Alz Media.
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of April sixteenth to April twenty second. James, some small news items.
At the start, Yeah, a few things I want to discuss op top. The United States government appears to be running multiple propaganda sites with associated X accounts that are opposing as Iranian media. One of the accounts is located in Florida. This is not like massively uncommon in a conflict of this right now, the information war is part of the war.
This is what like US actual psyop is like. This is what the United States syop operations are.
Yeah, the syop is not like the woman sold you that you follow on Instagram.
This isn't new for the US to be doing. It is new for it to be like this sloppy. I think that's probably fair to say this is like a sloppier than normal.
Yes, that's what's remarkable here. It said it's shoddy and that is not a good sign for their for like the whole US sort of capacity in this regard.
But it depends on how you think about it.
But yeah, yeah, yeah sure. Secondly, a number of former DHS Department pronoun Security and iOS Immigration and Naturalization Services officials have filed an amicus brief with a Supreme Court explaining why the cancelation of the hat TPS Temporary Protected Status is illegal. They do include Janet Napolitano, which is nice, but a ton of people from Obama Bush, even Clinton admin pre DHS I ins were part of this amakus brief.
An IDF soldier has been photographed destroying a statue of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Lebanon, showing it with a splitting more the reporting called it a sledge hammer. That's not what a sledgehammer looks like. I know, I get really picky about this, but like, maybe if you haven't worked with your hands, you should write things that can be read by someone who has scan and not
be completely ridiculous. The IDF has launched an investigation and so far subjected two soldiers to thirty days in military detention, which is more than they would get if they had killed actual Christian children in Palestine, says a Lot. I think that this image is like, we spoke about this in our group chat, but this is the it's one image at Comic Book Evil. There are many reasons why this is the thing that's blowing up for them. Ken
Paxton is investigating Act Blue. Act Blue is a major donation website for Democratic candidates, is claiming that they have continued to accept gift card donations, which could hide donations from foreign individuals or corporations or even states. I suppose the United States government's plans to send Afghans who are stuck in Limbo and Kata to the democractic Republic of
Congo being reported on by the New York Times. Just for some context here, I saw people sharing this and thinking that they that this referred to Afghan SIV recipients who are resident in the United States. That is not what it's referring to. It's referring to people who the Biden administration removed from Afghanistan or wherever they worked in Pakistan right and then took them to katter As like a temporary stopping off point where they would continue to
do their vetting and background checks. This is normal for refugee admissions as opposed to asylum admissions. And then the twenty twenty four election happened, Democrats lost, and that's people have been in limbo ever since, and it appears to Trump administration has been trying to get them various states in Africa to accept them, and it's now proposing the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country which already has a significant refugee crisis.
Ron Desentis, who is term limited as governor, has been jockeying for a position inside the Trump administration. Axios reports Dessentis has expressed interest in being Secretary of War, attorney general, or even a Supreme Court justice. Trump is expected to reclassify marijuana as soon as maybe today. We're recording this on Wednesday, April twenty.
Seconds fingers crossed.
Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order to advance its psychedelic treatment for mental illness and possibly reschedule certain substances which have completed phase three clinical trials.
Yeah, this is the real sign that their internal polling is showing Trump really closing on getting blow thirty percent approval.
That's that's the most whatever, it's actual legal marijuana. Fuck it. Yeah, Like at this point.
It's such an easy win, and it's been an easy win for the last three presidents.
And anyone could have done it. It's a gun that's been left on the ground and fucking Trump finally just picked the damn thing up after it got covered in an inch and a half at dust.
Like unbelievable.
They're desperate, keep pushing. We can get like completely legal LSD. I believe in us.
On Fox News's Sunday Morning Show, Cash Brittel announced that the FBI will soon make arrests related to Trump's claims that the twenty twenty election was stolen, with Patel saying, quote, they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system.
I can announce on your show that we've got all the information we need. We're working with our prosecutors, a Department of Justice and their Attorney General Todd Blanche and we are going to be making arrest and it's coming, and I promise you it's coming soon.
Patel later said it's a conspiracy case and that quote, we have the information to back President Trump's claims. On Tuesday, voters in Virginia approved a redistrating measure which would likely move four Republican seats to Democrat seats in the midterms. This measure passed was fifty one point five percent of the vote, totaling over three million votes. Virginia joins California in approving new congressional maps to combat the recent gerrymandering
in red states like Texas. At the behest of Trump, but now with Virginia, Dems are actually up one seat nationally. Ronda Santis has called for Florida lawmakers to meet next week to consider redistricting in their state. Trump has called the Virginia election quote unquote rigged, saying that Republicans were winning until a quote massive mail in ballot drop un quote, which is just how elections work. That's just how voting works.
Yeah, we were winning until more people voted for the other until.
We counted more votes that showed that we did not win.
We just live in the twenty sixteen election forever.
Now.
Yeah, it's great.
I was doing pretty well in that boxing match until it started.
Until the other guy punched me into face.
The margin of victory closely matches the result of the twenty twenty four presidential election in Virginia. Republicans have challenged the Virginia redistricting in court since before today's election, and the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the measure could
go to a vote while legal challenges continue. This is the second most important election this week, the most important one obviously being the Webbys, in which I think can announce we have won in the unrigged election matters, the only fair election that this country is seen possibly in like over twenty five years.
That's why they selected Claude as Person of the Year.
Clearly, the Webbys in twenty twenty six are the only election that's going to affect anybody's lives.
I think we can all agree on that anyway.
So as you probably are aware because the President shouts about it every ten minutes, there's a ceasefire currently in effect in the conflict with Iran, the war of choice that we started with Iran. James is going to talk a little bit more about that in a second. But because of the stand down, there's been kind of time for both forces to you know, reassess things, and time for outside people to reassess, like kind of what we
can tell about what's going on. Obviously in the immediate wake of Operation Epic Fury, and is recently as last Tuesday, President Trump said quote, we've taken out their navy, We've taken out their air force, We've taken out their leaders. On April eighth, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic Fury a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield. By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iron's military and rendered it
combat and effective for years to come. Now that last sentence, the first part is technically accurate, but not in the way that Hegseth means.
No one knows what decimate means anymore.
Decimate literally means to destroy like a tenth of a group. Yeah right, yea, And yeah, that's pretty accurate, right, But the second part of that sentence, rendered it combat and effective for years to come is not accurate. Neither is Trump's statement that we've taken out their navy and their air force. CBS published an article today reporting that roughly sixty percent of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard CORES is still in existence, including fast tag speedboats
and Iranian air power. While it's been degraded, is still significantly more functional than actually I had assumed. About two thirds of the Iranian Air force is still believed to be operational despite the massive US and Israeli air strikes largely targeting air production and storage facilities. The fact that you're looking at two thirds of Iran's navy and air force still functional and at least about half their ballistic
missile stockpile and their launch system stockpile intact. That's a significant difference from what the administration has claimed and evidence that where we to continue to press with the open fighting part of this conflict, it would be years probably before you're talking about like a complete degradation of Iranian fighting capability if that was ever achieved, Like when you factor in the United States would continue to suffer casualties,
and we've already been losing more of you know, particularly our interceptor missile capability and a number of advanced systems like a wax then we can avoid to replace James.
Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about the ceasefire itself, right, and then like what's been happening there. Let's start with, like I guess straight off, hor mows updates and then get into the ceasefire. The Navy intercepted an Iranian vessel in the in the Arabian Sea this week, close to the Iran Pakistan border. The Tuska was warned. Imagine they use an l rad to warn it. People see l rads on ships sometimes that think they're coming to like make you deaf. That's one of the reasons
of ships have lrads. But they could have also used a radio that if they can talk to them on the radio of they're receiving communications with the radio. They then ordered it to evacuate its engine room. They then shut out its engine with the five inch gun.
First time they've gotten to do that in forty years.
Yeah, I was looking at I guess it was. It was since what nineteen eighty eight the last time that I was thinking it's it's been a lot. It's been a minute since its ship engaged in the ship with its main gun. It was a USS Spruance, a guided missile destroyer that did that. Subsequently, US marines on the Tripoli we were reported on when the Tripoli first moved
towards that region. Right, We specifically said that this is one of the capacities that it had they boarded the ship, so they transferred to by helicopter and then boarded the ship. The US has since inspected other ships, including outside of the Saint Comeo. So the US perceives its blockade to be global right of Iranian assets, of Iranian vessels and the quote unquote shadow fleet, which we've already explained on D so I'm not going to go into depth on
what that means. The IOGC also fired at several vessels in the street. There is some reporting that one of them, an Indian tanker, had paid a fee in cryptocurrency to what turned out to be a scammer. I am certain that these scams exist because there have been multiple warnings of them. I haven't seen any evidence that is satisfactory enough for me to be confident that that particular ship had been scammed. But perhaps the most compelling piece of
evidence a ship is called the San mar Herald. Is this audio that we're going to play right here, if my.
Baby sef my naby, is this modeling a San Marda.
You give me Clarence to go, my name second.
On your list.
You get me Clarence to go.
You are fighting.
Now let me turn back. Just to guess I wasn't clear you gave me clearance to go. You're firing now, let me turn back. So it does seem that that vessel believed that it had clearance to go and was sent fired upon This morning, there was some ocynth pictures of IIGC and they looked like kind of fast attack boat kind of things. Throughout what was talking about in the Strait of Hornmuz Yeah, something of a flex Yay, we still have a navy like yeah, yeah, yeah, I
think that's important in the context of the ceasefire. I want to explain very briefly, there's been a lot of contradictory reporting on when, where, and how negotiations are going to happen. The ceasefire was set to expire the day
we're recording Wednesday. On Tuesday, we saw Donald Trump laterally extend the ceasefire by truthing quote based on the fact that the government of Iran it's seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal Simonia and Prime Minister Shabbad Sharif of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with
a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our military to continue the blockade and in all other respects remained ready and able, and will therefore extend the cease fire until such time as their proposalists submitted and discussions are concluded one way or the other. President Donald J. Trump, the consensus seems to me that this is not like an infinite extension. This is like maybe less than a week for Iran to either comply with US terms or submit proposals.
In the US consider it's acceptable. A lot of that reporting does seem to come from Baraque Revied, who's not really good at journalism, so take it with the pinch of salt. Trump, though, is correct that the state of Iran is on a unified entity, and I covered this in the piece I did last week on an update on the Iron War, Right, Like, I think there's a tendency from people in the global North to look at
a state and see it as like a pyramid. Right, you have the head of state, and then you have government, and then you have legislature, and then you have the people they commanded, right, military and all the civil bureaucracy. That's not quite how Iran works, and I went into more detail in that episode that I made, so I'm not going to go into it here. But there are a series of overlapping but not entirely aligned power centers within Iran and within its military capacity, both within its
military and traditional sense and within the IIGC. Why this is relevant to the negotiations is it's not possible for politicians to negotiate if they do not believe that they can agree to terms and that their military will then comply with those terms. Right. If the Iranian Foreign ministry agrees with the US to do something, the IGC doesn't do it, that then immediately undermines any further negotiations.
Right.
So when we see, for instance, this morning, a large number of boats going into straight upform news, that looks a little bit like a flex right, in the context of this power struggle, In the context of Trump acknowledging that Trump has once again been truthing this week about Iranian nuclear weapons, I'm just going to read one of his truths because I think it contains it shows that the administration feels that it is weak on this particular accusation.
Israel never talked me into the war with Iran. The results of October seventh added to my lifelong opinion that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Did Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that sentence.
That's just that's that's Iran can never have a nuclear weapon in karmadd did the word did?
Yeah? Yeah, I'm not reading that wrong. Yes, it's a hang out.
Just what he says. Yeah, he's simply senile.
I can't help you. I'm just saying the words. I watch it and read the fake news pundits and polls in total disbelief of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the twenty twenty presidential election was rigged, Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn't like talking about.
The results in.
Iran will be amazing and if it RAN's new leaders regime changed, exclamation mark clothes, parentheses are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future. President DJT. That's one of the more challenging passages of English language texts that I've ever approached. I speak four or five languages, and that's that's why I set me back. But I've tried to give you a good faith reading of it. He's clearly sensitive to the allegation that Israel pushed the US
into this conflict. Right, He's clearly sensitive. The last thing that I want to add is that strikes on Kurdish groups have continued despite the ceasefire, right despite the renewed cease fire the PAK. Just two hours after Trump announced the extension of the ceasefire, Tehran sent four drones to attack a PAK base. There have been more injuries in Kurdistan.
It doesn't seem that Iran considers any ceasefire to apply to its ongoing attack against Detroit Gilati groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan inside the borders of Iraq.
Next up, we will discuss the charges against the SPLC, But first listen to these airs. Okay, we are back. On Tuesday, April twenty first, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Cash Battel announced that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and
conspiracy to commit to concealment money laundering. The indictment argues that the SPLC defrauded their donors by using donation money to pay confidential informants within white premacist or neo Nazi organizations. Here is a short clip of the press conference of a reporter asking Todd Blanche a question.
I just want to make sure I understand you're alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups to continue.
Their operations.
Is that I'm not alleging it the grandeurary return and indictment that says that, and so what what the what the investigation found, according to the indictment that was returned today, is that they were paying So so, the Southern Poverty Law Center is raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismount racism, and over a very long period of time, they were using some of the money they raised from donors to pay to they call them feel
you know, basically, to informants too, for information, for access, to just pay them for for certain to do certain things. And and so yes, that's exactly what the indictment charges.
The SPLC is a nonprofit advocacy organization aimed at quote unquote dismantling white supremacy and exposing hate. They operate a blog called hate Watch and run a public database of
hate groups and far right extremists. This indictment claims that the SPLC is utilized informants to gained information on far right activity since the eighties, but between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid over three million dollars to individuals associated with various violent extruist groups quote unquote in a clandestine manner.
Yeah.
No, one, if you kind of have been in the world of CVE countering violent extremism like research, or like involved in NGOs in that sphere at all, or a been a researcher there, you're probably aware of the fact that the SPLC, like has been paying informants. A lot of their scoops are because some Nazi tells on another Nazi, essentially right, So that part isn't surprising. The weirdness is how the SPLC was going about it and how much fucking money they were giving.
Some of these The amounts of some of these.
Is, yeah, it was legitimately shocking.
And I do want to get into some more details about those amounts in the groups and the sort of nest of fake businesses the SPLC used to distribute this money, according to the indictment. The indictment reads that this was domnination money quote received under the auspice that the funds would be used to qu unquote dismantle violent extremist groups. This money was instead being used in part by the SBLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent
extremist groups. That money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.
Unquote.
Money was funneled to individuals associated with violent extreamist groups including the klu Klux Klan, the United Clans of America, Unite the Right, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations, and the affiliated Sadistic Soul's Motorcycle Club, National Socialist Party
of America, American Nazi Party, and American Front. One informant, according to the indictment, was quote a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the twenty seventeen Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. This informant made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate
transportation to the event for several attendees. Between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid this informant more than two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. From twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three, more than one million dollars was allegedly paid to someone affiliated with the National Alliance who served as an informant for over twenty years while
fundraising for this Nazi group. The Imperial Wizard of the Rebooted Imperial Clans of America was a paid informant, according to the indictment. This is likely a guy named Bradley Jenkins, an officer in the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Soul's Motorcycle Club, secretly received more than three hundred thousand dollars Between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty.
The former chairman of the National Alliance was secretly paid more than one hundred and four twenty thousand dollars, while the SPLC website featured an extremist profile page for this individual, likely Eric Glebe. The SPLC also paid the leader of the National Socialist Party of America seventy thousand dollars between twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen. This individual was a former director of an Aryan Nations faction and a former member
of the KKK. This is likely a guy named Paul Mullett, who the SBLC hosts an extremist file web page on their website. A few other unidentified informants are listed in the indictment, as well as a claim that the SPLC funneled more than one hundred and sixty thousand dollars from a fictitious entity to an informant quote, who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders, including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the klu Klux Klan unquote.
That's a lot of money now. To obscure the nature of these payments, the SBLC opened a series of bank accounts at multiple banks for various fictitious businesses. These weren't actually incorporated, but they claimed to be businesses with names like the Center Investigative Agency or the CIA. Why Yeah, Fox Photography, Northwest Technologies, Tech Writers Group, Rare Books, Warehouse Imagery, Inc. JNJ Electronics, Kelly's Marine and Turner Personnel.
Great good work guys.
Essentially, the DOJ is arguing that the SBLC solicited donations under false pretenses and then transferred that money to extremist groups using a network of fake businesses. To get a conviction, the DOG will have to argue that this activity constitutes wirefraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. A conviction will result in the
forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. The right has reacted to this news by calling the Unite the Right rally and kind of the alt right movement as it existed from this time period a syop or a false flag. Senator Mike Lee, right wing political influencer Nick Sorter, and Elon Musk have boosted these claims, getting tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of likes on x the Everything app. This seems to be a new narrative.
It's not really new, I guess, but an enhanced narrative that is emerging among the online right as a way to dissuade some of the uglier parts of that era while still carrying along a lot of the same politics.
Especially on the Great Replacement, which is more of a mainstream idea among the conservative movement at this point in time, so they're able to walk away from the uglier kind of imagery and explicitly not see elements of this like the KKK, which is very boomer very very Boomer coded the KKKA, so they're able to call stuff like that and the Unite the Right Rally a syop or a false flag while still reaping the benefits that the alt
right movement achieved by kind of trailblazing certain rhetoric into the conservative mainstream. Right wing commentators have also used this news to reassert one of their favorite claims that Patriot Front is a psyop or a false flag operation, that whenever a group of young Nazis show up in a U haul all wearing matching outfits and masks, that this is a staged event by either the deep State, the FEDS, or a group like the SBLC. Patriot Front is not
actually named in this indictment. There's no evidence that the SPLC was paying anyone at Patriot Front to inform on the operations of that group, and obviously paying an individual to inform on the details of an upcoming event like Unite the Right. Does not mean that the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was planned or staged by the SPLC. Dozens of people were involved in the planning of this event,
and hundreds participated of their own volition. One person in a planning group chat sending info to the SPLC does not mean that this action was staged or fake.
Anyone who's in the field has had a lot of issues with the SPLC over the last few years, especially people who work for them. I have a lot of I know a lot of a lot of good people have worked for them and gotten fucked over by them. They did a lot of union busting too. The people who run the SPLC, and some of them are the people who are specifically accused of having committed these crimes.
I don't know if I feel like that, like the specific things they have to prove in order to date a conviction are accurate, because fundamentally, anyone who donated to the SPLC knew that they were like getting shipped from informants, you know, like I don't think that was like the amount of money though, is shocking.
That's what That's what they're gonna have to defend in court. Yeah, they're going to have to have to argue that the money that was donated was used for its intended purpose, which was dismantling white premisies. You'll have to say that the information that they obtained through these through through paying these informants, was still in furtherance of that mission. Right, That's going to be what they're going to defend in court. Now.
You know, obviously the FBI also uses information, sure, right, the FBI does this same thing. Famously, the FBI paid the OH nine A affiliated Joshua Caleb Sutter over one hundred and forty thousand dollars. From twenty three to twenty twenty one.
The FBI funded a publishing.
House, a neo Nazi publishing house essentially yeah yeah, yeah, which is responsible for, in part, the political direction of the atom off in division. Now, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that quote, the SBLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence end quote. Using donor money to allegedly profit off klansmen cannot go unchecked.
Unquote.
Patel has said that quote this is illegal and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved. The SBLC released a video statement saying that the use of informants was quote unquote necessary and claimed, quote these individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of
our nation's most radical and violent extremist groups unquote. The indictment does not characterize many of these informants as quote unquote infiltrators, but rather individuals who were already members of these groups and were paid by the SBLC to share information and gossip on fellow members. The SBLC statement also said that they quote frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.
We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families unquote. Like a lot of the people in this field, the FBI knew the SBLC was doing this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cash, Betel announced that the FBI was severing ties with the SBOC, saying the organization had been turned into a quote unquote partisan smear machine that defamed quote unquote mainstream Americans.
With its hate map Okay.
Attorney Ed Martin, former head of the DOJ's Weaponization Working Group as in weaponizing the DOJ against political enemies, shared news of the indictment on x everything app and wrote, quote, they killed Charlie and they will pay unquote. So clearly this prosecution is politically motivated, right. There is political motivations
behind behind deciding to do this right now. The FBI already knew that this was happening to a certain extent, but now they are going after the SBOC as a part of a targeted political prosecution, and this indictment could be seen as part of the anti Antifa nonprofit crackdown. Last March, CBS News reported that the FBI and the IRS formed a new initiative to investigate fraad at nonprofit organizations with suspected links to domestic terrorism, following federal directives
to pursue Antifa aligned groups. A spokesperson from the IRS told CBS News quote, IRS Criminal Investigation is collaborating with federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to investigate individuals and entities that may be funding domestic terrorism or political violence.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the SPLC was so reckless and sloppy, and the fucking amounts are shocking and indefensible, and again not necessarily in a legal sense. Like I'm very doubtful of the government's case, but I am very angry at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I don't think it should continue to exist as an organization if it's going to do this.
Yeah, and like when you combine this, as you say, like anyone who works in this world, people working there had a mitiable time for a long time, for a great variety of reasons.
Yeah, I'm I'm livid at them.
Yeah, this is obviously evidence that the Trump administration is doing what they've said they're doing that, Like the DOJ is going to be looking into these like big you know, liberal and left aligned in goos, particularly that like are
focused in combating the far right. But in terms of this showing any reason to be like scared that they're going to disappear people Like, No, the SPOC did something crazy, and I don't think that the charges specifically are valid, but like they open themselves up to get fucked with by doing something so not like give one of these people a million dollars a million dollars.
Yeah, that's wild.
Yeah, why do they have a fake company named after the CIA? What are you guys doing?
Yeah, someone thought they were being a really cool secret spy.
And I mean those those are some of the charges that may be able to stick. Is the sort of stuff about misrepresenting, Yeah to a federally insured bank, that that type of stuff could be easier to argue based on what I've read in the indictment. But of course that'll get settled in court.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And as a way to sort of close this out, I think one of the things that we're running into here is one of the things that the right is being able to use here is the fact that a lot of these sort of liberal and central left NGOs absolutely sucked and like we have covered on this show, you know, a whole bunch of these organizations do in union busting, and they're like their priorities don't necessarily match
what you know, I would say ours should be. And I think this is something that this administration is going to continue to sort of in some ways use as a rift point, like the fact that these groups are doing all of this unhinged shit, right, this is this is the political consequence of the structure that these NGOs use in the way that they've operated, and now there's sort of chickens are coming home to roost.
I want to talk this week in our immigration segment about the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This is the agency task with vetting and adjudicating immigration benefits. It's the only immigration agency at DHS, so traditionally hasn't done enforcement sweeps right. So for a while, particularly recently, people there have felt a little out of place at the
Department of Homeland Security. Right. The idea has been keep enforcement and processing separate so that people don't have very reasonable reasons to fear doing the legal process. Right, So people continue to show up to their interviews, to submit their documents, etc. And generally they are funded in a large part by immigration fees and perceived as the friendly
and more welcoming side of the process. Their job isn't historically has not been to kind of root out bad migration as so much as to help people, or at least to process people to do the bureaucratic part of migration. Under the second Trump administration, however, this has changed. There have been detentions at interviews, there have been cancelations of
citizenships ceremonies. The USCAS has begun hiring for a new position, and this new position is eligible for remote work, for more remote work than existing hires, and it's called the Homeland Defender. So like we probably many people have seen
these Homeland Defender advertisements on x dot com the everything website. Right, Homeland Defenders been offered up to fifty thousand dollars in signing bonuses, and at the same time as offering remote work benefits for the Homeland Defenders, the agency has been forcing other people to return to offices that could no longer fit the number of staff it had and the
years of work from home. The agency grew and changed right like almost every organization did, and there were reports that you literally had like lawyers sitting in corridors working on their laptops or like trying to perch on a radiator or window sill because their offices could fit people right. And at the same time, the branding around Homeland Defender is not the way that USCIS staff traditionally saw themselves.
In Minnesota, USCAS has begun reinvestigating people admitted with the incredibly highly vetted refugee status, so we already spoke about it once today. Right, the refugees are vetted before they even enter the United States. Across the country, executive orders were followed with memos pausing or entirely stopping the process of legal and veted immigration for people from an increasing
number of countries. The legally mandated green cards for adult children and siblings or current citistants, as well as spouses and minor children of existing permanent residents has gone unfulfilled. This is quote unquote family based migration. They used to call it chain migration. Right. That used to be the language on the right. It's something that Trump administration has hated since its first term. Right, this has been a thing that they spoke about and that has been spoken
about on the right for some time. These green cards could be reused for employment based claims, which is going to have a much larger number of people who are already in the country. It's not bringing new people in or they might go unused. Refugees are being detained without
any clear legal authority and requizzed about their applications. According to reporting in The New Yorker, this means that people are being taken in detained at an ice facility right and then quiz about stuff that they'd already been asked about before they came to the United States. When they were doing that vetting, people who are married to United States citizens are being arrested at interviews, even though generally there was an amnesty of people who, for instance, had
overstate a visa and then got married before. USCIS has also committed significant resources of the agency that may well have been taken away from processing claims and devoted them entirely to investigating naturalizations with the goal of denaturalizing naturalized United States citizens. This is very differ got process right. The Afreem case is the Supreme Court case which governs this right. It where refers to someone who was a
Jewish communist or had been in Israel. What it says is the government cannot de citizenize someone because it doesn't agree with their politics, even in the time of anti communism. Right. Once somebody becomes a citizen, their files are removed from USCIS and they go to the National Record Center, and so calling the presumably tens of thousands of files of naturalized United States citizens and hundreds of thousands over time
millions right would require some kind of filter. The most likely way this is being filtered is through their nationality right. One can imagine, for instance, that the seventy five countries Trump has paused green card processes for might be a start, or their specific focus on Somali people might even prove
a more focused way of doing it right. They have had some success this week, a Belizean woman was found guilty of naturalization fraud for submitting a fake divorce degree she married an American citizen without being divorced from a previous spouse. Belize they found that she had falsified those documents right. They are also pursuing a case against a Nigerian man who's already been convicted of fraud and has already been put in prison for that, but they are
now pursuing a denaturalization case as well. Virtually every interaction with USCIS now seems to require interviews in person and biometric connection. This means that applicants now have to come into an office where they know that people have been detained, and this leads to people being afraid to do that right.
Petitions are slowing down as they're moved around to a dwindling workforce which is still focused on processing those as opposed to the growing amount of the USCIS workforce which is looking for quote unquote fraud in applications or attempting to denaturalize people. As we just covered, among the people waiting without visas are some people who are waiting for special visas, which are given to people who are survivors of human trafficking, gender based violence, or other crimes. This
includes children. There's especially immigrant Juvenile visa, which every single person I've heard of coming on an SIJA visa has had things happen to them which I didn't struggle to think about. That we keep you up at night, and the thought that those people are waiting in limbo because they're trying to denaturalize people is particularly upsetting. I'm sure it's also upsetting to some people who've worked at USCIS their whole life, and I know that morale among those
people is pretty low. While the agency sort of has changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Talking of changing beyond all recognition, we're going to now pivot from journalism to probably some adverts for online Yeah, it would be shocking and jarring.
I love it.
You could change your life beyond all recognition. If you have a big win like that or a big loss. Yeah, yeah, you can change your life that way. Derekson, we're not supposed to mention that.
We're back.
And we all just voted on Forbes dot COM's newest prediction contest, how many people will be wounded in the next three American mass shootings.
I'm excited. There's a big prize for this one.
Sick.
Yeah, that's only slightly an exaggeration of what Forbes is actually doing. Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty gross. It's pretty really hideous.
It's okay, guys, it's not it's not a market, it's just our prediction platform.
Prediction platform.
There's no real money, only social capital.
That could be the slogan of most journalistic enterprise is in twenty twenty six, to be honest, Yeah, Forbes has kind of been a blog rather than a news website. But this is still pretty disgusting.
Speaking of there being no real money. Yeah, let's talk about the Federal Reserve.
So when we last left are I hesitate to call them heroes, But when we last left the Federal Reserve Board, there was a very obviously cooked up investigation by the Justice Department into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This investigation doesn't really seem to have advanced at all, but the conflict over Powell and over Powell's replacement has been intensifying in recent weeks. Last week, on the fifteenth of April, Trump threatened to fire Powell if Powell stayed on as
basically the temporary Federal Reserve Chair after his term expired. Now, the reason this is happening is because Trump's attempt to get someone confirmed to replace Powell has not been going well, and if no one is confirmed by May fifteenth, then the office is just empty. And Powell has said that he wants to stay on and become the temporary chair.
This is sort of unprecedented, but then again, we've also not ever had the president's open an investigation into the sitting chair of the Federal Reserve, causing him to give a reverse hostage video. So where things are right now is that we are getting hearings on Trump's preferred nominee, a man named Kevin Walsh. However, there is a real problem with worsh as as a candidate that's not doesn't have anything to do with who he is. We'll get
to that in a second. The biggest issue that Trump is facing here is that Tom Tillis, who's an outgoing Republican Senator, is refusing to let any Trump appointee pass through the Finance Committee unless Trump ends the investigation into Jerome Powell. So this has had everything at a complete standstill.
It was sort of unclear though a lot of different Republican senators had threatened to do something like this, But because Tillis is just leaving, he's just he's retiring at the end of this, at the end of the session. He's the one who's you know, up there doing it. And this has ground the nomination to a halt. We're still getting hearings, but there's no way for him to actually get a vote to get get this process out
of committee. So into this morass steps Kevin Walsh, who he's not the most unhinged guy Trump could have picked high bar.
This is, at least.
Nominally, on the surface, sort of a fed guy like he has worked for the Federal Reserve Federal Reserve banks before. He's not a podcasting right, yes, actually actually.
That he might have one. There's a non zero chance.
He might be. He might be. I I don't know, but I am not willing to say that he is not one. So now this, this, this whole nomination has also become a mess because again, as as we've been talking about, the reason why Trump wants to basically take dirrect control of the Federal Reserve and and FED independence by installing his guys as a chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is that he wants to FED well, he wants to be able to control the FED so he can control interest rates.
He wants interest rates cut.
Now, this is coming up a lot in the hearings, and so far Walsh is giving answers that if you've ever watched the testimony of someone who's who's trying to get onto the Supreme Court, it's a lot like that, where they he is saying the things that he is supposed to see. He's saying that he opposes an interest rate cut. He's saying that the primary job of the FED is the combat inflation. He's saying that he believes in FED independents. But he also has said that Trump
has not asked him to cut interest rates. And Elizabeth Warren, who has been sort of leading the Democratic charge against this, has pointed out a number of things, one of which is in workerboard. He gets some more of the weird shit with him in a second. But one of the major things here is that the President has said that he's asked Worsh to do just rate cuts. So somebody's lying here. Worsh isn't giving non answers about that. I'm also just going to read this quote from the Associated
Press quote. Warren also noted that Worsh has not disclosed all of his financial holdings, which include investments in startups and private companies, or the size of those financial stakes. For example, Worsh has said he has holdings in SpaceX and polymarkets, but has not said how large those investments are.
Great, well, you can't win them off.
Yeah, So later on Warre said he would divest from one hundred million dollars in investments. But you know this is great. Warren also points out that he's in the Epstein files because Epstein apparently invited him and his wife to a party. It is unclear at this point what what a connection he had, or if there was more, But that's not a great sign. Where we are right now is that Worsh is normal enough of a guy that Tom Tillis is willing to vote for him if
the investigation is dropped. Tillis and some other members of the committee have been Republican members of the committee have been talking about this scheme to get the investigation transferred from the Department of Justice to the Senate Committee. I think at which point they could basically just kill it or just have it be a thing into budget overruns. That's not like an attempt to depose their own Powell. That's it's not clear what's going to happen with that,
and it hasn't started yet. This is the point that we're at right now. This conflict is going to keep heating up as the May fifteenth deadline for getting a new nominee in before the board vacancy happens and Jerome Powell basically stays in power longer than his terminally last happens.
So we're going to keep following this story. And there's one other story that we are going to keep following, which is there was an exclusive by the Wall Street Journal, which is a report This is from unioned US officials, but it claims that the uas Central Bank governor is reportedly trying to get what's called a currency swap with
the US. So what a currency swap is basically is, it's like it's a way to try to fix an exchange rate and get a country a certain amount of US dollars by just like just at the fixed exchange rate, just like swapping X amount of dollars for x amounts of another country's currency. This report was immediately denied, very very quickly denied by a series of posts on x the everything app by the UAE's embassy to the US where they gave a thing. Trump also had like started
talking about this too. I'm just gonna read a little bit of this quote. We very much appreciate President Trump's recognition of the UAE is one of America's most important economic and trade partners. That recognition reflects a depth the mutual trust based on mutual investment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial
backing misreads the facts. The UAE is one of the most financially resilient economies, underpinned by more than two trillion dollars in the sovereign assets, more than three hundred billion dollars in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE Central Bank and banking sectors with approximately one point five trillion in deposits. So when they start listening out the deposits, that's when things are not going great.
And yeah, the.
Issue here and something this is what the wallsher Jourtle is talking about, is that this is not an IDIA proposal. This is a proposal for what's becoming increasingly clear, which is that there's no there's not actually an end to
the war and Iran in sight. And if the strade out from Moves remains closed, this is an existential crisis for the UAE because not only are all of their exports stopped, you know, like the UE itself is just physically under threat, is infrastructure is under threat, and it's
very difficult for them to get more investments. And this could in the future start a dollar crisis of the kind that we've talked about on this show before Go if you want to, Yeah, I've talked about basically dollar crises and how you can have balance of payments crises
for running out of US dollars. What's interesting about this reports and the reason that we're sort of talking about it right now, is that one of the things that the UAE reportedly was mentioning was that they might be forced to turn the Chinese currency.
Its Basically, they might be forced to like sell.
Oil in Chinese currency in order to like get it through the straight, which would be a apockal shift to the entire global political economy, right, which is like, the America's status in the world is in part, but in no small part, based on the fact that you can really only buy oil in dollars. And it seems like what's happening is that the UAE is looking at their
long term prospects, going we're completely screwed. They're going, oh, well, don't If you don't just hand us a bunch of money, we're going to have to start looking at the underpinnings of you know, American imperial power. So we're going to continue to see where this goes. As this war continues in asces stray continues to be blocked, countries around the
world are going to become more and more desperate. As the economic consequences of this ripples out across the world, We're probably going to start seeing more things like this. And at some point, if it becomes clear that the war is not going to end. In Trump's early week announcement that the ceasefires are going to keep going, stops being able to keep the stock markets from being up. We're going to start seeing an even wider spread impact of this. But this is a bleak sign from staunch us ally.
Yeah, we have one final story before closing, which is a little funny, also worrying, but more funny.
I think I think that's pretty good.
Shawnee Kerkhoff, the woman that Glenn Beck's right wing outlet The Blaze falsely accused of being the January sixth pipe bomber, has launched a lawsuit against The Blaze and the two quote unquote journalists who wrote the story for context. Last November, The Blaze published a story claiming to have identified the bomber as a Capitol police officer who responded to the January sixth insurrection, based on quote forensic gate analysis which determined the officer was a quote up to ninety eight
percent match to surveillance video of the bomber. Oh god. This lawsuit claims five counts of defamation and one count of defamation by implication, and Kerkhoff is requesting a jury trial. The documents claim that the Blaze report targeted her because of her actions on January sixth as a police officer and testimony she gave against insurrectionists in court, and part of the intention of targeting her was to build on this larger idea that the defendants had that January sixth
was a quote unquote inside job. As these reports were getting published by The Blaze, Glenn Beck said on his show, quote, this is one of the biggest stories. I think it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last one hundred years. Monstrous, bigger than Watergate. Pullit surprise winning stuff.
Do you have a capacity for self delution? Stuff?
Waiting for the pullets are committed to finished reviewing this one.
They're gonna have to get in line after the police serprise are surely going to get for interviewing the dude who murdered Minneapolis Democratic politicians. Well, Yeah, which I'm sure was an action that his lawyer was super stoked about.
Yeah.
Court documents to say that because of this false claim, the CIA placed the plaintiff on administrative leave and she was forced into hiding amidst online threats from conspiracy theorists. Quote for her role in supporting the deep state, including in posts on her mother's obituary web page. Unquote, she was getting death threats on the obituary page for her mother.
Yeah, in constant frustration in my life, his journalists posting screenshots from court cases and then not listening to the court listener page. So I decided to find the page so I could not be that guy. But yes, some of the threats this woman got genuinely probably made her life very difficult to live for a period of time. Absolutely.
The pseudo ledgers that even after she was cleared as a suspect and weeks later another suspect was arrested who seems to be the likely bomber, these Blaze quote unquote journalists continue to harass her and that their quote false and defamatory accusations have irreparably changed her life unquote. The documents say that this ruined her lifetime career in public service by forever linking her to the bombing and records of an FBI investigation, making any potential security clearances needed
in the future difficult or impossible to pass. One of the journalists was fired by the Blaze on April first, just earlier this month, and the other resigned two days later. They have since raised over twenty thousand dollars since leaving the Blaze to continue their claims on a new independent website that they're launching.
Given the name of the website, the website is called Yeah, They're a toss Regnant LLC. Yes, yes, veritas. I think that just means the truth is King based trains.
Yeah, yes, thing, that's what they were going for at least.
Yeah, I love it.
I love it.
When I read that detail, I was you guys are going to be the most sued any people have ever been.
It's beautiful.
Something about PITOD seems you're relevant here, mm hmmm.
The document says that the plaintiff was called in to work on November sixth, where two FBI agents then asked her about quote unquote online chatter that she was the bomber. She consented to a phone and car search and was placed on administrative leave. Later that day, a quote unquote caravan of FBI vehicles arrived outside her home, including a bomb disposal truck and a helicopter. I'm just going to
read from the document quote. The agents claimed that they were primarily looking for shoes agents edited their vehicles with their guns drawn in full tactical gear. An agent called mister Dickert, who is the plaintiff's boyfrien, and commanded him to quote, come out of the house unarmed with your dogs. Mister Dickard and missus Kirkhoff complied and stepped outside. Agents swept through the house, then re entered with bomb sniffing dogs.
They opened cabinets, rifled through drawers, and scattered Missus Kirkhoff's and mister Dickard's belongings, all without obtaining Miss Kirkhoff's or mister Dickard's consent. It suddenly occurred to Miss Kirkhoff that they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes.
Quote never heard them asking for the dogs to come out before. That was a new one for me.
That is an interesting detail. That is an interesting So the plaintiff asked the agents there why they would do all this to investigate quote unquote online chatter, and as senior official responded that these orders came from quote unquote higher up and that Miss Kirkhoff could quote clear everything up just that night if she would accompany agents to the FBI office for a polygraph interview. Ms Kirkoff agreed, and agents assured her that the drive out to the
office would take longer than the interview itself. This was not true. The interview lasted almost three hours. Agents repeatedly accused the plaintiff of placing the bombs and continually asserted her guilt. Part Way through the interview, the interrogator changed out the tubes on the polygraph because they quote did not like how they were reading unquote.
That was a remarkable detail.
Jesus yeah, oh, Jesus Christ.
And at one point told the plaintiff that she quote unquote fail Wow, oh gosh. The plaintiff assumed, was just an interrogation technique.
Yeah, you can't fail a polygraph test, right, It just gives information, yes, often not actually information which he's very useful in any way relevant whether you're telling the truth or not. Polygraphs not not really something that should be used in this capacity. But here we go anyway. But yet it's not like a past fail. It doesn't like a bleep, bleep bleep. I had to take ta now.
After midnight, she asked if she was free to leave, and the agents said yes, so she went home. In the next day, the FBI returned her phone, and then once she got back her phone, she saw this quote unquote online chatter exploding all over alleging that she was
the bomber. A day later, the Blaze published a report explicitly naming her as the bombing suspect, something they already alluded to in previous reporting, which sparked the online chatter, which caused the FBI to search her home and interrogate her. This was all intentional on the part of the Blaze.
According to this court document, the defendants, these quote unquote journalists purposely forwarded a tip to the Office of the Director National Intelligence in an attempt to get quote unquote coroboration of their reporting from sources inside the government by getting the plaintiff placed under investigation prior to their publishing of the articles identifying her as the bomber that this was This was basically all.
Part of a ski Their goal was to set the narrative.
Jesus Christ m months later, the defendants have refused to remove headlines or social media posts claiming to identify the bomber, even after the actual text of these articles was removed after the FBI arrested the real suspect in December, well just last month, the quote unquote journalists published another article on The Blaze titled quote Brian Cole Junior's physical presence, posture, mannerisms are no match to FBI's hooey clad pipe bomb
suspect unquote. This was another article on The Blaze saying that Gate analysis showed that Brian Cole Junior, the actual suspect who has been arrested, does not match the Gate does does not does not have a positive Gate analysis match to the surveillance footage from that night.
It's god because it's not real, because because gaate analysis is bullshit.
But they break that down in the quote documents, right, The footage of her that they had was when she's carrying like fifty pounds of tactical gear and a heavy bag tactical gear.
Yes, yes, and she suffered a serious laying injury in college.
Yeah, it's comical that like they this is what they went with. But then the fact that they're doubling down on its very funny and legally baffling. Yeah, they really are not ready for the consequences to hit them on this one.
No, So, like I said, these two Quoe unquote journalists were fired and Slash left The Blaze earlier this month, but in posts and podcast appearances, they assert that Brian Cole Junior is a quote unquote patsy, and that quote the truth about the pipe bomber has been quote unquote floored it, and that quote unquote legal considerations are preventing them from further disclosing the quote unquote darker details about their Yeah, pipe bomber theory.
She's christ now.
Brian Colt Junior's defense lawyers have filed a subpoena for miss Kirkoff which misleadingly states she quote unquote failed a polygraph. This subpoena also contains her home address, and the subpoena has been spread online by these quote unquote journalists as
evidence that they were right all along. The plaintiff continues to deal with doxing and death threads as a result from the subpoena and the quote unuote journalists continued reporting spreading claims that she is in fact the real bomber. So Kirkoff is requesting a jury trial with these six counts of defamation, and I hope she gets a lot of money from everyone involved in this.
Yeah, I hope she gets every dollar.
Glenn Beeck Hans, Yeah, I mean I hope the outlets existing that is that would be ideal.
Yeah, I hope the outlet becomes yet another subsidiary of the Onion.
That would be a magnificent way for this to end. But yeah, like yeah, And then another element of the documents I noticed was that they talked about how the quote unquote journalists had benefited from their blue check X posts, right.
Yeah, monetized accounts on X.
Yeah.
I would be interested to see as we get more in the discovery element of this case, how much were they making, how much were it making from X versus the Blaze, Like, I'm going to follow this one just because so many of the bits of misleading reporting we see are because of this financial incentive structure. So it'll be very revealing for us.
And this financial structure is something that X Everything app is somewhat attempting to take on, at least for news aggregator accounts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they specifically went after Dom Lucret apparently.
Yes, one of X's guys announced like a week or so ago that they're going to be reforming reforming the payout system for news aggregators. This is Nikoli de Beer.
Yeah.
Part of the way they're doing that is that Ex's traffic is in free fall, and this is something that we're seeing like across social media. There was a really good report that Peter Tornberg, who's an assistant professor in computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, published earlier this year. I mean, like just today came up with an update on it. On like the most recent numbers we have on like what's happening to the different social
media networks. Visiting and posting on x the Everything app and Facebook have seen like a nearly fifty percent drops, a significant decline among like the youngest and the oldest users on social media, particularly like people over sixty five and people from eighteen to twenty four have seen like the biggest decline and like the time that they've actually
spent on site. I'm going to be doing something more detailed about this in the future, but a lot of what you're seeing from these big social media companies and these like big pit It's right, are moves in desperation. This is not working as well as it used to. The economics that wants underpin this system are falling apart.
None of these companies are as profitable as they used to be, and people are pulling away from social media, particularly from like a lot of the text based social media sites which were never as profitable as like short form video was. So I don't know, that's something that made me less bummed.
Well, I hope she gets certainly all the money they got from X and learning how much money that was will be super interesting in discovery and hopefully much much much more money as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, speaking of money, James, you wanted to plug a donation.
That's right.
Yeah, I want to talk pretty briefly about the guys from Cobra column. So Cobra Column if people aren't familiar, it's a special Force or it's a PDF that is aligned with the Karen National Union COREN National Liberation Army and the struggle for liberation in the m Ar against the Hunter right. They have been fighting intensely in an area near Miawity, place that Robert and I spend some time, actually just across the river from place Robin I spend
some time. Albeit the Hunter has successfully launched munitions into Thailand several times now, and they are really like if you want to look at the frontline of people's autonomy against autocracy, against dictatorship, against tyranny, like, they are at it, and they need money to sustain their efforts, to feed themselves,
to equip themselves, to buy medical equipment. And I think they're also trying to buy a replacement helmets and body armor because they're getting hit by drones right and people have survival injuries, but their armor is destroyed. If you'd like to help, you can send fifteen euros for ten stickers. Stickers have the Milk Tea Alliance salute, which is the same as the solute that the Cupscats use and the one from Hunger Games. I'm not going to describe it,
becauess you can work it out. It is stickers for Meanmar at ProtonMail dot com. You can send fifteen euros for two stickers. That's s T I C K E R S F O R M y A N M A R at ProtonMail dot com. If you want to email us cool Zone tips at proton dot me. If it's a marketing email, I'll block you.
Put a trans girl on your couch.
We reported the news.
Ay bye, We reported the news.
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
