It Could Happen Here Weekly 237

And instead of diving in immediately to that, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about the tragic death of Ezra Francis Houllett, a transperson from the United States, in immigration detention in the Dominican Republic. I should mention that they use both them and he him pronouns. However, I'm going to be using they them going forward, because that's what the friends and family of

Hullet put as their pronouns, and the GoFundMe. They were found dead in the Haina Immigration Detention Center, the biggest immigration detention center in the Dominican Republic, on June twenty third, twenty twenty five. The GoFundMe, set up by their family to bring their body back to the States, describes them as a compassionate and sensitive person who lived with mental health issues and the after effects of childhood trauma. They were twenty four and a really good artist from looking

at their Instagram. Per the Dominican news show Ellen form Conaltega, who interviewed Hollet's mom, Hullet traveled to Puerto Rico without their family's knowledge and seemed to be in contact with a social worker here. I found a local Telemundo affiliate here in Puerto Rico that reported that they went missing on September third of twenty twenty four. However, it gofund me says that they were missing in pr since March of twenty twenty five. And Hollet's mom told elin Former

that that's when they last spoke. Around that same time, Hollett flew to the Dominican Republic. According to ellen Form, shortly after that, they were detained inside a construction site where it appears that they were squatting alongside a Dominican man. After being detained by the tourism police, they were passed on to the Dix Young henerrad Le Megrasciung or DGM,

which does immigration enforcement and manages detention centers. Per ellen Former, this was about thirty seven days after they entered the DR. I want to preface this next section by saying that the DR isn't particularly kind to transfolks, which I'm sure

affected Hollet's experience during immigration detention. Hollet was initially sent to the male wing of HEINA, not because the DR is particularly woke and sends people to detention based on their gender identity, but because they were male presenting and didn't have any ID on them. However, once the DGM was able to identify Hullet, they were transferred to the

female wing of HEINA. To be honest, quite a bit of the reporting around Hullet in the DR and here in Puerto Rico is quite transphobic, and the way that these immigration officials talk about Hullet in this kind of mini documentary by Ellen Former is also quite transphobic. Videos published by Ellen Former appeared to show Hullet curled up on the floor next to dozens of other people who were sleeping in two small rooms inside of immigration detention.

Some of the notes in videos uncovered by Ellen Former appeared to show that Hullet was suffering from a mental health crisis Throughout the more than two months they were in immigration detention. Pullet's mom told ellen fordmher that Hullet suffered from schizophrenia. They also wrote about having asthma and being allergic to milk. Per Ellen Fode Ma, Hullett's mom conferred to them that they needed an inhaler and an EpiPen.

Although news reports say that DGM provided Hullett with some medicine for the apparent mental health crisis they were going through, I can't find any reporting that says that they ever got an inhaler or an EpiPen that they needed. A coroner's report found that they died from a heart attack,

according to notesjasin a national news website. There, per information obtained by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights, quote, at least four facilities are being used as immigration detention centers, present overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, deficient food, and lack of access to healthcare. The same report states that a newborn died

in Heina on November fourteen of last year. People I've spoken to who've been detained in Heina over the years have described the conditions there as horrific, particularly as the Dominican government has ramped up deportation efforts massively against the country's Haitian population. Detention Centers are routinely overcrowded and people have very little access to food or water for days,

from what they tell me. Further, people I've spoken to detainnes are sometimes beaten or extorted by guards to be able to call their families, to get their documents or for food, and I talk a little bit more about this later on in the episode. But the reason that

I started with Hullet's story is twofold. First because their death was significantly undercovered by English language media, and second because they died as a direct result of an immigration system the systematically abuses Haitian immigrants and has been historically shaped by the US military and the American border apparatus.

While they're organized in different ways within the law enforcement structures of their respective countries, there are a lot of similarities between the DGM and ICE and the United States,

particularly in their tactics and how they've terrorized immigrant communities. However, before diving into the current immigration situation in the Dominican Republic and how a lot of it has come as a result of collaboration with American immigration enforcement, I want to give some historical context about how, in a very real way, the United States created the Dominican Haiti border. The Demerican Republic was originally a Spanish colony, Haiti was

originally a French colony. Haiti became independent, then invaded the Dominican Republic, then they fought them back to become independent themselves. But throughout all of that time, the Dominican Haiti border was in amorphous space, not the kind of quote unquote hard border that it is today. There had been agreements on where the border was supposed to be. People roughly knew where that border was supposed to be on a

map and on the earth. If they lived near that area. However, it was just kind of essentially an imaginary line that ran along the two hundred and forty miles of land that make up the border between the two countries. However, in nineteen oh five, the US established a customs receivership over the Dominican Republic to force the Caribbean nation to pay its foreign debts and ostensibly protect it from a possible European invasion, which is a classic Monroe doctrine move.

According to a journal article titled Haitians, Magic and Money, Drasa and Society and the Titian Dominican Borderlands by A. Lauren Derby, while these weren't the first border guards, they were essential to turning the border lands into the border as it exists today, one of the most highly regulated and police borders in the Western Hemisphere. And I should also say that at some points throughout Dominican history, the

military patrol the border. Per a document from the Marines titled Marines in the Daminican Republic nineteen sixteen to nineteen twenty four, North Americans were part of the Dominican Frontier Guard that regulated this border. Some would later go on to become part of the Guadala National Dominicana, which was created by the American military government that controlled the dr

between nineteen sixteen and nineteen twenty four. In nineteen twenty one, the GND turned into the Porcia Dominicana, which also stationed people of the border. At that time. For more context, the American government was occupying Haiti at more or less the same time from nineteen fifteen to nineteen thirty four.

This period of American occupation of L'spanola greatly defined the relationship that both countries would have with each other go going forward, as well as both countries military and law enforcement. The military occupation of the Dominican Republic also led to laws that prevented the entry of workers who weren't white unless they came through official border crossings and paid for

temporary residence permits. This is, according to the book More Than a Massacre, Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands by Zabine Cadeau. While there had always been racial prejudice on Hispaniola, this brought even more, leading to Dominican security forces to arrest people on suspicion that they'd broken this law even if they hadn't, and it was

later used to strip Dominicans of their citizenship. It also strengthened the idea of quote unquote Dominican ivad as something closer to being white and European. That sentiment that continues to this day and in some ways is even stronger now than it was then.

dominicanness and blackness are distinct. Absolutely the Haitian people are black, which obviously is someone who's who's lived in the UK and the United States is difficult for me to understand. But like all of these things are so feally constructed that doesn't mean they're not real. It just means that that people made them, people can move them.

by some people in the current day. Although I will say, if you've seen the video of the comedian I think saying I know blacky Dominican, that's a I have pretty much witnessed something exactly like that said completely seriously several times throughout my life.

you are ye, within like a one hour flight. And yeah, it's just this is like the nature of creating hierarchies, right, they can shift to include people and shift to exclude people.

that imaginative line in the earth. These kinds of steps by the US military government were essential to creating this idea. The Dominicans in Haitians are two completely different people, have it to be clear, It's not that this sentiment didn't exist beforehand. In particular, the Dominican elite hated Haitians a

lot for the invasion of dr by Haiti. That centem existed in the borderlands, but a lot of those people were bilingual, which is very different from kind of people inside of the metropol who saw themselves as kind of this one identity versus along the borderlines, which is usually what happens. Right there is a kind of melding identities in ways that isn't seen anywhere else.

to high school classes who crossed every day. Like I've got friends who couldn't make rent work in California and so they go to Tijuana and like, obviously, o those people speak two languages or like both languages at the same time. I think that's just a nature of living in the borderliness.

Haitian sentiment essentially exploded. He introduced the SEA, a national identification document for all adult men, so Haitians had to pay for the SEA and a foreign residency permit, essentially ending the binational lifestyle of communities on the border. According to more than a massacre, if the US started the border, then Trhillo marked it as a sign of utter violence by ordering his troops to ethnically cleanse the Dominican border

of Haitians. In October of nineteen thirty seven. This was known as the Parsley Massacre, and estimates of people killed vary, but the most common number I've seen used is roughly twenty thousand Haitians killed over the course of about a week to two weeks. And this massacre, of course came about as a way for him to define the border by stripping Haitians of that land because they were It was mostly done inside of the Dominican side of the

d R. Haiti border. Yeah, it's called the Parsley Massacre because soldiers reportedly recognize Haitians by their inability to pronounce Parsley in Spanish prehied. However, experts think that this was just a myth, another way to separate Haitians from Dominicans. According to More Than a massacre also is a not so fun fact. A lot of the violence took place along the Massacre River, which a lot of people think is called that because of the nineteen thirty seven massacre.

But from the various Spanish language sources I've read, they all essentially say that this isn't true that it was. It's called the Massacre River because of the frequent violence that took place there. Between Spanish colonizers and French buccaneers in the eighteenth century. And this is according to an article by se Montal Driguos Nacola titled Dominican Republic and Haiti at the crossroads of the Massacre River. The Dominican Immigration Agency the DGM was also established by Trigo just

two years after the Parsley Massacre. Not only were they essential to deporting Haitians during Trhiyo's reign, but they also forced the Haitian population into the sugar producing regions of the country, and because he couldn't deploy overt state violence there in the same way that he did along the border,

they came up with a new plan. Any Haitian immigrant detained in the area would just be brought back to whatever sugar plantation would pay their immigration taxes, essentially creating these zones which still very much exist to this day of Haitians living in and around these sugar plantations that they also work at. I should say that this wasn't a codified policy, but that it coexisted with other tactics

throughout the years. The Juhio government also instituted a policy that made all Haitians who owned land or businesses to not be able to work outside of the sugar producing regions. According to a journal article titled Avail of Legality by Amelia Hinson, I visited some of these sugar plantations in twenty twenty three, and many of the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent who live there are descendants of the

ones Trhiyo pushed into the region. While anti Haitianism already existed before, through Hillyo, he cemented it into the political structures of the Dominican Republic to the point that it still continues incredibly strong into the modern day. About fifty one percent of Dominicans believe that immigration harms the country, per a twenty twenty four pole by the polling firm

Latin Nobarromtro. Many Haitians come to the Dominican Republic seeking a better life for themselves and their families, much like immigrants in the US, and similarly to the US, getting a visa or becoming a citizen for them is extremely difficult. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and I should also say that they are by far the largest immigrant group in the country, which makes sense because they're next door neighbors.

The construction and the sugar cutting industry are completely dependent on cheap Haitian labor. The sugar cutting industry is heavily reliant on this labor, a lot of which is done by undocumented immigrants. Many people over the years have called it a quote unquote modern form of slavery. I've been to these camps and what they endure for extra dreamely little pay is horrific. I went there at the tail

end of twenty twenty three. And while there are some places set up by the companies that own those sugar producing regions that are they're like they're called batayas inside of the sugar cane mazes. Some of the batayas have like houses made out of cement with electricity, and some are completely degraded, made from wood that's rotting and they have no access to running water or electricity. There have been over the years attempts by both human rights groups

and the companies that own those regions. It wasn't benevolently, is my opinion on it, but more because of the pressure that they've received over the years. To move these people into somewhat better conditions, and thankfully for some of them that they have. For others they have not. A lot of the Haitian migration in the last decades has come after the twenty ten Haiti earthquake and the twenty

twenty one assassination of Haitian President Jovenol Moyes. The two events, as well as other crises, have caused people in Porter Prince, the capital of Haiti, to experience significant violence and hunger crises. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced out of their homes and left the country over the last decade, per the Migration Policy Institute, For many, the national path of migration out of Porter Prince is towards the border

and towards the Amican Republic. And as we've seen, a lot of those Haitian migrants have also tried to go into the US through Latin America. And I mean not to say that they exclusively go there, of course, but they try to go wherever they're able to go.

I remember like right around that time in twenty twenty one, so there was a large number of migrants, of course, who had been stuck in Tijuana because of Title forty two. They tried to cross and they kept getting bounced back right, and so I would cross to talk to them. They moved to like right by where the ped West pedestrian crossing is now, and they were just camping there in

the square. Like literally, you go over the broad border bridge that goes over the road, you pop out your first step on like on the ground, and the bridge is probably in Mexico at some point, but they're right there. I remember speaking to Haitian folks there about like they'd had genuinely hoped for a little bit better from the

Biden administration, which of course they didn't get. Very common pathway is to Brazil to do underpaid construction work for the Rio Olympics, and then finding yourself without work, without much of a chance at citizenship for permanency, deciding to come Norfolk that that was very common pathway at a time too.

been entitled to Dominican citizenship. This ruling is called lacent ensia the judgment. What this essentially did was that if you do not have at least one parent who is a Dominican citizen, then you do not have Dominican citizenship. In the US, we have birthright citizenship or jusli, which means that if you're born on this land or inside

the US, you are an American citizen. This course applies almost everywhere except certain colonies like American Samoa, so essentially, in the Dominican Republic, if one of your parents was not Dominican, you did not have citizenship. The thing about judicial decisions is that they typically only go forward in time. But what was particularly evil about La Centensia was that it applied retroactively to nineteen twenty nine. And I want

listeners to sit with that for a second. Even if it applied just going forward, it would be a horrible thing, but going back nearly one hundred years is just horrendous because what the ruling caused was a chain reaction that stripped entire families of their citizenship. Because if your grandparents were in citizens then neither was your dad. And if your mom was in a citizen then then neither are you.

Of course, this ruling also affected anyone who did legally still have citizenship but didn't have the documentation going back that far to prove it if the government came knocking. So yeah, essentially, imagine if you had to prove that your great grandparents were citizens in nineteen twenty nine. I mean, I don't think I personally would have that documentation for my great grandparents.

the people whose citizenship this law took away. In total, the decision impacted about two hundred and forty five thousand Dominicans, of which two hundred eleven thousand were Dominicans of Haitian descent, according to the Center for Migration Studies, I of course say Dominicans because they were legally speaking Dominicans at the time that the sentenciad took place, but now they have

been stripped of that citizenship. The Dominican government tried to backtrack this decision just a year later, after a lot of international criticism and provide a path to the stateless, but the damage was done. In twenty twenty three, it's estimated that as many as one hundred thirty thousand people remained stateless CMS. There is no law that provides a

path to citizenship for the children of the stateless. So even after this twenty fourteen law that tried to make people back into citizens or provide a pathway to citizenship if you have a child, that child was not going to have citizenship. Yeah, because so many people were affected by it, and a lot of the slowness of the government,

the ways that government doesn't work. You have this wave of denationalizations, and because of a lot of the problems of the government, some people who should have had that pathway to citizenship provide it to them still don't have it.

their self published numbers. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean three hundred seventy nine thousand, five hundred and fifty three people were removed from the country because of possible double or triple counting if a person crossed the border more than once and were detained and deported. But even if you cut that figure in half or in freeze, that still is a staggering amount of people's lives who have

been touched and affected by this deportation apparatus. To give some more recent numbers, in May of twenty twenty six, the DGM said that they deported thirty five thousand, three hundred and five migrants according to their own numbers, And the thing about the Dominican Republic is that essentially every law enforcement agency does immigration enforcement. The great majority of those migrants deported in May were detained by the DGM,

the Detectinda. Out of the racion, about five eight hundred were detained by the Dominican Army and about two thousand, three hundred by this specialized Land Border Security Corps which is known as says Front. They essentially patrol the national border with Haiti, and about one thousand, three hundred of

those people were detained by the National Police. These numbers are so staggering because all of these law enforcement agencies are trying to meet a ten thousand a week quota that President Luis avinade is set for the Dominican government

in twenty twenty four and continues to follow. This number, to me is really really staggering, and it's kind of horrific because you read it on paper and it's hard to really understand the immensity of this mechanism to forcefully move people out of the country, and as well as all of the law enforcement work and immigration enforcement work that goes into detaining the people in the first place, then sending them to immigration centers, and then deporting them

outside of the Demican Republic. And that the way that that usually happens is that they are loaded into these trucks which are converted horse trucks. Sometimes they are like the little short ones and sometimes are the very long ones that you see to move palettes of stuff that have this cage built onto the mac and people are just stuffed to the brim inside of there. It's really incredibly inhumane.

for bribes during immigration raids and during their detention. For the article, guards in Haina, the largest immigration detention center in the DR, we're charging about two hundred and two hundred and seventy dollars to be freed, which might not seem like an insurmountable amount of money in the US, but it's about half of the average monthly salary in the DR, and these migrants are making much much less

than that. Yeah, the same report says that guards sometimes charge migrants families so Detanese can get food while detained. So much of the rhetoric that abin Aleed and other Dominican officials used to justify their actions, especially in recent years, is that immigration contributes to the destabilization of their society. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Haitian immigrants are just trying to live in peace and escape the violence or crisis that

they're facing in their home country. And like I said earlier, a lot of industries than the DR rely on cheap patient labor. And I would be remiss to mention that a lot of the people that the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement are deporting are people that the Dominican Republic made stakeless first place. So they essentially created this gigantic group

of people that they are now supporting rights. It's the way that the nation state operates to kind of push people, to push people that it considers undesirable out of that nation's borders.

justification to detain pretty much whoever they want. It's got so bad that in twenty twenty two, the American State Department issued a travel warning for quote unquote darker skinned Americans about the risks of being swept up in the country's immigration crackdown. And to me at the time, having written about that, it's kind of incredible to see American agency be like, Hey, the racism this country is so bad, you should be on the lookout. Yeah.

the metal bars. And I've seen this personally at the dr Haiti border, where they're taken from immigration detention centers and then dropped off and essentially forced to walk into the Haiti. When I was at the border in twenty twenty three. The ones I saw and was able to speak to had grabbed everything that they could as they were getting detained, because they knew that it was possible they could never make it back. Some of these people

included mothers carrying small children and babies. One worker who I spoke with worked in construction, and he claimed that he was being deported because his boss had called immigration enforcement on them because they were talking about getting paid more.

immigration rates. There have been several women who were deported very quickly after being discharged, according to a report by the Guardian, and I've personally seen a pregnant mother with a small child forced across the dr Haiti border after being dumped there by DGM, similar to how the American government essentially created the Dominican Haiti border and shaped its

border guard in the early nineteen hundreds. They also routinely provide training for several law enforcement agencies who enforce the Dominican immigration laws. For example, agencies from the Dominican Republic routinely received training from International Law Enforcement Academies, which are international police academies administered by the US State Department where US law enforcement trained police and other law enforcement agencies

from other countries. A training schedule from twenty twenty four I found showed that the Dominican Republic participated in nine sessions throughout the years with agencies like ICE and CBP. However, when it comes to being trained by the US, no one beats the Querpo Especial Sado de Segrestre known as SESSFRONT or the Specialized Land Border Security Corps. They are in charge of securing and quote unquote protecting the Dominican border with Haiti. They are in arm of the military

and were created in two thousand and six. That same year, unidentified quote unquote US experts reported that there were a quote series of weaknesses that will lead to all kinds of illicit activities along the border. According to a two

thousand and six article from Dominican Today. For the same article, the military patrolled the area beforehand, but the study revealed the lack of and bad shape of the Dominican Armies facilities, the lack of training, logistics, weapons, vehicles, garments, as well as low wages and bad nutrition for these these soldiers. And I should say that's a quote from the Dominican Today's article, and I wanted to talk a little bit about the border before I explain it later on in

more detail. But a lot of the border that I've been to between the Demaican Republic and Haiti is along the Massacre River where part of the Parsley massacre happened, and you essentially have this very big cement and iron and steel border wall going up that has completely separated this contiguous piece of land where people were once upon a time over one hundred years ago, able to more or less walk between and walk over without much restriction.

At all, and you know the place where they've built the barrier. This was not like what you know whenever someone from Puerto Rico, whenever someone talks to me about the US border, I'm imagining the big iron wall throughout the desert. This, yeh, was not that. This was kind of very lush, green mangroves. They used to be one big forest, but now they created a bait strip of land that now separates that forest that once was won

and then put the border wall there. So a lot of this modern history of collaboration between the US and the dr immigration enforcement is recorded in Todd Miller's Border Patrol Nation and Empire of Borders, both of which I recommend everyone go read. Yeah, Miller is great.

entirely Colombian young men. I literally watched these guys get like I watched a family who had known from the jungle right, and then we reconnected in La Jas Blancas, which is a reception center. Reception center is a pretty euphemistic term there. It's not a great place to be.

I think it's closed now actually, but they would come and call out names and it was like, what's going on, Like maybe we're getting taken somewhere, like maybe this is they want to check out passports and then just start loading me into same thing like a flatbed truck. And I remember one guy like having to give his baby to his wife and I was there and he was like, Hey, what are they doing? And I was like I don't know, man, Like I don't know that. Some guy was like this

is how they deport people. It was a very wow, Yeah, it's horrible. And then his wife was just like standing there next to me and like I was horrible, Like I put my arm around her, and she was just sobbing and of course separated from her partner and the father of her child. But yeah, it's rough to think that. Then I went home and did my work and paid my taxes and paid my little share of that family getting torn apart. But yeah, that was that was Blue Team.

There wasn't a drump thing like this is. The US has been trying to move that traumatic violence further and further from its population for a long time. That's what strong borders are, right, Strong borders of violence. Strong borders are tearing families apart. Strong borders are people dying. And there was an understanding shared by both parties that Americans

don't like seeing dead people. They don't like seeing families torn apart, as we've seen in the last few years, a couple of years, and so they have sought to move that violence further away from the metropol rather than stopping doing the violence.

incredibly uphill battle of passing several borders. It might be the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic, than into Puerto Rico, or it might be Haiti to some Latin American countries, then a several Central American countries, and then onto the US southern border. Right yeah. But versus let's say if I wanted to go to Haiti, it would be pretty incredibly easy for me to go there, right, and this is you know what we see.

didn't agree with was a threat to its interest. This is essentially kind of the same reasoning as a Monroe doctrine, and the American Empire just massaged it for the modern

world in some ways. This is why international collaboration between American immigration enforcement and border security agencies his skyrocketed since the dawn of the millennium, to the point that CBP agents have traveled around the world to show countries how to enforce their country's borders so that people inside of those countries wanting to leave and reach the United States

borders are never able to do. So. We talked a little bit about this, I can't remember if it was on air or off air, about how Bavino did that in Honduras.

around but not technically not the ones making arrests. Yeah, Like you can read this in the Miller books. But this is a thing that the US does all over the world.

the wall that they patrol. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, in twenty twenty two, the Dominican Republic started construction of a Mexico US style border wall that, if it's finished, would span almost half of the border with Haiti. When the project is completed, it will be the second longest border wall in the Americas, the first being the Mexico US Wall. It is supposed to be high tech, containing a series of cameras, radars, and drones that are

supposed to run the length of the wall. This wall, like many other border walls, has done intense environmental damage along the course of the border, particularly to the mangroves that run along the border where the wall is being built. In twenty twenty three, I visited Dahabong, a town in the northern section of dr Haiti border, to report on

the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement apparatus. For myself. The Hobong is where the Cessfront has a very important base, and as I mentioned earlier, it's a place where a lot of the violence of the Parsley massacre took place. Tessafront's base in the Hobong is painted in a beige brown camouflage pattern that makes it stick out like a sore foam against the green forest background where it's stationed. However, it does blend into that strip of land where they've

cut out to make the border wall. You know, in many ways the government tries to reshape the land in nature to fit its image.

Haitians needed the water for agriculture along the border, but the Meinican officials said that the canalization would take water away from their own purposes. A couple weeks after I was there, they opened up the border again, which was extremely necessary because border towns like Dahawong and Juanaminthe, which is the town on the Haitian side rely on each other a lot for trade, and this has been that

way since time immemorial in that region. Right, the binational market in Da Howong is pretty much the only place where Haitians are legally allowed to enter, but they have to leave the same day they came in. So essentially this giant market, and there is a steel wall that runs along the outer perimeter of it, which is where you have cess front border guards. So if you pass through the border cross saying you do the whole like

immigration check, you're able to go into the market. Yeah, and you could essentially do like a circle around it, so you're able to go into the market and then you leave the backway which connects to another border crossing.

need to enforce this this border right yeah. So yeah, this, this market in the Hubbong is where a lot of people on the Haiti side of the border are able to buy and sell a lot of stuff they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Sure. So the bridge that runs over the Massacre River that connects the Hobong to what I mean is within feet of the national and like

I mentioned, all encircled by says Funt's guards. Any Haitian who would try to pass that fence without going past the official checkpoint would likely be detained and deported immediately if they're caught by the border guards. And as we know, even if a border presents itself as extremely rigid, a lot of it is for show. At least in my experience with the Dr Haiti border, right, a lot of

it is theater security theater. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was there, I spent the better part of my time there just watching DGM trucks bring dozens of people to the border, then watched as sysfront guards herded them out of the Dominican Republic.

pourus in several places. When I was in the bateyas in the sugar producing regions, which are the little towns that they have or little settlements that they have inside of the sugar cane maze, I spoke to someone who had been detained outside of the sugar cane areas without their work permit and then deported. His family had to pay a buskung essentially what the US would call a

coyote to bring them back across the border. However, this forced him into what's essentially debt bondage to the buskung because the worker couldn't really pay because of the sugar plantations pay a pittance, so they were essentially in a recursive cycle of some part of my money has to go to the buskung and then whatever's left has to go to paying for my family and my needs, and

it was never enough. Sadly. Yeah. So, one of the news videos that I watched as part of research for this was a PBS like a seven minute clip where they talked to a Haitian man as they were being deported along the border, and when they went to talk to the guy's family the next day, the guy who had been deported was there because he crossed the border through the river overnight, and you can hear the astonishment in the narrator's voice, even though that script reading was

probably weeks later. And it's just an example of how these borders are more porous than the state wants them to be and wants them to appear to be. So I wanted to start finishing off by mentioning that the Dominican government is now actively collaborating with the Trump administration's deportation campaign by agreeing to accept for country deporties from

the US under the initiative. This agreement, as I hope I've shown throughout the course of this episode, is another action in a line line of collaboration between the dr and the US when it comes to immigration enforcement. Noticeably, the agreement leaves out Haitian nationals, and the US is supposed to provide funding to ensure that these deportees have a quote unquote adequate conditions per the Global Detention Project, which really remains to be seen if that's the case.

But if the conditions in the current immigration detention centers are anything to go by, I'm really not holding out hope that they're adequate conditions. So before I finished the episode, I want to return to Hulletts stuff in Haina, a facility systematically created with a deep racism towards the Haitian migrants who make up the vast majority of the people detained there. Hallet was killed by a system that the

United States helped create and then shaped. The probability that the DGM agents who were at Haina at the time that Hullet died, the probability that they were trained by US officials is not zero. And right now we're seeing the immigration sets that the US helped train outside of

the country boomerang back towards US. What I thought was only a thing of the Dominican Republic, where you have a kind of paramilitary style immigration force raiding everyone insight and you know, kind of systematically terrorizing and population has now become a common reality for millions of people inside of the US.

just through paying your taxes, and that fucking sucks. It shouldn't be that way. Absolutely, Yeah, it's tragic. I want to thank the person who reached out to us to share this story with us as well, because, like I wouldn't have been aware of it otherwise, there's so much horrible shit happening in the immigration system that you know, we miss things.

rural areas. But then also to be reminded of how two tiered rural existence was, especially for people like you say, Clent and Caine, Like it's it's a brutal way to make a living too, like hard backbreaking work under the hot sun, like a machete, Like swinging a machete all day, Like you can fuck yourself up pretty easily.

and then they would leave after about six months. But as the border hardened, those people had to make decision whether they stayed in Haiti or stayed in the place where they could get work. And a lot of them decided that they had to stay in the places where they could get work.

next day over the river. Reminded me of that Woody Guthrie song where he's talking about the the Los Gatos Canyon plane crash and how all those people had Many of those people had traveled multiple time times from their homes in Mexico to the US whenever there was an expense so they couldn't cover with like whatever they could

sell from their estantia. Right, they would come come across in labor, or young people come across in labor in order to establish themselves in life, and then go back and then if they needed they had to expend their children. Whether they would come back in labor some more or some people would just come back in labor every year and then one time on the way back. They're plane crashed and they all died. Like it's uh, yeah, it's

so much needless suffering that happens because of borders. It's rough to think about people in those detention centers like that always kind of makes me sad. Yeah, having spent a lot of time around them, it's pretty fucking miserable in there.

because my mom was born there and then left when she was a small child. Like to me, I don't know, it was an extremely bleak, bleak thing to realize just how how the state prefers some people under it and then others not. You know, it was, yeah, I always think, like, you know, this is this is a person who is a Dominican, like this is so so like culturally more Dominican than I could ever be. But I'm the one who legally is entitled to citizenship.

diabetes education for folks there. And how much harder it was for the Haitian folks, even if they in some cases that they had family who were there, they had spent most of their lives there, like like for them, it was so much harder than it was for me, who, like, you know, I'm just a guy from Britain, like, like, I have no stake in this at all, but I could you know, no one batted Nilid when you fly into the airport there and come on through that you don't even need a visa.

world and it's only getting worse. Right, Like, as we're recording this, people in Belfast are fucking attacking people who specifically, I guess, like I spoke to some people in Belfast today and they were like, yeah, it's not all of us. It's a small group of loyalists who are very, very racist and have been for a very long time. Yeah, but nonetheless, right, like a there's a crime think sticker that I think of a lot that says the border

doesn't protect you, it controls you. And like maybe Americans are realizing that now that border patrol and murdering US citizens in US cities. You know, I said this the other day, and we're talking about Gregory Bavino, Like there is no reforming this shit. Like the nature of what we have done for decades with borders is that it kills people who did nothing wrong. And if we want to get away from the place where at now when this shit needs to be torn down, all of it.

The way they're building border wall now, it's very clearly with the understanding that they just need to build as much as possible because no administration will ever tear it down. Absolutely, That's what they did in the first truanp administration too. They literally skip the hard parts. I remember being out there in late twenty twenty, even after August, September, October, November, December, and they're like skipping the difficult helly bits just just

to put more miles of wall in. And like they're building now. They're kind of fellings those gaps and just building wall in places where we never thought they would because they have fun, limited money, and like they're doing it because they were right in twenty twenty, right, Biden didn't tear it down. In fact, he repaired and maintained and continued to build it. Like we need to really think about rolling this shit back if we ever want to make sure that this can't happen again.

the episode, this is this is a global project. Yeah, they're not only doing immigration enforcement in the US, They're helping and sometimes do it immigration enforcement outside in you know, if they could, they would probably go to every country on Earth and be like, hey, this is how you hearden your borders and do immigration enforcement. Yeah.

the US Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Those are common comparisons, but few know much about the settler colonial origins of Liberia, which has gained a little attention as people have begun learning more about the concept. So I'd like to take a look at Liberia, Israel and the parallels of settler colonialism. This is it can happen here. I'm Andrew Sage Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined once again.

to build new societies. Wolf notes that invasion is a structure, not an event. He calls setler colonialism inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal, and calls elimination an organizing principle of setler colonial society rather than a one off occurrence, Unlike the kind of exploitation colonialism, which seeks to extract resources and leave settlers come to state to claim land. As Wolf quotes, the we bird rose to get in the way of settler colonization. All the native has to do

is stay at home. Settlers tell various stories to justify their eliminatory ambitions race, religion, ethnicity, civilization status, but it really comes down to territory. Settlers want to establish lastin autonomous communities by eliminating the existing indigenous way of life and replacing it with the colonizers culture, economy, and political order.

Wolf says that settler communism destroys to replace point into the quite visceral example of Israeli settlers of root in ancient olive trees and replacing them with foreign fruit trees, or as Israel often euphromizes it, making the desert bloom.

Elimination doesn't have to mean the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people, though frontier homicide tends to be a trend, but elimination seeks to dissolve indigenous people and their way of life through various means expulsion, encouraged population mixing and forced assimilation, enclosure, child abduction, missions and board in schools, religious conversion, marginalization,

labor exploitation, and more often several at once. Settler clunalism tends to remain deeply embedded in the laws and institutions of the countries foundly that way. But Woth points to a curious side effect of settler clunalism, which is the way that settler society subsequently attempts to recuperate indigenity in order to express its independence from the mother country. He

references Australia's incorporation of indigenous symbolism for one example. Australia, Canada, the US, New Zealand, South Africa, French, Algeria, Rhodesia, Liberia, and Israel are all examples of contemporary or historical settler colonial societies, but I'm focused on the parallels between just

two of them, Liberia and Israel. In eighteen eighteen, the American Colonization Society scouted what was then known as the Grain Coast and deemed it a suitable location for their planned African colony, meant to be a home for formerly enslaved people in the US foreign emancipation as well as free black people that already existed in the territory. The first successful settlement was established in eighteen twenty two after an agreement with the local chiefs signed in eighteen twenty

one granted the society possession of Cape Mesurado. Now, some free black Americans had advocated returned to Africa projects long before the ACS was even founded, so we shouldn't erase the agency in this. But the ACS was led by a mix of white abolitionists and white and slavers who mostly just wanted to rid themselves the free black population in the US. Most free black Americans opposed project, either initially or in time. Those Black Americans that did participate

came to be known as Americo Liberians. They carried on the American Colonization Society's narrative that the establishment of Liberia was a return to the promised Land and exodus, a formally enslaved people return into the ancestral homeland to establish an independent land of freedom, and as a minority in that land, the American Liberians would establish a government and various settlements they ruled that would attempt to expand Liberia's

initial territory and to bring civilization and Christianity to the natives. Those that went were clearly heavily influenced by their American background, viewing themselves culturally, socially, and educationally superior to the Native

African ethnic groups they encountered. After a few decades of support from the American colonization Society, independence was declared in eighteen forty seven, but only recognized by the US in eighteen sixty two, so very quickly fell into a deteriorating economic situation marked by heavy foreign deck obligations culminating in multinational intervention and oversight in the early nineteen hundreds, as well as the establishment of a million eco rubber plantation

for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which would exploit the indigenous people in Liberia for decades to come.

It's see in the Anmar, right like, a country that was brutally colonized by the country that I was born in, but in which essentially today the state of Myanma is it's self a colonial entity.

I still believe that that is possible, but like in the last six months, you know, I've seen people back away from that within Kurdistan, right and start talking again about the Brotherhood. People's was a mistake. They feel betrayed. I don't think those people would consider themselves to be super but they feel that their project didn't work. That

really makes me sad. Ultimately, the Brotherhood of Nations like didn't succeed in Syria, right, and we've seen it effectively at like Sirious Dog or the Syrian Arab Republic after hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives for it to be a place where everyone could be free. And yeah, it really saddens me to see that that, like, like I really hoped for something better, this idea of Brotherhood of Nations, which acknowledges people's difference, but it doesn't create

a hierarchy. But we're not. We haven't made it quite work yet, I guess. And because we live in a world right where they appeal to nationalism and bigotry and the idea, like specifically in Syria, I think that like Arabs should not be equal to Kurds was appealing. Through making that appeal, this project was able to be sabotaged.

my work, but Tobago is kind of attached to Trinidad against their will. And even now if there are people who try to push that trend bag or unity. But there are also people who will assert, particularly people from Tobago, who will assert that, yeah, no, we want greater autonomy, we want even independence from Trinidad. And so for maybe

certain people unifying purposes that would use the term. But I try not to give off that impression that I'm using it for kind of unifying nationalism, because I think with the nationalism of such a young, quote unquote nation, a nation of nations, of various people from all over

the world, mostly brought here against their will. Yeah, they are these competitions I think over the proportionality of the representation of different ratio ethnic groups, the competitions over who gets to define what this Trinidadian nation is, what it means to be a Trinidadian, and efforts to kind of balance or imbalance the proportion of representation depending on which

government is in power. You know, our current government is very much oriented toward a kind of Indo Trinardi and Indian focus and have in many ways marginalized all other groups, maligned all other groups, disrespected all other groups within the country to kind of elevate the sense of or get back for the Indian people in Trona and I don't want to go too much down that road talking about that, but it's just another example to me or the frustration

and misdirection that comes with investment in nationalism, which currently holds a monopoly both here and much of the world on narratives of liberation and anti colonial resistance. So Ima streeted as an anticlonial resistance is synonymous with nationalism. Yeah, as though the two cannot be distinguished.

than the absence of oppression.

and the resources of its people. While the elite would themselves be subordinate to the global catalyst order dictated particularly by America and Europe, so the supremacy the American Liberian elite did not place them in a position of supremacy in the global stage. They were still in a subordinate position in some ways. Turning out to Israel. The political Zionist movement emerged in the late nineteenth century Europe amid programs and a failure to achieve equality for Jews in

many countries. Its most influential early theorist Theodohood So argue that Jews constituted a nation and that anti Semitism could not ultimately be solved through integration into European societies. Instead, they required a state of their own, and Palestine was not initially the only territory under consideration. Various proposals included Argentina, Uganda and other locations before Palestine became firmly established as

the movement's focus. Not all Jews agreed with this political Zionist cause that many Jewish socialists, particularly those associated with the General Jewish Labor Bund, rejected Zionism altogether. They argued the Jews should fight for libration where they lived, rather than establishing a separate nation state. Nevertheless, the Zionists colonial settlement efforts began and expanded in Palestine through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aided by wealthy benefactors, land

purchases from absentee landlords, and growing immigration. The movement received a major boost in nineteen seventeen when the British government and issued the Balfour Declaratia express in support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Despite the fact that Palestine's our population constituted the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants at the time, a settlement expanded. Sinus narratives

increasingly emphasized the idea of return. The Jews were not colonizing a foreign land, but return into an ancestral homeland from which they had been dispersed centuries before, and The state of Israel was officially established in nineteen forty eight, accompanied by the Nakba or catastrophe, when more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes

across Palestine. Like Liberia before it, Israel emerged as a state founded by a population claiming a historic connection to the territory, and like Liberia, is legitimacy would be built upon narratives of return, civilization, and nationhood, while the indigenous inhabitants found themselves excluded from the political order being constructed on top of their home.

For Liberia, the answer becomes pretty clear once we look at how the new state was organized over the course of the nineteenth century America, Liberia and settlements expanded their territory through a mixture of purchases, treaties, coercion and military expeditions, and outright warfare with inditionous peoples who made up the overwhelming majority population, who were largely excluded from political life for generations. They lacked meaningful representation in government and were

treated as subjects to be administered. The elite monopolized state institutions and eventually established what was effectively a one party state under the True Whig Party, which ruled Liberia for over a century. The Liberian state extracted taxes and tribute from indigenous communities, relied on indigenous labor, and by the early twentieth century, international investigations were uncovering systems of forced labor and human trafficking, so surveyor that they generated an

international scandal. While the settlers themselves had once been victims of slavery and racial oppression, they recreated similar class and ethnic hierarchies in their state. Liberia, of course, differs from many other settler colonies, but they retained the basic framework of a settler population clearing sovereignty over territory inhabited by indigenous peoples and conscer treating political and economic power in its own hands. Now, compare this to Israel. From the

late nineteenth century onward. Zionist organizations acquired land through purchases and violence following the Knappa, which created one of the largest refugee populations in the modern world. The Palestinians, which remained within Israel, was subjected to military administration for years. While Palestinians in the occupied territories continue to live under a different legal regime than Israeli settlers. The nineteen fifty two Citizenship Law and the twenty eighteen Nation States Law

cemented the Jewish supremacist heart of the Zinis project. As since nineteen sixty seven, settlement expansion in the West Bank had steadily increased, accompanied by land seizures, home demolitions, restrictions on movement, and the fragmentation of Palestinian communities and Gaza has been an open air prison where settlers occasionally mow the lawn aka slaughter population since two thousand and seven. It's worth noting a major difference between the two cases,

which is the demographic element. America Liberians remained a small minority ruling a much larger indigenous population, but the entire history of American Liberian ruled Liberia. Those kind of demographics are more akin to settler societies like South Africa, Rhodesia, and French Algeria, which leaned heavily into the exploitation aspect

of clonalism. Israel developed differently intentionally to ensure that Jewish people became the demographic and majority within its territory, so it's more comparable to settler societies like the US, Canada, and Australia. Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in how indigenous peoples were managed between projects. Liberia system depended upon indigenous labor, while Israel's project has generally prioritized secure

in land while minimizing dependence on pasted labor. In many periods of Zionus history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in favor of exclusively Jewish labor. But again, settler colonism operates according to a logic of elimination that might often be expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement, and whatever else. Again, the settlers want the land, the native becomes an obstacle, and different set of societies developed

different methods for dealing with that obstacle. The US had its ethnic cleansings, removals, reservation system and boarding schools. Australia had frontier wars, stolen generations and land dispossessions. Canada had assimilation policies like reservation schools. South Africa and a wide rule couldn't expel the black majority, so they maintained apartheid

controlled reservations and extracted labor. But again, what matters for definance at the clonalism is that indigenous sovereignty is displaced and settler control over the land is secured. Of course, indigenous people in all cases do not take this abuse

lying down. From the very beginning of Liberian settlement, Indigenous peoples resisted the crew grabble vy and numerous other ethnic groups fought against territorial expansion, taxation, forced labor, and attempts by the Liberian states to extend its authority into the interior. And despite generations of American Liberian dominance, indigenous resistance never

entirely disappeared. Eventually, the political order that had governed Liberia for over a century began to crack, economic crisis, corruption and grow and resentment towards settled domination culminated in a military coup in nineteen eighty led by Samuel Doe, overthrowing the government of President William Tolbert and ended more than a century of uninterrupted American Liberian political dominance. Now, that coup clearly did not create a free or egality society.

Liberia would soon face thectatorship, civil war and immense suffering, but it did mark the collapse of the older settler elites monopoly on state power, and efforts at recovery in the country are ongoing. Palestinian resistance, on the other hand, faced a very different structory. From the beginning of Zius settlement. Palestinians resisted displacement and land loss through protests, strikes, political organizing,

and armed revote. The Great Arab Revolt of nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine saw Palestinians launch a massive reich An uprising against both British colonial rule and Zonus settlement. Decades later came the first and second in Defaders mass movements, a combined protest, civil disobedions, community organized and armed resistance.

Pastidians have built a number of institutions alongside international Solarity movements in an effort to sustain their efforts under occupation, siege, exile, and apart. Even today, amid the destruction genocide of Gaza, passing and resistance continues. Liberia and Israel are both settled clinal projects, but they are different enough in scale and goals and methods and historical development that obviously treating them must equivalent for be misleading. The point of the comparison

is to identify what these societies have in common. Since the cool In Liberia, the old American Liberian elite has lost its monopoly on power, but in Israel, the settler cluninal project is alive and well was ever expanding settlements, occupation, displacement, and brutality. Whether settler dominance in Israel remains or falls is yet to be seen. In Liberia, the end of

settler rules not automatically bring justice, equality or freedom. The liberation through state power has not brought their relief, especially in the context of a global capitalist order. The replacement of one ruling class for another has not ended the struggle, but maybe put a semi coola on that struggle. I believe the aim of deconization must be not merely the fight against the people at the helm of the system, but the very helm of the system itself, dismantling the

structures that make domination possible. The first place, for Palestine and for all people's struggling against oppression, ending set localism is only the beginning in the pursuit of liberation. That's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace.

Banks wanted to clarify exactly what was being said there so that we could make sure that everyone got the right information. Hello everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined by three other people to discuss this indictment in Minnesota. I'm going to ask them all to introduce themselves. So if we start off with you Mo that would be wonderful.

people who are getting arrested. And people started sharing that we were about to see a press conference by the federal government and they were going to be like, we've caught this terrible anti foot terrorists, and I thought that's.

confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. I think it's really critical that we understand and that not only is the United States Federal government continuing to perpetuate its violent occupation in the same places that it has historically done so in ways that are intended to either include or exclude certain groups of people, depending on what's expedient for the federal government, but that they're doing it in the exact same place as I think the largest mass execution

in US history, which was a mass execution of Dakota people, that after it was carried out, was determined to have been totally unlawful and to have involved totally insufficient legal process on the part of the United States government, and to have involved actions that far exceeded the lawful, legitimate

authority of the US government. And of course that's exactly what we're seeing here again, is the United States federal government taking actions that far exceed its lawful authority and punishing people who resist those excesses.

And then they actually really see indictment like fifteen minutes before the presser, I believe.

kind of state violence. Yes, as Mahos pointed out in the chat, these people are being perpostrayed for attending court proceedings which are public. In the indictment, the district Attorney, I guess outlines that these people were members of a group called Damn Direct Action Minnesota, previously known as Twin Cities direct Action. There are a number of other groups and acronyms here that I don't think is huguely important.

That they are alleging that they were part of a group that conspired two, among other things, disrupt and obstruct

federal agents too. I'm going to quote here. The purposes of the conspiracy include the following preventing the enforcement of federal immigration law by force, intimidation and threats, opposing the authority of the United States government, preventing, hindering or delaying by force, the execution of the laws governing the identification, detention, and moval of non citizens, to include the Immigration and Nationality Act, and preventing impeding and interfering federal law enforcement

from discharging their duties, including enforcement federal immigration law by force, intimidation, and threats. They then go on to detail a great number of messages from a number of signal chats. They specifically identify them as signal chats, and a large number of the messages pertained to a protest held at the Whipple Federal Building on the twenty third of January. That's a protest that Margaret and I covered, and you will have heard our coverage of it before you can go

back and listen to it. The specific allegations here are that the accused people conspired to create a soft quote unquote and hard quote unquote barricade. The soft barricade took the form of a shield wall that Margaret and I reported on the time. The hard barricade they're alleging was a number of trailers that they're alleging the accused people attempted to flip over in order to prevent fed accessing Whipple.

those two things takes up most of the ninety four page indictment.

And one of those is kicking a police car. And one of those is this using a vehicle as a dangerous weapon to make quote physical contact and inflict bodily injury. And that is number two hundred and seventy six out of two hundred and seventy six not counts, but like claims made in this document. So they are clearly spending the overwhelming majority talking about other things.

this country for at least several decades. That's just what I can speak to personally, and it has been framed in a different way. They've done this kind of thing before, but it is in this current, real bad.

I know you enjoy the First Amendment. Would you like to explain to us exactly what conspiracy is and what's going on here with the charges of conspiracy?

really First Amendment protected conduct. So in order to understand how First Amendment protected conduct can be evidence of criminality, we have to look at what is a conspiracy, And a conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal, because what it is is a claim that a group of people made an agreement to do something illegal and then took steps overt acts, engaged in these quote overt acts in the service of carrying out their illegal agreement or their agreement

to do something unlawful. Right, So all of these things. You know, there's so many things in here that are clearly institutionally protected. They're very preoccupied with people being members of different groups identifying themselves as anarchists, swearing T shirts or sweatshirts that are at one point, I think they say they're ANTIFA branded. I didn't know we had a brand.

the public discharge of their duties. Looking at an ice agent or taking notes on what they're doing. Is actually, it's not only not unlawful, it's clearly First Amendment protected conduct. Right. These people are doing legal observation. And so what is the thing that's allegedly removing the First Amendment protection from these behaviors is this claim that all of these things are being done in the service of this larger agreement

to do something illegal. What is the illegal thing interfering with the discharge of ice you know, I guess I'll say duties for a given value of duties.

the thing about conspiracy. That makes it so attractive is that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize garden variety lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior and whole communities of people who are engaged in those behaviors by making the claim that all of those things, and all of those associations, and all of those beliefs, and all of those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a

larger agreement to do something illegal. Now, of course, they're not addressing the fact that people are organizing themselves to prevent Ice from doing things that we know are very much not lawful, right, like detaining people who are citizens, detaining, among others, indigenous people, punching through people's windshields and pulling them out of vehicles, like I don't know, murdering two people,

And that's not being dealt with in this at all. Right, The idea that Minneapolis is organizing itself to prevent this massive, you know, unlawful occupation, that true to form, exceeds the lawful authority of these agencies.

conquer social movements. But the other thing that they're doing, and I really want people to be alert to this, is that they are making it possible by associating the two, they're making it possible to later come back and go after even those people that they are currently defining as good protesters. So there's a point in this indictment where they make a claim that an organization, I think it's the It might have been the five oh five OHO one organization. We need to check that.

assistance with a rally. And even though in this situation, I believe the prosecutors are setting it up like, oh, well, this legitimate group is working with this the bad guy group, what they've done is created a discourse that will allow them if they want to, that will allow the government to come back and say, look at this group purporting to be a union and doing legitimate, peaceful protests, but they're actually enlisting the assistance of you know, the Direct

Action Group. So on the one hand, you know, I think the indictment is playing right into this good protester bad protester narrative, which, to be clear, it doesn't matter if you are protesting in the air quotes right way, you will still be subject to police violence.

this particular case as effectively as it usually does. And that's part of why ICE is so scared as relates to Minneapolis is because there is such a I mean, obviously, I'm sure there's divisions, right, but overall there's such a unity around like the thing that is happening is far more important than our differences that like, I think they're not going to successfully split people in the general discourse. They'll do it a little bit, right, but they're not

going to have nearly the traction they usually do. So I actually think that this point that you bring up is so vital, except of course for the fact that there's no time in history when anyone has ever come for one person in the morning and then a different person at night. I can't think of any examples of that, Right, that's sarcasm for Yeah.

like drop all the charges. There does feel like this sense of solidarity among people for being brave and trying to get out there and support their neighbors. That feels unique and makes it feel like it would be pretty hard for them to be really successful and pushing this narrative here.

half an hour and inconvenienced all morning. Right, It's like, okay, But then on the following page it's very clear they're talking about, you know, how violent Ice is being, and it's very clear that the steaks are actually life or death, and that all of the people who are in the streets inconveniencing Ice are doing so in defense of others, like and when I say defense of others, I mean in a legal sense, right, a self defense or defense

of others. And they're not coming there and shooting ICE agents. They are inconveniencing them and even the indictment itself, even from the government's own narration, you can see that what is at stake for the community in Minneapolis is true life or death steaks, and what is at stake for the ICE agents is that they are inconvenienced all morning.

to the public. Of course, there's going to be FEDS there. But as wiser people than me have always said, your signal messages, if you can see them on your phone, and someone else gets your phone, they can also see them on your phone. So a lot of people were arrested here and had their phone seized as evidence. There's lots of ways that these messages could have been obtained. And what Moe is saying, I just think it's worth elaborating on that.

overt acts. Yeah, you know, and a lot of it is around the ideology of these people, and interestingly, it mentions anarchism or anarchists substantially more than it mentions antifa with emphasis on the wrong syllable, of course.

crimes or whatever. And I just think that's worth pointing out that that is a thing that the state is heavily focused on. But for me, as an anarchist, this is about the kind of thing where you're like, well, the courage of my convictions. It's not a crime to believe that we should organize society and a bottom up, horizontal structure.

feeling right now? Well?

interesting and probably a whole other conversation. But that's a big deal that people were facing conspiracy charges, which are very serious federal charges, and were released today at their arraignments.

I think it shows it's an indication of where the courts are at, and also just these cases are taking place in these cities where the whole world watched the federal government do absolute terror and people do beautiful human loving each other in all the ways that they could to try and keep people alive while federal agents killed people.

which was that's the second one after Prairie Land. So while a lot of these cases around the country have been dropped, not all of them have. But it's hard to imagine this being super successful given where it's taking place.

I'm sorry, Saint Paul. I'm so sorry I keep accidentally doing that in Saint Paul, You're also wonderful and people have done so much work and they have been this like guiding light for a huge chunk of people living in the United States of America in this past year, right, like looking how people have come together to defend their neighbors and themselves, and like, I think that it's important that we say that unity has to continue. And so it's like the reason that I am optimistic is because

of the actions that I saw in Minneapolis. Sorry I didn't go to Saint Paul, but you know, the actions I saw in Minnesota. But that has to continue, like what during court support during you know, so it's not like just a oh, we've got this right, but instead by continuing to say we we are looking.

do prisoner support. I am so relieved, I guess to know that Minneapolis and Saint Paul have such well developed legal infrastructure, including not only lawyers who have you know, decades of experience fighting against the politically motivated abuse of state power against people, you know, on the basis of their First Amendment protected beliefs, but also legal workers and jail support and people who have really learned over the course of not just this last winter, but you know,

through the course of many decades of movement struggles, how to deal with this kind of stuff. And I know that these particular this particular group is in really good hands. It's not that this isn't a terrible situation, and it's not that it isn't going to be potentially devastating for the individuals who've been indicted, but the kind of solidarity that we have seen and that we saw this morning at the courthouse is really heartening to me.

like they were defeated there. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening right after they got their funding bill passed, right, but very clearly the people of the Twin Cities stood up to ICE and CBP and one and ICE and CBP know that they are very upset about it, but that means you can do it again, and like this takes a different form when it comes in the form of court support, right, there's a different kind of struggle, but the way we confront

it is the same, which is to say together, we saw people wholly each other so close in the Twin Cities and it was really beautiful amidst horrible, horrible shit. And I think that people can continue to do that and continue to be this light that the rest of the country looks up to.

to freak us out and make us really scared. And we don't know if this will hold up in court yet, so let's keep our feet on the ground and puld each other close and try not to.

their homes, lagging their homes on fire, targeting these people because they were not white. And this person, who I've known for a while, reacted to watching footage of this and reading headlines and their general shock and horror by saying something along the lines of I guess if this kind of stuff is on the table, I understand why people need are fifteens Now? Nothing had actually changed about the way the world works to alter this person's opinion

of guns or of reality. They were simply forced to confront an aspect of reality that had previously been obscured to them because in earlier days, they had assumed that in any civilized nation, and they considered Northern Ireland to be part of a civilized nation, police would stop this kind of behavior. And if you feel like the rule of law is something you can trust on pretty immutably, then someone else saying no, I would rather have a gun of my own than trust a cop might sound

like a mania. Today's episode is not about guns or gun rights. It is in the most direct sense, about data centers and the current people's war on building more of them. I see the current vast groundswell of support for this kind of activism and this fight in general, as the most hopeful change in domestic politics in quite some time, and I think this movement could become a weapon that drives a stake into the hearts of the silicon oligarchy that currently rule quite a lot of our world.

The problem is any mass movement like this, especially one built on what is essentially also like the biggest name in the news right now, AI, is going to involve a lot of misinformation and even disinformation. People don't just hate data centers for good reasons, they hate them for bad ones too, Or at least it would probably be more accurate for me to say a lot of people hate them for reasons that don't reflect something data centers

actually do or make worse. The broader reason that I've seen some people have issues with this fight, with this mass movement against the construction of new data centers is that data centers are utterly necessary modern infrastructure and incredibly crucial to the maintenance of what we would consider basic daily life. This is something that's true even without AI, and this is something that was true prior to the introduction of what Silicon Valley likes to call AI into

all of our lives. Data centers are what make the age of cloud computing possible, and starting in the twenty tens, we decided that the cloud was where everything compute wise was increasingly going to happen in the future. There were pragmatic reasons for this. Having words savior document to a cloud file that makes it instantly accessible from any machine with Internet access should you desire. That's a big leap

forward in capability, at least in one direction. Likewise, having like a watch on your body that cannot just take down your biometric data during a workout, but can store it and analyze it over long periods of time that offers people real utility. There's a reason products like this are very popular. You can't, however, have the entire world mapped out and accessible for turn by turn navigation without needing a shitload of data centers somewhere and in fact,

in quite a few somewheres to make that possible. Now, of course, there are also privacy trade offs for all of these kinds of products. That's been the entire logic of the Internet of Things era. You hand over your data and we deliver utility. Privacy advocates have had issues with this from the jump, but most people didn't because the benefits were obvious and most people don't like to read or think very hard if we can avoid it.

For almost twenty years, consumers largely ignored the rollout of data centers around the world, even sometimes into our backyards, because big tech had reasonably good pr and most people were happy with their gizmos. All in all, you get a hint of how uncontroversial this used to be. In a twenty twenty two article I found published on Microsoft's source Emea website, written.

Simply put, they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, and across Europe, Microsoft data centers are operating around the clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services, from the life saving work of doctors and first responders to essential services like groceries and online banking. At the same time, data centers also empowered everyday necessities like food deliveries, remote work,

and video calls to family. The article goes on to include a quote from Rahil Nasir, an associate research director at a market research firm, who called data senaers the invisible infrastructure, which I find interesting because absolutely no one would call it that today, right People on these saw them as invisible back then because there hadn't been much public discussion about these things, and there weren't nearly as

many of them, to be fair. In twenty twenty two, the del Oro Group estimated global data center capex to have been about two hundred and forty one billion dollars. McKenzie is currently predicting global spending on data centers will

reach seven trillion dollars by twenty thirty. The number of data center projects in development or under contract exploded pretty much right after Microsoft put out the article I quoted from earlier, and this put millions of people face to face with the reality of data center construction projects, many of them revolted. Q one of twenty twenty six saw a record seventy five data center projects blocked or delayed nationwide, which made it, in NBC's words, the most blocked and

delayed quarter for data center projects on record. Researchers at Data world Watch told journalists they did not consider this a cyclical spike polygon, instead a structural shift caused as quote communities internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to eight hundred and thirty three across forty

nine states now. The rapid and obviously organic nature of this growth has alarmed certain democratic and Republican politicians, largely the ones who have taken money from the tech industry. Some of these folks have panicked and insisted that Chinese government propaganda is behind the growth and opposition to data centers.

The New York Times published a piece by sociologist Tressy McMillan Cottam, who argued that Democrats need to make the issue of data centers their issue because she believes that these protests could have a significant impact on the midterms, and in twenty twenty eight, in her column, she states that she wasn't initially sold on the value of data center protests, but time around activists convinced her that she'd been wrong, in part because this was not an issue

that inherently drew urban or suburban or rural voters together, but all of them like it didn't inherently pull it Republican or Democratic voters, and thus it was a way to bring people together and get them working together uncommon cause, which is a really beneficial thing to do if you're trying to pull people closer into like a broader political

alignment with you. And I would add to that point, just based on my own research and what I've seen, I feel like the fight against data centers is something that has what I like to call a high likelihood of fundamentalism in it, or HLF, and an HLF issue is a kind of political fight that if you get drawn into it, you're really likely to become some kind of fundamentalist on the matter. And abortion would be a

good example of this sort of issue, right. That's why back in the nineteen seventies the Republican Party adopted abortion as a central concern, because if you get someone to become an anti abortion activist, they'll vote just based on that right. And if one party is against abortion and one parties for it, they'll never consider the party that is even open minded to it being legal in some limited sense, right, they become an absolutist on the matter.

These are great issues to pull people into like a voting block with, because if you can get them to associate that issue with your party, you can kind of immunize that chunk of your voter base from economic concerns or other points of attack, at least in theory. Now, different issues tend to create fundamentalists for different reasons. People who aren't organizing against data centers aren't doing it, usually because they think the idea of a data center is wrong.

But many of them do believe that AI is evil and immoral, and AI is the reason that so many new data centers are going up. Many more people oppose new data centers for the specific reason they see them as a threat to their own personal environment and to their own power bills, and to the cleanliness of their own water and air. It may seem as if this is the kind of support that would tend to breed

shallow activists. If you just don't want a data center in your hometown, that doesn't mean you give a fuck about one going up in Mississippi or wherever you don't live. After all, none of these people presumably cared about the data centers that had been going up five years ago, ten years ago, before the issue became salient to them.

But as treci Cottam wrote, the realities of doing this kind of organism on the ground have a tendency to transcend the reasons individual start getting into the fight.

they're committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate mouthfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them, and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something. Few politicians are offering a taste of political power. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads,

and we're back. I think it's really important to emphasize something that Cottam said at the end of that last quote, which is that part of why the anti data center movement is potent and why it tends to draw people in much deeper than maybe the initial shallowness of why they got in would suggest, is that it offers them a sense of political power and of agency, and an age in which people are being trained more and more

to feel as if they have no agency. You can't stop this, you can't fight this, or alternatively, this guy will do the fighting for you.

I do, of course, want to see the Republican Party beaten electorally, and more Democratic votes is the only current way to do that. But the Democratic Party is not morally or logistically capable of doing anything but betraying these people in the long run. I really do believe that the reason why is the reason why the party has been incredibly slow to embrace these activists in any cohesive fashion. This movement is death for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley

has a lot of fucking money. And when I say death, don't think I'm exaggerate. Data Center Watch is calculated that the total value of data centers blocked in early twenty twenty six. This is just the first three months of this year, was around one hundred and thirty billion dollars, compared to a total of one hundred and fifty six

billion dollars in projects blocked in all of twenty twenty five. Now, a huge month last year for data construction expenses in the US was last Juli, which was actually a historic month, and that represented about fourteen billion dollars in expenses. So the value of the projects that have been stopped are significant, even in tech industry terms. More to the point, nearly all the money that underlies and underwrites these corporations and

their owners is fake. Elon Musk could not produce a trillion dollars of real, liquid US dollars if he wanted to, because that simply is not how assets work. Most of his wealth is in stock valuation, and those stocks are worth what they're worth because of consumer sentiment as much as anything objectively real. The entire AI bubble is being underwritten by the belief that this will be worth it. There are trillions in value here, and we just need to spend a few trillion more to unlock them.

to kill many of these big overvalued companies. SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta can't all survive a market collapse, just as they won't sadly all die, nor can their billionaire bosses all remain masters of the universe. If they fall off their perch in a ray that shatters the global economy. We won't even have to bring all of these guys to court. Some of them will

get done and by their former friends overseas. There's a reason why some VC types have already started trying to describe anti data center activism as terroristic. They are in fact terrified of it. This segment from an ArsTechnica article by Ashley Bellinger should give you an idea of what I'm discussing.

Data Center Watch reported last year, where before officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they're in encountering backlash before any deal is in the books. Data Center Watch found in some cases, research is reported opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor of a data center was enough to

trigger organize resistance. Now, folks, when you hit this level of cultural inflection with a movement, you are in an extremely powerful but also very dangerous position. There's a reason that Steve Bannon's also made waves recently by encouraging his side to start reaching out to the anti data center people. He knows this energy can be co opted, or at least he believes it can. For my part, I want

to see this energy harnessed. I want to see it burn brightly like the working flame of an oxyocettylene torch, because I want to see it used to cut directly into the belly of the industry that I hate. The best way for us to do this right now is to create as many moments as possible where projects to

construct new data centers clash with protesters. Each of these conflicts has the potential to spark a panic in the market, and every piece of bad press contributes to the overall weight of public opinion and expectation against AI and against big tech. We never know which piece will be the one that breaks this current incarnation of the industry. The name of the game for us, then, is to create as many moments as we can that endanger the future

of this market and the industry behind it. And we can do that entirely legally by forcing them to confront reality. None of these data center projects are sold to towns and cities based on real, accurate information about how they will impact the environment and the local community. One good example of this recently from the United States is a story earlier this year about a data center project in

box Elder County, Utah. The proposed buildings together would have been three times the size of Manhattan and stretched across multiple sites. The project was championed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary, who was also the VC behind it, for a separate article in Ours Technica, quote residents' top concern was the straight out data center project draining local waters, and they were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the

vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a fifteen dollars fee to register comments to block the transfer of nineteen hundred acre feet of water from a ranch to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and potential risks to air quality, local wildlife and land. Venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of o Leery Digital and Shark

Tank Investor, is behind the construction of the project. He told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working with state officials to be more transparent about the project from the beginning. We really screwed it up, O'Leary said, while confirming he was not expecting this intense kind of blowback from the public. He claimed that he and state officials anticipated that people would be excited about the major local investment and made huge mistakes by not involving the

public more and discussions based on that assumption. We pissed off a lot of people, and that's not the way I do business. O'Leary said, that's not now, even that he undeniably did business this way. I disagree, but that's beside the point. The resistance was successful. Now, the project wasn't killed entirely, but it has been massively scaled back

and may yet on the vine. The fact that resistance to this huge project and many like it, has caused so much damage to the industry has prompted a scale response. In late May and early June of twenty twenty six, I noticed a drip and then a flood of new articles and viral content critical of the anti data center protests. One good example of this would be a June tenth article on the website bar Chart by Nash Riggins. It was titled data centers get a bad rap for using

too much water and energy. It turns out almonds suck up even more now. In this incredibly snotty little shit of an article, Nash is reporting on the fact that a bunch of pro AI influencers had with shocking coordination, started posting online responding to complaints about data center water usage by pointing out how wasteful it really is to grow almonds. You know, the almond industry uses even more

water than AI does. And you know, if you want a good response to that, just say, sure, put them out of business.

Karen How's Empire of Ai. The book claimed surging AI demand could use up to one point seven trillion gallons of fresh water globally by twenty twenty seven, or half the water annually withdrawn in the UK. Masley says the word use in that sentence is misleading. Data centers do evaporate most of the water they use on site for cooling, but on site use represents only about twenty percent of their total water footprint. The other eighty percent comes from

power plants that heat water to spin turbines. That water is then returned, mostly unchanged, to its source. Masley's viral post got him interviewed by The New York Times and earned a correction from the author of the book, But his critiques about specific claims made there shouldn't be seen as having any overall legitimacy to the broader argument about

data center water use. For one thing, he acts as if all data centers function the same way basically, both in terms of how they are powered and in terms of how they do cooling, and thus you can make the kind of assumptions about water use that is making and you just fucking can't now. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute has published an expanse of analysis of data

centers and water consumption. They point out that this is all much more complex than Masley's quote might lead you to believe, and I'm going to read from that article quote. In the context of data centers, water consumption refers to the amount of water withdrawn from blue or gray sources minus the water discharged by the centers, primarily warm water left over from cooling the it racks. The consumed water is generally the water that evaporates or is otherwise taken

out of immediate human usage. Withdrawal of fresh water from local streams or underground aquifers may lead to aquifer exhaustion, particularly in water stressed areas. Approximately eighty percent of the water, typically fresh water withdrawn by data centers, evaporates, with the remaining water discharge into municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume of waste water from data centers may overwhelm existing local facilities which were not designed to handle such a high volume.

And again, one of the things that Masley tends to ignore is that even when you're putting this water back into the system quote unquote, that doesn't mean it's going back to the aquifers that it was pulled out of. It doesn't mean that it's going back into the same way, which can still cause massive issues. Now, how water efficient a data center is is going to vary depending on the climate of its location. But because these tend to require a lot of space, many are built in places

where land is cheap. Those places are often hot and dry, like Utah and Wyoming. Data centers and hotter climates use more water. Data centers specifically built for the AI industry also have higher chip density, which requires more cooling, which uses more water. As time goes on, These increased demands lead to more and more being demanded of the local

areas that agree to host data centers. Since data centers don't lend themselves to any other industries or create very many jobs, this often leaves local communities dependent upon them, which means they have no choice but to say yes to ever harsher environmental demands. I'm not creating a hypothetical here. This has happened over and over again, and I'm going to read again from that article by EESI dot org. Northern Virginia is considered the world capital for data centers,

with over three hundred operational data centers spread across four counties. Collectively, all data centers in Northern Virginia consumed close to two billion gallons of water in twenty twenty three, a sixty three percent increase from twenty nineteen. Luton County, with approximately two hundred operational data centers, used about nine hundred million gallons of water in twenty twenty three. This has led Lutenwater, the county's fresh water authority, to rely heavily on potable

water for data centers rather than reclaimed water. Now activists looking for cautionary tales about what data center addiction could do to an area should look no further than Northern Virginia. The region started saying yes to such development decades ago, when the industry was very much different. Back then, AOL was based there and their data center was part of an overall campus that employed more than five thousand people per an article by the Lincoln Institute. The campus has

since been demolished. Three large data center facilities are being built on the site. There's a big fence around it for security purposes, so it's totally isolated from the community now, and it's only going to employ about one hundred to one hundred and fifty people on the same piece of land. That's the difference. That's a quote from a local resident, and well here from some other local residents. But first,

here's ads and we're back now. I've mostly discussed the fight against data centers thus far as an American thing, and it isn't. I think it is particularly relevant to our upcoming elections in a way that deserves particular attention. But this is a global fight. And it is a global fight not just because people hate AI, but because data centers and the AI they enable have come to symbolize the tech elite who have bought our world and who are in the process of burning it to the ground.

Hatred of these people should know no geographical boundary, and this presents the possibility of internettional outreach as well as collaboration and strategizing. As an example, I'll discuss a small community in Romania, Mishli, which is located in one of the poorest sections of the country. In twenty twenty, they said hello to a team from Cluster Power who wanted to construct a data center in the area. The mayor gave a welcoming speech that should sound familiar to many

of you. We are incredibly proud to have an investor on board and to see people talking about the data center in Mishli. The company contributes to the local economy by paying taxes here and has chosen this area as its headquarters. So that all sounds great, But I found an article for algorithm Watch that notes quote no documentation was provided to verify the tax revenue actually generated for

the commune. A June of twenty twenty four, only ten jobs had been created, compared to at least three hundred that had been promised.

catch them. There are dangers to embracing a movement based around opposing the construction of infrastructure that is necessary for a lot of modern life, But I might argue those dangers look a lot less scary if we recognize that necessary for modern current life and necessary for life itself

aren't necessarily the same thing. In much the same way as I would give up my ability to buy pistachios and almonds year round to avoid California not having water, I'm willing to reconsider what miracles of daily life are really worth the cost. If it turns out the cost is that high, and the scariest thing in the world to the people who currently run it is this, perhaps one day soon everyone will start to feel this way.

unconstitutional attempts to regulate federal law enforcement. The French government suspects the Israeli quote unquote elite influence cyber and technology firm Black Core, of interfering in elections in France, Scotland, and the New York City mayoral race by orchestrating online smear and disformation campaigns against left wing pro Palestine politicians in.

who have engaged in misconduct. And I'm going to quote here from an article on MS now by Kindlanian quote Committee Democrats have information that Betel has issued more than one million dollars in awards, the letter says. The letter says that the money went to special agents serving on his director's advisory team, which Raskin's letter describes as a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out

your unlawful and partisan orders. There's very little else known other than that allegedly some of these payments were made so rapidly that they bounced back like he was sending.

trying to fuck up your public lands again. Fuck Mike Lee, Utah Senitor, if you're not familiar. So, there was a bipartisan Wildfire Prevention Act of twenty twenty five Fire Prevention Act that was going along smoothly in its little Senate journey until Mike Lee decided to put in a spoiler that would rescind the roadless Rule. We've spoken about the two thousand and one roadless rule before, so I'm not going to go into very great detail. I've spoken about

Lee ad nauseum. Lee used his position of chair of this committee to insert this right, and in doing so, not only is Lee trying for a third time since twenty twenty five to sell off public lands, he is also probably ruining the future of the Wildfire Prevention Act, the funding that this will have, that the effect that this will have. It's now unlikely to pass because Mike Lee has spoiled it with his public land sell off shit. Again.

People might recall Lee try to sell our public lands with parts of the Better the Better Business Bureau, No, the Big Beautiful Bill, the other BBB, and again when he attempted to justify motor vehicle use in wilderness. Garrison and I med an episode about that where he was talking about how you need roads in wilderness areas to

allow border patrol to do border patrol stuff. The Forest Service had previously talked about rescinding the road this rule through like administrative rule chain that seems to have been an extremely unpopular choice, but that that process is still on going. But what Lee's trying to do here is lock it into legislation as opposed to something that another administration could change back. Finally, I guess it's all kind

of public lands and related stuff for me. This week, Fish and Wildlife Service agents served a warrant on a property in New Mexico after two colored Mexican gray wolves, which are covered by the endangered Species that were killed. Calling to an Affidavid file in New Mexico. Both wolves were killed after being caught in the leg hole traps. One was left to die, the other was shot and then beaten in the head. I read this warrant today.

It's kind of interesting. I saw something very very brief reporting on it, and Molly helped me find the warrant. The people on who the warrant was served on were horse breakers, but I think they worked on a family cattle ranch. It seems that the Fish and Wildlife Service agents set up cameras after the collars of the wolves told them that the wolves had died, and then they realized that they had remained in one area. It suggests that they had remained one area sometime then died I

either had been trapped. They were able to set up cameras and film these guys recovering the traps, according to Jaffa David, and so they are now going to begin their prosecution. I guess well more from me. Fifteen people in Minnesota were indicted on criminal conspiracy charges for events and protests around the Whipple Federal Building and Fort Snelling. We covered this in great detail on a show that broadcast on Wednesday, the seventeenth of June, So if you'd

like to know more about that. We got some comment from a couple of lawyers, and Margaret and I were present at one of the events that this indictment centers on, so we get some more insight there.

of the vote in the Democratic primary. Both candidates are not expected to face substantial opposition in the upcoming general election, so it looks like big wins for the DSA in Washington, d C. Last Tuesday. Robert California, Yes.

the fact that she is not a genocide denier. So that's kind of bracing. That's nice to see. Anyway, That's really all I've got to say.

the car. So she was bagging up and she hit a car as I was opening the door, so the doe flew back in. By the time I sat my baby down, it was like three to four shots. One of the shots hit him and his real cage, and the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh. We lived and went to since help your hospital where he was pronounced did my god.

trained to do the opposite of that. You know, they're trained that their lives mean more than the lives of infants.

it's not very good. Cell phone camera doesn't show the shooting itself, but shows the car driving away from officers. We also had some of the witnesses basically described the car like driving away from the officers and the officers shooting. But you're right, it's definitely following the trend that we've seen a lot with federal law enforcement, but not just them. Yeah, this is a local Yeah, of this idea like vehicle weaponization. Yeah, and that they have the ability to respond to quote

unquote vehicle leapization with with lethal force. Yeah, or something we've seen claim a number of lives just this year.

a place where things like this have happened before. The fact that there was a woman like again last year who was tackled in this same parking lot by the police says a lot. Yeah, and continue in the trend of police violence. Yeah, the police tear gas protesters on Tuesday in the parking lot and like the same parking

lot where protests were going on. All of this comes in the sort of context of the deployment of a nationwide panic about shoplifting, deployed by the right as part of their strategy to bolster support from the police and roll back the gains of the twenty twenty George Floyd Uprising. Everything about police killings has just just continued to get

worse since the Sharp administration took power. We've had it now from federal agents, we've had it from the police in general, and as Gary was talking about earlier, Yeah, this is kind of this intersection of this panic about shoplifting combining with this panic about sort of vehicle weaponization and turning into the cops murdering a one year old.

I think it's also worth noting in the context of this allegedly being about shoplifting that nobody involved, like no one who was in the car, which is the mother of the baby, and also the woman driving the car who the police had initially confronted in the story we heard earlier. Neither of them have been arrested. So yeah, yeah, I don't know. This is one of the worst stories for police shooting I've ever encountered. And yeah, yeah, protest

presumably are going to continue tonight. This is again being recorded on Wednesday, June seventeenth. They may have escalated by the time you're hearing this.

us on a conference call. So this is a memorandum of understanding right the MU is titled quote Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran. It'll be signed on Friday. That that would be the day. If you hit US today comes out, that will be that day. It's already been electronically signed. Apparently it's still unclear if it's trumple Von she's going to sign it on behalf of the US.

military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon. An undicate from now on not to initiate any war military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. And it's showing the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war and all fronts, including in Neblon. We're going to get onto that, don't worry. Probably the headliner rate is the nuclear stuff zero point

eight quote. The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. There's still negotiation on a rich geranium. But CNN had a leaked version of a previous version of this draft, and it didn't have the following. So this has been added at a relatively late stage. And it seems that there is a quote unquote minimum methodology for like degrading their enriched uranium,

which is to downblend it under IAEA supervision. That seems to have been added very late, so that that's kind of their like lowest threshold that the US is willing to accept. I guess, which will be not transferring that uranium but down blending it. The United States is committed to withdraw down its blockade and its forced pasture within

thirty days. Today we saw Iranian tankers across the USA's blocke with that an issue claims about the straight up horror moves on Trump's true social account and those that we see on Iranian state media and in the document Diverge, Trump has claimed and equivocally that straight is open without tolls. This is not something we see in Pakistani PM Shabasha

Reef's statement or in Iran. As far as News Agency fast US, she seems to say that the strait will be administered by a man in Iran, and then I'll just read from the MoU here. The Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for sixty days only from the Persian Gulf to the See of

a Man and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start and considering the need for removing the technical, military obstacles and de mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran,

will be instated within thirty days. The Islamic Republican Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of a Man to determine the future administration and maritime services in the Straight of Horn Moose in discussion with other Persian Golf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and sovereign rights of coastal states of the Straight of Hornmos not entirely clear there, but it does seem to perhaps leave open some kind of Iranian A man whole agreement.

Islamic Republic of Iran. A separate line item details the United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets that Republic of Iran upon implementation as MoU so they also get sanctions relief, right, Yeah, so they are getting all of the funds in the US has had frozen. They're getting sanctioned relief. And it seems like, it's conceivable with these two sentences that they're trying to include the unfrozen funds,

but also highly conceivable that they're not. They don't seem to have restricted ballistic missiles, they don't seem to have mandated anything about changing the in the regime of Iran. Human rights, women's rights, rights for minority ethnic groups in Iran. Iran since this, since we first learned as mu, Iran has continued drone strikes against Kurdish groups in Southern Kordistan,

Iranian Kurdish groups who are currently in Southern Kordistan. Yeah, And then then like with not over yet, because let's talk about what Israel has to say. Oh boy, yeah, Israel it just seems to be showing no signs of feeling themselves to be in any way restrained by this. Many Israeli politicians are public broken with the US on this. Israel's National Security Minister bank Via, famous for many terrible things, took to Twitter to announce that he had other plans, saying, quote,

Trump's agreement does not bind us Israel. It's not subject to the United States. We're an independent sovereign nation explanation mark. Our duty is to the citizens of Israel, to the soldiers of the IDF, and to the Jewish people, and our historical duty to the persecuted and murdered Jews over thousands of years of exile to provide security to Jews in the land of Israel. Every time we succumbed to international pressure at the expense of Israel's security, we played

a blood place with interest. So I don't think Bangavia feels bound by this to stop aggression in Lebanon, which will make the implementation of the whole thing very difficult. We've seen Trump really break with BB in a way that we'd heard before, but there have now been several more reports of Trump being very annoyed at NETN Yahoo continuing to effect if he sabotage these negotiations. Right, So, yeah, great times, very successful war. Huge dub. Speaking of dubs,

let's talk about sports. Oh yeah, this past.

lot to do there. On Saturday night, the New York Nickerbockers overcame the curse of James Dolan and beat the San Antonios Urus five games to one, becoming NBA champions for the first time in fifty three years. After the next drought ending victory, the city lit up in celebration, literally in the case of a school bus in Times Square.

But I think thousands, possibly one hundred of thousands of New Yorkers celebrated in a largely peaceful yet energized fashion all throughout the streets, buses and trains until the early hours of the morning.

being detained and questioned for eleven hours. Artan is from Somalia, which is currently on Trump's travel ban list, but Artan had actually already been vetted by the State Department and was issued a valid visa to referee at the World Cup. The executive director of the White House's World Cup Task Force, Andrew Giuliani, son of from the Pod and America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said that Artan was quote talking to some very bad people right as he was coming to the

United States. There's some classified information we can't discuss now at some point that may be released unquote. Just last year, the Confederation of African Football named Artan as Referee of the Year. The Trump administration currently has travel bands against four of the qualifying countries participating in the World Cup. That's Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Singal, with exemptions for athletes and team officials participating at certain sporting events like

the World Cup. For football fans wanting to attend the World Cup, there are visa bond waivers for Ivory Coast and Singhal, but not Haiti in Iran, with the Admin citing a high visa over stay right among Haitians and national security concerns related to the war in Iran. The Iranian travel ban also does have an exemption for certain religious minorities. Fans from the afric Coast and Stingal still have to deal with restrictions, as fans from those countries

have reported getting their visas denied. It appears that in order to attend the World Cup they needed to apply for their visas prior to the presidential proclamation on December sixteenth. Very few fans from those countries are in and many have reported getting visas denied. Bomber visa bond waiver just applies to the fee, the visa fee that the Trump administration has has introduced, and they announced that there was

a waiver for the fee for World Cup countries. Yeah, so if they did get the visa, they don't need to pay this extra fee, but they can only get the visa prior to the travel band going into effect in December.

ultimately allowed entry, but the team photographer was not. Finally, New York City is hosting eight games for the World Cup, including the final, and in the lead up to the World Cup, Tom Homan threatened to send quote more ICE agents than you've ever seen on quote to New York City following legislations signed by Kathy Hokel limiting cooperation between

ICE and local law enforcement. Following Homan's threat, Mary Mum Donnie said, quote, the World Cup is supposed to be a celebration of the world as a whole, and some of the decisions that we've seen being taken by the federal administration is anethema to what this tournament is supposed to be about.

border to bring people inside the United States. Advance pointed to the administration's efforts to go after left wing terrorist funding networks. Almost all of that is not true.

weekend in Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska, and California. But rather than being the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess, law enforcement only learned about this potential attack because the mother of one of the members of this group as planning the attack called the police concerned about her son's recent firearm purchases and contact with individuals online. By the time the FBI got to this person, nineteen year old Tyson Proper, he was already in a mental hospital.

Dublin Springs Mental Health Center for homicidal ideations. Tyson Propper himself told police and FBI that he and others online had planned to use drones to detonate explosives on the north side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to evacuate south, where other co conspirators would be set up with sniper rifles to fire on the fillying crowd, targeting politicians and other quote unquote high value targets at the Freedom two fifty event. Proper and for others are charged

with conspiracy to commit murder. A family member told officers that Proper talked about meeting up with people he had met online to conduct quote unquote missions and quote unquote recons and that he allegedly spent about three thousand dollars of his graduation money to buy quote camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition,

extra magazines, and plate carriers unquote. After searching his phone, investigators found signal chats detailing of planned attack, with maps highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. The day after local police first visited Proper's home, the sheriff's office

contacted the FBI. The FBI then searched Proper's home and found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a list of approximately forty six names, including celebrities and politicians, as well as pages quote in which Proper wrote that the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children

and others to a demonic figure unquote. Family told FBI that Proper had quote recently began interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who represented themselves as ex military and that may share some Christian based ideology.

Family members said that these individuals were using religion to manipulate Proper, and that they quote expressed ultra religious and anti government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers, taking up all

the water in communities, and other government actions. The Ohio criminal complaint says that Proper family members also highlighted concerning statements that he had made in recent months, quote, such as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti Semitic comments on Facebook.

explosives or the drones needed for plans. Expensive and we're still trying to figure out how to get enough money to purchase materials needed.

very larpie. They wanted to do something like they discussed assassinations, They discussed various types of attacks, but that they were interested in a tax for these like general anti government reasons rather than a specific sort of like niche political ideology right or ties to neo Nazi accelerationist groups. Like I said, we will go into more detail next week. Tuesday night, Vance did comment again, admitting that the attack plan was quote unquote not that advanced and that the

suspects quote weren't in town. They had not really done that much planning. Great cool, dude, Yeah, so yeah, Vans kind of changed his tune later on in the evening.

this story that's been dribbling out? No, So this first got onto most people's radar in like twenty twenty two, when Andrew Gellman, who's a statistician, posted on his blog that he had gotten an invite to this like Dialogue

twenty twenty two, which was like that year's event. It was described as an off the record retreat for global leaders, and there was a list of confirmed participants like this was part of the like some of the names of people who have been in this organization we're talking about. It was going to be referred to as like a hack revealed some data that had not been like effectively redacted on the website to this organization.

There are no speeches or panels, only moderated breakout discussions for eight to twelve participants. Everything is one hundred percent off the record. The agenda is curated based on your interests and we optimize for introverts, no small talk. So yeah, there've been I think a couple of other previous cases where like invites to this have leaked out to different people, Like several folks who have gotten invited have like posted about it. This is not a totally weird thing for

billionaires to do. Jeff Bezos has a similar kind of thing where every year or so he'll have a group of people he finds interesting that he takes to a resort or to a nice property or something that he owns somewhere and they'll all hang out and they'll have like discussions. Sometimes people put on presentation for like three or four days. And we've gotten that a couple of people who have been to these have like written about the experience and in some cases critically.

which is why. It's particularly interesting that very recently there was apparently a directory in the website's code, and Swiss activist Maya Arson Crime, who is also a friend of the pod in the actual sense, was tipped off about a directory in the code for the website for Dialogue that basically was not They hadn't done the things that you would want to do to protect the data of their members, right, that's that's the basics of this, right,

So something was left undone that should have been handled, and a bunch of information was revealed and Wired got as a result of this, the names of two hundred and twenty two people and the records, and these are a mix of folks who are like members of this organization, and Dialogue over the years has turned into more than

just every year people meet. There's also apparently like a dating app component of it where they're advertising it like if you let us know who you're looking for, We've got this network of influential people will hook you up with another, you know, the you know, only special and

important people. You know, that's a lot of the appeal, right, These are a lot of starfuckery that goes on in the Silicon Valley set but because of all of this stuff, there's also information on a retreat, the upcoming retreat this year's a bit which is apparently August twelfth to sixteenth. God, I'd love to get a seat at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

that's boy howdy. But I did look into pray dot com and as soon as I went to the prey dot com website, it informed me that the founder and CEO is one Steve Gattina, who has the empty eyes of the shark from Jawns. Have you guys, Are you guys looking at this Steve now in the research stock?

of twenty two. I run into a lot of these LinkedIn founder guys, and often it's hard to tell what their many different companies do because they all have like thirty of them.

company that has like drone stock footage. And after that he started a business called Prey dot Com in honor of his mentor and business partner who had just died. And when I started looking into this guy, I realized I've been following him before because I periodically on Reddit will go to the LinkedIn maniacs some Reddit.

It turns out she just juggles two jobs but always makes time to sit with him every night and help him with his homework. He's going to college, she said, with determination, whatever it takes. It's amazing what love can do even when life gets tough. And to prove that this is a true story, he shows a picture of some lady and a kid sitting in a booth booking at a notebook. Wow, I love these guys and their inspirational Definitely didn't happen posts. Definitely not a thing that happened to you.

know w Anything? And it's like a YouTube prank video where he runs to prince He's wearing like a green tight skin tight body suit and he runs up to Princeton grads like after right after graduation and asked, like, do you know how to pay your taxes? And it's also you can like give out a bunch of copies of a shitty book about like life skills, and like, I'm sure the book sells to like parents who give them to their kids, but no one reads this.

should I do this thing? Basically, I don't think we know what jeff responded, but you know that caused because there's that it like, there's an invite to their twenty fourteen rich in the Epstein files, there was a lot of confusional People are like, oh, Jeffrey Epstein was a member of Dialogue, and this was furthered by the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a member of Dialogue, but not that Jeffrey Epstein, the former CFO of Oracle was also so the fact that number one in the Epstein file

someone forwarded an invite to the jeff Epstein who's a pedophile and number two there is an actual member of the group named Jeffrey Epstein, just a different one, caused people to believe that he was a part of this, but he does not appear to have been in a way that anyone is proven.