risk is higher to states where maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long the risk will be lower, you know, but I, you know, I certainly that's more achievable for a lot of people than getting set up in a foreign country, as James will talk about, if your hope is just I'm going to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever

as an asylum seeker. As again, James will go into more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers, and that's not really again, it may not be nearly as much of an option as you think that is right now, I you know, had to go through kind of my own process after the election of like, well, am I going to like, you know, get my finances in order and move to another country and basically try to like pay my way into getting a visa somewhere like in Spain,

which is an option for someone like me. And I came to the conclusion that like, nah, you know, if the worst case thing happens, I'd rather like die here or whatever. It's just not worth it, you know, to try to get out. So I'm committing to trying to like hold the line here with everybody basically that I love in the world, because like what else are you going to do? You know?

the more high value passports in the world. You can you can go almost anywhere with a visa or in many cases without a visa. Seeking asylum is an extremely different process. If you think you're just going to get on a flight and leave and stay somewhere, like understand that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas with the United States soon if we continue our current sort of pathway with by more isolationist immigration policy, and

then you'll have to get that visa. And then you know, if you overstay, you will be subject to enforcement. The sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be something you enjoy again. And that's just if you're able to fly somewhere, and so you try and overstay a visa or you try and apply for asylum. I have people I've met in every facet of my life, Like I know guys who I met as a bike racer who have applied for asylum. Guys I met a bike racer are staying on that bus in the UK. It

is it is a miserable fate. And I think that's that I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying that you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and it's tripped you of all dignity and in some places extists people of of like their lives right, people die migrating. It's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that migrants do because that everyone is trying to make a buck off them.

that many people have access to. Yeah, why not? Why not? You know, if you have the financial resources, when not try and see where that will go? Why not begin pursuing that totally?

live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And that is that it's worth acknowledging, that's worth putting effort into. To the point that, like after the election, I was already considering maybe, you know, trying to travel around the country some more, And after this last election, my line of thought was way more on the side of I would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia

as possible. I would actually want to stay in this South for as much as I can, because this is like not a place that I think people should be walking away from. And in some ways that does come from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons. As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport as well as an American passport, that is, you know, something that I like to have as a back pocket option. But that's something I'm not like considering like at all,

Like I do not want to move to Canada. All my friends are here, my life is here. There's certain scenarios where things get much much much worse, even though things are already getting quite bad, But there are certain scenarios where, yes, that passport will come in handy. And that's why I do encourage, like, no matter what you should you should see if you have any options to become a citizen in more than one country. It is a great thing to be. It's it's good to not

be just tied down to one place. But the process of trying to to you know, immigrate somewhere where you do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging. And we will probably discuss some some more of this later because I think there's also a sort of like onion of a threat of people when you're when you're thinking of this question and like which people will will be or are currently being targeted the most, and how that kind of affects the options in terms of like relocation

to places view it as like safer havens. And I like to jumpstart that onion of protection discussion. After these messages, we're back.

to get those rights like stripped away. I'm trying to think of like the list of refugees that were allowed under Biden that are now like like imminently going to get their stuff stripped away from the Trump administration. I know Venezuelan, Yeah, I know you run Haitian immigrants are another off God, but groups that have that have been able to come here the past few years that are going to be now seen as like quote unquote illegal

by the White House and Immigration Customs Enforcement. You then have student visa holders which are already like currently under threat getting visas taken away. You have people on work visas. You have green card holders, and you even have naturalized citizens and among just regular citizens a naturalists, I guess people that were born here, you have other factors that could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or based on gender and sectional reality. And that's kind of

like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of. So as much as it's like dangerous to be like, you know, like a trans anarchist right in the United States, I think that is that is fairly different than a Haitian immigrant who's about to get like literally hunted down by ice, right, And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options for how they're going to like handle this question and handle like the decision of you know, preemptively choosing to

relocate somewhere else. James, do you have any kind of thoughts on this like onion?

existence was precarious in this country for decades. Right, Maybe we'd go back to nineteen ninety four in Operation Gatekeeper, Maybe we go back further whatever, I don't care. Maybe we go back to the operation whose name is also a slur in the nineteen thirties. And I'm not going to.

to exist for a very long time. And like the way that they have got through this is together, and that's the way that we will get through this too. When there have been threats to migrant communities, migrant communities have shown up for each other. Right, they're doing that right now. You see groups like Anon dela Barrio in San Diego right like going around announcing when there are

ICE presence of ICE offices in the neighborhood. The way that they have got through it is through other people in positions of procarity, showing up for one another and taking care of one another. And if that is a new position for you, if finding yourself further along the intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you, then like

it's scary. I do understand that that that procurity is petrifying, but understand that communities and people have been here for a long time and look at how they've got through it. And in queer communities too to a degree, have been persecuted in this country for a very long time and have developed ways of not just like existing, but also like continuing to and to joy and experience joy and not just like live in fear, because I think if you live in fear, like you've kind of given up

to a degree, oh you've let them win. To agree, I should say, like, I do understand that being new to this is petrifying for people, and like I don't want to just say like, oh, you shouldn't be scared, or you know, you should look at how migrant communities have taken care of one another, but like now is

the time to begin establishing solidarity as well. So like those communities which have been precarious for some time, they're not closed spaces, right, Like you can be in solidarity with them and you can learn from them, and I think that now is the time to do that, Like, now is the time to build stronger links. If you're really worried about things being really bad in this country, and you have good reason to be right, like.

you should have already been doing. Frankly, like I've been advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport, because that does make it easier to leave the country.

whatever we do, we do together. And I thought that was very profound because they were at that time like dancing around a fire in the midst of what was like an open air concentration camp, you know. But if you can find a community, and you can find a way to continue to experience joy, then I promise that things won't be as bad as they seem right now.

we've spoken to in Meama. Right. They decided to remain rather than to leave, and in doing so that they created a culture that was based on resistance and that resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly on violence and to determine their outcomes. And I think we should look to those examples as we consider, like, what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here.

that you that you should like consider. If you do not already have pre existing plans and means, maybe it's not something to put all of your effort into doing right now, because that is such a massive undertaking in general, and not everyone has that option, and there's gonna be people stuck here, and you know, part of like my thinking on this is is like I'm in a relatively privileged position. I would rather use the sort of benefits and the stability that I have to help other people

that are going to be living in this country. So I'm going to stay here to do that. And that's part of kind of my thought process on a personal level, do I you know, one day, maybe one to live off the continent. Yeah, but that's like for personal reasons, not for political reasons. That that's because I think Glasgow looks pretty. And if you also think Glasgow's pretty and

you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess, like the politics of escape, I do find a little bit troubling in some ways, and I guess I would like to talk about that a little bit more after this at break.

you can look at the AfD in Germany. But but some of what's happened with this Trump administration has almost weakened a degree of like this global.

general election. That's going to happen, I'm guessing next month with the new Prime minister like about about to call one, which makes sense because he should call one.

British politics are always really hard for me to diagnose because all of their parties there are pretty wacky.

immigrate to Australia. It's not the easiest to immigrate to Canada. Frankly, Yeah, I'm not as familiar with the Canadian.

Fuck off, if I may say so, But like, yeah, we've all grown up on the stories of people who stood up for what they believed in, right, And Margaret makes a whole podcast about it, and Robert does on Christmases, yep, and like there's a reason why they did that, Like you know they I know that the idea of running away and being safe could be tempting, but like, if this country gets as bad as it needs to be for people to run away in large number, it's then

like the world gets markedly less safe. Oh yeah, you're going to be running for the rest of your life.

takes a considerable financial investment. So instead, part of what my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a whole bunch of like the like most at risk people. A part of this even extends out to like moving from state to state. I'm obviously in support of free movement. I've traveled around, and I'm going to continue to travel around. I want to see as much as in the world

as I can. But like another facet of this politics of escape is that something I hear very consistently from my my friends in Atlanta, And this is something like I can attest to, like personally, the most amount of like like vocal transphobia from people like on the street that they have faced has not been in Atlanta, where they live. It's been when they're visiting people in Seattle or Portland. Like you actually get a lot more like weird anti queer harassment in Seattle, which just just like

on like the street level. It's bizarre, Like cities all have different kind of like modes of operation. People have different like informal like manners in terms of how how you like behave on the street. And it's it's it is.

This is something I've definitely actually I've definitely experienced. There's there's a lot more like open openness towards like certain types of of like anti trans harassment in like these like liberal safe havens like quote unquote Yeah, I've been called slurs on the street way more or in Portland,

Oregon than I have in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is this is another like interesting aspect which I'm not saying Atlanta is like quote unquote safer city than Seattle if you're trans I'm not saying the vice versa either, But this is like just an aspect of like the politics of escape, like especially in the in the United States, like the there like is really no like real escape like there there is no mythical safe haven where you can live your your free life and frolics through the

park and never have to face any kind of hardship or like political disenfranchisement. If you still want to relocate somewhere, that's something that you should consider and again create options. But I also do not want to like abandon my friends here because I just you know, have a more stable job, Like I want to be here for them and and help them, and not in like a patronizing way, but in like a solidarity way. Like that's like really

important to me. And I think of people who are who are thinking about these same things and kind of running these same questions of of if they want to commit to sting in the United States. I think should also make those considerations of is like you know, which which one of your friends is not going to be

able to make the same calculation. Yep, And frankly, I feel I feel like better as a person and like my mental health feels better knowing I'm going to be here with them rather than going to a Berlin nightclub.

there for the funeral. That means that when they have a grandchild, they have a niece or a nephew, something happens in their community and they want to be there to help. It's a natural disaster. They had just stuck. And that's not something to like to discount as something

that's not important, Like that is really hard. And if you have a community now, especially for trans folks, right, Like I just think that like there are so many places where, like like you say, Garrison, where bigotry against transfolks is being more and more normalized. Like if you have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every day with the people you're around, like leaving that should be something that you really think hard about, because that

can be hard to find. Yeah, yeah, especially in Edinburgh because they're all turfs with the in the cafes. That's not true.

of low key been one of these places. Especially if we're going to go to war with Canada to make it the fifty first state, then it might also uh create create some some some tricky aspects.

point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value. Right,

something like three billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games again, it's it's a lot of mobile games, and it's also mostly people who are women, and non white. And yet, however, Comma, when people think about like the gamer TM, you are not thinking about.

is a fascist movement. Now. Part of the reason this works, and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people

because it's new. No one has sort of defined it as a political identity before, and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit, or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money, and then that are taken

like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah, And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on their right. There are a lot of like sort of political figures. I don't know, you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming, like like h Bomber guy. I guess this is an

example like Hassan. To some extent, there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then by sort of like become political. But on the other hand, gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is. Have I told you this story about Kabab

the German now? Oh boy? Okay, so back in the dawn of Time I played a lot of Heartstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.

But you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up, and something I remember is like all of the fucking Heardstone streamers and these are like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kobob the German and it turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because he was a fucking German neo Nazi. Well many such cases, yeah, for people who like are not aware of of like mid twenty tens

German fascism. Remove Kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So great stuff, great stuff. This is just was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now, this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.

And so the two examples we're gonna look at are Sam bank and Freed's And this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum, Right, We're gonna look at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon musk are new Overlord. I guess. So we're gonna start with Sam bankin Freed, and you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.

And I, I guess it is important to know like Sam Bakman Fried like is I guess like he is a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah, before before he was put in prison for twenty five years for fraud.

game called Story Big or Algy Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like as as any gamer will know a person who plays the League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories people who's ever existed. And one of the things that that SBF did as as a sort of pr thing right was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big Shorts, We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.

give a shit. So he plays meetings like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video game stream meetings because it is too obvious. But I play.

a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming, Like god, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a it's like a mob but like League of Legends but like third person and I played so much Smite that they were pro showing my casual games. When when the Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like I can't argue with that.

fucking video games all the time. And and this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this, this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing and and like and like SBF like is a gamer, right, but like why why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry. It's it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't

have the same kind of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would see or something like movies or like.

like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on, And it's just really really easily just sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer like, you know you, like, you show a gamer like a League of Legends addicts, and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is

like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I've known too many League Legis players of my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game.

Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog an athletics team invented like baseball metrics and they use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well. And like I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, Like whatever, I'm not gonna argue about

baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta? Can he is? He is like one of the main figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically, what baseball team is this? Oh? This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved to Vegas.

My opening savment for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons, going one in thirty one, which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the Earth, no one is going to fucking go one in thirty one into cruss two seasons football again. So again that is a one in fifteen season, followed by an owen

sixteen season. It's the second oh to sixteen season. Ever, unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's like mea, why the fuck you're talking about?

really fucking like morally reprehensible, right. He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended

him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting, is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who've been on the Texans, And again, like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.

largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So, how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who like is now laundering being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural like being a rogue outsider. Right, how does Deshaun Watson his like greatest fucking project to do on the field. So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. It is second season in weeks one through five out of out of seven hundred and fifty

nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.

They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get point three less points than an average team would.

I can I can see that. Yes. Also, I've always wanted to fuck you complained about this on area and this is this is the best fucky chance I've ever gonna get, So Jesus fucking because it's like what I talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, yes, this is what it feels like. Is this what they sound like? Yes? It is it is absolutely what you

sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback, they sign away basically the entire future of this team hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator two hundred and thirty million dollars. And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on, like by

the jock or whatever. Right, That's like that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there's are like oppressed by this. But like it's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way down. And you can watch like just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking

geniuses by using both of these fucking affects. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as as this sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read something by a friend of the show Vicky Osterweil, and a piece called game Boys.

Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that

one was master to live under current economic conditions. Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.

They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else the

fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by

CIS men. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Samba Been Freed and also for the construction of right wing gaming movements in general, and for what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is contested ground. Right.

As much as we think of as like right wingers, right, there are a lot of what you would call it to like traditionally sort of leftlooming demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn, the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work, they're also a thing that people use to like escape the

fucking hell world totally. And like, I mean I know this right, Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese chance of better, he's better at video games, and both the people have been to be fucking talking about in this story, right, Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path.

But again, like competitive fighting games like yeah, Melee, I mean, I'm gonna brief mentioned Sonic Fox, who is a black, non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time, incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat someone thirteen to zero in a first to eleven absolute legends, right, But you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can

use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life. Right now that these people are in power, and you know who else is in power, it's a product and services to support this podcast, All Hail, we are back now. Obviously, the other part of this. You know, we've talked about we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.

And you know, the thing about gaming, right is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system. And like I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dip shit.

with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence. But like you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters most most Yeah, I would say that's that's true. Yeah, right, and so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like fuck them, like eat shit, like I'm sorry, you've you've become Nazis, like fuck off.

of like aggrievement that powers all these people. And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now it's it's been shifted into this not anymore. Yeah, Now now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women in minorities, right.

I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry which are fucking terrible, and it's good, but like, as a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with

like film or music. But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read a piece called goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it

came out. And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being i mean literally being used is like scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games, and you know, and this expands out to like workers more broadly, they're literally being used to silence anyone who talks about the problems with like this game that like when Cyberpink twenty seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it was it had

just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit anthe they didn't want any one about because it was a broken, shitty game. And you know, they're also used for just like anti queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're also like signaling to their base that like I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera, Like you should

fucking support me for this shit now. Pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of Sam Bankman freed because like man.

that we're gonna get you in a second. This is something that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals i'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game, and he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered, Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to I figured out for Like how bad at this game

he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car. It's stepping into like the shittiest call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator with the working break on.

giving him shit about it. So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Yelbo four. I'm not gonna talk about Dielbow stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player and not diebol player. The dialbum and Path of x ale like Fairy much the same kind of game, basically, like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.

But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the best Path of Exile two players in the world, and he was doing this on his alt account, which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but the all the e's are threes, So with's CYB three r g A M three R four twenty.

I hadn't played Path of XL to at this point, right, I had only played the original one like a decade ago, like a little bit of it, and I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before, like has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those valuable currencies in the game, just like walk past it,

didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays video games, This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him and eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level of his Path of Exil to account, and then he claims that he never claims that it was his path of xel to account, and this Jenny Weinley has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like

the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asthmagold, who was like a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass, like is like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry and fucking asthma Goold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck? And like everyone fucking

reacts like this. It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this, to like to elon like this and like like again, like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait,

this guy's just like lying. Now. What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of Little Pets of Path of Exile player on a

stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And and a lot of people he talks to about the stuff, for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people, right, it's like a lot of it's a lot of people

who aren't gamers. And he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's weirdly on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like the sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer.

But the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very, very popular. That is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games and cheated records of video games. And Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right.

right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how

far right he is. But he did a video about about Elon claiming to be a quack player and what he found so is Elon like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of the good players were there, and he he came his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better WiFi than everyone else and so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good WiFi, and then he got destroyed,

which I just I just think it's funny, right. That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he he has this theme claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran some much who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.

But the reason I bring this up is that, like at the end of this video, Jobst is like goes on this whole thing about how and this is this is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally goes on a thing where he says, Yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie.

And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass, but literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right, I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this, and so you should not

be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon Musk is doing, and like just the willingness to just be like, this guy is a fucking just just a serial liar, Like everything says is a lie. He literally calls him a con like, says that his activity is like a con man. He says the things that he's

saying are like either liars or delusional. There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him. There's a day to happen literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft is a famously like not a leftist company, right, Like they've done

a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games as a black guy as like a character in it, and literally the official Assassin's Create accounts replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your

Path of Axile two account told you? And like replied and replied to a thing about Hassan, Like, we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right this thing that had been like a really really consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him and is sort of being polarized against him by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably transparent it is, and like obviously, like I don't think like the gamers

are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this, other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these people do this and like gamers is like a demographic that's important to these people is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right, that doesn't happen

that often. But one of the ways you can do this, and this is this is, you know, to take a really really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay home and that was enough enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for

Cureanzi's government was enough for them to take power. And I think like the actual, like the actual serious points of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they can be stopped.

He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist e guy who was run the provisional government in between the first Okay, we're done, we're done here, we're done here, we're working out, we're leaving.

each other. So if you and a friend are like planning what to order on fucking grub Hub tonight when you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can keep that secret. Or if you and a friend are planning what substances to buy that the government might not

want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if you and your friend simply don't want various media companies taking every detail and phone carriers taking every detail of your life's conversations and turning that into analytics data, you can stop them from doing that. And if maybe one day you might be engaged in speech that the government might not like, you can continue to engage in that speech privately without danger.

Because it's very secure the Trump administration takes office. One thing that they are annoyed about is that when you are government employees, even if you're doing top secret shit, especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of meetings about national security planning for like military actions that you are supposed to only have in something called a skiff, and a skiff is basically a room in you know, the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right, I'm

not one hundred percent sure where all the skiffs are, but it's like a room that is incredibly secure, and it is the only place that you are supposed to have certain kinds of conversations. And in fact, if you are having one of those kinds of conversations in a skiff, no one, not even the president or the vice president, is allowed to have a phone in there. It is a very strict rule. You don't take phones into the

skiff because none of them are fucking secure. Now, the problem is all these communications, all of this stuff is documented and potentially foilable. Maybe not immediately because there's always security concerns. They have the ability to redact.

We've got to have the head of the CIA his represent you know that kind of thing. There's a few more people in there. Mark Rubio, Mark Rubio, right Sex State, you know, and his representative, Raevin Miller, Stephen Miller. I don't know that Miller had a representative. He feels like he handles a lot of this stuff on his own. But yeah, on his phone too much, Steven Miller.

you can just invite them. Otherwise, you can set what your signal name is going to be, and so when people type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that, or if you send them an invite, that's the name they'll see. And this brings us. I got to take an aside to talk about a guy who is not a member of the Trump administration and who is not a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg born in nineteen sixty five. He is currently the co editor

of the Atlantic. Prior to this, he had what some people would call an illustrious career. He grew up in Malvern and Long Eye and I'm Maulvin. Yeah, what I'm looking at his wiki here, which just has the line that his neighborhood was mainly Catholic and he described it as a wasteland of Irish pagramists.

whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy, not a I bring this up to be like, not a left wing radical.

that he had, so he's also attracted their ire. But he's again generally I would say, like more on the bootleoker east side of things, Like he's just kind of like a NATSEK cheerleader, Right, that would be a fair way to describe Jeffrey totally. I don't know that he would entirely disagree with that description of himself.

He leaves, and he puts out this article and he redacts most other than the what's happened, which is a

story in and of itself. He like goes out of his way, like there's people who are like in intelligence that are in this that he has their names, and he's like, I am not naming them because they're serving intelligence officers, and that's a no no. He doesn't like specifically give up other than that this is happening anything that's like particularly dangerous, right, But this is the kind of thing as soon as it comes out, obviously it's it's a fewer and it's unlike most of the time

when everybody gets like pissed, it seems to like it might have some legs because it's just such a what the bach moment, right.

be classified. Things it should be quote unquote high side on personal devices using signal as opposed to a state department or government issued device which doesn't have your personal contacts to avoid all this, like a device which is not hackable advice which has not been exposed to QR codes, for example.

It is like a loitering munition. Maybe a drone, yeah, but no no aircraft, not a manned or personed aircraft.

stuff that should be classified, very clearly. It's stuff that put those people's lives at risk in the event that the whoth He's had any means to respond to like F eighteen's, which I don't think they do really now. But you know, Iran, who absolutely is a state backer of the who he's, does have the ability, at least in theory. They they kind of haven't. They've kind of shown their ass a bit in the last year or two with Israeli strikes in a run.

There's this decades long debate about like Hitler literally order the Holocaust or did he just kind of like keep making it clear to people that if they kept moving in a more holocausty direction that would.

we expect in return. So yeah, it's he never he never specifically says the President has okayed this. But yeah, that's obviously people in Europe really pissed. I've seen some statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom like the sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers is obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing people off, should we pivot to advertisements?

right has another crucial case in front of him. What the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoked the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic or very very ironic. They're talking about state secrets now, having just added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what they have done. You can go back last week to understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from. If you didn't listen to last week.

During this hearing, quote Judge Patricia Millet said, quote the Nazis received better treatment under their Alien Enemies Act than these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings in the nineteen thirties and they didn't just get loaded onto plane in the central work camp. Not a great reflection. And where we're at. The Trump administration is trying to challenge the jurisdiction of Bosberg, saying that they should have

filed the same claim in Texas. Meanwhile, then, as whalen governments are filing a colegal claim in El Salvador to deliberate their citizens from SECOD. It's worth noting, of course, that these people, some of them, have been tortured by the Venezuelan government right and chose to flee at no small risk to their lives. Like if people have an listen to some of our older stuff, like I've been to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the

vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to my episodes about that if you will know more about why people are leaving Venezuela. We have a little more information on some of the people detained. One of them is a makeup artist. He's a gay man who was beaten by guards as a US photojournalist. Watch another one that Miami Herald is reporting had been granted legal refugee status, So it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed Venezuelan's.

Some of these people have been through background checks already, right at which they will have disclosed their tattoos. That's one of the things that they'll be asked about, and they would have disclosed those. So whether they control eft IT or quite how they came across these people, it's still a little bit unclear. A couple of other things regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across

my radar but probably don't marrit a whole episode. It's been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement to hand over the tax records of undocumented people it's claimed for decades. If it won't do this, this is why most undocumented people pay taxes, right.

for undocumented people. So yeah, that will have consequences, and it will have consequences, especially in industries right like agriculture and construction and my large numbers of people tend to be undocumented. Talking of undocumented migration, the COMMA secretary Howard Lutnik reports it. He said it on the All In podcast. He has claimed to have already sold one thousand gold cards. So gold cards. If you didn't listen to our previous appoint that is Oh.

the current situation with immigration. I also wanted to add at least three people who were aware of died in San Diego count on the fourteenth of March in a storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived was found next to the remains of her father, who died of exposure in a winter storm out here. So yeah, the border continues to be doing violence to some of the most marginalized people alive, which is great.

of Defense. Hegseth roat Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as is Breonna Keeler, an American journalist who currently serves as co anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central. Lauren Pikeoff, an executive producer at MSNBC, is also in Walls's contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network Wow. Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon.

But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name stands out from the crowd. Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from The New York Times after it was revealed that her reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close to an administration set on war. It's just like, Okay, we don't check any of this, we haven't locked anything down.

Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward.

immediately send your lawyer. But after receiving this text, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading quote, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you.

If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS now. That same day, ICE agents showed up at the home of Chunk's parents, and Chung's lawyer called quote unquote Audrey from the police, who revealed she was actually an ICE agent and stated that there was an administrative warrant for her arrest and that the State Department can revoke Miss Chung's residency status. We're going to talk more about what's happened with miss Chung after this at break.

Rubio had quote revoked that as well unquote. So this similar to like a mamou Khali like demonstrats that like they have no idea of the of the actual residency status of the people that they are going after. They are just going after non citizens and may eventually start going after citizens too. Like they're just going after people that they assume have like the least amount of protections, whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on

a student visa or a work visa. They don't really know going in. They're they're they're just going after people. Then, on March thirteenth, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants, citing a statute for harboring non citizens. The Trump administration is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders

the administration's foreign policy agenda. One twenty one year old student who was the Vale Victorian at her eigh school is hindering their foreign policy agenda for attending a sit in protest. Her lawyers note that Chung was not, by any means like a movement leader. She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests

against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyer's right quote, Miss Chung has not made any public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests. She was rather one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns. Chung herself had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung

was not in violation of any university policy. So in response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to try to locate and deport her, Chung went into hiding. Her whereabouts are still unknown as the time of recording, and her lawyers fouled a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.

The lawsuit reads, quote officials that the highest echalons the government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Miss Chung's speech. ICE's shocking actions against Miss Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech.

the movement of Khalil to ICE attention in Louisiana. A DHS statement said that ICE is going to quote investigate individuals engage in activities in support of hamas a foreign terrorist organization unquote. The statement also claimed that Chung would have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge, which is like contrary to incidence of ICE just deporting people before they're legally required hearings, even like in defiance

of like extra court orders mandating those hearings. Like ICE is just lying here, and I think it's worth pointing out, like what types of people they are going after right now. One type of person that ICE is going after is like non citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of what they actually did. Right This can be anything from from standing in the street to doing a sit in protest to just like being arrested on campus and removed

by campus police or NYPD. Right, just just any arrest like on record that shows you at one of these protests the other in the cases like Khalil, like he was never arrested. He was the subject of a mass doxing campaign by other students at Columbia, professors and other you know, quote unquote anti Semitism organizations which target high profile activists to create like public pressure against them, and those same lists are now being used by the Trump administration to target students.

And it's interesting like as they approach, most of these people are unmasked, and then as soon as people realize what's happening, like like people in the neighborhood it realize what's happening, they all start pulling up like a like half faced mask like gaters gators.

able to identify her. But as Garrison said, right like, in terms of how they're picking their targets right now, it seems to be heavily tied to these vigilanti zionists, far right groups. I did see that a judge has already ruled that she shouldn't be left, she shouldn't be removed from Massachusetts without further consultation with that judge.

just to not answer the door. I usually likes to rely on people that have already been arrested or already detained by like police, Right, that makes it much easier for immigration officials to find people without that locating people can be a little bit harder with the use of this like harboring non citizens warrant, that shows like there's trying to create this precedent for being able to actually break into more people's homes even though you know she

had a permanent resident status. This is just like in terms of the tactics being used, similar to like you know this all these like gray man block people approaching you on the street one by one. That's like a tactic to take note of. The use of this type

of warrant is also something to take note of. We are already at that point where people are like are like going into hiding, right, This is like very very like dystopian ya coded stuff where you're like, you are literally as like as a twenty one year old like junior being forced to go into hiding because federal agents are after you because you sat down. Yeah, you sat down in front of a building in protest of a genocide.

You're not even a movement leader, and this this type of thing shouldn't even happen to quote unquote movement leaders.

do so. The email address is cool Zone tips at proton dot me. Proton Mail is an encrypted email service. It's only end to end encrypted like signal. If you send it from a proton mail address, don't copy any Atlantic journalists on your email, and you should be good to go.

Mohammed Mansour, who works for Palestine Today, was killed quote in his house in southern Gaza, alongside his wife and his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeira. Later that day, the IDF killed a twenty three year old a Palestinian journalist, Hassam Shabbat, in a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in northern Gaza. I want to read this statement from Hassam quote. If you're reading this, it means I have been killed, most likely

targeted by the Israeli occupation forces. When all this began, I was only twenty one years old, a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past eighteen months, I've dedicated every moment of my life to my peak. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza, minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, intense anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger

for months, yet I never left my people's side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest, something I haven't known in the past eighteen months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now, do not

stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away, keep fighting, keep telling our stories until Palestine is free.