It Could Happen Here Weekly 218

And let's just get right into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the dhs gov online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends outside of X the Everything after, this extends outside of Blue Sky the Internet in general.

This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti fascist like education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So bear with me. This is going to be kind of an odd episode, but I think I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same

traps that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's let's let's start by talking about some communications posted on the internet by at dhs gov a picture of a painting titled American Progress by John Gast captioned a heritage to be proud of, comma a homeland worth defending.

So on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting, or at the very least of painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth that the tide of quote unquote progress as Indigenous people are are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.

a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past. I would say ten fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and usually fourteen eighty eights, with eighty eight meaning hal Hitler because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common Nazi tag. You'd see this in graffiti, you see this embedded into into posts, see this in

like Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post, we can not only count fourteen words in this tweet, this is actually a fourteen eighty eight because two of the h's in this in this post are capitalized unusually and that means hal hitler wo because hc eighth letter. Uh oh, but wait, actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.

eighty eight. It's literally jermatria and then also counting the total words in the whole suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for another fourteen What are we doing? How is this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump administration and finally proves that they're fascist. You can just look at all of the

fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking, ha ha ha ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with AHHD one eight eight fourteen, nice trigroipers. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post, you can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide

of manifest destiny. While the administration, the DHS is currently furthering as no nationalist policies, they are doing this.

a real tree. And you don't need to sound like a da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious, like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is already fascist, if they're just saying things openly and furthermore doing things, what purpose does a dog whistle? And this

is something that we're going to discuss. Are not just saying this and closing the episode, We're going to get into these Yeah, And I think part of what's happening here everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that we're missing what's right in front of us. Qwanon has a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist in the way that it did in twenty eighteen. That the q Andon cult conspiracy theory as like a singular

cultish project is kind of no more. But q Andon has a cultural victory over the entire United States, and not just on the right wing, not just on Mega. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on

the Internet. And this is what like everything is. And like the real turning point I think for the right wing was probably the twenty twenty election in like a massive fracture from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading up to that which contributed to this yeah, and I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole

new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because that door is opened now, I'm seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blueing on conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across. And gonna do a whole

piece on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blue and on conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and like secret codes thing, because it's so evocative of like, you know, Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have

been doing for generations. And we're to talk about that more and read a little bit of an essay on that topic after this ad break, and I will let you know. There's gonna be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode, So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the code. Okay, we are back speaking of the paranoid style in American politics. I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking

about here. This was an essay written in the sixties by Richard version hoff Setter Hofstetter Richard Hofstetter, one of the first like modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna I have three paragraphs here that I selected as being relevant to the current topic at hand.

their contact. Unquote. And I like that section specifically because fourteen eighty eight is a real dog whistle. We can see this used. There's aspects of people are who are trying to search for this and trying to search for patterns in the communications of unadmittedly fascistic government agency that I find like sympathetic, like I can understand, because yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote quote. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of

conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenarianists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days, and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before

it is fully obvious to it. As of yet to unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Unquote, hof Setter is talking about something that that me and Robert specifically have have have discussed a lot on this show before how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.

the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,

and they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety to it. They're just saying it. They just want to do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and it's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

the Patriot Front playbook. Here the ICE director said that he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this, you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the Paraoid Style of American Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style

is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with fectuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully

and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this Nazi code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping, looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this

is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that I was talking to this is like arguing, like, ICE doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason to.

eight nine ten words not fourteen ten words. Wow, DHS said quote, serve your country, defend your culture, no undergraduate degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants. It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest No, And I want.

is doing. But also like if you look at any pulling at all, but anything the people are doing, everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're that all these people are Nazis, because it's like that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already. Like trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, hi, i'm your neighbor, you also

fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this shop people are doing in la and like follow these fucking ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of yeah, trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge, so people do it less even though it's less effective.

attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention, yeh, of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things that we you know, argued for visibility around to kind of be used in a way is that don't really make sense that it's it's kind of like trying to

tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because I mean, one person who I was lightly arguing about the SOD line was saying, like, this is not numerology, and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes, And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.

What they're actually like saying, which has like proto fascist or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it. Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's gonna finally realize that DHS has an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message? Is there one person

is going to become given to us? No, that's not the purpose, And so trying to conceptionize this is like we have to we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about.

It can stage any protest movement it wants to. Right, And I think you've seen this a lot in the American case, where like I see people who are like genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately be killed because the American State is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to the Panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits

into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right, Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump

out and grab people. It's because when they tried to fucking we stomp them, right.

falling into this trap like more so than others. And it's a little bit evident of something that like I've described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen era, and where you have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This

is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote, Nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote, and like, first of all, this is not a game. This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who

are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And I think that view of like anti fascist like education risks repeating like the Okay symbol debacle right where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like easter egg anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barber streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating impulse because they're

the little bitch boy ideology. I think as a rat, Limit put it one of one of my favorite posters, and like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thought and careful of how we do it. To recap the Okay symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and had then having the media try to convinceate with people that anyone who uses like the okayhand symbol is secretly

a fascist. And this scheme worked, and eventually the Oka symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol.

Even though this whole thing was like invented as like a joke online, and I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the fourteen words dog whistle, with an increased use of the fourteen words and invoking the fourteen words among far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS gov account, and there a heritage to be proud of, homeland worth defending American

Progress like ethnonationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded fourteen words dog whistle inside, I can't tell you that. And the point of trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we

talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi, that is how Nazis works sometimes, And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want, But you know what I do want right now?

that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bit ideology because it's too timid to enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what rat limit predicted. There's this current trend on x Everything app where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these.

Of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual person affiliated with the government, but making a whole media blits about random blue check Twitter girls. Maybe not so much.

Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if of random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Hile Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their instapot.

And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film like god asmr videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes. Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important, and they're bad, right, I'm not saying these things are good.

Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure acti deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this like this neoliberal.

The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand when the Trump administration started using military carry planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Columbia. Mexico refused to allow US military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later

caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did but has a larger esthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this like image aspect I have some quotes from Fisher, and that's kind of all I have left.

feel representation instead of do the action. And this is this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through a whole bunch of different analyzes of how

capitalism functions. Right, this is this is one of the three lines of the society a spectacle, and it's this real issue that we're dealing with now because again kind of in a sense, what has happened to everything, right, And you can argue to some extent that like our channel being called cool zone media is sort of this is that all politics from every side has been completely

reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows, like allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of through the sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah, and it also is doing the same thing to us.

But the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't, right, And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of esthetic of sort of like of fucking living in images, right, and you know, go do the actual shit that the board is talking about in the society a spectacle where you and all your friends formed workers councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of

the people who are taking it from you. You're just gonna live in the fascist timare forever.

blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress driving out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying the torch of progress. It is an ascetis sized politics on like a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat this antioat quote Mark Fisher in capitalist realism quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.

Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence have celebrated the destruction of public space, but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. Unquote. This is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.

it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows its cause? Lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being a negative miracle, a milidation in which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship is held to

be one of the virtues of capitalist realism unquote. And yeah, that's what me is talking about with Gidebor and society of the spectacle. That's a trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still as that mean it's like good, right, That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher A Lawn Badeu quote to justify

their conservatism. The partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal like stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS,

but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lamosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda. And already parts of this are slightly outdated. Oh yeah, because we're shit now, Like, but this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions of people die, right. One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through asthetics of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump

administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do. Yeah, and so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane that we should not allow at all.

so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys, we're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them, so you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is like the prime, the prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, Do you have any any final wise notes?

in New York. There's not a lot yet known about how things played out precisely, so I don't plan on Telvin too deeply into my speculations, but many have been drawn attention to the similarities between this recent historical moment and another notorious US invasion of a nearby Latin American country, Panama, back in nineteen eighty nine. Hello and welcome. Take it up in here. I'm Addressage and I'm here with.

like the US said its Homeland Security secretary to the inauguration of the current Panamanian president, Like it was really just, i know, not great, Like it didn't make me happy.

the US invasion of Venezuela here in turn twenty six. Yeah, So in case you did know to some basic facts about Panama, it's a country on the Isthmus connecting Central America to South America border in Costa Rica and Columbia. That's a population of just over four million people, and it is best known, of course for its canal, which is a real feat of human engineering with an unfortunate tragedy behind it, that links the Pacific Ocean to the

Atlantic and via the Caribbean Sea. This canal is one of the principal reasons why the US has so long been invested in the fate of this still Spanish speaking country. So you see, if they go all the way back to eighteen twenty one, where as a member of the newly minted Republic of Grand Columbia, the country gained independence

from the crumbling Spanish Empire. But after that Republic of Grand Columbia dissolved in eighteen thirty one, Panama remained part of Columbia until, with US back in, it seceded in nineteen oh three. Now, Panama had actually tried to gain its independence from Columbia before then, in eighteen thirty, eighteen thirty one, and eighteen forty, but among many other reasons, despite being part of Columbia, it didn't have any roads connecting it to the rest of Columbia due to the

Darian Gap. Can you tell me a bit more about that part of the world, because I know you have a lot of intimate knowledge of it.

to immigrants. Many of us are migrants too. We go to Panama for education, I mean center from the Panamanian border. Patrol slash military are there in small numbers, but like, essentially you are outside of the state in this area right. Certainly in terms of provision of services, it's very little, and that's because largely it is geographically very difficult to access. To get there. Just to sort of paint people a picture, I took a plane. Then I drove all the way

to the paved road till that ended. And then I hitched a ride on a truck all the way on the unpaved road until that ended. And then I hitched a ride in a dugout canoe that was literally a log that someone hollowed out, and I took that for about five hours, and then I walk for a while, and that was how I got to where I stayed. It's still extremely difficult for people to cross, and I guess,

like you know, I like to read James Scott. I think about the way he thought about the art of not being governed, right, and it's still one of those areas that it's hard for the state to extract tribute from.

It's unimaginable. People die every day. I saw that myself. It's incredibly dangerous and difficult journey, but people take it because they want a better chance at life.

But despite that fact, Panama only succeeded in gain its independence with the help of the US as American ambitions and local elite ambitions aligned for development of the canal. Now, all this and what follows was recommented in Emperors and Jungle, The Hidden History of the US and Panama by John Lindsay Poland, which I picked up my library and it was really a fantastic book that served as my main

resource for this research. In NCA Poland's words, Panama was a longstanding laboratory of US imperial power and some of the things I found out about in this book I never heard of anywhere, and it really shook me that these kinds of things were happening, you know, at this crossroads of continents.

a heavily racialized approach to the region. You know, they saw the Colombian army as ignorant mongrels, and they saw the Panama Isma's civilians as savage and animal like, especially as Americans and American capital were involved in the construction of the Panama Canal railway, which was built between eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty five to facility the Californian gold Rush.

You see America as iron Panama for a long time because they saw it as an appealance side for a trans Isthmus Canal, the next big project in international trade. And aside from their direct interventions, they were signed in treaties concerning Panama even before Panama was independent, while I was expanding in its territory through the conquest of Mexico, the US signed the Bidlack Treaty with Colombia in eighteen forty six to guarantee Colombian control over Panama in exchange

for free access to any future canal. As we all know, a MA always keeps its promises. So only four years later, in eighteen fifty, the US and England assigned the Clayton Bulward Treaty, which ensured their joint cooperation in any future canal. You know, not, as I said, the US and England signed that treaty. Yeah, because Columbia was not involved at all.

independence prestige. Yeah, and then you know, they wanted to keep up with the English who were busy colonizing and pillaging much of the world, so they attempt to set up a colony in one of the least hospitable places

on the planet unsuccessfully. You know, people got malaria. When I was there, I was told that every type of malaria is present in the gap just because you have such a global population of people, right that the Mosquitoes are buying someone from East Africa, then they're buying you, then they buying someone from West Africa, South America, Nepal. You know that the Mosquitos is getting a global buffet. So back then obviously still malaria.

about it. I'd love to hear from you. But yeah, the Darien scheme was this kind of idea of a Scottish empire that ended up completely backfiring.

I think it's it's actually slightly narrower there. So whether they were early in that and just sor right, well, we'll establish ourselves here and then as we'll build a canal a bit later.

France in America's backyard as far as they're considered. Yeah, right, The Monero doctrine was established in eighteen twenty three, so it had to be activated then and there. And of course they didn't just want a canal for mercantile or geopolitical reasons. Remember they had just conquered several states in Mexico and reached the Pacific Sea to shine and sea, as they like to say. Unluckily for them, they were still quite a lot of Native Americans and Mexicans still

living in the western plains and West coast. Plus you had a lot of Asian immigration to the West coast as well, and the leaders of Americas didn't exactly appreciate that. You know, they wanted northern European stock to populate the western coast, unpolluted by having to share a railroad with

black and brown Panamanians. Yea, So they have to get a canal so the whites don't have to step foot off their boats and mingle with the locals, you know, because then they could stay on their boats, they could go through they never have to breathe the same air

as the local inhabitants of Panama. And so after wrapping up their war with Spain, having newly minted colonies in the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, they really really wanted a maritime shortcut to continue their great empire building ambihops because they see having to spend sixty seven days to reach from San Francisco to Cuba. They didn't like that, you know, going all the way around the Patagonian hu and all that. That's not fun. So the US created an opportunity for itself.

After Columbia Civil War between the Liberals and the Conservatives that you know raged between eighteen ninety nine to nineteen two. Here's what happened. In Panama City. Most of the white elites tried to stay out to the conflict, but in the rural interior there was a different story as the liberals found support among the mestizo peasants. In Panama, the civil war was less focused on parties whether you're a

liberal or conservative. It started off like that, but became a mass uprising against the distant conservative government in Bogota. So after several major battles, liberal forces had taken control of almost all of Panama's interior, and that's when the US society started in. They used the bid Lactreaty of eighteen forty six as justification to bring in their military to protect and said across Panama, in particular the real Way. Thus, the liberals were unable to finish their victory and had

to sign a peace agreement. And in the following months, liberal forces regrouped and once again took control of nearly all of Panama except Cologne and Panama City, and once again the US got involved and blocked Liberal entry into those cities. The US made it impossible for the liberals to win, so they surrendered and signed one last peachtreat in November nineteen o two. And in the civil war

and all that for what? Because more than sixty eight percent of Panama's cattle was wiped out, agriculture had collapsed. The armies on both sides committieder atrocities. You know, thousands of civilians fled into the mountains. Entire towns were emptied as people were escaping conscription and violence. Have you ever read the book One Hundred Years of Solitude?

negotiate for their own ambitions. With the war over, President Roosevelt was looking to finally negotiate for Panama canal rights. And if you couldn't get a deal with the French canal company there was ready to sell or the governments of Colombia. He had permission from Congress to pursue a canal in Nicaragua instead. Interesting the French company was definitely ready to offload their investment, because you know, there were

multiple attempts to set up a canal. The French had their attempt and they were ready to get it off of their hands, right. But the Colombian government rejected America's hey Hran Treaty, which offered what they considered an inadequate ten million dollars in exchange for sweeping canal rights. So

America made them an offer they couldn't refuse. What happened next was that Roosevelt and a French share holder named Philippe Punao Veria struck up a little side deal of their own, and the US Navy got orders to prevent Colombia from crushing any uprising on the Isthmus. Would their circumstances being what they were on the ground in Panama without Columbia intervention due to the US blockade, it didn't take long for Panamanian forces to declare independence. Finally, in

nineteen oh three. The Big Black Treaty the US had signed with Columbia was supposed to protect Columbia's control over Panama and ensure free transit throughout the Isthmus and the US did basically the complete opposite. You know, that's what makes them such an excellent partner on the global stage. You can always count on them to uphold, you know,

the highest standards of moral and and diplomatic decency. So before you know it, America was recognizing a newly independent Panama and drafting up a treaty with bunal Veria, who the new Panama government had given permission to negotiate a deal. But I'm thinking that they may not have known that bunal Veria had already practically signed them away. They didn't like the fact that they would behold on to a

treaty that no Panamanian had signed. But if the US made sure that the Panamanian government understood that if they didn't like the treaty, the Navy could always just let the Columbian Army come in to lift their independence in the bud. You know, it's like, oh, you don't like, who's going at us? Well, you know, it'd be a real shame if the Columbia Navy came back in to the picture. So the New Canal Treaty gave the US far more than they had even expected to get from

the deal. They claimed permanent control over a ten mile wide canal zone, inherited the French canal works and the railroad, and secured the right to seize land anywhere in Panama if they deemed it necessary for the canal's defense, operation or sanitation and trust and believe they would use that privilege to seize land at nineteen different times between nineteen o eight and nineteen thirty one, cumulatively hundreds of square miles thousands of acres, often without notice or compensation, and

always justified as necessary for canal defense. The canal's zone was removed from Panamanian courts all together, and the US was authorized to police Panama City and Cologne and build military garrisons. Panama's new constitution made it an effective US protectorate. Article one hundred and thirty six explicitly allowed the United States to intervene militarily anywhere in Panama to restore public

peace and constitutional order. Civilization, as Roosevelt argued, was the urgent mandate for all these actions toward building the Canal. Jesus construction officially began in nineteen oh four in a Panama exhausted by civil war, quanted by the French failure, and politically dependent on Washington. So he said, you had been to the canal zone and the museums and stuff, Can you tell me a bit about what you know about the canal's construction.

I think it was the gold ticket. Yes, Yeah, they were explaining how life was so much more difficult the lower down that system you found yourself.

and even how you were buried. You know, the American workers, the white American workers in the canalskan instruction, occupied the gold role and the Caribbean laborers were pushed onto the silver role. They had to perform the most dangerous work under the worst conditions, and so during the US construction phase alone, roughly fifty six hundred workers died from disease and accidents, and the overwhelming majority were the Caribbean laborers. Sadly,

their deaths were treated as expendable losses. Is an engineering project framed as a triumph of civilization. The Canal construction finally concluded in nineteen fourteen, and so after its independence, During the Canal construction and afterwards, Panama faced eight further US military interventions, including the famous ninety eighty nine invasion, which we'll get to in the next episode. But take a guess as to what their rationale was for these interventions.

for their rights against the elites. The US would get involved. Yeah, the U s supervised elections, they oversaw the police force, they vetoed public spending whenever it wanted, and the US bases lined the canal with thousands of troops explicitly for the purpose of maintaining quiet and protecting property in Panama. Panama's whole political history in the twentieth century was basically

shaped and dictated by US interests. In nineteen oh four, when general Isteban Whereas a threatened revolt, the US officials pressured Panama's president to fire him and dissolve the army entirety. In nineteen ten, when Vice President Carlos Mendoza, a liberal mulatto married to a black woman, seemed likely to win the presidency, the US Chief of Mission, Richard marsh threatened occupation if he were elected, so Mendoza withdrew his candidacy.

During World War One, the garrison commander used occupation imposed moral reforms by shutting down saloons and prostitution and publicly denouncing Panamanian cities as dens of vice and in the countryside, ostensibly to protect American landowners, US troops drunkenly abused, stole, and burned homes for two whole years until they finally withdrew, and in nineteen twenty five, the US came into Panama City to crush a Renter strike. Panama also became a

regional launch part for the US Empire. The Marines were stationed there, whore repeatedly deployed in Nicaragua, Mexico, and beyond. For the US Empire, the costs could always be externalized to Panama. Panama was an imperial laboratory for the US to test ideas and weapons they felt were risky to test at home. During World War Two, they tested various chemical weapons in Panama on nature and people, with minimal disclosure and almost no regard for long term environmental and human consequences.

the way down to Argentina. I think, geta can we can we just nuke the Darien and we'll just join them up and they'll be fine.

the canal. And so the idea of sea level canal is, you know, so much more convenient if you didn't have to wait for all those mechanisms to you know, drain and fill and all those different things. Yeah, but nuke in the canal to create a new sea level canal's really not the best idea.

People are living on the island, but they dropped a nuclear barn and then we're just like, oh, wow, it's blown off over there. Did the result in people being severely irradiated?

to this reborsal. Now, as is the kneeature of interventions, after a certain point, they started weighan because you know, the intervening power has created this setup that they find preferential, you know, so while they're setting up they may have to intervene on repeated occasions, but once they get to a certain point where their control over that area is crystallized, they don't have to intervene as explicitly as often, so direct US interventions waned as time went on, but the

tensions continue to build in Panama for independence from the US, and these tensions flared in January nineteen sixty four, which would get the ball rolling for a new treaty between the countries that will replaced the previous hay Banal for the year treaty. So, since that nineteen oh three treaty, Panamanians want to get revisited and revised. Remember, they didn't want to agree to it in the first place. They

were kind of coerced into its terms. Both the US's proposal to create a new sea that canal without nukes, which would require cooperation with the Paraminians there would be forced to say he was Paramian demands into consideration, and so as a concession to Panamanian nationalism, US President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson developed a policy that would fly the Panamanian flag alongside the American flag ou La la in certain parts of the Canal Zone,

and then JFK was assassinated in November nineteen sixty three, and then in January of the following year, Balboa High School, which was an American school in the Canal Zone, refused

to fly either flag. So on January ninth, nineteen sixty four, American students decided to raise the American flag for freedom or whatever, and Paramanian students from Panama's National Institute marched to the school to raise their own flag, and then there's a scuffle, and then the Panamanian flag is torn, and then that scuffle becomes a riot, where twenty four

Panamian civilians and four US soldiers were killed in the fighting. Yeah, and hundreds of Pamelian civilians were injured by the American crackdown.

In fact, one of the reasons the idea of the nuclear excavation was considered in the first place was that it didn't require as much Paramanian labor cooperation as a typical canal project would, and because tensions were so tense that Panama, they were like, let's circumvent them and just

just opening up ourselves. But when the nuclear canal project collapsed, and with mountain pressure from the Paramanians, the stage was set for the US to pull back its more direct and open medland in the country, at least for the while.

JFK's vice president Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in November nineteen sixty four, and as the annalyustry of the riots approached, he resolved to figure out that new treaty, explore c level canal preparations, and settle things with the contingency of Americans in office sought to preserve America's perpetual ownership of the canals, including the famous white supremacist art conservative Strom Trummer.

If you know anything about trum Thum, and you know that like fok found in kitchen, you know the fact that this guy was against Panaminians having control over the canal. It's not surprised. And this is the guy who set a country record for philibustering against the Civil Rights Act.

I know I have that threat still dangling. Yeah, stay tuned for the next episode this has When it can happen here, I'm andrews Age. I'm here with James Stout and as always, all power to all the people. This The year was nineteen sixty eight, and the military coup had just rocked the Isthmian country of Panama. Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, joined again by.

Panama became a testing ground for US Empire. Long before, during, and after the construction of the Panama Canal, the US had repeated military interventions justified as protecting transit or American and wrists, and Washington ultimately backed Panama's break from Columbia

nineteen oh three secure canal rights on Washington students. This independence came with a cost A caveat, a lopsided treaty that turned Panama into US protectorate and granted the US permanent control over the canal zone and the rest of

the country. Effectively, the canal's construction itself was an insurance feat built on racial hierarchy, and throughout the rest of the twentieth century, the US continued to demonstrate its control over Panama's politics, the attempts of its people to exercise their autonomy, to exercise their their rights, and the US of course engaged in the testing of chemical weapons in the season of land and the use of the country

as a regional military launch pad. And yet Pamelians continue to resist, continue to challenge US control, and continue to demand treaty reform. And so following the nineteenth sixty four riots, there was an opportunity to negotiate a new treaty, but after the first attempt was rejected by Panama nineteen sixty seven, a military coup would rock the country in nineteen sixty eight.

A feast to get this timeline thanks to my main resource for these episodes, Emperors in the Jungle The Hidden History of the US in Panama by John Lindsay Poland, but he doesn't go into too much depth on the military coup specifically, but that I had to look to an EPSCO knowledge advantage article by Carl Henry Marco titled

Omar Torrijos ousts Arias in Panama. What I learned from that was there was a coalition of National Guard officers that ousted President Arnulfo Arias, who was himself trying to consolidate control over the military so they would support his future elections by removing those officers he thought he could control.

So there were apparently racial tensions mixed into the school, as officers in the National Guard had increasingly come from Mestizo backgrounds as opposed to white backgrounds, which had traditionally supported the civilian predominantly white oligarchy. So a coalitionive officers tried to change this. At first, they were led by a guy named Major Boris Martinez, who seized power and ousted areas before anyone thought for a moment the things

were finally going to radically change in the country. Within months, student protests were crushed by the National Guard with arrests and beatens, making it clear that the military rule and not democracy, was there to stay. Not long after Martinez took control, he was himself ousted by a lieutenant colonel and the junta's chief of staff in nineteen sixty nine. That man was Omar Torrijos Herrera, a Mestizo officer with

middle class roots. Who sought to challenge the oligarchy. Somewhat fun fact, though, Lindsay Poland mentions that Torrijos sued as a spy for the US military intelligence from nineteen fifty five to nineteen sixty nine, informing the Americans about everything from labor unrest and student activities to political issues and the Soviet Chinese penetration. Tori Host was one of the soldiers who helped suppress the unrest in nineteen sixty four. In fact, oh well, but in power. Publicly, he styled

his military rule as reformist. He pushed through land reforms that opened up estates long when applies by elites, and promised change for rural Panama. But although these reforms were popular, very few poor Panamanians actually benefited. Meanwhile, he overhauled the bank n doors in the country, such as Panama quickly became a hub for offshore banking and money laundering. But it can't be said that he didn't do anything positive for the country because he was the one whom ased

to establish a new treaty with the US. The US was facing international pressure this point for the continued ownership of the canal, especially thanks to a nineteen seventy three United Nations Security Council session hosted by Torrijo's in Panama City. In nineteen seventy seven, Tory Host negotiated Jimmy Carter and secured the treaties that promised the Canal's return to Panamanian control.

The Tory Host Carter Treaties which agreed to transfer the canal from the United States to Panama on December thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, with the surrounding territory of the canal so And returned first in nineteen seventy nine, and the US military being allowed to remain the country until nineteen ninety nine. But despite this major win, torri Host knew his rule was under pressure, so he announced a controlled return to civilian government. He created a political party dominated

by the National Guard. He stepped back from the presidency. He installed a civilian figurehead named Aristateius Royo, and he promised elections by nineteen eighty four. But then his private plane crashed in nineteen eighty one. Which it was funny how frequently that happened back in those days. You know, yeah, small aircraft doesn't randomly. These political leaders are constantly dying and blamed crashes very sad, and so the democratic reforms

didn't happen. Instead, Torijos's intelligence chief emerged as the new military dictator of Panama. His name was Manuel Noriega. Now, as Lindsay Poland talks about in the book, Noriega was another informant for the US in the mid nineteen fifties, but his career in the military wasn't going anywhere because he had a history of alcoholism and beaten women until

Torijo's hand picked him as his intelligence chief. Manuel Noriega came up inside a Panamanian National Guard that had been shaped, trained, and closely supervised by the US during the Cold War. He was educated at Peru's National Military Academy, trained at the School of the Americas, took courses in intelligence and conter intelligence in nineteen sixty seven, and trained in psychological warfare at Fort Benning. By the late nineteen sixties he

had also become a regular informant for US intelligence. You know, he took more than just a few courses. He was very much embedded with the Americans and so totally hosts dead. Noriega seized the opportunity to take power. Initially the US was pretty much okay with this. No Diego had previously been a CIA asset, providing intelligence and governments and militaries

across the region, including Cuba. He had helped suppress leftist movements, facilitated US regional operations, and maintain stability around the Canal, and for that he was well compensated more than one million dollars from the cie WOW, plus at least another one hundred and sixty two thousand dollars from the U. S Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. By the early nineteen seventies, US agencies already knew that no Diego was

deeply involved in drug trafficking. In nineteen seventy two, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs even considered assassinating him. But he's just too useful for him to go so soon.

with them on that operation. He also maintained relations with both Nicaragua and Cuba, and meanwhile, under his leadership, the Panamanian Defense Forces expanded their role in both arms and drug smuggling networks, much of it feeding directly into the US drug market. So Noriega and the US had to break up in the mid to late eighties. And this

is also thanks to US domestic politics. You see, in nineteen eighty six, the Iran contra scandals saw a key figures who had shielded Noyeka previously be removed from their positions. At the same time, the crack co key and panic took over US politics again a very racialized situation. Congress had passed sweeping anti drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and the media was freeing this whole drug problem as a foreign,

racial black threat. Yeah, Noriego, being a Panamdian dictator, ended up being a very useful prop villain of sorts for the burgeoning war on drugs. So in February nineteen eighty eight, US Grand Juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega for drug trafficking linked to activities from nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty four. Sanctions followed within weeks, supposedly to force amount, but they didn't. The sanctions called shortages. You can only

collapse and suffering among ordinary Panamanians. Yet Noriega stayed in power used the crisis to justify emergency measures and nationalist rhetoric, as is usually the response. I realize with US inflicted sanctions they end up creating almost a support base right for the administration and power, because you know you're trying to make the people suffer and it said people end up standing with their government even if they have critiques of that government.

And you know, I'm sure they're probably MASAD agents on the ground, as they are in most protest situations, not necessarily massadity agents, but intelligence service agents in general, from agencies around the world.

ninety elections after his chosen candidates were decisively defeated. Protests followed the Panamine and defense forces crushed them, and the images of his opposition figures being beaten by his military saturated US to the visions to reinforce the racialized image of the savage Panamania because many of the soldiers that were doing the beating were black and brown, and the opposition figure in question was white, So they were able to clip that and you know, create a whole narrative

around it that served their interests. Now, in October nineteen eighty nine, a coup attempt by Panamanian officers failed and the officers were executed in the US. Meanwhile, criticism of President George H. W. Bush had intensified, with editorials and senators accusing him of weakness for his failure to act decisively against Noriaca, and oh boy, call a man. We to go on and improve his prove his manhood, you know.

So further motivation for what came next was Noriacer's nomination of Thomas Duquet as the first Panamian administrator of the Panama Canal Commission. Bush did not like that pick, and if the US invaded, then they could pick who they preferred, So there was another motivation. The invasion was also motivated by a desire to showcase the Pentagon's post Cold War mission.

You know, the Cold War was weiganing at that point, particularly with the fall of the Berlin Wall mayor months before, and so a new threat, a new boogeyman was needed to justify US military action in Latin America, this time in the form of the drug war story. And then on December sixteenth, a U. S. Marine Intelligence udit ran a roadblock near Pameian military headquarters. Parmanian soldiers opened fire,

killing Lieutenant Robert Pass. Another U. S. Soldier and his wife were detained, and while the soldier was beaten, the wife was threatened with the rape. Within twenty four hours, Bush ordered a full scale invasion on December twenty or nineteen eighty nine, the United States launched its twentieth military intervention in Panama since eighteen fifty six, and by far the most violent. It was the worst destruction Panama had seen since Columbia's Thousand Days War. Eighteen thousand people lost

their homes. At least five hundred and sixteen Panamanians were killed by official Pentagon counts until Army estimates, however, but civilian deaths closer to one thousand jeez, and many believed that the true number was even higher. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed. El Toro Rillo, a poor, mostly black and Mestizo community built originally for canal workers, was bombed and burned to the ground. San Miguelitos also hit and across the country.

Thousands were detained in prison camps. Damage exceeded one billion dollars on top of losses for nearly two years of samshuns. The US used overwhelming force, including stealth bombers, the bonnassaults, and heavy firepower in densely populated areas, against a Panamanian

force of only about three thousand trained soldiers. Noriego was jared flew into the United States, tried and imprisoned, and as Lindsay Poland writes, quote, the names of the twenty five US soldiers killed during the invasion ruled across TV screens around the world. He had a register of Panamanians killed during the invasion has never been published even in Latin America. End quote.

United States in this you know, selective outreach. Yeah, because at the very same moment, our wills atrocities were being inflicted by leaders across the region, carried out by regimes firmly integrated in Washington's could races. In Guatemala, for example, security forces kidnapped, tortured, and raped Diana Ortiz, an American nune before she managed to escape. But there's no evidence that this triggered outrage in Washington or cares for military intervention.

And then in El Salvador, Gorilla forces launched an offensive on San Salvador, and the army responded by murdering six Jesuit priests. The same forces went on to arrest, torture, and intimidate international aid workers and church prisnel, but none of this was treated as grounds for invasion. Regime she enjoy emergency action. The US only removed Noriega because he wasn't convenient to their ends anymore, and the aftermath of

that invasion was utter devastation. Panama was left without a function government until the US military stepped in to fill the vacuum after two or three days. American forces formerly took over the administration of the country under the Pentagon Plan called Operation Blind Logic. U S officers were a signed to supervise twenty two Panamian ministries and state agencies

effectively run in the country for months. At the same time, the military crippled what remained of Parama's civilian administration by season roughly fifteen thousand boxes of government documents. The invasion permanently resheeted Panama's political reality, dividing it between those absorbed into Noriega's nationalist rhetoric and those who had welcomed foreign intervenure. It also sent a clear message to every political actor

that Panama's sovereignty was conditional on their cooperation with the US. Meanwhile, in the US, there was baillium murmur against the government's claimed right to invade Panama, removed its government, dismantle its military, and infect costs on Panama's poor, black and Mestizo communities. The US kind of moved on from Panama after the vision.

I mean, they continued to meddle, intervene, but they've basically gotten what they wanted at that point, which was the removal of someone who was not going to cooperate with them anymore. Unless you believe that they disrupted the drug trade with the arrest of Doriego, Panama continued to function as a transit point for cocaine and a center for money laundering at basically the same scale as before. So finally, what exactly is the connection with Venezuela. If any James you want to.

don't even have to declare a war. We don't even have to do an invasion, right, we can just just kidnap a guy.

to liberate people, that went to liberate the canal. It's so disappointing to see people still look at foreign policy

and binary terms. And like you said before, I think one of the things that the Venezuelan people I'm speaking to express deep, deep frustration with is that when they take a risk right and go online and share their frustrations with both Chavismoon and with the United States invading their country, they are told by Western leftists that they must be either THA agents or pretend Venezuelans like Americans posing as Venezuelans.

of course, primarily the lifting of US sanctions. Yeah, and you know, secondarily their own self directed liberation from the imposition of the government on their projects. But you know, there are those who have those projects who support the government's involvement, who get received funding and that kind of thing.

by someone else. Or that they're not capable of understanding. Like people in Venezuela are extremely aware for the consequences of US intervention. I lived with people who were tortured in Chile. When I lived in Venezuela, many people came from fleeting Pinochet to Venezuela. It was a place that previously accepted migrants. Before migrants I ended up leaving in large numbers as they have now. People are extremely aware of what US intervention means. You know, they're much better

educated than most Americans on affairs in South and Central America. Yeah, they know the game that is being played here, and I would just like to see people afford them the same humanity that they afford people in this country. Shouldn't be that difficult, but it genuinely seems to be.

the conditions they've been placed in. Yeah, and I think there's room for those conversations we had without you know, erasing that ipe. We see your perspectives and favor of that simple binary that keep coming back to.

we can give criticisms from a place of solidarity. One of the things that I learned when I was in ra Java, like, not everything that happens there is something that I think is perfect or good, right, And there are a lot of people there, including internationalists, right, Like there's an anarchist group Techoschin Analysis, who are an anarchist group within the revolution, and like the revolution itself is not purely anarchist, right that they exist to give criticism

from a place of solidarity, and both groups wanting the other group to get better, right to have what they want to succeed, which is how our relations with these other Like I guess liberation struggles in Venezuela would be a reasonable term to use, right, Like, our relationships with them should be that like we care about you, We hopefully both care about these things right about human liberation, about people being able to live with dignity and respect,

and we could disagree, but we're ultimately disagreeing from a place of solidarity and support, not of condescension, which is what I see far too much. I think when I'm on the internet.

restore democracy, and defend American lives. And this is in spite of the fact that US collaborated with that very same regime for years beforehanded Interestingly, in Venezuela's case, the justifications we also pretty similar. At first, stopping drugs, restoring democracy, defending American lives, and just like with Panama, they faced sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and economic pressure. But after the invasion of Venezuela, Trump just dropped the pretense entirely, just came out and

said it, Yeah, we want their oil. So what what is the international community going to do? About it. The laws do not apply to us. In fact, we are going to withdraw from all of those international agreements that you know, threaten not interest. You could look this up that the US literally put this into.

drug war hysteria can be found in both invasions. And just like Panama left the media consciousness after the invasion as though the problems were solved, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar situation play out after they get what they want out of Venezuela. Suddenly all the issues of Venezuela have would no longer be in the picture because America got what they wanted. Courses development story so it remains to be seen. That's all I have

for today. History does not repeat, but it's good to know because I find it often rhymes or power to all the people.

overtaking the country. And then there's a Q and A with me afterwards, where I sit down with Anne Burrows, who's the President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. She's also an internationally recognized leader in human rights and social justice. She's a chair on the board of directors for Amnesty International. She was jailed as a political prisoner for fighting apartheid in her native South Africa. She's a pretty cool person. So that is the episode you're about to listen to.

say some very strong things and it will be fantastic. So, without blabbering anymore, I am going to welcome Robert Evans, who is a journalist and author and the host of the enormously popular and influential podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Couldn't happen here. He's also the author of A

Brief History of Vice and After the Revolution. He has that rare ability to connect history, power and lived experience, and he will certainly talk to you about his lived experience in the trenches of Portland, and he'll do it in a way that's unsettling. As I've said, he's going to challenge us, He's going to be provocative. But that's why we've asked him to provide this keynote. So Robert please come on up, it's your moment.

year old daughter. As was noted earlier, we live in Portland, Oregon, and while my friend wasn't planning to attend any protests, certainly not with her daughter in tow, she was keeping up with developments in Minnesota, where ice officers had just shot a man they described as Venezuelan in the leg

and then tear gassed a neighborhood. One resident tried to get his family, which included small children and a newborn, out of the area, but they were gassed in their car, and then for good measure, ice officers hurled flash bangs into the vehicle. His six month old infants stopped breeding, and he had to beg repeatedly before officers would let

an ambulance in to resuscitate his baby. The child was fine, now, so my friend was right to fear that her little girl might get gassed for nothing more than existing in the wrong neighborhood. Questions like this aren't theoretical to thousands of American parents right now, and they aren't theoretical to me.

I was tear gassed more than one hundred times in twenty twenty, and I spent a fair amount of time pulling children and other civilians out of cars that had the bad luck to exist on the same city block as a man with a badge and a grenade launcher. And so it bugs me just a little when I see Governor Walls tell protesters to stay peaceful and not take the bait. In fact, I'm left asking what do

we think the bait is here? As best as I can figure it, armed and armored police officers blind firing chemical weapons that civilians is bait, while any response from those civilians beyond packing up and going home is taking said bait. Throwing back tear gas containers or anything else is somehow an escalation. So is standing against a riot line with a gas mask and a homemade shield to

stop your neighbor from getting deported. Any act of resistance big or small is all the justification federal agents need to deploy more of the violence they were already using. It's a neat little rhetorical game that liberals have let themselves become trapped inside. Playing that game lets them avoid answering one supremely ugly question. If your enemy controls the police and the military, and they've promised to destroy you,

what does fighting back even mean? Up until the present moment, the answer given by prominent liberals has generally been you fight by voting, or by making your voice heard, or something similar. I have a good friend who tried to make her voice heard in twenty twenty. She is now an early menopause in her twenties after being rendered sterile by chronic tear gas exposure. None of the officers who poisoned her, or thousands of other Portlanders ever saw a day behind bars.

and benefits. So when you hear stories of Homeland Security hiding Nazi songs and their recruiting ads for ICE, remember it's not just an ICE problem. And yet some liberals and progresses will tell me state and local police aren't the enemy. ICE is just an aberin agency, and surely there's some democratic cheat code we can use to get the good guys in blue to help us take them down.

So much of the unchecked authoritarian nightmare currently rampaging through our streets is the product of a system that views policing as sacred, officers as infallible, and protest as inherently suspicious and dangerous. This is the standard line, even within the halls of power or in the Democratic Party, and it is part of why regular young people in this country hate elected democrats. The people out, thank you, the people out in Minneapolis battling riot lines and sub zero weather. No,

there's no help coming. The cavalry does not exist, and so They've had to build their own architecture of resistance off and on the fly, since immigrants and other people being targeted by ICE can't safely shop. Local businesses like Rectangle spelled like wreck is in a car Wreck Pizza have raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and distribute food and other necessities. Gathering and handing out donated groceries feel safe, peaceful, and legal, but that's not how

ICE treats it. Rectangle's fundraising campaign earned them a visit from armed ICE agents, who, for the account of co owner Brianna Evans no relation, stormed up on our door to try to get in. Thankfully, members of the neighborhood had been standing guard. They were able to raise a significant force of locals to swarm and chase off ICE, who tried to gas the neighborhood as they were leaving,

only to have their munitions kicked back at them. This is one small example of the kind of networks of aid and resistance that are evolving on the ground right now as I speak. Another example that arose in the wake of renee Goods murder is ice Watch, an informally organized network that activates members of the community when ICE

shows up in their area. The logic behind ICE watch is that these federal agents will be less likely to engage in extreme acts of violence while surrounded by crowds of citizens following them and trying to wear them down with shame. This is a good tactic, and we here might rightly consider it a non violent tactic. But the federal government does not remember Renee Good was shot and

killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism. Through mouthpieces like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has made their stance very clear. Anyone impeding the actions of lawelaw enforcement is a terrorist. Waving a sign or filming an ICE agent makes you just as much a terrorist as someone who breaks a window or throws a rock. You cannot be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that

this government will not consider you a valid target. And yet again and again I see no spine or backbone from the men setting themselves up as the future of resistance to Trump. Gavin Newsom can't even stick to his own guns in his own podcast on whether or not ICE is terrorizing Americans. Senator Corey Booker's big recent suggestion was more training for ice agents, as if the men brutalizing our neighbors aren't doing exactly what they trained to do.

About a year after Joe Biden's inauguration, I found myself up in the woods of rural Washington, an hour or so outside of Seattle, doing firearm training with a group of leftist side met during the twenty twenty protest. And I know that kind of thing makes a lot of people here uncomfortable, and a number of things about our

shared future might make you uncomfortable. During a break in the activity, I sat down for a smoke with a guy who'd spent the last several years teaching himself to be an armor or someone who repairs and maintains firearms. As he'd gained skill with this, he'd started to take his grade school aged daughter out shooting. He didn't like that, he felt like he had to do this, but as he informed me, I don't know that she won't have to fight for her right to be treated like a

human being. Hearing that, I thought back to a woman i'd met a few years earlier in the bad lands of rural Syria. She'd been held as a slave by ISIS militants for two years forced into the kind of life that I hope is unimaginable to anyone sitting in this room. One night, as the Kurdish dominated militias of the SDF advanced on Isa's positions, she managed to escape.

After a harrowing journey on foot, she found her way to the sdf's lines, where the first person she saw was a fighter from an all female unit holding an AK forty seven. She made the decision to join up herself that very moment. She wanted training and a gun of her own, because then, she informed me, no man could ever own her again. Now, politics isn't supposed to work that way in the United States. People should not need to use weapons to defend their most basic civil rights.

But can you look at the mobs of armed men breaking into homes and businesses in Minneapolis and elsewhere, many sporting Nazi tattoos to go along with their badges, and tell me definitively that we're going to get through this

without a fight. At the end of the Second World War, as the dead were counted to cries of never again, an attempt was made to create a rules based international order built around the bones of the last failed attempt to do so at the end of the First World War, and as we stand here in twenty twenty six, potentially looking at a US invasion of Greenland, watching military helicopters circle American cities while secret police snatch victims from their

families and haul them off to camps and defortation facilities, we must admit that this second attempt to create a rules based international order is failing as well. We and our predecessors failed at building and maintaining a system that would stop all of this from happening again. There are

many answers to the question of how this happened. The fact that the United States from the jump refused to be bound by the same rules we hoped lesser nations would follow was certainly part of the reason why our insistence that no foreign court ever judge American politicians or

American soldiers was as narcissistic as it was insane. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the ongoing militarization of the border and border patrol, the granting of qualified immunity the police across the country, these were all further

steps on our national road to perdition citizens United. Our refusal to punish Facebook executives over the cabridge, Analytica Scannal, and our failure to charge the people responsible for January sixth with treason are all further steps on that road. I could talk about what led us hear for hours, but all that matters is this. We the United States are not special. Our long democratic traditions, great wealth, and high opinion of ourselves have not protected us. The enemy is that the gates.

in Minneapolis. The bad guys are outnumbered. We can't forget this, and they certainly won't.

ground in Minneapolis know this. Whenever I talk to activists, whether they live in Los Angeles and Portland at Land of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, I see the same thing I saw in people in twenty twenty, a grim but very accurate assessment of what this fight is going to cost them. They are going to lose eyes and maybe limbs to riot munitions. They and their friends will be arrested, beaten,

possibly tortured, and imprisoned. All of these things are happening right now to regular people who have done nothing more than speak up in lend aid and comfort to their afflicted neighbors. They are willing to risk their lives because they know the hour is late. I have not seen anything that approaches this level of commitment from the liberal intelligencia, from most elected Democratic officials, or from the party itself.

immediate threats. There's a book I come back to again and again when trying to puzzle out my own path forward in these unsettling times. It's titled They Thought They Were Free, and the author was a Jewish American progressive journalist and educator named Milton Meyer. Not long after World War Two, in the early nineteen fifties, he moved to a small German village to get and know and interview a number of ordinary citizens about their involvement with the

Nazi Party. Meyer called these men and women the little Nazis to contrast them from the big Nazis like Himmler and.

whole work. For Meyer didn't only interview little Nazis. He sat down with people we might call little anti fascists. These were Germans who never bought into Nazism. They hated it from the jump. They even fought it for a time, but they were never central organizers or members of the resistance. And when it became clear that the Third Reich had taken power, they faded into the woodwork to try and

stay alive. Meyer sat down with one of these people, a friend of his who worked as a chemical engineer, and asked him, one day, tell me, now, how was the world lost. Here's how his re spont started. The world was lost one day in nineteen thirty five here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law,

the law of total conscription. Under the law, I was required to take an oath of fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty four hours to think it over. In those twenty four hours, I lost the world now, This man, this friend of Myers, knew that refusing to give the oath wouldn't cost him his freedom, but it would cost him his job and make it impossible for him to get another.

No one would hire a Bolshevik, and although he'd never been a Bolshevik, once the fascists take over, everyone who isn't a fascist becomes the worst thing they ever called their enemies. Today, I guess it would be far left extremists or antifa terrorists. Anyway, Meyer's friend explained that he thought he couldn't risk being tarred with that brush. Not because he wanted to escape with his fan and get a job elsewhere, but because he genuinely wanted to stay

in Germany and fight the good fight. He had many German Jewish colleagues and other dissident friends he wanted to be able to help, and he calculated, quote if I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if I remained in the country, I

myself would be in their situation. And so he decided to take the pledge, making a decision I think many of us would have made, telling himself simply that by saying the words I swear to God, he was ensuring no human being or government could override his conscience, and he was as good as his word. Through the war years, Meyer's friend helped save many lives, using his apartment as a safe house for people fleeing the Third Reich. That's incredibly admirable. I think we can all agree. But Meyer's

friend felt nothing but shame for his actions. He said later of the day he took the oath. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. Now, Meyer was confused by this, saying what I'd imagine most of us would say in his position, Well, by taking the oath, you were able to save many lives. You were just one man, and the Third Reich was already in power. What more could you have done? Here was his friend's response. Of course, I must explain. First of all,

there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on.

Nazi regime. And Meyer responded, logically, you don't truly believe that your lone refusal could have overthrown the Reich in nineteen thirty five, and his friend said, no, of course not, but then went on to elaborate, there I was in nineteen thirty five a p example if the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth and education and imposition rules or might easily rule in any country.

If I had refused to take the oath in nineteen thirty five, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me all over Germany were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or indeed would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in nineteen thirty five meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany

were also unprepared. Each one of these hundreds of thousands was like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. Now Meyer still doesn't believe his friend because he's bogged down in the historical details, the nitty gritty of the rise of fascism. His friend, who lived through that, is instead focused on the greater moral and historic truths behind it. These hundred lives I saved, he told Meyer, or a thousand or ten,

as you will. What do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil? And if my faith had been strong enough in nineteen thirty five, I could have prevented the whole evil. Now, the faith he's expressing isn't a religious belief per se, but rather faith that right and wrong exist, and that when people step into our communities hell bent on harming others, they should be

stopped by any means necessary. So Meyer asks him, can you imagine anything your society might have done to sustain your faith, to ensure you and other Germans like you would have been prepared to resist. Meyer's friend realizes he's speaking about education, the very American idea that ideologies like fascism thrive in ignorance and can be banished by the light.

He insisted, Meyer was barking up the wrong tree. My education did not help me, he said, And I had a broader and better education than most men have or ever will have. All it did, in the end was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily that I might have done if I had been ignorant.

in nice rooms to discuss the issues. It is incumbent on us to look out at the people struggling in Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland and Philadelphia and everywhere else and ask ourselves, how can I support them, and how can I go further? The answer to that question is going to be a little different for everyone here, but none of us can afford to hold on to our old ideas of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable protest.

We're all going to have to become more comfortable with taking on risk, because the boundaries between what is legal and illegal are going to change on a daily basis

as we prepare for what comes next. We could all do a lot worse than to take the advice of New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeldt, who, during a vigil for renee Good, told his clergy get your affairs in order, make sure you have your wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.

And I think that when liberals today, all of us, you know, we tell ourselves that we're choosing a less evil, we're staying quiet, or we're sort of staying within the bounds of you.

I think of my own, my own experience. You know, some people in the room know that I was a political prisoner in South Africa, and you know, I made a very conscious decision at a certain point, and it was a moral decision to get involved in the Antipotheid struggle, knowing what the costs were. But I would love to hear from you about what it is you think that compels people, as I said earlier on, to cross from accommodation into moral risk.

of stay where they are, to not see what could come next, right, to not take a step forward, because they all have lives, because we have a functional enough society, because people have kids to get back to and jobs to get back to, and nobody wants to play act at an October revolution in between the middle of their work week. And one of the things that is a potential moment of change is when that the certainty of well, I have a life, right, and my friends have lives,

and we all have something to get back to. When you have a large enough chunk of the populace who doesn't feel that way, who feels like, well, they've taken what I would go back to, They've taken any sense of security I have. There's no longer a point in me holding back because this is not holding back, and I don't have anything to go back to that's one of the things that causes mass and sudden flips. And you asked a little earlier, do I think the window

is closing? And I think, kind of somewhat paradoxically, the window starts closing as soon as it opens, but it can never close all the way because there's not a lot of them. This is true in every country, with every state police force compared to the size of the populace. And so there's always a potential when enough people get angry and enough people get radicalized, that a system, even with the amount of violence behind it that ours has,

can be toppled. That said, the longer we let this go on, the more they have wrapped their fingers around every aspect of policing injustice in this country, the more ability they have given their officers to utilize violence, to utilize advanced weaponry, to utilize drones and things like stingrays

and whatnot against protesters. And so in that way, the window within which people can react and feel like they have a decent chance of getting away or of succeeding closes because the force deployed against them gets larger, which makes it a lot scarier and makes people less likely to take those risks.

what what is that resistance en compass? And we know that it can take many many forms. So I sort of want to push you a little bit more, you know, what does fighting back actually mean? But what for you feels morally defensible and what genuinely troubles you?

that I think actually has serious weight. The weight to uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is. The way to uproot a regime that says entrenched dis ours is a general strike. It's almost the only leverage that we have, which is why I'm happy to see them starting to explore doing it, and as a real thing.

In Minneapolis, you get this thing online and Twitter, on Blue Sky whatever, where people will periodically be like, we're doing a general strike next week, Nobody go to workers shop.

that uphold daily life and our daily comforts will start to fail if it's an actual, functional general strike, And so you have to have systems built up for that, and it's one of the things people don't often think about when they're hearing these kind of big hitch ideas for resistance campaigns. One of my favorite examples of this just in terms of like the difference between here's the idea and here's the things we have to do to

execute it. In Liberia, kind of at the end of the last really big period they had of like these kind of warring warlords, there was a massive protest campaign by women in Liberia that was I mean, it was basically pulled right out of Lizistrata. It was we are not going to have sex with our husbands, like, we're not going to do it. It was a mass resistance campaign. This has been written about. I know it sounds like Lizistrata,

but it's a real thing that happened. And when they were considering how are we going to actually do this, they had to consider some really ugly realities, including the reality of rape, and so a factor behind the scenes and figuring out how to organize this was how are we going to create networks to smuggle women out of dangerous homes and keep them safe for the length of

this protest campaign? Right and when you're talking about what's going to be necessary for a general strike, it's a ton of illegalism, right, you know, everything from people shoplifting food to stop people from starving, but to the very fact that carrying out and participating in a general strike, if one gains any momentum, will be declared illegal by the regime. They will try to crack down, They will arrest ring leaders, they will put people in black sites.

These are realities that have to be accounted for in the underlying planning, and I'm hopeful about the potential for something like that in twenty twenty eight. Now, when it comes to the stuff that really scares me, one of the things that scares me is what happens if we cross the point into which there is no longer any

hope or talk of peaceful resistance, right. And you have to consider this when you have a large number of armed men saying we just need to kill all of the people who are on the other side of this thing which we have in this country right now. There's a lot of them, They have weapons, many of them are in the police, some of them are in the military. These are realities of our present situation, and that's scary to me because when you cross that line, there's no

longer any question of like right or wrong. It's just a matter of like what can survive the onslaught, And that's I think the thing to try to avoid at all costs, because any sort of mass internescing conflict in the United States among the Americans, it'll kill is many people outside of the country because global food systems and global medicines to supply systems will collapse. Right, So we're talking about having governors call out the National Guard against

federal police forces. I think about both the necessity of that, because you have to try to resist and you have to try to make it clear is there anyone backing up the people from this federal agency? Is there anyone at a state level? Is there any kind of resistance that the state is going to respect? You have to ask that question, but some of the answers to it can take us to really terrifying places. And I don't

think we can avoid asking the question anymore. I don't think we're going to avoid a point at which some governor tries something like that, because Ice is going to continue grabbing, right, They're going to continue pushing what they can do in blue cities. They're not going to This is not the extent of the shit they're going to try.

just extraordinary. So you know, I mean again going back to my experience in South Africa and you know, this idea of a general strike, you know, what was ultimately the most effective weapon against the apartheid regime was mass mobilizing, mass organizing across the country, mass marches that actually that quite literally made it was a specific campaign to make

the country ungovernable. And it was on every level. It was consumer boycotts, it was mass marches, it was you know, marches specifically targeted at the aparthe eight laws that broke the back of the apartheight laws. And it was that aided by incredible pressure from outside, from outside sanctions.

truth and reconciliation campaign? You know, we had a truth and reconciliation campaign in South Africa and it was extraordinarily healing, but there was no restitution and at the end of the day, there was no justice. So what was the sort of transformational societal transformational aspect of that should we think about an American truth and reconciliation campaign? Is it something closer to Nuremberg? You know, who gain to be

seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who going to be seen as the architects of this anti authoritarian movement? You know, how do we as a democratic country or a democratic society, how willing are we to go to pursue those consequences? I mean, we've just seen how hollow that can be. You know, after January sixth, you know

how Trump has pardoned the insurrectionists. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, and I know we've only got three minutes left before I get hold off the stage.

and killing people right now. I would say that's a likely possibility, just given the way in which this country has handled similar things in the past and the ways in which other countries have handled similar things in the past. Let's not forget the Nuremberg. For all of the things about it that were good, was also a failure in a lot of ways. Right The vast majority of the Nazis who participated directly physically in the Holocaust did not

see any kind of criminal consequences. So when it comes to what I think we should have, I think we do need something along the lines of in Nuremberg. And I think that if you want to talk about the people politically who are committing crimes right now and who should be on trial, I think we can all come up with a lot of very similar names.

but in direct violence. Facebook knew for a fact that the military of me Amar was using their website to spread propaganda to help further in ethnic cleansing, and they made the choice basically to sit with that because it made the money, you know, And that sort of thing should be seen as just as illegal as a bunch of ice agents without a warrant busting into somebody's house with guns, you know.

the hundred times that you've been to your guest. You know, I've been to your guest many many times in my life, but it's definitely not one hundred.

eighth to February fourth. Very exciting events happening this weekend, as we know, the super Bowl and even more importantly, the Turning Point USA halftime Show streaming on Daily Wire Plus, America's Real Voice, National News Desk and TBN. I don't know what that is.

ten k because I wound up there. I hadn't even planning to go, but I showed up with a friend and as we were kind of watching the crowd pass, a buddy of ours came up who knows one of the people who organized the march, and was like, yeah, they're expecting like ten thousand people and I was like, there's no way they're going to get ten that fucking people out here. And then as the crowd went past me for like twenty straight minutes, and I was like, yeah,

that might be ten thousand people. That really is quite a lot of motherfucking people. It was an extremely diverse crowd, which I mean in the age sense primarily it's Portlands, so not in the in any other sense of the word.

is heading. We're kind of in like the middle of the crowd probably, and we see a cloud and it's like three point thirty in the afternoon. So the people I'm with, who have all been through their share of Portland protests, are like, that can't be tear gas. It's not even four pm and this is the Liberal March. There's no way they've gassed it already. Like I saw the front of the march. It was a bunch of

people in their fifties. Like, they're not forcing the issue with Ice, I don't think, but apparently pray the claims made by Ice. When the crowd reached the Ice building, people began throwing water bottles. So obviously that's a situation that can't be allowed to continue. So they gas the absolute fuck out of the march, and they gased it so much that the cloud of gas spread to cover pretty much the entire march, including the people who were nowhere near.

It was straight up a bad time and it continued for the next day. There was another march the next day that started at city Hall. This kind of galvanized people in Portland to specifically take up the charge of protesting for the city to basically not renew or cancel ICE's contract to use the building that they're based out of.

pissed again because they gassed the big Lib march. All of the unions are really angry, all of the nurses are really angry, The city government's angry. The Mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson, made a statement that all of the I say should quit their jobs should resign. I don't know that. I think that they're actually going to kick I out of its building now. To be fair, I don't think that ICE is really getting much done in that building

because it's locked down completely. They are using facilities up in Washington for the actual immigration stuff for the most part, so it's become I think it's largely a symbol. Yeah, a symbolic kind of dill. So we'll see. I don't know what's going to happen next, but yeah, that's the update from here.

it can cause miscarriages. There's documentation and miscarriages and at least three different countries as a result of tear gas use, although again it's not the kind of documentation you'd want for a medical thing because you can't really isolate out other factors that may have been happening at the same time, because you're trying to figure out what this and other things are doing to people's bodies in a place like Gaza where you have no kind of like clinical control.

But outside of that, there's evidence of missed periods that it can like delay or cause unusually painful periods.

airborne raids in Nigeria. On my news letters of people want to read that they can and secondly, I wanted to mention that Judge Anna Reyes has stated Secretary Nomes decision that would have rendered three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians without legal status when she was going to let

the temporary protected status expire. I have explained TPS several times on ED and in my first Darien series, so I'm not going to go into detail about it here, but if you'd like to listen to those, you can find out more about it.

these hearings to be public. This follows a slew of new Epstein documents that are released by the DOJ last week, which Robert You'll be you'll be covering on behind the Bastards soon.

emails between Brock Pierce, the Mighty Ducks guy, and Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, but that could mean anything, you know, that could mean anything.

Minnesota authorities. He was talking about handing over detained people who would be deportable, I think, but I have not seen a similar statement from state authorities in Minnesota, at least at a time so like take that with a pinch of salt. Right, A lot of what we see coming out of drum DHS just straight up isn't true.

Alaska or North Carolina will be deploying to Minneapolis. In some other Minneapolis related news, Don Lemon, front of the Park, was arrested Thursday, January twenty nine, and now faces civil rights charges for allegedly violating Face Act, which prohibits interfering with reproductive health services or people exercising religious freedom at

a place of worship. On January eighteenth, Lemon reported on a protest at City's church in Saint Paul, where one of the pastors is also the head of the local ICE field office. A magistrate, judge and an appeals court previously dismissed the charges against Lemon before the case was brought before a grand jury in Minnesota. Six activists and

one other journalists are also facing charges. We reported on this protest after it happened, and yeah, the DOJ has been trying to pin pin Lemon on this for the past few weeks. Yeah, probably not a great sign just for you know, general general first Amendment activity.

freedom of speech, they can go after journalists first. But like when someone is recording ice operations, they are doing citizen journalism, they are protected by exactly the same rights that we have as journalists who are doing this as our full time job. There isn't a special first Amendment for us. And so when the border patrol agents killed Alex Pretty, they killed someone who is at that time

engaged to journalism too. And like, I'm happy to see journalistic bodies standing up, not just for people who employed this full time journalists have put all of our rights to document and record.

Nome has said they will grow the program as funds become available, but those funds have been available for some time. Right In twenty twenty four document ICE document that talked about their pilot program study, they said, quote full implementation is expected by September thirtieth, twenty twenty five. Eagle eared listers will notice that it's in the past. However, in twenty twenty five, ICE began and rolling this back. They issued a directive which continued only implementing the body worn

camera program in the certain pilot programs cities. The Trump administration, in its second term, has called Congress to cut funding for body worn cameras by seventy five percent and reduce the staffing of the body worn camera program from twenty two people to just three. They have also cut oversight offices within DHS like oh IDO. O IDEO is like the nichest level of DHS. Understand that when you know of o IDEO, I think Biden created it. I actually

I've seen them once. It's the Office of the Immigration Detention ombardsmen. They came to the outdoor detention sites in hercumber which seems to be something of a concession that by the administration at the time denied people were detained in those sites. It had one hundred plus employees at start of the Trump administration. It also has three now according to Reuters. This most recent bill, as Garrison said,

does include funding and a mandate for their use. A federal judge in Chicago had already ordered agents there to wear cameras in November of last year. I should note that I also looked up the ice body warm camera policy and theoretically now in so far of any of these policies are being followed right, prohibits them for using body warm cameras for the quote sole purpose of recording people engaged in First Amendment protected activities. So they can

just use their phones for that. I guess that's what they've been doing.

He was filming on his own cell phone, so obvious. Obviously. Yeah, having a camera on the agent is not going to prevent them from killing someone.

Border Patrol ceased using their cameras early in the Trump administration, citing an issue with the bluetooth used by the cameras that could make them detectable. This is a thing that can happen. It is possible. There's a GitHub script for this. Whether they're justifiers stopping using them is an entirely different question. Both the agents in the pretty shooting were wearing body

can but we have not seen footage. The two agents have been identified by Pro Publica as Border Patrol agent Jizus jesse Or Choa and Customs and Border Protection Officer Field Operations Officer Raimundo Gutierrez. A Choa joined twenty eighteen. Gutierrez joined in twenty fourteen. Gutierrez is part of the Officer Field Operations Special Response team that is generally a team with training in weapons and tactics who would serve high risk warrants do raids.

And to get a look at what average regular registered Democrats believe. There's a new poll from you gov that came out this week based on data from late January early February that have seventy nine percent of Democrats saying they support abolishing ICE. Abolishing ICE is also up eight points with Independence and more people overall support abolishing ICE at forty six percent to forty four percent opposing.

found that that's not justified. Another eight attorneys have left or announced intentions to leave the US Attorney's office in Minnesota. They are now operating at less than half the capacity of assistant USA attorneys that they had in the early Biden administration. They've also lost several non attorney staff, and the Star Tribune reports that this is due to concerns about selective prosecution. And the exclusion of state and local

investigators from the good and pretty cases. In court yesterday, one federal prosecutor said, and I'm quoting from the transcript here, this system sucks. This job sucks. Another quotation. I am here just trying to make sure that the agency understand how important it is to comply with all the court orders, which they have not done in the past or currently.

I'm here as a bridge and a liaison between the one that in jail, because if I walk out sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt your honor, so that they could have a full twenty four hours of sleep. Yikes, it's just a person on the ragged edge. Yeah, that is someone who is breaking. Yeah.

part of the executive branch. Yeah, this is on you. Like it was a good, little little core exchange. And then finally NBC has obtained a leaked email from Greg Bovino showing tensions between himself and Todd Lyons. Lions is the acting director of Immigration and custom to Enforcement. Lions attempted to prevent Baveno from engaging in widespread sweeps in which agents kind of ran around check papers on anyone they think might not be a citizen, and he encouraged

him to do targeted operations instead. And then mister Bovino said in the email quote, mister Lyons said he was in charge, and I corrected him, saying, I report to Corey Lewandowski, Garrison has just made a face for those.

before the warrant was served. This search warrant was signed by a United States Magistrate judge and instructed investigators to seize quote all records relating to violations of Title fifty two US Code two zero seven zero one and two oh five one one, with these violations occurring quote after

October twelfth, twenty twenty unquote. The former statute here two seven one relates to retaining and preserving election records for twenty two months after an election, and the latter two five one one relates to voter fraud or threats, intimidation,

and coersion against voters. The records that were to be seized are listed on the warrant as quote all physical ballots from the twenty twenty general election in Fulton County, all tabulator tapes for every voting machine, all ballot images produced during the original ballot count, All voter roles from the twenty twenty general election in Fulton County from absentee, early and in person voting and any electronically stored information

relevant to those items above. The Fulton County Commissioner mount Ivory said that federal officials took seven hundred boxes of ballots, and curiously, Director of National Intelligence Tulci Gabbert appeared at the side of the search and had a phone call

with Trump. After the raid concluded, Gabert sent a letter to Congress on Monday, claiming, quote, my presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence relating to election security, including counter intelligence, foreign and other malign influences, and cybersecurity unquote.

She also wrote on x the everything app quote the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has and will continue to take action under my statutory authorities to secure our nation ensure the integrity of our elections. I will include here that four days before January sixth, twenty twenty one, Trump told George's top election official to quote unquote find enough votes to overturn the election. Here's a recording of that phone call.

sure illegals are not voting, for example. That's what the Save Act is about, and we have to continue that and the President is keeping a proper focus on it. This investigation is to ensure that all the questions that about the elections in Fulton County are investigated properly so that people have confidence in this system.

the court cases around Trump's attempts to overturn the election. Yeah, and especially like looking at at what South Cura did after their president tried to take over the country a year or two ago, is like, oh, yeah, that's very clearly what we should have done with this guy.

has come out. In January, a judge has unsealed a State Department memo from March twenty twenty five that confirms that Ramesa Osturk's visa was revoked and the government sought to deport her on the basis of oz Turk co authoring an op ed in the student newspaper at Tufts University.

This memo admits that DHS could not provide any evidence that oz Turk ever engaged in any eighties Semitic activity, was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine, or has ever expressed support for terrorism as claimed by government officials. Last year, Churchill McLoughlin told CNN at the time of oz Turk's arrest that DHS and ICE investigations had found that oz Turk had quote engaged in activities in support of hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing

of Americans unquote. On the contrary, this newly unsealed memo from the State Department reads, quote, while os Turk has been involved with actions protesting Tuft's relationship with Israel, DHS, ICE or Homeland Security investigations has not, however, provided any evidence showing that oz Turk has engaged in any anti Smithy activity or made any public statements indicating support for

a terrorist organization or anti Semitism. Generally, unquote. The memo goes on to state that though a previous DHS report quote implies a connection between oz Turk and the now banned Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, the report presents no evidence other than os Turk's membership in Graduate Students for Palestine, which supported proposals to Tufts which were also

supported by Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine. Nor has DHS ICE or HSI shown any evidence that oz Turk was involved in any of the activities which resulted in Students for Justice in Palestine being suspended from Tufts unquote. The Bureau of Consular Affairs VISA office and ANAD no reporting specific to oz Turk on US government interagency databases.

According to this memo, and interagency vetting partners do not provide any response to oz Turk's twenty twenty four VISA application quote indicating the existence of derogatory terrorism related information. I'll read the final quote here from this memo quote, DHS did not identify any alternative grounds for removability that would be applicable to oz Turk, including the ground for removability for aliens who have provided material support to a

foreign terrorist organization. Or terrorist activity, and has not indicated whether it plans to consider termination of oz Turk's CIVIS registration, Although information provided by DHS, Homeland Security Investigations and ICE does not establish any potential ineligibility for oz Turk, you may, in your discretion and in accordance with Department policy in nine FAM four three point one point one DAH five b A, I prove revocation of her F one visa

effect immediately based on the totality of the circumstances presented, indicating that revocation may be warranted unquote. The only evidence held against her in the memo is that she wrote an op ed. You still can revoke her visa if you want to.

twenty five. Quote, we revoked her visa. It's an F one visa. I believe we revoked it. And here's why. If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa.

If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, We're going to take away your visa. Unquote.

In December, a federal judge allowed oz Turk to continue her research and teach at Tuft University on the basis that she is likely to succeed on the claim that her visa termination was quote arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law and in violation of the First Amendment. The court case related to her removal proceedings will still continue.

into Commishlo one hundred and hessecas. These are essentially like Syrian, so I guess right. Integration of the SDF will occur as brigades of the Syrian Army deployed Derik. If you're looking at a map, it's probably going to say al Malakaya, Delhi being the Kurdish name, Comichelo, Hesseka and Kabani. These forces will be largely Kurdish, but they will also include Assyrian and Arab elements, as the SDF always has. I

imagine they will probably be Armenians as well. There then, nearly always are sending in the sdfs in the beginning there have been. The agreement also included the integration of the Shaish into the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, the government takeover of oil fields and borders, and a recognition of Kurdish education credential across the country. The A and E S will appoint a governor in Hesseka and the security chief will be appointed by Damascus. The SDF will

also appoint a deputy Defense Minister in Damascus. The STG appointed Marwan Ala Ali Debac security He previously did this for HDS in Idlib Hyactoria al Sham Right, that's the group that formally listed as a Foreigntarist organization in the US that has gone on to take over Syria and become the government in Damascus, and he sort of oversaw their purge of rasal Din, which is like an al

Qaeda associated group in Idlib. Shortly after the deal was signed to Syrian traditional government began accusing journalists who entered via Samalka, as I have done and Robert has done, of having entered Syria illegally, which great I guess. Turkey has continued to prevent aid coming to Kabani, where water and power remain cut off. Pretty bleak situation in Rosjaba.

I'm glad that there is not more killing and not more dying, but also sad to see some of the things that so many people for and died for being lost, especially this idea of brotherhood of peoples, which I think was integral to the Asjaba revolution and the women's revolution, which it will be very hard to sustain in the context of the estate led by HTS. Pretty upsetting. I know that they can still use your support. Sorry, we'll put a fundraising link for heavusaw at the bottom of

this Yeah. Good time to be alive. Yeah, great, great stuff happening in the world. Yeah, if you would like to email us, you can email us using a proton mail address. To email our proton mail address, which is cool Zone Tips at proton dot me.