Also media.
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.
Welcome to take it up. And here a podcast where the it is the authoritarian takeover of the city of Chicago. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today is an episode that was significantly delayed by the fact that our guest got shot in the face by riot munitions while attempting to cover an anti ice protest and an ice facility, and then her coworker was fucking grabbed by the Feds the next day, which she was also still out at for reasons that are semi incomprehensible to me, because again,
she was just shot in the face. Since this is Raven, a journalist with the independent outlet Unraveled, which really truly is doing a lot of incredible work on the incredible proliferation of ice raids around Chicago. Raven, Welcome to the show. Oh boy, oh.
Boys, is right? Thanks for that intro. Yeah, we're in the ship right now, We're in it.
Yeah, I guess I would to immediately start this with you are mostly you're basically okay from my understanding, from getting shot in the face of the right munition like a week ago.
I am. I am basically okay. I have like some swelling still in my jaw. I'm going to the doctor. We'll see like if there's any soft tissue like lingering effects later on down the line. But nothing's broken.
Yeah, which, thank god, holy shit, thank god that I can really fuck you up permanently.
Like yeah, I mean it's spent several weeks now of the FEDS just pummeling people with these stupid little pepper ball rounds. Yep, And like the core of it is like metal, you know, it's like this little bullet thing
with like the pepper powder on the outside. So if you shoot someone in the face with those, I mean, like we've seen horrific injuries these last few weeks protesters and also like people getting concussions from like you know, sear gas canisters exploding right by their heads and other things, broken bones from these really violent arrests, and yeah, it's just been awful. Not gonna lie.
Yeah, I was.
Shot at, like literally, I was like taking a photo of a fed like an oppressed gaggle. We were all hiding behind this van while we're just like being shot at. And this guy, I mean, he stared right at me and like right down the barrel of my lens like he knew what he was doing. She's christ Yeah, another reporter it was like a similar situation where these guys
like fucking ambushed them. Like it was just two reporters like hiding behind a van and these guys came up along the side of the fence and just started like shooting them in the face with these rounds.
Yeah. So, and this has been at the protests at the ice facility in Broadview. Yeah.
Broadby is like just a tiny little suburb, like just outside of Chicago. It's still in Cook County, majority black suburb, actually black working class, the mayors of Black Woman And now this ice facility has been there for a while, obviously. Yeah, people were protesting there weekly for like over a decade, but nothing like what we've seen these last few weeks.
Yeah, Okay, let's go back in time a little bit, because in between the last time we spoke to you and now there has been so much unbelievably horrible stuff in Chicago. I guess. Yes, let's go back a couple of weeks and talk about the guy they murdered.
Yeah, so, shortly after this latest ICE surge began, they sailed a man at a traffic stop. Two ICE agents who were seemingly operating completely alone, didn't seem to have any backup with them. It was just these two guys in this car who jumped down on the sky. And yeah, it feels it feels like forever ago, but of course
it was only a few weeks ago. Yeah, and you know, that's that's an example of just like a police killing that we may never learn more about because you know, it involves the FEDS, right, you know, there's no timeline under which they have to release any information or like
tell us anything about their their own investigation into it. Yeah, so that is of course really horrifying and horrifying to know there's kind of these these missing a few seconds of video right where we don't see the actual shot fired yep, or shots excuse me, we can sort of piece together what happened, but you know, this happened in a working class Latino suburb, heavily Latino suburb, not not very far down the road from the actual ice facility.
Like as you were saying, the part of what's really frustrating about this is we can't tell you why they stopped this person, right, because they won't tell us. Right, we know very little about this other than they stopped the guy, he tried to drive away and they shot him. That's like that's all we know effectively, right.
I mean, they claim he had some traffic violations, which is true, but I mean, like who doesn't.
Yeah, Like, I don't know. If we're shooting people for traffic violation, this country is going to have like ten people in it by the end of it.
Like, yeah, he wasn't suspected of any like crime. No, I believe that it was just opportunistic Yeah, that they were just looking for an easy target. And these guys are acting like cowboys, I mean, like just doing this jump out by themselves. And also to be clear, I mean like when they say he drove away from them, I mean some of the video that we do have it shows him slowly reversing backwards away from them. It's not like he just drove over the agents.
No no, no, no, yeah, which is.
Was of course their initial narrative that he like hit one of them with his car and all this stuff that of course turned out to be false.
Yeah, And it's also frustrating too, because you know, in the app well, I would say, in the absence of better information, but it's the media, they will just straight up print, you know, no matter just how unbelievably absurd the lies are, they will just straight up print Department of Homeland Security press releases as if they have anything
to do with reality whatsoever. Even as it becomes increasingly clear, even more of a it's ever been that you simply cannot rely on on police press reports to understand what happened in the situation. People will just keep printing that. And so that's the first that's the version of the story that goes out first, which is what everyone sees, yep, And they don't see the video where it's very clearly not what happened.
Yep.
It is a maddening situation. So yeah, I mean, like that happened, and then almost immediately and like concurrently, of course, all of this other ICE activity started ramping up. Yeah, and then around a week and a half ago, Bovino showed up, and Border patrol showed up, And now it's amped up even further because they are even worse than our regular ICE guys.
Bovino and the Border patrol people, those are the people who seem to have been pulled out of Los Angeles and deployed the Chicago.
Yeah, Bovino moved this sort of larger border patrol operation here to Chicago. So there are Border patrol units here from you know, Arizona, from California, different places, and they've been doing sort of a combination of like just strictly cornyasque propaganda ops, you know, like driving around on their boats for photos, combined with like actual terrors, like a few nights ago, hundreds of FEDS rating an entire apartment building of people in the middle of the night.
Yeah, And I think we'll get to that rate in a second, because it was unbelievable, sort of gruesome and horrible. But yeah, I wanted to talk to you just about sort of what the general sort of ICE operations and then the Border patrol operations have looked like in the city and what it's been like being in a place where there's just guys in masks gragging people off the street.
It kind of feels like streaming underwater and no one can hear you. Yeah, just sort of witnessing this every day. And it is still highly dispersed, right like Chicago and the metro area and the suburban counties where this is happening.
It's a huge, huge area. So like we talked about last time, it's a real challenge to focus people's attention on because it can appear like the waters are calm like where you live, you know, like they're doing it in these very fast strike teams in this very dispersed way, so by the time you even hear about it, they're already gone. So many cars abandoned on the side of the road. It's like windows smashed out, je it's christ
like landscapers, work bands and stuff. You know, Like people are just rapid responders are just getting to sites where someone's reported something happening and all they find is like a busted out card and then they have to piece together like potentially what happened. And additionally, the broad view, so like this ice facility where people are protesting regularly. You know, it's not set up to be a permanent attention center. It's just supposed to be like a temporary
stopping point because Illinois doesn't have overnight immigration detention. So additionally, there are like so many extra people crammed into this facility that wasn't designed to hold them. Yeah, and of course the conditions are horrible, you know, like they don't have privacy, they don't have enough bathrooms, they're not getting fed, they're not getting medication, you know, like after the kidnappings, after the disappearances, then there's this pipeline of detention horrors
that people are enduring. So this is this is why people are protesting, you know. I mean, this is why people are out there yelling at the fence. Because the people who are who are brave enough to go out there and yell at the fence or to take the pepper balls or what have you, they they are in agony. They're aware of what's happening. They're witnessing all of this and feeling like this needs to stop. And there are
a lot of people hiding in their homes. Yeah, you know, like like it it's true, like I don't always want to make like Holocaust comparisons because I feel like that that's what we always go to. But I mean, like that's the most apt comparison that becomes to most people's mind. You know. They think of like and framekiding in your attic, like those kinds of things, And it's like that is
literally where we are at right now. People are literally infiding because they are worried that if they go to Sam's Club they will be kidnapped by secret police.
Yeah.
I think the behavior that they've been exhibiting against the protesters too, has been very, very similar to what they've been doing to the people that they're grabbing off the street. I want to talk to you a bit about like what it's been like dealing with the way that the Feds have been attacking the protesters constantly.
Yeah, well, these guys are fucking monsters.
Yeah.
I'm trying to thread this needle for people of like all policing is bad, right, Like a police is violent, All cops are violent, But there is something different happening here as a result of the fact that there is literally zero accountability. And I'm not suggesting that like police accountability isn't a sham, because in general it kind of is. But I think, like, you know, when you take away every single guardrail, these guys don't have to identify themselves
and they don't have to answer to anyone. Yeah, their bosses aren't going to write them up. You know. It's kind of like with any other job, right, you know, take a city cop here in Chicago. Of course, it's rare that any of them ever actually get fired for
the horrible shit they do. But you know, there's this sort of bise level of knowing, like, well, I got to show up to work every day with my name on my vest, and I also have like all these other bosses and all these other people who are going to like you know, maybe make my day harder if I like really fuck something up, right, And so when we're talking about the FEDS, there's just nothing. There's just
nothing there. They can literally do whatever they want. On top of like just not having the same level of like quote law enforcement training. I mean, we've been watching these guys for weeks like fucking hurt themselves with their pepper ball guns. Like they literally are like dropping shit as they're like on the process, like like watching people have made like call of duty comparisons, like Proud Boy comparisons, and like it.
Is kind of like that.
It's like if you just gave a bunch of chuds, a bunch of like military and police here, and we're like, all right, go out and like pretend to be a cop. And that's like literally what it feels like. And so I'm trying to thread this deal for people of like, yeah, all cops suck, but like what's going on with this is like so much worse. Like they're just out there like shooting at people randomly, like and you know, for no reason. Like it is just one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life.
Yeah, And I also I want to put this into perspective, like you have also covered a lot of protests in the city.
Yeah, I've covered a lot of pop violence. I've been to a lot of protests, I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at this point, right, Yeah, And there's just certain like things that you're used to seeing and certain there's a certain predictability sometimes to like a lot of their movement.
Yeah.
And what's interesting too, is like in some ways they are actually more militarized just in terms of like their riot formations and like how tightly coordinated their units are because they practice and they train for like crowd control stuff all the time. And then you have these just like ice chuds running around with like way more gear and they look way scarier, but they're like way less
organized and way more chaotic. Yeah, and there's not enough of them right, so like they're not even like doing a good job of like backing each other up, you know, like in the field. Like I'm just watching them like leave their own back unwatched and you know, doing things that are like dangerous for them, Like they want to
act like a military unit, but they're like definitely not. Yeah, it's I mean people have made the comparison of like Proud Boys, which I think I don't know, it kind of works in a sense like street fighters because what they're acting like, you know, Yeah, it's just it's just been super violent, super awful. Chicago does not have really any experience with like these just FEDS in general, like
to this level. I know that out in Portland for years now, like there have been various protests outside of the Ice or something like there's just there's been like a lot more a lot more fed presence out in Portland, Seattle. Throughout the past few years of protests, I've seen you know, people interact with them, and we just we've had nothing like that here. So this is also like very unprecedented, like for this region.
Yeah, because usually CPD is like brutal enough that they don't you don't end up with like yeah, federal deployments. And now it's like oh.
Boy, yeah, well, and also keep in mind, this is all happening in broad View, so like they don't even have I mean there's been there's been tensions and arguments and discussions around what's happening with their local police department, and just sort of the interface here too, because it's like this tiny little police department is now having to sort of manage what's going on with this ICE facility, and they're not directly like assisting ice with froud control,
but they are like basically setting up a perimeter around the area, right, and so then like their guys are getting to your gas and like complaining about it.
Yeah, was it broad to you? The police chief who like finally was like, oh, holy shit, I've never been treated this racistly by a police officer. Before I was like, Oh my fucking god, like, yeah, you're just now realizing that you're the baddie, like when it finally like happens to you, like come on. Yeah.
He he went on on like ABC or whatever and was just did this whole interview about like, well, ICE is disrespecting me as the police chief, and it's just like, like, what did you expect?
Yeah, man, you signed up for the racism organization and you were like, ah, I'm in charge of my local by local chapter of the Racist Association, so it'll never happen to be And it is like, oh shit, you mean there's other people who are higher up in the racism police Like god, yeah.
So that's been That's just been like a weird side story to this of kind of like the mayor and the police chief and the fire chief are not thrilled about what's going on, and they're like looking into the legality quote of the fence that ICE has put up just like across this street that goes past their facility, which is in this kind of like tucked away sort of industrial park thing, but there are homes like right on the other side, and you know, they've just blocked
off this entire street and there was like a business on the other side. You know, it's like obviously a huge fire hazard to just like block a whole road like that. They didn't ask permission to like put this up, ye, not to mention a hazard for the people in the detention center, which is now boarded up and has this
huge fence across the street. It's like, oh my god, if there's a fire or like an emergency and they needed to evacuate the people inside, yeah, I mean, like obviously people would die.
It's this incredible mix of both blatant disregard for the safety of anyone involved and also just wanting to hurt people. And it's this incredible fusion of they are both incompetent and malicious, which is yeah.
Right, which is not a great combination.
No, let's talk about this raid and self or Yeah.
Well, you know, we don't have a we don't have a ton of details on the true extent of this because it happened at one in the morning. So two nights ago, hundreds and hundreds of federal agents showed up to an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood, which is a predominantly black neighborhood where a number of newly arrived migrants settled because there's cheap housing there.
Yep.
So when Governor Abbott started busting people here a few years ago, that is one place where you know a number of people found housing. And unfortunately also too, there's like a lot of slum boards down that way.
Yeah, cheap housing being shit in Chicago, Yeah, of course. Okay, I see tents organizing that. I have seen shit that. Like, I have seen people sewage like running out of their bathtubs. I have seen I have seen places with no electric like literally no electricity, no lights, no running water, like actually literally like frozen solid in the winter, and no one can contact the landlord. And those were in parts of the city that were like not even that badly off.
The apartment that I had, they're almost fucking killed me from dust inhalation, and like that's like that's like a like a normal cheap apartment. It gets so much fucking worse. The pictures from like inside of the apartment, not even just the parts, were like, yeah, the doors are blown off.
It's like these apartments fucking sucked because they're run by They're run by fucking slanlords and yeah, like the housing situation in Chicago, so much of it is so shit is never gonna get repaired because these getting landlords don't give a shit because they can just keep astracting money from it because no one can go anywhere else. And yeah, yeah.
I mean these people were living in really bad conditions. I've heard that, like a lot of people were like strippled, quadrupled up in units. You know, I don't I don't know what it looked like before it was rated. Yeah, but it's like virtually empty now. I mean like there there were some and to be clear, like what happened to back up a little bit, you know, they hundreds and hundreds of FEDS showed up at this building in the middle of the night and reportedly detained everyone in
the building. So there were like, yeah, you know people in the building who aren't immigrants, like black people who live in the neighborhood.
You know.
There was one woman being interviewed on broadcasts who's like an older black woman, you know, who was just like, yeah, I was like dechanged by the FBI, you know, like in the middle of the night, like asking me if I'm a citizen, you know, like, it's just absolutely fucking wild that this happened. Also as of today, granted this might change by the time your podcast is.
Out, importantly, So we were recording this the night of Wednesday, October first. Who fucking knows what we'll have learned about this or what will happen in between this and when it comes out probably Monday, Probably there will be new horrors. If you've heard about like the horrors in Chicago and it's not in this episode, is probably because it happened after we recorded. Things are happening at a terrible rate.
Yeah, So as of today, Wednesday, October first, I could not find a story on the Suntimes or the Tribute website about this raid, and I think, yeah, of course, a lot of people want to indict mainstream media for not covering things, which like is fair sometimes, don't get me wrong, They've been trying. Things are happening so fast now and there are so many horrible things happening every day that like no newsroom can keep up.
Wait alert, red alert. They did finally get a story up five minutes ago, so I checked the book. They got one up, They got one up the Tribute, The Suntimes sometimes sometimes.
Okay, Okay, well it only took them two days. Okay, sure, I haven't read it yet. Maybe maybe it's a good story. I don't know, maybe they went really in depth.
It's not terrible. It doesn't actually seem I mean, it's pretty long. I mean, I'm going I'm going to read one quote from it to get people at understand. This is, like, I actually think is pretty representative of like the independent media covers that I've read of. It aren't federal agents and military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women,
and children from their apartments some naked residents. Witnesses said, that is the thing I've seen in everything report about this, is that a bunch of people just literally didn't have clothes on because they were drag out of their bed. They were like fucking naked children, like naked like people holding naked babies being pulled out of their fucking apartments. Like Jesus fucking Christ God, And this.
Was like such a huge number of beds that like the buses were re routed around the scene. I mean, like there's questions, there's questions right now over like the level of CPD involvement in like protecting the scene. And this was not just Ice. There were a ton of FBI and a ton of atf.
Yeah yeah, which you know, it's like, Okay, what is the FBI doing right now? They are fucking dragging naked children and out of their fucking homes, like out of their fucking apartment at one in the fucking morning.
Yeah, and they were they were in in fucking moving vans like Patriot Front.
Like, yeah, fucking horrible. I mean, like I got I ever seeing a statement where it was like they were denying that they had loaded any immigrants into moving vans, yeah, which.
Like maybe that's I don't know, maybe only the FBI. Yeah, beautiful halls, Like I don't know.
Yeah, I'm also just like haunted by like what O the reports that I saw where they were talking about like they separated all of the black people into like one van and all of the non black people to another one, and it was just like, oh God, like these people. There's another thing. I think this is in the story that you that you wrote about this or they literally like fed literally said fuck them kids.
Oh my god. I don't I definitely didn't write that, but I believe that someone said it.
Yeah, it was Oh my god.
I believe it. I'm I'm I mean, I'm glad to hear that. Five minutes ago the sunset I covered it. You know.
Yeah, they finally got around to it.
Yeah, good for them to be clear, Like they probably interviewed a lot more people than we had capacity to. You know, it's been obviously a huge challenge to even cover all this stuff, like as this tiny, random weirdo ass news outlet, like yeah, and we're still figuring out as we go, but yeah, I mean this this I am still it has been two days and I am like still trying to wrap my head around this raid, this specific raid, because it's just, yeah, so horrific that
this happened. And of course, like the timing, like they knew what they were doing by timing it in the middle of the night.
Of course. Yeah, I'm gonna fucking read the STIPs article because I've just been reading it while you're doing it, like Watson is. Somebody lists across the street said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes and into hu hole vans. Kids were separated from their mothers. It was heartbreaking to watch sid Watson, even if you're not a mother, seeing kids come out buck naked and taking from their mothers, it was horrible.
They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and throwing it apparently allegedly throwing them at U haulvans.
Like yeah, I mean, this is like psycho shit. The last three weeks four weeks has just spent a gradual progression of like the most evil shit you've ever seen in your life. I don't even know what to say about anymore, honestly, because it feels like it feels like our only way of grappling with things like this is by making comparisons to other things. And I don't know that that is really helping anybody right now. But you know,
it's ethnic cleansing, it's genocide. It's like literally, I was just saying earlier today when like when you drill down to it, like they're disappearing like vast majority Latino men. There are some women, it's not only men, but like they are definitely targeting like mostly men, and like these are people who are migrating here from Central America who are like if you look at their lineage, mostly like
indigenous to this fucking continent on like white people. You know, it's just an extension of like the American project, like of the white nationalist like extermination of the people indigenous to the Americas. Like that is literally what's happening like right now. So yeah, it does not feel like, I don't know, like like enough people get it to the level that they should.
Yeah, well, and that's I think. Like one other thing I wanted to talk to you about was like the way the press bubble has worked around this, where again, the fact that federal agents dragged naked children from their homes at one in the morning in the third largest city in the United States, That is a story that is hitting the mainstream Chicago press today two days later, and I think the only national coverage of it that I've seen are from people who are basically like repeating
the scoop that was given to this, like unhinged UFO outlet. Who were the people that got the exclusive? Oh have yeah read into this yet? Oh God, no idea? What hold on? Hold on, let me let me God fuck Okay, I'm very excited to tell you about this is so unhinged.
I saw like the propaganda video that they made about it.
Yeah, so the group that got like the exclusive like press release thing from the Feds, which is basically being like reprinted by Newsweek, who are just a joke at this point. Like their description of it is like a federal agent's repelled from black cop helicopters and the rooftop Chicago residential buildings targeting trend to AGAUA gang members according to NewsNation, And I was like, what the fuck is
news Nation? Like, I've I have a pretty good grasp on like all of the weird right wing news outwits, I'd never heard of this one. I looked them up and the first like big thing that I saw about them was that, well, any they are the people. They were the person that Chris Cuomo went to after he was like publicly disgraced as a journalist. And the second thing I saw about them was that their big thing
is that they like quote unquote take UFOs seriously. These are the people who were given like the exclusive scoop on this is like the UFO outlet.
That is so funny. That is when I watched the propaganda video that we were watching about it, Yeah it was News Nation. I just thought it was like I don't know, some right wing outlet like any other.
Yeah, that's why I thought too that I looked at it and like the Wikipedia article was like just when there's a section titled UFOs, I was like, what the fuck?
Great?
Great?
I didn't know about the UFO connection. I mean I saw them. I saw their reporters like actually at the protests, like interviewing, like the one guy in a maga hat who showed up to counter protests, Like of course that's whom they inter.
Yeah, of course, of course.
So that's good to know that they are UFO weirdos.
Regime approved of regieve approved media outlet, the UFO guys.
So, I mean, the the the official like like DHS line on this entire thing is that trend de Aragua was this, Like this entire apartment building was a trend de Arragua hide.
Down just like No, it wasn't like.
Like it's literally just the same fucking thing that Israel does about hamas right when they're like, oh, yeah, this hospital that we're bombing, Yeah there's hamasoles underneath. I mean it's like the exact same ship.
Yeah, the connection you made earlier to this functioning as an extension of like the genocide that founded this country. I think it might have been Hannah or Rent. Okay, I want to attribute this to herr Hannah Rent, which is I guess kind of a mess because of her. Don't do not ever look up Hannah rent stuff on segregation, or actually, maybe do if you want to see the worst argument you've ever seen in your life, where like famed intellectual Hannah or Rent says that segregation is like
a defining quality of like a free society. I'm not like a.
Super expert on Hannah Rent, but I definitely did not know that.
So oh yeah, no that people. People don't I'll say this, wait, people do not be bringing that ship up. Everyone else is like, oh god, holy shit. You were like a major segregation like intellectual who got brought out to be like segregation is actually good. No, this is free association. But I think it might have been her. It mightn't fit someone else. I've been trying to look for who had this idea and I haven't been able to find who it was. And I vaguely remember being a Rent,
but fuck her. This has all been a very long whine saying like there's there's an idea that I ran into you back when I was in my sort of like days in the academy about the way that societies reflect their founding violence. And you know, the sort of like the founding violence of the United States is the genocideviticious people and slavery, and you look at what they're
doing right now. You're just watching sort of in miniature, that violence just being replicated over and over again, where like you're tearing fucking mothers from their children in the
dead of night. And it's the same people, right, Like this is an apartment building where almost everyone is black, and the people who aren't black are immigrants, right and obviously like some of them are both, but like you know, but like you're just like watching the founding violence of this country just being played out over and over and
over again every night. And it's this thing where like I don't think on a fundamental level that this thing that we've built, this sort of like this conception of what democracy is, like this conception of what the state is, this conception of like what this country is, is going to survive this moment. Either it's going to change completely or the part of it that was nominally a democracy is going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide over and over again. I
don't know. I quote this song a lot, Song of Choice by Peggy Seeger. That's about the rise of fascism that I think about a lot that has on one of the lines is today the soldiers took away one. Tomorrow they may take away two. One April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And yeah, they're just fucking taking people away in the night. Right now,
that's the stage of this where we're at. And either something fundamentally changes or right, you know, like that the end of that song is either like they take you or at the end they don't take you because they know you didn't care, right, And.
I mean, look, I've been I've been covering civil conflict and violence, you know, like more or less for the last five years. Right, I was at January sixth, like literally in the middle of the mob. I've seen a lot of shit.
Reporting on it. This very clear reporting on it. Clarify I was there.
I was not, although my fashi uh stalkers might insist I was part of like an Antifa conspiracy to.
Right, But.
But you know, I've seen a lot of shit the last five years, obviously, and I think this particular moment feels like, yeah, like we're kind of you know, like we're a marble at the top of like a spiral, and it's like either we're going to keep rolling down or or somebody like jams it or takes the marble off, you know, like there's just this is this is a spiral, Like there are so many factors that are going to contribute to this getting worse if we do not significantly
alter course. And I think, you know, this feeling that we have locally of like we're screaming underwater and nobody can hear us. I'm sure is share a sentiment that is shared in LA, that is shared in DC, that is shared in all of these cities all over where Ice is doing similar shit. It can make us really angry. I mean, I've been really angry at times in the
last month about the lack of like attention whatever. But then I think about how everyone is overwhelmed because there's so much horrible shit happening every day on so many places, Like we just can't keep up anymore, Like none of us can keep up.
Yeah, Like I mean, like, I'm in Portland right now, and like it's my job to keep track of this, and I can't tell you at this exact second weather a federal deplay I'm to Portland is honor off. I think it's currently off. But also by the time you're listening to this, who the fuck knows? And like, yeah, like right, I don't know. There's an aerid line about how it's easier to hide a thousand atrocities than it is to hide one because you can just keep ramping the tempo up exactly.
I don't know. I'm not a historian. I'm just a journalist, so maybe you would know better than me. But but I feel like we are literally already in a civil war. We just don't know it yet, or like we're waiting for like some specific thing to like prove it, you know, Like I don't, I don't know. Yeah, I think generally nobody knows until it's like already you're you're already in it.
To me, it feels like we're in it, yeah, But I but I also wonder if that's just the cognitive effect of like us being here literally in it because so much is going on, and then thinking like well, if the ice surge subsides two months from now, is it going to still feel this way? I don't know. I mean, yep, to me, it feels like we've got several more years of the Trump regime at least. Ye if we look at this in the sense of like, well, they're escalating, and then also this is going to keep
going for several more years. Yeah, that's a terrifying concept. Yeah, where do we go from here? If it's just gonna like get even worse?
Yeah, And I don't know. I think I've been there a lot recently. I don't know. It's the thing I've been telling listeners of this show is that, like the upside of all of this is that everyone hates them. Yeah, oh yeah, Like their proof of ratings are so bad. Everyone fucking hates them, and all of this stuff is
hideously unpopular. And the giant economic collapse that is very obviously going to happen when the giant AI bubble that is like that is like a third of US's GDP pops what it inevitably does because it doesn't make any money. They're doing all of this in a situation where the economy still appears to be functioning, and when that shit implodes on them, shit is going to be even worse
for them than it is now. But also like on the other hand, unless people do things about it, then it doesn't really matter how popular or not they are if as long as no one is willing to like stop them. And I guess that's like the last thing I kind of want to close on is about, like can you talk a little bit about like what you've seen organizing wise that you can talk about that have been effective.
Well, I think people here are still figuring it out these protests. Outside of the ice facility. You know, there hasn a lot of autonomous organizing. Chicago does not have the same entrenched autonomous organizing culture that you see in like Portland or Seattle for like a ton of reas which are like on the scope of this episode series the history the history of organizing in Chicago, and like
how we're in this specific moment. You know, it's important to remember like this is a city where like the FBI murdered Fred Hampton, right, it is bad. So there's a lot of tension between different organizing factions about how they want things done, and a lot of it is fear driven for a good reason, because people are terrified, and yeah, they're still figuring stuff out. I mean, I think, for lack of a better firm, last Saturday, people got
their ship rocked by Border patrol. You know, they were so violent, they were so aggressive, they were just so out of hand, just like immediately too. I mean it was just like zero to sixty instantly, like there was just a Saturday. We saw them just immediately tear gas and and shoot at people over nothing, like nobody was doing anything, and they just assaulted the crowd with like the most tear gas I've ever seen in my life.
So I think folks were definitely under prepared for that, But that doesn't mean that it's like insurmountable to resist something like that. I think there are questions surrounding the best way to protest this specific building because of the location, and it's tough because it's not in Chicago, it's hard to get to for some people.
Yep, yep.
But I don't want to. I don't want to write anybody off. I mean, I think people are just still figuring things out, Like it's it's ice is adapting, Border patrols adapting, and so then organizers also have to adapt, like it's like this tennis match, right, yeah. Yeah, And so you know, we are also very much here. Our activists are not used to like a huge and our press also by extension, are not used to like a huge amount of chemical weapons.
Cargo doesn't use tear gas like historically, like they just beat people, right or like shoot them with right munitions, like they don't tear gas. And I think I was really always told, like growing up in the city as an activist, was like if they start using tear guessing
once they way from shooting you, right. And they finally did it in twenty twenty, which is the first time anyone had seen it in like decades, right, and the fact that like they're just doing it all the time now, like Jesus Christ, well, the.
FEDS, I mean we saw this in LA at the beginning of this summer, where like Border Patrol specifically just has this enormous amount of chemical weapons that they like I don't know, maybe maybe they're going to expire soon and they have to use them all like like I don't know, I don't know what the rationale there is other than just being evil. Yeah, but it's like literally their first voice of like they're just I mean, they're
fucking enjoying it. They're fucking enjoying it. They're enjoying yeah, shooting at people, tear gassing them, playing g.
I Joe, Like yeah, I mean, I will say it does also raise the question, like how much of this stuff do they actually have, because like twenty twenty, they went through decades of stockpiles right right, And like this is a thing that like, I don't know, someone who has a lot of time and as an investigative journalist should try to go track down how much of the country's tear gas supplies they've been able to replenish, because they used a lot of it on us in twenty twenty.
And like, I mean, this is I don't know if
it is famous. I guess in bicycles, it's kind of a famous story that one of the one of the South Korean military dictatorships was taken down by a student like protest movement that calculated exactly how much tear gas the police had and did this thing where they would do these marches where they would whole bunch of people would show up and the police start characterizing them, and they would just slowly keep her treating and keep her treating until they ran the state out of tear gas.
I mean, I know, I hope to see that level or strategy in America.
Yeah, law, like you know, like nothing nothing, nothing is impossible with the power of really really pissed off students.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the I'm not familiar with the manufacturing process for these kind of like how long does it take the like replenish and where do they source it from?
Yeah, this is this is one hundred percent a Hey, I know a bunch of journalists listen to this podcast. If what if you wants to go do this, you would be doing a great service to everyone in this country.
Like right, I'm like assuming that it's not made in the United States and they're like importing these things.
A hug huge amount of Maybe I'm the American American tear guys ends up like all over the world because we're one of the big suppliers of it.
Okay, well, then I was mistaken. The popper Ball gun dispenser company apparently is based in Lake Forest, so it's actually local.
Oh interesting, Yeah, yeah, since you're kind of oh.
Well, it's just like a glorified paintball gun. Basically.
Yeah, the thing I've been getting from listening to you talk about this and from talking to other people is that, like, both part of what's making this so horrible and also maybe where they fail is that these people don't know
what they're doing. They just like violence, right, And liking violence and being willing to hurt people is a very effective short term strategy for causing violence, right, But it remains to be seen whether it's an effective long term strategy for like holding power and accomplishing their goals.
Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. It feels like it feels like their operation is brittle, like it wouldn't take a lot to like impede it. But because they are so violent and so out of hand that just like the slightest resistance, it's still really challenging to figure out. I mean, and to your point earlier about
everybody hating them, I mean, that is palpable. I have heard the anger and the rage pouring out of people at these guys, you know, like, yeah, of course it's palpable how much people hate them, how much what's going on? Of course they're struggling to hire, of course, they're all wearing masks because they're fucking terrified they're going to be docs,
you know, like they know that they're hated. Yeah, but that's also a double edge shore because I think knowing that everybody hates you anyway, well, that's just also sometimes going to make you even more violent because you don't care anymore.
Yeah, And I mean I think the traditional social movement gambit has been like the more people can see how violent they are, the more people will go out to resist them. And I think right now we're in this scenario where because of the sort of media blackout and like the media bubble let's input around this, it just hasn't been getting out the things that they've been doing.
And I think that is also a thing that you random listener can do things about in terms of like hey help people, you know that, Like, yeah, there's like aking a federal occupation of a city and they're like dragging naked children screaming from their homes, like tearing them away from their parents. Like that's a thing that you can, like, that's the thing you could directly do. That is a very very low lift.
Yeah, and also countering this like national guard misdirection thing that is just like constantly going on where it's like every fucking two days, Trump and Pittsburgh are arguing about you know, a hundred troops coming to town who are essentially just infrastructure for ICE. They might block some roads, but like they're not the main threat.
Yeah, Yeah, Do you have anything else that you want to tell people? And then also, where can people find and support your work as you go hopefully not get shot again.
Well, I I've resigned myself to the fact that I get shot again, but they can find us at Unraveled on all the social platforms, you know, Unraveled, press, dot com. And I think the only other thing I want to say is, you know, as bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just like, yeah, resign ourselves to total dumerism. We have the moral high grounds here, like we are doing the right thing and they are not. Yeah, and we can win this.
I want to close on the story that came to mind when you said that, which was the story of the liberation of Turin in World War Two, where Turin was like, you know, like one of the great industrial cities of Italy and it's directly under the occupation of
the Nazis. By the end of the war and ahead of the Allied advance, the city plans in uprising and the SS commander who is running the city explicitly tells them, if you like, if you do this, we will turn this into another warsaw And they do it anyways, and they beat them. All of these factory workers who had guns smuggled in successfully do an uprising and defeat like an SS panzer division and just kick the shit out
of them and liberate Turmin. And you know, those were people facing odds that were so much worse than the ones they were facing today. They were facing a straight up military occupation by the SS. And they beat them and they've freed themselves. And you know, history is replete with dictators who thought that their occupations would last forever until one day the Americans were withdrawing from Iraq, and the only thing that's eternal is their fear of the uprising. They will want to destroy them.
Welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here, reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riad, I'm Garrison Davis. This episode joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and presenting our special report.
Robert Evans, I am so happy to talk about our favorite time of the year, which is of course the Riod Comedy Festival, which occurs from September twenty sixth to October ninth.
It's the highlight of my year each year.
Happy to say all of Cool Zone will be there performing in Riod, immediately getting arrested. It's going to be really good, very much excited, like all of your comedy favorites. Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr asas En. Sorry, we will be getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidence reporters, civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison. Yeah,
so that that's what's happening this week. There's been a big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians.
Louis c.
K it looks like a mix of guys. Okay, not surprised David Chappelle. I'm surprised that old David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that current David Chappelle would do this.
Bilbert is disappointing.
Bilbert is disappointing that one hurts. Moe Ahmer, who is a Palestinian American comedian who lives in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riad and form not great.
Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.
Yeah, she and.
Gillis said yes and then said no. Let's be real fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did. Okay, I believe he's the one that said yes and then said no. You get you get a variety of responses from people who were invited to this fucking thing. And I'll make it clear kind of where my moral line stands. I don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the
bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what you're doing and how you do it, and this is the wrong way to do it, because these are not just people. If someone had just shown up at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand up set, I don't particularly care about that, even though there are lesma jest laws like I wouldn't care if someone did a stand up comedy set that couldn't make fun of
the King of Thailand, right, which is a crime in Thailand. Yeah, you know, people perform in parts of the world that have different or bad laws. The US has bad laws.
We do bad things.
I don't think it's inherently evil to just perform at a random club there, which is not what the people who are performing at the Yadd Comedy Festival are doing. This whole convention is being put on by a guy named Turkey, I'll shake. Turkey is the chairman of the
General Entertainment Authority, which is a Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammad Ben Salmon playing League of Legends, and he's kind of like key to Ben Salomon's plan to like make Saudi Arabia cool, to like bring it into the global entertainment and like social network without moderning its laws or allowing people to, you know, make fun of Mohamed Ben Salmon or his friends for an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill Burr and
all of these other guys and paid them so much money. There is an entire wing of the All Higher Prison called the Tutu Wing, which references al Shak's nickname Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out. Often people who made fun of him or made jokes that he did not appreciate are put in tortured. This guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad died in Night eleven.
H Fuck, it's fucking shocking the fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing, and he has been He's been like questioned about it, and his answer, basically, I'll say this repeat, was basically like, yeah, but there's a lot of money, right, And I'm separating in my head to a degree. I think it's bad to take money from the Saudi government to do something like this that is being used to like whitewash their human rights record to make them look like cool part of global society, even
as they this week executed another journalist. I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion about THEO Vaughn, who sucks and it's like, yeah, he'll take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm just I'm not surprised, right, And there's some other guys in this that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.
Did you see theo Von's beef with Ice this week?
Oh? Does theovon have beef with Ice this week?
Yeah?
They use video of him without his consent in one of their marketing videos.
Yeah. Great.
So Jim Jeffries on August one on Theovon's podcast to talk about agreeing to do this show, and he said one reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I'm gonna die on, and argued that freedom of speech machines like himself would do good by like, you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and key in the men on the freedom of speech thing. Basically, it'll be in net positive for freedom if I go
speak at this thing. And in the funniest possible follow up, he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged that they killed a reporter and that you can't even do that on your own fucking podcast or fucking theo
Vod's goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed to show up and perform at this this fucking nightmare event, and Dylan is why we know kind of how much money is on the table at this thing, because he has said that he was paid three hundred and seventy five thousand. He was offered three hundred seventy
five thousand for one performance to be there. He said the kind of the lowest number people were being offered was about one hundred and fifty thousand, and the most like highly paid people were being offered up to one point six million dollars. So I mean it's possible see people were getting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer to like where the Bill Burrs and the Dave Chappelle you're getting right like in the one point six million.
So these guys were offered an insane amount of money. And Tim Dillon went on and like talked about this on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to do it, and defended and it's very funny. He like brought up like slavery in Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia has slaves as a way to like to segue into a defense of why it's fine for him to do this, And this is just one of the funniest things I've ever heard, Well.
They have slaves, then they kill everyone. Hey hey, hey, hey hey hey, get over it. Get over it?
So what.
So what they have slaves? So what my friend, I not a friend, somebody I don't even know.
I bumped into them in Tribeca and he goes, I would never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves.
I'm like, well why not.
They'd be deferential, right, I mean, I imagine the slaves in those countries are good at what they do.
Okay, So that's that's the clip. I just wanted to have one of the most Yeah, and it got him fired from the show. He's good bending them, he's big, like slavery's not so bad, and he's still got fired.
That's the insane. That's like, yeah, it's nuts. Oh my god, Like it's really bad. To cleanse our minds of whatever that was. Here's an ad break.
Okay, we're back, Robert.
The degree to which everyone involved in this has just nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking. I want to read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of twenty.
Ten to make me sad.
This is from a set he did at the time. This him talking about Beyonce. Uh, she's out there singing about girl power, telling you to put a ring on it, all that crap. And then what she does, She takes a million bucks to go sing at some private party for Gadafi's kid, Momar Kadaffi, you know, the guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever. Like, what the hell you're gonna jet off to Saint Bart shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pawking a million,
and then go back to preaching about empowerment. Come on, man, that's the hypocrisy of this whole thing. These celebrities, they'll take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, oh, I'm all about the people, until some crazy dictator weaves a stack of cash and then it's where's my private jet? It's ridiculous.
This nus, Yes, Bill, it is fucks. This sucks to be a Bill Bard defender for you. I notice truly the first, the first actual stain on Bill Bear's legacy.
That's a very good comedian.
That's quite a remarkable fucking stain.
Gold Comedians are evil. It's just it's that easy he address.
It's you know part of it is that and if all. Unfortunately, I kind of think the response of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair with its like, man, it was too much money. It's just a shitload of money. Like I'll do fucked up shit for a crazy amount of money, and it's like that's bad, but at least you're honest. Bill's response to this was like, it was great to experience that part of the world, to be part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia.
The royals loved the show. Everybody one was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the audience wanted it. They wanted to see real stand up comedy. It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I've had. I think it's going
to lead to a lot of positive things now. He did talk a little bit about like the rules that they had to bye bye and said that like when they were first handing around contracts, he pushed back and was like or people pushed back, or like comedians didn't were like, you can't have all these restrictions and that they whittled them down to just a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't make fun of royals and religion right now, as pointed out by the fact
that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking positively about slavery and the there were more restrictions than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand up in the region and gave
him grief about it. When I was landing in Bahrain, like I'm fucking nervous, right, and then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East, you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded. Right after a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided, I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language, but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia, Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount
of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to be screaming death to America and they're going to have fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right, because this is what I've been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense, and I'm thinking, like, is that a Starbucks next to a Pieza Hut, next to a Burger King next to McDonald's. They've got a fucking chili and yes, man, they have stores. In the Middle East, you can.
Restaurants that specific combination of kun like the Saudi is the reason the current government of ba Raid is in power is because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to crush the uprising.
There were twenty eleven like hideous.
There's so much that's fucked up just being like, well to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking royal family of Saudi Arabia. I went to Bahrain like like that.
They're not the same place, no, Like, yeah, I wanted to check out some brown Muslin people. Turns out that people like that seems to be the gist of what he's saying, and they like pizza too.
Fuck me.
You could go to again like Iraq and perform in fucking uh. Yeah, you go to an ideal and it's nice. It's nice, and you're not going to be performing at the behest of the fucked up government, right, You'll just be performing in a country with the fucked up government. And there is a difference.
Right.
I'm not angry at the idea that some rando might like perform at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest of the regime.
Yeah, that's a different thing.
I do think there's an argument for like, well, people in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh. That doesn't mean you have to take the money from their fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked
up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart was also a part of this show, and he posted a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi Royal Turkey Al Shake is, and Turkey Al Shake has now been sharing that video on all of his social media accounts like you're holding water for people for a guy he was a wing in a torture prison named after him. That crosses a line for me. You know, when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad
support all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with, right Like, if you're talking about, you know, make it a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's you know, fucking streaming division, right, well, there's a degree of moral compromise there, and I think, depending on what you're doing and what not, can be justified by the fact that
number one, like that's just the way television works. There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company that has the ability to fund, you know, a production like that, but taking money directly from the hands of the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses a line. I think that crosses the line for a free speech activist. It should across the line for Pete Davidson, who's dad died at nine to eleven, but.
She's apparently not. That is a wild one.
That's the craziest one to me, that Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia. Oh man, are you gonna it's just mom sit on the scene. Oh man, she's probably getting a lot of money if she is, So it's fine. It's fine. I don't know like how much. And it is one of those things I get the people who are like, Okay, but you know, the US is fucked up to and it is. And so if somebody is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to perform at
the White House, I'd say pretty fucked up. But like, that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know.
Yeah, And none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay to like entertain the fucking prison.
Guards, right, Like, yeah, well hopefully none of us will be going to Guantanamo Bay for any reason. As long as we keep playing these ads, we're back.
I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective, because they have been doing really for the last half a decade, a fallout pr blitz. Right, We've seen this in WWE. We've seen this with a whole bunch of professional sports stuff. Like most of the esports is run out of the esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Now like the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund just helped Jared Kushner buy EA, right, just like one of the largest video
game companies in the world. Right, they've been, you know, they've been doing this sort of whole sportsw washing strategy of using these things to sort of normalize, normalize the regime. And I think the actual genius of this right was not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and
with comedians. The genius of it was that they were able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their, you know, horrific domestic human rights record, and they were to some extent.
But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record is a victory for the Saudist because it means that nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like, for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying in their war and Yemen, and these Sudanese child soldiers were drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, a group that is almost
entirely composed of the militias who did the genocide and
dart four. So these are the round troops that they're deploying in Yemen, are as Sudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did the genocide in Darfur in twenty eighteen, which was not that long ago, Like I remember twenty eighteen, So do you statistically if you're listening to the show they carried out an airstrike on a school bus that killed twenty six children, right, no one is talking about the air strikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do, like,
for example, there was a huge one in twenty sixteen where they killed one hundred and forty people in one air strike, after which the area was described by a rescue worker as a quote lake of blood. And this has been the really successful thing about about the Saudi specifically targeting sports, specifically targeting entertainment, is that the people
covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia. Right, And this is also partially what was going on Bill Burv because they're just racists or their attempt could do a backlash, and they're trying to do a backlash with things like Okay, they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right, But like Jamal Kashogi was one guy out of thousands and thousands in thousands of people that they were killing and are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen. Right.
And this is one of the reasons people have been able to get away with this, right, is that no one has been walking up to them and going, what do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers? Because nobody knows about any of that. And this is one of the thing that I want to just say at the end of this, which is I know for a fact that journalists and editors listen to this show and please, for the love of God, find someone who knows literally anything about the Saudis war and Yemen and have them
write this piece on sportswashing for you, literally anyone. And this is what this is what makes me insane about all this coverage is that like, if you even a little bit paid attention to what they were doing in the twenty tens and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen. You know about so many even I'm not even I'm not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are so many things that they did, you know.
And like one of the common defenses is like, oh, like you know, like we live in the US as the fucked up country, right, Like who cares about authoritarianism? Just like, I don't know, it's harder to make that argument when it's about Sudanese child soldiers.
Well, and it's just again, we're not pissed because some guy performed at a nightclub in Riyad. It's it's that you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.
No, it's because they took money for the governments. All these all of these things, all of these all of like wwe like all of these sports events, these are funded directly by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is the wealth fund of the Saudi government. The people who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child soldiers to fight their warren Yemmen.
Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing. I would say like Ian Trello's done some excellent stuff.
The Guardian has a good article on this where they really coalate some of like the very worst responses, written by Seth Simon. So I liked that this does seem to be blowing up. Hollywood Reporters piece was pretty good.
Too, Hollywood Report to My friend was the editor of that publication for years, and they have consistently done some stuff that we wouldn't expect looking at the title of publication.
Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like I think this is going to cost any of these people their career because it's I don't think it is. But it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment. Uh So I don't know.
Yeah, I mean they get called out, it shamed like it's Yeah, it's a pretty shameful thing to do.
It's a shameful thing to do. It's a bummer. I wish people had not made these choices because man, it's depressing.
Yeah.
Well, luckily I have some news to lift our moods after this depressing episode. I am pleased to report that Cool Zone Media will be headlining at Victor Orbon's new comedy festival Hungry four laughs.
Yep.
Next year twenty twenty six market in your calendar. Cool Zone Media presents with Victor Orbon Hungary for laughs. That's all for us today. At it could happen here. See you next year in Hungary. Goodbye everybody. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On the morning of Sunday, September twenty eighth, a forty year old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc, Michigan church. The man started shooting people inside and then set the church on fire,
burning the building down. Four churchgoers died, eight others were injured but have survived, and police killed the shooter on the scene. The President, the Vice president, and the rest of the right were quick to call this yet quote another targeted attack on Christians in the United States, to quote Trump on truth social White House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt went on Fox and Friends the day after the shooting and said.
This, it's unfathomable and as the President rightfully put in his true social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted attacked on Christians.
As the church was still burning, right wing podcaster Betty Johnson, who recently rode with Ice in Chicago, posted on x the everything app quote church is on fire, Christianity is under attack. Pray unquote what Betty Johnson neglected to mention this was a Mormon church, And pretty soon it became clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist ANTIFA, but a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormon's were quote unquote
the anti christ. According to Burton City council candidate Chris Johns, who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days prior while canvassing, one of the shooter's friends told The New York Times that the shooter believed that the Mormons quote are going to take over the world unquote. This guy obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormon's stemming from a breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago.
After the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became more clear, the Trump dmen quite quickly stopped talking about this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity. But this attack was more deadly than any recent school shooting or any instance of targeted violence which the administration has been framed as political violence happening this year. After the shooter was identified, rather than talk about his
apparent motive, people online argued about his political orientation. A picture spread online of him wearing a Trump twenty twenty camo shirt that read make Liberals Cry Again. The right wing outlet The Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic was photoshopped, with The Daily Caller sharing a version of the shirt that they alleged to be the
original unedited photo without the Trump graphic. Except that version without the Trump graphic is in fact the doctored photo. The Trump one is the authentic version. Right Wing users on x the Everything app spread a list of political donations to progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio that read politically Active Democratic Socialist. Except that account and those donations were from a completely different person,
just with a similar name. Now, just because it's pretty clear that this shooter supported Trump doesn't mean that we should frame this as partisan political violence. This was a classic American shooting. A marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative experiences with the Mormon Church, moved to Michigan, but continued to have very strong anti Mormon sentiments which he held until he acted on those sentiments' lead to
his death and the deaths of four other people. And extremely tragic yet extremely American sequence of events. But the conversation and coverage surrounding this Mormon Church shooting is such an open display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies. Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker went on Fox News to discuss this shooting, where he laid blame on politicians rhetoric calling people Nazis.
So, you know, this is a situation of you find a manufactured grievance, if you will, and that a whole lot of stimulus from from people either on the Internet or even politicians.
Theyrre responsible politicians.
We all know who they are.
You know, they're talking about Nazis and anarchists and existential threats. You know they need to crawl back into their dark places. These people are out there. That has to be taken into account when you start firing off.
Your mouth that simply has nothing to do with this specific attack. But both politicians and the media have this obsession with only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party and then weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the
oppositional political project. Following Charlie Kirk's assassination and the media blitz around it, fellow far right commentator Stephen Crowder has revived his long dormant college debate series Change My Mind Now, with the prompt they left is violent propagandists collapse political violence into a simple binary, which is just a very limited way in trying to actually understand public acts of violence, the idea that things can only happen because of of ideologies,
not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions, or class This year, there's been one other target attack that ties the Mormon Church shooting for the highest fatalities in attacks this year, and that was the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July, where the gunmen attempted to shoot up the NFL offices, motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school. No clear ideological motivations here. Lots of shooters aren't typically
ideological in like the ordinary political sense. The only recent shooter that could be accurately categorized as quote unquote leftist is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy staffers in May of twenty twenty five. Now, under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Bill Maherr.
But this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, just two days after the char Turk assassination, demonstrates this point about how media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of violence through ideology, long before we have any actual clear indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.
There's a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely to be either a white supremacist or a radical Muslim. If it is shooting of a Republican politician, it is very likely to be a trans Antifa marxishuan Is.
We don't know. We don't know what this kid is. Wait, we do know this kid was of the left. We do know that we do know what that this kid was of the political left.
That is according to contemporarious reporting from The Guardian as well as tablet magazines.
Today it's two days out. We don't know shit, but here we don't know shit.
They never do.
The Internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.
It's not about the Internet.
That's about the that's about.
The actual reporting by mainstream except the Guardian is not right wing.
Here's what I here's what we heard. Here's what I was told so far, And I'll tell you what was wrong. First I heard he's a registered Republican not not true.
Okay.
Then he was a donor de Trump not true. His father works in the sheriff's office, not true. There was a picture I'm wearing a pro Trump shirt not true. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America not true.
We don't know what he is.
Well, how are you so sure he's of the left?
Now?
I agree? When you right on a bullet.
What did he write on the.
Bullet catches fascist? Which is also a gamer thing? Okay?
But now I'm hearing he may have been part of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right wing enough.
Yes, I mean so that you're sure he's not that I'm not sure that he's not there you were was hold on, hold on, no, hold on, okay, because.
I've Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just because the target of violence is as a political figure does not mean that it's political violence. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is a key example of this, and for the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a personal motivation based on romantic attraction on a dog day afternoon over any larger partisan political motivation. It doesn't even make sense to view the first attempted Trump
assassination as political violence. Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting, he did more than sixty internet searches related to Biden, Trump and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions. Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to fall into the right place at
the right time. The mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August who shot two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the right branded as a trans terrorist originally planned to do the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared that trans girls attending the concert
would be armed for self defense. As I've previously reported on this show, this shooting bared similarity to TCC or True Crime community, not as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters, akin to neo columnbiners, who encourage each other online to then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or replicating those of previous school shootings
or mass shootings. This pseudo mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the role of quote unquote the shooter can be its own motivating force, beyond any culture, war issues or ordinary partisan politics that might get sprinkled on top as seasoning. On Wednesday, September twenty fourth, the twenty nine year old open fire with a bolt action rifle targeting an ICE Field office in Dallas, Texas. This attack claimed the lives of three immigrants who were detained by Ice.
In a copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare CEO assassination. This shooter allegedly wrote anti ice on unfired bullet casings. In the immediate wake of this attack, the right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed Democrat politicians for spreading anti ICE rhetoric. At a North Carolina event, JD. Vance said, quote, Here's what happens when Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part
of an authoritarian government. When the left wing media lies about what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they are doing is encouraging crazy peaceopull to go and commit violence. Here's a brief Fox News report.
We have a problem America.
We are living through a scourge of left wing political violence that three weeks into this month has made it bloody September today, another attack.
On ice as is not uncommon with mass shooters. This guy was a registered independent, and the shooter's brother told NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics. I find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other gen Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or CNN. Journalist Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter, who described him as a libertarian leaning four Chan edge lord who
hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians. Friends believed that the bullet inscription could have been written as a joke intended to rile people up. They told Klippenstein the shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted away due to his continuous anti social edgelord behavior in regular day to day interactions. Nancy Larson, the acting of his attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE
operations as human trafficking. Larsen says the shooter did not mention any government agency besides ICE, but left a note for police reading quote good luck with the digital footprint. This shooter killed himself after the attack. These public acts of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for self annihilation while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a
violent act. What causes someone to do this can be a mix of many factors, including access to guns, individual motivations, social alienation, self annihilation in so far as there is an overtly political element, it's often the result of a
political alienation. Usually, the type of person who commits a bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat Republican binary, with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across the left right spectrum. Mass shootings which are accompanied by express political motivations usually stem from anti Muslim or great replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people in Western culture
will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants. But throughout the next three years, under Trump's federal government and the right wing anti woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture, nihilistic self destructive acts against American society may take a form which could be characterized as quote unquote left wing violence, despite most of these shooters being far from your average
DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist. Considering the Mormon church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the Iced Dtaee shooting, and the Minneapolis Catholic School shooting in the Year of Our Brain Rot twenty twenty five, I think it's pretty clear that the current US state apparatus does not need to stage false flags. The state just tries to take advantage of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives. In an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality, no crude fabrication
of physical reality is needed. They are more than happy to simply pick and choose, and magnify and obscure various events to fit their preferred version of reality. The night before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq war veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina, which did not result in nearly as many national headlines. The shooter targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people injuring six others.
The suspect rowed a boat up to the bar, fired with an ar mounted with a scope and silencer, before speeding off on water. Police have also deemed this a targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues, this event will be quickly forgotten. As I'm recording this episode, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot quote leftist terror cells in Texas.
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present ding there can be no compromise with those who want us dead unquote. This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presdential Memorandum Number seven, which targets quote unquote, domestic terrorism indicators like anti Christianity, anti capitalism, anti Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration, and
hostility towards traditional American values. All this partisan rhetoric on targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition. Meanwhile, this passed Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former state senator, and their son. The judge was out of
the house at the time. Last month, the judge temporarily blocked a voter suppression executive order signed by President Trump. In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge had received death threats. This has been it could happen here, see you on the other.
Side, Well, can it could happen here? A podcast beset by horrors of such magnitude that sometimes you have to go back to a thing that you just talked about because there were more horrors in it. That you didn't have time to cover the first time you went through the horror, sorry, the first two times you went through the horse and with me to talk about the horrors? Is doctor cave Hoda, who is a doctor? I guess, as you probably could have guessed from the title. You know,
I scripted this out very poorly. Uh oh, this is great, you're doing great, keep going, I say, scripted this out. Literally. The only part of this introduction that was in my notes was cave Hoda, doc you're at host of House of Pod and friend of the show, which was not in my notes either. But that's right, friend. The energy is chaotic today.
Friend, Most importantly, it has to be that is the normal response to what is happening in this world. If we don't embrace a little chaos, then we will lose our minds.
So I am. I am loving how this is going so far. I am so glad because there is so much chaos. One of the chaos things that we have been tracking, and that you spend a hideous amount of time tracking too much on your show.
Too much.
Yes, it's not good, it's very bad. Please stop doing this stuff so we can all go back to doing normal things. In our lives.
I would love to just do more fart jokes and episodes on poop, but people in power keep saying and doing terrible things. You have crazy, terrible things that make me feel like I'm losing my mind. So I have to keep doing this from Ultaris one because someone's got to talk about it too. It's sort of therapy for me, Like, if I just internalize this, I'm gonna I'm gonna be a miserable person.
So thanks, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about well, Okay, see this Literally every single time I do an episode, it's like, I'm really excited to talk to you. And also, Jesus Christ, I wish we did not have to talk about this. That's how everyone feels. That's how my feel, that's feel when they see me. It's terrible. God, really, truly, we got to stop meeting like this. One day. We'll do
a fun episode one day, and I swear to God. Okay, But the thing that I've been talking about that we've both been covering is basically the annihilation of the entire
US medical establishment at the federal level. It is being systematically dismantled and One of the ways that's being sematically dismantled is that a bunch of people have been put in charge of it who are I mean two years ago, were fringe anti vaccine cranks and are now running like the most sophisticated like public health institutions that have ever existed.
Yeah, as a producer extraordinaire, Sophie Liechttermann once said, you can't put a hater in charge of the thing that they hate the most. And that is what has happened, completely and fully, almost at every step of this government. Yeah, they find the person that hates it the most and they put that person in.
Yeah.
And you know, one of the big sort of I don't know if turning points is the right word, but one of the major events we've been covering from this was the announcement by Rfkjunior and Trump that they had found what causes autism and also ADHD too, which I got very little coverage. I think I said this last
time I talked about this. It was very baffling. But there's just there was so much in that whole thing that I think a lot of the stuff kind of fell through the cracks inside of like, well, there was a lot. There was a lot to digest. There so much.
There's so much, and so I guess I want to we wanted to talk about mostly the hepatitis B thing, but also just sort of the broader anti vax stuff that was in this before we get into I don't know, like the weirder, more boutique anti vax stuff, which is like the anti hepatitis B vagazine stuff, a thing that I didn't realize people were against like children getting until like now, and like I follow these things decently closely, Let's start a little bit with like, let's let's ease
the audience into this by by going back to the classics, the greatest hits. We didn't really have one hit, the one hit of the anti vaccine movement, which was Trump's stuff about separating the MMR vaccine. Yeah, soh yeah.
Recently during that press conference where he really threw tylern All under the bus, he also really it was weird because there's no new evidence. I want to make that clear. There was no new evidence that they presented about vaccines. But Trump actually really harped on vaccines and his thoughts, his medical opinion, and his advice on how to manage vaccines is truly bizarre. Never seen a president say or
do those sorts of things. But one of the things he mentioned was the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps, rubella, and he said that it should be split into three separate shots. Again medically unfounded. It really, as you have alluded to, echoes, these long debunked claims, these Wakefield like claims, from starting from back in nineteen ninety eight. Again, Wakefield was the disgraced author of that vaccine study that tied
it to autism, lost his men license for that. But that has persisted and carried on, and the seeds of that are still growing terrible, terrible plants in trees today. And one of them was this fruit of Trump saying we should break up the MMR vaccine. So I'll just say it up front. One, there's no reason to do that.
There's no reason that shows improved safety. There's no credible evidence to suggest that at least, and more importantly, the more you split these things up, the more likely you're gonna end up missing doses.
That is like a known fact.
If you delay vaccines, if you split them up more than they need to be, there is a much greater chance you will miss that. In case this is not clear, measles is bad. It is one of the most contagious viruses out there, and lower vaccination rates quickly lead to outbreaks, as we're already starting to see, and when there's already some hesitancy in the community, pushing it like this is
a terrible thing. So even though that was a throwaway statement from the presentident of the United States, it could
have serious repercussions. And it's it's very concerning, and I've also I have committed myself every single time this comes up that the Wakefield study, which is where this this whole separate da war thing like came up as it's not even a conclusion that even even if you take his completely fake premise that he made up, it doesn't actually follow that you should split the vaccines up.
It's baffling. But the second thing is the reason he wanted to split the vaccines up was that he was trying to sell his own vaccines. Correct, he was just trying to sell his own vaccin I it makes me insane every single time this has talked about, because this whole thing is sibbetically, it's literally an industrial complex it's like the y vaccine industrial complex. They're all trying to sell you something. That's the whole thing.
I was watching Trump give this talk this press conference, and I said, I think I said this on another show here on this channel.
I started to disassociate. I'm like, yeah, this can't be real. I am I dreaming?
Is this?
It felt like I was having an out of body experience. It did not feel real to me. To be fully transparent, I did not make it through that press conference. Watching it on video. About like four minutes in, I was like, fuck this, I'm going to read the transcript. So I'm just working off the transcript because I was like I can't.
It was tough. I can't do this.
So on my podcast, The House of Pod you should all listen to it, I played a clip from Trump talking about Tylan All and another clip of him talking about heptiz B and when you listen to it. When I listened back to it as I was editing it, it sounded like I edited his clips to make him sound crazy.
I did not.
I just took straight from what he says, and it just the way he was talking. It's hard to listen to. I mean, it's hard to read too. But the way he talks, it's so disjointed, and he just goes from one thought to the next. Hey, does this weave thing that he thinks is so clever, But it's just lost. The threads are never brought together. It's just an unraveled, terrible rug of lies. And that is that is why it's so hard to like listen to him. I I totally understand.
Yeah, well, but and this has also been you know, one of the things that most of the media has done is that you know, in order to be able to like play a listenable clip on air, right, and also in sort of innservative power, they edit the clips to make him sound like a normal human being. Right, So the version of it that people are seeing is not the version where he's just sort of completely ranting incoherently and like, you know, you just see these clips.
But then also because they're because they're they're editing it down progressively more and more, like just more stuff more, just like information content gets lost every time, which is the problem because there's just like so much yea, the fire Hose of Nonsense.
Yeah, title of my first album, incredible, incredible, Oh god, Okay, so you know what, right, we're going to a second fire hose of nonsense.
This is slightly early to be doing this, but fuck it, it's chaos week. We're doing it. Do you know what else is a fire hose of nonsense? Oh?
Well, I wouldn't say it's nonsense. I would say it's very important in these bills. So it's very very important I believe in. I don't end up just kidding. I'm assuming ads and services. Yeah, this is the froucess services to support this podcast.
We are back. So it makes the torrent of you know, the the MMR stuff, which also I do want to say, very briefly, is sort of a baffling thing to be talking about in a thing where you're not blaming the vaccines for autism, you're blaming Thailand all but then you're still also mad at the vaccine. It's very weird. Yeah. I had thoughts about that.
You know, I felt like what Trump was doing with that by bringing up the vaccine stuff was I felt he was trying to console RFK Junior in a way. I felt like he was like, Okay, hey, we're moving away from the vaccine stuff to focus on this tile law stuff. But I know how much you love the vaccine stuff, AREFK, So let's talk about that.
So I felt like he was just throwing that out there to play k RFK Junior. That was my guess. But I don't know how to read sociopaths very well, so this could also just be like what comes into his mind when he thinks about medicine, right, so you know, oh yeah, again, weird to me that this president was giving medical advice. I mean, he was making statements, do
not take time. He said that multiple times. He talked about breaking up the hepatitis B vaccine and changing the heptides B vaccine, that the times of it, which I think we're going to talk about because that is very important to me, and things that doctors would have a little pause to say so strongly, and even the people whose paper he's citing would say, oh, slow down a little bit with that. You know, it's very important. I think it's super impactful, and you're right, it's slipping under
the radar. So I would love to talk about the hepatitis B stuff. Yeah, let's do this.
So I'll give a little background for your listeners who don't know me. I am a gastroentrologist and hepatologist. That's liver, not herpetologist, which is a study of snakes, which sometimes people think online. I am a doctor that looks at the liver, and hepatitis B has an important place in my heart. It's a disease that can be incredibly devastating.
It's incredibly common, it has so many complications, It has such long term ramifications on someone's life if they have it, so many things they have to consider, do follow up, so many possible things that can happen with it. And the thing about it is we have a vaccine for it that is very safe and super efficacious, works really well,
and when we use it, it works amazing. In Trump during this conference through that a couple of passing shots as he was doing this this whole rant about tile mall et cetera, and those passing shots can have a huge impact on uptake in this country. I think it really needs to be discussed. So I'll stop there. I'll let you see what questions do you have for me of hepatities because I could talk about hepatitis B for a long time.
Yeah, okay, let's let's let's go back to like the very basic How would you explain hepatitis be to our dear listener who knows many things, but what hepatitis B is is not one of them.
Yes, so hepatitis just means inflammation of the liver. Anything with itis means inflammation. And there are different ways of getting hepatitis or inflammation of the liver. They range from alcohol, medications, autoimmune problems to viral things. And there are viral things that can cause bad hepatitis affect the liver, primarily hepatitis A, B, C. You've heard of some of these hepatides, and hepatitis B
is a very common one in the world. It's about two billion people in the world have either had it or presently have it. About eight hundred and eighty thousand people in the US alone have chronic hepatitis B, but if you actually look at studies that include more immigrant populations, that number can go up to about two point two million. It is something that can when you get it at an early age, when you're young and you're a baby or an infant, you're young and your immune system is
not super robust yet. It's very likely about ninety percent or more that if you are exposed to it. You'll get chronic infection from it. If you get it when you're older, it's a little different. You can have a pretty strong reaction to it. You'll get really sick, potentially sometimes to the point where the liver fails, but most people are when they're older able to clear it. They're going to eventually get rid of the virus point where the liver is fine and it manages, but it lives
in the liver indefinitely. Once you get the hepatitis B, it's a very good chance you will have it forever. Whether or not it's causing you problems is another thing. A lot of people can live with it not have any problems, but a lot of people will get it and they will be very sick in the beginning. And when you get it as an infant, you have a very good chance of having it for the rest of
your life. And that can be a major problem because like all viruses that go into the liver like this, all these viral hepatities, what can happen is it can cause scarring, which you might have heard of when it's really bad, called cirrhosis. When that happens, the liver can stop working. You can get cancer of the liver. You can get big blood vessels in your esophagus called esophageal varices, and vomited blood.
You can get a lot of bad things that happen.
Now, what makes heptities be particularly insidious, It makes it a little bit even my opinion, more dangerous than a lot of other viral hepatides is that you don't always have to go through these phases to get to the really bad part. Like when you have hepatitis C, for example, you get bad scarring over a long time that can cause that cirrhosis, and that cirrrosis can lead to cancer.
But since hepatitis B is a DNA virus, that DNA can get into the DNA of your liver cells and it can cause cancer without even having to go through those steps of cirrhosis. That obviously terrible, and that can happen to young people, and I've seen it and it's awful. So I'm saying all these terrible things about hepatitis B because it's one of these things that does not need to be I didn't mean to say that like that, No, I didn't mean to make a play on words there.
But it doesn't need to happen because we have this great vaccine that can manage this and when we use this vaccine, it works. In fact, in the US, they looked at it between nineteen ninety it was introduced in this country, like for infants in nineteen ninety one, and when they looked from nineteen ninety to two thousand and four, they saw a ninety four percent decrease in kids in adolescents who have hepatitis being incredible, I mean, that's amazing.
That's really good. Like this is a great success story. And part of the reason people like Trump don't recognize that this is an issue because it's done well, because this vaccine works and it does a good job. Now, the other thing to discuss is how it is transmitted, because that's a big part of what Trump was saying during this press conference. Yeah, and he said it's sexually transmitted, which is true. That is one of the ways that you get it, but you also get.
It from the mother.
The mother when you're having a pregnancy and a delivery, it's a messy, bloody process and that is a huge risk factor for the infant getting hepatized b from the mother. There's also household things that can happen. You know, people share razors, that's a risk factor. Toothbrushes, small things, bites at daycare centers. All these things are small risks. They're not as common as sex or the childbirth ways of transmission, but there are other modes of transmission for getting hepatitis B,
not just sex like Trump was saying. So, I think that's super important to be clear that. I think that is one of the major things he said that was wrong. He said a lot of things are wrong, but that's probably the biggest easiest one to point out.
Yeah, And I think it also was interesting because that was one of the things that got followed up on by reporters. But the reporter was like, well, you can also get it from like reusing needles, which like yeah, but like not mentioning the whole. You can get it for being born, a thing that everyone has to do. Statistically, this is the statistics bear that out.
That is true.
Yeah, but a percent rate of being born in order to.
Exist, that's exactly that's exactly right. You know why I realized why Trump says this. This is the realization I came to. He doesn't even think about this as a possible mode of transmission. If you've ever seen a delivery, I don't know if you have mia, but if you've ever seen someone give birth, whether it's natural, vaginal or cesarean or whatever, whatever method, there is a lot of fluids, blood, mucus. There's a lot of fluids happening during this time exchange
between mother and baby. And if you saw that, I think you'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense that you would get it that way. If you do get it through sex, why couldn't you get it through that? You know, if you could get it by putting a penis into a vagina, for example, why couldn't you get it from being birth from one? So you would you would see that, and you would it would make sense
to you inherently and automatically. My guess is that Trump has not seen any of his kids delivered that that would not surprise me. I mean, if he was in a nearby room, I would be impressed in edwa cast aspersions on our president.
I don't know.
Maybe he was there, you know, cutting the umbilical corridor. I don't know, but I get the sense he was not, And I feel like that's why in his mind he doesn't even register it.
And then then the other thing that makes that's weird about this is he's like, Oh, it's just me.
I say that they get the shot at the age of twelve because it's sexually transmitted, and that makes me wonder. I'm surprised no one's brought this up. Why does he think that's okay? Then does he think that kids are having sex at the age of twelve and that's okay? Why did why did twelve become the number for him?
It's so weird and I don't know that's truly one of the There is something just deeply evil going on in his mind, but I have no idea what it is, and I can't follow the path of logic because I'm not like a billionaire who was born in like the fifties or whatever. I don't know that that guy has seen That guy has gotten brainword from things that like don't exist anymore. No, he was born in the forties. Sorry, my apologies for thinking he was born a full decade
later than he actually was. Good lord, Yeah, I mean I think the results are still the same. Yeah, But I mean it's like, you know, there's just like there's prejudices and weird stuff that he picked up rattling around
there that like who knows where they came from. And I think also, you know, one of the other ankles about this that's sort of really distressing is this like what feels like the sort of stigmatizing aspect of it of just being like, oh, well, there's something you can only get like sexually transmitted, like why are we giving
this to kids? And it's like, well, yeah, but like there's just like a bunch of other ways that you can get it, and like only talking about that one and then having it as an excuse to raise the vaccination age for no reason, and that.
You know, again goes back to the MMR thing, because you know, when we talk about giving these doses, the who the CDC, they recommend the birth vaccine within twenty four hours or the first at least. Then the current schedule is you get at birth and follow up set one to two months, and then again at six to
fifteen months. And part of the thing of stretching that out, pushing that out further again same thing as the MMR, which is the more likely you are to not do it at all and to have decreased uptake.
Yeah, so this is the real reason why that's a concern. Yeah, and it's this sort of decreased uptake is their goal, right, Like that's what they want. Like that's why RFKI Junior, for example, is making it increasingly difficult to get the COVID vaccine and the flu vaccine and stuff like that.
And it's you know, they're doing this sort of like double pronged approach of both establishing it from the top down through the medical bureaucracy of taking control of and also just like spreading it among their supporters and among people who are like, oh that the President wouldn't just like lie to me about medical stuff, right, that's unreasonable. And I mean if you didn't know, if you didn't know that there was another means of transmission, what he
said is reasonable. You know, why would you give an infant a vaccine for something they could only get through sex. I mean, yeah, you bet sure that makes sense, but it's just wrong. Yeah, it's kind of pointless to ask the question does he know he's lying on this one? But I don't think he is. I honestly don't think he understands.
I think he probably did hear that there are some other modes of transmission, and in his mind, it requires some sort of blood contact or some sort of mucosal contact in his mind, and that's how he interpreted it. And I think he just doesn't equate that with childbirth. I think he assumes it like because the child he sees comes out like perfectly wrapped and cleaned and you know, looks like a little baby in like a blanket when he sees it. Yeah, So I think I think that's
the thing. I think he believes this.
I don't think he's lying on purpose on this one. Yeah, that makes sense, And I think I don't know. I think it's an interesting aspect of this is that this is like it was kind of just a Trump thing, right, Like this is like one of the parts of it that like RFK Junior and Martin McCarry didn't really talk about. It was just Trump kind of just like started talking about it for reasons that are deeply unclear. Yeah.
I mean, Martin McCarry is an interesting guy, and I think he did some good things in the past and done some not so great things. Some bad things, Yeah, would not be serve this administration. This may shock you, Mia, but Trump picked somebody for a high level position that might be a little problematic.
Well, especially this version of the administration too, where it's like in Trump won it was possible for them for him to appoint someone random and it kind of be like Department of Energy, right right, They put Rick Perry, who famously would call to a well forgot that it was the thing that he wanted to abolish. But then he got in charge of it, and the Department of Energy of people like explained to him this is where the nuke stuff is. And then he was like, sure, whatever,
fucking go run this. I'll just stay out of everyone's way. And that kind of works fine. That he's not happening this administration. You are not kidding, You're actual Rick Perry going to like a make workshop, letting the bureaucrats run the actual stuff. How wild it is that we long for the days of Rick Perry. Yeah, the days when someone could explain to you, hey, this is the department that does the nukes, and they'd be and they would
change their opinion about it. Staggering incredible. So let me tell you a little bit more about this McCrary character. So he is a surgeon. I don't think he practice as a surgeon, anymore. But he's sort of a health policy expertly self fashioned as one, and he's the person that was tapped by Donald Trump to leave the FDA. You've seen him on Fox News a lot, and he's
been very outspoken about pandemic policies in the past. He was noted as one of the greatest perpetrators of COVID misinformation during those times when the people fact checked him again and again found that he was wrong. But the thing about him that you may or may not know how I first learned of him and how he popped up on my radar a while back, was he is the person that's responsible for this claim that medical error is the third.
Leading cause of death in the United States. Sometimes that's cited as second. Yes, that's him, he's the person, oh boy, right, Which there's a lot of issues with this claim. It is at best controversial. It's based on extrapolated data. There was no formal methodology that went into him doing this. It totally misrepresents the complexity of healthcare and healthcare outcomes. But it's like the herpees of medical misinformation because it always comes back no matter how many times it gets
disproven or people talk about it. It always comes back, and it's always used as this. It's an inherent part of the belief structure of these anti vaxxers. It is taken as gospel now. But back in twenty sixteen, basically he wrote this BMJ paper that estimated something like two hundred and fifty thousand deaths per year in US hospitals were due to medical errors. But again, was not a
formal study. It presented no new data, and it didn't have any sort of real rigorous statistical method behind it. It kind of averaged figures from different sources. It doesn't actually even work because death certificates don't capture medical error, so it's hard to really study that even if you wanted to. But anyways, long story short, no matter how many times people disprove this or make arguments that work against it, it never goes away.
So that's him. That's McCary, Oh boy, oh boy. And he's not running the FDA, which is oh yeah, which is great.
We put the war people in charge of quite possibly the most important part of our country.
Yeah, I mean just the Health and Human Service is run by RFK Junior. Is just when he first took off as my line on it was millions will die, and we are so incredibly on track for millions to die from just this guy and his people being put in charge.
Yeah, I mean, I should say one more thing about maccarury before we move on from him that claim. You know, I wouldn't say that medical error isn't an issue. I think it is a very serious issue. Even if there's one or two cases in the whole country, it's a serious issue and that should be addressed. But what he's doing is I think harmful. I don't think that is
helping in any way. I think it's only made things worse by contributing to where we're at today with our anti vax stance, our whole anti intellectual approach to medicine.
And that's that's a thing that they do. This is the thing they take a little kernel of truth. If there is any lack of knowledge, that there's any slight vacuum in understanding, it gets filled with these bad actors, these people, and he is, in my opinion, one of them, but still somehow not the worst, you know, not the worst. Is one of those bars in the Trump administration where it's not even the bar solo. It's on the ground. The bar is so low that like you have to
go digging to get under the bar. And it's not like a little bit of digging, it's a lot of digging because the bar truly is below hell. There's like a second hell down there to find this bar for where these people are. Oh god, it's second hell. Every time I look into any of these people, just yeah, no, no, you're never going to be surprised. Has get hit or mariad with an axe? Like this guy's just the secretary of Defense now he's like, he's the guy going in
yelling at the generals. This is the guy who was on Fox News and he threw he just throwing an axe and he threw it over the target and it hit a bunch of marines. Like what are we doing here?
Well, whom amongst us hasn't done that? Maybe he is the real Antifa.
Yeah that's true. True. I have never hit a marine with an axe. Yeah. So now well there you go. Huh tragic, Tavia, Do you have anything else that you want to tell our dear listeners about this whole debacle?
Get your vaccines? Yeah, you know, get your vaccines. Get vaccinated. Now's the time to start doing it for flu and COVID. If you can talk to your doctor. If you're having difficulty getting your vaccine from your local places, your regular places, talk to your doctor about getting it.
You should still be able to in most cases, So do it while you can.
And if you want to hear more about this stuff, make sure to check out my podcast, The House of Pod. We're going to talk about the stuff a lot more. We'll talk about other stuff too, but you'll hear more on this along the way as well. And you know, I like that people are questioning some of these things. I don't think it's unreasonable. Some of these topics are
not unreasonable to have. You know, we as I discussed earlier on another podcast on this channel, Channels that we say on this network, I should say the title and all autism question is not like a totally wacky crazy one. It was a decent question to ask. There was some correlation, but the evidence when you look at it, shows that it is very likely not a causal relationship when you
look at the evidence. And I think it's okay to have some of these conversations, and sometimes it takes a little nuance when you look at them, but I encourage people to continue to do so, and to keep reading and to find trusted sources and look at those and learn about them yourself. I think if nothing else good comes from all this, it's that people are starting to have an understanding of antibodies and the science behind vaccines. And I think that's not a bad thing. So, I mean,
things are terrible. Things are terrible. There's so many bad things in the world. But I will say this, I see bright spots constantly. I see more and more people who care about science. I see more and more people than I ever have before care about important topics across the world. They're not scientific, like gaza, for example. I've seen more people care about things that I've ever seen before in my long life, and I feel like that's a good thing. There are bright spots out there and
that's what I cling to. And I see more people interested in this. People want to talk to me about hepatitis B and what it is and how to avoid it. And I think that's great. So there's some good coming from this.
Yeah. And you know, and this is I think the fundamental thing that both the media apparatus and the regime are trying to conceal which is that there are more of us than there are of them. There always have been, and especially right now, there are way more of us.
And you know, their ability to shape the world is disastrous, but their ability to shape the world as fundamentally a minoritarian force in this country right with like thirty to forty percent of the population, is always going to be limited and always is always going to be in danger of simply being reversed. And we can be that reversal, one person at a time. Yeah, I love that. Well, Kaye, thank you for being on the show, and go listen to House of Pod is great. It's all thank you. Yeah,
we're okay. You could do worse.
You know, quite frankly, if you ever do anything on accident that leads to a police officer falling over, even if you had nothing to do with them falling over, it's time to leave. It's time to go, even if all you did was make a joke.
This is it could happen here.
Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today I'm joined by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of October first to October eighth.
That's right, baby, Brian, big deal day as Yeah, October seven eighth in history, the first week of October, you know, October Gloctober.
I mean, who doesn't love a good glock? Not in California, California. It doesn't love a good glock, Gavin use them in the California. Let's Gavin Newsom doesn't love a good glock. I mean, honestly, band them. Bretta fans don't love glocks. Still sore about that, Big guys, the surviving sick guys. Oh boy, it's rough being a SIG guy out there these days.
It's got to be tough. Yeah, well, that's why we're selling armored box of shorts.
That's right.
You enjoyed a SIG.
As long as you get our new, our new hard class four body armor box of shorts, you can appendix carry a SIG so hour without blowing your job.
You've quickly put on my ceramic boxer.
So that I can carry a fucking h eighteen. Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, stay hot by Cool Zone dropping next week. You can find them by tagging Robert on social media at why Sophie, Why We're finishing our twenty part series.
People have asked for episodes on how to be a gun owner, and so we're putting together a twenty part series on how not to shoot your own penis off. So law enforcement officers in the audience, you'll want to check that one out.
I just got a notification that Sophie had canceled ed. Which are things from responds to what we're doing right now.
Let's start because there's a lot of news this week by talking about, frankly, the most important news story in the whole nation right now. On Thursday October second, right wing influencer Nick Sorder, along with two other people.
I know.
It's stupid, Oh, it's really stupid.
Along with two other people were arrested by the Portland Police Bureau in connection with a fight outside of the Ice Building during a protest. Sorder was provoking reactions from protesters when he was then chased down the street by a woman in a bird cost bird costume quote swinging a large stick covered.
With feathers resulted by Big Bird.
According to court documents, The three people were arrested at all charged with disorderly conduct, though charges have since been dropped. Sordi's arrest ignited a right wing firestorm the likes of which I have not seen since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
I'm glad people are finally waking up to the antifa police department that rules Portland with an iron fist.
For a long time.
Tim Poole posted on x the Everything app, I'm calling on the Trump administration to launch a legal challenge against Oregon following the arrest of Nick Sorter and if necessary, deployed National Guard Organs failed to uphold federal and state law and we should not tolerate it.
Oh and like, yeah, there was like a fight and they detained people, and then the DA didn't press charges against Sorter, and it's it's just it couldn't be more of a nothing burger as an actual story.
Nothing than nothing burger. Yeah, but oh boy, but not according to the AG's office, who quickly responded on it to Tim Poole's request, and by Friday morning, the White House, the Attorney General, and the Justice Department announced a quote unquote full investigation into the arrest and the conduct of the Portland Police bureau. Finally, conservative influencer Benny Johnson, who's been embedded with ICE this past week, posted on x
Everything app quote important news. I spoke with DHS Secretary Christinome. She's been briefed on the attack and arrest of journalist Nick Sorder. Secretary Nome tells me DHS will surge ICE resources in Portland. Quote Antifa is a terrorist group and will not control our streets unquote. Thank you, Secretary Nome.
Benny Johnson later shared video captioned breaking. DHS Secretary Christinome has announced the Department of War will deploy to Portland and Chicago within twenty four hours to crush left wing violence unquote. And here is the video with Christinome talking about the quote unquote Antifa affiliated anti ICE protests.
Well, you've got a presence in Portland as that is Antifa ali and so that is a situation where you have known professionals targeted violence that want to tear down America and will apparently attack anyone, even journalists.
They're just trying to report the truth of what's happening on the streets.
So we're not just going to be rolling out of Chicago here, but we're sending in the Department of War at the request that I made to Secretary Headset, They're going to be rolling in here within the next twenty four hours.
They'll be coming to Chicago too.
I put a request in today for them to come to Chicago, and we're going to not only have our officers that are out there with HSI and Space, but we're also going to have backup from our military, because everybody deserves that. And so what we saw happened to that journalist last night will not happen again.
Okay, Yeah, Benny Johnson showing a very professional journalism there by just saying wow a lot.
It's a pretty wild scene having like troops walk behind Christy Nome as this podcast or Grills Grills are on it, sending the military to cities, Yeah, in front of a backcat.
The reactions from the after Nick Sorder's arrest were pretty wild, with journalists going on Fox News claiming that the Portland Police are affiliated with Antifa, and popular right wing influencers on x like Amuse saying, quote, the Portland police are now colluding with Antifa to prosecute federal officers protecting the ICE facility.
When has that happened.
Each time federal officers engage with Antifa. Portland Police Liaison's clutch statements and videos from Antifa to facilitate state criminal charges against DHS. So somehow, in the year of Our Lord twenty twenty five, the Portland Police Bureau is now Antifa, which is a truly miraculous state of affairs. After his release Friday morning, next Order posted on x quote You've
proved what we've all been saying for years. You're corrupt and controlled by violent Antifa thugs who terrorize the streets. Referring to the Portland Police, I have been in direct contact with top officials at DHS. What's coming in Portland is unprecedented, all thanks to Portland police exposing themselves by
arresting journalists. Great work, Portland unquote. A day later, on October fourth, a Trump appointed federal judge granted the state of Oregon and the City of Portland a temporary restraining order blocking trumpenheag sess federalization and deployment of two hundred organ National Guard against the wishes of Oregon Governor Tina Cotec.
The judge found that existing local and federal law enforcement were sufficient to police protests, that the Trump admin had mischaracterized the reality of the current protests outside of the ICE facility, and that violence against ICE in other parts of the country is not sufficient justification for a local military deployment.
It's worth noting this judge, Judge Immerget number one, not a woke judge, was literally if you go back and you watched the Monica Lewinsky hearings or the I mean, this is the Clinton sex scandal hearings, but this is the part of it in which Lewinsky was being grilled. Immigrant was the female lawyer that they brought out to be incredibly cruel to Monica Lewinsky because it wouldn't look as often putting and wound up.
She wound up.
Part of why Monica Lewinsky became so is she immigrant looked fucking nuts and immigrant is the person who is looking at it, who is going through all of the claims made by the administration and going there's literally not only is there no justification for the deployment of troops in Portland, but everyone calling the shots at FPS and ICE is like everything's under control, we have no need for additional people. Yeah, there's no real danger here, Like this is not a leftist judge. This is not a
judge with a political act to grind. This is a judge. But thirty years ago you would have called a far right extremist kah.
I will quote a little bit from her ruling here quote to accept the defendants arguments, that's the federal's government would see to render meaningless the extraordinary requirements of ten USC. One two four six by allowing the president to federalize one state's national guard based on the events in a
different state or mere speculation about future events. In other words, violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here, and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using non military federal law enforcement unquote.
On the Trump Admin's argument that the presidents authorized to federalize state national guard in the case of rebellion or invasion, the judge concluded that the legal definition of rebellion requires quote, First, a rebellion must not only be violent, but also armed. Second, a rebellion must be organized. Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed. Fourth, rebellion must be against the government as a whole, often with the aim of overthrowing the government,
rather than in opposition to a single law or issue. Here, the protest in Portland were not a rebellion and did not pose a danger of rebellion, especially in the days leading up to the federalization unquote. The judge found that the president's federalization of the Organ National Guard without proper
statutory authority under ten USC. One two four h six, exceeded the president's constitutional authority, undermined Organ's sovereignty, and violated the Tenth Amendment by infringing on Organ's constitutional power to control its own national Guard, writing that the Trump admin quote interfered with the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments.
Unquote.
Yeah, is that the one where she she said their argument was untethered from the facts.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that was a pretty good, uh good summary of what's going on here.
Later that day, Stephen Miller went on News Nation to talk about the quote unquote insurrectionists interesting word in Portland and the new National Security presidential memorandum to investigate dismantle so called left wing terrorist networks.
We're the federal government. We are not going to tolerate a lawless insurrection. We are not going to tolerate domestic terrorism. And we are going after the Antifa, rioters, the insurrectionists, the violent assaulters, and we are not only going after them, we are going after their network. We are going after their funders. Every time we make an arrest, we are
initiating an investigation into the entire domestic terrorist network. The President issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum in NSPN making clear that it is the national security priority of United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks. And that is exactly what is taking place. It is what we are doing, it is what will happen.
His use of the word insurrection there is important.
Yeah.
A day later, President Trump also used the term insurrectionists to describe protests in Portland and complain about the federal judge who blocked the deployment of National Guard, saying, quote, Portland is burning to the ground. You have agitators, insurrectionists. All you got to do is look at the television. It's burning to the ground. The governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives. That judge ought to be ashamed.
And again nothing's been burnt down. Nothing was burnt down in twenty twenty. Most of the big nights that I slately have been maybe two hundred people. You know, You've had some more on a few occasions, but like it's usually a lot less. It's probably just unnecessary for me to correct all this, but I guess I can't fight the urge to be like, none of this is accurate to what's happening.
Yeah, yeah, the simulation is more important than the reality.
Yeah, Miller has done this before, right, Like he kind of likes to use these words that exist in legislation and sort of point to the direction he wants things to go. I guess, yeah, Like he did this by calling anti for an enterprise. We sort as to an extent with Title forty two and his reference to migrants to the public health threat. This is kind of a trademark move for him.
Almost no hours after the federal judge blocked the federalism of Oregon National Guard, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered three hundred California National Guard to be deployed to Portland. In the next day, Texas Governor Greg Abbott authorized four hundred Texas National Guard to be sent to Orgon and
Illinois in coordination with the Department of War. On Sunday night, the federal judge that previously blocked the organ National Guard federalization made another ruling blocking the deployment of troops from California and Texas, finding that it was quote, in direct contravention of her earlier tro This secondary toro halted any Federalization relocation or deployment of any Guard members to organ
from any state. The Trump administration has appealed these rulings and oral arguments will be heard on Thursday, October ninth in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Stephen Miller called this ruling quote one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen, and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the
twenty twenty fourth election by fiacht. By Monday, Miller told reporters, without going to specifics, that the president quote has a very broad range and set of authorities when it comes to deploying federal assets.
Quote.
That same day, Monday, Trump discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act in a White House press conference.
The Insurrection Act.
Sir, what the Insurrection Act under what conditions or terms would you?
Well, I do it if it was necessary. So far it hasn't been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enacted, I'd do that if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.
Sure I do that.
I mean, I want to make sure that people aren't killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe. And it's turning out, and we started with DC it's been so successful. You look at what's happened with Portland over the years. It's a burning hell hall. And then you have a judge that lost a way, that tries to pretend that there's no problem. Actually she's not even saying that there's a huge problem. Important. I'll tell you what the problem is.
Crime.
Okay, crime. There's a huge problem in Chicago. It's called crime. And we want to put out the crime, and they want to inflame the crime.
Oooo.
Sure, that's the clearest statement we've gotten from the President on the conditions in which he would invoke the Insurrection Act. I think, specifically pointing towards governors, mayors or courts that prevent ice from completing immigration actions in those cities and counties.
Yeah, and that's the thing that we've gotten for him. That's the most specific indication of things that are happening right now that could cause him to do it. We still don't have a direct I'm going to do it, but I think it's pretty clear from this that he wants to these people in circles. I'm talking about wanting to do it for a long time, and I think this is in some ways the closest we've gotten to it.
Yeah, and that's why you have people like Miller and Trump himself using the word insurrection when describing what's happening, to establish a pretext to actually follow through on that and declare the Insurrection Act when it suits them.
Yeah.
I think it's worth noting Mellos doing Miller is often the originator of many of these kind of legal theories. This one has made its way to Trump.
I'm going to declare an ad break and then we will return to finish our reporting on war ravage Portland. Okay, we are back. DHS Secretary Christy Nome has made some pretty fantastic claims about the nature of these protests and the threats facing ICE agents both in Chicago and Portland. And I'm just going to play her clip from Fox News here talking about the threats to ICE.
Our intelligence indicates that these people are organized. They're getting more and more people on their team as far as attacking officers, and they're making plans to ambush them and to kill them. We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It's been two thousand dollars to kidnap them, ten thousand dollars to kill them. They've released their pictures, they've sent them between their networks, and it's an extremely dangerous situation
and unprecedented. So we've put protective detail around those individuals, change some of our operations to keep our officers safe. But make no mistake, this isn't just about protesting free speech or that they don't like that people out here are upholding the law of our country. They're actually going out there and saying, kill these people, and we'll give you this much money to do it.
It's quite a specific claim.
Miss What she's doing there is conflating alleged cartel bounties on ICE agents with protests happening outside of ICE facilities, making it sound like the protesters are putting ten thousand dollars kill bounties on ICE officers.
Man, let me tell you, nobody who's out at ICE right now has collectively ten grand to put towards a bounty.
Yeah, what are we doing here?
On Tuesday, October seventh, Christinome arrived in Portland, Oregon, along with her conservative podcaster sidekick Benny Johnson, who has been live streaming ICE operations in Chicago with Nome. Benny posted on x Everything app breaking DH Secretary Christinomes stares down army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit from the rooftop of the ice facility here in Portland.
Finally someone took that chicken guy down to size.
I want to play the video that I think one of us should like set this stage for what we're seeing.
Secretary, do you have a message to the protesters, especially the man in the chicken outfit?
Man in the chicken outfit, I.
Just see him now.
Goodness, you can do better. Our goal is that people would peacefully protest, but that we would still be allowed to en first law in this country.
So it's too bad.
They're uneducated and elanformed.
If you look at this protest, there's about what twenty people on the street corner adjacent to the ice facility, nearly as many journalists and photographers as there are protesters. And this is what Bennie Johnson is describing as an army of Antifa, is these twenty people holding signs across from like a police line on the edge of the ice facility. At a later point, Benny zooms into another street corner which similarly has about a dozen people over
a one block away from the ice. This is the army of Antifa that Benny Johnson is referring to as he, along with Nick Sorder, stand with Christinome on the roof of the ice facility, surveying the area. Which is just a fantastical sequence of events. We time traveled and told me that five years ago that Christy Nome and Betty Johnson are going to be on the roof of the ice facility calling a man in a chicken outfit an
army of Antifa. I guess I could believe you, but it would still I guess it would still be upsetting it.
I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't like, I wouldn't like argue with you. I'd be like, yeah, I mean that sounds like a natural extension of where things are at this point in time.
On Tuesday night, Nome went on Fox News to talk about a meeting she had with local law enforcement and the mayor where she threatened to send four times as many federal forces into Portland, Oregon.
Sure Man, I told them what we wanted.
We wanted more security here at the building, a bigger buffer zone to keep our officers safe. We wanted to have their streets opened up again and not let the anarchists run this city anymore. That we would ask them to continue to back us up like we've been asking for, instead of what they've been doing the last several months, which is just leaving our officers hang.
Out to dry.
The chief asked if I wanted to meet with the mayor, and I said absolutely. Came back and just met with a mayor, and I'm so extremely disappointed he's continuing to play politics. Did not commit to any of those promises and said that he'd give me an answer by tomorrow, and I'm hopeful that he will. What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some
of these security measures for our officers. We were going to cover him up with more federal resources, and that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so that the people of Portland could have some safety.
Again, almost no one's even there. I can't exaggerate the degree to which this is not a major factor in ninety nine percent of people's day to day because number one, where the ice facility is is cordoned off from the rest of the city like pretty isolated chunk. It's isolated,
you might say. And number two, just like most people that I know who were out in twenty twenty don't really have a clear idea of what they should be doing right now or what the most useful thing to do is right now, and have spent a lot of time in front of federal riot lines and aren't right now. And like it's this complete disconnect between what's actually going on in the city and like what's what's being reported,
which doesn't matter really, Like it doesn't impact anything. That everything they're saying is a lie, yeah, because their people believe it.
It's just kind of frustrating now and this information is all into tro document that blocked the deployment of National Guard quote. Plaintiffs provided all of the PPB call logs in the month of September, which showed that Portland Place Bureau worked in close coordination with Federal Protective Service supervisors and regularly checked the status of the ICE facility as
detailed above. They also showed that protest activity in September generally did not involve the violence against federal property or personnel unquote. Where the police Bureau have been working in coordination to manage the protests outside the ICE building, They've not abandoned ICE officers. That's not actually what's happening. A federal judge is deemed that local law enforcement are more than sufficient to handle the protests outside of the ICE facility.
The Trump government just really wants to send the military into cities, as they've already done with d C, as they were wanting to do with Memphis, Chicago, Portland eventually like New Orleans. This is just something that they really want to do. On Tuesday, October seventh, Texas National Guard arrived in Illinois and are currently stationed at an Army
reserve center in a suburb south of Chicago. Sunday night, Governor Pritzker made a statement reading, quote, this evening, President Trump is ordering four hundred members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon, and other locations within the United States. We must now start calling this what
it is, Trump's invasion. It started with federal agents, will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state's military troops. There is no reason a president should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation.
Unquote.
The state of Illinois announced that they would be seeking their own tro against Trump's military deployment. The Illinois Attorney General said in a statement quote, the American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly for the reason that their city or state leadership has fallen out
of a president's favor. And on Monday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order establishing city property and unwilling private businesses as ice free zones and discuss the deployment of troops from out of state by warning quote the right wing in this country wants a rematch of the Civil War unquote. Yeah, and so we have a kind of news update, which is so this is being recorded on Wednesday, October eighth. It's possible this will again change
by the time this comes out. The most recent information we have is and this is supported by CBS per a statement from US Northern Command, which is part of the Defense Department's War Department. But yes, they're sitting five
hundred troops. I'm just going to read the direct quote Illinois, approximately two hundred soldiers from various units of the Texas National Guard and approximately three hundred soldiers from various units of the Illinois National Guard were activated into a Title ten status and have arrived in the Greater Chicago area. National Guard re mobilized for an initial period of sixty days, will be under the command and control of the commander
of US Northern Command. So that's where we are right now. Yeah, there is out of state Guard deployed into Illinois, like they are in this borders of the state right now. When Haiggs has tried to deployed California National Guard to Oregon, it's unclear how many of them actually arrived in Oregon, but we do have confirmation and photos of Texas Guard in the borders of Illinois.
YEP.
This morning, Donald Trump truthed on truth Social that quote, Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also unquote, is that the President of the United States calling for the jailing of a mayor and governor.
Yeah, he's also more recently calling for the jailing of everyone who burns American flags and a anim of a year in prison. Again, the legality here is deeply unclear. There's not a legal underpinning for that, other than he's instructed the DOJ to start going after those folks.
But yeah, this is just words that he's saying.
But I think the words that he's saying are sometimes not always, but sometimes important.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I want to turn from here to the other occupation of Chicago, the one that has been doing significant damage already in the city as we have been covering, which is the Ice and Border Patrol deployment in Chicago. There's been more escalations that we are going to spend a small amount of time talking about. ICE has begun detaining unhoused people. We have reports of eleven total people they've detained so far. Most of them have been released.
But the most prominent, and this is something that Brandon Johnson specifically mentioned in his speech, was for people who were taken in Chicago neighborhood called Broadview, who were outside a shelter. According to the Chicago Reader, we don't know where they are Jesus as if when say they're just gone, no one, no one has been able to trace them down. Yeah, and this seems to be part of a broader trend of ICE agents taking action against people who I mean
appeared to be US citizens. We saw this a couple like last week with and this is another thing that Brandon Johnson specifically mentioned with him with ICE agents just choking a black man out on the street. The major story is that there has been a second shooting by ICE in Chicago on What we know for sure about this shooting is that on Saturday morning, an ICE agent shot a woman named Merrimar Martinez, who appeared to have been part of a group that was following ICE vehicles
around the city. Martinez was shot and drove herself to a nearby auto repair shop, where a medics and police showed up. I'm going to read the Sun Times' account from the shop managers who they spoke to of what happened when she got to the body shop. Quote, the shop manager spoke with a nine to one one operator and said, send somebody quickly because this lady is bleeding profusely. I mean it was instant puddles. Police and paramedic showed
up a few minutes later, he said. As paramedics place a turnquit on Martinez's leg and arm, a bullet fell out of her arm and onto the shop floor. The manager said, Martinez thankfully does not seem to have been really really severely injured. She is like she is enabled
medical condition. Now, EHS put out a press release almost immediately claiming that their agents who were quote ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles and that quote Nortinez, woman they shot was quote aren't with
a semiongmatic weapon and has a history of docsing federal agents. Now, it is worth noting that best practice when looking at Department of Homeland Security statements, especially under Trump administration, is too simply assume that they are not telling the truth until any details they have mentioned are corroborated. What the
exact situation was before the shooting is very unclear. Both Department of Homeland Security and federal prosecutors have claimed that a group of cars basically boxed in an ice vehicle, and their repeated claims that they were ramming the ice vehicle and then that's why the ice agent opened fire. That's the DHS's claims. Yeah, yeah, this is this is the DHS's claims, and these are the claims that are
made in court documents. I want to read from the Sun Times also Martinez's lawyer's description of what's going on, because it is significantly different from the government's account. And it's also it's also worth mentioning that there's already been some deviation between the court documents and the DHS statement. For example, the court the DHS statement mentions a semi automatic weapon, and there's just simply no mention of that in like in any of the sort of charging documents.
The deadly weapon that she's being accused of doing an assault with, which is what she's been charged with, is the car. Yeah. So here's here's from the Sun Times. So PARENTI, who is her attorney. Parenti also offered to play an agent's body cam video that shows the shooting, noting prosecutors did not show the video that he claims
disputes the government's version of the shooting. Parente said the video shows an agent turning a federal vehicle left into her Tina's vehicle, after which the agent says, quote, do something, bitch. The agent then exits the vehicle and shoots Martinez. The attorney said Martinez had quote seven holes in her from the shooting, and that agents were in such a hurry to take her into custody at the hospital that they
had to return later when Martinez began bleeding from her wounds. Yeah. Yeah, so this is a significantly different portrayal of the shooting. We do not have access to this bodycam footage yet it has not been released to the public. There is a video that we do have that does not show the shooting, that shows some of the stuff leading up to the shooting, from that sort of audi repair shop that she went to. It is still very unclear what exactly happened here other than the fact that I shot
this woman. That's the only thing that we one percent know.
She does have a concealed terry license and had a handgun in the car with her. Yeah, the lawyers have claimed she never brandished the weapon and it was in the passenger seat.
And there's no evidence that she did brandish the No, no, no.
Nor is Ice even claiming that, like like, Ice isn't even claiming that she brandished weapon. Ice isn't claiming that she fired a weapon.
No ice specific claim is that when she was arrested later, she had the weapon on her, which could refer to the vehicle or whatever.
Yeah. Well, and I will say so. The initial Department of Homeland Security press statement said that she was armed with. Correct, Semiana had weapon. I think a lot of people took that to mean, you know, because DHS was implying stuff by saying that she was armed with even though she was not.
They're inhabiting the ambiguity of the right, Like yeah, right. They also said that they fired defensively, which makes you infer that this person may have fired at Ice. Yeah, even though DTS has never actually claimed that, they are trying to selectively use words to make people infer things that they're not even actually explicitly claiming.
Yeah, yeah, and we're going to have to get more details when we're going to have wait to see exactly what happened. But what the evidence supports right now is that ICE shot someone who was doing rapid response work and it is frankly a miracle that she wasn't severely injured or killed. And this is again the second time they have done this since ICE's deployment in the city. The first time they did just straight up kill a man.
So we'll be following the story as as it develops, and we'll be following the continued actions of ICE in Chicago and other places. Yeah, and we will continue to talk about stuff after these ads.
All right, and we are back MEI was talking about rapid responders here, and I want to talk a little bit about one of the tools that they were using, which was called People Over Papers. There are many of these apps that have sprung up since the January of this year, rate since we saw much more visible immigration enforcement on the streets. Padlet, which was the I guess bulletin board type service that was People over Papers relied on, has removed People over Papers right say it violated their
terms of service. The removal comes just a few days after a Laura Luma tweet, which tag the CEO claimed that People over Papers was violating the terms of service by quote harassment, stalking, privacy violations, inciting violence, and other unlawful activity. Luma, there is noting things in the terms of service she perceives people to be doing with People over Papers right. This has happened after another of these apps, ice Block, was removed from app stores last week, also
involved some LUMA posting to Blee. Tricia McLachlin, the DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, has claimed and this is in contravention of what's widely held to be caught precedent and the Lord. She has claimed that videotaping ice agents is doxing them, and separately, Christie nom has claimed that doxing is an act of violence. We can join the two dots there in videotaping ice agents is an act
of violence seems to be what's being suggested here. We can see the consequences of this argument in the deportation of Atlanta area report to Mario. Mario was held for more than one hundred days in detention. He was arrested a No Kings Day protest. If you can remember back when people were doing those things, but the charges against him were dropped. However, since then the government has argued that his filming of law enforcement constitutes a threat to
public safety. Mara has now been deported back to El Salvador. He's an Atlanta reporter and like I guess to editorialize, it would be really nice to see a fraction of the advocacy we saw for Jimmy Kimmel as someone who's actually doing reporting right, not just trying to be funny.
He's not as big as Jimmy Kimmel. There's never as any followers.
Yeah, yeah, but he's also been sent to El Salvador, whereas Jimmy Kimmel was sent back to his mansion in Hollie What eggs, Yeah, exactly for like less than a week. So I'm going to link in the show notes both to an abvacy campaign and the freem of the Press Foundation piece about Mario, and you guys can can check that out if you'd like to. Second character for this
week is Tom Hohman. You guys will remember Tom Horman Bordizar, a guy who famously, well relatively recently, has become famous for scenically accepting a bag with fifty thousand dollars of cash in it in an FBI sting operation. Let's play this clip of Pam Bondy, who is answering questions in front of Congress here about what happened to the literal bag of cash?
What became of the.
Fifty thousand dollars in cash that the FBI paid to mister Homan in a paper bag? Evidently, Oh my.
God, Tom and Jerry asked shit.
She's looking through her notes right now, she's selected the.
Page, Senator.
As Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently stated, the investigation of mister Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing, and.
That was not my question. My question was what became of the fifty thousand dollars in cash that the FBI delivered, evidently in a paper bag to mister Homan.
Senator, I look at your facts.
Are you saying that they did not deliver fifty thousand dollars in cash to mister Home?
Senitor as recently stated, the investigation of mister Homan was subjected to a full.
Question by the FBI agent that's by.
Department of Justice prosecutors. They found no evidence of wrongdoing.
That's a different question. What became of the fifty thousand dollars? Did the FBI get it back?
Mister white House? Excuse me, Senator white House, You're welcome to talk to the.
FBI the report to you.
Can't you answer this question?
First of all, this guy's name is mister Whitehouse. Senator white House, Charrison. That surely is a little confuser.
Yeah, maybe against some emails for a wrong person. Sheldon Whitehouse apparentes.
Theoretically, if he had a job for the administration, his email will be white House at white House dot gov.
Yes, that's cool.
Yeah, Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen, given the line of questioning that he pursued here. But yeah, you can hear Ritchie. She seems to be unwilling to answer. Where the paper bag of cash money? Yeah, has gone incredible stuff.
But it's easier to lose that than you'd think you.
One would assume that FBI would have some kind of tracking capability when giving someone fifty thousand dollars in a paper bag, But here we are.
Maybe it's a no country for all mint kind of situation. Whoever found it was smart enough to dune transponder first, we will probably never know if they're smart.
Yeah.
Well, building on that, what Pro Publicer is now reporting is that Homan went into business with a Pennsylvania consultant named Child Soul, and that Soul has been offering cons on how to obtain contracts a Department of Homeland Security. So Homan consulted for Soul's firm during the buyer the administration, and during that same period, Soul became the chair of
Homan's Border nine to one one Foundation. According to their reporting, Pro Publica has called into questioning the extent to which Homan has actually recused himself from contracts, saying that he participated in meetings with executives about government contracting plans. So normally a government official would be bound to steer clear of their former business associates for at least a year
when they enter office. Right, I can't like consult for Garrison Inc. And then become procurement for DHS and immediately buy one thousand of whatever Garrison Inc. Is selling you. You can tag Garrison on a blue sky where they will read what you think they're selling.
If this will result in me getting fifty thousand dollars in a paper bag, then you know, maybe.
Yeah, in this instance, I would be the one getting the fifty thousand dollars from Garrison Ink came return for buying whatever it is that you are selling orbs.
Maybe yeah, that's not a great deal.
Yeah did Yeah, I did.
Well.
Seems like it was a great deal in this instance for a Tom Holman.
Yeah. Well.
Their reporting suggests that Herman went from a relatively modest income in twenty seventeen to being a multimillionaire by the time he filed his twenty twenty five disclosure documents. When you assume federal office that you have to file these disclosure documents disclose your assets, I guess the famous one is Jimmy Carter's peanut farm. But it seems that during that time his personal network increased significantly, right, he did
a lot of consulting. He became like a talking head on Fox News in the Biden administration, it's difficult to summarize the intricacies of history. I encourage you to read it. For instance, of the third person called Mark Hall, who appears to be doing some work on behalf of Homan,
but also retaining relationship with Soul's clients. It looks a lot like what's happening is that the people who Homan had been doing consulting with and now trying to make money saying that they have act special access to DHF based off that consulting. This kind of builds on some of the stuff that we'd already seen and spoken about
last week. Right finally, on the immigration beat, I want to talk about a case where the petitioner's attorney has stated that the petitioner I'm not going to name the person, I don't think it's necessary, was taken to hospital by CBP after they severely injured his leg on a raid in a car wash in Carson, California. He was booked into the hospital under a pseudonym and kept there under armed guard from August to twenty seventh until October fourth.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, So this person, they weren't coming up in the detainee locator, right, They hadn't apparently been allocated in a number, which is what you'd normally used to look someone up on the ice detainee locator. And I guess the argument there was that they weren't booked in until they left the hospital, so this person basically disappeared for more than a month. The judges granted that petitioner an attentive restraining
order in that instance. Right, But I think this I have been receiving a lot of messages about a Chicago older person who was detained by ICE at a hospital, and I have seen a number of reports that suggest that that's because Ice were detaining people in the hospital. To my knowledge, the only person they detained in the hospital was the older person. They were not detaining patients
at the hospital. They were there because they had bought somebody to the hospital in order for that person to be a patient, because that person was in their detention, in their care and needed medical assistance. I have seen outlets I don't should I name them, like Democracy Now got this wrong, and so that they were arresting people, so like Democracy Now is one example, right. I have seen outlets reporting this as Ice were in the hospital
detaining people. Nothing I have seen leads me to believe that, and lots of things I have seen leave me not to believe that. It doesn't mean it's great for the people who are bored in hospital by ICE, and sure it fucking sucks. I'm sure it has a chilling effect on other people going to hospital to know that they are there, But so does reporting that suggests that you can be picked up in hospital if you're an impatient or if you're in the emergency room. That stops people
accessing medical care, that actively puts people in danger. We need to be really, really fucking careful when sharing this shit. That includes people who are journalists or claiming to be journalists.
People are so upset, rightly so, with what ICE is doing that there can be this attitude and I've encountered before of like, well, by undercautioning people, that's the biggest risk. And it's like now when we're talking about whether or not people go to the hospital for life serving care, Like, no, I'm sorry, it's just not like these are not equivalent risks.
More people are going to be in a position where they would be scared off from going to the hospital and not in any danger from ICE going to it, then might possibly be in danger going to the hospital. Like you're just endangering people by trying to get them to believe it is not safe for them to go receive life saving emergency medical care at this stage. Now, is it possible that's going to change?
Good?
God, I'm certainly not going to say no, right, I'm certainly not going to say no.
One hundred percent.
But that's not where we are right now. Just overcautioning people is not a net good in this instance. Yeah, absolutely, sometimes it is, but not here because again, if people don't go to the hospital on time, they die.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I'm aware of cases where people with genuinely life threatening medical emergencies have been had to be persuaded to go to the hospital by people right because they had seen this. Because these rooms don't just spread via social media built by WhatsApp groups and things, and it can be very scary for people.
Well, and people largely construct their beliefs on reality by like what the weight of the people that they know directly or follow are saying is true. And when you see fifty people, some of them you kind of know, some of whom you've at least followed to an extent online, all say this is unsafe, then there's a tendency to get angry when people are like, well, I don't know, maybe it doesn't it actually, yeah.
Like I mean, like I care about the safety of migrantes in this country. I think anyone who looked at a totality of my work would would believe that right, like it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. That means I want them to go to hospital when they're fucking sick, and that means that people who are saying things that are not true. I understand why, right it lines up with the other things that we know to be true. ICE
is doing terrible shit. Shit is terrible, but it is still an area where we need to exercise extreme caution when reporting on things until we know that it is true that I saw coming in to hospital and taking people out of the beds, which again, not a thing that I think is happening. Let's pivot a little bit to public lands. Some think that I think about a lot, but we don't always report on here, but that I think is very important. I want to talk about the
Roadless Rule today. So September saw the end of the comment period. It was a very short comment period on the Trump administration's proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule. The Roadless Rule, if you're not familiar, protects over fifty eight point eight million acres of national forest land from roadbuilding, logging,
and other industrial activity. According to the Center for Western Priorities, ninety nine percent of the comments submitted, of which there were more than one hundred and eighty thousand, were opposed to rescinding the rule. The roadless rule has previously had broad bipartisan support. It was not a particularly controversial thing. Agriculture sexuary Brook Roylins announced a proposal earlier in the summer, saying it would increase logging and decrease wildfire risk. Research
suggests that the opposite is true. Cutting roads into forests provides more ignition opportunities rate By allowing people to go into those forests, you allow those people to do things which lead to fires happening, right, get cars overheat, they smoke cigarettes, they fucking shoot steel targets. In the middle of the summer, we.
Just had a guy brought in for the Palisade fires, and he was like a twenty nine year old uber driver who was having clearly a bad mental health day, called in after he set a fire, but kind of made weird denials about it and like fled to Florida. And it kind of just looks like he was listening to a song where there were people lighting fires and decided to light a fire and it got way out
of control, way too quickly. Yeah, and it wasn't even the same night, Like it took like a week because like they put out the initial fire, but it kept burning through thick underbrush which eventually got recot. That's my understanding based on the articles that I've read. But like, yeah, it's I mean, in that case, it's just a guy who's not super well.
Yeah.
Sure.
And like the other thing the cutting grows will do is it will change the fotiage. Right, You'll cut down the big trees and you'll have smaller shrubs, and that those are easier to burn the big trees.
Right.
The Wilderness Society has some date on this. I think they found that forestwich roads were four times more likely to have fires. I will link to that Wilderness Society data. The roads rule was passed under the Clinton admin and it's being rescinded as part of a March executive order which which sought to increase US timber production. I want to note that there will not be guys with chainsaws rolling into your favorite national forest like next week or
next month. Right, Like building these roads would have to be financed by the United States Forest Service, which is of course currently well, if you go on the forest website, forest Service website will tell you that radical left Democrats have shut down the federal government right now in a pop up but we did it, guys. Yeah, so the
Forest Service finally coming out against the work left. But yeah, the Forest Service would have to finance these, and it's currently understaffed because of the voluntary and DOGE based layoffs. It's not particularly well funded. I don't see the Forest Service going in for a lot of road construction, but it might be wrong, right Trump Kelly seems to see not importing timber as a major issue. I'm not quite
sure why. Like, I guess there's this. This was an issue in Britain when they had to respond to the Spanish Armada cut down a lot of trees back then. Not familiar with very similar Yeah, national security issue. I think we can agree right to Spanish.
I mean, I'm just excited that now I can finally drive my ATV through these you know, environmentally protected area damn right garrison without getting harassed by the park ser Yeah, woke Left.
I'm going to be the drunkest guy on an ATV and Joshua tree. I'm going to drive straight for the biggest tree I can find. Anything over a thousand years old is fair game for my bumper. Baby, it's hit close to home. I'm sorry, James, Jesus is seething right now. Jessu is going to fucking cut me.
If I see anyone stealing or destroying a Joshua tree, I will I.
Would never harm a Joshua tree. I would never harm a Joshua tree. There's one kind of tree I will harm in discriminately and in the tree of paradise. But that's good for the environment. But those trees kill them wherever you find them.
I think the only Joshua te it's okay to hate it is the album by you too.
Yeah, that's also burn every copy of the album josh Yeah, I'm okay with destroy raise it from the run over those within ATV. Yeah, I wouldn't mind if that became extinct.
Why not?
Yeah?
May you want to talk about tariffs. We're talking about timber, and of course there has been recently a tariff on Canadian lumber woke trees coming in from our neighbors to the north. So sorry, perhaps that's why we need to destroy our national forests.
I mean, Canada kinda is destroying theirs and they still have trees the export.
Yeah, I do. I guess one thing I haven't said about public land that you should always say when you're talking about public land is that it's all native land, actually, and the framing of public land is a place for white folks to recreate. It's not the correct framing. It's not how we win this fight.
And no, and you should also if you care about not just the damage that fires do, but conservation in general, and you ever hit the opportunity to go through like up here in the Pacific Northwest, you can go through chunks of the forest that are managed by the state and that are managed by the Bureau of Management, and then you can go through chunks of forests that are managed by the indigenous communities. And the way in which
forests are managed is very different. Yeah, and different in a way that one is the right way to do it and the other two arts yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
This is land that was all stolen from its indigenous stewards by means of genocide, and we should give it back.
And it's not just a matter of that's the the right thing to say, but also that is the right way to preserve those lands.
Yeah, the people who've been in stewardship of those lands so much only than in America has been a country anyway.
Watch the I think nineteen ninety one movie clear Cut, which is set in Canada. But a fucking banger, real good movie.
Check it out.
I don't know if those two things are compatible, what Canada and a banga.
Yeah, it's good. It's it's it's a it's about an indigenous activist and a white lawyer.
Who you don't like cronin What's wrong with Histor?
He's fighting the log movies. It's it's really good. It's about this, Like, Okay, I want liberal white lawyer who's fighting like a logging company and this indigenous activist who takes him and kidnaps the head of the logging company and takes them into the forest. And that's all I'll tell you about the movie. It is a fucking banger.
I don't go on this podcast make fun of your own country, Garrison, David, you will all, by the way, like Clearcut, watch that fucking movie Tariff talk.
Yeah, movie Tariff flick at that for fucking segue. Yeah, locking jazz.
Rocking jazz pot locking locking jazz, rocking jazz bo okay. In Lightning Round, we have huge We have two pivot points here. We're gonna go for the timber pivot instead of the movie pivot. So Lightning Round. Trump is imposing a ten percent tariff on softwood lumber, a twenty five percent tariff on upholstered furniture, and twenty five percent tariff on kitchen cabinets. In vanities, Ikea is the thing.
Ikea is tyas Shay's long industry is collapsing in Canada as we speak.
Yeah, so this is this is going to be in effect October fourteenth, get him now. And then also these tariffs are scheduled to increase at the beginning of next year. The upholstered furniture tariffs are increasing to thirty percent, and the kitchen cabinet and vanity tariffs are increasing to fifty percent at the beginning of next year.
Oh yeah, the idea that there's a vanity tariff is very funny to me, like not as now, but just like as a concept.
Yeah, people, these are nominally lumber industry tariffs. I think there's some kind of housing development brain inside of Trump's head rattling around as to why there's some only tariffs on vanities and upultered furniture. Who knows, baffling. The Canadian government has been attempting to lift the tariffs. It has not worked. Negotiations once again failed today, which is octper eighth. Okay, bouncing from that to something that's also very important, blashet
Wete and I feeling more important. So one of the issues with the current government shutdown is the threat to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants, and children, which is normally called WIC. The rec funding is extraordinarily important because it feeds several million people. And Okay, this story is very, very weird because we haven't gotten any direct thing about how this would work outside of the
Press secretary saying it. But the Press secretary is saying that Trump is going to fund this program with the money from one of the tariff pro Yeah. Now, it is worth noting that this is just very unconstitutional. Exceptionally unconstitutional. Is a violation of the part of the Separation of powers where they say that Congress is the thing that
that Levy's tax doesn't decide where the money goes. But it's also it's not clear if this is even happening or how it could even remotely happen, but it is being reported. WIC has been a program that Trump has been using to push his narrative about the government shut down.
Yeah, I think forty percent of children are on WICK right now. Like, this is an extremely important program. It's one of those things where like again, there was complete biparties and support apart aside from complete lunatics until very like you would never have heard like a fuck Wig statement. It's done a lot of good for a lot of
people who need a lot of help. I did see a statement from the Wick Council that basically asserted that, like, look, we'd be excited if you would keep us keep Wick funded, but using tariff money if not a sustainable or like reliable approach to do this, just just fund it by playing for government program to the youth a way.
Yeah. So the other major tariff news that we have is basically, for the last couple of weeks, Trump has been threatening to impose one tariffs on pharmaceuticals. This was originally supposed to go into effect in October first, and then Trump started cutting a bunch of deals with drug
manufacturers to exchange sort of lower price agreements. And also, and this is the major significant element, as we've seen with the whole bunch of companies that have made deals with Trump pledges of large scale investments in US manufacturing and production. These tariffs have sort of been staved off, and the administration is now saying that they won't do it because they don't need to, because they have resear greevments for drug companies. Pfizer was the first major company
to sign a deal. This has been part of an initiative called trump RX, which is supposedly coming in twenty twenty six.
Man.
Yeah, and the plan is to have direct to consumer drug sales by forcing these companies to give the US Most Favored Nation status, which like basically the thrust of this is giving specifically this trump RX thing, the prices that these drug companies charge to undeveloped countries. However, and this is extremely important to not being reported very much. Trump Our Rex, assuming this comes program comes into being, you can't use insurance on it is only you can
only buy drugs off there. You would only be able to buy drugs off there without insurance, So it probably doesn't lower your drug costs at all if you have really any kind of insurance.
Certainly lowess it cost your insurance company has to pay, right, like if you're insured badly.
Yeah, right, you know, And so the actual good that this could even potentially do, I think is very very limited. Yeah, but that's sort of what's going on. This is the part of the initiative. If you see people talking about how he's lowering drug prices, it's specifically for this weird trump are X thing, which again you can't use insurance
to use. So there's been a few other tariffs that he's talked about, and I kind of want to set a spectrum of how real a tariff is because there's there's a whole bunch of different kinds of terifts that Trump announces and then nothing happens on yeh. So, for example, you can have a kind of tariff where he announces on social media but there's no date, right, So one hundred percent tariff on foreign made movies. This is the second time he talked about it. There's never been a
date attached to it. It seems to be something that he tweets about and then forgets about. It never happens.
On the more real end, there are tariffs like the one that is currently being proposed as twenty five percent tariff on heavy trucks that's supposed to go into effect in November first, but there is no executive order, so that one we can't treat as real as for example, the lumber tariffs, which have an executive order, although so again you have to wait for these to actually go into effect, which which would be category sort of three and four are isert executive order and has the date
of the executive order doing the thing passed. So we have a couple of floating tariffs. From there, we have those twenty five percent tariffs on heavy trucks which are supposed to go into Efectivember first, assuming it's an executive order. We have this film tariff, which is the was the scariest tariff by far one tariffs on foreign made films.
What are they tariffing that have to hoist the black flag? Again, my friends don't know has any idea what that means?
We have no, absolutely not. We have no clue how this is no detasfled.
Okay, he just said what film. Okay, sick good. I'm glad that everyone's equally clear on that.
Get back to torrenting Babel.
I think I think the final thing we should talk about is so on November fifth, the Sutreame Court is going to start hearing the case against a bunch of the tariffs that Trump has been doing. We've talked about this before. The Trump administration has also stated that even if these terriffs are found on constitutional, they are going to continue to apply tariffs themselves using other laws.
That's good.
Even if they lose the Supreme Court case, that doesn't mean that all the terriffs are suddenly just not going to happen anymore. He will probably try to reimpose a whole bunch of them under different terrorf authority, and we'll go through this whole process again. But yeah, this is this has been this has been terriff talk.
Great.
Okay, So I have a fundraiser for you. We're doing Bouquette again. Buqutt Tan is an Alavi Kurdish woman. Because of her beliefs and her ethnicity, she found it very hard to live in Turkey. We've we've documented Turkey and
Kurdish people's relations quite a lot on this podcast. She is now living in southern California and she needs to raise money to pay her lawyer for her asylum case, and the website for that is GoFundMe dot com, slash f slash urgent, hyphen help, hyphen four, hyphen, bouquette, b u k e t s hyphen, asylum, hyphen, or you can click it in the show notes. If you would like to contact us with a news tip, you can do so by emailing cool Zone Tips at proton dot me.
It will be encrypted if you use another proton email address from one end to the other end, So if that is something that is a concern for you, that is how you can reach out.
We reported someone's nos, We reported the news.
Yeah, we reported the news.
Hey. We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Folzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We can now find sources forere It could happen here. Listened directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.