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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to take It happened here a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
And I'm your host, Bia Wong.
This is one of the most acute places where everything is falling apart and one of the most acute attempts to put it back together again. We're just going to get right into it with me to talk about a potential Brench strike that there is significant organization going on for right now in Minneapolis as a reaction to the federal occupation. Is Tara Rogavier, the director of the Tenant Union Federation. Tara, Welcome to the show. Thanks, So, okay,
let's rewind a little bit. Can you talk a bit about what the specific conditions of the occupation and also just sort of the preoccupation world for tenants got us to a point where there is potentially the largest restrict we've seen in a century being organized right now.
Yeah, absolutely so.
First of all, thank you so much for having me and I am boarding live from the Twin Cities, where we've been in a really intense organizing drive now for many weeks. And of course the people of the Twin Cities have very ferociously fought back against this federal occupation for nearly three months. But I appreciate your question because I think actually to take us back a little bit is critical to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in now. So the first and most basic thing to say is
the rent is too damn high. Yep, pop looking not afford the rent in any corner of the country. You know, it's been true for many years now that a person earning minimum wage cannot afford a two bedroom apartment in any American county, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural. And as our rents go up, the conditions of our homes get worse. So what we have taken as saying these days is that we're paying higher rents than we've ever paid for the worst conditions we've ever endured.
And I know you know that.
As a tenant and as a former tenant organizer, your goal, but so many of our people are living this reality every day. And you know I organize. I'm based in Missouri and I helped to found and organize with Casey Tenants, and increasingly we're organizing tenants in places like Raytown, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City, and the stakes are so high, and I really want to make sure listeners
are aware of this. All of us are aware of it, But just to put a fine point on it, when you get priced out of a place like Chicago, you might end up in a place like Kansas City. When you get priced out of Kansas City, you might end
up in a place like Raytown, Missouri. When you get priced out of Retown, Missouri, there is no place else to go, and you're just stuck renting from the landlords of last resort, the people who are very keen to exactly how desperate the tenant condition is today, and then they exploit that by keeping us living in filth and hiking the rents at every turn. So that's some of the context that brings us into this moment, and that will be the context underlying every crisis following this one.
And I think that's a really important thing to note, because the story I'm about to tell you about what's going on here is then also a story of possibility about what might go on in every crisis that we encounter from this point on. So we started organizing a tenant union at Twin Cities Wide tenant Union at the end of January, and the reason for that is that the tenants of the Twin Cities had essentially been organizing unions for the two months preceding that as a way of fighting ice.
Every building has a group chat right now.
Every building has someone distributing whistles and zines so that people get information about how to spot ice, what to do, advice is there. People are organizing mutual aid to take care of their neighbors. That is essentially the work of a tenant union.
Yep.
So all we've done in the last couple of weeks is add some kind of structure and formality to the way that tenants have already gotten organized under this federal occupation.
Could I ask a quick question here about how how the sort of citywide federation came together. Yeah, because there's something I've seen attempted before, but it is pretty difficult.
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think this won't surprise you that in a moment of crisis, Yeah, it's actually easier than in other circumstances, unfortunately, to get people organized. So a process that might have otherwise taken months to sort of align all the various entities organizing tenants in the Twin Cities took a matter of four and a half days.
It's astonishing. Yeah, it's the best I've ever seen anything like this mid.
Right, And that's not to say it was easy, right, it took a lot, and you know, it took a lot from us as the Tenant Union Federation, but more to the point, it took a lot from tenants here who have been organizing in their own formations for many months preceding this crisis. So there's a local organization we're working with called Inqualinosunidos. They've been organizing for ten years and they've a base of mostly Latino and Somali tenants all across the city. Then there's a crew that's been
organizing in South Minneapolis, the South Minneapolis Tenants Union. Then there's tenants to have been organizing in Saint Paul. Then there's tenants to have been organizing autonomously in their properties and forming tenant associations and marching on the landlord. So what we tried to do as quickly as possible was kind of assemble all of these forces and really focus ourselves on the project of building something that was bigger than some of its parts, that could create the potential
for enduring power out of this moment. And the thing that we said in those four and a half days of sprint as we try to assemble this force is the Tenant Union is good for protection today and power tomorrow.
So this is just an experiment, right, We actually don't know what's going to come of this, but it's an experiment that I personally feel extremely invested in because I, like you, have lived through many moments of uprising and activation in the last several years, and unfortunately, more often than not, that uprising and that activation eventually evaporates, and the Tenant Union offers one potential vehicle to hold some of that activation into the future and to channel it
into real and enduring power.
Yeah, there's another aspect of this before we get into what's happening right now that I was really interested in, which is how did the sort of connections and organizational bonds with labor unions start happening, because that's another really cool feature of this that's pretty unique.
Yeah, totally unprecedented, and even I, yeah, my mind kind have blown right. A sort of contextual piece that's important is that the people of Minnesota are built different. There's a longstanding alignment partnership relationship among organized labor and between labor and community organizations here that sort of doesn't have a comparison anywhere else in the country. And I might be speaking out of turn, but I've never seen anything
like this. I've never seen this depth of alignment among organized labor, between labor and community and so that context is really important to understand because then I think in this moment of crisis, labor is much more open to a call from community groups and from tenants then they
might be in other types of situations. So, you know, we really leaned on the local relationship and the depth of relationship between groups like Inculinosnitos and these like labor tables that have existed, and you know, further important context is like groups like SCIU Local twenty six, we're leading the call for this general strike day on January twenty third, and there was this incredible table of labor leadership that came together to sort of lead that day.
Can you explain for our listeners, like, when you're talking about it like a labor table, can you explain what that is?
Yeah?
I mean, essentially, as far as I understand it, there's just a really regular conversation that labor leaders are having together and these days, I think more often than not, it's not just labor.
It's labor.
And then they've pulled in partners from community groups and tenant unions and some of the like resists informations as well, And that also is remarkable. Right I'm saying this as though it's just kind of like, you know, fact of
the matter. It's amazing that labor leadership in a context like this is in touch enough that they understand who's leading some of the decentralized autonomous resistance work and is not only aware of that, but pulling them into these kinds of war rooms that are now existing, and you know, they're talking on an almost daily basis as far as
I understand it, So the ask moved pretty quickly. I think we brought a vision and a strategy to some of the closest labor partners, and their willingness to join in on the strike drive comes from an intense clarity about the stakes for their members. Any of these unions include membership that cannot make the rent on March first, and so they're not taking this lightly right, This is a big risk. They're sticking their necks out. For some
that is a total moonshot. We don't know whether or not we're going to be able to pull it off, but what we know is we needed to try for some additional leverage that we didn't have a couple of days ago.
Yeah.
I'm astonished by effectively every part of this because and every fourth thing you say is like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
But yeah, how.
Fast it came together is astonishing. The willingness and speed with which labor is mobilizing is sort of is astonishing, And yeah.
I don't know this is this is really really cool.
Yeah, And I guess the next thing I wanted to ask about outside of sort of the how did this organization come together? Is what are the specific demands being made.
Yeah, so there's three main demands related to the strike drive. One is ICE out, and a part of that that I feel like you'll be interested in is ICE is in. The federal government is pretending that the reason for the invasion is economic. They're like, this is an economic intervention. ICE is here to fix the economy by deporting a bunch of people who are taking your jobs. Part of what we're trying to do is highlight what is the reality, which is that ICE is bad for the economy. ICE
has devastated the economy. We're trying to heighten that contradiction between what they say they're here to do and what is actually occurring. And so we will demonstrate if we authorize a strike, what actual economic disruption looks like if tenants exercise their economic power. So that's one thing, Ice out, ICE fully out. There's all this talk about a drawdown now, but there's still ICE agents here can napping people.
On a daily basis.
The second thing is a statewide eviction moratorium. And this has been a demand for the last two and a half nearly three months. The governor has not moved on it. The state legislature has not moved on it. Eviction court is running quote unquote as normal during a time where there are three thousand federal agents in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. So demand number two is end evictions, no evictions under federal occupation and frankly not for a long time until
something resembling real recovery is possible. And then demand number three is real rent relief. And the real is important here because it's not enough just to get tens of millions of dollars that we would then be expected to apply for and turn around and give to the landlord. So when we say real rent relief, we mean tens of millions of dollars that come with strings attached. If landlords benefit from what is effectively a bailout because of how bad ice is for the economy, then they should
be accountab to a higher standard of tenant protections. So one I saw out to eviction, moratorium three rent relief.
These are fairly moderate demands, and they remind me a lot of a series of both demands and also just the way that policy works treating the initial parts of the pandemic, where there was there were a lot of in a lot of cases there actually were like eviction moratoriums that you were never enforced as strictly as the letter of what they said, but was a thing that was implemented in conditions where suddenly people just literally couldn't work because massive external force.
Totally.
Yeah, a lot of what we're working with right now is groundwork that was laid during the COVID nineteen eviction crisis or the early years of it. Right the bill that we introduced in the state legislature this week is literally modeled after the Rent and Mortgage Cancelation Act that we wrote back in twenty twenty to try to get rents and mortgage is canceled when people couldn't go to work and couldn't leave the house because of the pandemic.
And I think that's actually an important thing again to keep in mind, because crises like this will continue happening under today's conditions. Right We're hurtling towards deep and encompassing authoritarianism, there's escalating climate catastrophe. We're going to be in this situation much more frequently and at higher degrees of stress
pretty much for the rest of our lives. So it's good actually for us to start learning from the work that we did five years ago and applying it here to borrow and steal from our past selves to build from something rather than start from scratch.
I wish we didn't live under these types.
Of cascading cris but that's the situation we're in. And I've been feeling so often in the last month that the only touch point in my life I have to this moment is the early months of the pandemic.
Yeah, and I think that gets at the depth and seriousness of the crisis in a way that I feel like is not understood.
Yeah.
Outside of Minneapolis.
I mean, I think, you know, like my connections, I'm from Chicago, my connections in Chicago, there was a lot
of that experience. But even in Chicago, it was kind of there were places that were like that, and then you could go like three neighborhoods over and everything was sort of operating normally for the most part until the next sort of raids came, and that I feel like, I don't know, it seems to be from listening to you talk about this, that that's been the catalyzing force for all of us, that it is just constant crisis everywhere.
Yeah, and I think you're right that people outside of the Twin Cities maybe don't understand the depths of the devastation. But just to put a fine point on it, conservative estimates show over forty seven million dollars and lost wages among people who have not been safe to go.
To work in the last three months. Forty seven million dollars in lost wages.
I just had a conversation with a dad yesterday whose kids go to a school where there are eighty families where the parents have not been safe to go to work. They haven't been safe to take their own children to school, and so the other parents in the school have been organizing support around them for the last two months, and they just did a round of calls through all those families this week.
None of them can make March rent.
So even if we're living under a supposed draw down, the crisis is still so alive. And I think that's also why you see organized labor lining up alongside us in this strip drive. They know, like Local twenty six has two hundred members that cannot make the rent on
March first. So I think that that sort of like economic side of this story is not really known felt or understood outside of the Twin Cities right now, but everyone here knows and feels it because they've turned their lives inside out for the last three months to organize you know, millions of dollars in mutual aid. But here's the thing is, we cannot go fundme our way out of this scale emergency. Yeah, it requires state intervention, and that's what we're calling for.
I want to come back to that that forty seven million number for a second, because I think when we hear numbers like that, we're used to hearing them in the context of you know, state agencies or multi billion dollar companies, and this is not that. This is not a situation where these people have billions of dollars and you're losing some fraction of that. This is something where
every single one of those dollars matters, so acutely. It's not forty seven million dollars coming from Google's forty seven million dollars coming from people like you. And that is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis.
Yeah, it's a huge crisis and one that kind of ludicrously. The leaders at the state and city level have suggested that everyday people should solve forty seven million dollars for everyday people is enormous. You know, through extraordinary efforts, the people of the Twin Cities have organized something in the neighborhood of six million dollars in rental assistance for their own neighbors, like mutual aid style forty seven million dollars
or fifty million dollars. Seventy five million dollars is nothing for the state to figure out. Right at the city level, there's you know, something to the tune of sixty million dollar pot that's funded through sales taxes that goes into the maintenance of the downtown infrastructure. They pulled some of that money just this past week to support small businesses.
Yeah, what about the people.
Right, what about the people who have had to scrounge together what they can to take care of themselves, dip into their savings, put together funds to take care of their neighbors. That can't continue like that forever. And it's ludicrous that they've been asked to do that until now. So the strike drive is really about making that point
in public that the state needs to intervene. We need solutions, We need some level of commitment from the state, the governor, the state legislature and from the cities in order to protect people, to keep them in their homes for now, and to make them hole in the long run.
I think the other element of this too, and something that I remember dealing with joint tenant organizing, is that on a very basic level, this is the most brutal possible time that you can be evicted. It is February right now, it is going to be early March, which
is whether that can just kill you. And on top of that, on sort of political level, where we're very used talking about eviction as like a kind of process that we're used to happening, but it's like, no, we're sending a bunch of people out into whether that will kill them, and then also just into the arms of
a federal occupation. And it's the only metaphors I could think of is it's like, yeah, you're evicting people into the hands of the Gestapo, which is one of the most evil things that can even possibly be contemplated.
Yeah, and yet it's just what business as usual has been.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to even find the words to describe the evil. And as you said, it's not dissimilar to the first year of the COVID nineteen pandemic, before there was a vaccine, eviction courts and states like mine
and Missouri were just open. Yeah, you know, the courts were open in my county starting in May of twenty twenty, a full year before we had a vaccine, yep, And people were being evicted into the streets during a time when we were told to stay home in order to protect ourselves and our neighbors from a deadly virus.
So it's a really similar thing.
You know, the quote unquote business as usual of state sanctioned violence, and every eviction is an act of violence. The sort of normalcy in the mundanity of that violence is practiced every day and in front of our eyes right now. And I think that that point about mundanity is important to draw out right because I think what we've seen in the Twin Cities in the last three
months is really visible in your face state violence. As the ice agents have come and pupper sprayed and beat people up and of course shot and killed people as well. The day to day violence of eviction is actually harder to mobilize people around because it's so boring, it's so bureaucratic, it's so taken for granted that the state treats us like this, that the state exist to protect property over
people and their lives and their needs. And that's an interesting thing to think about in this moment too, where there may or may not be a drawdown of the federal agents, but the long standing economic impact of this invasion are here, and it'll be an interesting test of people's solidarity and focus and endurance to continue showing up in the months after the agents.
Go away, assuming they do, which is also.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, assuming they go away, right, But you know, I have faith, I have more faith than I've ever had in my life that the people of the Twin Cities who have so righteously fought this invasion are showing up and will continue to show up even after a time when the agents are gone, assuming that happens. And that's a critical test, that will be a turning point, because we live in a world where this mundane violence actually does happen all the time, even outside of crisis.
Yeah, And the ability to turn the sort of rupture in these moments of crisis into an actual change to the way that everything works, I think to some extent, is the thing that we failed to do after twenty twenty, and is the thing that sort of, you know, the foreclosing of the possibilities of the uprising and of the mutual aid from the pandemic is what allowed the sort of monsters that rule our world today to sort of tear their way through.
Yeah, exactly, So.
I know that you have to go very soon. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know and are there ways that people outside of the Twin Cities can support y'all?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
We are running phone banks now through March first to increase our numbers for the strike drive. So depending on when this airs, it would be amazing for folks to join those phone banks. They can sign up at Twin Cities Tenants dot org. There's a link to sign up to join the phone banks. Tenants wherever they are should get organized and should get trained by Tenant Union Federation. We've got our big Union School training that's a virtual
three month training coming up this summer. There will be more information to come on our socials and our website in the next couple of weeks and months, and they should follow along. People should follow along on social media. We're learning a lot and we're going to be sharing a lot of those lessons in public. And I think an important note to end on perhaps is that this is not a ViBe's based organizing drive. This is not
social media only. You know, we're believers that words mean things, and when we say we're running a strike drive, we mean that shit. So we're running a really intensive organizing effort that may or may not work. You know, we are trying. We're trying something big and unprecedented, and part of that attempt and part of our seriousness is also
acting with extraordinary discipline. So we will not authorize strike if we are anything less than ready to be on strike depending on the situation with our demands and whether or.
Not they're met.
People should stay tuned because I think in the way that this plays out, we will also be modeling some of what we're learning in real time around what it takes to exercise both vision and strategy and discipline as a collective in this kind of new territory.
Yeah, and this is quite frankly one of the coolest things I've ever gotten.
To cover on this show. This fucking rocks.
Love it, And yeah, I hope it goes well for y'all, And I hope you fucking win.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Miya, of course, thank you for coming on. And yeah to everyone else out there, I don't know. I was just some random college kid when I started doing this, so you too can do tenants. Organizing in YouTube can do incredible things when the BOMA calls for it.
Welcome back to it could happen here a podcast where Robert Evans is slightly adjusting the levels on his microphone because I am in New Orleans traveling and with my friend and city resident and former guest of the pod.
Carl Casarda. Carl, Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Robert. It's great to be back. I mean, we've done a few episodes in the past on different podcasts, and it's always I don't want to say a treat, but it's good to work with you because some of the topics, of course, are pretty rough.
Yeah, and you and I have talked, I think primarily in our previous episodes about both like digital security and then guns, Like we've talked about people getting into shooting, We've talked about like kind of what's responsible and irresponsible
when it comes to training and firearms advice. And today we're kind of starting by talking about guns in a different context, which is the fact that specifically they are often used as an excuse by a law enforcement like the fear of the fear or the reality of some
in being armed as an excuse for killing them. Right, we can talk about the killing of Filando Castile in July of twenty sixteen, who was a black man who was stopped by the police and a legal license concealed carry holder and was shot during that traffic stop because the officer panicked. But the case that's right now on people's minds is the case of Alex Pretty, who was killed by border patrol earlier this year. Was wearing a
gun during a confrontation, but he was just filming. They stripped him of his weapon and they shot and executed him in a case that has actually drawn criticism from gun rights organizations towards the Trump administration, which doesn't happen often.
But I think the kind of point you brought up when you and I started talking about this was that what happened to Pretty, you know, not only can you go back to other cases where law enforcement have shot people legally concealed carrying, as we talked about with Castile. But this is not a thing that is the result of the escalation of the Trump administration's use of bord
patrol and ice. This is a long standing behavior that border patrol agents have exercised and been exercising elsewhere for years. Like what happened to Preddy is novel because he was a white guy in the middle of Minneapolis, but it's not a novel because border patrol shot and killed somebody and then justified it by saying he had a gun.
Yeah, it's border patrol, and really by that extension of all law enforcement in the US. Because there's so many examples, it's almost hard to draw out just one or two. You can go for on forever for this, but there's some real prominent ones that make a lot of sense.
In fact, even here in New Orleans, right after Katrina, there were a family that were crossing a bridge trying to just recover some water and supplies, and a bunch of law enforcement officers jumped into unmarked vehicles, ran over on a bridge, jumped out, and with unauthorized guns, including Ak's, unloaded on them. And it was called the Danziger Bridge shootings. I have a video on the channel about it. And
this is where this gets relevant. They not only shot them, they chased them down from a moving vehicle and killed them in their back with a shotgun while he was running away. But they used the pretense of them being armed even though they were not, by dropping drop guns and calling them ham sandwiches. So again, the pretext of there were guns, therefore we're allowed to kill them is just an example of that right there.
Yeah, and this is really interesting because first off, you get the gun rights people, or at least a chunk of the conservative gun rights people, who will come out whenever someone actually is carrying a gun. But the fact that this happens so much more often, where the police just kill someone and say because we thought they had a gun is also I mean, it's a human rights issue, but it is a Second Amendment issue, right You've got
this weird dichotomy. We're on the right the existence of the second because it's often said that like, oh, the presence of a gun, even though you have the Second Amendment means the police can kill you. But the reality is that the existence of guns in the country means that the police have the ability to justify killing, and border patrol has the ability to just to by killing someone for no reason.
Which it really brings up a really interesting question because, I mean, the Second Amendment is literally the second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is now right enshrined directly in the Constitution. It's the first is freedom of speech and the second one is the right to care
and bare arms. And so if that is a constitutional right, even in instances where you see like Alex Pretty who is a legally licensed CCW holder still can be killed with essentially no justice being delivered for their actions, raises a very interesting question about how is a right a right when they can kill you for the presence of a gun, even when it's legally possessed and not even being used in a offensive manner, like even if it's just on you or they think there's one there, suddenly
they can kill you and nothing comes of it. And that's the case with so many instances. I got a few more here if you want, Like Daniel Shaver, this is one in Masis. It's not border patrol, but it's still law enforcement. It has the precedent of the problem. Twenty sixteen, he was a Texas exterminator. He was traveling through Arizona and he was up in his hotel room and someone on the street saw him or thought they
saw him messing with a firearm. Turned out it was like a pellet gun or something he used to shoot rats. But they rolled up. They called him out of his room and in a very horrific video of screaming at him and giving very inconsistent commands, along with another gun that was illegally modified or at least not authorized to be modified, where the dust on the air fifteen and
said you're fucked on it. They unloaded on him while he was crawling on his hands and knees begging for his life, literally begging for his life in the video, and again really nothing came of it. In fact, the officer that shot him ended up getting back on the force just long enough to give him essentially a life pension for the trauma he received for killing the man. So the presence or the perceived presence of a firearm justified them killing him while he was crawling on his hands and knees.
You know, we've talked about the warrior cop ethos and guys like Colonel Grossman who have helped to inculcate this idea in law enforcement that you are in like dire threat of immediate death every second of every day, as like the sworn law enforcement officer, and thus you have to react like this, right, Like you have to react immediately with lethal force the instant someone like reaches into a pocket or I can't tell you how many times
it protests. I can remember one really clear time from twenty twenty where I was with a group of people. They were promising to arrest all of us, and I was kind of talking to the police officer basically being like, looker the mayor's most recent orders, like we are allowed to be out here. Yeah, anyway, it was a whole thing.
But one of the protesters, who was just kind of standing behind me, very nervous, like reached into his pocket, I don't know what it was to get a phone, and all of the officers tend stuff, and I had to be like, don't fucking go, like keep your hands visible, man, Like we're standing in front of a bunch of and you shouldn't have to do that, right, putting your hands in your pocket shouldn't be a justification for a man pulling a gun and blowing you away with the authority
of the state behind him. But the reality of the situation is that like whenever I am talking to police officers, I keep my hands in front of me and fucking visible.
Yeah, it produced a situation in which regular American citizens, or we'll get into this too, the tahona Otam Reservation members, Indian members, members of the tribe. You have to be as a civilian trained how to interact with these very dangerous people who have been given a ideology of like killology. You mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, who actually never shot on anyone himself, but was one of the sea crystals of this training mentality in which he espoused, don't be afraid
to shooting. That's going to happen is you might get sued, but don't worry about getting sued. It just gives you a little break and some time off the force until you get it cleared. He's on video saying this stuff, and that mentality so imbued into all of the law enforcement agencies now presents a problem where the legal right of having a firearm is I'd say very questionable that it's the right when they have all authorization to kill
you for the thought or presence of a gun. And it shouldn't be civilians, just regular people that have to be trained how to deal with these dangerous agents of the state, because they're the ones that are indoctrinated into this fear mindset when we're prayed to at this point because they can kill you and nothing seems to come of it.
I think the thing when we were chatting about this kind of behind the scenes that you brought up that was really interesting to me to emphasize was the degree to which this is not a training problem, right, This
is not a lack of training problem. You hear a lot on the kind of more moderate Democrat side of things about how we need to be retraining these agents and that like the murder of Renee Good, the murder of Alex Preddy is the result of like bad training behalf of Border Patie, and it's kind of part of this whole rogue agency thing you get with Border Patrol and ice that like because of the Trump administration and how they've flooded it with bad recruits and how they're
not getting properly trained. That's why things have been so deadly. And when you look at the history of how Border Patrol has worked on things like the Dahanamodo Reservation. What you see is a whole bunch of cases that sound a lot like what happened to Inna Good and alex Pretty. They're just not happening to white people in Minneapolis, right.
Yeah.
I think that's something that a lot of people who haven't had the experience of living near the border, because I also spend a lot of my life in Arizona near Tucson, and therefore the Tahuna Autum reservations right there, and therefore have some insight into the things that go on right there near the border. And this is not new. The thing that's new is that it's being extended across the country and now into internal spaces. But the policies and the way the Border Patrol and ice have acted
is by no means a new standard. For example, not only with the firearms, but their instances at least two instances, if not more, in which there's verified video of Border Patrol agents intentionally swerving their vehicles to hit tribal members. It's on footage, not only car footage, but footage of the cell phone being struck. One instance, at Leach, they were killed another instance, they were hurt, and with that footage, even though it very clearly the car swerved to hit them,
nothing came of it. So it's hard to not see that there's something going on here. I don't think this is a training thing. I don't think they're training them to run over people. But there's some cultural maliciousness that's imbued into some of this that's hard to ignore. Another example of that was in twenty twenty three there was a TO member, Raymond Mattia, that he was called for.
Supposedly there was gunfire heard and so Border patrol shows up and he's in front of his house and he reached for his cell phone in his pocket, much like you just described. Again, Wow, there's a recurring theme here. And he was shot nine times, thirty eight rounds fired, killed, He had no gun on him, he was just a TOO member and therefore it didn't really make any press.
Again, you see, this is a qualified immunity problem, right, And it go back to that, And there's been some talk of like if you're going with the reforming ice rather than the abolishing thing, which is you know, certainly
something a lot of Democrats talk about. Like I've heard some discussion of like, well, maybe removing qualified immunity at least for border patrol and ice, And it's so much bigger of a problem than that, Like I certainly will I will accept any reductions in qualified immunity for law enforcement,
because that's where a lot of this starts. But even without that, if these go to court, if the officer in that specific shooting had gone to court for that specific shooting, I think there's a very good, if not overwhelmingly likely chance that he would have just been able to argue us in fear of my life.
Right.
Everyone knows how dangerous police officers' jobs are. Of course, you know, if you reach into a bocket around them, you're signing your own death warrant. And some of my problem with this is the degree to which Americans, and maybe this is starting to shift, but things are as bad as they are because for a very long time, Americans were willing to go along with the idea that police officers lives were so dangerous and their jobs were so important that almost any violence they meet out is
justified by the danger that they exist in. And I want to talk more about that with you, but first here's some ads.
And we're back, Karl. I'm going to hand back to Mike to you if we're going to continue ourtist cut.
Well, that's the challenge that I see with all these and these are just like again a handful of examples of which there are so many you can't even enumerate them all. I mentioned the Danziger Bridge shootings in which two men were killed, and there was really no justice came for that, although there was long trials and almost almost someone got in trouble, but not really. They all eventually got out with very little justice. Daniel Shaver was
killed in Mesa. That guy got pension Borlando Castile, Nothing really came of that. Paul O Reims, the guy hit by the Border Patrol SUV, nothing came of that. Another example, while this was a protester to Guita in twenty twenty three protesting cop City was unloaded on in his tent where they said he had a firearm. Again, another similar example fourteen times and was killed in the process. Hey everybody,
Carli here and an important update to the podcast. Once it was released, we quickly realized that there was a mistake embedded in it, and it really kind of lies on me. We recorded this today after Marti gram That's no excuse.
We were both a little tired.
But at the same time we had a conversation in which we discussed we just removed this from the podcast entirely, just snip it out, and both of us came to the same conclusion that it was too important to leave Tortugita's story in the podcast, because the reality is they're not talked about as much as they should be, and what happened to Tortegita matters very much and it should be kept in the public consciousness, especially since the bodycam
footage has not been released. But in this I mistakenly used the pronoun he and him, and Robert followed suit, just because we were kind of recording together in that time and space, and this was recorded very live and raw and real. But tortu Ghita, the queer indigenous activists that gave their life fighting against Cop City, went by they them. So please accept my apology and our apology
for this mistake in the podcast. But again, we wanted to leave it in because it was too important and too significant to tell Torteguito's story than it was to snip it out. Due to this mistake, So hopefully you'll understand and accept this disclaimer and apology for this mistake and realized that was of course not intentional. Thank you. There was a bunch of actual bodycam footage that's never
been released to the public. But at the same time, the autopsy of him showed that his hands were up in the position he was in when he got hit with those multiple fourteen rounds. But we don't even get to see the bodycam footage. And there was audio where the cops at least implied that one of the cops shot one of the other cops and that's what instigated the shooting.
It's the kind of thing that, like, we don't know what happened in the shooting of Tortuguhito, right We simply don't know, in part because they haven't released a lot of the information. And right now, the burden of proof is on Tortighita in this case, or you know, people who think he was unjustly killed to prove that he didn't shoot the officer, as opposed to where I would argue the burden of proof should be, which is on
the agents of the state. He shot somebody, right, like if you were going to say, this kid pulled a gun and fired on you. I want the proof, and it's on you to give me the proof. And if you the police do not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were in fear for your life and being attacked when you use deadly force, my assumption is going to be that you murdered a guy.
And I think that's.
How everyone should feel, right, Like, that should be how we treat police violence in any society, not this the
United States. I mean, if you're listening to this in the UK or Germany and you're a reasonable person, I would think that your attitude should be Yes, if a Bobby or whatever the Germans call their police kills somebody, he should have to prove that he or she should have to prove that they were an immediate fear of their life, which is not so different from anybody else, right, I can think of I can think of one police shooting that I saw a video of spreading on Twitter,
where like a guy was literally like sprinting around in traffic with a gun, like pointing it at people in traffic and got shot and killed by an officer. And I was like, look, if I'd had a gun and felt like I could take the shot.
I might have shot that guy.
Too, because he was parjacking people at gunpoint and pointing a firearm. And they're like, yeah, that's the case in which maybe you have to shoot a guy because like he could kill someone at any second, right, And I'm not going to judge a police officer for shooting in that instance, But I wouldn't judge a civilian either. I
don't have a different standard for them. If you are a cop or a civilian and somebody shoots at you, you have the right to defend yourself, right, but you also should expect to prove that they.
Were trying to hurt you.
This is the challenge I have with all this is, like you said, in any instance, that's a self defense shooting. And in this and in many instances, law enforcement are put in a situation where they're not necessarily even defending themselves, but defending the community or others, and therefore they have justification. I'm not to say here to say that every law
enforcement shooting is not justified. Many of them are, but in the instances where there are questionable circumstances, of which many we've just enumerated here, even instances in which they have body cams on which are supposed to be would validate their actions, but they won't release it to the public to see it. It draws a very significant question of the validity of these events and what they're doing and why there I would say, no better way to
say than covering something up. In fact, going back to Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, there's a video of him talking about law enforcement, which of course extends to ice and Border patrol, as the samurai of the land. And you know, that reference isn't really a good one because when you know what the samurai are, that's a disturbing statement. But in his mind, he's making this point that they have these tools that are for life and death and the right
to essentially kill, and referring to them as samurai. And I think that mindset is sadly very much permeating the law enforcement agencies of this country.
Yes, it's the myths of the warrior cop.
And I think one of my frustrats here stems from just as someone like you, I carry a firearm regularly, and I think a lot about what would happen if I had to use it, and I think about not just the practicality of like, okay, am I trained properly to use this thing competently?
You know?
But what would the order of operations need to be if somebody tries to kill me and I successfully kill or injure them with a firearm, Well, I'm going to need to call the police immediately. I'm going to need to contact a lawyer immediately. I'm going to hope that there are eyewitnesses there. I'm going to hope and seek to provide as much evidence that I possibly can that I had no other choice to do what I was
going to do. Right, Any civilian carrying a firearm responsibly thinks about the same things about like if I am in a shooting. First off, there's the question if I need to defend myself, But then there's immediately the question if I need to defend myself in court and police don't have that second part not really, not in a way that matters.
And this, to me is why the Alex Pretty situation, which was so visibly documented by multiple cameras, is such a concern because in this instance, we see two officers unload on the guy. One guy shoots him at least once or twice, and then another guy unloads on him again, and we have multiple video angles, Yet the narrative from them is that this guy was attacking them, which is clearly not the case on the video. I mean, you can look at it from multiple angles, whether or not
you agree with his protest methods. He was not attacking anyone. He was standing between them getting pepper sprayed and being beaten with pepper spray can and then getting unloaded on And at the same time, we now live in this situation where at least some parts of the firearms community or gun community, which isn't owning a thing, isn't a community,
but we use that term gun community. Like you said, some of these rights groups have said something, but the response to this is still disturbing to me because there's a lot of people saying, well, don't show up to a protest with a gun, don't be in public with a gun, you can't bring gun. In fact, we saw parts of the Trump administration saying don't show up with a gun. This man had a handgun and two magazines
on him looking for trouble. Well, if he was, he didn't have the gun out and by the way, carrying a handgun with an extra magazine is by no means abnormal. In fact, that's a normal procedure for most people that
concealed Carrie. If you and I were hanging out on the street and we decided that we got into a fight with some guy, you know, Sheila Woof comes out of the bar and starts swinging on us, and then and then not only did we punch him and knock him to the ground, you shoot him, and then I shoot him nine more times, and there's video evidence of that. We're going to jail forever. But we at footage of these guys doing this and really nothing comes of it.
Part of like what I really want to get across to people is how bog standard this behavior is. The agents that shot Preddi were experienced veterans. They were not newbies. They were not proud boys who just gotten inducted into the force, you know, and tasked with doing vigilante justice.
They were sworn law enforcement officers with decorated careers, and they were acting the way the average cop expects people to act in a lot of situations, or at least at least a significant chunk of the law enforcement community expects police officers to be able to act right, like, I don't know that. I think most police officers are going to shoot a man who has been disarmed when he's in the middle of a pile of guys who have their hands on him. But most police officers will
defend their colleagues who do the same right. That's almost more of the issue. It's not that the average police officer is looking for an excuse to shoot somebody. It's that there's enough of those guys on the force and all of their friends support them when they do it right. And that doesn't exist on the civilian side of things, right I think about like in Portland we had a mass shooting that was stopped by a protester who was then gave himself up to the police and was taken
into custod He was initially charged with murder. And if there was the knowledge as a police officer that if I shoot someone, whether or not, it's totally justified, the next few months of my life are fucked completely. I'm not getting time off to chill, I am having to defend myself and have some of the worst stress of my life. Maybe we'd have fewer police shootings right if they knew it was going to be a miserable situation whenever they drew their gun and fired on somebody.
And I think you have to have that be the understanding.
And I know, like the counterpoint that at least police defenders will come up with is like, well, that might make them less likely to defend themselves, and like, well, then why are you calling them heroes if you're not expecting them to risk their lives for the good of the body politic? Right, we'll talk more about this, but first, ads.
What's really interesting about this? And I would think, I mean, I'm sure you have a really large amount of cops in the audience here, but here's the thing. Really, everyone should be concerned about this, even cops, even border patrol,
even ice. Law enforcement in general should be concerned about this because as this activity becomes frankly more common and more accepted in their ranks, that thin blue line being not one about solidarity but one of silence and lack of justice, that puts them a danger too, because if a person or people are so afraid of the reality of the fact that they can be just executed in the street with no repercussions of it, it sort of gives civilians, well it takes away our trust in the system.
There's no due process. You can just die for nothing for having a cell phone in your pocket. It'll make some people more reckless in their actions when dealing with law enforcement because they are like, what do I have to lose. I'm gonna die anyway.
It's the same logical problem as if you're like, well, armed robberies should have the same consequences as killing a guy, or they should be very similar. Your life should be over either way. Well, then what's the reason not to shoot someone and kill them in a robbery. Leaving them
alive just increases the odds they identify you. If you're looking at the difference between thirty years in prison or fifty years in prison for robbery and murder, why not just commit the murder right Like, it's this calculus that's
being forced on people. If you know, any time the police take you into custody or start to move to put hands on you, you feel like there's a very good chance they're just going to murder you, then people are going to start making very different choices when they're physically in contact with the police, and that makes life a lot more dangerous for everybody. And that's part of why this is what we're seeing is just so fucking irresponsible.
And historically there's realities for this too, depending on what part of the community or who you know, your demographic, if you want to go back to the past, whether or not you agree or disagree with like the politics or actions of for example, the Black Panthers, the reality is because black men were just shot by cops with no justice being delivered ever, they started taking on strategies
and policies that reflected that fear and concern. But now that's being extended to people well beyond that, when we see middle class VA nurses with a license being killed the same way, well, this is what's been going on in those communities for decades and decades, well before the Civil War. Let's be realistic. And so I'm not saying that was right or wrong, but I'm saying it is
a logical conclusion. When you fear that the agents of the state can kill you and there's no justice to ever be had, well what do you have to lose?
When we were talking about this early, you brought up something the Attorney General of Arizona had said recently on the subject of ice agents who are not identifiable as law enforcement coming to your door with guns.
I don't have the direct quote, but I'm paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of if people are at your doors that are unidentified with masks in Arizona, the castle doctrine essentially provides you the right to use force against them. And that is a very interesting statement to be made by someone as high in power of government of a state level at that point. But I mean, there's some truth to that, and the reality is when people aren't identifiable, it is very easy to show up.
And I mean we've already seen examples of people pretending to be ice because it's very easy to put on some body armors, some camouflage and a mask and look like these guys that are not identifiable. And therefore, when that is the case, how do you know what's there and what you're facing is even law enforcement in the first place.
Yeah, yeah, And this is Chris Mays, Chris with a Kay who's a Democrat, and the Arizona Attorney General. And as you said, the way that it was framed in this conversation was basically, this is a disaster because if you have law enforcement agents that you can't identify people absolutely have a right to just start blasting in Arizona based on Castle doctrine, And in fact, the interviewer in that brom Resnik, asked, like, are you giving people permission
to shoot federal agents? And May said, like the law does, right, Like that's the issue. You know, how do you know if some guy's just in a mask at your door with a gun. How do you know? And the fact that you're expecting Americans, a jumpy country of paranoid conspiracy theorists with four hundred million guns to see masked men at their doors and show discretion.
Seems like a bad bet to me.
You know, this comes back to the point I was making. I don't think the Attorney General was there was saying just go shoot federal agents. I don't think that was the point. The point was simply what I mentioned earlier, which is when you can't identify, or you don't know what is going on, or you're in a situation in which these people are not acting in a reasonable manner,
you don't know what you're dealing with. It's the same thing I mentioned earlier, in which if you're that concern or you don't believe that due process or justice is going to be served, your decision making logic might very well change. And like you said, in a country where many people are armed, I think this is something that every side of this issue should be concerned about, including the law enforcement agents, because they are at risk too.
As this continues, the risk to them increases, which will then be used to justify more force against civilians because it's a vicious circle. Well, that's a fun note to end on, Carl. I want to direct people towards en Range TV. You mentioned that you have a video about one of the shootings that we talked about, so I want to let you kind of plug that at the end. Yeah, thanks, Robert, I appreciate that a lot. So in Range TV is my video project. It's about ten years old.
Now.
You can just find it at range dot tv, which is my website, or you can just google in Range TV on YouTube and you'll find it immediately. The algorithm will give it to you. But the search engines bight and the video that I'm referencing there, and there's a lot of them on there in regards to topics like this historically speaking, but the specific one about Danziger Bridge
is right there. So if you go to Range TV and type in Danziger Bridge dn ZINGR, you will find that two thousand and five shooting, which is just an example of so many of these that happened. And I do have some discussions on there about recent events about Alex Pretty and such as well. So Robert, thank you for having me back on the show. I always appreciate it, and I appreciate our collaborations. And hopefully somehow this stuff makes a difference.
Yeah, I hope so too.
But at least I think it gives people something to like expect, right, like to look at this is kind of the cycle we're going to continue to see unless they pull back, unless ice and border patrols start using a great deal more discretion. Like, I think we've given people an idea of like where the future is trending, you know, and I unfortunately I'm not super optimistic about it right now, but you know tomorrow's unwritten.
Welcome to it happened here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by James Stout.
Hello, I get what are we What are we learning about? Today?
We are going to be learning about a man named James Fishback.
Okay, get first name.
Oh yeah, I've wanted to get someone kind of unbiased, but I now understand, unfortunately that you might be might be just kind of, you know, drawn drawn to him.
Yeah, I've come here to defend the James name.
I don't think that defense will last very long.
I okay.
James Fishback is a former Hedge fun analyst who's been worming his way into the political world of the New Right during the past two to three years.
Yeah, I'm giving up on that one already. Got no interest in defending this guy.
If you're active on you know, any kind of political feeds, whether that's you know, short short form video, blue sky Twitter, you've probably seen a video or two of James fish Back. But this episode we're gonna dive a little bit more into his background and his current political activities, which includes some things you probably haven't heard before. So James Fishback has tried to attach himself to a lot of, you know,
various aspects of the New Right. He attempted to attach himself to the presidential campaign of a vek Ramaswami back in the Uldie days.
Okay, yeah, remember when.
But he did so just by like showing up at campaign staff events. He wasn't a staffer, like he just kept like appearing. He asked, like, stay overnight at a hotel that this staff was all staying at for this campaign event in Florida, and tried to build a personal rapport with the VEC over a few months, and eventually Fishback outstayed is welcome. He then pivoted to becoming what I would call a D tier right wing commentator and
an advocate of Doge. In twenty twenty five, Fishback was a frequent guest on Like News, netw Works, CNN, Fox and others, speaking as a quote unquote Doge advisor. Huh, a role that he never officially had great never actually worked with Doge. His quote unquote advising was through adding Elon Musk on Twitter with random suggestions.
Yeah, just at least literally in their comments online.
And yeah, his Doge claim to fame is that he came up with this idea of the Doge dividend, which is like a stimulus type check that the government would send to people based on the savings that they found or created through slashing government agencies. Cool, So that that was his idea that he added Elon Musk about and this idea gained some traction, and then this this kind of boosted his image as a quote unquote Doage advisor and helped him trick news agencies into boosting his public
profile by associating him with Doge. Eventually, this led to DOGE official Katie Miller, wife of Steven Miller, having to clarify in July twenty twenty five that Fishback was not involved with Doge in any way, but he got a lot of traction off of this Doge advisor thing right back when Ramaswami left Doge.
Oh yeah, it's forgotten that he did. Wow, how time flies.
Before the inauguration, because he was planning on and is planning on running for governor of Ohio, Fishback tried to put his name in as like a hey, all become the co chair of dog elon since my pal Ramaswami is going to be busy. That also, you know, did not did not work obviously.
Yeah, what needy guy.
He's just very very needy, very clingy.
Yeah, paid, very parasocial.
Yes, And after Katie Miller released a statement being like this guy's not part of Doge, Fishback began lobbying Trump for the vacant seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Really no shame.
Based on his you know, credentials as this like patriotic America first investor right who's worked at a hedge fund or two and tried tried to get his way onto the SPACON seat. When that didn't turn out, obviously, Fishback set his sights on his home state of Florida, launching what I would call a groper style campaign for governor Cool and this is what we're going to be discussing for the rest of this episode.
I'm not like intimately familiar with the grouper space, but this seems to be like the most kind of like Beata behavior to constantly like notice me, uh, I forget what that's a wed that begins with s pick me, No, yeah, it could be pick me. I guess it's like a notice me SEMPI or something that people say.
I never expected you to say noticed with.
Yeah, I've unfortunately I've been on the internet too. Like that's what he seems, right. He seems like extremely uh yes, yeah, listen, is like I think what would be coded as like beata behavior in the.
Yeah and now he's kind of trying to do this with when tesen the Gropers, although as to this point, more successfully Okay, he's actually more successfully ingratiated himself with the Groper's space. On Tucker Carlson interview, he talked about how the Twitter account sorry x account af News or af post it's America first post America First News was a part of his like political radicalization towards the sort
of Groper's style politics. This is like a news aggregation account that promotes far right nationalist talking points through and like framing through various news stories. A lot of people used to share a post with this account, like not knowing its political orientation, just because it was very active as a news aggregation source.
Yeah, there are a few of those on Twitter, like bno news is another one that just aggregates from repost.
Stuff and you know, Fischback has pointed to this as being a part of his like Graper style.
Read pilling is the activity of this.
Account to get a sense of his kind of very groper online background or at least like a place within the new right. I'm going to read a tweet of his from February eighth, twenty twenty six, quote as Florida Governor. I will refuse to let sub human gesterres spike our collective cortisol, not even once. Also, no foids or egirls unquote. How much of that do you understand?
James, I got cortisol. I'm familiar, all right, Okay.
So yeah, this is using the kind of currently trendy like looks maxing terms the jester, which has been used a lot since Clivicular's stream with Fuentes and sneak O at that club where they played the Kanye hal Hitler song. Spiking cortisol is a frequent way that people in the looks back in space will refer to your stress being raised, especially like through politics, Like through politics raising your stress. Okay, and foids an ego is just like misogynistic ways to
refer to women coming out of like the in cell space. Okay, So you know this this post is you know, kind of a joke, but it's also signaling to a certain a certain type of person that hey, I'm.
Your guy, Yeah, I speak your language.
And it's also just really annoying. Right, He's he's trying to be off putting on purpose because that will drive attention to him from people who don't like him, and you know, and try to cover him in this episode, you know, I'm trying to like ride that line of not just unnecessarily giving him publicity because he has outrageous things, but then also framing his rising profile within a certain like context, which is Groyper candidates popping up more and more frequently across the United States.
Yeah.
So, in terms of Florida, Desantists can't run for another term.
He is term limited.
The clear front runner to succeed Dysantis is US Representative from Florida Byron Donald's who has Trump's endorsement. Last month, Lieutenant Governor j Collins also announced to run for governor.
But Fishback is not a non player in this race, and his candidacy displays attention within the Republican Party between the former like Tea Party and classical MEGA wing, which is now the effective conservative establishment, and this New America First wing, which takes some of Mega's originating principles to their far right nationalist conclusion. I talked about this tension last year in the episodes about Nick Fuentez's interview with Tucker Carlson and this surge of Graper adjacent gen Z
staffers filling out the ranks of the Republican machine in DC. Now, Fishback is one of the first candidates to draw a lot of attention by essentially running as a graper candidate, and depending on how well he does, it could indicate how successful this politics can be when presented in front
of Republican voters. The primary election isn't doneuntil August. There's not tons of polling yet on this race, like let alone from a stafflish pollsters, But as of late January, Fishback's most favorable pole puts him fifteen points behind front runner Byron Donald's according to quote.
Unquote Patriot polling.
Meanwhile, Donald's own sponsored poll puts them upwards of forty two points ahead of Fishback around the new year. So all this stuff is really out of date night and Fishback certainly has risen his profile since then, but we're still waiting on like reliable polls to come out. Yeah, but he's certainly getting a lot of headlines and is doing a successful job in raising his public profile.
Now. Part of Fishback's strategy to.
Raise his public profile and like name recognition both in Florida and nationally, it seems to be just through generating controversy very similar to how Fuentes did this or the more recent social ascension of the looksmaxing streamer clovicular. Earlier this month, Fishback claimed that a fire was quote intentionally set in his sideyard, prompting him to do a publicity stunt where he walked out of his porch holding an AR fifteen style rifle above his head, promising to shoot
anyone who attempts to harm him and his staff. I will share a clip.
I've seen this one. I'm excited to wash it again there.
If you come back to this home and our staff, our volunteers are working hard.
We're not waiting for the police.
We're gonna shoot you with an AR fifteen sight on scene.
Five five six. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. It's very simple. Shall not be infringe? We have a right.
It's just a bunch of woods. They're saying, like, no in any particular. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't make much sense. It doesn't know it. It's also five point five six. I guess people do call it five five six bit Yeah, fascinating, two two three thirty round doesn't as you have a sine in there? I noticed no, no, that bake sites folded down as well. It's for those familiar with such things, a straight at the box Smith and Western MP fifteen. It looks like he may have bought it quite recently.
So this is one such incident where he tried to generate some kind of publicity through this, you know, very provocative gesture. But he's also done this through the language he uses. Fishback refers to front runner Byron Donalds, who is black as by Rone, which is just not his name, and has said, quote by Rone wants to turn Florida
into a section eight to ghetto unquote. He's also used Charlemagne's nickname for Hakeem Jeffries a pac Shakur to refer to Donald's, and has called Donald's a quote unquote slave to his donors Jesus Christ. So yeah, a lot of stuff like that.
Yeah.
Fishback has proposed a fifty percent income tax on OnlyFans creators, calling it a quote unquote syntax, and one of his very first campaign videos was titled I'm running for Florida Governor to make the trains run on time.
Oh cool?
So this has not like generated tons of controversy in headlines. Yeah, it's you know, caused some social media posters to be like, oh, look at this guy clearly doing a Nazi dog whistle. But then it's also signaled you know, early early in the campaign signals to you know, grapers and people in the very very far fringes of the right, has signaled
to them that hey, I'm going to be your guy. Yeah, which in part he's doing so that he can count on them to kind of do free, free publicity for him, right, Like he wants to activate a certain type of overly online young male to be like a public spokesperson to like to just to boost his name recognition. And even if he doesn't win in Florida in this race, it' at least help his career like nationally in some way. So he's he's counting on this like a graper block
to do a lot of heavy lifting. And that's part of what he does. Some of these very very late, gross tongue in cheek stuff make them trains run on time. Come on, dude, Yeah, it's like a clumsy dog whistle, right, It's embarrassing. There's no like a sleight of hand here or whatever. You know, he's just kind of blundering his way towards being like look at me Nazis. Yeah, and like this video he just talked about trying to bring back the Amtrak to the Florida Panhandle.
It's like a one minute video.
Cool.
It had nothing to do about actually like making trains run on time. It's about trying to return Amtrak to a certain section of Florida. Fitchback has promised to quote divest every penny from Israel on day one unquote, which would include three hundred and eighty five million in foreign bonds invested in by the state. And he's opposed to adopting anti Semitism definitions in schools that make it quote unquote against the law to criticize Israel.
H yeah, Yes, this is where the right and the soft dare.
I bet.
Yeah, I'm sure it's Israel you'll concern with here.
Buddy, Yeah, no, I bet, I'm sure he's not to being this out of you know, principled stances of Palestinian solidarity.
And he just wants to do anti Semitism like the old fashioned way.
Yes, And this can be displayed during a campaign event at the University of Central Florida where Fishback discussed how to make lunches in high school cafeterias more healthy topic, what's with.
The pop tarts in the Broward County public schools in the cafeterias. I'm not saying that the test scores are a result of the pop tarts, but if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set up our kids for failure, you would feed them the absolute boy slop in our cafeterias.
And that that is on gentile.
Okay, everyone's really excited to hear that. Hey, uh yep, wow, Yeah, I mean the crowd is like they love it. Yeah, but it also looks like they just derived from like a Southern Florida be a pong invitational tournament. Like it's uh, it's a lot of like frat boid type.
Yes, it's a lot of the people who are who consumed like the menosphere type content online. Yeah, short clips of Nick Fuentes probably aren't regularly tuning into his like three hour livestream on Rumble, but engage with his content through short clips online. Yeah, same thing with like sneak o clvicular Right, it's it's it's this type of this type of influencer which has right wing politics, but they
aren't like super invested in politics. It's this it's this mix of like post in cell male influencers that combine right wing politics, and it's a very common form of like entertainment for these people that we see in the background this video. Right, it's a lot of college guys eighteen to twenty two.
Yeah, it's like it's mostly white men, yeah, from like traditional college age.
Speaking of schools, in twenty twenty two, a Florida school district cut ties with Fishback's debate organization after a female student came forward with allegations at Fishback quote initiated a romantic relationship unquote with her while she was working for his student debate organization when she was seventeen years old he was twenty seven.
Jesus.
The student claimed in a protection order request that after joining the debate organization when she was sixteen, Fishback quote unquote systematically cultivated a relationship with her by increasing quote unquote opportunities for personal interaction, and that Fishback later quote unquote explicitly directed her to keep the relationship a secret while she was working for his school debate organization. Jesus, after turning eighteen, she moved in with Fishback. The two
were briefly engaged. Fishback denies the student's characterization of the relationship timeline. After the girl broke up with him, Fishback allegedly sent hundreds of unanswered texts to her over several days. This information comes out of a harassment case that was later dismissed. The case wasn't about the legality of their relationship, importantly, it was about harassment after the two had broken up, where these details emerged.
Yeah, his debate organization, this is some kind of like like plastic turning point.
Yeah, but it kind of it was.
It was a Florida based debate organization in high schools to encourage encourage debate. It was active around twenty twenty two. It was bought by another company a year or two ago, but in twenty twenty two a district ended cooperation with this organization after news came out about this relationship. Yeah, it is interesting considering the amount that Fishback and Fuentes and these guys will talk about the Epstein file and then have this in your.
Yeah, inappropriate relationships with underage women.
Yeah that work for you in your high school debate organization.
Yeah, that gives me the age in a substantial way. Also kind of not that surprising from this kind of area of the right, but it's still gross.
Yeah, it's time for an ad break, but we will return to discuss fishbacks reoccurring campaign rhetoric and his promises as governor.
All right, we're back.
A big part of Fishback's campaign is targeting H one B visas he promised on day one as governor to fire as many H one B workers as you can and quote unquote incentivize companies to hire Americans. Again, here's a radio appearance where he discusses.
This on the first day in office. I would fire every single H one B who works at a state agency. Number two, if you have a state contract with Tallahassee, I don't care if it's serving NILS or serving.
Up IT tech support.
You have twenty four hours to pick, as President Reagan said, Drew, now is the time for choosing.
You got to pick.
Do you want your fifty million dollars a year state contract from Tallahassee or do you want your fifty year, one hundred h one bees.
You pick. You can't have both.
There's no negotiating, and you have twenty four hours that's how we create a culture that stands up for the dignity of American workers.
That's an interesting approach, Like you can't get h one b jobs not for the federal government, but for state government. I kind of imagine that, especially in Florida, there are very.
Many Well, he's not just concerned about h one bes. Fischback is also railed against student visas as a threat to the American way of life, and has falsely said that Trump plants descended two hundred thousand students from China to Florida's public universities, which serve only about four hundred and thirty thousand students, so.
They'd be like forty five percent.
It's not real. It's that's just not true.
Yeah, this was proposed as an idea, not Florida specifically. But this was proposed in spring of twenty twenty five as a negotiating tactic with China over tariffs. This isn't a real thing. Since then, Fishback has promised to raise tuition on all foreign students to one million dollars via executive order. The governor cannot legally raise state school tuition via executive order.
These are just words that he's saying, well, so like.
A lot of these state schools having a certain number of students who are paying a higher fee, be that the non US or out of state, like it's integral to their budgeting, right, Like, yeah, they're not making it on in state tuition.
Fishbag has talked about all this in an interview on Tucker Carlson's Internet show last month, where he said that a child quote from Shenngin, who doesn't know what Florida orange juice tastes like, can't possibly in an economic sense, but I think I mean not to sound gay, but in a spiritual sense, does not represent our state and our heritage unquote. Tucker replied, that's the opposite of gay. Actually, quote that's.
A head of an exchange of words. Again, Like I'm like a little lost here.
Yeah, this is this is a sizable faction of the new right of of the of of of the gropers who are filling staffer positions at Heritage and in DC, Like this is the sort of media environment, like linguistic environment that that they that they are coming out of, and the pearl clutchy reaction is is not useful here, right, I'm not like who cares right, this is obviously embarrassing.
This is like a man in his thirties trying to sound like a kind of homophobic eighteen year old who's kind of only homophobic via like linguistic reflux.
This is like embarrassing cosplay.
Yeah, it's very cringe.
I can't even find this stuff offensive, Like this is this is just it's.
No, it's sad. Like the primary sentiment I feel is like vicarious shame, yeah, for this guy and his like desperate search for attention.
Now, a core component of selling fascism into people is that they were promised a future that's now been taken away from them because of some people that are the enemy. Right, this is like the dream of finding a subservient wife, a cushy, full time job, buying a home, raising two point five kids in a safe and secure homeland. But because of quote unquote them, this dream is no longer possible. Through the years, we've seen different versions of this targeting Jews, Feminists,
palace Indians, Muslims, Mexicans, Central and South American immigrants. Now, during Fishbeck's Carlson interview, he elucidated on like an updated version of the like twenty first century version of the American dream that was stolen from gen Z.
Gen Z was such an important part of the president's victory last year. Yes, and they feel betrayed by a lot of these Trump advisors and what they've chosen to prioritize and not.
I can see why.
And when I've met them, and I've met them where they are at their universities, whether it's UF a couple of weeks ago, I'll be at FSU and just a couple weeks from now. Their number one frustration is that, look, they don't want to be lectured anymore. They got a degree, they got good grades, they got good test scores. They didn't study gender studies or black intersectionality. They did the stem thing that Republicans told them to do, learn to code,
Learn to code. And now they say, you know what Amazon, Google fed acts. No, No, those jobs aren't available for you, upesky Americans. You want paid time off, you want to go to church on Sunday. We're going to give those jobs to an entire new class of foreign serfs known as the Indians and the Chinese. And we're not going to even interview you for those positions. They don't even pretend that the Chinese or the Indians are smarter. They're not. They don't speak our language, they have no skin.
In they're not smarter.
Act they're not at all.
I know.
And so the issue then becomes, do we actually have a labor market that is utterly rigged against American citizens? The answer is yes.
I think this is a really interesting exchange on a sort of slide that's happening on the right.
Beyond talking about like illegal immigrants.
What's really interesting to me is that like the first real immigration lik restrictions that were part of the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act, right, Yeah, and we have circled all the way back to essentially a very similar argument.
Yeah.
The slide from talking about illegal immigrants in like the far right space to really honing in on on student visa's foreign workers, I think is an interesting pivot. And this new version of the American dream of like, you know, stem jobs, learned to code that's now been taken away, that's no longer accessible because so many young Americans aren't getting hired because they're adamant about going to church on Sunday.
Something that's not true. That's not real.
Yeah, that's not a real thing.
First of all, young Americans are not in large numbers going to church on Sunday. Nor is their hiring this
discrimination because they don't want to work on Sundays. Right, These things aren't aren't real, but it taps into a certain feeling that someone in college might might have right now, especially in the wake of like ai Vibe coding, of they were told that there's this like lifetrack where you can work in tech, and now there really isn't many tech jobs open to people, and they're trying to turn this situation into this fight against legal immigration.
Yeah, into fascism. It's funny to see Colson repeating that they learned to code thing, as if that was like a serious piece of career advice given to people Like that has been a meme for no close to a decade. Yeah, like everybody knew there was bullshit that it's it's literally like that. The phrase is a joke.
Fishback later says after this little rant that quote, our north Star should not be a free market but a free people. He's okay, if the market's not freeze, Okay, if we're going to be restricting which types of workers are allowed, as long as we have a free American people.
Yeah.
So his strategy for winning this race appears to be through appealing to homeowners and prospective homeowners through tax cuts and down payment assistance, but then also really trying to engage gen Z voters. Looking at the successive of previous politicians, including Trump and how much of his victory was related to the gen Z vote, He's he's really really honing
in on trying to activate young voters in Florida. He's planning to visit every single state college and so university and talked with these issues as a social media stunt. He's going on a statewide waffle house tour, visiting all the locations in the state. Great and through this he
continues to talk about these beliefs on legal immigration. In an interview with a local magazine, Fishbeck discussed his belief in the quote unquote great replacement, stated quote, you can't make America great again with Chinese, you can't make America great again with Indians. You can't make America great again with Haitians. So when I speak about the great replacement, I speak about legal immigration programs that for far too
long have been overlooked. A legal immigration has been a primary concern for establishment Republicans, but each one of many legal immigration programs, by definition, takes spots and slots jobs away from American citizens. My campaign is the one that stands up and says America is for Americans, and so we have to stop apologizing for that. Yeah, little slight move there with the Americas for Americans. Yeah, in reference to German Germany for Germany for the I'm sure he
knows exactly what he's doing, Oh, most certainly. Yeah, Like this is the obvious next place. They have made so much political headway with racism, and like the obvious direction to keep going there for is to be the one who's willing to lean a little bit further into racism, Right, See if that can get you a little bit further, a little bit, a little bit more popular. Yeah, it makes sense in that. In that way, That's why I
find his canaidacy really interesting. Regardless of how well he's gonna end up doing in the primary, he is trying to trojan horse something into not even trojan horse in a way, he's kind of openly trying to pull something into Republican politics and something that's been like festering in the sidelines for a while. You know, start that Nick's been advocating for a while. There was that fight around H one B visas about a year ago. Yeah, and he's he's really honing in on this as a potential
future for the party. And what we're gonna We're gonna see how successful this is. Like in part right, there could be other factors that make his campaign not do very well beyond these sorts of politics, but this is the first time you've really seen these deployed at this scale, I think. And he's counting on the Graper support and this is what Nick's been talking about for a while, trying to run candidates like this as much as possible.
In twenty twenty six, we'll talk more about Fishback's relationship with Fuentes and the Grapers after this ad break.
All right, we're back.
In my episode last year about the right wing fallout of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson's brief friendship, I discussed how Fuentes was making threats and promises to deploy his Graper fan base to influence elections, both in twenty twenty six and then in the Republican presidential primary in twenty twenty eight, and after that new cycle had peaked, Fuentes continued to really hammered down his promise and threat to various candidates that if they do not adopt sufficient America
first messaging, he will deploy his fan base across many different primary states to influence the election through support and harassment. And I believe that Fishback is attempting to hold Nick to this promise. On a podcast appearance last year, Fishback said that Nick fuent Has quote unquote broke the Internet by speaking truth to the deranged maniac Piers Morgan in an interview.
I do love how Peace Morgan is now like an avatar of woke for the Nick American Right.
For the biggest interview of the year, Nick fuent Has and Piers Morgan were Nick made very very clear, we are done with the pearl clutching, We are done with the white guilt. We are done with this pseudo religion that attacks us for just wanting to exist in our own country, to buy a home, to get a job, and to bet fit from all the things that we were promised.
There he is again talking about all the things that we were promised.
Yeah, and us right, like he's a thirty year old hedge fund guy. Yeah, like he got all the things.
No, he did get the dream that he is saying no longer exists, like that has been his life.
Yeah yeah, and he's just trying to cash in on it now.
No, but it's.
Through this interview he just keeps talking about Fuentes and glowingly refers to the Groper fan base.
I'll tell you the truth. I found the audience of young men who follow and watch Nick Fuentes to be actually incredibly informed and insimple and very patriotic young man. I'm gonna be completely honest. I probably shouldn't say this, but I think Nick's following is actually really impressive. There's a lot of young men who are patriotic, who are well informed, who know our history, which is why they are so frightened by the current path that we are on.
Having a candidate talk openly about the gropers in this way I think is super interesting. This is the one of the first cases, and I don't think it'll be the last where nicks fans and Nick himself are like openly referred to in a race like this.
Yeah, it's it's interesting again, Like super duper surprising to me how easily the Overton window is moved to the right right now. And there's a whole network of these like short form and long form video places to do that right that are kind of set up to incentivize that. Almost he doesn't have any particular genius that allows him to do it right, Like, there is a system in place both with like Fointe is kind of outside of
the electoral politics Overton window. And then all these places that straddle the line right like Tucker Carlson, et cetera, et cetera, where, yeah, that exist to bring these further right discourses into the admissible discourse of electoral politics in this country.
Yeah, and a fishback, as a largely unremarkable candidate is counting on a group of probably hundreds to thousands of young men to do free campaign work for him by telling them that they're good, smart little boys, by complimenting them. He is counting on his success being contingent on this
graper army of gen z Internet users. To him, these are like a valuable political block and like that that's the thing that I find interesting about this, as you they used to be like pure poison, right, yeah, yeah, Now now they're seen.
As like a as like a possible asset.
Yep, And Fishback knows that there could be some drawbacks by going this extreme. A few days ago, Fishback walked through Miami's nightlife on stream with Menosphere influencer sneako who asked Nick foyant as if you would endorse Fishback as governor?
What you say already said?
Yes?
Nick Foyn says has endorsed James Fishback for governor Florida.
That'll really help go Wait, you want to voting for five one?
Nick ones, He's voting for Byron Donald's.
But that's a bad name, myrown Donald's.
Does that even sound like it could be a governor?
So there you can see that he knows that it could have some possible negative effects, but he's he's willing to play in this like irony irony zone while still very clearly embracing Fuentes and and the gropers.
Yeah, and like this stream with Sneakos is like indicative of a few things.
After Fishback talked about goyslop at that school event, you know, he said afterwards that he wasn't aware of like the offensive connotations.
The fuck else is getting which is not true.
Right, This has been like a four Chan term forever to talk about how like the Jews are poisoning gentiles with food to make them like subservient. Right, that's what the term means. He knows that, And he continued to use the goyslop term on Sneako's stream, and after jaywalking on this stream, Fishback joked quote.
The headline will.
Read tomorrow, Florida govenatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer, referring to sneak O great And based on the most recent polling we have on this race, Fishback's youth centric
strategy does seem to be getting its intended results. In a University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab poll from the middle of February, Byron Donalds is up thirty one percent to James Fishback at six percent, about a twenty five percent gap, which is kind of in between the more Fishback friendly Patriot polling numbers and Byron Donald's own internal polling. A sizable gap, to be sure, but
not one that is insurmountable. What's really interesting about this pole, though, is the youth numbers for ages eighteen to thirty four. James Fishback is at thirty two percent, whereas Byron Donald's is at eight percent. He's massively ahead among youth. Meanwhile, Byron Donald's tactics to address Fishback's connection to the Gropers has been a little odd. I'm gonna read a statement
from last week. Quote, Dear James Fishback, I heard you crashed out when I told the truth about your stupid anti Semitic BDS plan that you stole from Kamala Harris, just like you stole your whole gimmick from Nick Fuentes and Zoron. Mam Donnie, You're no racist, your no groper, You're no anti Semite. You're what people hate about politics.
Performative slop unquote. So Byron Donald's approach to addressing Fishbeck's ties to the Gropers are not to actually attack him for these ties, but to say that he's a fake groper, that he's not actually one of them, that he's stealing his policy ideas from Kamala Harris and stealing his gimmick from Fuentes and Zoron, Mom Donni quote unquote, your no anti Semite, your no racist. So basically attacking Fishback for not being a real enough racist, and Donald isn't the
only one linking Fishback to Zoron Mamdani. The conservative magazine The Spectator released a positive profile on Fishback last week with the headline is James Fishback the rights answer to Zoron Mamdani, The similarities seemingly being that he's behind in the polls in a race that could be very influential for the future of the Republican Party, while gaining a lot of traction among youth and having a savvy online element of the campaign, and so Byron Donald's response to
Fishback's popularity online a popularity among young voters is to compare him to Kamala Harris and Zoron Mamdani and claim that he's not actually a real racist, that he's not
actually a real groyper. I do not believe this is going to be an effective line of attack or damage his numbers among the young, especially male supporters that he has, because Fishback already knows that he has the groper base in his pocket, and that's why he's able to make jokes with Sneako about how no, no, no, Nick Fuentes
is actually supporting the other guy. He is secure enough in his Groper support to jokingly distance himself from Fuentes as a strategic move, because he knows the Grapers are already going to be doing free labor for him to boost his chance of winning. He already has them cool.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, Like he's relying on social media exposure from them, and then he can even say other stuff to conventional media and it probably won't matter that much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean he's still getting profiled by major outlets like every every week, and it's it's it's it's gonna be a long race. He wants to eventually debate Donald's, like in a televised debate. Unclear thataught's going to happen. Yeah, but as of now that that's that's kind of the current state of his candidacy, his strategy to overcome the
gap and polls. And I will be keeping an eye on this race specifically because it does relate to what I was talking about last year in terms of this like wave of Groper friendly candidates expected to try to get into the Republican Party in the next two to four years.
Yeah, it's The election is November of this year.
November is the general August is the primary.
Okay, yeah, so I guess the kind of Republican primary in Georgia is the big deal. I mean in Florida. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
The primary race in Florida is going to be the one that I'm keeping the most track of.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you know, don't be surprised if if you start seeing fishback pop up and more stuff in the next few weeks. Yeah, great, Well that does it for us today at it could happen here. Yeah, now it's time to end the podcast, to lower the collective Cortisol.
Welcome to it could happen here. I just want you to know our nation is back. It is the Golden Age of America. And we're going to talk about the sears say the Union by President Donald Dage Trump.
And I've been saying our nation's back since way before it left, honestly, so I'm glad to see that we've caught up.
But back to.
When, sir, you know, it's a transformation like no one has ever seen before. Turnaround for the ages.
We're gonna We're gonna do it better and better.
Better and bigger and brighter and whatever B word he can decide to include.
We just keep winning.
So you're getting some idea from this about the tenor of the President's State of the Union speech.
That we all just listen to. Yeah, it is.
Like eight thirty pm at the end of a long work day that was already long before we listened to the.
President eleven thirty pm for Gear.
Yeah, eleven thirty pm for Gear. But I don't actually believe in time zones. I think that's a gon spere, but we'll talk about that later. So, in terms of like first responses to the State of the Union, I think mine was Trump spent a lot more time focusing on the achievements of other people, like literally handing out a bunch of awards, and less time, as a percentage of the speech actually trumpeting things that he did and his own successes in a way that I found kind
of telling. And I think this merges with the fact that he did not mention Ice by name during the speech, So I kind of saw this as a recognition by him and his people that like, there's some face that needs to be saved, and we've got to try in this speech to kind of minimize our least attractive attributes and maximize the positive you know.
Yeah, My take was that he was trying to simulate empathy and try to keep hold of that Republican crowd and try to endear himself to them as much as he could despite the state of things.
Yeah, yeah, and trying to associate himself with a lot of acts of heroism or military valor or you know, which is classic strong man's stuff, right, like the you know, we're achieving a time of national great notes. Here some examples of masculine virtue. Blah blah blah. We saw the US men's ice hockey team.
I really hated that twelve minutes in. Yeah, came in because we just keep winning. Our country is winning too much. We're winning so much that we don't know what to do. Yeah, And here are a bunch of a bunch of those winners.
And I did find that kind of surprising too, like how quickly they got brought in and how much of a like a lot of the length of this was just him announcing people who had won something or were about to win something, and everybody clapping.
Yeah, it's the most medals that we've seen in a State of the Union address.
And I wonder, because I know one way in which these get quote unquote rated by news agencies, like how much percentage of the time was its standing ovations? How much percentage of the time manytimes they have to stop for applause. Maybe he's just trying to game that system. Amazing, that's pretty funny.
It was really easy to take notes because of how much applause there was in single lines he sat.
Yeah, and not just applause, right, there were there were large periods of time when people were chanting USA, USA, or Charlie Kirk's first name.
Weird.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it started off with some some more like statistics of dubious origin, but the economy and various other things. He claimed that fentanyl was down fifty six percent. That yeah, the strongestport of security ever. There's been no illegal aliens admitted to the United States in the past nine months.
Zero.
Well, that's a tortology, right, Like when you were admitted, that means you have been processed to release into the United States. So by definition, yes.
Have there ever been illegal aliens admitted to the United States?
Yeah, that's not what admission is, right, It's like saying there were.
It's like being like, no bank robbers have eagerly robbed a bank. Yes, it's well, no, I guess you're right.
Yeah, no, fish have walked under my orders.
And Robert, you mentioned you wanted to say something a little bit about the fentanyl thing. He brought up.
Yeah, I mean I love fentanyl, obviously, big fan of the stuff. You know, I don't like to use it, just like to read about it, study it uses.
No, that's a joke. It's a bit.
Don't do fentanyl, folks, please, And actually people aren't doing as much fentanyl, which has nothing to do with the Trump administration. So when he was like, there's fifty six percent less fentanyl getting into the country, I just I knew that was wrong, because, first off, I remembered reading that during the Biden administration there had started to be like a significant constriction of the international finnyl supply market.
So I looked it up and I was in fact accurate.
In my recollection, I found a pretty good article hosted by the University of Maryland's Medical School by Carl Hill, which notes that in twenty twenty three, the journal Science published an article by a Maryland criminologist that argued that the overdose deaths that had started to be noticed in twenty twenty three was driven by a collapse of the international fentanyl market supply chain. And you may note twenty twenty three is when Donald Trump was not the president.
For this article, we were trying to understand why Finnel overdose deaths, after rising rapidly for a decade in mid twenty twenty three, suddenly turned downward. Peter Reuter, professor of public policy and criminology from the University of Maryland, told The Baltimore Sun, where you're reasonably sure that something has happened to the precursor chemical supply from China, there was
a significant cause of the downturn in fentanyl. So again, what he's saying is the supply constriction happened in twenty twenty three, and it doesn't seem to have happened because of stateside US policy. In other words, the contraction of the supply had nothing to do with US stopping fentanyl at the border and everything to do with an issue
somewhere in China. Now, there's been a couple of theories as to this, including some international laws that have altered, like the way these kind some of the chemical companies in China have to work but the gist of it is that this started in the Biden administration and has nothing to do with border policy. It's purely result of the actual physical supply of fentanyl, and that constriction began in China. Anyway, That's what I had to say.
Yeah, I think it's worth noting. I'm not quite sure where that fifty six no idea. It could be sieges that they maybe seized a lot of fentanyl. Like, I'm not quite sure where that came from. Like, there were a number of statistics which I couldn't track down, right, the nineteen billion of fraud in Minnesota by Somali people.
There was one I loved. He made a note that two point four million Americans have now sentded wasn't the word he used, but got.
Been lifted off of food stamps. Lifted off of food stamps.
Two point four million Americans are off of food stamps.
Yeah, and he's specifically lifted off, as Garret noted, which would insinuate that, like their circumstances improved and they no longer needed food stamps. That's not true. Yes, we simply introduced like work requirements and other restrictions that kicked two point four million Americans off.
Of kicked people off of the food Style program.
Yeah, we've pushed people in into starvation because we.
We lifted them into starvation. Garrison, we lifted them there you.
Govation and this was this was his line right before he started talking about how we're winning so much and broad the hockey team that was the segue was talking was talking about how there's millions of people who now can't get food stamps and look, look how much we're winning.
Quote, we're winning so much. We don't know what to do. Yeah, that's my big problem.
I Folt so encountered that what to do with all the victories.
But no, there's there's a few other stuff.
I mean, he's talked about like, you know, the lowest inflation in five years, which is continuing, you know, continuing trends that have been going on for the past like three years, right in inflation, gas prices, mortgage rates. Did this interesting line. A short time ago, we were a dead country.
Now we are the hottest, hottest, the hottest.
And then he said hottest again, and then he had a really a really beautiful line of pros our new friend and partner, Venezuela and us barrels of oil, our new friend and partner.
He called out Delsey by name and was like, she's doing great things for Venezuela. We're going to do great things together. Like a bizarre, really occurrence. Like then, I think that it goes to show how he understands foreign policy, which is in a very transactional way. It's not about an ideological disagreement. This is about having someone who he feels is personally loyal to him and owes him the position that they have, and that's I think what he's
going for in Venezuela. He didn't mention the amnesty, but he at one point brought down a Venezuelan man whose niece was in the audience to reveal that her uncle had been released from prison. I will be eagerly awaiting news on that man's ongoing immigration status.
So bizarre.
Yeah, there was a lot of this, like really weird political theater.
And so much of it that just was in seats for all them and they were really like awkward open door moments that were just just unnecessary. But that that's what he was going for tonight in Metal Metal medal, A.
Lot of medals, a lot of medals, a lot of awards. We got the list, right, the whole, the trifecto. We got the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the Medal of.
Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Pident sorry, Presidential Medal of Feeding, Purple Heart at Purple Heart.
Yeah, yeah, we gave out of purple Heart and Olympic Gold.
Oh yeah, many of those.
He like had this ex strange moment where he's like, I would like one of those, but apparently like.
It's not for the Medal of Honors. You can only get him in the army. Maybe they'll open it up. Maybe they'll open it up, and if they do, I'll be the first one in line, sir.
Yeah, he did teut that we ended d I in America, just like one of the annoying talking points that means nothing.
Yeah, well, so I were not mentioned by name. There was a lot of border chat.
Right, Yeah, especially at the at the Star and then a few times towards like the middle end.
Yeah. And one of the things he did pretty consistently was was talk about horrific incidents, often involving the death of children, sometimes in front of their parents. Yeah. I just want to highlight a couple of those the first one. He talked about Delilah Coldman, right, who was injured in a crash with Big Grig, the drivers, which was not a US citizen, but did have a work permit, a work permit issued by the federal government under Donald Trump.
And this has been a claim on the right. This guy was undocumented for some time, right in that California has been giving CDLs two undocumented people in this case said that is not the case. I'm interested in what happened to the Coldman family. I understand they've been through like a horrific thing. Right, their daughter, it looked like she was going to use the use of her legs. She's now relearning to use her legs and to walk,
which it's great. But previously they had met with the person who was driving the vehicle that caused their daughter this horrific injury, and they had explicitly declined to politicize it,
say that they weren't interested in doing that. So I don't know what happened here to now Trump proposing a law, which Delilah's law, he's calling it, right, which would I'm trying to remember if he said stop non citizens or undocumented people or illegal aliens to use his parlents from getting CDLs, obviously.
I think are legal aliens.
There are states which will give you driver's license without asking for documentation for the very obvious reason that people in this country have to drive. Large parts of this country are set up around driving. You cannot exist in some parts of America without a motor car, and it is better that people get a license and insurance than that they don't do that.
He said, Barring any state from granting commercial driver's license to illegal aliens was his frame Okay, yeah, that's.
His normal framing rate. I have never had a CDL in this country, and I've never gone through the application process. But I assume one would first need a federal work permit, right as one would for any employment.
Well, you need a driver's license, pud also need to drive there.
Yeah, you gotta have a driver's license to get a CDL.
Yeah, yeah, there's a background check component, it looks like to the CDO.
One of the lines that he used right before this call to action was that illegal aliens cannot read road signs.
Yes.
Yeah, that's how we introduced the section of like, yeah, they're all through this country driving around they don't know what like a warning sign is or a stop sign.
Obviously, lots of people come to this country in a perfectly capable of speaking English, sir. Also people who are born in this country you don't speak English.
Well, we just we don't have an official language.
Just to say, a lot of people can't drive very well in this country. Yeah, as an as an LA driver, A lot of your people don't know how to merge. And it has nothing to do with your what language you speak or your citizens state. Okay, like this is a pointless remark to me.
It's just it's a policy that they can make, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, didn't he sign an executive order officially making English the official language. It's at some point early on. Yes, No, I'm just I'm trying to remember if that's the case or not. Yes, yes, okay. The other claim that I thought was interesting was the killer of this young woman in Charlotte, right, who has killed.
The trains stabbing incident from last year.
Yeah, Arena's a Rutska, and Trump claimed that the man who killed her had come in through an open border. I am not able to find any evidence that this person is an immigrant to the United States, and I have not found that reported anywhere. His father appears to have at least resided, if not been born, in the United States. So his name is to Carlos Brown Junior. And so assuming that the cartis Brown, who is resident
in the same place is his father. Therefore, I would assume that he was born in the United States and had citizenship through Bethey citizenship. I have no idea about his father. Could well be a citizen two. I'm just trying to research things in a hurry. I have not seen it reported anyway.
Zero reporting about this man being an immigrant, including from right wing out let's who use this horrific incident to stoke like racist crime panic narratives last year.
Yeah, and that may not have been the goal. It may have just been more traditional like race panic.
Yeah, that was what it was. They used it for racialized crime panic. This comment by Trump inferring that he is an immigrant may have been an unscripted ad lib that he just did.
But from what we could tell, this man was not an immigrant.
Yeah.
Now, it's just like a guy did a bad thing.
Nor was he released early from custody, by the way, which is part of the narrative that the right was using in the reporting around this was that this guy was like released early from prison, and he did serve the entirety of his sentence.
He may not have been released early from his sins, but you're released early from your sentence of not listening to us.
Here's some ads. That's one of the worst ones. Yeah, well, too bad, and we're.
Back, hooray.
So in the start to middle section where he was he was still kind of talking about the economy before the entire pageantry performance took over. He started talking about the tax cuts and the one big beautiful bill, and he had this fun line about how all the Democrats voted against these tax cuts, and this made all the Democrats stand up in.
Applaud that funny.
But then he talked about this mom who was homeschooling two kids, who also worked as a waitress during the night shift on top of her husband, who also, you know, works full time, and how these these tax cuts have have gotten them to take an extra five thousand dollars home each year. Right, this is the no tax on tips thing. And this story of this of this mom who's homeschooling kids and working a night and a full time husband was was like framed like as this like
triumph of the American economy. It was hard to interpret this as like a massive economic triumph when you were talking about a mother who's not only doing labor at home by schooling her children and then also working nights, and a husband who's also working full time like that, that that demonstrates how difficult it actually is to exist economically, especially if you have a family in the country right now.
And his his kind of twisting of this scenario to to support his his his notion that he is he's helping the American economy I found to be quite interesting, And that is that's mostly with the Democratic response. Like ri Spenberger was about, it's like how it's pretty clear to most Americans that it's actually been quite economically challenging based on his wildly unstable trade agreements and tariffs which have caused a great deal of economic instability in this country.
Yeah, there was a feeling during the Biden administration, especially with like Pusaki, right, like the Biden administration was somewhat gaslighting people as they struggled economically. Sure, but Trump has not not diverged from that policy. Right. No, And obviously now the dams are calling out talking of budget tree issues. Did anybody else catch that the Democrats have frozen funding to dhs who would like to be out there helping people shovel their snow.
I missed this. I missed this shoveling snow line. Yeah, I didn't catch that either. Really, I caught it.
I caught it. Okay, I thought hallucinated.
Maybe that flooded the banks of like guarantized nonsense filters and we just shut down for a second.
Yeah, that one, Like I actually went back on the live stream and that was one of the few moments where I, yeah, I wondered what heck he was talking about.
Yeah, I'm sure he's going to be deploying FEMA FEMA, Yeah right, FEMA to New England to help to shovel the snow.
Yeah, great, I'm sure that will be received. Well. Yeah, that was one of the more insane ones that I that I just it really took me a second to work out on earth was happening. But yeah, I believe that that was maybe a FEMA reference.
No, I won't be happy until Homeland Security Investigation agents are shoveling snow.
Honestly and make them do it. In every state, even though ones without snow. Just get out there and pantomime it with a shovel.
You know, we got sand in California. We'll find him some work.
Shovel some sand.
I think the most interesting portion of the State of the Union address was when Trump talked about his tariffs, specifically because just days ago Supreme Court struck down his
tariffs as not being legal. This will get discussed more in Executive Disorder tomorrow, but I found this to be quite interesting because Trump acknowledged all of this and then discussed how he is going to keep doing the tariffs anyway, right in front of the justices, just just openly talking about defying a Supreme Court order in front of them, and the camera kept going back and forth between the President and the justices as they just like sat there.
It's a completely blank face as he's talking about defying their order. And this is like real, real peak constitutional crisis stuff.
He kept saying, it's an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme corip Mind you, there was four of them there. They all stayed stoic, and some voted for him, some voted against him, so it was a mixed bag. But he was basically like it was like you know, when you do something wrong and the teacher lectures you in front of the class. It was very much that they didn't
really give him much of reaction. He was talking about all countries and companies want to keep the deal, talking about tariffs and it's safe our countries and this is such an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court, but that it doesn't matter because he's going to keep doing it.
We're still doing the tariffs. Yeah, we've talked a lot about it.
You know, there's going to be a certain point in this in this administration there where it's going to come down to a Supreme Court ruling saying that something he's doing is illegal and he's going to keep doing it anyway. He's already flirted with this in the past year. There's a few kind of more minor moments where, if not fully breaking a ruling, was bending it to a near buckle. Yeah, but like this is I think this is the most blatant incident so far of the President just blatantly ignoring
and then defying as Supreme Court ruling. And then he talked about how, you know, ideally tariffs will take the place of income tax, which sure man.
Good luck with that. Yeah. Cool.
He had a bit where he was like, we've worked out a new and totally legal way to do it.
Is that when Nie mentioned that congressional action won't be necessary for the new tariffs.
I think, yeah, there was some new and.
Established I mean, because that would be the legal way to do it. That is, that's the power that Congress has.
Yeah, yeah, we have their need to work it out, like we've got that one COVID.
Oh my god.
Do you want to talk about the rate Player Protection Pledge? Yes, sure, yes, the idea that tech companies will have to provide their own power to the data centers popping up around the country, lowering energy costs for residents of these neighborhoods.
Yeah, and this is relevant for a couple of reasons. He's talking about allowing Basically, the issue is that all of these data centers have increased electricity costs for a lot of Americans, and he's claiming we're going to put that on the tech companies by allowing them to make their own power plants. Like that's probably, he says, by making them responsible for funding the power that their data
centers cost. But specifically, the way this is supposed to work is by letting them build power plants.
Is that explicitly laid out in this plan, because the way he said it certainly was unclear.
I mean he said they're going to have power plants. The direct statement was like tech companies will be operating power plants that they're using to fuel these facilities. And that's like in line with lobbying Silicon Valley he's been doing for years to make it easier for them to create small nuclear reactors, like this has been for the last like several years. Silicon Valley interests, including like KRO's Power, have been pushing to make it a lot easier regulation
wise to operate small nuclear plants. Like that's definitely what he was referring to.
That's great. Feel good about that.
Yeah, I mean there's a good BBC article on it from like twenty twenty five with the title why Big Tech's nuclear plans could blow up, But it features like a lot of quotes from guys at AI companies and at Google talking about like small nuclear reactors can provide twenty four to seven clean energy near data centers. According to Hyder Raza, an expert in AI and energy use at the University of Essex. There's a lot of these
quotes that have been going around for years. So when I heard Trump say they'll have their own power plants, that's what I read it in the context of.
Okay, and he just he says big tech companies. He didn't list out like.
Who's Yeah, he doesn't who who that.
Would be, because it's just like not a thought out plan. It's just something for a headline.
Yeah, this is like the kind of conclusion of years of lobbying for small nuclear plants on behalf of like big tech companies. And I'm not against the idea of more nuclear power. I am against the idea of letting open AI.
Yeah, i'd be the ones who offer.
A power plant of any kind. Yeah yeah, yeah.
And having it in the State of the Union is something of a signal by him to them, right, like that they are like his constituency.
Yeah.
I think it's also, as gare noted, it's like a nod to the affordability thing, Like he's had to deal with that a lot because people can'tnot notice that things are getting more expensive. So he's promising your power bill will go down. Because I've done this thing.
Yeah, talking of getting more expensive. He spent a while talking about prices, like how he'd gone around and he'd seen like one eighty five a gallon gas and blah blah blah. Like I thought it was interesting that clearly they understand right again, it shows that affordability is something that they know they're week on and he's trying to trying to, I guess, reinforce the areas where he feels stronger within that and not talk about the ones he doesn't.
He talked about home prices, talked a lot about his Trump savings accounts.
Yeah, the Trump accounts for for kids.
If there is an infomercial vibe this day, Yeah, he plugged a couple.
Of different Trump r X and accounts.
Yeah, And he talked a lot about like I think, Rob, youve got the transcripts in front of you, if I'm not mistaken. He said that with a small investment, they could be worth one thousand dollars, hundred thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars by the time the person is eighteen.
Yeah.
The website describes it as we're building a long term financial security for millions of children by creating tax advantage investment accounts for you as citizens under the age of eighteen. It asked you to thought a form and then it says, get one thousand dollars for every American child born between January first, twenty twenty five in December thirty first, twenty twenty eight. The account is fully in your child's name, and you are the soul custodian until they turn eighteen.
No contributions necessary, but you can deposit up to five thousand per year for maximum growth. That's what the website says.
Yeah, Like and like if this is I guess to start off, this was like real. If it was real, then like I don't have a problem with the idea, Like it's okay, share, but that's my immediate question, especially since it seems like the big thing that he was harping on is that like this was funded in large part by like a six something billion dollars nation by the by the.
Dells, by like Michael dellahs.
Yeah, And so first off, I've used Dell computers, so I.
Was immediately like, oh, this doesn't seem like it could be good.
But yeah, I don't, like I don't know enough about this program to really know though, it's just like, my it's a Trump thing involving so I'm on edge. But what are we actually looking at here?
Yeah?
So I'm just going to work out the amount of interest it would take for that one thousand to turn into one hundred thousand in eighteen years if I just plug it into the inflation calculator. Yeah, even at sixteen percent, that's not doing it.
Well.
If they put that one thousand in Nividia stock five years ago, then it's certainly possible.
Yeah, which I think.
I think that's part of these accounts is that it's like it's tight end with stock investments. It seems it seems like it doesn't sound like it's just like a
high yield savings account, right. The other Trump branded service that was advertised infomercial style during the State of the Union dress was Trump Rx, which is essentially Trump's version of Mark Cuban's cost Pluster Drugs website to get prescription drugs at very close to the cost of manufacturing, something that Trump reiterated multiple times that he did not name the Trump Accounts or trump Rx himself.
Yeah.
Sure, is this what the part when you tried to use a woman's IVF story for propaganda. Yeah, I really disliked that.
Yes he did.
He did one of these, like one of these people either brought in or sitting sitting high up in the pews. He tells a lot of these little stories throughout the State of the Union. He talked about a woman who was trying to do IVF and the drugs were very expensive and now thanks to Trump Orex's it's less money.
Well, it's just obnoxious because Trump said that he was quote unquote the father of IVF and claimed to be able to provide resources for people that want to pursue IVF, and he has not fallen through on any of those promises.
He signed some executive orders that.
Did boo all and it's still an absolutely outrageous cost to do IVF and he's done nothing. He's done nothing. Yeah, So to use it as propaganda, I find it to be extremely offensive.
Well yeah, sure, but there's a lot that's offensive about the propaganda he does in this, like about the things he uses for propaganda, all the murders and.
Like that's I just didn't want to I just didn't want to skip over that because it's not going to get as much of a headline as some of the other horrific things he did.
But it sucked.
Yeah, yeah, what else sucks pretty hard? Rub it ads?
Not the ads for this podcast.
Oh no, absolutely not. No, I was thinking something entity different.
All right, we are back.
One thing that did get both both chambers of plotting to the surprise of Trump, because both for the Democrats applot again a little bit of the Republicans is he talked about the Stop Inside or Trading Act, which would somehow, I need to look into the actual actual bill itself, but restrict to Congress people from doing inside or trading. And this did cause a lot of applause on the on the Democrats side and some applause on the Republican side.
And Trump remarked on both being interesting, and I made a Nancy Pelosi joke.
She was there. They showed her later on. She was there.
In terms of disruptions to the Democratic side, Al Green did a little protest thing at the beginning, and then during the section where Trump was talking about the Democrat DHS shut down, he told he told the room to stand up if you believe that that protecting American citizens is more important than protecting illegal immigrants or something something to that effect.
Yeah, the role of the government is to protect American citizens, right like, yes, not illegal immigrants.
And this caused a shouting back and forth between Alan o'mar and Trump would which lasted for lasted for quite a while. I wasn't able to hear very much on the car to newsfeed and it's there's I'm not seen much reporting on it yet because we were recording this literally minutes after.
She shouted that he's killing Americans.
Okay, that makes sense, Okay, yeah, yeah, which accurate? Which which he is? That is That is a solid That is a solid retort.
And when you're talking about the DHS shutdown and standing up for American citizens as American citizens are being gotten down by the DHS, that is a fine retort, a retort that was mirrored in the Democratic response, which we might talk about an executive disorder tomorrow. He mentioned trans people kind of one time in the speech close to the middle. He talked about how a school socially transitioned
someone without telling parents. This this kid ran away from home and then a left wing judge refused to return the child home. And this this person who was who was at the time a trans a trans guy was sent to an all always stay home but is now a proud young woman with a scholarship to Liberty University.
Yeah.
And this woman who is part of this little performance did this like zoomer finger gesture bit, Yeah.
The Hailey Bieber hand gesture.
Yeah, I'm hit with the kids.
Yeah I'm not. I didn't know what you talking about.
It was annoying, like we need more normal d transitioners. But if you are, you just never are never going to show up to anything like this?
No, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, who wants to have the President of the United States talk about your transition?
You know what, when Joe Biden gets gets elected again, I'll show up. I'll show up at the State of the Union, Joe.
I think it could happen.
You know, stranger things have.
But you know, Trump's line after this was, you know, talking about how there's all these transitions happening without telling parents, and the quote we must ban it and we must ban it immediately. Whatever the trans stuff was all was all in relation to miners transitioning without rental approval. That was Trump's framing for the entirety of the transition stuff. It wasn't expanded beyond that.
He did go off script to be like, these people are crazy, you're in that.
Yeah, when the Democrats didn't applaud for his transcommence, he did, he did start talking about how, you know, deranged the Democrats are.
He said, shame on you. Shan like got like a kind of a chant going almost.
There was a lot of shame stuff back and forth in this section, say same thing during the like the stand up of you believe that the role of governments to protect American citizens.
Yeah, those were the most like out and out fascist moments of this whole thing. Yes, like that in my opinion, Yeah.
We got a Kirk moment after this trans thing. Talked about this renewal in Christianity among young people thanks to one Charlie Kirk who was.
Martyred for his beliefs.
Yeah, they you know, charted out Erica to do her like shtick that she's been perfecting for the past like six months.
Surprisingly, no like fire or sparkers or anything.
It was hard to recognize her without the fireworks. Then after this section, after the Charlie Kirk Christianity section, after the Saint Kirk section ended, it really became a military pageant for the rest. It got very metal gear solid correct for the final final, you know, forty five minutes, where he brought up a whole bunch of people and gave gave the medals as we've discussed, and then recounted the Maduro extraction. Yeah, in an extremely metal gear solid style.
You talked about, you know, the bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities. He talked about bombing drug smugglers and remarked that we quote seriously damaged their fishing industry unquote, which is a little joke about how the people that they blew up might have just been fishermen, not actually drug smugglers.
Well, in a joke about how, like the fishing industry has collapsed because people are too scared to get murdered by the US to go fish, so they support their families.
Yeah, in addition to the fact that they were already struggling to afford fuel for like I know, Venezuela and fishermen wotings won't going great for them.
Talked about how Hamas had to dig through piles of hundreds of bodies to find some of the slain hostages to return them as a part of the negotiations between Trump Moss and Israel and boasted that he had ended ten wars, and Marco Rubio looked a little soulless.
Yeah, Marky, mark I took a little.
Bit of a note on Marco Rubio because he said he will go down as the best ever Secretary of State, and it seemed like he was really throwing his support towards Marco Versus Vance tonight at the State of the Union.
No, because Vance is now in charge of the War on fraud. The totally real thing. Yeah, yeah, that is happening, which Trump announced is JD. Vance's new role is to be in charge of the War on fraud.
Great pig, JD Vance War Fraud.
But do you want do you want to talk a little bit more about this, like medical gear solid, Hideo Kajima military pageant finale to this speech.
Yeah, well I know about Hideo kajimas he tweeted in support of the FDF and then deleted it sad. Yeah.
Wow, you live by the tweet, you die by the tweet.
A lot of this was kind of textbook FASCI stuff, not to like, you know, overly belabor the point, but the bringing out of the survivors and victims of crime, the parading of military heroes, right, Like you can just go to Robert Paxton's book, which I have just over there, but I'm not going to read from it right now, Anatomy of Fascism. Yeah, see Anatomy of Fascism, and you can start checking off the list and you see so much of it here, right Yeah.
I mean a mix of like you know, war veterans, World War Two. Trump had a lot of this to seventeen seventy six, the fact that the two hundred and fifty anniversary of the United States is coming up.
Yeah, and then the national betrayal and the Scapegoat Group and him being the renovation.
Like we got it all baby.
Yeah. His speech read like he looked at Paxton has these motivating passions of fascism, and it looks like he kind of went down that as a checklist, as he was as whoever wrote this was writing it right like it has almost everything from that, the glorification of Marshall Valor, like I said, the blaming of Escapegoat group, like I alone can bring this nation back to great nurse things that were not new Fort Bragg is back, James, Yes,
I believe different, a different different brag. Yeah, they found another guy called Brag, which he didn't mention. The Fort Bragg is back, but it's a different brag this time, and I'm sure just a coincidence it's the same as the first.
But no, Robert, I think you're totally right that, like he started off by, you know, you have to adjust the economic stuff at the front because he ran on so much of it. But they want to get through that as quickly as possible. Then in order to try to coax this, like you, patriotic spirit, it devolves into this ceremony of like military greatness, of like returning to military greatness something that was lost and now we have Redone.
You know, this was the most successful military operation in decades. I had four leaders calling me to congratulate me on it. You took down the Chinese and Russian defense systems. This guy's leg was ripped apart by bullets, but he still landed the chopper. Like so much of it becomes about, you know, the heroic moments done by other people to had pad around the actual fractured state of of Trump's of Trump's America.
And waving the bloody shirt is a phrase you hear like it is a phrase you hear associated with fascist movements. It's literally referring to like a thing that happened during the rise of the Nazis, right as a result of
like the murders of some of their street fighters. But that's I mean, like he's doing very much a version of that here, like including the fact that while he was talking about this attack on Venezuela and the that injured piloting the chopper, he spent like a lot of time talking about blood like sloshing around in the bottom of the of the of the flight down the aisle.
The isle or whatever nil the isle of the chinook.
The blood was streaming down, so all of the all the special forces in the back knew that the pilot was injured and that they were all at risk. Very bloody, very very bloody speech in general.
Yeah, a lot of blood mentioned.
There's Similarly, like the Lake and Riley sections of his State of the Union addressed last year were very similar, and he was trying to, you know, play play the hits in terms of how much that stuff, that stuff played well among his bass last year. He was trying to recreate that in a few moments when when one of the instances you have is you know, someone who was socially transitioned who now isn't and someone who was injured in a car accident, you know, not a murder.
Those are two of your instances. It's starting to get weakened a little bit. He tried to use the Kirk assassination as one of these instances, and then one one instance of a stabbing that was a murder. Those were the bloody shirts that he was waving, as well as the National Guard and Jared Kushner.
Kushner was that the mentioned him by name? I think more than once. It's always a jump scare for me.
Yeah. He may have mentioned Kushner more than Vaughan's.
Yes, definitely.
He barely mentioned JD Bands, which is very interesting.
Yeah.
Does anybody else have any thoughts?
No, it's ober.
I'm glad.
Yeah, let's be done with this.
Let's be done with this. That I was it was too long to begin with.
I wish we were finished with this state of the Union as soon as al Green was that's there's our reference to him getting for the second year in a row.
Yeah, he's made to have it like.
Plans dinner for halfway through We're like, don't. I'm not going to be there long. I'm gonna I'm gonna worry out immediately.
Don't worry why not?
And you know, if we decided there's more to talk about, we'll mention it on Edie. But for now, that's all we got.
The Save America Act, he did mention, which we need to cover in depth very soon and.
We will, yes, we will, but for now, I.
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder are weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what this means for you. I am James Stout and today I am joined by Sophie Lichtman and Mia What. This week, we're covering the week of February eighteenth to February twenty fifth.
We'll also have a segment by one Garrison. Davis added on later they were out in the field covering a story which will be an episode coming out soon.
But yeah, they were inside the capital, not the not the January States Capital. Yea, yeah, so around maumbarmy. I understand who's going to pardon them and it will be fine.
Oh my gosh, seems like four people who actually believe this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, please don't take to the subreddit. Garrison has not been arrested. It's up to a couple of small things, I guess. Last week, the Georgia State Elections Board voted to reprimand Elon Musk's America Pack for mailing absentee ballot applications prey filled out with voting information during twenty twenty four elections that violates state law.
Uh yeah, yeah.
And they didn't they did this thing. I don't know if you remember this. They didn't indicate like it wasn't a ballot, it wasn't from the government to vote with, it was from Elon Musk.
What that's so unhinged.
Yeah, he was really on one back then. It'll be interesting to see how he approaches the mid terms with his America Party.
Wow. Scotus did say that USPS is legally immune for intentionally missdelivered mail. They're basically saying, you know, and this was a five to four decision and it happened on Tuesday, February twenty fourth, that the US Postal Service can't be held liable for intentional failure to deliver mail only.
Hinge's decision by the way that the actual the actual story behind it is this black woman who was renting property out to people and all the like. The people were pissed about it because they're racists, and so they were doing shit like intentionally not delivering bills and stuff. They were like locking their mailboxes with like locks that no one had the keys to because the post office people were just putting locks on it. And it got ruled that they have immunity for this.
Wow. Bizarre.
Yeah, I mean all of this just feels like it's being targeted for voter suppression. But yeah, that's a bigger story.
Yeah, but it's also another case of Supreme Court says racism, Fine.
Yeah, money such cases.
Yeah, let's see. Uh that's the dog trine. The other thing was this this week is part of the DHS shutdown. Lewandowski and nom decided that they were going to shut down TSA, pre check and global so those people aren't familiar, are like expedited processing. One is for getting on the plane as you go for security there and the other one is for when you arrive in the United States and nuclear customes. That this lasted for like minutes. It
seems to I think global entry is still paused. There are other ways in which having a global entry car can exploit your entry into the US. Still, but the pre check thing did not last very long because that would have probably pissed off all the wrong people, right, Like.
Yeah, and also make lines even longer, which is airports are already a nightmare. Come on, come on, they.
Would have gotten killed by the wrong congressional staffer.
Right you think Ted Cruz doesn't have TSA pre check?
Please the idea that like, Okay, so we're like, they're forcing all the TSA people to work anyway, right, because they are essential employees. But be like, if you can find a way to make those people work less, let's say by having a group of people who have been pre cleared so the TSA people don't have to spend quite a long checking them.
That helps.
Actually, this is not a cost saving measure. This is clearly to try to punish people and put it on the dems.
I simply have TSA pre check just so I don't have to take off my shoes, and because it brings me great joy when I get to ditch people who do not have love ditching Robert Evans at the airport and every time we travel together, it's a battle who will get through the line first, And one time it was him and he was like, ah, you know what I deserve that a prettiest years of a previous job bought me that PSA prew check and I've had it for years and wow, I love not taking my shoes off.
That's it.
That's the only person for me. I'm like, Wow, get to wear shoes first worldbum.
Oh yeah, let's talk briefly about Mexico.
Yes, oh god, dramatic tone shift.
Yeah yeah, yeah, well you know you might use your pre check on a trip to Mexico.
Wow.
Transition.
Wow, yeah, that's a transition. That's what we do here, I see, Yeah, professional podcasting. The Mexican military killed Elemento on Sunday. Mencho's legal name is Nemesio where a servantees. He was, of course the leader of the CJ and G, which is I guess the English translation would be like the Hallisco Cartel new Generation. The Spanish acronym is how it's generally used. He was also the most wanted person in Mexico. The operation was carried out by the Mexican military.
I've seen some reports they didn't notify local law enforcement so he wouldn't be tipped off now. Mento is reported to have died on a military flight after the raid, so have been injured in the raid and then died on the way back to Mexico City, where he was obviously going to be treated, and then questioned if he survived.
I guess in response, more than two hundred and fifty nar called blockadoes knuckle blockades, if you're not familiar, are roadblocks that are generally made up of vehicles that are carjacked. They're often like buses, and then they're set a blaze that they're set at ninety degrees to the direction of travel of the road right, so it makes a roadblock. So more than two hundred and fifty of these were set up around the country. This is a relatively common response.
The most I guess like serious response we've seen to a government action before was called the Kolia Kanasso Couliacan was in a lower cartel. This this one they're calling the men jassel right, using the same etymology. I guess. There have also been a tax on Mexican National Guard troops, killing more than two dozen in twenty four hours following the raids. More than sixty civilians I've now been reported
to being killed, including a pregnant woman. Yeah, it's all like, it's folks in Mexico who are going to suffer, right, Like it's everyday people trying to get on with their lives. Another of the things that happened is the bank will Benstar, so like well being bank, I guess I would translate that as it's a bank that exists to bring people into the banking system who would otherwise be unbanked. It's a government initiative in Mexico, so a lot of branches
of that bank have been burnt down. This is part of a tendency on the part of shinen balm Right to repudiate the previous policy of hugs not bullets, and to go after organized crime in Mexico more violently. I guess. It seems like the country's security forces have been leading the charge against the seen a Lower cartel, and this may be indicates that it's the military who were going after the Hallischoo cartel. So like the two branches are
pursuing separate missions against against different entities. Right, it remains to be seen if there was any US involvement. I kind of take issue at the Niegiac suggestion that there has to have been US involvement. Like, the Mexican government is more than capable of doing state violence. It has done so for a long time. Ye, you know, the Mexican government is capable of acting on its own. Not everything that happens is about America. I don't want to
cover this in too great of a detail. It's not really a beat that we report on other than this is a relatively major occurrence in Mexico.
Yeah, and Gear is gonna plug in now, future Gear, tell us what you got.
Hello.
Garrison Davis here with Sophie Leuchterman for a special segment about the Super Bowl commercial for Ring the Doorbell, owned by Amazon Yep. During the Super Bowl, Amazon's Ring Doorbell air commercial showing off a new feature called search Party, which was advertised as a way to locate lost by automatically searching through footage captured by ring cameras in the neighborhood to track of pet's movements.
Ooh, who picked the name search party? And who thought that wasn't creepy?
Search Party is interesting because it makes you think of like a crime scene. Yes, that is a brain link that they may not have intended. Let's play, yes, please the audio from this commercial because, as Sophie discussed before, we started this segment where we're unsure of the overlap of it could happen here listeners and Super Bowl watchers. So here is the Ring commercial audio. It's thirty seconds.
This is Milow pets or family.
But every year ten million go missing, and the way we look for them hasn't changed in years.
Until now.
One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.
Since launch, more.
Than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with search available to everyone for free right now, Join the neighborhood at Ring dot com.
Join the neighborhood.
No.
Also, when did they launch this?
Do we know it's launched? I'm pretty sure search parties launched.
I just don't believe that Dog and Day bullshit.
It launched in late twenty twenty five, Okay, And I can speak to this a little bit more, actually sure because I saw this feature early when I was in
Las Vegas actually right this commercial. This intends to portray, you know, a heartwarming unification of a dog and its owner, but in effect the ad sparked public backlash, including from politicians like Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, and privacy rights organizations and among normies, because this ad accidentally demonstrated the technological capacity to turn every neighborhood ring camera into a web of surveillance that AI can use to locate anything.
Based on a picture.
Now, as I said, I saw this feature unveiled at CEES last month. I talked about it on Better Offline. At ces the AI search functionality was described like this. The owner of a lost pet can upload a photo and post a notice in the ring app an Amazon will utilize ring cameras in the area to search for matches, and if a match is found, the owner of the camera can share the footage with the owner of the
lost pet. But the public display this technology during the Super Bowl has stirred trouble and bad headlines for Amazon.
Senator Ed Markey said that the.
Ad quote exposed a scary truth the technology in its doorbell cameras can be used to hunt down a lost
pet or a person. Americans oppose this creepy surveillance state unquote, and the privacy rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a statement that the ad was quote unquote disguised as heartfelt, but actually quote previewed future surveillance of our streets, a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything human, pet, or otherwise.
Quote.
Now, these concerns are in the wake of high profile ICE rates targeting neighborhoods, and a recent announcement that RING was going to partner with the police surveillance company Flock, which operates large scale, integrated camera systems that allow police to tap into a network of surveillance in urban areas through cameras and license plate readers. Now, Flock claims that they do not give federal immigration agencies direct access to footage, and that may be true, that.
Doesn't mean that won't change that they don't have capability to do.
So well, and that doesn't mean that CBP and ICE can't acquire that footage in an other ways and currently right now, a four h four media report from last May showed that local police working with ICE used Flock's camera network to track immigrants as a part of ICE and homeland security investigations, so they are getting access to this footage even though they aren't directly tapped into the Flock network because they can work with local agencies in
states that do not have sanctuary city policies and in states that maybe do, because police.
May not be always following those laws.
Ring, not Flock, says that their footage can be requested by local law enforcement and users can decide whether or not to respond, though Ring is also subject to warrens of subpoenas and court orders requiring some footage be handed over to authorities. Following the backlash to the Super Bowl ad, Ring canceled its partnership with Flock in what the companies describe as a mutual decision. The deal would have allowed Ring owners to directly share footage with the Flock network.
Now.
All of this happened around the same time that the FBI was able to access recorded footage from Nancy Guthrie's Google Nest camera as a part of that kidnapping investigation, despite Guthrie not having an active recording subscription, so this too sparked privacy concerns. Cash Rettel FBI director said that the footage was recovered from quote residual data located in back end systems. This was footage that Google records and stores for free on a temporary basis, usually for a
few hours before it is quote unquote deleted. So if you have one of these Nest cameras, Google will store a few hours of footage for you to look at for free and then says that it's going to quote unquote deleted, and Nest owners can pay a reoccurring fee to keep that footage accessible on the Google Cloud for longer. Guthrie did not have such a subscription, so this data that was recorded was marked for deletion. But data deletion
is not an immediate process. It just a piece of data as being okay to write over with new data, which means until that happens, fragments of that data can be retrieved and pieced back together. But this can be tricky and take a lot of time, and in this case, it took Google over a week for a very high profile.
Case, and they're still working behind the scenes to retrieve even more footage. Yeah, from this Nest camera.
It's it's not easy.
I think the sort of privacy concerns for this case do not reflect largely for I think most people's concerns because the specific way Google stores it footage in the cloud is also unique to the Google Nest system.
Ring doesn't do it in this same way.
They also ended up outsourcing this to private security retrievers for data retrievers, as opposed to doing it internally either with the local sheriffs or FBI, which says a lot.
Yeah, not surprising, and yeah, there's always a concern with these sorts of you know, doorbell cameras, that the footage can be subpoened, right, sure, but that process also takes.
A long time.
I think there's a difference between the sort of flock style immediate access and subpoenating footage or having to piece together fragmented footage in the case of like the Nest storage system. But this is this is the current situation with with the Ring and Flock deal that fell through. Ring does partner with Axon, the bodycam company. Similarly, police can send requests to Ring users and they can voluntarily
send the footage if they choose not to. If police really want that footage, they can try to get a court order that may or may not succeed, depending on the details of that case.
My question is when you were a CS what were they highlighting there? Was it different from this commercial or was it a similar campaign?
It was very similar to this commercial. It was it was like a section of the large like Amazon room. Like Amazon has a whole suite a suite in this hotel, but it's it's it's not like a hotel room. It's on the convention floor, but they have like their whole whole like kind of ballroom section Amazon Wing and Amazon Wing of the convention. Yeah, and this was one of the many products. They had a few other surveillance products, like a like a security camera tower it's powered by
solar that can like roll around. Also is planning to integrate into these web surveillance networks. But since this ad and the negative backlash which led to the Flock deal coming through, there still has been reports from four oh four media about internal discussions among Ring to use search Party for crime to quote unquote stop crime, and they're still ongoing discussion on the various ways to apply this technology.
In an internal email acquired by four oh four, the Ring CEO said that search Party could be a tool to help quote zero out crime in neighborhoods. The abilities of using this to track humans are very known among the people at RING.
I think it's really interesting how quickly this partnership was dissolved with the backlash from that Super Bowl ad. It seemed to be almost instant. It's pretty quick, which shows that once upthing's really bad and you pointed out sometimes that can work to stop said bad thing.
Yeah, but yeah.
Search party creepy, though like a law enforcement still wants to use it potentially be helpful with certain things, maybe, but it really just seems like they're trying to do like normal people surveillance.
Yeah, and then putting it with this you heartwarming package of helping find lost dogs. If you want to locate a lost dog, the most efficient way to do that is by having your dog micro trip. That is still the most most reliable method. Using this integrated camera network as a as a way to coax people into submitting into a system like this by waving the lost puppy banner is a little bit insid.
Leave the dogs alone. The dogs don't want to be surveiled. My dog doesn't want to be surveilled. She does she surveils my house. Stop trying to take the dog's jobs. We're gonna go to a quick ad break and we'll
be back. And we're back. And I just wanted to follow up on something that was kind of overlooked from the City of the Union, which was, you know, kind of a throwaway discussion about IVF, and I just wanted to give some information because I think it's worth talking about for those of you who don't know, IVF is
incredibly expensive. According to I looked at the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as an article from CNY Fertility that says the average coughs of IVF is often quoted at twelve thousand dollars, but that is just the price quoted by the Fertillity Clinic for like their base package. And I have several friends who have gone through this
and the costs are outrageous. Many other necessary expenses on top of that, twelve thousand dollars is around twenty thousand dollars and for most folks, on average, IBS doesn't necessarily work the first time around. For a lot of people, you're spending somewhere between thirty thousand per round to fifty
to sixty thousand per round. And you know, despite and fertility being a medical diagnosis and IBF being the best medical treatment for that, A twenty eighteen analysis of the IBF insurance market by Mercer found that seventy four percent of Americans do not have insurance coverage for IBF, and you know, just from speaking with friends, even if they do, it's still outrageously expensive. So we're looking at a cost of about somewhere between depending on insurance or without insurance.
And that's not even including the medical costs. That's not including the downtime cost of not working. That's not including if you're just doing egg retrieval and the cost of storage. But these expenses are outrageous and it's been a heated topic for many folks in the far right. And just for an example, I would like to play a clip from Charlie Kirk talking to to Sorry Sorry in advance
two Girl Twins that you know. I actually when this when this video originally dropped, it was a discussion with a bunch of my friends, So I kind of think it's worth sharing just to see, like how heated of a topic it is. Because I want to talk about how Donald Trump has addressed it and how that changed. So here is an interaction between two girls that were IVF babies talking to Charlie Kirk about IVF, and I think it's just really interesting to hear that extreme thinking
from that side. Hi, Charlie.
Hi, So my name is Paige and this is my twin sister ivs wows.
We have two older sisters that are also IVF. Okay, so this is about IVF of course, so I'm particularly neutral on the topic. I don't want to have like a forced opinion because like my entire family's kind of become a product of IVF.
Are you guys surah too or just IVF just if?
But I watch your videos and so I've noticed that in one of your videos you do mention that you are okay with IVF, but you're morally against it.
Is that true?
Yeah, it's a little bit deeper than that. But I have a lot of problems with IVF albe it while acknowledging the fruit. I'm glad you're both alive and so that must be celebrated. So it's a very I'll explain the difficulty, but please continue, Okay.
My like part one of my question is just as someone who was conceived through IVF, why should I also be morally against it?
Got good question.
Okay, So as a pro lifer, first and foremost, we have to have an issue with the discarded fertilized eggs that happen during IV That's why you guys are twins is because during your creation process, if I can be provocatively blunt with your you lost a lot of your siblings. Yes, am I correct, and.
Saying so for our older sisters, they had six embryos in their batch. Two came out, of course, but for us there were three and then two came out.
Yeah, And so that's my first problem is that it definitionally is saying like we're going to discard life to get to life. I have a problem with that.
So I do.
Agree, but in a certain way. Oh sorry, So in a certain way, those embryos, like say, they weren't going to become anyways, but at least we were trying because they were going to be raised in a house where we are pro life and we really wanted to be able to have kids and cherish that. But by taking that loss, they were able to have at least us out of the three at least they.
Could have the one.
So it's kind of I don't know where I'm going with that.
I understand what you're saying. So there's a pro life way to do IVA, which is only implant the eggs of which the children that you actually want to raise. And so by the way, you have a lower likelihood of working because in your case it would be maybe two or three. For example. The way that the IVF doctor will sell it is like, look, here's six embryos. You'll be lucky if one or two implant to the
uterine wall. Let's see what happens. Now in certain cases, four implant to the uterine wall and you get quadruplets, right, which is what happens.
I find that to be a little bit.
Creepy, to be honest, that a doctor can kind of call shots on what life is going to live and not live.
I think you're a little bit creepy.
Try this guy understand what it is, like, I guess, like ideologically obviously, no, but like what how does he think that?
Yeah, so that that was like an extreme side of things. Yeah, that opinion of you're killing your siblings and you know that, that sort of thing. I just find it the beginning of that video. I talked about it with a lot of my friends when I first came out. I just thought it was so interesting that where he's like, well, I'm glad you're alive, but you're immoral? Is such a such an unhinged stance. Meanwhile, during the Trump campaign, sorry in advance, Donald Trump's voice.
Trump back to back. I could hazard pay.
After listening to it for like two hours last night of.
The Yeah, yeah, Trump deeply pivoted We're going back to like about a month before the election in twenty twenty four. But he deeply pivoted on IVF after the BioMA Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively halted IVF treatment in the state by declaring that frozen embryos are legally considered to be children. This decision led to a temporary shot down of IVF services at major clinics due to liability risks.
This is you know, from on Hopkins Public Health website. Yeah, and so that started a big discussion and split lots of different people on different political sides about the topic. But yeah, Trump pivoted an IVF and this is what he had to say, Oh, I want to talk about IVF.
I'm the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question.
What the fuck?
Yeah. Also during the campaign trail, in an interview with NBC News, this is the most important clip of it, he said the following, Well, as you.
Know, I was always for IVF right from the beginning, as soon as we heard about it. It's fertilization and it's helping women and men and families.
But it's helping women able to have a baby.
Some have great difficulty, and a lot of them have been very happy with the results, as you know, and what we're doing, and we're doing this because we just think it's great and we.
Need great children, beautiful children in our country.
We actually need them and are going to be under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment.
So we are paying for that treatment.
Or we're going to want it or for.
All Americans that get it, all Americans that need it.
So we're going to be paying for that treatment, or we're going to be mandating that the insurance company pays.
So either either the government will pay for it or the insurance companies.
Yes, that did not happen. He campaigned on that and just giving that false hope to people struggling with infertility who can't afford the Like I said, thirty to sixty to God knows how much thousands of dollars is pretty sick.
It's particularly weird when I understand this is this thing that Lick his party is not united on. But like they've gone after not having to pay for other reproductive health care right and like specifically I'm talking mostly about abortions here, right, Like that insurers or employers would not have to pay for it. That that's a demand that
you constantly hear on the right. Like, I guess this is such a strange issue for them, because I guess it's one of the few areas where there's still like some division where they haven't all just like fallen into line on it.
Right, And right after he was elected, it was in the middle of February twenty twenty five, you put on an executive order that said, end quote to support American families is the policy of my administration to ensure reliable access to the IVF treatment, including by easy unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens, to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable. Okay, so he's already gone back on the promise from money campaigned, but that didn't stop him from doing this.
We're gonna have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for women to hold women between the fertilization where all of the other things that we're talking about.
It's going to be it's going to be grace.
We're joined today.
Horrible word, fertilizer.
I'm I'm still very proud of it.
I don't care.
I'll be known as the fertilization President.
That that's that's not bad.
That's not good.
I've I've been called I've been called much worse.
Wow, yeah, you have, that's it. Yeah, I didn't expect that one today.
I'm sorry.
It's so insane. And then back in last October, they put out like one of their like White House fact sheets, you know, fact sheet. President J. Trump announces action to lower costs and expand access to in vitro fertilization IVF and high quality fertility care and for the American Siety for Reproductive Medicine. You can read this on the White House website, but this summary pretty much covers it. It's
that the Trump administration's ivfinition contains two king components. The first is a drug pricing agreement with far supertical company EMD Serrano provides discounts on the list prices of select
IVF medications. These medications will be offered at a lower cost to eligible users through a government operated portal well trump rx doc gov and preliminary federal estimates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services suggest potential savings of up to twenty two hundred dollars per treatment cycle for medications alone. So trump rx dot gov launched this month
in February twenty twenty six. It's a government hosted website that serves as a facilitator and points Americans to drug makers direct to consumer websites where they can make purchases. It also provides coupons to use it pharm disease and it seems basically like a government version of good rx and is very similar to Mark Cuban's Cost plus Drugs, which has a lot of the same medications with similar discounts,
including the same kind of medications for fertility and per ASMR. Again, this move alone does not make IVF attainable for most patients. Fertility drugs represent only one portion of the overall cost of care, and patients without good insurance coverage continue to face significant out of poet expensive Trump has repeatedly promised to make IVF University successful. This announcement does not fulfill
that promise. Meaningful progress requires policies censure all Americans who need medical assistance to build their families and access that care.
Also, by the way, you can't use your insurance with Trump or X, So yeah, it's an either all.
It's great to note he specifically brought this up in last night's State of the Union during one of his what I call it propo. I think back to like the Hunger Kise, what I call a propo, which is when they like bring people out. I like dates back to like Reagan and when they bring people out to be like and this person here. But it just was such a bizarre thing to bring up. And you know, Trump's State of the Union was the longest.
Of all time, Yeah, I think, sir, and he spent.
A total of five minutes on healthcare alone, and this was part of it.
And here tonight is the very first customer ever to get that big discount, and it is big. Katherine Raider for five year She and her husband have struggled with infertility, and they turned to IVF. One drug has been costing Catherine four thousand dollars to purchase, but a few weeks ago she logged onto the Trump rx website and got that same drug that costs four thousand dollars, got it for under five hundred dollars, a reduction of much more
actually than three thousand, five hundred dollars. Catherine, We are all praying for you, and you're going to be a great mom.
Really creepy, yea, imagine having the president talking about how you've been boning, Like, like, what a.
Fucking how you're having trouble.
That's a difficult thing for a lot of people to talk, Like, I've had friends who've gone through IVF as well. Yeah, thing that happens when your ear thirties, But like, it's a hard thing for people to talk about, let alone to have it talked about in front of the whole fucking country.
Fertility and infertility is such a personal thing, and it's really to use that woman pain to promote your drug discount website. It's pugg it's repugnant.
Yeah, and she's still paying five hundred bucks a month, like like, that's just a lot of money.
She's unreal one hundred percent. While that's not as bad as five thousand, that's so much money. And it's like, while any discounter fertility related drugs is good, this is not what was promised. I've still ridiculously unachievable for most people. He is not the father of IVF And this is fraudulent advertising, just a way of like trying to promote his like artificial empathy to a wider audience. And it's despicable and fertility issues do not need to be played
with like that. That's what I had on that. It was like a very big throwaway comment, but I thought it was worth talking about because it's been there's been like a linear lead up to what that was, and I think it's important to talk about.
Yeah, definitely.
Anyways, James, you have more to talk about.
Yeah, So, going back to Congress before the State of the Union, Senator bloom Othoal's office published a couple of documents from two anonymous whistleblowers which show changes in basic training for er er are enforcement removal operations. So they're one of the branches of ICE. You also have HSI and then like ICE administrative stuff made us at home lown security investigations. The EERO are the people who are supposed to go out and detain and remove people, right,
that is what they do. The documents show quote cuts of more than a dozen significant practice examinations which potential ICE eer officer is no longer must undergo. In fact, the cut is sixteen out of a previous total of twenty five. So there are now just nine of these practically exams, whereas before there were twenty five. The exams remove include quote judgment, pistol shooting, determined removability, encounters to detention and detention to removal, as well as criminal encounters.
So these are like exams that would test the knowledge of the potential would be ICE agent on these issues.
Right, So you so you just don't have to know that any more?
Yeah, well you can you do an open book test. It's open book multiple choice it is now. Yeah, in some cases there isn't a greaded practical exam at all. It's just passed fail.
Open book multiple choice.
Yeah, to determine your understanding of the law, right or becoming and testing. Yeah, I know, right, I guess it's a caveat all of this by saying, like the people who killed Alex Pretty and Rennie Good were exceptionally well trained. They had been trained for a long time. They had been in DHS for years and didn't stop the murdering Americans industry. I'm not saying that, I'm not Joe bidening this, but this is still notable. There is also the wholesale
removal of some classes. These classes that have been removed include the use of force simulation training that's like a late they watch a video and they have like a laser pistol. That's how they slate use of force there. Well, they used to, I guess, also the training on the legal structure of the United States government, ERRO authority, and use of force. It also shows a huge reduction in the overall training, which we also heard from Ryan Schwank will get to in a minute, but he was a
former lawyer with ICE who testified to Congress. Toddlines previously told Congress that the FLDC that's a federal law enforcement training centers in Georgia had been moving from five eight hour days to six twelve hour days. So although the number of training days for ICE agents have been cut, the number of training hours was the same. They was going to get through with their grindset, I guess, but the whistleblower documents show that they're still appearing to do
eight hour days. Like the number of days have been cutting out, the number of hours of training in each day has remained the same. There are some longer days, but mostly those are people who have to make up the PT test or like some nights seem to go later with practical stuff like first aid and shooting, but the bulk of the days continued to be eight hours. There are now forty two total days versus seventy five before. Some of this was already public actually in certain forums
and subreddits. Era Officer has been posting about like the faster training course for a while. The documents show a target of four thousand and seven new officers in fiscal year twenty twenty six. They would aim to have commissioned four thousand new ice officers by the end of September. We also heard from Ryan Schwank who testified to Congress, and they published some excerpts in this many which I'm
just going to include here. A couple of quotations quote, I am duty bound to tell you that the ICE Basic Immigration Enforcement training program is now deficient, defective, and broken. And another quote here. Without reform, I will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty and do not know the limits of their authority, and
do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order. Finally, ICE is lying to Congress and the American people about the steps it is taking to ensure its ten thousand new officers faithfully uphold the Constitution and perform their jobs. Schwank was hired in twenty twenty one as a assistant
Chief Counsel for the ICE Officer Principal Legal Advisor. He also serves as a resident attorney at Dilly, which is a detention center for families and children, and at some point in this past he was a private practice immigration attorney. What good lord, this is not like a particularly woke guy, I would say, and like none of this is to suggest that it would be okay for there to be
thousands more ICE officers if they were better trained. Still wouldn't, but it does show that the state is building a force of people who don't know what an unlawful order is and what their rights are and what their obligations are and what the rights of the people who they are detaining are. And talking about the rights of people who are being detained, I want to talk about a
development in the case was the unaccompanied Guatemalan children. People remember that over Labor Day, the Trump administration tried to deport these children and they tried a number of like credit lawyer shit like like just really like silly, like I don't know these legal arguments, which which was kind of superious to get away with it, and they were prevented by a restraining order, right if you remember the judge Sparkle Supernannan who was the first judge who issued
the restraining order. But they did so in the middle of the night over Labor Day weekend and sent one of their attorneys to the airport to prevent them. Christ yeah, truly like last minute stuff. The class for that tro and the injunction was quote children from Guatemala who are all will be in the custody of defendants. They all will be lead to the next part of our story.
Right.
A lawsuit is now alleging that CBP is flouting the injunction by returning children when they first enter custody before they're sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. So they kind of tried to previously make this argument that like they were with Oh, they weren't with ICE, so they went with DHS. There with O R. Right, So the
Office of Refugee Resettlement is a distinct entity. So they'd sort of tried this like, oh, there's nothing we can do to stop the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and that had not worked.
Right.
The suit also alleges that quote defendants are using misinformation, coercion, threats, and fear to persuade children to relinquish their rights and sign paperwork portedly accepting a form of expedited voluntary return.
This is common across DHS. Rightly in my reporting on Dearly, for instance, Primrose told me that the forms for voluntary repatriation are present like all day and all night in their room, Like any time it gets too much for you, anytime they're too hungry, too tired, to stressed, too scared, you could sign that formula on a plane and it's all over for You're going back to wherever you fled from.
Including the case as a claim by an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center that unaccompanied children have been given a document that quote completely misstates or at least dramatically misrepresents the immigration laws that apply to unaccompanied immigrant children, and it conveys to vulnerable children threats that are quote in clear contravention of the entire system implemented to protect and promote the safety and best interest of unaccompanied immigrant children.
This you went to the Trafficking Victims Protection re Authorization Act of two thousand and eight. So what this is suggesting is that these young people are being provided with essentially it's not legal advice, but it's misconstruction the rights that they have to be protected, right, and so that they are not being advised properly of the protections that they have under law. I'm going to keep an eye on this one because I think I don't love the
phrase unaccompanied. Mine is when we talk about this, because these children, after and accompanied, there are people who are with them, who care for them on their journey here. Right, I've seen this firsthand. It just means that their immediate
family are not with them. But like we saw in the State of the Union last night, right, when the Trump administration talks about migrants, it wants to talk about people who kill children, right, like that is the thing that they or hurt children that it's a thing that they trusted out a couple of times last night. It is not the migrants who are hurting children in this instance,
it is the government. These children who came here on their own to be safe with very few options, right, and either their parents couldn't look after them, while their parents aren't around anymore. There is not a more sympathetic case, right, There's not a clearer example of people we should be looking after as a state or a community or a nation or whatever. And the fact that they're trying to turn these children around and boot them back to the
dangerous situation they came from is really morally appalling. Will keep reporting on it because I think it is like a very important thing to shed more light on.
Absolutely, it's horrifying. Yeah, just on a basic moral level, like being the person whose job it is and the apparently doing this job of trying to construct fake legal arguments so you can fucking deport children, Like what the fuck? Yeah, it's just so evil.
Yeah, it's it's horrible, like they you know, I've spent a lot of time with migrants to spend a lot of time with migrants with children. I've known plenty of children who are traveling without their parents, and the things that they go through just to get here are horrific, and the things that they're going away from are probably worse.
And to think that those kids could be booted back to the places they fled within seventy two hours of arrival before they're transferred to O r R, right after months, potentially years, is Yeah, it's genuinely appalling to me. Like, few of these things shock me, but they still disgusted me. And I really hope that this is something that will continue to get coverage, not just here but elsewhere, because like, these are the most egregious wrongs that the immigration system does.
Yeah, let's to take a quick break and the meal will be back with some terror park.
Oh what's that?
Oh?
Is it?
Is it? The dulcet tones of someone who isn't Joe's Dramma singing the worst clash song.
Z spot Sorry, Rocky jazz bo Rocky jazz.
Bo, I love how consistent you are?
Relent Chance is the worst clash song.
It really pass me off. Like people they think, oh, the clash and then they go No the song that they played while they were fucking bombing Iraq in nineteen ninety one that made Joyce Drama cry and what she hadn't written it? Yeah, uphold listen to other clash songs please.
Oh God, speaking of clashes. Wow, we have finally learned the results of the log awaited Supreme Court case about specifically the tariffs that were implemented through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Those have been struck down. So this is the retaliatory tariffs, this is the Liberation Day stuff, the ones on Canada and Mexico. Some of the tariffs are still in a fact. We will get to that in a second, like, for example, the illudinum and steel ones, et cetera, et cetera, are still in effect. I'm gonna be doing a full episode about this case and about what's going on with tariff
policy now, because it's very convoluted and weird. But what's important for our purposes here is that in a lot of ways, this is a very narrow ruling in that it is just specifically about this one act IEPA, and what it specifically, very narrowly says is that IEEPA does not give Trump the authority to do teriffs. What it doesn't say anything about is his ability to use other acts. And we're gonna talk about that in a second. Okay
to do tariffs, And it also doesn't say anything. And I think this is actually very important about the completely unhinged state of emergencies that he's been declaring in order to be able.
To use IEPA.
And that's also good to be very important in a little bit because because there's no ruling on that, he's probably going to be able to do some of this stuff with other tariffs. So basically, immediately after this ruling, Trump imposed a ten percent tariff across the board, using Section one twenty two of the Trade Act in nineteen seventy four, he says, so he implements it at ten percent, and then the next day he says it's going to
be fifteen percent. The current rate as of data of recording on Wednesday, the one that's actually being assessed at customs is ten percent. Because he hasn't signed an executive order to actually lift the fifteen percent. It's all very weird, it's all very sort of extremely chaotic. So right now the fifteen percent hasn't gone through. But I want to talk about this Section one twenty two thing that he's using right now, because this is a significantly less broad
authority than the authority he was claiming before. Okay, first off, it's worth noting that Section one twenty two has literally never been used to enforce tariffs before for reasons we'll get into in a second. Because it's very weird, and it's also going to be very, very difficult to do the kind of Calvin Ball tariff policy Trump wasn't implementing, where he just sort of says a thing and a
tariff appears. So the thing about one twenty two is that instead of the thing that Trump was doing before, where he was just tweeting out a tariff rate for an individual country because he was mad at them, section one twenty two it only allows you to set a flat tariff rate for every country in the world, and
the maximum tariff rate is capped at fifteen percent. The other thing that's notable about this is that Section one twenty two tariffs also need to be approved by Congress after one hundred and fifty days, at least in theory. The Cato Institute interestingly is arguing that Trump theoretically could just extend it for another one hundred and fifty days after the first one. But this, this would be a huge mesa because there's no way he can win a
terror vote in Congress. There's just absolutely no way. Now, the other important aspect of this that's very weird, that I think is going to become a very large sort of point of discussion in the coming weeks is that
section one twenty two. So I've read this section. It says specifically, quote it can only be used to levy tariff's quote whenever fundamental international payment problems require special import measures to restrict imports one to deal with large and serious United States balance of payment deficits.
Now that's vague.
Yeah, oh yeah, Well but here's the thing though, here's the thing. So I tried to write a version of this where I tried to explain ballot to payments and what a balance payment deficit is. I'm going to do that in the other episode. It's too convoluted. But what's really important about this is that Trump has been complaining about trade deficits, and the state of emergency is over trade deficit. A trade deficit is not a balance of
payment deficit. Balance of payments is an accounting identity that has to do with like it's literally like the sum of all exchanges between everyone in the US and everyone outside of the US. So you by definition can't have a deficit in it because it's the accounting identity attracks both sides, right, So if someone in the US is sending money to someone, it tracks both the fact that the used person set the money and the fact that
the other person got the money. So you can't have a deficit because it's always one to one because it's it's tracking both, right.
So you're saying the limit does not exist.
Yeah, it's on hinge, And like you know, and specifically for.
The US, it is. It is possible to get into trouble with balance of payments if you can't just print your currency, Like if your currency is on the gold standard, you couldn't here, you get in trouble here. Now, a notable thing about the United States is that we are not on the gold Standard, so we literally even if you use definitions of ballants of payment where you could theoretically have one of these problem, the US cannot have
a balance of payments crisis. It cannot. It definitionally cannot have one of these.
Right.
And the thing about this, right, you're gonna hear a lot of people talking about how the US is a balance of payments crisis. If the US was having an actual serious balance of payments deficit right now, there would be riots in the streets.
That's not an exaggeration. This is normally what happens. Normally.
Balance of payments crises are a country owes a bunch of money and they straight up do not have enough US dollars to pay that off. And when that happens, things happen, like suddenly there's like five hundred person lines outside of every gas station because there's not enough money to import gas, right, like you can't import food. It's like,
like that is what happens when there's balance of payments crises. Right, This is like Sri Lanka in twenty twenty four, and like that's the kind of thing where you get a balance of payments crisis and people burn down the presidential mansion like we don't have one.
Yeah, this is not happening. So there's already becoming an.
Attempt to be like, oh, the US is a balance of payments deficit, there's a crisis. No, no, no, no, no, no nonsense, gibberish. You're gonna hear this a lot. It's complete nonsense, and it's it's one of the things that makes me look at this and go, Okay, this is the immediate one
that he picks. But like, this is not gonna survive in court because the specific line here where it says fundamental international payment problems, like we don't have fundamental international payment problems, like we paid all of this gets paid every year.
It's it's funny.
In the executive order it says the US sometimes has international payment problems, and no, it doesn't. It has never had international payment problems like on any kind of real scale. The closest thing you can do is look back at periods when the US was again on the gold standards, and even then we were fined like it's it's it's complete gibberish. I'm pissed about this. I'm annoyed that I have to go back to balance of payment stuff. But this so this is probably not going to hold up
when the inevitable next lawsuit goes under. However, Comma, there are a couple of other trade authorities that he can use that they've been talking about using and some of them have been used already. So broadly, we've been talking about like two kinds of tariffs on this show. We've been talking about the tariffs that are on a specific country, and those are the ones that are basically gone. We'll get to the one exception to that in a second. And then there's been the ones that are on goods.
So if you remember, like though, there was a there was a tariff recently on like vanity cabinets stuff.
Like yeah, yeah, I do remember that one. Yeah, really weird niche thing.
Oh jampitions. Wait wait, wait till I talk about what the legal authority of tariffs on kitchen cabinets was.
There's a special constitutional exemption for those.
It's so bad.
Okay, So so this this is this is the section two thirty two of the Trade Act next seventy four. These are these specific tariffs and these ones are supposed to be tariffs on goods in response to threats to national security.
So it's yeah, hang on, join the DUTs for me.
The price of I pointed cabinets are too low threat to national security.
It's funny because okay, this is the one that legal experts think actually can potentially survive challenges because it's national security. But it's like, okay, like I get our Supreme Court. The fact that this ruling was six to three is frankly ridiculous, given that again, Trump was pretending he had legal authority to issue tariffs in a bill that literally never says the word tariff. It had never been used to raise a tariff before. Okay, So like Supreme Court
was like, okay, well that's nonsense. And even I, who was extremely cynical about the Supreme Court, do not think that you can compellingly argue in front of a court, and this probably won't even go to the Supreme Court, like that you can compellingly argue that is, it is part of the national security interest of the United States that American cabinet makers mildly out compete foreign cabinet Yeah.
Wow, yeah, that's a weird one. I mean, yeah, national security and like terrorism, the magic Woods when it comes to the Constitution.
Yeah, but in this case, okay, like really seriously, with a stream it's gonna walk up there and go national security, right.
Yeah, they've done some wild stuff in the court. Yeah yeah, yeah, it was interesting to what like you say, you were saying like how much they'll get past the court. It was interesting to watch the Supreme Court justices in the State of the Union just like, oh yeah, just grimacing through it. Yep, yep, he was so.
Mad at them.
They're usually pretty stoic, but there was a serious grimace action going yeah.
Yeah, and there was no attempt to hide that particular face, right.
Yeah.
I don't know if we've ever had a sitting president like school the Supreme Court in a State of the Union in that way.
I think maybe it is possible AFTR did it.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I can see the.
FTR did try to pack the court at Yeah.
Yeah, that was at least funnier.
Or at least back in the day when they used to like fight on the floor of contrast like something back then.
Those are the days.
So there's there's one more trade thing I think we're talking about here in terms in terms of of where more terif aulready can come from, and that's section three oh one of that same TERR Effact. And this is the one where so a lot of the tariffs on China are actually still in effect because a lot of those tariffs are actually from the first Trump administration and then Biden continued them because it's yeah.
They hate China. I quite seriously do not have a better.
That.
Yeah, but section three oh one is specifically for quote unfair trade practices.
Yeah, no, like unfair. It's such a strange word to use in legislation, right, like what what do we what do we mean by that?
Well, so like in the original context, it was like supposed to be an anti protectionist thing, okay, but it's also like, yeah, people are like, oh my god, it's unfair of that, Like the Chinese companies get money from the governments, and I'm like, all of you get fucking money from the government all the time.
What are you talkt like yeah, and like they're talking about it like it's unfair that the wages are lower in certain countries, you know.
Yeah, And it's just like do you look at this, And it's like, Okay, the US, the entire US agriculture industry, like all of the corn grown in this country is grown because they pass an ag bill every single year that does subsidies that are literally illegal for like any other country to have because I specifically got agreements carved out of the free trade statutes. Yeah, it's it's absolutely ridiculous. But you know, this is the one that he's been
able to sort of use so far. So I think this is going to be the one that's going to be leaned on once the Trump people sort of remember they have it. But the problem with using three oh one is that there's actual bureaucrat accepts you have to do, like you have to like convene a bunch of trade authorities,
and you have to have like a specific anti competitive practice. Okay, So this is also I think going to be very vulnerable to legal challenges, except probably on China, because you actually have to go through and designate what the legal practices are, and I mean usually the process six months, even when you're moving quickly. So there's also I guess what I would call the sort of like the secret dark mode option where they just start doing the nightmare or stuff.
This is something that I think it was hazlit.
One of Trump's officials talked about this last year is potentially using the Smooth Harley Tariff Act.
Like the nineteen thirties as like.
Yep, yeah, yeah, the one the one that is very famous for exacerbating the Great Depression.
Yeah, then what I lend about in high school.
Yep.
It's also the other thing about this, right is this Act is not on the books anymore. Okay, because also okay, so I've seen a conflicting explanation to this.
Some people are just confused.
I think the explanation of it that I've seen is that it was superseded by sections of the nineteen seventy four Trade Act.
Okay, So it's not even clear if this is in effect.
But this is in theory, like the sort of like dark maga, like we're reaching into the bag and pulling trade authority out of something button they could reach for.
Right, Yeah, we'd take done before with like title forty two and stuff. Right yeah, the title thirty two is to stop people with tuberculosis, like back in the day. That was the idea behind it, and they pulled it out in twenty twenty, right and then Biden just like this, Harris kept it for much longer than trap.
Yeah.
But I think I think this is and this is I think actually a very significant moment for the Supreme Court. And I think sexul Bank independence will eventually become this if and when this gets this gets to the courts.
Yea.
But tariffs are sort of the the red line for a couple of the Supreme Court justices who normally sided with Trump, just specifically because A. I mean, it just says in the Constitution that tariffs are specifically a thing that Congress does. So you can't just be like, oh, they gave me the power to do this unless they like.
Explicitly said it.
But then b it's it's this is this is the financial redline, right like, this is this this is the point at which you're fucking with the money. So this is the point where the Supreme Court was like, you know, we've we've let you just make up laws in a whole bunch of other cases, but this is this is the actual limit of it when it comes to authority that really significantly like destroys the American economy.
Yeah, like the economy has more rights send people do.
Yeah.
Absolutely, this is the way that it's always been. I also want to mention one closing thing on the terriffs is that the Supreme Court didn't answer the question of if people are going to get their money back and
how the refunds are going to work. Sure didn't, Nope, And I think it's because they couln't get agreement on it because this ruling is kind of a mess in that it's like this like weird fractured coalition of justices or like parts of them agree on part of it, and there's like parts of the opinion that are agreed by to by a plurality of the corp and not a majority. It's it's very weird. But yeah, they have
no idea how this is gonna work. There's already lawsuits going on to get the money back that have been in place already, so presumably some kind of redispensations going to happen. It's going to be unbelievably chaotic, Okay, but we will we will keep you updated on how American trade negotiations go.
Yeah, okay, we reported the news. Yeah, put a trans girl on your couch.
Oh actually, okay, I have one also really bleak update on put a Transgirl on your couch, which is we actually got numbers, well they're technically not the first numbers we've gotten, but we got actual good numbers on the number of trans people who've moved, we've like fled their state, like just from mid twenty twenty four to mid twenty twenty five. The statistics suggests that it's it's ten percent of all trans people, which is four hundred thousand people.
I think that's likely an undercount, and that's just the first half of twenty twenty five. Yeah, that is a humanitarian crisis, Like this is an internal migration crisis, right, the view that these are internally these have become internally displaced people. Yes, and yeah it's hideous and the least that we can do at this moment is putting trans people in your couch because the violence of there fleeting is intensifying.
Yeah, a lot of people actually reached out to our email. Our email is cool Zone Tips and proton dot me. And that's mostly for things that you know that we should report on, not for just like general episode ideas. If you're trying to be be a source for so I have some tip of something that you become aware of this and being reported. It's not for like Robbie should do this episode on Bastards.
It's not.
I just want to emphasize once again that it is not.
There is a if you want to do that, go to the Bastards up read it. There is a section for that. Thank you.
But a lot of people had reached out to be like, I want to do this, but I don't know of anyone, and obviously I don't want to be like posting online like transfolks come to my house, because that seems like weird to behavior. So that's something we will try and aggress like in a more general kind of mutual aid focused. Yeah, series of episodes that will work on but those people, it is good that you are trying to do something.
Yeah, we reported the news.
We reported the news.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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