Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #18

of event at the Capitol Jewish Museum. Prior to the shooting, the suspect was seen pacing outside of the building. According to witnesses and surveillance video, a thirty one year old man named Elias Rodriguez approached a group of four people leaving the event. As he walked past them, he turned to face their backs and shot two people and continued to fire as they felt the ground. One of the victims, a twenty six year old woman, tried to crawl away

after being shot. Rodriguez followed her and fired again Jesus while he was reloading, She sat up, and then Rodriguez shot her several more times before throwing his gun into a bush. He ran into the museum after the shooting. Security let him in thinking that he was a victim. Witnesses say he appeared traumatized and in shock. People from the museum event brought him water, and when they asked him if he was okay or if he was injured,

Rodriguez requested the police. When cops arrived, he allegedly admitted to shooting, and, according to witnesses, quote, grabbed a red cafea out of his pocket and started free Palestine chance quote there is only one solution, Antifada revolution unquote. While being arrested and taken out of the building, he chanted free,

Free Palestine. Israel's ambassador to the US claimed that the two victims were deliberately targeted as Israeli embassy employees, and that Rariguez mingled with attendees at the reception earlier that evening before raising suspicion and being asked to leave. Although the organization who put on this event, the American Jewish Committee, disputes this account. They say that Rodriguez tried to register for their event but was denied entry following a background check.

Rodriguez is a lifelong Chicago resident. He got an English degree at the University of Chicago, legally bought a gun in Illinois and flew with it to d S the night before the shooting. This event was as an American Jewish Committee access DC Young Diplomat's Reception. The description for the event reads quote, this special event brings together Jewish young professionals age twenty two to forty five and the DC diplomatic community for an evening dedicated to fostering unity

and celebrating Jewish heritage. Join us for heavy appetizers, cocktails, conversations, and a special guest speaker. We are excited to introduce this year's theme, turning Pain into Purpose. Here from members of the Multi Faith Alliance and Israel as they delve into humanitarian diplomacy and have a coalition of organizations from the region and for the Region are working together in response to humanitarian crises through the Middle East and North

Africa regions. The two victims were a young couple, Sarah Milgram and Ran Lisinski, twenty six and thirty, who met through their work at the embassy. Lisinski identified as a Christian, though he was born in Israel and moved to Germany as a kid, then returned to Israel and served in the IDF. There is an alternative claim that he was born in Nuremberg and then moved to Israel as a teenager, but most reporting says that he was born in Israel.

In the aftermath of the shooting, politicians widely condemned this as anti Semitic violence. The acting US Attorney said that they are investigating the cases a hate crime and an act of terrorism. Dan Bongino, Deputy FBI director, said the

shooting was a quote act of targeted violence. The Israeli Foreign Minister and net Yahoo have laid blame at college protesters and foreign government officials, including the leaders of France, Britain in Canada, accusing them of blood libel for talking about Israel's quote supposed genocide and crimes against humanity unquote, and calling such rhetoric critical of Israel. Quote unquote incitement. Natanyahu said, quote free Palestine is just today's version of

Hyle Hitler Jesus Christ. They don't want a Palestinian state. They want to destroy the Jewish state. They want to annihilate all Jewish people who have been in the left d of Israel for three thousand, five hundred years.

organizing against Israeli war crimes. Right. Like, the argument they want to be able to make is that just saying free Palestine is an active terrorism, And there was an act of terrorism here, right, Like shooting two embassy employees for the crimes of their government. Like that is a clear act of terrorism. Right. You can feel however you want to about it, but like that's the definition of what was done. But the things he was chanting were

not part of the active terrorism. The fact that he shot people to death was the active terrorism.

will be people who carry out attacks like this. And I don't really know there certainly didn't seem to be outside of this guy's personal chats with his friends, a lot of evidence that would have set him on anybody's radar. He had been at like a PSL Party for Socialism and Liberation March in twenty seventeen or something, but like, this wasn't a guy who had a history of violence

or anything like that. And quite frankly, that's just a reality of the country that we live in, is that when people like this decide to carry out shootings for whatever reason, the odds of catching them are extraordinarily low.

instead moves to criminalize dissent. He talks about armed action. Quote an armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares in many unarmed actions.

the Native Curse Millennial. And the other is that the bring the war home reference in his manifesto, which is basically a reference to something that I believe was Louis Beam, who is a neo Nazi organizer, said about trying to get Vietnam veterans to essentially bring the war home to the United States in order to spark a race war.

And those two little things are weird. However, the rest of this guy's fairly well documented history and background does not suggest anything like that, So I don't think that that's the credible thing to blame this on. Quite frankly, Yeah.

He finishes with his thoughts on the quote unquote morality of armed demonstration, where he discusses this tendency to dehumanize the perpetrators of atrocities, as a method for us to cope with the monstrous evil that ordinary humans are capable of.

thing to do unquote. It did find it interesting that on December fifth, twenty twenty four, Rodriguez posted on his Twitter account that quote eighty percent of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance EXECUTIVEUOTE. As for his political background, Rodriguez identifies as a Maoist, third worldiest yeah, and believes that the global seuth alone has quote unquote revolutionary potential. A friend of Rodriguez described his politics to

journalist KNK Clippenstein like this quote. He was a big proponent of the emerging resistance axis of Russia, Iran Hesbula Assad Syria.

are calling it a false flag. This development is shocking, but not completely out of character. Yeah, he always had strong political convictions. From the sound of the manifesto, he's the same as he was.

his Twitter account. Clippenstein spoke with at least five friends of his, who all claimed that they never heard Rodriguez express anti Semitic sentiments. Now, one of Arigue's friends gave Clippenstein access to a years old private WhatsApp group chat that Rodriguez frequently posted in, including up to a day before the shooting. Clippenstein says, quote, the messages don't reveal any hatred of Jews per se, but they do portray an often bitter man who hated all sorts of other things,

especially Israel and its Warren Gaza unquote. Yeah, and from what we conceived of the chats that kind has posted, this matches pretty well. A chat member wrote, quote, I'm almost surprised you're not anti Semitic elias. It usually goes hand in hand with the whole Stalin did nothing wrong, mantra.

Just put him in a padded room and forget about him.

But it was a big thing for people who were on four Chan and who were on Something Awful. And Something Awful was the website that gave birth to four Chan. It's where I was raised on the internet, and many many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, I think I don't remember the exact year, but we started gathering on this game for children. It was like an MMO for little kids and like pretending to be members of a cult in order to like confuse small children.

And then four Chan did their own version of that that was a bit more racist, which is often the case.

think it's actually likely or he did both. But his friends described him as somebody who was really into something awful, right, as somebody who had been influenced by that in particularly a subset of the something awful forms called FIAD, which stands for fuck you and Die, which kind of pioneered a lot of the most toxic aspects of online discourse.

Awful ban list when somebody gets banned. Obviously, again, I don't think there's like a positive thing to him being like him being on something awful didn't cause him to shoot two people, but him being on Something Awful was a natural part of the progression that led to him being the kind of like toxic online asshole that he was.

And sort of evidence of that is that one of the last things he had done online before the shooting was he had gotten briefly onto Blue Sky and then gotten in trouble for repeatedly harassing Will Stanzel, who's another annoying asshole on the Internet, who was also a Something Awful goon who was raised in this same chunk of the Internet, and who became a similar kind of asshole,

just with wildly different politics. And these two hated each other, and Elias like threatened to murder him over the internet because he's like again that these guys, he's that type of guy. He's that type of guy, which doesn't mean again, which doesn't mean this is why he did a shooting or had anything to do with that, because there's a lot of this type of guy and almost none of

them commit acts of terrorism. It just like his background makes complete sense for the kind of guy that we can see that he was online.

help the Palestinian people currently being killed by Israel. The exact same day that this happened, Wednesday, the twenty first, ninety three people were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip and that type of stuff does not really

get reported anymore because that's how media capture works. Americans are really good at getting desensitized to this in a large scale media environment, but stuff like this only serves as a distraction and fuels Israel's oone motivation for their continued actions.

stuff specifically and what people can do about it. First, can you can you explain what is going on in this budget with the ban on trans healthcare using Medicaid?

began investigating first. Me and Mattie were talking about it a bunch she's the one who took me off to it. They started off by implementing huge cuts to Medicaid that would result in millions of people losing access to their healthcare, not even just trans people. Shortly after they announced these cuts,

for instance, adapt a group of disabled activists. They are famous for being the ones who climbed up the steps of the I believe it was the Capital Building in the nineties to raise awareness and help get the American Disabilities Act passed. They staged a protest on the United States Capital during a hearing for this bill where Republicans were just talking about it and praising themselves. Multiple active got arrested. They're all fine now apparently apparently they weren't

treated too bad either, which is good to hear. But what ultimately happened is more and more came out, and it came revealed that not only would disabled people be affected, but basically every marginalized group for people of course being what we were focusing on given the beat, but this will impact essentially everyone, especially if you're a low income, especially if you are a person of color, you are more likely to be impacted just by virtue of this bill,

and how sweeping it is, and Republicans implemented a ban for gender ferming care for minors on it. It was a very milktoas ban that at the time was projected to pretty much get overturned in court right away if we were to pass.

I'm telling people to prepare if it passes for twenty twenty six, because there's a decent change. Republicans will try to expedite it. Because it passed through the House, it passed through committees in the House, it was sent to the Senate, and I think that's what we'll give to Mattie to talk about kind of what next steps for that are.

on budget items, not policy items. So for example, you couldn't say, hey, weed is legal everywhere now or something like that, or raise the minimum wage, which Democrats tried to do in twenty twenty one and they failed because

there are rules regarding how this process works. And so what we argued in an article was that there's a possibility that, you know, if activists and advocates reach out to their senators and advocated to point out that this part of the bill is completely against those provisions, against those procedural rules for the Senate Parliamentaria could rule against it and basically strike that portion of the bill without

ever even becoming law. And you know, that would stay people a lot of stress and anxiety, and you don't have to worry about the court battles and what happens with Scremetti versus us, which is a Supreme Court case that's going to be ruled on on gender firming care soon. So what we've been telling people, and you know, including listeners for your show, is that people really need to reach out to their senators every single day, email call

and ask them to vote no on this bill. On HR one and it specifically mentioned the trans healthcare aspects. And if you want, there's templates online on our website, or you can just you know, ask them, Hey, we don't think this bill is good.

central health care. We cannot rely on the government to protect us and give us what we need, because fundamentally, the government and the laws that it aims to uphold are about protecting the rich, protecting the powerful, protecting the wealthy. The law is functionally something that gives police power to act as essentially an occupying army on state and to persecute anyone who deviates from what those who are disproportionately rich and powerful decruity. And we need to start focusing

on building long term solutions. Everything we can do with legislative activism is important, but ultimately it will not save us because there will be more attacks down the line, and they'll keep coming, and they only need to win once. We need to win that every time. But there are

long term solutions. My beat at this point is essentially just telling everyone to get plugged into your local mutual aid network, get plugged into people doing work on the ground in your state, in your area, who are focusing

on a plethora of different issues. A bit of a self plug here, but I wrote an article, for instance, last month, where I interviewed a seasoned activist in the Twin Cities who told me just a lot about the history of radical practice in the cities, especially in light of the George Floyd riots and especially in right of corporate pride, rango capitalism, whole nine yards. Recommend reading it. It's on the free radical dot org. Check it out.

But beyond of course my own writing in my own interviews, there are so many people doing work that doesn't get covered because it either isn't pattalable to mainstream news audiences or it isn't seeking coverage for a variety of reasons. In every single major city this I can guarantee there are people doing work. Most of the time. It's not

going to be publicly visible, but they are there. I would recommend that everyone who is not currently plugged in gets started with something that is much more entry level and something that is much more like meant to be kind of for everyone who may not be willing to do more in depth and more treesy type of stuff, food not bombs, is the great thing I recommend for everyone to check out. Not every city has one, most two,

every state has one. Beyond that, there are plenty of local mutual aid groups in every single locality, and if there's not one directly by you, there's probably one in your nearest major city. I would specifically recommend I'm a bit biased here, but I would recommend focusing on ones that are decentralized and non hierarchical, ones that don't revolve around centralizing power and placing that power in the hands of people who are either good at smooth talking or

who have a lot of money. Ultimately, the way forward for people of all different marginalized groups, not even just trans people. You know on document immigrants, blocking auditions, well of color, low income people, disable people, and so forth. The way forward is by recognizing that our issues affect all of us. Attacks on trans healthcare are not limited there. Inevitably, let's say they ban trance healthcare overnight, They're going to come for intersex people. Next, They're going to come for

gay people. Next, they're going to come for everyone. So I would just say get involved in your local groups and reach out there. Are resources out there. If you need some, check out the free radical dot org. I recommend a ton of them.

hundred fronts, you know. But this means that there are so many different things that you can do to resist them and to make sure that this fucking budget they're trying to pass, to make sure that everyone in this country suffers, and specifically that trans people cannot use the health insurances that we need, use Medicaid, use Affordable Care Act to pay for stuff. This stuff can be resisted

in so many different ways. You can, as we've talked about, you can call your senators, you can yell at them, you can make their lives miserable until they agree to not do this. And then also you can join your local mituway groups, you can join local activist groups. You can start, you know, getting a serious organized other ways you can. Again, like we've talked a lot about unions and the role of unions and trying to struggle on the show. We've talked of God, We've talked about so

many things. I'm going to do a one second plug for the episode I wrote last year called you already know how to organize, because you do already know how to organize. And yeah, none of the things that are happening here are inevitable. They can be stopped and there are so many different ways for you to start stopping them.

This is an eleventh grade transgender athlete from Urupa Valley High School near Riverside, California, and she won the Division three girls long jump and triple jump and placed seventh in the high jump at her Southern Section championship a few weeks later. There's going to be I don't think it's happened yet a championship meet that she qualified for

as a result of this. And when this happened, it was immediately left on by the Trump administration and by right wing media as evidence of this thing that they've been trying to push for forever, which is that trans

athletes are a threat to women's sports. Right now, this is something that number one, there's just not a lot of And this is also something that like, I think something like two thirds of Americans when polled, say that they don't feel like trans athletes should be competing with you know, quote unquote naturally born women in women's sports.

Right Like, this is a thing that the right has built a lot of support for because they have made this a political issue for so long, and they've been largely successful in that the State of California and California lawmakers have been pushing back against this. There have been state bills in order to allow these girls to continue to compete, but Gavin Newsom has not expressed the same degree of support. And this kind of largely came out earlier this month when he had a meeting with conservative

personality Charlie Kirk on his new podcast. As Newsom said, Kirk pushed so hard on the topic that Newsom said he felt like he had to address it. Here's how Newsom characterized it, and then he asked me, tell me that's not fair. And I looked at him. I said, you're right, that's not And so it wasn't some grand design. And I know, I know that hurt a lot of people, but respectively, I just disagree with those on the other side of this. Now, this brought a backlash against Newsom.

He was attacked for flip flopping because again, like the California Democratic Party's position on this has been to defend trans athletes, but Newsom kind of flipped as soon as he was in a room with Charlie Kirk. Now, Newsom will argue that he also tried to stick up for trans athletes to Charlie Kirk to be clear about that, this is exactly what he said to Charlie completely fair on the issue of fairness. I completely agree. So that's

easy to call out the unfairness of that. There's also a humility and grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is issue that I have a hard time with as well. So both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think you know is inherent in you but not always expressed in the issue. And first of all, there's

no decency inherent in Charlie Kirk. And second, yeah, there's also a humility and grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide. What does that? What that mean? What does that mean? Gavin?

having big blue conversations. And then he went on to say that basically the backlash to him agreeing with Charlie Kirk on this has convinced him. I always thought the right overstated how judgmental my party was, and I'll be candid with you, I have a deeper understanding now of that critique than I ever ever ever understood. It's like, now that people are angry at me, I believe there's a problem with my party being judgmental.

and Field Championships. Right, and he said that, under the leadership of radical left Democrat Gavin Nuskum, California continues to illegally allow men to play in women's sports. The governor himself said it is unfair. Trump wrote, first off, the fact that Gavin agreed with Charlie INA's podcast did nothing to change the rhetoric around him. He's still radical left democrat Gavin newscom because you can't make these people unhappy, because it's not about fairness, it's about hurting people.

administration backs down. And to be fair, and I think against Maine, California's got a lot more weight to throw around. Yeah, it's the fifth largest economy on the planet. They have some they have some fucking hack behind them, and like news clearly has.

you stand there. You accept that the zeitgeist is a screen door and it's going to bounce off of you and back in enough for another direction if you stand for something, right, Gavin decided not to stand for something, and immediately after Trump made that tweet threatening to withhold funds from the state of California, and you know, the Department of Education has opened title for investigations in two leagues that have allowed trans athletes, including CIF, which is

California's high school governing a sports governing body. Right after Trump made this most recent truth, the CIF released a statement saying that it had made the decision to pilot an entry process for the championship that's coming up that will alter the way they hand out awards. It will expand qualification opportunities for biological female student athletes. Is the exact way that they have phrased this. And basically what they're going to be doing is giving an award for

biological men, biological women, and than trans competitors. Right, so there will be like three long jump awards.

this thoughtful approach. And I should note here this has done nothing to actually calm the right or get conservatives to back down right.

Governor whoson needs to pick aside, do something, do the right thing. So again, this gets you nothing with them, right, it benefits you not at all. There's another quote I want to read here from State Senator Scott Weiner, who is the leader of the Senate Budget Committee and again a member of the LGBTQ Rights Caucus. Trump is now targeting California, just like he targeted Maine. Threatening to withhold federal funds of California doesn't follow as I legal edicts

targeting transgender people. California law protects trans people. That won't change Main one in court. So will California. There's only one answer to a bully No, And as Main Governor

Janet Mills said, see you in court. Sorry I got I don't know why I said Governor Fray earlier, but anyway, the point here is that you have Californian legislators saying the right thing, and then you have of fucking Newsome being like, no, no, no, actually we're totally going to cave and in a way that won't even make the Republicans happy. It's just frustrating to me that you do have Democrats trying to do the right thing here in California politics and Newsom absolutely having CIF do a run

around on them out of pure cowardice. Anyway, that's what I got.

at expedited remove all proceedings. If you want to know more about exactly what they exploited remove all proceedings are and how they work, you can go back to our episode, which will have aired the day before you hear this, and that would explain And I talked to an immigration attorney there and explain a little bit more about how that works. This includes people whose cases were not dismissed.

So Previously it was reported that ICE was dismissing cases of people who had arrived less than two years ago and placing them under two forty explanited remove all proceedings. Apparently they are also detaining other people. I am not sure how that works. I have not seen any justifications for this to give me an explanation for it. I'm

not sure how much that matters anymore. These people are going to have to fight their removal from detention, which is obviously going to be a pretty unpleasant experience.

eye on. Right like right before the end of title forty two, I saw they were advertising for ICE contractors to transport detainees. So this is sometimes a sign that bad things are a foot in the immigration world. I'm guessing in this case it's either this or a plan to further expand detention capacity, which also something the Trump administration has been talking about. Right, So they also have these various subjective orders authorizing more budget and the budget

bill or threwting more budget for detaining migrants. Secondly, the South Sudan case rope we's covered this last week at ALVSUS Known.

of the court's injunction. The courts injunction had given them ten days to assert their reasonable fear of torture and then a further fifteen days to ask to reopen their case if the Department of Home Land Security determined that fear not to be credible. Justice Supreme Court Justice Jackson has given the plentiffs a week to respond to the United States the DOJ's call for a stay right, So in practices, people will still have that ten days from the injunction to make their play that they have a

fear of torture. Right. South Sudan has said that if these people aren't South Sudanese, it will just return them to their country of citizenship. So if the United States can't return them there because they have a fear of torture, it just seems like the whole South Sudan thing is just an end run around the Convention against Torture right there their obligation not to return people to places where they will be tortured. Talking of returning people to places

where they will be tortured. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has deported twenty people to Mianma. This is according to reporting in Meanma Now. I've also written about it on my page Patreon page. I've linked both of those in the show notes. But it should be noted that me and I Now broke the story and it's getting very little coverage in the United States. I can speculate as to why that you probably don't need to hear me to sort of join the dots there.

in Burmese hunted attention facilities are atrocious. These people are currently being held at the on Tarpi Interrogation Center. It appears at seven, one of the earliest, but this has been happening since March. It appears that somebody these people have been released. The rest are being held by SAC. That's the Burmese hunter of military intelligence units, who will

almost certainly torture them. Me and MA does have a temporary protected status, but I think I've seen a couple of posts about this, so I just want to clarify the TPS doesn't apply to people who entered after the TPS was granted, or to people who have committed certain crimes. We know that at least one of the men they returned had been convicted of a crime. Not all of these crimes are like particularly HENUS felonies. Right, you can do a certain number of misdemeanors and also be deported

under a TPS. But I'm trying to find out who these people are. I know that you can't download our podcast in Meanma, which is a huge dub for us. But you know, I know a lot of Burmese people do listen, so you know, if you have an particular

insight into this, you could reach out to us. We'll drop the email addressing a little bit here it does seem very unlikely that these people were given a chance to make a claim of fear of torture, right, because it would be a very easy claim to make, given every major human rights organization on the planet has documented torture of detainees in Meanma. I was just reading a report this morning about harassment of trans women in prisons

in Myanmar. But the same thing goes for CIS folks, for straight folks, for everyone, right, no one, No one comes out of there the same they went in. Yeah, I can't believe that these people were given a chance to claim a credible fear because it would have been such an easy claim to make, yep, And they wouldn't have been returned there. So yeah, I wish the story was getting more reporting. I wish more people in the

media in this country cared about me and Maa. But that's a drama I have been beating for four years now, and I don't think she's going to change anytime soon. So I guess all there is to say is that I really appreciate those of you who do, especially those of you who listen to the show and take an

interest in all things Meanma. But yeah, if these people have been returned to a country that the US press was more familiar with, there'd be a lot more noise about this, but this is absolutely unconscionable.

way torture stops in Burma. Is is when the revolution succeeds and liberates to Britains. Like that, there is no reasoning with the Burmese hunter. Yep, it's about all I got. It's pretty fucked like.