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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, But you can make your own decisions.
Garrison takes a puff of their clove cigarette as slow jazz plays in the background. These sites say what they used to be. I've been digging into liberal conspiracy theories. That is, they're all the rage where the sky is
blue and the book is face. These libs think Old Donnie Jay's close call in Pennsylvania was a false flag, that the South African Musk stole the election, and that the Park Service has gone rogue, waging an insearchent information warfare against this corrupt administration, sending out coded messages on social media. It's called blue and on doll and it's been making me blue. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mio Wong for our Blue On On episode.
Finally, I never thought. I never thought I would be nostalgic for the days where I was arguing with Isis on Twitter. But increasingly increasingly I am looking back at that as the golden age the Internet. We were merely dealing. No, it's it's only gotten.
More stupid right wing terrorist organization. It's it's only gonna get more stupid from here. Oh yeah, no, this is this is the least stupid it's going to be for at least fifty years. And this is the thing that I realized what doing my research for this blue On episode is that usually conspiracy research is kind of fun. I have a good time looking into conspiracy theories. I like going to conspiracy conventions. I get joy out of this,
almost no joy. Looking into liberal conspiracy theories really boring and kind of sad.
So that's the intro for this episode, Garrison, can I interest you in some of the bespoke shit? None of none of the none of this twenty twenty four elections stolen? Can I Can I interest you in some two thousand and four iowall vote total skill? Oh yeah, absolutely, We'll get to that so much better.
We'll get to that in our last section, because yeah, there has been liberal election done out in the past, not at the same I think scale it exists at now, but yes, it certainly has existed before. And you know, for a while, conspiracy theories were like a bipartisan or at least like a by directional political pastime, like old conspiracy magazines were not as partisan as conspiracy theories have seemed today. Think of like, you know, JFK. Everyone gets to have fun with JFK except for me. I don't
have any fun with that. And conspiracy culture used to like crossover between hippie environmentalism, anti semitism, anti corporatism, anti authoritarianism. All these things exist both on the far right and the far left. There was a lot of meshing between different different polarities of conspiracy theory, and I think politics on the fringe are slightly more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
And if if you spend any amount of time and like, you know, the communist left, you'll see that they have their fair share of conspiracy theories or even just a conspiratorial way of understanding the world.
They all think that we work for the CIA.
Yeah, stuff about the CIA and NATO all kinds of stuff, and though like anti vaccine and nine to eleven trutherism were initially more liberal aligned conspiracy theories, in the Obama years, conspiracy culture coalesced around the growing far right. Look at people like Glenn Beck and the slide of Alex Jones into the fascist right. Case in point Obama, Birtherism and
all this stuff leads to Donald Trump and QAnon. As of late, liberals have had a conception that as the more rational of the two political alignments, they were almost naturally immune to conspiratorial thinking. Meanwhile, attacks on consensus, reality, fractured information streams, and any larger collective sense of what's real and what isn't started to slip away from everyone.
Here, Yeah, your camera's flashing. They're trying to silence me. They're trying I'm getting too close to the truth. He legitimately looked like a fucking like you're being taken off the air in a cyberpunk thing, like you pirate radio is my cat started to unplug my camera. Really funny shit.
Although my cat is named Theodore Katzinski and Kazinski was a CIA operative who got mk ultra, so you never know. The right wings trailblazing of political unreality allowed space for liberals to dip their toes into the conspiratorial mindset again, but maybe without even realizing that's what they were doing.
Exaggerations of Russia Gate was one of the first Trump era liberal experiments with conspiracy theories, the idea that Russia not only engaged in hacking on a social media disformation campaign to influence the twenty sixteen election, but that Donald Trump himself colluded with Russia to get himself elected and
might even be a Russian asset. And even though those allegations were investigated and not concretely proven, the conspiratorial churn continued, emboldened by the media environment that the right has created. As QAnon accelerated during the second half of Trump's first term, so did the decline of American consensus reality, culminating in the Stop the Steel movement in January sixth, which were explosive manifestations of Internet conspiracism which erupted in the physical world.
A severe fracturing of reality took place. Any conception of a shared political reality seemed so far gone, and the effects of this loss aren't just contained to Republicans, but this also enables liberals and people on the left by opening up space for small reality tunnels to form regardless of political ideology. The siloing of information channels makes it almost impossible to actually form a consensus reality. As the United States has embraced its political cafe, as everything gets
more absurd, what loses is political mundanity. Liberals and the left were almost destined to become more conspiratorial in this current moment. And you can even look at how newsome is like copying Trump's posting strategies, and even how people like me memify and replicate Trump phrases. Many such cases, we were all gonna be pulled into this at a certain point because it's just more interesting. I'm going to quote from one of MIA's favorite books, the CCRU quote
God No. Conspiracy fictions are spun out of an all encompassing narrative that can't possibly be falsified, because they want you to believe in their non existence. To attempt to refute such narratives is to be drawn into a tedious
double game. One either has to embrace an arbitrary and outrageous cosmic plot in which everything is being run by Jews, Masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, Microsoft or Satan, or alternatively advocate submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing the hyperstitional chaos that operates behind the greens. This is
why atheism is usually so boring. Both conspiracy and common sense the normal reality script depend on the dialectical side of the double game, on reflective twins belief and unbelief. But disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief.
Unquote.
Belief is so much stronger because disbelief is so much more boring. It only exists in comparison to belief in something. I think this is why everyone has this urge to get more conspiratorial and like Americans specifically, our country is based on conspiracy theory, like the Masons are such a core part of our national identity.
I fucking went down that title. I went down the like if you ask me to start talking about politics in late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties Italy, I could start talking about how Italy was run by a rogue Basonic lodge. So that actually is true. If you google propaganda due you will you will find out this was this was actually, this was all the front page of the New York Times. It was to be fair to the basis, this was a rogue Masonic launch. They had
been expelled from the Masons for being assholes. But this is true. All conspiracies are true, but only about nineteen seventies Italy. But it's more interesting, right, like it it's
so much more interesting. Yeah, it is more interesting. And it makes it really hard to disprove conspiracy theories when the act of disproving it makes it feel like you're submitting to some all controlling authority, and people people feel like they're losing, like they're they And that idea of submission is why people get so pulled into conspiracy theories, because they think that believing in conspiracy theories is itself almost a form of resistance against you know, quote unquote them, Yeah,
which is which, which is very funny, because the actual operation of conspiracy is precisely the other way around. Like conspiracies had been encouraged by the government, by governments for ever, like the protocols are the Elders of Zion were like an op by the fucking czars, like like this is this, like this this, this is this was this was literally
a Russian police operation. Right, but all of these people now believe that they're like, oh, I'm like the anti systemic person because I fell for this like anti Symitic police operation. But it's yeah, it's a really powerful force.
The US government has intentionally stoked like UFO conspiracy theories for eighty years.
Yeah, because it covers up the thing. You know, if you if you want to go conspiratory about it is because it covers up the thing they're actually doing, which is like mundane but horrifying weapons testing shit.
Like Now, the CCRU proposes that quote unquote, unbelief might be the way out of this cycle by building a plane of potentiality where the annihilation of judgment converges with real cosmic indeterminacy. I myself tried to embrace an unbelief viewpoint for a lot of things, but I think that only gets you so far, and might also so encourage some of these same problems in a larger scale. Because America has now gotten to the point of unbelief, especially
in regards to QAnon. We've outgrown the need for QAnon because everything is QAnon.
Now.
Politics are about determining who is and isn't a pedophile immigrants are trafficking children. Donald Trump is on the Epstein list, which both doesn't exist and was invented by Democrats. Historical events are staged. Every election was now stolen by the side who won. DHS is posting coded messages on the Internet.
The FBI and police are faking crime statistics. Everything Trump does is a distraction from whatever the previous thing Trump did, which itself was a distraction from whatever the previous thing Trump did.
So on and so forth.
This is just what American politics are now.
Yeah, and while Trump's numerous connections to Epstein are long documented and he appears in Epstein FBI investigation files, discussions around it can feel very the storm is coming. The pedu elite are always just about to be arrested and removed from office. I like to see old Donnie J wiggle his way out of this jam. The logic of QAnon has perforated almost every aspect of American politics. On
Blue Sky, there is this conspiratorial mantra gaining traction among liberals. Quote, he wasn't shot, he didn't win, He's on the list.
Don't like that.
Oh no, that's what they believe. Do you know what isn't a conspiracy theory. Maya that advertisement is designed to drive consumer demand repledged capitalism by replacing your desires.
Not a conspiracy theory. That's just the good old truth.
Listen to these ads, all right, We're back as q andon itself became a uber conspiracy theory overtime liking together a large collection of historical and contemporary conspiracy theories into one overarching story. Bluinon does not just refer to a single conspiracy theory, but rather as a label that can be applied to a general assortment of theories or conspiratorial
thinking held by contemporary liberals and Democratic voters. I myself used a version of this term all the way back in January of twenty twenty one for a since removed YouTube video due to threats of violence, in which I used the word blue QAnon to describe Portland liberals who believed that Russia was staging Antifa protests to make liberals look bad after Biden's election victory, and some of the banners used in this video apparently had threats to the
President of the United States, so YouTube took down the video. Unfortunately, even though the video was just outlining liberal conspiracy theories about this protest, thinking that Russia probably made this banner.
The censorship regime continues apace.
Around this time twenty twenty one, the term blew and on was mostly used to refer to Trump Russia conspiracy theories, but there were a whole bunch of other liberal conspiracy theories in this era, like how palettes of bricks were being mysteriously dropped off at protests. And though I will say this conspiracy theory was used by both people on the right as well as some centrist liberals.
Yeah, and I think this is actually you know, you were talking about how there is this like QAnon, like this sort of moment of break with consensus reality. And I think the twenty twenty uprising was one of the
most the single most important events in this entire process massively. So, yeah, because the twenty twenty Uprising was a systemic challenge to both the liberal and the Republican establishment right, because if its central premise is true that the United States is a structurally racist state, right that is based on the oppression of black people, then you can't continue to maintain
the state. And also, simultaneously, the thing that was incredibly threatening was that people were actually willing to go out and fight the police over this. And on the right, this obviously causes massive reality fraction because they have to grapple with the fact that like most of the country was fine with burning a police station down or were they right? Yeah, this is like oh no, there was
this was this was act. This whole thing was actually like a plan by like Antifa Democrats and like Pritzker's billionaire, like the Jewish billionaire sorrow Jewish billionaires.
It was actually the Boogaloo boys who planned the whole thing and burned down the Third Precinct.
Yeah, and this is this is a very very compon. This became the liberal main line on the burning of the Third Precinct was that it was a false flag by like the Boogloo Boy People don't remember the Boogloo right, Boogloo Boys. Yeah, it was like they're like this very very weird race.
War fashion, trying to encourage a new civil.
Lanness of a word weird fascist group. But like that became the liberal main line because they had to find a way to explain the fact that the people who were you know, like a lot of people who are norminally supposed to be their base, decided instead of doing their sort of just like vote for the presidents and like vote for the Democratic president and like non violently and passively do nothing, people went and fought the police for most of a year, and this caused this massive
fracturing where people had to believe it instead of there just being construction sites and people taking bricks from construction sites, as people have been doing for literally since the first brick was made, people have been taking them and throwing them at enemy authorities, right, Like Stonewall was a false play, yeah, right, because the actual power of that uprising was so dangerous to the fundamental liberal conceptions of of reality in the world,
and that like the marginalized and oppressed people who they who they sort of planned to represent, would take take it into their own hands. The idea that, yeah, the state is structurally racism, so it has to be resisted. That caused people to just have to create these like just pure reality tunnels of like, oh no, actually, any attempt to fight the police is a false flag that
the police want to do. Or the burning of the Third Precinct was actually like the fascist attempting to provoke people, and that the state actually wants you to fight it, because if you fight the state, then the state wins. And like this is one of the er reality tunnels
that creates this sort of conspiratorial mindset. We're like the Booglue boys at the third precinc That's not just a thing from like you know, online posters that became the main line of the Democratic Party because they also had to contain the uprising and from there and once that's the accepted narrative of like the Democrats, then this pure reality tunnel conspiracy shit is now just baked in to the very core of liberalism as it attempts to recuperate
and defeat the energies that were unleashed by twenty twenty And that's how we're here. That's a large part of it.
Flash Forwarding a few years during the first half of twenty twenty five, especially in and around Biden's disastrous debate performance, the blue and on term begun being used to refer to a collection of theories that a secret cabal of deep state elites, the news media, high ranking Democrats, and Republicans were targeting Biden to sabotage his presidency to make him lose the election.
There's no such thing as getting old. There is simply being sabotaged by q cards and camera lighting positions.
Now, the blue On term here is sort of a misnomer because like at this point, like Russia Gate, and QAnon had very little in common. Like one viewed Trump as the Messiah, the other viewed him as basically, you know, an anti Christ slash Russian asset. In the wake of the Trump assassination, Philip Bump penned a Washington Post article declaring, quote QAnon and blue and on rhyme, the similarities end there. And I have sympathies for this viewpoint, especially in the
wake of like January sixth. Right, Blunon doesn't have Satanic wayfair child trafficking, but maybe it doesn't need to. No, In conspiracy theories, it's not just about the substance of the beliefs held, but the function and methodology of the beliefs. And in the past year, Blunon's function and methodology have started to parallel q Andon's more and more, which leads us to the event that really opened up operating space for the mainstreaming of the liberal conspiracy theories, the attempted
assassination of one Donald Trump. Americans are particularly susceptible to assassination conspiracy theories. It has kind of been woven into our national identity now. Of course, Republicans, including elected representatives, developed their own fair share of theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. But that's a another episode. Here's a viral Facebook video. Remember Facebook, it's not that bad taken.
Look what happened? Fake ass shit man.
Stage, fake ass shit bro Ain't no bullets flying and network.
You know what I'm saying. If you know anything about the shootout.
Soon a shootout, you will see bullets, class stuff getting piled off. Oh, ain't netting going on, never getting hit, nothing getting piled off.
He definitely didn't get hit.
He faked it all.
The whole dang is fake stage and Grid Broles how didn't play y'all. They gonna make y'all vote on now off the dump?
You feel me?
Oh, y'all?
Oh he oh, he been shot at.
Y'all all gonna on a vote on goat some fucking clowns.
Bu.
The word staged spiked in use by almost four thousand percent on Twitter, according to the misinformation tracker NewsGuard appearing three hundred thousand times the day of and after the shooting. The term inside job also rose on social media, up by over three thousand percent, with bots and inauthentic accounts adding to this chaos and Israeli dsinfo tech firm Cybra found that forty five percent of accounts using hashtags like
fake assassination and staged shooting were inauthentic. Within a day, a post on x questioning the authenticity of the event gained over fifty thousand likes. Quote great camera angle, great quality, no secret service agent in front of his head covering the wound, conveniently placed US flag unquote. Another got nearly fifty thousand likes, asking users to quote raise your hand and repost if you think this was staged.
There was a flood of posts.
Earning thousands of likes and millions of alleged views, which questioned why Trump was able to or allowed to stand above the crowd after being shot, yelling fight, fight fight, risking getting shot again, and while it could have been possible that there was a second shooter, Trump was only able to stand back up after it was confirmed that Crooks was killed. You can hear it in the video
shoot her down shoot her down. Secret Service was already aware of Crook's position prior to the shooting and had not located any other possible shooters. But reality does not matter here. Yeah, I'm going to play a short clip from a YouTube video which was uploaded just a month ago with over eighty five thousand views, explaining why someone feels it really easy to believe in this conspiracy.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I normally don't go down conspiracy hos.
I don't, but we know MAGA does.
Maga has gone down so many conspiracy holes and brought it to science that we've got people not giving their kids vaccine. We've seen easels rising in Texas. We had people not wanting to get into COVID. We had quarterbacks telling people to take ivermectin. We had people saying take fucking horse trank oralizers to get rid of COVID. And so now I think I've earned opportunity to go down
a rabbit hole. This video was someone who was right there at the Trump rally, and they're contending that this whole thing is made of which a lot of us felt like it was anyway, because we do know that Trump, he's not afraid to fool around and shall we say reality or entertainment TV. We know he's not afraid to do that, and I'll show you an example of that in a minute.
What example do you think he's going to show a WWE thing? It is a WWE thing. I remember there was so much WWE like tieing shit with this. Well we'll get to that in this second.
But I find this explanation of why this person feels almost allowed to believe the conspiracy theory is now super interesting. It is specifically because the right has been so willing to embrace conspiracism that now it feels like it's fair game for liberals to do it as well. And this guy is just almost almost acknowledging this fact. He's kind of like working his way to my entire thesis here, maybe without realizing it.
Also, this guy sponsored by an AI company, just just to make this absolutely perfect great stuff, great stuff happening in this in the sphere of our political discourse. We love to see it.
But yes, based on the blood severed across Trump's face after he went on the ground, people postulated that Trump was hiding a razor blade in his sleeve WWE style to purposefully cut his face to make it look like he was shot.
Yeah, Donald Trump bladed himself. What are we doing here?
So should we believe that faking getting shot is beyond boom? Why would we believe that when this is steal Trump that once was trained by the WW whatn't those some convincing ass right hands he just gave vincement Man, No, those.
Were the least convincing right hands I've ever seen, and I have watched pul Colgan threw a poton not for me.
You know what, I think we've saved this whole assassination thing right here. Like this stuff doesn't even warrant debunking. Debunking is useless, right, Yeah. All of these conspiracy theories rest on the fact that rally attendees were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and two people died as a sacrifice to sell this event, and that the Biden era Secret Service
helped facilitate this whole operation. I watched YouTube videos explaining that even if bullets were fired and people at the rally were hitting killed though just not Trump, the actual footage of the shooting is actually ai because as the number of targets hit don't match the number of shots heard in the video, and people in the crowd suddenly disappear once shots are fired, as in people get down
low on the ground to avoid getting hit. As for the number of shots hit versus shots fired, these videos seem to not realize that bullets travel through objects like say Donald Trump's ear the.
Point of a bullet.
Also, this was actually Trump loyalist police firing into the crowd as a part of this stage operation, not not Thomas Crooks. After the shooting, a political advisor to Democratic donor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman named Dimitri Melhorn sent an email proposing that the shooting may have been quote encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash unquote. The next day, Melhorn regretted and apologized for sending the email. And think
about it. While one person was lined up perfectly to get the now historic photo, think of how many other professional photographers at the rally weren't so lucky. There's not just one photographer at the event, there's lots, And yeah, one person got a really compelling shot.
It's a campaign event. There's paid photographers there. This is what a campaign event is Oh my god, there was a flag that was stayed because it was a campaign event going insane.
According to a poll from Morning Consult, roughly one in five voters said that they found it credible that the shooting was staged and not intended to kill Trump, including one third of at the time Biden supporters, thirty three percent of Biden supporters, and twelve percent of those who backed Trump, which is really funny to me.
That's actually really funny. It was an inside job.
Good job, guys, good job the mega Trump assassination truthers the majority of voters, though sixty two percent, said that the unsubstantiated notion is not credible.
A statement I've seen from both the conspiratorial left and the right is that we know all about say Luigi Mangioni or this latest school shooter, but still know nothing about the Trump assassination. And this just isn't true. We actually know a lot about Thomas Crooks. Now, just because you haven't read about it doesn't mean that we don't know. I'll link to a recent New York Times article looking into his online footprint. We know a lot about this guy.
Yep.
But based on the conception that this failed assassination attempt would in the end help Trump get elected. Some people chose to just reject the event entirely, and yeah, it was surreal, a warped manifestation of millions of people's dream And when things happen that challenge expectations or are just plain weird, some people reject that reality and substitute to their own alternate realities which make more sense to them. If a near mis event like this would help Trump,
then it must be Trump's doing. Do you know what Trump has no control over?
It's so not true that he doesn't have control of these products and services. We have good report I got is his Increasingly.
The tariffs aren't real, be a. I won't believe the tariffs until I see them with my own two eyes.
I'm gonna I'm going to walk you to the port of LA. Are gonna go look at the tariffs together?
Why inside?
So here's the ads. All right, we're back.
You can't talk about liberal conspiracy theories without the most blatant example of some libs taking a page right out of the megaplaybook twenty twenty four Election denial God another instance of Trump and you and on trailblazing something that used to be on the political fringe and normalizing it
as acceptable political discourse. Early on, after Trump was declared the projected winner, liberals questioned why there were seemingly twenty million missing Democratic votes from the expected twenty twenty four totals, pointing to the higher numbers in twenty twenty seemingly forgetting that vote. Totals were still being counted, and in the end, there were only three million fewer votes this election, which
is extremely reasonable for an election, according to NewsGuard. By Wednesday morning after the election, Trump cheated was trending on Twitter with nearly one hundred thousand mentions since midnight. I'll read a few of these viral tweets quote. I hold a master's degree in political science. I don't yet understand these results, and I don't pretend to. I'm not into conspiracy, but I'd like to know millions across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan
really split their vote? Did millions of Democratic voters really stay home?
And the answer is yes, yes, yes they did. That is what happened. You figured it out.
People did split their vote, and yeah, lots of people were not compelled to vote for Harris and stayed home. Congratulations you you stumbled across the reality.
Mm hmm.
Another person remarked, quote, I hold a master's again. I love all these people prefacing this by saying that they have degrees.
And I want to say two things about the degree thing. One eight each of the time when someone starts doing what are these things? You can go back and find different degrees they pretended have two. I have been around people who get master's degrees in political science. We are not talking about the cream of the intellectual crop here, Like, this is a discipline that is like economics for people who like or even worship the chain rule than economists. Like, what are we doing here?
Quote I hold a masters in political science with a minor in statistics, and I can't make sense of this. Human nature had to completely upend itself for this to happen. Swing states voting straight blue down the ballot except for the top. Nah, that's not what people do, and yet it is what happened. A frige political science analysis.
This is hinged for them so very quickly.
Liberals demanded recounts and court challenges, begging that Kamala Harris take this to court with misinformation spreading that she was planning said court challenges. Others alleged that Elon Musk hacked
voting machines. According to a report from the University of Washington, over a five day period, there were hundreds of thousands of tweets and retweets about how Elon Musk, working with Trump and sometimes with Putin, used Starlink satellites to steal the election, perhaps by intercepting than changing totals through the Internet, despite most voting machines not being connected to the Internet.
No, and the actual thing that he did was like going to places and saying, I'll give you a million dollars if you vote for this election, one of you will win. Like that's like the actual thing that he did, which is so blatantly obvious and.
Like basic like ground game targeting and swing states, Like, yeah, they mobilized a shit ton of money. Quote, I'm hearing today that Elon's software Starship is the software that handled all the swing state ballots. If indeed this is true, this is clearly a conflict of interest and another reason why swing states need investigations. Well, good news, this isn't indeed true.
You made this up. This is fake.
It's not just Twitter, though on Meta's Twitter alternative threads, there was a hotbed of election denile, with posts like this spreading on the platform and beyond to places like Reddit. Quote Trump cheats at everything in life. Putin interfered in the past three elections. Musk and Trump talked to putin a lot. Musk's Starlink uploaded votes in swing states. Swing state voters went Dem down ballot, but Trump at the top.
Unlikely Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence unquote. This is referencing a conspiracy theory from the time that based on an event on November tenth where a Starlink satellite re entered orbit and blew up, as elon Musk's technology is known to do. This was its self proof that he was blowing up his satellites on purpose to conceal evidence that Starlink was used to alter election results. SpaceX regularly retires satellites which then slowly fall to Earth and blow up.
This is ordinary practice.
This particular satellite, which exploded on November tenth, was decommissioned back in August. This has nothing to do with the election. Still, there were viral tweets calling for a quote unquote, forensic investigation and accounts like your n on News, an account pretending to be affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous, which is a real vector point of left wing conspiratorial thinking.
I'm going to put a note here. Viz says that the history of relationship if your n on News is very complicated. This is not a this is not a definitive statement on it. Please don't get mad at us. It's a it's a fucking mess. It's a fucking mess. That's That's what I'm gonna say about it. That guy sucks shit.
They've been spreading a lot of election misinformation news, especially in November.
Quote.
Some strange statements from Trump and Elon have fueled doubts about election integrity. You can just change one line of code, Elon stated about the code on electronic voting machines. I don't need more votes. I already have votes, Trump stated repeatedly, So why not take a look unquote. This alleged quote from Elon cannot be sourced at all. The full version of it is quote. If you want to steal an election, all you have to do is change one line of code unquote. I have tried so hard to find the
original source for this quote. I cannot. It is just liberals saying Elon said this. It may have been something he said, I cannot find it. Even if it is something he said, it's not evidence that he stole the election, no at all.
He does this like there's a whole conspiracy on the left that thinks that Elon Musk was behind the coup in Bolivia, which was like something I was accepted by EVO back when he was in the NIS, like in Bolivia because it was like politically convenient for everyone involved to believe that, like Elon Musk did this coup in Bolivia over like lithium prices, when the actual reality was
it was done by a bunch of Bolivia agrobarons. But people just believe this shit and and Elon will just play into it, like because I don't he probably didn't say that. But like even if he, like he did say the ship that he did the coup in Bolivia, but like he didn't, he objectively didn't lollxd like I okay,
I'm not I'm not. I'm not going to get into the price history of of lithium here and how there was a fucking market glut at that point, which is the exact opposite thing you would want there to be if you're trying to steal with you like, it's nonsense. So people just believe this shit because it fits, it fits their version of reality. And the right is really happy to sort of play into this because they just play around with conspiracies.
And this line from Trump is just breaking about having a lot of projective votes already.
That's all it is.
Yeah, the day before inauguration day, people alleged that Trump may have accidentally admitted to stealing the election in one of his speeches.
Oh my fucking god, let's take a look.
Trump just told on himself.
He just credited Elon Musk's knowledge of how voting machines work for his victory in Pennsylvania. He said this during his victory rally in Washington, d C. The night before alleged inauguration. Let's listen to the audio.
And then he journeyed to Pennsylvania, where he spent like a month and a.
Half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania. And he's a popular guy, and he was very effective. And he knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like.
In a landslide.
So that was pretty good.
It was pretty good, So thank you to Elon.
That is from a very popular TikToker. This particular video has twenty thousand likes. I can't even find how many views it has, but there's hundreds of comments talking about how the election was stolen. The same video was spread by people like a friend of the pod Brooklyn Dad defiant.
Oh god, fucking okay, I need to spend five seconds. No, we don't have time. He's literally paid by a Democratic party. He used to be Yeah, he used to be bluterally paid a Democratic party. He was a fucking oil guy. God damn it.
Sorry, okay, but he said quote. Is that a fucking confession?
Oh?
Twenty three thousand likes?
Oh?
Which, Now this line from Trump gets referenced a lot in liberal stolen election theories. Trump is not saying he won because Elon knows vote counting computers. Those two statements can be separate statements that are just right next to each other. More, it could be easily interpreted as saying that Elon Musk's computer knowledge helped prevent fraud, ensuring that if Dems tried to steal the election again, Elon would have caught them. As twenty twenty, Republican election denial focused
heavily on voting machines. In terms of numbers on how many Democrats don't think the election was legitimate, we do have some statistics. In twenty twenty, eighty eight percent of Democrats thought the election was legitimate and accurate. In twenty twenty four, it was only sixty three percent, with nine percent saying it was the result of illegal voting or election rigging, and twenty nine percent saying they don't know
if it was legitimate or accurate. Of course, the Republicans found this election was extremely legitimate as compared to the last one, in which a majority of Republicans thought it was the result of illegal voting or election rigging. But still twenty nine percent of Democrats in twenty twenty four not knowing if the election is accurate pretty pretty damaging, and obviously a lack of trust in election systems is
an extremely damaging thing to the functioning of democracy. The reason why I decided to finally do this episode after pulling little research bits over the course of the past year, is a tweet from August twentieth quote. Two whistleblowers have now confirmed that the NSSA conducted an election audit and Harris was the winner. Don't fucking ignore this. One hundred and forty six thousand likes, almost thirty thousand retweets, five point five million quote unquote views. This went super viral.
One of the biggest instances I've seen in recent election denial. This viral tweet links to a substack with over fifty one thousand subscribers and three million views. The focus of the blog is showing how Kamala Harris really won the twenty twenty four election. The recent posts cover how a former CIA operative has confirmed that, based on an NSA audit of the twenty twenty four election, Kamala actually won. This was a quote covert compartmentalized forensic audit unquote.
It's literally just stop the steal. They did this the same thing.
It was completed in December twenty twenty four, and based on the findings, the NSSA and CIA recommended a hand recount, but the recount was unable to take place before the January sixth election certification, and since then, the findings of the audit proving a Kamala victory have been covered up
by Tulci Gabbard and the Trump administration. This blog claims the election was stolen by hijacking voting machines and quote illegally copied software, decades of vulnerabilities, and the installation of a back door through a last minute change order right before the election unquote. Now, there's a few problems with this theory, the first at which being that the NSA doesn't audit elections.
No what.
This substacker also operates a still growing TikTok account to prevent being suppressed for misinformation. The user toksin coded phrases calling elections baking contests. State election results are either red cakes or blue cakes.
Votes are ingredients.
Rist In her most popular video with about seventy five thousand views, she claims that Trump isn't giving red swing states FEMA AID because he knows that these states actually voted for Kamala Harris, and so Trump is punishing them by withholding aid. This is her second most popular video, with fifty thousand views, talking about North Carolina and how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel worked together to alter election results.
Hey y'all.
Quick update on the baking contest in North Kakilaki and the cake is in fact who we were able to identify about one hundred and ninety seven thousand ingredients that were swapped out by the space Baker, So he and his friend whose name rhymes with seal have been up to some interesting things.
When it comes to these baking contests.
So the surveillance Seal and the Space Baker doing some doing some interesting baking. So we need you to let your media friends know and let all your let all the people know. We're going to do an email campaign next week because that seems to be how we get this done. We do have avenues to undo this unholy.
Mess, and just hold on to your hope.
Run over to my friends at the coorse Ate and of course the Common Coalition. Check out the report. We have more to report on all of the baking contests that we're working on. We're still digging, We got more to go and blue Skies ahead, y'all.
There's something specifically uniquely horrifying about the way that like just the sort of TikTok language of sewer side or whatever like that people say, like that kind of shit this stuff just makes me really sad. No, it's it's so like I can't have fun with this anymore. Oh God, damn it.
The same thing when I was watching some of the trum assassination videos when I realized this is just from people who are unwell, and I can't even have fun with this. And that is also the case with a lot of Q and on stuff. You should be really careful about how much joy you take in the suffering of people and people displaying their suffering on the Internet by engaging in this stuff. But yeah, this stuff's just
really sad. Like in other videos, she's with her followers to contact their state governors to convince them to change all the voting machines because they've been compromised. And I'll play one more video before we close the episode, I
says over thirty two thousand views. She talks about Trump using tariffs as leverage to get countries to sign deals with Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, which will then be used to control elections worldwide, and the only way to stop this is to impeach Trump and put Kamala in the White House since she is the rightful winner of the twenty twenty four.
Election, they take from their constituents.
Now to address the Space Cadet, and how look at what he launched last year in record time ten months, this low orbit DTC constellation. And look at what they're doing with the countries around the world. To get your tariffs removed, you have to sign a contract with the Space Cadet. Hello, this is not about any kind of like you know, internet in the rural areas, blah blah blah. Nothing about this is to be nice. No, it is to control future contests. The US was not the endgame.
It was the litmus test. So we can get out of this. We have constitutional avenues to get out of this situation, but we need Congress to act, and Congress won't act until the American people know what happened. And they're not going to know what happened until our influencers and our media handle the situation. So Rachel Matto, please, Lawrence Midas touched. For heaven's sake, Midas touched you guys, four million people, you could be blasting this out and
letting the American people know what happened. Do your jobs, please, so we can get the rightful people in the.
House that they belong in, the big white one.
I think one of the things that makes me so insane about these is that like if you're actually, I
guess Garrison, you weren't around for this. But like I've legitimately have lived through two attempts to steal an election, right, Like there was two thousand which the Republicans just stole and then yeah, Donald Trump did try to steal the election in twenty twenty, but he did it by having people try to form mobs outside of polling places and then like his supporters did January sixth That's a real thing.
But the thing about these conspiracies is like they devour reality, They consume it and strip it for his constituent parts. Which is why you see so many like you know, used to see so many conspiracies that would you know, if you look at their giant conspiracy charts. They're talking about like the structure of the World Bank and the IMF and like that's where the Builderberg group stuff comes
out of, Right, they love charts. The Builder Group stuff is them taking the real structure of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and then you know, devouring that structure and spinning back out conspiracy and that that's what these things do. They take they take real things that happen in the world and just devour them and
turn them into just nothing. And it makes it harder to act because like, yeah, we do live in a world where the Republican Party has like attempted to or successfully did steal two elections, but not this one.
And if this is your mode of resistance, of hashtag resistance against Trump, that's useless. It's completely useless. It's not actually managing any of the effects of Trump on people, like ice, like attacks on career people. It's this fully contained, non non form of fighting.
Yeah, and like like you see you see this, You see this too on the left of CIA stuff, where it's like everyone is convinced that like the person they're arguing with on Twitter like is the CIA, and that the way that you combat CIA influences by like spreading I don't know, post and pro asage shit. And it's like that's not not actually substantively combating the influence of
the CIA. It just feels like it is. And that structure of feeling is so powerful that it prevents you from doing actual action.
There has been this new conspiracy theory getting traction on Blue Sky a lot that the masked people engaged in Immigration enforcement ICE aren't actually ICE agents. They're secretly quote J sixers, bounty hunters or thugs, oathkeepers, proud boys. It's a big assumption to even say they're federal agents. They're not identified. We have no idea who they are. Could be proud boys, or oath keepers or three percenters unquote.
This is trying to push the blame away from the US government, who is engaging in this action ICE, onto these non state actors, which people in their mind think are easier targets. And it's just a completely misunderstanding of power, and it's a misunderstanding of their current political situation, and it gives you no ability to actually stop the bad things ICE are doing. I've seen this theory gain a
lot of traction online. And in the same way that QAnon is a product of the cognitive dissonance of Trump supporters having to grapple the fact that the trumpet that their god king is in power and their lives still suck, this is this specific one is a product of the cognitive dissonance of like the fact that these people all supported ICE when Biden was Biden was the run, running it when like Biden fucking did his executive order to shut the border down, right, but kumboom Biden was like
doing consration camps in the desert. They were all pro ICE, and then they suddenly have to deal with the world where ICE is doing an ethnic cleansing and they can't process that. And so the way that they attempt to cope with it is being like, well, that's actually not the real Ice. That's like j six proud boys. It's a groper occupied government. They're sending out coded messages on Twitter. Yeah, it's the same thing me and you did the episode about a few weeks ago in our dog Whistle Politics
and the Hunt for Coded Nazi Messaging episode. But yeah, And though some Democratic voters are engaging in election denial, I think one key difference from twenty twenty Republican election denial is that liberal election officials have as of yet not been willing to participate in this rhetoric openly or pursue these baseless fraud accusations. This is still one difference.
But I think it's a ticking clock. I think it's only a matter of time, especially once we see the midterms that people running for office, that Democrats might start embracing some kind of wing nutty stuff the same way Marjor Taylor Green Trojanhorst wing nutty politics into Congress, and now we see a whole bunch of other representatives being able to engage in conspiratorial thought on the right. There's going to be a few instances of this, I think
in the next midterm election for Democrats. It's something to keep an eye out for, because I think it's only a matter of time. Like what I mentioned in that CCR you quote, mundane reality is going to lose because this stuff is just more interesting. People are going to
try to buy it, and it requires constant pushback. It for part one, But there's gonna be another episode tomorrow where I talk with Jack of the Alt watcher Blue Sky account to discuss the latest evolution of blue and On and possibly the most qan Oni extension of Blue and On we've seen yet, the Alt National Park Service and their coded messages being sent out on Blue Sky and Facebook. So stay tuned for that tomorrow, and remember you are not immune to propaganda. Seventeen two nineteen, two
hundred twenty seven general public. Please disregard as this podcast as fighting battles on multiple fronts. This podcast is it could happen here, and I'm Garrison Davis. Last episode, I talked with Miowong about the trajectory of liberal conspiracy theories, specifically throughout the last ten years, from Russia Gate to Trump's staged assassination and twenty twenty four election denial. This resurgence of liberal conspiracism has been dubbed blue and On.
If you want more background on that, go listen to our previous episode. But this episode is about a new evolution of Blue and On and possibly the most Qanani iteration we've seen yet. The Alt National Park Service a social media engagement farming account that gained traction on Blue Sky and Facebook last February. In March admidst cuts to
the Park Service from the Trump administration. This account gained followers by posing as a group of anti Trump dissidents from within the Park Service, and soon enough it inspired a collection of other Alt government accounts like Alt CDC,
Alt Nih, Alt Yellowstone, and Alt Noah. The original Alt National Park Service account basically never talks about the park Service itself, but during the first few months of Trump's second term, the account started going viral by posting sequences of random numbers as ostensibly coded messages to other hashtag resistance fighters, though the account has since experimented with, altered
and refined their engagement strategies. To hear more about that and how Alt National Park Service fits into this trend of liberal conspiracy theories, I talked with someone who has spent the past few months documenting and writing about this account. The person who runs the alt watcher account on Blue Sky and writes about their search on the blog Dispatches from the Online Void. So here's that interview.
My name's Jack.
I'm the user behind the account alt Watcher on Blue Sky, and I've been following the Alt National Park Service for about six months, just documenting what they do and how they steal from journalists and how they're driving a lot of people insane, including me.
What is the Alt National Park Service or first, what does the Alt National Park Service claim to be?
Yeah, that's an important difference. The All National Park Service claims to be a loose affiliation of anonymous former parks employees that are either still employed by the park service and kind of working behind the scenes, or who were fired or laid off by the Trump administration and are now part of a nationwide coalition to resist the government. That's what they claim to be. What they really are
is just a Facebook shit posting account. We're not sure if it's one person behind it or if it's a group. It's remarkably hard to find out anything about the person who is behind the account, who they are, where they are, and how they started this. But what they do most of the time is repost the work of journalists directly plagiariyes from news outlets, and post these vaguely conspiratorial things online to try to whip up engagement from their followers.
I first became aware of this back in probably March of twenty twenty five, specifically when on Blue Sky they just started posting a lot of numbers. Yes, I was aware that this account was created, like in the aftermath of some like Doge related cuts to the Park Service, or like anti Dei, anti woke stuff, and then this account popped up claiming to be you know, like resistance from inside to people who watch politics like seriously for their jobs.
Was very clear that this was.
Not a legitimate organization, and then they just started posting numbers sequences of numbers along with other cryptic messages, and this like immediately starts hitting like the q and on bells. Back in July of twenty twenty four, there's a Washington Post article about the Trump assassination conspiracy theories, but specifically it was it was a I think it was an opinion piece critical of terming liberal conspiracy theories as as
quote unquote blewing on. They said, quote the main similarity of q and on and bluing on is that they rhyme.
And for a while I kind of understood this criticism and agree with parts of it, because there was there was structural differences between some of how you know, liberals or like quote unquote the left engage in conspiratorial thinking, and like the function of q and on the numbers think started to I'll mess with that analysis because then you started to see the actual methodology and like the ideological function of QAnon start to get replicated in what
is most likely just like engagement farming. But for the people who are following this account and engaging with it and like it becomes like an important part of their life and their perception of like hashtag resistance. And I think that's where bluing on actually proved itself as a term, was in March of twenty five, I guess, let's talk about the numbers.
You know what, I would love I would love to talk about the numbers. The numbers are also what stood out to me, and that is why I ended up making my account and diving into all this. During the pandemic, I got obsessed with qana, you know, as as just what is this? A lot of people did a lot of people did, you know, Look, pandemic did a lot of crazy things to us. Some people learned to knit, some people got good at baking. I got really into learning about q and on and I am. I'm a
huge fan of the QAA podcast. I listened to that constantly. And as soon as I saw altonps post one of the numbers, I realized, I'm reading this.
In their c voice.
Yeah, their their voice modulated voice that sounds like this whenever they would post. And I started reading all the numbers post that way, and just like you said, something clicked and I went, oh, this is oh, I see what they're doing here. Yeah, and they've posted numbers many times. I've got my giant spreadsheet pulled up here, and I think they've posted something like thirty numbers. It's been a
while since they've done it. But the thing that really gave the game away from me was during one of these numbers posts, they posted some random number and then replied to themselves and said, for discussion, what do you think these numbers mean? And I said, oh, I see what's happening.
Here, kind of giving away the game there, hell at exactly.
Yeah, this is not a group of government insiders communicating with their coalition. This is the user behind a Facebook account realizing in real time that they've stumbled on like a gold mine for engagement. Yeah, oh, we can just do this and people will do the work for us, and we're just going to say that out.
Loud and throughout.
Like March and April, their count just like rocketed in popularity. Yes, I've not actually looked on their Facebook account. Besides, like the post that you've shared, I've only seen them on Blue Sky. Is what is the difference of their presence on Facebook versus like blue Sky Blue Sky.
I think they're at something like nine hundred k on Facebook. The last time I checked it was about four point three million.
Geez.
Yeah, they are a massive presence on Facebook and they've been monetizing their posts. Recently, they have been sponsored content on Facebook leading to their page.
This is where I think one of the different from like how Q and nonfunctioned and all National Park Service, because you know, Q was not monetizing posts on the chance.
That's like I would have loved to see him try. That would be really funny.
I do not see like this account existing as like as a sort of operation to influence the political trajectory of the United States the same way that the qan on account at least evolved in that capacity. Even if it started off as like a shit posting thing exactly, it certainly evolved with with more of a malicious intent the people behind you know, Q posting.
Yeah, I think that's a big difference between them, is that this is straightforwardly an engagement far.
Yeah, using some of those tactics, especially like early on, but for a very simple reason, and that's that's making money on the Internet, like everybody is trying to do. It's it's it's just like internet hustle culture stuff with with no grappling with like the consequences that has for like the psyche of of people who who engage with your content.
Exactly, and the psyche of people who engage with this content is really what keeps me coming back to this project, because that is the real harm I see here. Look the online drifters or a diamond doesn't you know people who sell stuff online. It's everywhere, it's inescapable. What's unique about alt NPS is that they are trying to make money on convincing people that this is real. You know,
they're not just selling hashtag resist shirts or whatever. They're trying to get money out of people by convincing them that they really are part of a shadow resistance against against Trump, and that you can buy their shirts or you can straightforwardly just send them money for things like their all Junior Ranger program that they've said they're starting, and if you send them a dollar, you're helping fund
that program. And it's totally real. And the fact that they didn't mention it for seven straight months after initially announcing it is something you definitely shouldn't worry about. Do you know what else you definitely shouldn't worry about? This short at break.
So they have face pushback for their numbers posting, but they have found a way to justify it publicly, to talk about like how they've framed the posting of just like four numbers, two numbers, and like the sort of like defense of the account that it plays.
Yeah, that was this maybe says something about me, But that was maybe the post that made me the angriest of anything they've done, because I have a deep seated reaction to feeling like someone who thinks I'm stupid, And all I could think is, do you think I'm an idiot? When I saw their reaction to this, Because we are often criticized for the numbers we post online.
We can't tell you everything.
Sorry, And then they went on this big half explanation about stingrays and cell site simulator.
Cell site simulators.
Yeah, but they didn't explain what those actually do. They did not explicitly claim they were being surveilled by one, and they didn't explain why the existence of stingrays and cell site simulators means that they should.
Do all this on Facebook instead posting numbers does not bypass the security concerns posed by the presence of a cell site simulator. No, because you're still posting publicly on the Internet. That doesn't matter at all. Yeah, you're pulling something out of your asse that sounds technical, that's going to trick your you know, average boomer and maybe you know three out of five gen X people who are scrolling Facebook slash Blue Sky and like that's that's all
they need to do. But for anyone who knows what a cell site simulator is or how like internet communications works, it's very very clear that this is just like completely bullshit.
It's completely bullshit because you're right that this is all they need to do. They just need to deflect. And I think that's what stood out to me about this post in particular, is that it showed me that the person or people behind all the time ps have a genuine level of pr skill. You know, they have a certain level of what I think is a real skill at deflection public relations and being able to spin what
they're saying. You know, that's a genuine skill. It's a shame that it's being applied to this instead of, I mean, anything else, but that is a skill that they have that they're able to deploy in defense of their conspiratorial posting.
The other thing that they post in relation to the numbers. Is there one time forward catchphrase general public can disregard.
Don want to talk about the context of those posts.
Yes, those were replies that they would make to the numbers posts, usually to the numbers posts, but occasionally to.
Some other cryptic thing they would post.
They would post their numbers, say forty four, and then they would reply to themselves saying general public can disregard, or they'd say please disregard if you are a member of the general public. And there were a lot of people online who saw that and thought, oh, that must mean it's a code.
It has to be real.
They're engaged in some sort of like secret agent spy work, and this is very really important.
Yeah, yeah, And I would see a lot of people push back on any criticism that the account would get for this by saying things like, it's code for a reason. You know, guys, they're speaking in code. Don't try to crack the code. It's not for us, you know, this
is for the coalition. And whenever anybody would say I don't think this is real or like any of the things we've talked about about, why does this make sense, they would instantly be accused of being a right wing infiltrator or a troll or a MAGA spy or something like that. You know, there can be no actual criticism of the account. There can only be infiltration.
Yeah, and that does have more like Q overlap, I suppose absolutely. I don't know.
It's odd because like throughout through writing about all this like bluing on stuff. As much as this stuff is a legitimate problem, like which it is, it's just a symptom of a larger political problem in America, and the people engaged with it, if anything, are kind of victims
as well as like perpetrators. And like this was the same thing with like Q and on, where like your average person engaged with it as bad as it is and some of the stuff that they might like say or do, I also just feel bad for the people involved.
And it's this same thing with this.
As annoying as this kind of like lib slop can be, the people who have to have to believe in something like this in order to like keep going that it's kind of like a tragedy in a way, and this is obviously is serving some important psychological function for them.
Yeah, I totally agree, And I think that's that sadness. I think is what keeps me wanting to engage with this. You know, when I look at this and I see alt Enps trying to get people to buy their T shirts or just farm engagement, that's not remarkable to me. That's normal that happens on the internet all the time. What keeps me coming back to wanting to fight this and wanting to document all this is the people I see in the replies. Yeah, the people who say that
alt Enps brings them so much hope. It's what's keeping them from falling into despair. And it's not that I want to take that away from them, it's that I don't like that their need for that is being used.
Yeah, this is like a predatory mode of trying to capitalize on that.
Absolutely. Yeah, the account is trying to capitalize on people's need for hope. You know, they need to believe that there is someone fighting for them because in a lot of ways, it doesn't feel like anyone is. You know, it feels like our politicians are ineffectual, our institutions are crumbling. We need someone be there. We need ironically, we need patriots to be in control. Yeah, we need to trust the plant. There is an appeal to that, and I
do understand that. I understand that these people are looking for a light in the darkness, and I really can't pretend that I'm not doing the same thing totally through my writing on this. I need something to cling to, and I can't blame anybody for feeling that way too.
I mean, that's why I feel like your project, though, it comes from a much better and healthier place, because you're looking at this like decline in nationwide American sanity and trying to do something about it, even if that's just a documentation, and then writing about it and trying to explain to people and like help help people understand
where the psyche of the country is. And I think part of what makes me so interested in your project is that, like it reminds me a little bit of people who started studying QAnon, you know, back in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, back when.
It's just this little, cute, small thing, and then you fast forward years later they realize they've actually done some extremely important like work documenting a phenomenon that is shaping the trajectory of our country.
And I don't know if.
Alt National Park Service is going to evolve in the same way. But I think the slow embrace of this sort of conspiratoral thinking among decently sized like chunks of the democratic base, I think is very notable and work. Like what you're doing, I think actually has a really important place in trying to like map where our country might might be headed. And yeah, in a few years it might somehow it might turn out to be super important when the Libs finally do their own JA six.
So yeah, I mean, I to be honest, I would be very happy if this whole thing petered out.
Sure, you know, I would be very happy if.
One day the account just stops posting and there is no years long continuation with this like there was was something like you or not, you know. But I do think Altenps is a part of a broader ecosystem of
this blue and on world. And you know, I do agree with what you said earlier that bluanon is a phrase that I think does get overused, that there are some things that are just normal people, you know, expressing their political opinions that kind of gets derided as oh, blue and not, but it really is just people being normal or people being extremely online. But Altenps is a part of a bigger world of this sort of vaguely
left wing conspiracism. You know, I'm seeing a lot of crossover between people who post in reply to al t enps and people who have this sort of mantra about Trump that he wasn't shot, he didn't win, he's on the list. And you see that exact phrase, you know, post it over and over.
And over again.
It's in pictures, it's in memes, it's in people's posts. And I think all t NPS is a part of that. I think they're emblematic of that. Yeah, that you are not immune to conspiratorial think.
We are not better than that now, and they're facilitating I think that mindset. I think liberals became so susceptible to it because they had this conception that they're immune to it, that conspiracy thinking is something that only exists on the political right.
Yes, that's for other people, And this is part.
Of what I'm going to write about it, like in general, but like the way that consensus reality was like sheared down so heavily during the first Rump administration and like parts of the Body administration by people on the right that like weakened this notion we have of Consettu's reality that then liberals kind of got blindsided by when events happened that were hard to understand or felt so surreal or like bombastic, that it allowed a split that was
already there to grow into a pretty wide opening where you now believe that major historical events are fake and staged, that an election is stolen.
And you're like, what, what does this remind you of?
Like?
What?
Yes, one of the things you're saying remind you of. Isn't this part of why you're against the Trump movement in the first place.
Yeah, And I think God help you if you ever try and point that out. Yeah, you know, to a lot of the people in these replies, it's just like, hey, guys, doesn't a lot of this smell a lot like you or not? You know, doesn't this sound a lot like the way people talked about the twenty twenty election? You know, doesn't this smell the same way? And that is when people in especially in al t NPS's replies, will go nuclear,
you know. There, I've seen some incredible dog piles in response to people bringing this up, even if it's if it's anodyne, you know, even if it is just hey guys, just a reminder, I think this is something that we should you know, maybe I'll take with a grain of salt. People go nuts, you know. They they need to believe it needs to be real and it needs to be unquestioned, and that there can be no good faith questioning of this idea.
Do you know what else is an unquestioned truth that we have to go on one more ad break before we return to conclude our discussion on the Alt National
Park Service. It's easy to see how they reached just a certain like ceiling on how much they can just numbers post and have that be a reliable method of engagement that they've started to like experiment with with with different types of posting to see what makes people stick, who can help with engagement over a long period of time instead of just like rocketing to like virality first
but then having a stable audience. And now they're basically a news aggregator account but deceptively framing where they are getting their their news from.
Yeah, they are a news aggregator account with massive caveats.
Yeah, yes, well, I mean I think most news aggregator accounts are actually bad. Yeah, I'd agree this is something we saw in twenty twenty was how unreliable news aggregator accounts were and how much of a harm that they caused. And I see the current version of all National Park Service as kind of an extension of that taken to a slightly higher level.
I suppose I'm.
Obsessed with this, you know, I've said that a few times, but I've documented what I think is most of the time that they have posted a news article without attribution and either just described something where they could have or should have posted a link to an actual article, or more often just copy pasting sections of an article and reposting it as though they wrote it. You know, those are the ones that really get me. Those are the aspects of their news aggregation where you say this is
just plagiarism. You know, this is just you stealing verbatim from an article and acting as though you wrote it because you want your audience to think that you are a government insider with all this inside information, and that information like that is coming first to you, not to the New York Times, not to CNN.
Even though you're just posting sections of the New York Times and CNN.
Yeah, I mean, they took the first, I think three paragraphs of an article from Wired, and did it word for word, didn't link to Wired, didn't say where it came from, and implied that the information was being sent to the rangers of the all National Park Service instead of two journalists at Wired. This happens constantly, you know, and every time I think, well, they've been posting more link slately, they've been linking directly to actual sources of information.
Every time I start thinking that, they do it again. You know, they steal another thing again, or they've started posting to court watcher or directly to government documents in what I'm thinking as an attempt to dodge accusations like the one I make. Somebody in my comments described it as the don't cite Wikipedia, cite Wikipedia's reference page problem.
They're reading an article from NPR, and rather than just saying, hey, we've heard this in NPR, they're going to NPR's citation of the Department of Justice and linking directly to that instead to make it look like they're diligently watching government court records and posting them for our benefit the moment they come out, instead of just we saw this in the Washington.
Post and they've been engaging this for like a few months now with this sort of behavior.
Oh yeah, they've been doing that since January February. Yeah, they've also started claiming for a while, and then they stopped that. One of their sources they would list at the end of their posts was an unnamed official in whatever relevant government agency they were talking about. Our services include this newspaper, this website, and an unnamed Department of Justice official, an unnamed Department of Education official. They suddenly
stopped doing that as soon as they started. There was about a week or two where that was behind about every post.
Anything else you want to add about either the existence of these alt accounts or like any other aspect of this world you want to mention before we before we close up.
Yeah, I do have two quick ones, and the first is that among the alt accounts that you see online, the Alt National Park Service is overwhelmingly the most malicious and the most harmful. You know, there are may be a couple others that get a little wild, that are maybe a little conspiratorial. I think Alt Noah has been kind of in the spotlight for that lately, but a lot of them, like Alt CDC, the Alt Forest Service. All these random little alt government agency accounts are pretty harmless,
you know. They really are just posting links to news articles or given updates on their relevant agency.
ALT.
Forest Service mostly talks about the Forest Service. ALT CDC mostly talks about the CDC. ALT NPS basically never talks about the National Park Service. I think I can cut on one hand the times that they have said anything about the parks. There was a point when I think it was in the big beautiful budget bill where there were these massive cuts being proposed to the National Park Service, and they talked about the bill as a whole and didn't mention anything about the cuts of the Park Service.
Well, you never know who's watching the communication channels.
You got to be careful. There's cell site simulators out there.
There's cell site simulators out there. And then the second thing is that I'm always very careful in my writing and in my posts to emphasize that the people who followed this account are not the problem the account itself is. You know, I always want to make sure to have a lot of empathy for people who follow this account, because I understand why they did, I understand the hope they're looking for, and I never want to do what I see some people do in the replies to Altenps's posts,
which is dunking on their followers. You know, how do you rubes believe this? Do you idiots still think this is real? I never want to do that because that doesn't help anyone. What that does is make them dig in, It makes them double down. So I always want to make sure to treat the followers of these accounts with respect, you know, treat them with empathy, talk to them like a person. Yeah, And that's how I've managed to get
a few people to get out. I've managed to have people tell me that it was through my writing and other people's work on this topic that they were able to get out, they were able to disengage from this.
World of fake spies and code numbers. And I think that matters.
I think that that helps with every little bit we do, and it starts by just being nice to people, just being kind to people who are looking for hope in the world we live in.
Where can people find your work both on social media and then also you're writing.
You can find me on blue Sky at altwatcher dot bsky dot social and I am unfortunately still on substack at my name, it's Jajoyce Lynch dot substack dot com. And also look for dispatches from the Online Void is the name of the blog.
There should absolutely be more people reading your Dispatches from the Online Void, some very very solid work just straightly documenting the phenomenon that we've been talking about this episode and specifically the old National Park Service.
Well, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, it's fantastic, very like, non editorialized, just showing you what's happening, extremely well put together.
Well, thanks, thanks, and nice for you to say thanks.
Again to Jack for talking with me about alt National Park Service. I strongly recommend people seek out his research, both on Dispatches from the Online Void and Blue Sky. Before I close this episode, I want to remind everybody
that you two are not immune to propaganda. This past weekend, the internet has been a buzz with rumors and speculation that Trump died over the weekend or was actively dying, and there's been attempts to cover it up, when in fact he just went on a brief Labor Day weekend holiday.
People were sharing ai altered images to make Trump look more sickly and were speculating about road closures around Walter Reed Medical Center, sharing a map with roads blocked off, but in fact there were no irregular road closures, and this map of supposed closures that was spreading online just
showed old security gates. People concocted elaborate theories that Putin poisoned Trump during their last meeting, and that when the quote unquote President was supposed to give an announcement on Tuesday afternoon, it would be Trump resigning for health reasons, or Vance would come out and announced Trump died and he is now the president. And sure enough, come Tuesday afternoon,
Trump appeared perfectly normal for a press conference. Even in the lead up to the press conference, I saw people continuing these conspiracy theories with sometimes a tat of irony. But as the press conference got delayed an hour, there was more and more speculation about Trump's declining health and yeah, he is an old man, but he's not going to drop dead this weekend.
This isn't true.
This is a copium strategy, and the way people have been talking about it is very similar to the liberal conspiracy theories that I've been reading about these past few weeks. And as fun as it can be, to speculate about a president's health, as many people did last time we had a geriatric president?
When was that?
Oh last year? But as much fun as it is, things can quickly spiral out of your conspiratorial control, even when your percipasion is from the safety of ironic detachment. I'll talk a little bit more about Trump's imminent death theories on this week's episode of Executive Disorder, but until then, just remember you are not immune to propaganda.
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where by my longtime home city of Chicago is preparing for a federal occupation. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about what the fuck is going on about a thing that, at the end of last year, as bad as we thought this was going to be, was basically unimaginable. With you talked about. This is Raven, who's a journalist from the independent outlet Unraveled in Chicago, which does a lot of really really excellent work on
the ground reporting on social movements in the city. You're putting on the government does a bunch of incredible works and some really good stuff on shot Spotter. Yeah, Raven, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thank you for such a beautiful intro.
Yeah, thanks, thanks for doing this. I don't know, like I'm a really big fan of Unraveled. I think most of the newspapers in Chicago it's just like just weird right wing rags, and getting actual good news out if the city is kind of difficult because it's like, yeah, we we have a good number.
Now, like digital indie outlets in the city, but once you get outside of Cook County, especially, you know, the Chicago metro area is huge and like, yeah.
It's all like pink slime garbage, like everything's been brought out.
They don't have like real reporters anymore, so it can be a huge challenge to cover things like just in the collar counties, which is coincidentally also where a lot of this ice activity might be happening in the next yep, forty five days, thirty days, however.
Long it lasts.
Yeah, so let's I guess from the jump before we get into sort of the kind of long arc of ice and the FEDS in in Chicago for the last year, let's talk about Trump's thing to send in the National Guard and so off the pep in the city. I'm really concerned about.
Yeah, well, you know, there's kind of two things happening simultaneously.
Right.
Trump is threatening the National Guard, which has been a thing like threatening the National Guard in Chicago has been a thing with him for like a while, and it can be very difficult to tease out like what what level of it is propaganda.
And what level of it is like really happening.
Right. But the other more important part here is we do know now like conclusively that DHS is planning a large operation in like Los Angeles style. So everything that's been happening around Lay for the last few months is moving into Chicago. This is what the chief of Border Patrol has said. You know, he just put out like a social media video that was saying they're trading palm trees for skyscrapers and bringing a few hundred guys with DHS ice border patrol to Chicago.
So it's pretty wild.
I don't think I've ever seen border patrol in numbers on the ground here in the Great Lakes.
We've always known it's like this thing.
That cooking seembly happen because we're technically like a border city.
But you know, to be staring at in the face now like it's real, like it's actually happening.
It's obviously feels like a real emergency for our communities.
Yeah, And I think that's the interesting thing like talking to you and then talking to other people on the ground, is that like the National Guard deployment is what's getting all of the press, right, and people really aren't that
worried about it. It's worth pointing out. So we're recording this on the morning of like Wednesday, September third, yea, So it's possible that stuff has changed by the time this episode goes out like tonight, because the situation is shifting really rapidly, right, But you know that there's this whole fight over whether the Texas National Guard is being deployed here on a federal deployment. But people don't really seem to be worried about the National Guard, and I
think kind of for good reason. They didn't really. I mean, they did some stuff, I guess, but like they mostly kind of are there to make it look like there's troops in the street, right, while Ice in DHS does like the most horrific shit, right.
That's been sort of the the understanding of what's happened in Los Angeles and then in DC it's gone a little bit differently just because they have so many FEDS already, so they've been able to do a lot of traffic stops in these little FED tactical teams. So you'll have like some FBI guys, some DA guys, maybe like an HSI guy I just read and woppole the other day, they've crashed like six cars in DC.
I mean, like it's really dangerous that kinds of stops.
These guys are executing their jumpouts, right, It's not like opficer friends and like pulling you over a license and registration please.
You know, it's like really violent and they're in on mark cars and they're like trying to suffice people.
So that is you know, also what we're expecting to see alongside like the ice ups is these FED teams crawling through the city.
You know, I don't know when they're going to be doing what where, but like.
I said, the Chicago Land area, you know, the suburb everything around, it's very big. Yeah, you know, there's every indication this isn't going to be centralized just to like Downhoume chicag.
Yeah, And like I think there's something that's kind of hard to understand if you're not from Chicago, but like even just the city proper is massive. Yeah, right, Like it takes like I mean, I haven't driven it in a long time, but like I think, I think if you're trying to go from like the top of like the North Side to like the bottom of the South Side, that's like hour and a half two hour drive, right, It's massive, right, And this.
Naval station where they're basing operations isn't even in the city. It's two hours north than in in County. Yeah, so there are a lot of questions right now. I don't have the answers. Nobody's going to know until it starts, but you know, there are a lot of questions now just kind of like how far into the city are there even going to go? You know, it's obviously, you know what we've seen out in Los Angeles with these like larger like workplace raids like car washes and home
depot and stuff. It's really difficult to imagine them executing something like that in the city. I'm not going to say they couldn't try, but they would obviously need a lot of backup from border patrol. Yeah, to try something like that even in the suburbs, which is what we saw in La.
You know, that's who.
Showed up those first few days when they were like tear gassing the fuck out of everybody, and it was just like crazy.
You know, that was border patrol. So what our eyes are on is something like that.
And to your point about the National Guard and the press, you know, it's part of the issue is like the politicians, the electeds, like they can't say no to the fence, they can't say no to ice, like Ice is coming, DHS is coming, no matter.
What they do.
The Guard is a little more of like.
A political football for them, and and Pritsker can can push back, and there's like you know, the arguments about sending one states troops into another, and so there's more legal option, you know, all this stuff, right, But the FBI already has a field office here, I already has field offices here. You know, Like there's there's just I think also just a disconnect there because of like the way the news reporting works is like, well, we're reporting
on what the public officials are saying. Governor Pritsker did say pretty clearly actually like well, DHS is coming, you know, ICE is going to do these operations and we don't improve it, but we can't stop it.
Yeah, And I think before we get more into that, I want to pivot to talk about what the presence of ICE has been in Chicago already, and I want to kind of like roll the clock back to right before, kind of like I think, like the literally the weekend before the big confrontations in LA started, there was a pretty big raid at a check in and a bunch of stuff happened with that. I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.
Yeah, it was around the time when things popped off, and earlier I don't remembers precisely, but around then.
Yeah, yeah, I think it was like right before.
Yeah. You know, they have these stuck in sights where people have to go and some of them are on like electronic monitoring and some no, and they check in with ICE, and so it was like an ambush, right Like people showed up and then they were like, oh, we're actually like kidnapping you.
Yeah, and it was very very ugly of course, you know, like agents ripping people away from their families and friends.
And we had some local electeds like trying to get in the way of the van, and Chicago police of course showed up, and then there was this whole back and forth over whether the police really assisted.
ICE or not. And I mean they were there and they did crib control.
Yeah, they definitely did.
Like you know, it's it's very interesting what's happening with CPD and ICE right now, because like, at the end of the day, cops are lazy above all else too write, you know, and so there's this kind of tension of like, well, we support what ICE is doing, and ideologically, like of course the pops are aligned with ICE, but they also like don't want to get out of their cars, you know.
So it's kind of any any excuse they have not to do something they will take. So it's not that we've seen them assisting with like.
Enforcement removal operations, but of course if there's a protest, they're going to show up and police that.
And then also, like data sharing is a huge issue there.
I mean, like with fusion centers and with like block license plate data visas and everything, there's just the information is so porous between local cops and the Feds that it's just kind of absurd on a space to even think that they're like not sharing information.
Some of these cops are on task forces and they have like group.
Chats together, you know, with DA and FBI agents, right, so it's all it's all connected, it's all porous. They're already working with the Feds, you know, it's just they can't visibly be seen assisting with immigration enforcing.
But yeah, that was a really traumtizing day for community.
Like an organizer here who was well known was taken and she was a grandmother, so she had a family here too, you know, so it was brutal. And then around that time that that was happening, also, I started escalating rusts at the immigration court downtown, which went on for a while and ultimately was stopped by protesters continuing to show up and just have a presence there. You know, these guys are terrified of being docks terrified. I mean,
they just they really don't want to be filmed. And it's been a very different situation here in our courthouse versus New York's because I've seen so much photography out of the New York Immigration Court. For whatever reason, they allowed photos there, but they don't inside of ours. But you know, protesters started showing up there. I mean, we
had been their documentary what was going on. Slowly people started trickling in, showing up and protesting, and eventually people started then ta making it to like actually blocking the driveway that they were using a private parking garage belonging to the building, and so they were.
Like going underground and then like waiting and then using the great elevator. It was like the whole operation.
Yeah, but ultimately the building put their click on and ban them. You know, they got a lot of complaints from tenants. People didn't like that the protests were going on shore, but people also were like in the building, people were ICE using our crad Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we used the power of the use of against them, deploy every weapon exactly.
Exactly exactly it was.
It's kind of like a you know, diversity of tactics thing there where it's like the people who owned property in this building aren't super aligned with the like people trying to block ICE spans. But but at that moment they joined yea, and you know, so so that that was happening, and like while all of this is happening, of course ICE is still doing more dispersed traffic stops arresting people at their homes.
It's been happening. It's happening all.
Over out in Elgin, out in Waukegan, which is up by the Base of operations, you know, where they're setting up all of these operations for what's coming this week.
Waukegan, North Chicago and that area of Lake County.
There are a ton of imfants and they're not surrounded by necessarily like super progressive, super friendly people.
Some can be.
I mean the politics in the North Shore, it's very like purple like it's weird. It's like you can have super progressive people, but then also like it can be out in the Boonie somewhere you'll see like Trump science. So it's it's not as sympathetic as being in Enoughtown Chicago for sure. Yeah, And so there's a lot of concern from people up around the base about what's going to happen in those communities because there's much less coverage, too much less eyes on them.
Yep. I want to I want to talk more about sort of what enforcement has been looking like in outlying areas and what it's going to look like. The first we need to go to ads and we are back, So I want to I kind of I want to follow the train that you've been on about the stuff in the center of the city versus the stuff in the outlying areas and across Chicagoland in general, which is
also just massive, unbelievably large geographic area. It has unbelievably large numbers of people, and also the concentrations get way smaller really quickly. And I think, I don't know, it seems like the resistance inside of the city proper had been pretty effective in a lot of ways, just in the sense of like shutting down the courthouse raids for
the most part. But what have things looked like up near like Wakegan and like, yeah, in the sort of outlying areas in terms of like resistance and in terms of cooperation.
Yeah, I mean I've seen videos out of those places, you know, really harrowing scenes like traffic stops where they're separating people from their families, showing up at people's homes.
Usually what's happening is we're not hearing you got it until after the facts.
And in the city there are like good response groups going by different neighborhoods. But I think in general, sometimes it just doesn't feel very rapid because it's people are are vetting, they're verifying.
There's a lot of false alarms, you know, there's a lot going on. So that's what I've.
Seen that's happened out in the burbs. You know, it's kind of, like I said, kind of a black hole for news out there too. It's not always easy to get information, you know. We also had a case of like an ICE agent.
Detaining a woman with her child at like a well, it wasn't.
An agent, it was a contractor, contractor working for ICE detaining an arrest tee out at an hotel.
By Ohare Airport.
That's something that that people are concerned about in a more general sense too, right now, because we actually literally just this morning, we're looking at a letter from the mayor of broad View, Illinois, which is where our processing center is, outlining how they're going to be operational seven days a week for the next forty five days, which to me implies like thousands of arrests potentially happening, and that facility is not set up.
It's not a long term detention center. Yeah, overnight detention is banned.
In Illinois, so people have been kept there longer than they technically are allowed.
To even with like without some huge surge happening.
So it kind of thinking about what's potentially coming and then using that center, it kind of follows that, Yeah, there could be more contractors keeping people in hotels like dispersed around, like there's just not enough space at that
facility to keep up with that. And so because there are also backups in the like ice logistics chain, because like people have to be they can't be kept here long term, so they have to go to Gary Airport to fly out somewhere, or detention center in Indiana or Wisconsin or Michigan.
So I guess there's a couple of things kinds of sort of resistant stuff I want to ask about. I remember, like got back in like twenty eighteen. I remember there was a bunch of efforts to like block deportation flights out of the airport. Has up been still going no, I mean.
There was a protest at Gary Airport very early on in the year. Actually it was like right after Trump was inaugurated. I think I know a photographer who was arrested some protesters.
It was really random.
It was like towards the end of the protest, Gary police just decided to like grab and arrest a few people, and since then, I have not heard of any more protests or a time or attempts at intervention at Gary Airport. I mean, obviously it's not Chicago, it's Gary, so you know, there's a smaller community there people would have to travel to. I don't know if deportation, if any deportation flights are leaving from O'Hare.
I don't believe so, but don't quote me on that. I'm not sure.
Yeah, And it's still like I feel like O'Hare is kind of a soft target for that in the sense of, like, I mean, it's annoying to get there, but like there is just a rail line that runs it directly into O'Hare, and you can flood it with a bunch of people pretty easily, like what happened to like the beginning of Trump one.
Right, we haven't seen anything like that yet.
Yeah.
Yeah, But it's also like I wonder if they're still thinking about that in terms of like the flight logistics, in terms of like wearing stuff primarily through Gary.
Oh, I see, yeah, that might be why.
Yeah.
The other thing I'm wondering about is like, Okay, so I guess it looks like right now with the information we have that there planning to run their operations out of the military base. But everything that I've seen has been talking about like the National Guard operating out of that base, but do we know where the FEDS are Its supposed to be operating out of.
The Feds are operating out of the base. The National Guard will will potentially operate out of the base if they come.
But we don't have a lot of details on like a National Guard deployment.
And the other thing to keep in mind is like the National Guard are all younger people. Typically is a lot of young people, and they have like families and things. So that kind of information like a deployment right of like platoon or several platoons whatever the worst of National Guard.
It's not gonna stay secret for very long, right like, because we would know.
So I have not seen anything yet as a twelve thirty noon on Wednesday indicating that the National Guard specifically has rolled into that base.
That could change at any point, you know, I don't know what's.
Happened in the last hour to check the news, But what we do know is that the DHS Operation Customs and Border protection the FEDS that are coming.
They are setting up a base.
Of operations at that naval station, and the Navy said that they denied them lodging and that they have to stay elsewhere like hotel. Wise, I don't know how that will work because that's like several hundred people. I guess they're gonna have to disperse a lot around the suburbs in order to do that. And I don't know the reason for the denial for the lodging. It could simply be they literally don't have space. You know, people are actually like training there, like military and Navy and stuff.
It's not like it's just empty, so they might not have had capacity for that. But supposedly they're gonna be doing office space there. I think the letter also mentioned they can do laundry, their emails like stuff like that. But yeah, I mean that's that's like something that of course people have eyes on, because if you can locate a hotel, that's how where people are saying, you know, that's like a pressure point.
Yeah. I think I think that's an interesting point that comes back to something you were saying earlier, which is like it really looks like this is a lot of this is going to be targeted on the places close to the base, just because like if they're really like two hours out from the city, it's like pretty difficult to do raids further right into the city, just on the logistical level, and just like I don't know, just just in terms of like dealing with Chicago traffic.
It's like.
I don't want to exclude it as a possibility.
Yeah, it's definitely possible, but it's.
Like I just think when we look at inner city or urban policing, there are certain tactics that like local police use that we see the FEDS also using, right, like these unmarked cars, more covert operations, trying to move really quickly and get in and out because they know so that it's such a denser area and if rapid response shows up, people start showing up, then can get unsafe you know, for them as cops.
And so we just we do know that those tactics work. We know that this is how they've been doing operations so far.
With more DHS agents and more customs and border production backup, could they try for something bigger in the city, I mean yes, Like we don't want to rule that out, trust me, Like it definitely could happen. But I think given the numbers that they are trying to reach at this point, what we have to prepare for is being.
Really dispersed and just kind of everywhere, you know, like and like that traffic like you mentioned, you know, it's yeah, it's like obviously if they're driving like three in the morning or something, they're not going to face as much traffic up.
Nineteen ninety four.
But like, yeah, there's also the like covertness of it too, Like you can't just drive a bunch of military vehicles down the highway for an hour and a half and not be sighted or spotted right like, so then you'd be giving like you're giving people more opportunities potentially intervene. So I don't know, I mean, I think like we'll see them in the city for sure. We'll see them
in the burbs for sure. Whether or not we're going to see like teams of like border patrol, you know, in like full riot kit marching through like Pilsen that, I don't know. I think it's something that probably they want to do. I'm sure those dudes would be amped as fuck to like, you know, be in downtown Chicago, like harassing people, you know, beating up people, but from an operational security standpoint, like for them.
It is like so dangerous.
Yeah, so I just I don't know. So so, speaking speaking of dangers, we're going to go to these ads and then we're going to come back and talk about Oh god, is rumors the right word to describe something that the governor is saying about the target getting to the Mexican Independence State Parade?
But maybe not rumor? Maybe maybe just statement.
Yeah, I will, we'll figure we'll figure out the verbiage when we returned. Yeah, we are back. So one of the things that Governor Pritzker has said is that Stephen Miller, I'm gonna I'm gonna read this quote. This is an NBC. I'm gonna read this quote, just that Pritzker said at a conference, we have reason to believe that Stephen Miller chose the month of September to come to Chicago because celebrations around Mexican Independence Day that happened here every year.
And yeah, you know. He further said, it breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try and disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades. He said, let's be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here. So yeah, I guess I want to start by talking a little bit about these parades themselves, because they are a absolutely massive event in Chicago. There's like a big one in Pilsen,
but also like I'm just all over the city. There's just a bunch of people driving around with Mexican flags rocks. There's people celebrating. It's really cool.
Yeah, it turns into more of like a like a widespread like car caravan thing. Ye, there'll be a lot of yeah, you know, and like here's the thing. I know, traffic jams are annoying to like anybody, but when it's in celebration of something.
You know, yeah, its pick the train that day, it's great.
I mean, I understand the arguments for like, well, ambulances need to get through things like that, but I think there's a lot of power in people taking the streets and like, you know, the cars are just the easiest.
Way to get massive amounts of people around.
And then there's a lot of like there's a street culture here around like street takeovers too, and and this happens outside of like Mexican Independence Day, where like some some people will take over an intersection and do donuts and and set off.
Fireworks and like yeah, yell at the cops and whatever.
Right, it's fun, it's cool. It's it's good.
That happens in cities.
And I think when it comes to living in a city, it's like, yeah, you you're trading certain things for other things, and and and stuff like that happens.
And so with Mexican Independence Day, it's like we we we can have like.
Sustained nights where that is just going on and on, like the loop will be jammed up, like everyone will be jammed up.
And of course there's like the public safety people who like whine about it.
And and you know, yeah, this is also like a big like like white people of the city get really fucking pissed about this like every year. First like oh no, no, no, no, look at the Mexicans, Like it's just like and like like the most racist shit you've ever heard in your
entire life. And there's the people sort of below that who will couch it and like, oh uh public safety, right, and I'm going to be really fucking mean to these people, which is like if you're if you're pissed off at a bunch of people like basically doing their own parade. You are not fit to live in a city, Like get the fuck out of here, Like, fuck off, go back to the suburbs, you dip shits. You're fucking losers. You're not fit for urban life, like elight dick, the shit rules.
Yeah, it's Yeah, the reaction to it is like so so over the top, And it's the kind of thing where like when when Trump is like talking about the National Guard and responding to crime in Chicago or disorder, you know, that's the kind of thing I could see him like ordering them into.
Respond to, you know, especially if there's like there's like a shooting or something that happens towards the tail end of one of these celebrations, which again, you know, it's like that that's a risk.
Anytime large months and people gather anywhere.
Interpersonal violence freaking out right, like again, is a thing that happens, and the.
Direct cause of it is never like people partying. The direct cause of.
It is usually like somebody's got a beat with somebody, or somebody drank too much and lost in pulse control, you know, whatever the reason might be.
Yeah, So I think that is, Like I think that's what Pritzker is alluding to.
It's kind of like the car caravan and stuff when he says, like Steven Miller is bringing ice to interrupt family picnics, Like I don't I don't know where he's getting that information, Like I don't know that that is like specifically going to happen. You know, I think given what we've seen out in LA, unless I've missed anything, it doesn't seem like they've attacked any like festivals or like like public gatherings like that, like in a direct way.
You know.
I think like logistically it's just maybe not as easy to necessarily like grab people with questionable immigration status at that kind of stuff. And if you go to like a place where you know, like the car wash wherever they have intel that it's like undocumented people are working here.
It makes more sense.
So I don't want to rule out that something like that could happen, but I think I think there's a whether it happens or not. It's like part of it is also the intention is to have this chilling effect, like to make people afraid to celebrate or come out, to cause that terror, you know, It's kind of like we had a situation a couple months ago where some FEDS who claimed they were with like a financial crimes
task force. It wasn't even Ice, but I don't know what they were doing, and they were meeting up at a boathouse parking lot in Humboldt Park like a week before all these cultural celebrations in the area, and people got really freaked out because it.
Was just like, what the fuck are you guys doing?
And they like went into the museum and were like questioning workers and asking you the bathroom and I mean, just being assholes, it sounds like. And then they laughed, and then there were like all these questions swirling like well what was this, Like were they seeking intel before these fests? And you know, people made sure to like we wanted we wanted to still have these fasts, but we want people to show up in even bigger numbers, like powering numbers.
Everybody show up, and that's what happens.
And you know, they didn't attack the fest, And you know, that was a really weird situation because it wasn't Ice and we didn't know what was going on.
But I think.
Ultimately, like yeah, giving in and like staying home and refusing to show up obviously just plays right into their hands.
And I wanted to kind of pivot a little bit from this into the way that Pritzker has sort of been framing this, where he's talking about how if anyone throws a sandwich at the guard, this is going to be used as like the excuse to do a crackdown, and like I think, yeah, they're gonna they're gonna do the crackdown anyways, Like I don't think that's like.
I mean, this is the central kind of point of conflict.
I think in like a lot of movement space to discussions right now too, especially among kind of.
Like older liberals and like the younger generation.
And part of it is is like, yeah, there's this insistence that, well, he's looking for a reason to send in the National Guards, so don't give him more.
But it's like border patrol is the reason. Yeah, you know, like they're going to show up, and I don't know how it's.
Going to go down, if it's going to be walking again, if it's going to be in Chicago, whatever is going to happen.
But if somebody throws a water bottle at those DHS agents, that's enough of a reason, you know for them to say there's there's unrest, like and who triggered that, the cops?
Yeah, and like it's CPD, Like I have I have watched CPD do this shape to people where nothing happened, right, Like it was just people standing there and.
You know, right, our Attorney General said the same thing in a statement last night, like make sure you protest peacefully within the law. The Cook County Board President Tony Pukwinkle said the.
Same big money still around you.
No, I mean how all the like you know Illinois Democratic god big dog people, like they're all, yeah, all the machine mother fucking the same thing.
I mean, like honestly, Mayrev.
Johnson kind of was a little more fiery in his rhetoric, but he's still only going to go so far.
You know, like they're politician. Yeah, they can't.
They're not going to come out and say like, oh, that's physically crisis ice. I think we always yeah, but it is like it is a very dangerous way to frame resistance, like to say, yeah, well, don't provoke him. You know, it's kind of like living with an abuser or a bully and then blaming somebody for fighting back.
Yeah, and I think there's also there's really it creates really dangerous and hammocks on the ground. I mean, like I still remember like one of the things I'm sort of haunted by from this Durm twenty twenty was in
Atlanta or someone like the person who burned the Wendy's down. Yeah, like a whole there was like a whole thing where people were like, this is a federal infiltrator, and they turned them over to the FEDS, which doesn't make any sense, by the way, Like if your logic is this person is a FED and we turn them over to the Feds, nonsensical, But like this this is the thing you see a lot in these kinds of protests, Like people will just
like hand people over to the Feds. And then it turned out that that she was the girlfriend of a fucking guy the police had shot. Yeah, and that shit just like happens. Yeah, And I don't know, like that's like that's like the consequence of this this kind of stuff is like these people, the peace of police people feel like they are in power to hand people over
to the actual police. And I just want to sort of like take a second to talk to like directly to people who are listening to this who agree with this stuff, which is okay if you are facing a fascist regime, right, regardless of whether you agree with what someone is doing or not, do you think it's a good idea to hand them over to the to the legal executors of that regime, Like would you hand someone over to the SS because they resisted the SS and know what you didn't approve of?
No?
What are we doing here?
Right?
I don't know? And I think this ties back to something from what we're talking about the beginning of the week of like the extent to which people have become convinced that like the ICE agents are all like proud boys or something because they can't imagine the institutions that they had supported for so long, right, suddenly being fascist And it's like no, actually, like these organizations have always bent this way, and they're they're organs of the state,
which means they're going to be subverted to enforcing the regime of fascism, right.
And you know, I think I think a lot of people who kind of and I'm not talking about the politicians, but like regular people who kind of share in this sentiment of like they're scared.
They don't want to provoke or like make things worse.
You know, I think their their hearts are in the right place, Like they're coming from a place of like, well, we just don't want people to get arrested.
We want people to be safe. Like I think, by and large, that's the motivation.
But yeah, it's just kind of like a very shallow understanding of how resistance actually looks and works.
In real life. There's also just like a worry for a lot.
Of people that like, well, that kind of stuff might endanger others want to show up with kids or families, and I think there just needs to be like a separation in space.
Obviously, not every protest or every resistance is for everyone, but at the end of the day, like some of these.
Discussions kind of just fall to the wayside once things get to a certain point, because like, yeah, if border patrol rolls through your.
Town, you're you're not gonna be able to control how everyone responds to that.
Yeah, like that that's a point at which you can see a more spontaneous response. And and so like this sort of like top down movement organizer level like control of like the protests and how it's going to go kind of falls apart anyway, because by that point, like no one's in control of any.
Yeah, it's a it's a it's a bunch of it's a bunch of people running out of our houses being like fuck, fuck the fucking like the immigration authorities right right, you know, And I don't know. That's the thing that gives me hope in the situation, is that, like I'm going to retreat to the metaphysical level for a second, where like one of the things I don't know almost spiritually that I believe in is cities. That cities are
more than sort of some of their parts. Yeah, and obviously like they're they're broken down into all of these things, and you know, like like they're like there's something there right in Chicago. Is something that I believe in, and I believe in the people there, and I believe in their capacity to resist this and to drive these people
out because they can be driven out. And you know, with with enough organization and enough spontaneity and enough cost and on their logistical operations, they can be ran out of a city. Yeah, I think the power of a city. It's not something that's clear until it's manifested and you never know when it's going to manifest, but when it does.
If you look at the entire federal deployment, even if they bringing the National Guard, like we're talking about less than three thousand people, there are millions of people in the city. This is a fucking flea in an ocean, and the flea is relying on the waves, staying calm so it doesn't get drowned. And this is the thing that can happen. These people can be ran out of cities, they can be chased out, their operations can be made impossible, they can be rendered impotent, and they can be made
to retreat. And you know, that's just something I'll say, is just like the experience of watching these people break and run, because they will break and run. They can and they will, and you can do it is the most amazing feeling in the entire world, because you know, however powerful they look, they are beatable and they know it. And that's why they operate with this sort of you know, these like fear shock tactics, because they know that if you're not afraid of them, they can be defeated.
There have always been more of us than there are of them.
Yeah, like that's always been true, and they do rule by fear, and Chicago will fight back. And there's so much knowledge and history here of our urban black and brown communities resisting the police.
Even to this day.
I see on TikTok every night videos of crowds hassling the cops or pushing.
Them out of their hood. I mean, like, this is it's amazing happening right now. There are communities who do this work right now. The schallenge, of course, remains building solidarity across the borders of the neighborhoods.
Yeah, but I don't think this is an insurmountable thing.
No.
I have never been in a place where where people fly the flag of their fucking city that you like, it's not real.
We're basically a small nation state at this point. So this is going to get really weird really fast.
Yeah, And it's like, I don't know, like the US's record of military occupations is not good and we can hand them another l.
Yeah.
So, Raven, is there anything else that you want to say? And also where can people find your work?
Nothing else to say?
Our work is who've mostly even posting on Blue Sky honestly.
Which I always like kind of cringe, but we just do a lot of live reporting. It's the only functional way to do it.
Yeah, it's it's really good. By the way, this is like, it's it's a kind of coverage that I think is becoming more and more important as things go on, and it's really the only way right now to get good on the ground coverage of people of how these actions are actually unfolding.
And it rocks.
I've I mean, we've been there together at events at protests before, and like I could, I could, I could personally vouch for the coverage being good, and yeah, yeah, And it's also like, I mean, we have a lot of people on this show, but like it really matters when the people who are covering a social movement are people who actually are in them and understand how they work and like have been in these places, and so yeah, I think it's I think it's really really important work.
And I think people should go support y'all because it's it's great and it's going to be more and more necessary as the occupation unfolds.
As the occupation unfolds, what a bleak, what a what a terrible world.
But another world is possible. That's the most important.
Yeah, remember, Yeah, and the only way to do it is by build it, and you can do that right now.
I also do think a lot about how like the first well not the first police uprising, but like kind of the the opening of.
This like era of what's going on was the George.
Floyd Uprising, which didn't happen in Great Lakes in the Midwest, in the Mideamo West. Yeah, I think there is there's something about this leads in specifically We're generally not like the first to pop off, just because don't have as many people as in New York or Los Angeles.
But there's such a rich history of like resistance to the police here. I mean you get Ferguson and Missouri, which is like kind of Midwest, kind of South, but like these communities have such a strong history of noringm what it's like to live as like some downtowns too, and some of them still are with these like majority white police departments.
So it's it'll be something to watch how things unfold here specifically.
Yeah, and the uprising in Chicago was like one of the motion times anywhere in the country, Like they ran the cops out of the center of the city, like they they lost control for days of like the giant shopping district in the middle of the city. That is like the thing that like the Chicago business glitzy self image is like based off of they just lost it fully because people ran them out. And you know we did to them once, we could do it again.
Yeah.
Well, and I think public opinion against ICE is much worse than like CPD. I mean, like not that public opinion against CPD is great, but obviously things with ICE are reaching like a fever pitch right now.
Yeah, people hate them.
Yeah, so you know you're not. I don't know if there's ever been an occupying army that people didn't hate.
But like, it's just not going to go well for you when the locals hate you, Like, it's just not it's not going.
To go well.
Yeah. And I think you know, the history, as said this before, the history of American occupations is littered with defeats. Fucking hand them another one.
Oh mom, no inappropriate joke Robert to start this episode. Wow, I feel so clean, you know.
I guess you could say I have some executive dysfunction today.
This is it could happen here.
Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and possibly Sophie Lichterman, our producer. This episode, we are covering the week of August twenty eighth to September third. Happy Fake Labor Day to everybody, and some breaking news from this past weekend. Trump maybe died.
Yeah, let's check out on that.
Garrison, as our official, is the president a lie of correspondent?
Let me do a click at Google search here. Oh no, no, he's still He's still around.
Did everyone get checked again?
He's still okay.
The conspiracy theories this week were really fun.
And then there was that thing that video that went viral of like them like opening a White House window and throwing out a couple black trash bags.
That really was really funny.
That was really funny.
I was like, there's way worse things going on in the world. I don't have time to care about this, But we never got information about that. That was just some weird shit.
Not yet, not yet, Sophie sensational.
I don't think we know what it was.
I mean, it could just be that's them fucking cleaning shit, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were destroying evidence.
I wasn't aware those windows could open. I thought they were like bulletproof and and like weren't.
Supposed to open.
I'm sure they both bulletproof, but have to be possible to open so that the Secret Service has more paths of egress in the event that some crazy disaster of a fall the White House. You need to watch the documentary White House Down, Sophie. This spells all of that out.
So Trump went a few days without a major public appearance.
The man is just trying to take some time off.
Though he wasn't seen golfing between Saturday and Monday. But there's nothing on Trump's public schedule for three days during Labor Day weekend, where he essentially took a brief golfing holiday, and this fueled speculation that he was in a rapid health decline, spawning a whole bunch of gnsper theories about him being in the hospital, Vance imminently taking over, and some comments from JD. Vance during a USA Today interview
released last Thursday fueled some of this speculation. Over the weekend, Vance said, quote, I feel very confident the President of the United States is in good shape, is going to serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people. And if God forbid there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on the job training than what I've gotten over the last two hundred days unquote.
It sounds like he's ready to take the reins right now.
Sure, man, Yeah, you're trained up now.
Over the weekend, people spread AI altered images of Trump's face looking more swollen and sickly than it actually was, and rumors circulated that roads to Walter Reed Medical Center were closed yeah, when in fact there were no irregular closures, and screenshots of maps supposedly showing these quote unquote closures were actually just showing old security gates because yeah, you can't just like walk or drive up to the front door of Walter Reed Medical Center. Yeah, it's in a military base.
This is the ocent of idiots, right, which is people seeing something that is described as being one thing in this like little clip that they get of it in social media, and they don't actually do any further check up It's the same thing with like the pent Gone pizza totally orders that people are like, oh when when pizza orders peeked the Pentagon where about the US is about to go to war, and it's like no, sometimes people just order pizza near the Pentagon because the Pentagon
is surrounded by a city, right, there's like there's people.
The Pentagon pizza tracker was part of these weekend conspiracy theories that yes, you were like trying to decide how to handle Trump's declining health, and.
Yes, people just like pizza guys, Like it's one of those things. I'm certainly not saying there's no way you will wake up tomorrow to hear that Trump has died, because you know what, He's seventy nine. It wouldn't be weird if his health took a sudden turn in the next day. Just statistically, it wouldn't be weird because he's seventy nine. But like the people pointing outs the simile they were doing with Biden pointing out like oh, like the marks on his hand, and it's like, yeah, that
isn't it for both of them. This is evidence that they are older than you should be to be president. But like my grandpa had shit like that, Because my grandpa lived with us for the last like ten years of his life. His hands looked a lot like that for like a decade. Like, so people live for a long time. After it becomes clear they're very sick and old. It's not a sign that they're about.
To kick off this weekend.
That guy in Congress who looks like a turtle has had weird bruises on his body for as long as I can remember, Toddel, Yeah, but no, like accounts were basically theorizing that like Putin poisoned Trump during their last meeting, and this is why he's in a rapid health decline.
Oh my god, Why.
Why would he need to do that? Why would that benefit him?
So baffling.
Yeah, when people noticed looking at the White House schedule, which they'd realized just existed a few days ago. But when looking on the schedule, they saw that quote unquote, the President was to give an announcement on Tuesday afternoon. Because of this, rumor spread that it would be Trump resigning for health reasons, or Vance would come out and announce Trump died and he was the president now, like some like really bad.
Aaron Sorkin movie.
That's how it works.
Also, I just I just want to also put this out there. Yeah, that White House leaks like a fucking sieve. There is no way you could cover up the president dying without it being out immediately, Like come on, no.
I'm sorry, like you, they couldn't keep it hidden when he got sick. You think they're gonna keep the fact that they're gonna weaken it Bernie's head ridiculous.
Yeah.
When this press conference got delayed an hour on Tuesday, this too was used as the evidence of Trump's declining health. But sure enough, right before three pm, Trump came out with a huge gaggle of people, which is probably why it was delayed, because he had like twenty guys with him who, like multiple people spoke to announce that they were moving Space Command. And Trump seemed normal. He seemed like normal Trump, like he is an old guy. But no, this was just normal Trump.
Yeah.
Does he seem older than he did in twenty sixteen?
For sure, Man, it's like more wrinkled, but like, no, he's.
Older exactly like he did before these conspiracy theories starts.
Yeah, I mean he looks old, Like he looks older than he did ten years ago. Yeah, I'm just saying, oh.
She's so much less coherent than then. But like, yeah, he's not like, yeah, dying.
I don't have any particular reason to expect he's about to drop dead, like as opposed to like three months ago or six months ago, you know, yeah, Like does it appear as if time is continuing to march on his face?
Yes, of course, you know exactly. During said press conference, Trump himself was asked about his alleged imminent demise and responded, like this a.
Really different but about a big viral social media trend over the weekend.
How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?
You see that people.
Didn't see it for a couple of days.
One point three million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise?
Really, you know, I have heard it's sort of crazy. But last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful, they went very well, like this is going very well, and then I didn't do any for two days, and they said there must be something wrong with him. Biden wouldn't do him for months, you wouldn't see him, and nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him.
And we know he wasn't in the.
Greatest of shape.
No, I heard that. I get reports, now you knew.
I did an interview that lasted for about an hour and a half with somebody and everybody. So that was on one of your competitors.
That's a remarkably coherent Trump by Trump's standards.
Like no, and he's talking about how he was sending out very pointiant truths.
Over the weekend on truth So okay, that's for current.
Yeah.
Yeah, he just took a nice little golfing golfing holiday and like it is, Drue. He is the oldest elected president and the White House recently announced he was diagnosed with chronic venus and sufficiency a few months ago to explain his ankle swelling and the bruises on his right hand have become more noticeable, which the White House is attributed to frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin.
That is really funny.
Yeah, he shook too many hands.
He just can't stop shaking hands.
That's actually hilarious.
But the aspirin thing is is real and people of his age, frequent aspirin use can lead to hand bruising. Yeah, but I just finished up my blue and on research, and then this whole weekend as I was like literally finishing those episodes, this this whole, this whole giant wave of these like Trump health conspiracies just just completely took over, and I felt like I was like losing it. Like everyone around me, everyone around me was indulging this, and like usually from this place of like half.
Joking but not really joking.
Like when yeah, when that line gets blurry between are you indulging in this like ironically because it's fun, or does it is it actually kind of altering your brain?
Like is it actually slowly making you convinced of this stuff?
In like a small way, this gets to what is at the root of all conspiracy culture, regardless of like the political ideology, which is the need, the emotional need to believe that you are the possessor of secret knowledge. Yeah, right, like that that is so much a part of this that like no, no, no, I am privy to secrets about the world that the average person is not, and the degree to which that's like comforting and also emotionally
necessary for quite a few people. And that's part of the problem with humoring this is that the instant you let it into your life, it starts taking more and more power because it becomes part of your ego, It becomes part of your coping mechanisms. It becomes like yeah, something, but you become dependent upon it.
Yeah, and I think it's also word noting. Like, you know, people are confused all the time about how does the right come to believe all of these things? How does the right sort of you know, like, how how does like vaccine conspiracism spread? How does like QAnon spread? It's like it spreads like this, Uh right, this is what it looks like. And you're also not immune to it
just because your politics are better. It's still really really easy to fall down those pathways because they're addictive and fun, and that's spreading so much unhinged shit.
Yeah.
The root of a lot of madness comes with thinking that you're better than other people and you're not.
Cognitively, I can play around with this stuff without it affecting me the way to fix other people mm hmm.
Yeah, or just because this is because the politics of this counter factual belief system are better than their counterfactual belief system. This is not a counterfactual belief system totally.
Yeah, And like when we see this with the way some people talk about like Russia, and like, I've faced a little teeny bit of pushback on some of the ways that I was framing like Russia Gate in the Blue and on episodes, and like, there is a difference between a social media disinformation campaign to influence elections, which Russia does, Like we.
Know this absolutely, that's not in question whatsoever.
Yeah, there's a difference between that and like straightforwardly stealing, yeah, an election in such a manner that the election results are themselves illegitimate, right.
And this is the big question always if you're saying, like, no, they literally did steal this election in the twenty sixteen election the like, but they just like fucked up for twenty twenty. They just like couldn't get their shit together and time for that one, Like what or is it that they have influence campaigns like everyone else and they're influence, Like that doesn't mean saying that they're not problems, but it doesn't it doesn't mean pretending that's the only.
Reason shit broke their way, you know.
In part A big reason why things worked the way that they have and have worked the way that they have is that the disinfo campaigns that Russia, that the Russian government was engaged and were complementary to campaigns of disinformation that have existed for decades in the US.
Right, Yeah, look at the way they were funding right wing content creators through Tenet Media.
Right.
And like, you know, same thing with Trump, Like publicly encouraging Russia is not the same thing as actual collusion. And there is no clear indication that the twenty sixteen Russian influenced operations or even like their acts sing of voter registration actually made a meaningful impact on the results of the election. And this is the same thing with you know, like the rights legal methods of voter disenfranchisement, voter suppression or changing mail in voting rules. Right, there's
that versus talking about like hacking voting machines. Right, the former doesn't mean that the election was quote unquote stolen. Now just because they do voter suppression, right, the results still need to be accepted. Like, that's not illegal election interference. It's not good, we should we should oppose it. Yeah,
but it's not a legal election interference. And like this is kind of just like a coping method that passes the buck to avoid accepting that Republicans were better at winning these elections, and it may be emotionally easier to like blame Russia than to actually like reflect on ourselves.
And I've seen the same thing when people talking about how for the twenty twenty four election on election day there were bomb threats to swing state polling places that were traced back to Russia, and like, while this is nominally true, this did not influence the result of that election.
And then this can very quickly devolve into like just like basically like just asking questions right, like you can't prove a negative, and this just turns into like a very cartoon version of understanding reality, like with like people in ski masks fixing elections or changing votes, or like hackers compromising election like voting machines, instead of just accepting that a lot of people voted for Trump and he won well.
And it's the part of the other problem is that I think when you lose yourself in patterns of thinking like this, it also leads to a failure to accurately gauge the strengths and the capacities of the enemy, Like if you're unwilling to see where they've made smart decisions and where they've made good investments that have paid off for them. Then you are unable to follow and properly
counter those kinds of things. And I think part of why this is so difficult is that so many people, so many liberals and people on the left.
I don't think.
I think think both sides have differences in how they do it, but I don't think there's a massive difference in the degree to which either side does it. But you find on both ends of the political spectrum this emotional need to be like, these people are idiots, And the corelating factor with that is that like, and I'm not right, Like I'm smarter because I'm not one of these people, because I'm not one of these like fools
who buys into this right wing propaganda. And you're if you're more obsessed with that than you are with seeing where your enemy has made smart decisions, then you're going to continue getting dunked on by them endlessly. You get blindside.
And that's that's where we are right now. People are getting dunked on repeatedly because they refuse to see the things that Trump does that are based in actual intelligence, and the things that the far right has done, the things the Republican Party is of the architects of this movement have done that have been successful. You know who else is successful? Genius the products that support this podcast. Yeah, that's right, and we are bad.
So. On Tuesday, the mayor of DC ordered that the city will continue cooperating with federal law enforcement past the expiration date of Trump's Crime Emergency Declaration, which is set for September tenth. She has established the quote Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center. She's for DC to indefinitely coordinate with Trump's Safe and Beautiful Task Force. This is like a caving and like an acquiescence to prevent some kind of larger legal fight over Trump's ability to exert power
over DC. It's giving him a little bit of what he wants while trying to maintain a degree of sovereignty, but in doing so you kind of just play into what he actually wants.
In the end.
This Operations Center will work on quote centralized communications, formulate post emergency planning and operations, and ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within
the district. Later in her order, she quote unquote requests that federal partners adhere to effective community policing practices to maintain community confidence in law enforcements, such as by not wearing masks, clearly identifying their agency, and providing identification during arrests and encounters with the public.
Quote.
The Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center will continue to prioritize DC National Guard for typical mission focused activities unquote. So they are requesting that federal partners not wear masks. And that's kind of the strongest amount of pushback the mayor is allowing in regards to Trump's federal control of over law enforcement in DC.
Great, that'll solve it.
In a wild band. I said that like, one of the most important sources of support that the Trump administration has is a bunch of the democratic mayors and governors, and oh boy, is this one of them.
Yeah.
Uh. However, it's worth noting that this has not been the response of all of the democratic governors. And I think we're going to turn here towards the impending occupation of Chicago. So Trump has said that he is going to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, ostensibly also because of crime. As of two thirty two Pacific time on Wednesday, the third, we don't have a timeline for the National Guard deployment that could change. The situation is evolving rapidly.
We will get you more on a second. We also have conflicting reports where Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has said that the Texas National Guard is being staged to sort of participate in the sort of occupation of Chicago. It has denied this. We sort of don't know what exactly is going on with that, but it is worth noting that both Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have been very very clear that they do not want a federal deployment in Chicago. They have said go home.
There isn't really because this is a federal deployment, There isn't really much they can do about it outside of legal stuff. And the Trump administration has been a lot more careful about this, and they were in la in terms of how they're doing the deployments legally. So we'll
see what happens with the National Guard deployments. However, and this is something that I think is getting very very little coverage, which is that the actual threat model on the ground in Chicago and the day this is going up. We will have run in an interview the day before with Raven who's a journalist from the Chicago based outlet Unraveled about what the respect bonds in Chicago has been to all of this, and how people are repairing in
what the threat model is. The actual thing people are worried about in Chicago is not the National Guard so much. It is the deployment of federal agents from Homeland Security,
including ICE in the border patrol. Very very specifically. Their is significant concern about border patrol because while there has been ICE operation in the city and it's obviously very bad, as we sort of talk about, there really hasn't been any significant border patrol deployments and that seems like it's about to start as an indication of how fast the situation is moving. So that interview was recorded Wednesday morning,
September third, Yeah, September third. In the time between that recording and now, which was maybe three hours, we got more information about the federal deployment. So the Sun Times is reporting, based on reports from government officials, that two hundred and thirty agents, including border patrol, are being sent from LA to Chicago. Thirty agents are already here. They've been doing training in anti riot stuff with flash bangs. They've also apparently moved one hundred and forty unmarked vans
to this naval base not really in Chicago. We'll get to that in a second, but they've moved one hundred and forty un marked vans to do these kind of raids. This very much suggests that they're going to do the kind of smashing grab raids we've been seeing in LA. That's the thing people are very worried about. And we've seen you know, tiktoks from the senior leadership with the Border Patrol talking about how their talks.
I know it's it's bleak.
Yeah, no, literally, it's like it's it's tick talks of him going like we're trading our palm trees for skyscrapers. Jeez, it's really bad. It seems like they're going to be deploying the kind of smashing grab raids they did in LA. But comment there's one final thing I want to get to.
This naval base is not really in Chicago. It is really far north of Evanstone, which is like a thing that's like not Chicago's like this naval base that they're deploying from is closer to Kenosha than it is like Noosha, Wisconsin, than it is to like even the north side of Chicago. It's like really really far north again, like even getting to I mean neighborhoods that are pretty far north, it's
like an hour out right. It is mult a multiple hour drive into the center of the city, so it's going to be kind of difficult for them to deploy in the middle of the city. This is something I talked about with Raven. It looks like they're trying to hit the more outlining areas more with raids because those areas are less well defended and there's not as much sort of rapid reaction stuff there. That's sort of what
this looks like. People are preparing because I guess there's one more important thing, which at the naval base is where they're running their operations out of. But the naval base has declined the request to house them, so they're probably gonna be in hell seop We're going to target those, but yeah, that's that's where things are at as of Wednesday. They're staging in this weird naval base that is really not close to the city.
Yeah, I mean the real focus on this anti crime crackdown is also a way to like trojan horse slightly obscured ICE operations. And when Nacheler talking about like National Guard deployments to cities nationwide, the actual main mode that National Guard will be operating in is logistical and like like PaperWorks support for ICE operations. Yep, at least for these like broader nationwide deployments. With these specific deployment in DC and in Chicago, there's there's more preparation for like
carrying out ordinary law enforcement actions. But those actions also exist in coordination with immigration crackdowns, and like that's a lot of what these like more militarized occupations are going to be focused on. Yeah, and it's worth noting, like just logistically, like they're not going to be sending the Guard into the parts of Chicago where they're like aret is crime sometimes, although again it's worth noting crime rates
that waged fuck down. Yeah, But also like every story about this is like, oh, there were shootings over the weekend, and it's like, yeah, it's not good, but like the National Guard is not going to be deployed to stop shootings. They literally can't get there. Again, It's like no, three hours out.
No, they can't get to the north side of Chicago. And as as we all know from the song Bad Bad Lee broy Brown, the south side of Chicago.
Is the baddest part of town.
Jesus Christ.
I'm just gonna ignore that.
Uh huh, yeah, you should just ignore that.
There are places in Norset that they could deploy. But if you're trying to get to the actual south side, it is at least a three hour drive. And that's like assuming that, like the traffic isn't bad, Like it's at least three hours. It's possibly larger than that. I I didn't even bother checking it because I looked at where this was and I was like, this is basically
in Wisconsin, what are we doing here? So like this is you know, this is this is Gys Garson say, this is a this is a giant show force thing, and it's but it's mostly just this is the sort of shock and all thing to frame this as crime so that people aren't focusing on and obviously like it's bad having just like troops in the streets, but like the ice enforcement and the border patrol deployment is what the actual threat is here?
And yeah, and like, Yeah, Depentagon and the Trump badmen are planning a lot of different scenarios that they would like to enact. But Trump's actual comments on like a larger, like military style deployment to Chicago had been a little bit flip floppy. I think they're still trying to reach some kind of deal to like work with the local government and state governments in a way that is less bombastic than like a like a completely like adversarial deployment would be.
Yeah.
Even that that press conference where the shambling corpse of Trump made an appearance, his comments about the possibility of the plot of to Chicago is seemed still pretty explorer to There's still there's still like conversations being had about how to actually do this. They are not as as brazen as what they were in LA, and they don't have as much justification to do what they did in
DC to a city like Chicago. So they're still trying to work out some kind of deal with like the local governments.
Yeah, and it's really unclear to me that they're going to be able to reach a deal with Brendon Johnson and with Pritzker, who's leading it.
It seems that Brandon Johnson's less willing to work with Trump on this than the mayor of d C, so props to him for that, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, And it's just also a thing where Brandon Johnson is like very deeply unpopular in Chicago. However, comma actual federal deployment there is so unpopular that you have you have the fact that The Sun Times is pointing out in their reporting of this that crime reach are down, which they have never done, like ever, That's not a thing they ever talk about. It's so unpopular that there is really really significant pressure on both Pritzker and Johnson
not do this, and you know, maybe they cave. I have I have a kind of low opinion of them from like my like time in the city doing politics there. But I don't think they're going to cave on this, No, And I think what that means is that it's mostly going to be the homeland security like ice border patrol deployments.
Yeah, because Chicago does fall into our very loose definition of like a border.
Town, h yes, which most towns are.
Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaking of JB.
Pritzker, I mean he has a lot of corporate interests. He may have stock in one of the companies advertising on our show. They have no way of knowing.
We'll back.
I just got a text from JB.
Pritzker was recruiting for the private People's Militia to defend the free municipality of Chicago.
So he's recruiting horse archer for thees.
Yeah.
Yeah, you've got to be able to loose twelve arrows a minute from the back of a war pony in order to in order to make the make the cut.
Protesters did shoot arrows at the cops at Hong Kong, so it's not it's not without precedent.
Yes they did. Yes, they did at the university. Yeah.
Well, and you know, if if Florida National Guard deploys to Illinois, they may be able to use biological warfare because the Florida Surgeon General has just vowed to end all of the state's vaccine mandates, equitting them with slavery amazing stuff, not just the COVID mandates, all vaccine mandates across this state. After he announced this, he got like over thirty seconds of applause, like NonStop. I will play a little bit of the end of this announcement.
M hmm.
Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and and slavery. Okay, who am I as a government or anyone else? Or who am I is a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in your body?
I don't have that right. Your body, your.
Body is a gift from God.
You really wanted to say, your body, your choice, what you put into your body is because of your relationship.
With your body and your God.
I don't have that right. Oh really, oh really? Oh wow, unless it's trans healthcare, which case you simply cannot a little on the nose there, God, Yeah, it's frankly wild.
Yeah, motherfucker. It's like it's like that commercial.
That was I don't know, you might be too young for this.
Guess there's this commercial with this this old man with like a dollar on a fishing.
Rod going almost got it. It's literally that.
It's literally that no, very close into walking into a full body autonomy argument there, even though you know, for reproductive healthcare that is unrelated to general public health, which is why these mandates exist, which can affect people besides you.
Yep.
Ron Santas announced and during the same press conference the creation of Florida's own Make America Healthy Again Commission, which will enforce Robert F. Kennedy's policies to the fullest extent in their state.
Grand he was the least charismatic person we saw speak at the RNC last year, just saying yeah, Desantas, Yeah, in my opinion.
No, no, who was worse? Jd Vance? Vance was there that that lady did fall asleep.
Man, and people people were outwardly contemptuous of Vans at the RNC, like like Republicans were contemptuous.
But remember the women for trouble, the woman who fell asleep next to us, the advanced speech.
And then mold he's so dry.
Yeah, yeah, that was really good.
Yeah.
But I would say DeSantis is a solid number two. Maybe abbot three.
I don't know.
Maybe they should have got a vaccine to boost their charismas dats that's right.
That's how that works.
Yeah, lax Aura, So.
This is really dangerous. This is going to put a whole bunch of kids in harm's way. Yeah, worrying trend.
Yeah.
I'm going to talk a little bit about Ukraine. Ukraine specifically kind of the present situation of the war in Ukraine. Just kind of another little update, because people catch little bits here and there on the news about what's happening, and I think felt like we should probably update people
as to like what's been going on. Kind of the most recent news you've probably heard is that Russian forces have been advancing in the Dnetsk Oblast and recently broke into an eighth region of Ukraine and started taking villages in the d naipro Petrovsk region, which is like a major industrial center that's next to the Denet region, where Russian soldiers had not been recently. At this point, gains in this new region by Russia have been seemed to
be fairly minimal. They've entered two villages in the eastern part of the region. The Russian Defense Ministry claims that they captured both of the villages. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, well, they're in the area and they're basically contesting them, but they haven't entrenched or built fortifications, like
fighting is ongoing. I'm sure neither country is giving out perfectly accurate data, but it seems certainly fair to say and verifiable to say that Russia has made an incursion into this region, and the fighting is ongoing, however solid their gains may or may not be. This is not the entirety of what's going on in the conflict overall.
The basically the whole line of contact with Russia, which is about one thousand miles long, is in play at the moment, but there have not been like massive gains over the last couple of months, And in fact, as of August of twenty twenty five, Russian forces occupied about nineteen percent of Ukrainian territory. They first hit nineteen percent back in October of twenty twenty two, right before Ukrainian
forces liberated a large chunk of the Kersan Oblast. So basically what we're seeing here is Russian forces reached this peak like three years ago, a Ukrainian counter offensive pushed them back, and over the last three years Russian forces have kind of clawed their way back to where they
were near the end of twenty twenty two. Right if you're looking for like what is the overall progress of this war over the last three years, So that's obviously not going well for Ukraine, but it's also not This is not a situation where Ukrainian forces are in any
kind of collapse like you're looking at. It took Russia three years to get back to where they were three years ago, So this is I mean, this continues to be a grinding and hideous conflict, but it does not look like one at which the end is in any
way in sight. Still, even with the kind of pulling of support from the US of Ukraine, with the reduction in arm shipments and whatnot from the United States to Ukraine, there's not any signs of like a generalized collapse, And in fact, over the last couple of years, there's been a fairly minimal increase in occupied territory. Right now, the pace of Russia's advance in Ukraine, per a recent AP article, has slowed by eighteen percent just over the month of August.
So Russian forces took about four hundred and sixty kilometers of territory in August and had been seizing more like five six hundred square kilometers of territory a month in the couple of months prior to that. So that's kind of what you're looking at in terms of the overall
pace of the conflict. One of the major changes that we've seen over the last like really specifically like a couple of quarters in the conflict is Ukraine has been increasing their capacity to hit Russian strategic targets behind the line, like well, behind the line, we're talking fuel and we're
talking power infrastructure, which has been extremely successful. One of the things that's allowed Ukraine to hit these further back targets has been they've they've started producing an indigenous style of cruise missile code named the Flamingo, which has an eleven hundred almost twelve hundred kilogram warhead and a three thousand kilometer range, which puts it about one thousand kilometers past kind of the maximum range the one way attack
drones like these one way suicide UAVs, which had been Ukraine's furthest in way to strike Russian territory, those only reached in about two thousand kilometers, So this puts a significant amount of like Russia's infrastructure, within Ukraine's ability to target. They're currently producing I think that they're hoping to get up to by the end of the year, seven missiles a day by October. Now, these new cruise missiles are fairly easy to shoot down with like modern air defenses,
but modern air defenses are in short supply. So it's a matter of if you're able to produce an increasing number of these and you're fleeing as many of them as you can out every day, the Russians will have to make choices in terms of what infrastructure are we actually going to devote anti missile assets towards, and you know that's that's always going to be less than the
total number of targets there are to hit. And the in terms of like evidence that these strikes have been successful, there has been increasing limitations on personal fuel use inside the Russian Federation and increasing power outages, like all of that has gotten more common over even just like the last several months in particular, So kind of overall, what we see if we're looking at this conflict is a grinding, high casualty endeavor where the Russians are slowly pushing back
Ukrainian lines at the cost of a pretty nightmarish number of casualties. Right like, this is still a meat grinder conflict and that dimension on the ground for the Russians hasn't changed. The main thing that has changed is Ukraine has gotten better at striking behind the line, which has been met by a significant acceleration in Russian strikes, particularly even on like civilian assets in Ukraine, Like there have been more missile campaigns, more drone bombardment campaigns on the
capitol and civilian targets than previously. Like some of the largest raids just took place like three or four days ago. You know, that's kind of a broad update as to what's going on. It continues to be a very ugly war. One of the main things that we've learned about what modern warfare is going to look like is that it is almost impossible for infantry forces without air supremacy to break and make large advances and then hold that territory
if they do not have air supremacy. When you're looking at two peer combatants, that's almost impossible to do. And so a significant amount of the fighting devolves into who can fling drones and missiles behind the lines and hit different sort of strategic assets with more efficacy. And that's what the war has bogged down to at this stage.
Speaking of aerial strikes, do we want to at least reference the attack on the Venezuelan alleged drugs smuggling vessel that was announced during Trump's death press conference.
Yeah, we blew up a boat.
We did a boat in international waters that was claimed to be at trinda Agua, which is a Venezuelan kind of analogous to a cartel organized criminal organization.
One of the biggest boogeymans of the second Trump term.
Yes they're primary like Latin American boogeyman, and yeah, we blew them up. The administration is claiming it was filled with fentanyl or whatever. I don't believe there's as of yet any independent evidence that this boat was in any way affiliated with Trindagua or carrying drugs or headed to the United States. We simply don't know a lot of times, like just the way that trinda Agua works, this is
not like the Sinaloa cartel. This is not a cartel that has a massive degree of international capacity that extends to the United States. Like there's even significant debate as to how much they are extended into other parts of Latin America. They've had like really limited success expanding into Colombia because different insurgent groups like the FARC and the ELN have provided a significant counter veiling force to them.
And I wanted to note because one of my sources is an article on Trindagua by America's Quarterly and in talking about their kind of troubled expansion into Colombia, this article notes tellingly, even in these spaces, TDA Operative subcontract smaller local gangs and authorize them to use their name
to generate fear in compliance with their victims. And this is a really common thing with Trindaugua where when you're seeing, oh this is you know, TDA affiliated or whatnot, these guys may have no actual communication or very much to do at all with the centralized group. They're just kind of using the name for branding purposes because it scares off other gangs because it allows them to like act as if they're connected to this larger organization, but they
really are not in a very meaningful way. In the same way, a lot of you'll see a lot of articles that will be talking about like these are trinda Agua tattoos, Like none of them are actual like tattoos affiliated with the group. This is like largely nonsense because Trindagwa doesn't have a tattoo tradition. Per the people who
are actually experts on Trindogwa. There's a lot of good articles, particularly in Insight Crime Jeremy McDermott being one of the authors that have tried to bust a lot of these myths about TDA. We'll be doing more coverage on them in the future, but like, yeah, that's kind of the situation.
Speaking of international shipments.
Oh boy, sorry, locking jazz, locking jazz bog Sorry locking jazz.
B locking jazz bog.
Ah, that's good stuff.
Jesus Christ. Okay, So nobody being murdered in cold blood to post a video on x dot com. The everything app in this one, but probably there's its own fair share of harm. Yeah. So, at the end of last week, the official end of the deminimus exemption for packages under eight hundred dollars finally fully went into effect. We're going to talk about this more next week when it's more clear what the large scale ramifications of this are. We have been talking about this for a very very long time.
The other really big news this week, and this is I think most of what's been going on here has been the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of the tariffs that are in effect are illegal now. The court also basically put in a thing saying that this ruling doesn't go into effect until October fourteenth, so that Trump can have time to appeal. This is a Supreme Court. He's already appealing to the Supreme Court, trying to he wants a quote expedited ruling
from the Supreme Court. He started ranting about how if the tariffs go back into effect, are not allowed to be in effect, the US will quote turn into a third world country or may turn into a third world country. No, yeah, so not a third world country.
Oh god, the American Century of humiliation continues to chug on. Yeah, so, okay, it actually is worth talking about this case a little bit because it goes to the core of what's been happening with these terrorists, which is that yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
So in the Constitution, if you read it, it says that the power of taxes and tariffs led with Congress. It really explicitly says this. I'm gonna I'm gonna read a thing from the ruling is this is a quote from the ruling. Quote. The Constitution grants Congress the power to quote lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, and to quote regulate commerce with foreign nations. This is
the constitutioned Article one, Action eight. I'm going to stop here to note that everything that's in the Bill of Rights was not in the original draft of the Constitution that got tacked on later. So like freedom of speech, and like freedom of assembly, and like freedom of religion were considered less important by the people writing this than Congress or the other people who could do taxes. I'm
going to keep reading from this ruling. Tariffs are a tax, and the framers of the Constitution expressly contemplated the exclusive granting of taxing power to the legislative branch. When Patrick Henry expressed concern that the president quote may easily become king debates in several state conventions, Jonathan Elliott eighteen thirty six, James Manison replied this would not occur because quote, the purse is in the hand of the representatives of the people.
So I cannot believe that we have a president doing a t tax in terrists. I know, I know where's Boston when you need it.
Robert, do the voice.
No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not your fucking monk.
To see this is the only way to have to stop Robert from doing the voice is to try to get him into place because of oppositional defiance.
Yeah, that's that's what that's what rules may.
Okay, speaking of what rules are, so Trump has been using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and he like declared a state of emergency over like drug trafficking in order to do this. This is nonsense, gibberish. And this is actually where I think this is a very very significant part of this case here, which is like, Okay, what power does Trump actually have? Like can he continue to just sort of rule the United States? Many people are asking me questions And I'm gonna read this this
this line from CNN, which is quoting the court draft quote. Notably, when drafting the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Congress did not use the term tariff or any of its synonyms like duty or tax. The Court said in its majority ruling, the absence of any such teriff language in the Act contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such powers and including clear limit on that power. So this law
does not say that he could do this. He has simply been doing this the whole time, with using a law that it literally explicitly does not say the word tariff in it. So the Court is extremely unhappy about this. Ladies and gentlemen, we got them, it really is. I think this is genuinely just on a basic constitutional level, this is one of the most staggering ones of these I've ever in terms of just like does the Constitution still exist? The answer is eh, Like, this is article
one of the Constitution. It's article one. This is the first shit they wrote. This was like literally the whole point of the American Revolution was that the king can't levy taxes. It has to be the parliamentary representatives of the people. That's like the whole thing. It was that the slogan was no tsxactination without representation. Yes, yeah, and like and like obviously that's the stated goal of it. You could obviously go into your right, there's like a
million other things. You can go into your territorial expansion, you can go into your slavery blah blah blah blah. But like, this is what it was supposed to be about. And has just claimed this power from himself, And we're going to get a real test in the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court costs back from their recess in like a month, So we're gonna probably get a real test on how far the Supreme Court is willing to
let Trump just straight up rule by executive fiat. But in the meantime, all these terrors are still in effect. And yeah, this has been tariff talk. We have talked about the tariffs.
Excellent.
Well, I believe that does it for us. Yeah, you're at It could happen here, all.
Right, everybody until next time. You know, Well, just if anyone tells you the precedence is dead, assume they're telling the truth and go live your life.
We reported the news.
We reported the news.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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