It Could Happen Here Weekly 175
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the world falling apart. And it's mostly just about that at the minute, but we do sometimes talk about how to put it back together as well. Joining me today is Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Hi. And we're on the falling apart theme. It seems like we've been on that one quite a lot the last few weeks. But today we are specifically talking about what I'm going to call the rendition of the

non-US nationals by the Trump administration over the last week.

The reason I'm calling it, I guess, rendition and not deportation is because these people aren't being sent back to the countries they're from. They're being sent to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place called Secod. So the Trump administration has attempted to send 300 people who it accuses of being members of a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how they get there under the Alien Enemies Act, which

to a prison in El Salvador, where they will be detained for a year at the expense of the United States. And we're going to break down exactly how we got there over the course of this episode. So the Trump administration has accused these people of being members of two different gangs. The majority of them, there's 238 people.

are accused of being members of Trenderagua. Trenderagua is a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a foreign terrorist organization. Another 23 it's accusing of being members of MS-13, which is a Salvadorian gang. The Trump administration used something called the Alien Enemies Act to remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act...

We actually spoke about it in November of last year when we were looking at provisions of U.S. law that the Trump administration could use for its mass deportation agenda. This is one we spoke about. The Trump administration in the past has been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole series about Title 42 on that. That's kind of the paramount example, right?

The Alien Enemies Act is a 226-year-old piece of legislation. The last time it was used was to inter Japanese people during the Second World War. That's a pretty shameful part of United States history. It's great that we're going back there. Who are the enemies in this case? I should probably point out the Alien Enemies Act is intended for

the people you're at war with, right? So if the United States is at war with, let's say, Canada, and there are Canadian citizens in the United States or people who have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people are individuals within that group are suspected to be spies or suspected to be like

serving the interests of Canada, not the United States, then they could be excluded or detained under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country, as is the case here. And as we saw in this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal, right? This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have even a hearing, right? These people...

We're rounded up and booted out the country in very short order. Yeah, and like with or without due process, like we should not be

black begging people and sending them to the like al salvador labor prison right like this is like just doing this at all even with due process would already be horrifying yeah the fact that they're just doing it like without even any like court process entirely and like trying to like bypass that just adds like another level to an already like horrifying and you know evil and shameful action yeah it's terrible it's

I want to define some of the categories here. I want to start with Tren de Aragua. Spanish understanders will notice the word tren, meaning train. That's because they came out of construction unions who were building trains as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs. Tren del Llano is the other one that springs to mind, which also come from the same place and thus have similar names, but just people should understand that they're different organizations.

They also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf of the Venezuelan state, but in 2024 Maduro blamed them for the protests after his election. People remember that that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I covered that in my series on the Darien Gap, if people want to learn more about Venezuelan

of migration to the United States. In 2024, Biden named Tren del Agua a transnational criminal organization and then Trump named them a foreign terrorist organization.

He labeled several cartels as FTOs as well. At the time, there was a lot of speculation about why was it to allow for drone strikes or covert operations. I think we're now seeing that this was part of this larger ploy of deportation. Yeah, because, quote-unquote, terrorists have even less...

quote-unquote rights than quote-unquote criminals. Yes. It's like the triangle of which deplorable class has the least amount of rights. Terrorists are always the ones with the least. Yeah, and we've been doing that for 20-odd years now with Guantanamo Bay and renditions to Egypt and Syria and other places. In this case, people are being sent to Secot, which is this prison in El Salvador. Can you spell that? Yeah, C-E-C-O-T.

CENTRO... SECOLT. Yeah, SECOT, I guess. It stands for Terrorism Confinement, Terrorism Detention Center. It is largely referred to as a super prison, right? It was built in El Salvador by Bukele as part of his Iron Fist, would be the way you translate it. It's Iron Fist policy against gangs and against crime. And it has been widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed.

into cells with more than 100 people, but there are fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right? So they can't even all lie down at the same time. The bunks don't have bedding. They're just flat, like metal sheets. They're four high, so you have to climb over other people to sleep. For more than 100 prisoners, there are two open toilets, right?

That's the only access to a bathroom that you have. They might be allowed out for half an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave their heads and they all wear white. The lights are left on all day. As I said, they're provided with no bedding, no contact with the outside world, very little access to anything other than standing in that cell. There's two Bibles in each cell. It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Yeah.

This is completely inhumane, right? It's horrific. And for a couple of years now, Bukele has been doing these media tours of Secot, using it to generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote, what will happen to you if you're a quote unquote in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs and

As we saw when these people were sent to El Salvador, this tendency to use, I don't know what you would call it, incarceration as a way of making content was very much the case here, right? Yeah. We're going to break for ads. When we come back, we will be consuming content that is people being stripped of their human rights.

And we are back. Garrison, do you want to go ahead and play this? So the tweet in question, the zeet in question, it's by Naive Bukele, the president of El Salvador, right? Should I read it out? Yeah, I think you should. I think it's worth noting that this style of propaganda closely mirrors a lot of what DHS and the Trump administration is doing on their official accounts. A lot of the meme-ified content creation format, like aesthetics,

being used to just display like torture and deportations and human rights abuses is very common among government accounts in the States right now. It's pretty, pretty horrifying to look at. And this, this kind of follows suit. And, and,

possibly even more bleak. Yeah. But yeah, we should read this whole message and then we'll probably skip around on the video and talk about what we're seeing. Yeah, so I'll just read it. Obviously, you don't understand it. I'm quoting it here directly from him.

Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to Secot, the terrorism confinement center, for a period of one year, parentheses, renewable. The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.

Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year. On this occasion, the U.S. has sent us 23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvadoran justice, including two ringleaders. One of them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure.

This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable, and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place, all in a single action. May God bless El Salvador, and may God bless the United States.

I should probably just add that the US sent $3 million to pay for these... $6 million, I'm sorry, to pay for the 300 prisoners it intended to send. The zero idleness program is like...

one of the most sinister things I've like read recently. Yeah, I mean, you could pull out of a George Orwell or like an Aldous Huxley or something, right? And it wouldn't sound out of place. I mean, it's even like, you know, it's almost cliche now to point to like German work camps, but like, come on. Yeah, I mean. Come on. Yeah, we're doing it again. So yeah, we'll probably play a clip of the music and then I'm going to skip around on the video. We can just talk about what we're seeing here. Mm-hmm.

At first we have a shot of an airport with three different planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in single file. It has this action movie type music, lines of soldiers. So as the people getting loaded on the plane, they're getting forced down. There's people with guns, police, military, manhandling people, pushing their heads down, physically removing clothing.

They're showing their tattoos there, right? That's when they're pulling up his shirt. But even the way that they just walk around with these people, forcing their heads almost to the concrete as they make them shuffle along the ground. Just basic dehumanization. Shows them getting transported onto buses. So they said they're arriving at Sekkot now. Sort of bright white, very sterile facility.

Now they're being forced onto their knees, yeah, and shaved. Getting their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while being forced onto their knees on the ground. Then the cops doing this are all wearing, I guess, balaclavas, I would describe them as, face masks and hats. Yeah, all of the military and police officials are trying to hide their identity as they, you know, publicly display the actions that they're doing when they're, you know, shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera. Yeah.

So it's a lot of that kind of stuff. You see them pushing people all in matching white clothes in single file into cells. Yeah, and this is the cell we spoke about before. We'll include this link in the sources. It's basically just three minutes of torture porn. That's what they're doing. Yeah, it's pretty bleak, honestly. I don't know what else to say about it besides it's just channeling pure evil. Like, it's...

There's nothing else to say. Yeah, there's... I mean, there's... I don't know how anyone can watch that and think good. So we should talk about how they're identifying these people, and we should talk about the process by which they were sent there. ICE policy says a person can be deemed a gang member if they offer some notes to, quote, gang membership identification criteria. One of the criteria that they seem to be using in this instance is their tattoos. So...

There are some gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang, right? MS-13, Mara Selva Sruca, it's what the MS stands for, being one of them. These like Mara Central American gangs have tended to use that in the past and

This isn't really something that happens with Tren del Agua, as far as I'm aware of. Some people, they've pointed to tattoos of trains. In a document that Gaya found from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they were pointing to stars as evidence that people were part of Tren del Agua. As far as I'm aware, Tren del Agua does not have a policy of tattooing people, specifically because this is a thing that has been used by law enforcement agencies.

to identify members, right? Like it would be silly to keep doing that once it's become so clear that the state uses that. So the one sort of case that I've seen legal documents on of these people, the one name we have, one of these people who's been sent is a man named Jersires Barrios. He was a footballer, professional footballer in Venezuela who protested against the Maduro regime and was tortured and detained as a result.

I've spoken to probably, I would imagine, thousands of Venezuelan migrants, right? Again, I would like you to listen to my series on the Dalian Gap. If you haven't, I put a lot into it. All of these people have stories of watching people be shot, the brutal repression of protests, state violence, economic collapse, persecution for supporting the opposition in the country, right? And this is one of those stories.

The criteria that they used to identify him were a tattoo, which had a football with a crown over the top and then the word Dios, God, in English, underneath. Reyes Barrios' lawyer says that this is an homage to the logo of Real Madrid, his favorite football club. They have claimed that it's evidence of gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The other

The criteria that they used is a picture of him throwing up the horns, I guess, which I believe it means I love you in sign language. I'm not sure if that's like an urban legend or if that's the case. And there are obviously different sign languages. But this is a hand gesture that's especially common in the Spanish speaking world.

If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled up as if I was making a fist. Almost like a Spider-Man hand symbol, I guess. Sure, I'm not familiar, but if you say so. To visually reference for people. If you were making a little cow, like a bulk with your hands, that's what you would be doing, a bit of shadow puppeting. It's very common.

Yes, it's a very typical hand symbol. It's a thing that people do when they're taking photos. I've even seen it when, you know, if I'm working with a photographer and they're snapping photos of large groups of people, people just do it. Just like people do the peace sign, you know, it's a thing to do with your hands. Those are two criteria they use. So I should point out that none of these people have been accused or convicted of a crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador, right? Even if they...

had been accused of a crime, even convicted of a crime, the United States is very unclear what legal basis there would be to then detain them in El Salvador, right? Like the United States doesn't have a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies, right?

At the time of writing this, this has of course been challenged in court. A district court judge did block these removals. Now, he actually blocked them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However, despite this, the planes didn't turn around. I'm just going to quote directly from what the judge said here. Quote, "...any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States."

Then it's a little another quote later, "This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately." This didn't happen, right? The planes went from the US to Honduras, Honduras to El Salvador. They didn't stop even when the judge had given this order for them to stop. Now, normally in illegal proceedings such as this, right, the government or one of the parties may not agree with the findings of the judge and they may choose to appeal it, right? That's very normal.

You still comply with the order, then appeal it, right? You don't just keep doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think the judge was right. That's in theory not how this works. Now, in practice, what means does a judge have to force the executive to listen to him? I don't know. We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute.

The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling. One of them, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt claimed that there was, quote, no lawful basis for the ruling. Go back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal order is not the same as a written one. That's not something that's generally understood to be the case. And that because the flights were over international water, the order did not apply.

This was then part of the foreign policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is particularly worrying. You effectively don't have your rights in international waters, or humans don't have rights in international waters. Yeah, it's just allowing the US government...

the US government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever it wants if the action's being taken or not, like immediately on US soil or other foreign soil. Yeah. So we're going to take another break. And when we come back, we will talk about their response to this judge's ruling. All right. And we are back. So Trump's response to this Judge Boasberg's ruling was, I'm just going to read, this is a true social post.

aka a truth quote this radical left lunatic of a judge a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by barack hussein obama was not elected president m dash i'm not going to say when it's capitalized just understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that trump likes to do uh he didn't win the popular vote parentheses by a lot exclamation mark comma he

He didn't win all seven swing states. He didn't win 2,750 to 525 counties. He didn't win anything. I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate, but fightling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason for this historic victory. I'm just doing what the voters wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached.

We don't want vicious, violent and demented criminals, many of them deranged murderers in our country.

Make America Great Again. Tom Homan, the border czar, also told Fox News, quote, I don't care what the judges think. We made a promise to the American people. The President Trump has made a promise to the American people. We're going to make this country safe again. I wake up every morning loving my job because I worked for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we're going to make this country safe again. I'm proud to be a part of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming.

I just love seeing you going through these protesters just crunching on the apple as their liberal tears just flood the hallway. Tom Holman, thanks so much for joining the program. You got it. Thank you.

open defiance of the courts, right? Like, I don't really know. It's what we've been talking about the past month on executive disorder, how we are just continually like ramping up this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch. The congressional branch has already basically given up all of their power. And yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis.

Very few people are taking this as seriously as what it should be. And even the courts seem a little bit tepid to actually enforce their own power or try to. Yeah. I mean, Boasberg mentioned contempt once from what I can find on PACER, but like

Obviously, these judges, I think, are somewhat concerned that if they find the government in contempt of court, then what happens? Because if you play your trump card and no one cares and you have no cards left to play. It's kind of odd how the judges themselves are seemingly afraid of

like pushing this constitutional crisis into like explicit territory, right? To be like, what if we do the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else, like, oh, we have no power. Like, like we actually have like, like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch. Yeah. It's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this like very obvious accelerationist push of like, no, we need to actually test the,

test this out. Yeah, because we need to know where we're at. And they're scared to because they're scared what if that testing causes the Trump side to win. But they're already winning in the absence of the testing. Exactly. And the problem is that in absence of that, you are just giving up and letting Trump win. After Trump called to impeach the quote-unquote radical leftist lunatic of a judge who tried to temporarily halt the

the deportation of these 300 Venezuelan immigrants. Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for rulings that don't align with political agendas. And that's as far as they're going right now. They're making rare public statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile, Musk complains on twitter.com about a quote unquote judicial coup and mistakenly calls for 60 senators to impeach

leftist judges. Now, of course, the Senate does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate requires 67 votes to convict and remove someone from office once impeached. So, ha-ha! We got you. We got you, Elon. You made a mistake. We win. Community notes. Co-theffing. Yeah, it's...

Where we're at right now with this case, we're recording this on Thursday. Boasberg gave them a 24-hour extension to provide details about the flights. The government has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets, despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights, including in the video that we discussed yesterday.

Yeah, they're turning these into fucking like TikTok, Instagram, real hype videos. They're not state secret. It's propaganda. You're publicly displaying these to show that these people are not human. Yeah. Like you're trying to scare everyone into saying we decide if you are a person or not. And if you're not a person, this is what we can do to you. We can do whatever we want to you. Yeah. It should be noted as well. There is actually a process in US law through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court.

for the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing classified information publicly. In fact, Boasberg was chief judge on that court for five years. Jesus Christ. But we are not using that process. We're using the Alien Enemies Act instead. So...

Yeah, this is a new exciting territory. On Monday, so that's the day that you're hearing this, a panel of judges from the district court in DC will hear an appeal by the United States government against Boasberg's tentative restraining order, the one that it didn't obey anyway. So we will have more on this and we'll keep updating you on this. And

Suffice it to say that, I guess, again, this is a constitutional crisis. This is what it looks like. I don't know if people expect fireworks to go off or some confetti to drop and it to be like, separation of powers is gone. But if the government can ignore the courts, then that is what is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime these people...

many of whom, one of them was a musician, one of them was a football player, right? Like I've interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of Venezuelan migrants. And most of them, it will shock you to hear, are just people who don't want to live with the boot of the state on their neck, people who want to make a decent living for their country.

Their families, for what it's worth, none of the Venezuelan migrants I met in the Darien Gap are in the United States or have come to the United States. My knowledge is for people who are wondering how those stories kind of resolve. They resolve with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions, either working for very little or unable to work at all and trying to work out what to do. Yeah.

it's pretty bleak for them uh it's pretty bleak for us too if this is the direction that things are going i don't ever have much more to say no i don't know what else there is to say about them just bypassing the courts to do a complete authoritarian overgrab so that they can send hundreds of people to essentially a like a labor camp black site in a different country for in a

unknown period of time without any legal process. To be clear, not all of these people even entered the United States between ports of entry, which has been charged as a misdemeanor, but generally isn't charged. Some of them came with CBP1, the fucking app, the thing you're supposed to do. These are not proven criminals. These are just people, some of whom immigrated legally and have been detained by ICE and are now shipped off to a

like torture labor prison in a different country where they're going to stay for at least a year in parenthesis, renewable. So like indefinitely, like it's like they can be forced to labor for the rest of their lives. A thing that has happened before in human history.

No, like, history understanders should look at what's happening and be like, oh, we're doing that again, huh? And the only way that this ends is with people getting angry enough to start doing something about it. And I feel like we're so...

like everyone's become so complacent that it's even hard to get people to like care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening. Yeah. And you don't have to be like, I want to phrase this in radical terms, but you don't have to be like anywhere on the left to understand that like, this is an assault on basic human rights. It's assault on the foundational principles of the United States government. And everyone should be concerned about this. You shouldn't be a left right issue. This should be like a right wrong issue. And so hopefully, yeah,

You can all have some talks with your family this week. I don't know. I think it's really important to push back on the idea that these people have done any crimes because they have not. That they have been convicted or found using any reasonable degree of evidence to be members of gangs like Tren de Aragua. And even if they have been convicted, they should not be sent to the El Salvador torture labor camp. But the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just random, in some cases, like random people

Venezuelan men who have been rounded up for the crime of having tattoos for the most part. Fucking horrifying. It is petrifying. Yeah. It's happening. It is happening here. Every day we're getting closer to the cool zone as more and more people start taking this situation seriously. Yeah. So yeah, take it seriously. Advocate for these people. Best of luck. And if you want to email us, you can do it at coolzontips at proton.me.

That's an encrypted email address, but it's only encrypted end-to-end. If you also send from an encrypted email address, do your due diligence and send us tips if you have tips, ideas if you have ideas. And we will be back tomorrow with more things that are happening here.

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Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem, and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often... There's quite similar... There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like... No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never. Not yet.

I cannot wait for all you girls, gays, and theys to join me on this extremely special pink confection of a podcast. There is so much darkness in this world, and what I think we could all use more of is a little joy. Listen to The Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Love ya! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about bad things. Usually, I don't know, this is mostly a bad things episode.

I am your host, Mia Wong, and one of the kind of things we've emphasized in the show a lot is that a lot of the structure of the kind of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that was put in place under liberal administrations and its practices that are carried out by Democrats. And one of the biggest ones of those, and this is something that I think you can trace to violence here and you can trace to politics that inspired directly to how we got to Trump being in power, is the

the just continuous crisis in the U.S. of governments doing sweeps of encampments of unhoused people. And to talk about really one of the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does advocacy work for unhoused and disabled people in Alameda County, and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when

Yeah, this fucking unhinged shit happens. So both of you two, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate the chance to talk with you. Yeah.

Yeah, it's...

Yeah, I think soft. Yeah, maybe you want to take this one. Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. Yeah, thank you. I feel like, first of all, before I even go into it, yes, I think a lot of people who have never experienced a sweep or don't have loved ones who have been swept,

I think a lot of people have no idea what a sweep actually consists of, even if in a general sense they feel that it's a bad thing or a wrong thing. And I think part of that is deliberate. Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland, they're conducted by the Department of Public Works, they're city employees, they work nine to five. So except in cases where they work remotely.

over time or when the city uses loopholes to get around posting notice and ends up doing a sweep on the weekend. They're usually happening when a lot of middle class housed folks are at work and not, you know, out and about seeing what's going on. So a sweep, and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California, but I don't

think it's safe to assume that these operate in similar ways around the country. Generally, what'll happen is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a sweep has been posted. In Oakland, there is policy that states that you're supposed to have received at least a week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice, so you might not even know that it's happening. You might wake up at around 9 a.m. to a bunch of heavy machinery pulling up, dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of sort of like heavy equipment.

And then you'll have somebody from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know, making noise at your tent or your car or wherever you're staying, saying, hey, this encampment is being closed down. You have to be out of here. They're usually our representatives of the city's contracted outreach organization called Operation Dignity. They're supposed to be there. Very rarely do they actually have...

referral for somewhere to go, they'll basically just be like, "Hey, do you want services?" They won't usually specify what the services are. They'll just show up and be like, "Hey, do you want services?"

If you say yes or have questions about what services are available, they may give you a sort of very vague rundown of whatever might be available that day because they don't usually even find out what openings are available until 10 a.m. on any given day. So at the time that they roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet.

So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every sweep is a little different, but the commonality between all of them is that what the city is there to do is essentially to erase all sign that anybody ever lived there. So either you are able to pack as much stuff as you can and get it out of the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends up in the back of a dump truck. There are other sort of...

specific pieces of policy and operational things that can vary from time to time. Like, for example, they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which means that they're expected to store up to a cubic yard of somebody's belongings for 90 days at a storage location in East Oakland.

They rarely do this unless hounded to do so. And most of the time, the actual process of going back and reclaiming your belongings from that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages to do it. Yeah. So to just make this clear, the thing that they're doing is they show up and they fucking destroy all your property. Yep.

The thing that it most closely resembles is we're doing our own miniature ethnic cleansings. That's just what that is. Yeah. In every suite, there are at least several police. Depending on the size of the suite, it can be even more. There is a very real threat of police violence underlying every single encampment suite.

And so the sweep that Oakland, the sweep practices that Oakland has set up are like very kind of odd and they are associated with different like lawsuits that have occurred in the past couple of, actually since the 70s. But so there are certain requirements that the city of Oakland is obligated to follow and like certain provisions and offers that like

homeless people are technically supposed to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons, like rarely ever are. So for instance, like the back and tag policy that Satya was just discussing, like Dave, recently somebody did a PRA request to see whether or not to sit. He was actually following faithfully following that policy. And I think in like over a year or

there were, I believe, eight Baggin tags that were registered in the city system and

That was in that same period, there were like well over a hundred sweeps, you know? Jesus. I don't have the exact number on me, but, or yeah, actually 537 closure groups. Jesus Christ. Two instances of storing property. So, you know, that's people's, their whole lives, all their possessions, like,

precious items that they're able to hang on to are just...

yeah, destroyed and you never see them again. And I would also add to the piece around like the quote, like offer of services, like that's also something written into their policy that they're supposed to be connecting people to housing ahead of sweeps. And that's what they use to continually justify the way that they operate is that in, for example, city council meetings and homelessness commission meetings where

city admin is questioned on their procedures because they get complaints. Like, the Homeless Commission gets complaints constantly of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting referred to housing, and so forth. And the justification that's constantly used is like, well, we're offering people services every time and they just refuse them. And I think that that is pretty much the number one mythology that is... Mm-hmm.

continuing to spur a lot of the like pro-sweep discourse in Oakland specifically, and I'm sure in other parts of the country as well. And people are not like, to be clear, like,

most of the time people are not actually being offered services it's just not happening yeah yeah this is a national discourse you hear this all the time you know i think a lot of it kind of is concentrated in in the most unhinged like tech sectors in the bay but like you hear like officially elon musk has talked about like oh there's like there's like a homeless industrial complex and like all of these people are just like

they want to live on the street and like they're like turning down houses all the time and it's just like it's so it's so completely unmoored from reality but...

What's funny is I've actually used the term homeless industrial complex myself. I didn't know that was there. That's hilarious. There is a homeless industrial complex. It's just that the people making money off of it are the people who are perpetrating the sweeps. The reason that they're not actually putting forth real solutions that will get people into safe shelter and housing is because they...

they're the ones benefiting from the perpetuation of these economic conditions. Yeah, there's so many things that I want to take up on. But I guess just on that point specifically, there was an audit into California's spending on homelessness regulations.

I believe it was over a period of seven years, and it showed that there was $24 billion spent on grants to nonprofits or cities to provide people with different services that are kind of designed around homelessness and poverty.

providing housing or legal services. There's a whole range of things that's out there, but a lot of the time, these are the only options that are available to people and they tend to produce less than stellar results.

So out of the $24 billion that was allocated to help homeless people in that same period of time, homelessness in California just like skyrocketed, right? So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting pumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of like landlords and developers. It is an issue that people...

on every side of the political compass. They like to use this point to their own ends, right? So Elon Musk talks about it and people on the left will talk about it. But I think the experience that people on the street have is very different than any of these narratives that you tend to hear in the media.

Yes. Unfortunately, we need to take an ad break. I don't have a good position here. I don't know. We'll move from one set of horrors to a slightly different set of horrors and come back to the first set of horrors. All of this money is being like dedicated to these programs and homelessness is only rising. I think like one thing that I've heard before that's a

a kind of useful way to think about this kind of government spending is if homeless people would be better off if you just gave them the money directly, you know, then that kind of way it's really hard to justify these programs when that can't be said of them, you know?

And I think the thing that you pointed out, Emma, about the fact that we have huge amounts of money allegedly being spent on homelessness abatement or homeless services at the same time that homelessness is skyrocketing is really not an accident because what that money is really being spent on is to fuel homelessness.

Exactly. What is it like the homeless industrial complex? There's a reason that most of that money is going into the pockets of landlords and developers and then sort of like these sort of large, like nonprofit, almost like conglomerates of like service providers. And it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it exists in this country is not to...

homeless people into housing, it's to line the pockets of the people that are making the most money off of the real estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness escalating at the same time. It's because this is the feedback loop. The way that our economic priorities in this country are structured is

are such that those two things are going to feed into each other because that money doesn't actually exist to like serve the populations that they say that they're using it to serve. What they do get to do is by claiming that that money is going into homelessness abatement,

When clearly it isn't, they then get to spin a narrative where they say, oh, we've spent all this money, but the problem is just getting worse. That must mean that it is the fault of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly the services must exist to get them off the street. In reality, that's not the case at all.

Yeah, I think also it's super important for people to understand that these programs, housing programs, shelter programs, they are out there, but they are decoupled from the sweep operations that are occurring, right? So the city of Oakland, they are contracted with a nonprofit, Safia mentioned earlier, called Operation Dignity, and they are decoupled.

required to check in with different encampments that are scheduled to be closed at least a week before the sweep. And the purpose of that is to notify people that it's happening, that

the city of Oakland is required per the terms of this lawsuit back in, I believe, 2019, the Morales lawsuit. And there was a settlement that resulted in the city being required to provide clear notices whenever they're going to close a site. So yeah, this nonprofit provider is supposed to notify people and try to get them connected with services.

However, the services, for the most part, like housing for people who are unhoused, is largely funded through the federal government and through this very complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry. The coordinated entry system is not something that

the city of Oakland or Operation Dignity, like that is not something that they're providing people with during a suite. So when the city of Oakland, like,

For instance, in one of the Commission on Homelessness meetings, the city administrator, Harold Duffy, he presented actually in response to a question about somebody's wheelchair being destroyed by public works. He gave this really roundabout, deflecting answer where he said basically that everyone

who is at an encampment at the time of a sweep has expressly refused services, like shelter or housing or whatever. And that kind of presumes that the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with, which is just not the case. The coordinated entry system

It is a program that is first of all, like only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent supportive housing through the program. But also it is in such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're in. That the wait list is like thousands of people long and it can take the

well over a year before someone can get housing through that system. So it's just like, it's not true. They do offer people what are called community cabins, which are tough sheds. They're not even offering people that, they're full. Yeah, that's what they say they offer. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I feel strongly about this. So I think it's also worth saying, like in terms of, I feel like that's a really...

a really useful layout, Emma, in terms of like the way that the system is actually structured for people not to be able to access services. I feel like it's also worth pointing out that just day to day on the ground, I feel like I feel like I get to see a lot of sort of like minute details and changes in the way that they're operating in response to what the

their internal systems actually look like. And what we have seen over the last six months to a year is not only this pattern that Emma was talking about of people are consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused of refusing services just due to the conditions that they're living under, but also everything that Oakland has that approaches livable transitional housing, which is

kind of laughable in this case, because we can also go into like the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in Oakland, which are abysmal. But everything that they have that approaches livable transitional housing is full. I very rarely, every few weeks, maybe I see one or two people get referred to one of those programs. And far more often I'll be in a situation, for example, I was at a sweep

over near 23rd and Northgate a couple weeks ago, and I was there when Operation Dignity rolled up, and I heard what they were saying when they were talking to people, and this one dude was going around talking to folks, and he kind of... He wasn't even approaching talking about services. He was approaching being like, hey, I'm just here to let you know that this area is going to be closed down. There's a sweep that's going to be happening. So you guys have to be out of here. So that was what they led with. And then I prompted him, because I was there chatting with one of the guys that he was talking to, so I prompted him. I was like...

do you have any services to offer? And then he was like, oh, you can go over to St. Vincent de Paul, which is a congregate shelter in West Oakland with about 40 beds. Big room. And nobody is guaranteed a spot. It's just a room full of cots. A lot of people refuse to go there because the conditions are so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping in a room full of a bunch of strangers with no kind of security, no guarantee of being able to hold onto their stuff.

People are only allowed to bring in like a backpack's worth of stuff, I'm pretty sure. And you also have to, it's first come first serve. So you have to line up outside every single day and you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even if you line up outside.

So what we have is a situation where the availability of services varies from day to day. I cannot think of a single sweep in the last year that I have been to, and I'm at usually multiple sweeps a week, where there were enough guaranteed spots available for every person being swept. So the implicit assumption at every single sweep, and the Operation Dignity people know this too, like they know this, the implicit assumption when they roll up

And the assumption that colors even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're having with people is that the majority of people are just going to have to figure out how to pack their shit up and find another place to camp. It's the assumption. And it's gotten to the point where, like OD, employees will roll up. And like I said, they won't even necessarily lead with an offer of services. They'll lead almost in the hopes that the majority of people already have a place to relocate. They'll ask, do you have a place to go before they relocate?

offer services or ask if people are introduced to services. They'll ask, like, do you have another spot to move this stuff first? Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many people as possible from their list of people that they feel obligated to offer services to because they know they don't fucking have anything. Yeah. I think it's super important to just emphasize that point. The city is telling...

the media, they're telling businesses, anyone that comes to them with problems related to homelessness or concerns, they're telling them that everyone is being offered shelter and housing. And it's just not true. And that is reflective in the city's own publicly available data.

So they actually publish like a list of all of the encampment suites that they do throughout the year. And the Commission on Homelessness meetings will like report back to the commission about like service enrollments that they've done through a certain period of time. And like from May to September, they had enrolled

I believe it was 60 people into services, like non-specified services. And during that period, there was approximately 80 sweeps. And if you assume there's at least five to 10 people at every encampment when they do a sweep, and usually it's more, that is like...

9 percent, 4.5 percent of people getting enrolled into services, and of those maybe a smaller fraction getting into shelter.

And when they get into shelter, they just languish there, right? They aren't connected with caseworkers who help them get through this really convoluted coordinated entry process and like lengthy coordinated entry process. And so within a few months, they're just right back on the street, you know? It's just ridiculous. And unfortunately, because...

Homeless people have very little, I guess you could call it social capital. The city can get away with a lot of this stuff. They do blatantly illegal things that are against even their own policies, and nothing happens. And I guess maybe we should back up a little bit and discuss the city's policy. Let's run the second ad break, and then we will come back.

More ads, I don't know, by the question mark. We are back. Yeah, so let's talk about, I think, what the city's policies are supposed to be versus what they're actually doing on the ground. Yeah, I mean, their policy is their cover-your-ass technique, right? Their policy is what they refer back to whenever they want to sort of, like Emma said, if they're...

interfacing with businesses or house people, you know, and we have a whole range of house people calling 311, which is basically their tip line for like, go, you see a homeless person that you don't want to be seeing. But there's a whole range of people. There's people that are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going out doing vigilante shit and like destroying homeless people's stuff on their own. And then you also have people that are well-intentioned and really think the city is offering services.

So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy. That's the purpose their policy serves is not to inform their actions, but to inform their PR. So I think...

I think it would be helpful, Emma, how do you feel about if you want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's policy and then I can kind of give a breakdown into what that translates into on the ground? Yeah. So this is like, it's kind of a complicated situation, but the city has what's what they call their encampment management policy. And it was initially passed in

in, I believe, 2020, but it's gone through several evolutions over the past 10 years or so. And it is related to different Supreme Court cases and the settlement that I mentioned earlier.

So this policy, it provides certain very limited protections for people who are homeless in the city limits. The city is required by this policy to offer shelter. I believe it's a week for any person who's like subject to one of their encampment closures. And

Also, we mentioned the bag and tag policy. So if somebody, you know, they are evicted and they move somewhere outside with a tent, they bring all of their possessions with them. They are provided with a, I believe, three foot by three foot like storage space. And this facility that is super inaccessible and kind of like,

I don't even know if it's actually real, to be honest, because it's just like nobody ever... I've never heard of anybody actually getting their stuff stored and getting it back. But technically, that is a possibility. However, the city will only hold on to it for so long before they throw it away. And then the last protection or provision is the city...

until recently, supposed to provide people with shelter. So a few different Supreme Court cases are behind that provision specifically. And I think a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy framework that they were following until the grants passed ruling. And I guess maybe we don't need to get into that too much, but basically the whole idea of that policy

policy was like if somebody is outside living outside and the city suites them they have to provide them with some kind of alternative accommodation because according to like the ninth district court it was considered like cruel and unusual punishment to penalize somebody for being homeless

without offering them some kind of temporary accommodations. And so that was more or less the city's nominal framework for several years, basically. And

The degree to which they actually followed these policies, you know, they really didn't, except for in certain situations where there are, like, for instance, legal advocates who will file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep.

on the basis of failure to provide an alternative accommodation. And typically those arise when there is a very large encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue. A lot of the time, for instance, there'll be people staying on city or California state property

land and the city will like force them to move because of some development project that they're planning to do. And so in those situations when the media has kind of narrowed their, their focus and, um,

begun like discussing some of this stuff in the local press then like something like that became possible but after the grants passed ruling this past year the city was no longer like obligated under federal law to follow those policies and in September of last year

the late mayor, uh, Sheng Tao, she issued an executive order that more or less like just totally like rendered that policy framework irrelevant. So she, uh,

put forth a new framework that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered system of what are called "emergency suites." So if, for instance, an encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then it is a hazard to the public, quote-unquote.

Or if somebody has a tent that is up against a building of some sort, it's a fire hazard. And so in this tiered system, there's different levels of safety hazards that they're doing now. And basically what that looks like is a fire hazard.

Marshall and the city administrator will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody that's staying outside by their business. And with the fire hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without any prior notice, whereas the other two

There is some level of notice that they're technically required to provide. But yeah, so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage, they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own city resolution. But there is this provision that if, for instance, they issue...

somebody like a no or a one hour notice to leave because of like a fire hazard and like advocates can't make it there because they don't really know. Nobody knows it's happening. Then the city can just do that and not offer people anything. Right. So these policies have the effect of disempowering our community.

ability to respond to like a scheduled operation then the city can can really just like do whatever they want because nobody's watching what they're what they're doing i guess we can i think we can take this here towards something i think would probably be good to start closing on which is like what can people actually do about this

First of all, I think listening to all of this, it can be really easy to feel disempowered and to feel like, you know, the walls are closing in and there's nothing that we can do. And that remains not the case. You know, I think people should feel empowered to be able to physically intervene because the most effective way of physically intervening with this kind of violence is to commit to relationship building.

Something that I've talked about a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks that are kind of involved in like sweeps response and crisis response in Oakland is that

The one thing that the city cannot take away from us that we have an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are so inefficient and so seemingly bad at their jobs is not just the fact that they don't have anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street knows they're full of shit because they never show up with anything real. And

Addressing house people in particular, right? Like one of the things to get out of is sort of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh, like I don't have any housing to offer. Therefore I can't do anything. Like I can't fix the problem. I can't fix the route. So I can't do anything. In reality, all you really need to do is to learn to set that mentality aside and show up and like start meeting folks where they're at, start meeting your neighbors where they're at, start building relationships. You need to know, like if you live in a particular neighborhood, you're

Think to yourself, I need to know that if any unhoused person within a mile radius of my home was disappeared, I would need to know. You know what I mean? I would want to know if that happened. So if you go out with that understanding that you're starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are living outside in your neighborhood, ideally a lot of other people in your neighborhood too, you know what I mean? But what they're banking on is...

Right now, while they're still trying to use a PR cover for what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses, people not finding out about the violations, people not being there, and people not having relationships that will remain permanent.

strong, even as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what you can do to start is start investing in those relationships. Make sure you know what people's names are. Make sure you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted. Hey, that guy used to be on that corner, you know, every couple days of the week, and now I never see him anymore. What happened to him? And I think you can start there. And there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean, one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up at this point is

on the ground sweeps response. So we're still able to keep track currently of what their schedule is on a weekly basis, more or less. Like there's definitely operations we don't find out about until after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations we do still know about ahead of time. And so we'll show up, we'll make sure we get there before the city does. So like by 8 a.m. ideally, right? Like we show up, talk to people, be like, what do you need? Do you need physical help moving your belongings out of the eviction zone? Do you need

to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody who said they were going to come help you? Do you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number of things, really, but just being willing to show up and ask questions without necessarily knowing what answers you're going to get and being down to follow up and do aftercare with people and check in on folks and keep building those relationships.

I think that those are the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to need to be doing in the future because, you know, what the city is counting on is that they're going to be able to successfully create a scapegoat, right? They want to create like a faceless, nameless mass of people that they can pin all their problems on and then incarcerate. And the best thing that we can do is make sure that they can't successfully do that because we all have relationships to each other.

Yeah, I really appreciate those sentiments, Aptia. And I think the Oakland advocates doing eviction defense for people who are living outside, it's grown in size and capacity quite a bit in the past year. And

like the city has noticed that so they've actually like they've passed various resolutions and honestly a lot of their practices and their policies like their encampment management team they seem to be like responding to the increasing effectiveness of this response just like network of community defense

And so I think that all of those things are so important, especially as the Trump administration

regime starts to eliminate the very modest social safety net that there was. And before we end this conversation, I just want to emphasize that in Oakland, a majority of the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence, they are

non-white, mostly black, and are homeless in neighborhoods where they used to be housed. And so the gentrification that has happened, particularly in West Oakland, and the influx of high-income tech workers that displaced them and

moved into their family homes, they are the same people who are calling 311 to push the city to displace them again, but from a tent or a car this time. And I think it's just so, so important that particularly housed people

try to tap into the networks of community defense that exist in their areas. I'm sure that most cities probably have something comparable to Oakland, but with the measures that we're seeing cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is about 30 minutes south

of Oakland where they basically banned or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can get $1,000 fine or up to six months in jail for aiding and abetting a homeless person. And that's an extremely vague law. So like giving someone a blanket

could fall under this. So you could be fined or put in jail for giving an unhoused person a blanket in Fremont currently. So it's very important that people try to be aware of their city government, how they're maybe passing anti-homeless measures in their cities and trying to mobilize against that from happening.

I also have one more thing to add to that. I'm so sorry. Specifically, for anybody thinking about getting involved or organizing strategically around community defense, sweep defense, whatever that looks like in your particular area, I would say, first of all, especially if you're a house person in this case, like,

invest valuable time into getting to know people on an interpersonal level and getting to know people's needs first instead of falling into the trap of sort of imposing what you might have learned through like other sort of direct action organizing because this is not that, you know, like I think, yeah, first of all, just making sure that you're being, you're organizing as being led by the needs of,

homeless residents that are expressing what they need to. But also on top of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves of legislation that are being passed around anti-homeless laws and stuff,

don't preemptively obey. You know what I mean? Like, if you live in Fremont, don't preemptively say, ah, fuck, I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen in Oakland with the particular iterations of anti-homeless legislation that they've passed here is that just because they've passed legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet. And what you need to do, really, is...

step up real hard and show them you can't enforce this the way that you want to. And they're going to push back. There's going to be this back and forth interplay that we've seen, you know, for example, in Oakland with the Safe Works Unordnance, which we can probably get into another time because it's way too much to get into right now, I think, at this point.

in the episode, but it's a two-way street. It's this fight that you have to play to show them just because you've passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in a particular way. You have to give them something to fight against. You know what I mean? So that's just the other piece. Yeah. Yeah, and the rest of their policy is absolutely 100% evidence that if the state doesn't want to follow the law, it isn't real. But that also means that if they can't enforce a law...

It also effectively ceases to exist. That's just the sort of balance of forces here. Yeah, and there is a lawsuit currently against that, and it sounds like

The city of Fremont is probably going to be removing that aiding and abetting clause from the resolution, but because that specific provision is actually in the city's municipal code as a general provision. So even if they do remove it, charges could still be brought against somebody.

so like really the entire ordinance needs to be eliminated altogether yeah um i guess do you have anything else that you want to make sure that uh you get in before we close this out uh i don't think so not nothing that comes to mind but yeah again super appreciate you having us on to to talk about this yeah you know shit is rough right now

I think for me personally, it's been really helpful to direct my energy towards things in my social network in a way that's constructive and helpful to others. So I would definitely suggest this.

you're feeling like any despair, like worried about becoming like blackpilled or whatever, like yeah, just try to tap in and focus on things that are happening in your community. It's good for you and it's good for

the people in your community. Yeah, just seconding that, I think, like, being able to tap in specifically with, like, the types of unhoused organizing and underground economies that exist wherever unhoused people exist and, like, being able to, like,

tap into that and like you know again like speaking from the perspective of a house person like really humble yourself and learn from that like you're gonna learn a whole lot more relevant life skills just hanging out in social settings with people in the street than you are in any other area of your life so just go balls to the wall just start hanging out just like spend all your time loitering like just that's that's where we need to be right now is loitering in the street that's where the organizing is happening so yes reclaim the space oh yeah

This has been It Could Happen Here. Go loiter around street corners and make the state's life miserable until it cannot do the things it is doing right now.

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Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem, and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often... There's quite a similar... There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like... No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Not yet. Never say never. Never say never.

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I want to go back to the first time you ever met.

Thank you so much for this. Benny! One of the greatest. Thank you. I'm Selena, but we're watching Disney. When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up all these walls before, and then the first second, you, like, disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything, anything.

that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how it's happened here, and it continues to happen here. Sorry about that, but we're not changing the name of the podcast. You know? Because we're not. Anyway, I got James Stout with me, I got Garrison Davis with me. Woot woot. Huzzah. So...

The past few weeks, myself as well as probably everyone else on this call has been getting a lot of questions from listeners via the various social media apps that we damage ourselves by logging into on a much more than needed frequent basis. But one question that's been kind of on a lot of people's minds and something that we've been discussing as like a group is the idea of

Should you flee the country? Is the party over? Do we need to use the time we have now to get out? The Trump administration is cracking down on a whole bunch of groups of already marginalized people, people with fewer resources, immigrants, people who are here for asylum, trans people, queer people in general. It's getting pretty scary out there. And

the thought crosses your mind, maybe there's somewhere else that's better. And this has always been a tough question for us to kind of think about because we don't want to like inspire panic. That's not the purpose of what we do here. You should try to spread calm when times are bad, if you can. But the situation politically in the country and in many parts of the world right now is extremely fraught. And it does feel closer towards...

like the bad nightmare scenario than kind of I've ever thought it has before. So it's, so it's a really tough question. Yeah. And I think what we're going to be doing this episode is just kind of talking about this question and our thoughts around, um, you know, various responses to this line of thought. And, and I guess Robert kind of has a, a baseline, like kind of quasi answer, um, that I think we can use as a jumping off point.

If you're someone who is being targeted or in a community of people who are being targeted, you're a naturalized citizen, you're here on a green card, you're trans, you're any of the many different groups of people that are being targeted right now.

And you have the opportunity to leave and you think that that's the right thing for you and you should do it. You shouldn't feel bad about it. You know, if you've got a job that is in demand in other countries and you know the process and can get start the process to like get residency somewhere else and work somewhere else and, you know, make make your life work that way. Then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that if that's what you decide is the right thing for you.

That said, it's not. It's just simply not going to be a realistic possibility for most people. What is more realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving from states where the risk is higher to states where maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long the risk will be lower, you know, but I, you know, I certainly that's more achievable for a lot of people than getting set up in a foreign country, as James will talk about.

If your hope is just I'm going to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever as an asylum seeker, as again, James will go into more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers. And that's not really again, it may not be nearly as much of an option as you think that it is right now. I had to go through kind of my own process after the election of like, well, am I going to like, you know, get my finances in order and move to another country and basically try to like

Pay my way into getting a visa somewhere like in Spain, which is an option for for someone like me. And I came to the conclusion that like now, you know, if the worst case thing happens, I'd rather like die here or whatever. It's just not worth it, you know, to try to get out.

So I'm committing to trying to like hold the line here with everybody basically that I love in the world. Because like, what else are you going to do, you know? Yeah, like, I will just say that, you know, I probably have met more asylum seekers than most people you know. And it is one of the more miserable fates available to a human. It will, if large numbers of people start leaving the U.S., only get worse. If you're someone who's a U.S. citizen...

You have probably not experienced much in the way of like strict immigration enforcement if you have traveled around the world, right? You have one of the more high value passports in the world. You can go almost anywhere with a visa or in many cases without a visa.

Seeking asylum is an extremely different process. If you think you're just going to get on a flight and leave and stay somewhere, like understand that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas with the United States soon if we continue our current sort of pathway with more isolationist immigration policy plans.

And you'll have to get that visa. And then, you know, if you overstay, you will be subject to enforcement. The sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be something you enjoy again. And that's just if you're able to fly somewhere and then

So you try and overstay a visa or you try and apply for asylum. I have people I've met in every facet of my life. Like I know guys who I met as a bike racer who have applied for asylum. Guys I met on a bike race were staying on that barge in the UK. It is a miserable fate. And...

I think that I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying that you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and it strips you of all dignity. And in some places it strips people of like their lives, right? People die migrating.

It's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that migrants do because everyone is trying to make a buck off them. Right. I was just talking on another podcast about how the journey that people took up through the Darien Gap who tried to come to the United States, it would have cost them way less just to fly, but they couldn't because they couldn't get the visas. Right.

That doesn't mean like if you, you know, if you have a historical right to citizenship through various, you know, certain people have rights to Spanish citizenship or German citizenship or Irish. Irish is one that many people have access to. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Why not? You know, if you have the financial resources, why not try and see where that will go? Why not begin pursuing that? Totally. Yeah.

I think becoming a dual citizen, if you have the capability to, is a fantastic idea that I will never dissuade someone from. No. I would go so far as to say, even if you plan to stay here, if you have the ability to get dual citizenship, you should be pursuing that right now. Absolutely. It's something that you should do. It's often not hideously expensive. And it's something that might be, yeah, you have options and options are good.

Yeah, I am very hesitant to like openly call for like now is the time to leave the country. I do not feel comfortable saying that for a number of reasons. Like some of them are more political as in like I don't really subscribe to a politics of escape.

Even the idea of, like, fleeing states I feel a little bit iffy about. Now, there's certainly, you know, a lot of cases where families are trying to move, you know, outside states that have more restricted access to trans healthcare for minors towards more friendly states, which I totally understand. But I have greatly enjoyed getting to know a whole bunch of trans people in the South, and a whole bunch of trans people here are...

not willing to leave their home. This is their home and it always will be and they're going to stay and fight for it even as things get, you know, harder. And I don't think you should write these people off. I don't think you should write these places off. These places are still a terrain of battle and...

there are going to be places where trans people can still live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And that is worth acknowledging. That's worth putting effort into. To the point that after the election, I was already considering maybe trying to travel around the country some more. And after this last election, my line of thought was way more on the side of, I would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia as possible. I would actually want to stay in the South for...

as much as I can, because this is like not a place that I think people should be walking away from. And in some ways, that does come from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons. As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport, as well as an American passport, that is, you know, something that

I like to have as a back pocket option, but that's something I'm not considering at all. I do not want to move to Canada. All my friends are here. My life is here. There's certain scenarios where things get much, much, much worse, even though things are already getting quite bad, but there's certain scenarios where, yes, that passport will come in handy. And that's why I do encourage, no matter what, you should see if you have any options to become a citizen in more than one country. It is a

great thing to be. It's good to not be just tied down to one place. But the process of trying to, you know, immigrate somewhere where you do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging. And we will probably discuss some more of this later, because I think there's also a sort of like onion of threat of people when you're thinking about this question, like which people will be or are currently being targeted the most

And how that kind of affects the options in terms of like relocation to places view it as like safer havens. And I would like to jumpstart that onion of protection discussion after these messages. We're back and we're talking about onions, which you need to wear around your neck to protect you from evil spirits. Garrison, that's what you were getting at, right? Yes. Let's wrap this one up. That's done.

Move on to the next topic. Where five different onions to drive away the various secret police forces trying to hunt down individuals. Yes. Speaking of, I guess, like the big thing I'm thinking about right now, or one of the big things is,

there's different levels of scrutiny being placed on individuals currently in the United States. One, you have people who are completely undocumented, right? You have people who are currently here on valid asylum claims who are about to get those rights stripped away. I'm trying to think of the list of refugees that were allowed under Biden that are now imminently going to get their stuff stripped

stripped away from the Trump administration. I know Venezuelan immigrants are one. Haitian immigrants are another. But groups that have been able to come here the past few years, they're going to be now seen as like, quote unquote, illegal by the White House and Immigration Customs Enforcement.

You then have student visa holders, which are already like currently under threat getting visas taken away. You have people on work visas, you have green card holders, and you even have naturalized citizens.

And among just regular citizens, unnaturalists, I guess, people that were born here, you have other factors that could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or based on gender and sexuality. And that's kind of like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of. So as much as it's dangerous to be a trans anarchist in the United States, I think that is fairly different than a Haitian immigrant who's about to get like...

literally hunted down by ice, right? And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options for how they're going to handle this question and handle the decision of preemptively choosing to relocate somewhere else. James, do you have any kind of thoughts on this onion, I guess? Yeah, I mean, I think

You described it well, right? Like, I think a lot of folks are for the first time finding themselves in that onion at all, right? And certainly with respect to like immigration enforcement or potentially being forced to leave this country. And I think it would be good maybe to look at folks who have been there for a long time and look at how they've done, right? Because there have been people whose existence was precarious in this country before.

for decades, right? Maybe we go back to 1994 and Operation Gatekeeper, maybe we go back further, whatever, I don't care. Maybe we go back to the operation whose name is also a slur in the 1930s and I'm not going to say. I mean, indigenous people here have like, for all

all of American history have been people that exist in a wildly different reality than most US citizens, right? Yeah, where, yes, this country is predicated on the genocide of indigenous people. Well, and even in the ways that they continue to live here, it's like a different world from... Yeah, that genocide is ongoing. It's not a thing that stopped. It's not a historical thing. It's a thing that exists as long as this country exists.

I would look to those people, right? Like you said, Garrison, indigenous communities, indigenous people continue to exist in this country despite the best efforts of this country to eradicate them. Undocumented communities, right? Migrant communities of mixed status have continued to exist for a very long time. And like,

The way that they have got through this is together. And that's the way that we will get through this too. When there have been threats to migrant communities, migrant communities have shown up for each other, right? They're doing that right now. You see groups like Union del Barrio in San Diego, right? Like, uh,

going around announcing when there are ICE, the presence of ICE officers in the neighborhood. The way that they have gone through it is through other people in positions of precarity showing up for one another and taking care of one another. And if that is a new position for you, if finding yourself like,

further along the intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you, then like, it's scary. I do understand that that precarity is petrifying. But understand that communities and people have been here for a long time and look at how they've got through it. I mean, queer communities too, to a degree, have been persecuted in this country for a very long time and have developed ways of not just like existing, but also like continuing to center joy and experience joy and not just like

live in fear because I think if you live in fear like you've kind of given up to a degree or you've let them win to agree I should say like I do understand that being new to this is petrifying for people and like I don't want to just say like oh you shouldn't be scared or you know you should look at how migrant communities have taken care of one another but like now is the time to begin establishing solidarity as well so like those communities which have been precarious for some time are

They're not closed spaces, right? Like you can be in solidarity with them and you can learn from them. And I think that now is the time to do that. Like now is the time to build stronger links. If you're really worried about things being really bad in this country and you have good reason to be, right? Like, oh yeah. Yeah.

Shit's fucked up and bullshit. Yeah, it's really fucking bad. It's all really bad. Yeah. You know, we're sending people to labor camps. If you're scared, panicking, thinking I got to get out of here, I get you.

No, I mean, I think the thing that you should be doing, regardless of who you are, is you should be giving yourself options. You should be increasing the amount of options that you have. And like, that is something that is never a bad idea. That is something that you can never do too early. It's something that you should have already been doing, frankly. Like, I've been advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport, because that does make it easier to leave the country.

You should be getting that. And it's going to be harder, especially if you're trans now, to get a passport that matches what you look like, right? But this is still something I think is worth doing because it gives you an option. And you should be increasing the amount of options you have. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's never a bad thing. And like,

That community structure is an option too, right? Like people showing up for you and you showing up for them. That is one of your options. Don't forget that. And like, that will also bring you joy and you will feel safer when you, like we were supposed to live in communities and like, I, I,

You know, I've, I've seen a lot of people in very difficult circumstances. And one of the Kurdish guys once said to me in the, in the desert, he was like, whatever we do, we do together. And, uh, I thought that was very profound because they were at that time, like dancing around a fire in the midst of what was like an open air concentration camp, you know, but if you can find community and you can find a way to continue to experience joy, then I promise that things won't be as bad as they seem right now. Yep.

Within the Kurdish freedom movement, there's a phrase that is commonly used, a slogan you could say, I guess. In Kurdish, you would say, means resistance is life. And we should remember that for whole groups of people, many of whom we've featured here, if they had all just left, they would no longer exist in the way that they exist now, right? Kurdish people have been oppressed by various states for centuries, right? Turkish,

Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian. They've been subject to genocidal violence. And they've still remained there, right? And they've continued to fight against that state oppression. And they've created something beautiful today as a result that we can see in Rojava. The same is true of the Karen and Karen people we've spoken to in Myanmar, right? They

they decided to remain rather than to leave. And in doing so, they created a culture that was based on resistance and that resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly on violence and to determine their outcomes. And I think we should look to those examples as we consider, like, what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here? Something that, like,

I think Robert said in our work group chat, which thankfully has not been turned into an Atlantic article. I did invite Pete Hegseth. So we'll see if he hops in, you know. He's rejected us multiple times. Yeah. We've been trying to add the Atlantic editor-in-chief for years. No, he is not welcome. He's absolutely not welcome. Fuck that guy.

We just need him to manufacture consent for bombing another country in the Middle East on our podcast. It's so funny because it is like that is like the dream of every journalist that you just get added to the entire government's war planning chat and he just uses it to dunk on the Trump admin. Like, that's it.

Not to get more info on like anything happening. And then he like homers back into the hedge. It's fucking hysterical. They could have had four years. Maybe not. Maybe it was only a one-off chat. They would have accidentally invited a different journalist. It was going to happen eventually.

Magnificent. But something Robert said in our chat is that like, if you already had like plans or the ability to move to a different country of your choosing, then yeah, why not? Right? Like if you already were thinking about moving to Germany, which is very funny to say now, right? But if you already had plans and you had the ability to do that, then sure, that's something that you should like consider, right?

If you do not already have pre-existing plans and means, maybe it's not something to put all of your effort into doing right now. Because that is such a massive undertaking in general, and not everyone has that option, and there's going to be people stuck here.

And, you know, part of like my thinking on this is, is like I'm in a relatively privileged position. I would rather use the sort of benefits and stability that I have to help other people that are going to be living in this country. So I'm going to stay here to do that. And that's part of kind of my thought process on a personal level. Do I, you know, one day maybe want to live off the continent? Yeah. Yeah.

But that's like for personal reasons, not for political reasons. That's because I think Glasgow looks pretty. And if you also think Glasgow is pretty and you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess like the politics of escape, I do find a little bit troubling in some ways. And I guess I would like to talk about that a little bit more after this ad break.

All right, we're back. James made a horrible face when I complimented Scotland. What was up with that? It was when you said Glasgow. Oh, okay. Where, where? Also, Glasgow, not a city that's traditionally aesthetically prized, I guess.

Okay. Well, that's your opinion, I guess. Edinburgh is where if I was going to go to Scotland, I'd probably aim at. I'm not going to live in the Harry Potter town. Are you kidding me? Oh, it existed before those books. Yeah. That is rude, Garrison. Don't take that away from Edinburgh. Don't give her that. All the coffee shops are like fucking wizard themed now. Absolutely not. You haven't been to Edinburgh. Don't tell me that shit. I've seen your travel pictures, Robert. I've seen...

They were mostly hard liquor themed.

Okay, that's fair. Edinburgh is a nice city. Glasgow is a nice city. You can enjoy it. Stop by Carlisle on your way down, where my family are from. My favorite Glasgow fact is that there's a beverage called Buckfast that is 20% alcohol mineral wine made by monks that has as much coffee as a Red Bull. And in Glasgow, Scotland, for a significant period of time, roughly 1% of all violent crimes were committed with the bottle. Wow.

Yeah, Bucky is, it's a whole subculture. Buckfast gets you fucked fast. That's right, folks.

So a term I've used for like the past few years to like discuss this, to discuss this question of like, can you like outrun American fascism is the politics of escape. And for a while, I really was vocally opposed to this sort of politics because it felt like the entire world was going through a global far right power grab. And no matter where you run, you can't really get away from it.

And now, kind of curiously, some of this is still happening, right? You can look at the AFD in Germany. But some of what's happened with this Trump administration has almost weakened a degree of this global far-right power grab. For a long time, it looked like the

The Conservative Party of Canada was about to just completely take control over the whole country due to, like, pent-up frustration over Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. And now, due to the actions of the Trump administration, the Liberals have retaken a significant portion of, like, popular support and are probably going to do a big sweep in the general election that's going to happen, I'm guessing, next month with the new prime minister in

about to call one, which makes sense because he should call one at the peak of support for the Liberal Party after the Conservatives have taken a 12 to 17 point dip, depending which poll you use. So for a while, I was like, it doesn't even really make sense to flee to Canada because Canada is right on the coattails of America. Canadian politics are kind of historically about 10 years delayed from American politics.

And now the new Trump administration has kind of thrown a curveball in this, right?

British politics are always really hard for me to diagnose because all of their parties there are pretty wacky in my mind. Oh, yeah. Like, you know, what the Tories have been doing has been extremely worrying. Like the NHS, like trans stuff is pretty bad. Now that the, you know, Labour Party is in, it's hard for me to figure out kind of where the country is going because this Labour Party is a pretty conservative Labour Party. Yeah.

But this idea of being able to outrun American fascism is still something I find...

like unconvincing i guess like you you can't fully run away from all of these problems and there may be certain people that that it still like makes sense to start making these moves just to start planning for that option right i'm i am i am pro options even if this idea of like total escape uh i still find troubling yeah i don't know is anyone else any thoughts on this on this uh

Yeah. I mean, like as goes to US goes the world. Right. And I know that that is changing, but like maybe I think if it gets to the point where large numbers of people are fleeing the US, we might see some of that same anti-migrant rhetoric that we've seen in the US in even relatively liberal Canada, the United Kingdom. Sure.

other anglophone countries, right? Like it's already very hard to immigrate to Australia. It's not the easiest to immigrate to Canada, frankly. Yeah, I'm not as familiar with the Canadian one. Especially as like an American. Yeah. Unless you have like a job that you need to do in Canada and you're the only one who can do that job or you get a Canadian girlfriend and that makes it slightly easier, but still not like completely easier, frankly. Yeah, that is a, I guess that's the alternative.

Yeah, I think like, I know, like a lot of people who listen to this, listen to this because they have a fairly radical politics, right? Or left politics. Or you're a journalist or you're a federal worker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're looking to steal our stories. Fuck off, if I may say so. But like, yeah, we've all grown up on...

the stories of people who stood up for what they believed in, right? And Margaret makes a whole podcast about it and Robert does on Christmases. And like, there's a reason why they did that. Like, you know, they...

I know that the idea of running away and being safe could be tempting, but like if this country gets as bad as it needs to be for people to run away in large numbers, then like the world gets markedly less safe. Oh, yeah. You're going to be running for the rest of your life. Just look at how much food the U.S. produces, how much medicine. 70% of all of the blood used in every single country's medical system around the world.

is exported from the United States. Oh, wow. Yep. That's crazy. Yeah. And like, particularly for, for like U.S. citizens, right? Looking, looking to flee. Yeah.

The people who are going to be able to pull it off are people with pretty extraordinary means in most cases. I'm not saying all cases, but if you have the capacity to move from the United States to Germany, you're probably not living on the poverty line, right? This takes a considerable financial investment. So instead, part of my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a whole bunch of the most...

most at-risk people yeah a part of this even extends out to like moving from state to state i'm obviously in support of free movement i've traveled around i'm going to continue to travel around i want to see as much as the country in the world as i can but like i another facet of this politics of escape is that something i hear very consistently from my my friends in atlanta and this is something i can attest to like personally the most amount of like

like vocal transphobia from people like on the street that they have faced has not been in Atlanta where they live. It's been when they're visiting people in Seattle or Portland. Like you actually get a lot more like weird anti-queer harassment in Seattle, which is just, just like on like the street level. It's bizarre. Like cities all have different kinds of like modes of operation. People have different like informal, like manners. Like,

in terms of how you behave on the street. And this is something I've definitely experienced. There's a lot more openness towards certain types of anti-trans harassment

in these liberal safe havens, quote-unquote. I've been called slurs on the street way more in Portland, Oregon, than I have in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is another interesting aspect. I'm not saying Atlanta is a, quote-unquote, safer city than...

if you're trans. I'm not saying the vice versa either, but this is just an aspect of the politics of escape, especially in the United States. There is really no real escape. There is no mythical safe haven where you can live your free life and frolic through the park and never have to face any kind of hardship or political disenfranchisement. If you still want to relocate somewhere, that's something that you should consider and...

again, you,

create options. But I also do not want to like abandon my friends here because I just, you know, have a more stable job. Like I, I want to be here for them and, and help them and not in like a patronizing way, but in like a solidarity way. Like that's like really important to me. And I think people who are, who are thinking about these same things and kind of running these same questions of, of if they want to commit to staying in the United States, I think should also make those considerations of is like,

you know, which, which one of your friends is not going to be able to make the same calculation. Yep. And, and, and frankly, I, I feel, I feel like better as a person and like my mental health feels better knowing I'm going to be here with them rather than going to a Berlin nightclub, which does sound fun. And I still might on vacation. Oh, you definitely need to go to Bergen gear. Oh, I, I have,

You need to spend three days that feel like about four hours in Burgain. I am excited. I am for the first time planning to leave the continent this year, which is a little bit scary because reentering the United States is pretty tricky right now, which should also play into your considerations. Also the general safety of air travel.

At the moment? And the general safety of air travel. Now that we don't have a gay man running the planes. Yeah, it turns out he was actually all right at that. Woke was keeping those planes in the air. You know what? Kudos to him. Turns out he was okay at that job.

But yes, I don't know what I was saying, but I'm sure it was really important and well thought through about not abandoning people who maybe don't have the same resources that you do. Yeah. To your point about coming back to the US, understand that one of the things that migrants deal with, even if they get to a place and they have some degree of permanence and they feel safe there, is that they will never,

be able to go back to where they're from in most cases, right? That means when someone in their family passes away, they can't be there for the funeral. That means that when they have a grandchild, they have a niece or a nephew, something happens in their community and they want to be there to help. It's a natural disaster. They are just stuck. And that's not something to like to discount as something that's not important like that.

is really hard and if you have a community now especially for trans folks right like I just think that like there are so many places where like like you say Garrison where bigotry against trans folks is being more and more normalized so like if you have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every day with the people you're around like leaving that should be something that you really think hard about because that can be hard to find yeah yeah especially in Edinburgh because they're all they're all turfs with their in the cafes yeah

It's not true. Just to be clear. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the discussion I wanted to have. I'm sure we all have more thoughts on this that we will express very eloquently as soon as we close this recording session. That's how we do it. But I know this is the type of stuff that we've been thinking about. I know listeners have been too, because you're asking us these questions.

It's certainly annoying that we don't have a concise yes or no answer, but there isn't a concise yes or no answer. I think the most concise one I have is that you should be giving yourself as many options as you can. If that includes applying for Irish citizenship because your grandfather is Irish, then hey, why not? Go for it, right? Ireland's great. Nice country. You'll like it. But I am trepidatious, I guess.

about about you know public calls to flee the country at this point and kind of the underlying politics and ideology of that uh let alone the kind of the logistical aspects of of trying to relocate to a different country where you are not a citizen and frankly i think there'll be a lot of countries that are not super eager to take american immigrants

I think Canada is typically kind of low-key been one of these places, especially if we're going to go to war with Canada to make it the 51st state. Then it might also...

create some tricky aspects. Yeah, it could make it harder. But I don't know. If anyone else has any other thoughts, air them now or forever be beholden to angry Reddit comments. Yeah, I don't know. Please don't burn each other down on Reddit. Like, now is the time to give people a little grace and be kind to other people.

Don't flee to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs. I had a nice time in Belgium. What do you have against Belgium? I have a friend in Belgium. As an Italian, I think we need to go to war with them again. You know, it's what made Caesar great. It could make us great again. That's my stance on Belgium. It's Italian territory. I stand with the Belgian people.

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Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem, and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often... There's quite a similar... There's some cross-pollination happening in here. Not like... No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never. Not yet.

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I want to go back to the first time you ever met.

Thank you so much for this. One of the greatest. Thank you. I'm Selena, but we're watching Disney. When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up all these walls before, and then the first second, you disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement. What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything, anything.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It is your host, Mio Long. With me is Garrison Davis. Hi. I've played a video game before. I'm not very powerful, but... I, too, have played many, several video games. See, I wouldn't say several. I've played, like, a few. Many. I have played too many. Simply too many video games. So, okay...

This is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there? It's all really bad. And one of the people who's been making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers. The PayPal guy? The PayPal guy. The

The owner of X. I've been locked in my gamer cave for the past five months. I've not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah, you might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile 2 for him. We will get to that. See, I don't play those games. Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo, Mecha Games, and Helldivers 2.

Like a loser. That's reasonable. That's reasonable. Those are fine games. Oh, and Sonic. Oh, God. Okay. Pushing aside the subject of Sonic. So, okay. I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers.

And I think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in a hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is extremely annoying guy, but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value. Right.

something like 3 billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games and it's also mostly people who are women and non-white. And yet, however, comma, when people think about like the gamer TM,

You are not thinking about that. Yeah, like as a political class. Yeah, yeah. You know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird incel right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass. And this is in large part because Gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity. And obviously this is, you know, this is a fascist movement.

Now, part of the reason this works, and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people. Because it's new, no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before, and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be, like, treated like movies or some shit, or they want it to be sports.

Because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on the right. There are a lot of like sort of political figures. I don't know. You're sort of like online people who come out of gaming communities.

Like H-Bomber guy, I guess is an example, like Hassan to some extent. There's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like

become political but on the other hand gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right-wing space oh god garrison i feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is have i told you the story about kebab the german no oh boy okay so back in the dawn of time i played a lot of hearthstone as a kid and i was like i wasn't like good at

Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people? No, this is the World of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think I peaked at like

2K Legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world. Digital collectible card video game? Come on. Oh yeah. Yeah. But 2K Legend NA is like fucking shitter ranks. It's bad. I was never like good, good at it. I was just like

okay, kind of. But you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is like all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers, and these were like really big streamers, would play music from this guy they called Kebab the German. And it turns out that his actual name was Remove Kebab because he was a fucking German neo-Nazi. Well, many such cases. Yeah, for people who like are not aware of like

mid 2010s German fascism remove kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany so great stuff great stuff this is just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the 2010s now this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed

kind of recently which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech ceos like who want to be thought of as gamers and so the two examples we're going to look at are sam bankman freed and this is this is really technically on both sides of political spectrum right we're going to look at sam bank and freed and we're going to look at elon musk our new overlord i guess and

So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Freed. And, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to know, like, Sam Bankman Freed, like, is, I guess, like, he is a gamer in the sense that, like, he's, like, addicted to video games effectively and just plays them...

fucking literally constantly. Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah. Before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud. Well, probably not anymore. He's probably going to get pardoned. Oh, God. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting block now. All young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts. They put all their money in crypto. So now they're going to vote for whoever makes the line go up. I'm going to become the Joker. So...

Okay, the thing about Sam Magenfried, for people who have forgotten who SBF is, he is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it.

And, you know, Robert did a sort of behind the bastards on him. And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dog shit game called Story Break Bragine Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like, as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed. And one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of...

The Big Short. We're going to get to Moneyball in a second. Blindside. Other books. Reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing. But, you know, like a very, very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along. And and Michael Lewis is sort of angle on understanding him. And this is something that like SBF was like.

you know, was like projecting, right? In order for this to be the image of him was him as like the gamer. And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis, right? Because he just like doesn't understand someone who just doesn't

has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit so he plays video games during meetings. No one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video games during meetings because it is too obvious. I play video games once a week. That's kind of my limit. Oh, God. This is the one part about Sam Bacon Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games. It is my anti-depression strategy, basically. When I need to not think for a while, there's just me playing. Actually, Path of Exile 2

style too one of the games that we're gonna be fucking talking about today something that I play a lot of I've done so much fucking gaming like god I used to play this game called smite which is like a it's like a MOBA like League of Legends but like third person and I played so much smite that there were pros showing up for my casual games when the zoomer revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me I'm gonna be like yeah you know that's reasonable like can't argue with that I'll inform the council I'll for our next folks council meeting I'll bring it to the table that's reasonable

But, you know, so what happens with this sort of thing is that Michael Lewis's image of SPF becomes, as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things, whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally. Because he's just, like, playing fucking video games all the time. And this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do...

This sort of pretending to be a gamer thing. And SPF is a gamer, right? But why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's extremely profitable, and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have...

the same kind of critical culture around it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies. Or like respectability in some way. Yeah. Except in like the reversed Sam Baikman Freedway where like

the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius right like like like that era of like silicon valley guy yeah that's like he's he's so different right like he's he's he's not like put together and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker so it's kind of like it's kind of like a double-edged sword in like that specific way yeah well this this is all a feedback loop right because like part of it not being respectable is that

Someone like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been. These people don't play video games. They're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists. Right. And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on.

And it's just really, really easily to sort of, like, bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like, you know, like, you show a gamer, like, a League of Legends addict, and they will instantly be able to just, like, read this person, like, a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction, like, is, like,

kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I know too many League of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit. Terrible game. Yeah, but arcane though, right? All right. Continue. Oh, God. Okay, we're going to take an ad break and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.

So we are back now. OK, obviously, part of the reason this works, too, is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market. Right. But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really, truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass.

And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports. So Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball.

which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which I'll get to in a second. And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bastards. You can go listen to that. But I want to go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog Othman Athletics team invented baseball metrics. And they used sabermetrics to build this roster out of nothing that went to the playoffs and did really well.

And like, I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, like whatever. I'm not going to argue about baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses that like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Podesta.

He is like one of the main figures in this book. He's kind of like an assistant coach, basically. What baseball team is this? Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics, or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know. They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called now. They're called the Athletics now? No, no. They were originally called the Athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the... Well, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's.

They've been the A's forever, but yeah, they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland. Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, didn't Las Vegas steal it? Didn't the Raiders go there too? Yes! Yes, they stole both of them. That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head. Yeah, so, okay, unfortunately, we're going to be talking about football here. Bummer. So, this guy, right, Paul Podesta is like one of these sort of geniuses.

He later goes on to be, it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons, going 1-31-1.

which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go one in 31 in two cross two seasons of football again. So again, that is a one in 15 season followed by an Owen 16 season. It's the second own 16 season ever unclear how responsible for, for this year's, but what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade.

Okay, it's like, Mia, why the fuck are you talking about this? Parts of this is also like, these people are just evil. Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly, have accused him of sexual assault. He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit.

So that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson is that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right? He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting as like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who'd been on the Texans. And again, like,

Garrison, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds. Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans? It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners. They fucking traded this guy, right? And...

Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade that is three is the it is the worst trade in the history of football. It is three first round picks, two thirds, two third round picks and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy who, again, I kind of emphasize isn't enough is a serial sexual predator. Right. They hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL.

So, OK, so how does Deshaun Watson, like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who, like, is now laundering being a gamer as, like, the great symbol of sort of, like, cultural, like, being a rogue outsider, right? How does Deshaun Watson, his, like, greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season, in weeks one through five, out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2007,

to start weeks one through five out of, again, 759 quarterbacks. He ranks 753 out of 759 EPA for dropback. 753 out of 759. They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling an EPA of negative 0.3, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points.

than an average team would. How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games. Don't worry, we're almost done with the sports part of it. I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is the argument that sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right.

Yeah, of course. Yes. I understand that. I can see that. Yes. Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air. This is the best fucking chance I'm ever going to get. So, Jesus fucking Christ. Is this like what I talk about like movies or something? Is this? Yes. Yes. This is what it feels like. Is this what I sound like? Yes.

Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of this team, hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator $230 million, and this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius?

And this all comes back to, again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're, like, picked on, like, by the jock or whatever, right? That's, like, that's, like, that's, like, the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're, like, oppressed by this. But, like...

It's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way down. And you can watch like, just like the worst people in fucking history, just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using, by using both of these fucking affects. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically in, in the culture and, and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like,

you know, as this sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil, in a piece called Game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety.

To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one wants master to live under current economic conditions, games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches.

Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them. But they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns

intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Sam Baipin Freed and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk, is that

Gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right-wingers, right? There are a lot of what you would call traditionally sort of left-leaning demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because...

as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work they're also a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world

Totally. And like, I mean, I know this, right? Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese trans woman who better is better at video games and both the people I'm going to be fucking talking about in this story, right? Like, well, I heard I heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced, but we're going to we're going to talk about the path of exile character fucking next.

You know, but I mean, it's worth mentioning like speed running, right? Which is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games. Yeah, it depends. It depends a lot on the genre. Yeah, like competitive fighting games. Like, yeah, melee. I mean, I'm going to briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black non-binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time.

incredibly beloved. The only person in history ever to beat someone 13 to 0 in a first to 11. Absolute legend. But these are the people that these fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life. Right now, these people are in power. And you know who else is in power? It's the products and services that support this podcast. All hail...

We are back. Now, obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked about, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. And, you know, the thing about gaming, right, is that it is to some extent a tool for

that people use to cope with like you know the realization of the violence of the gender system and like i am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dipshit right yeah that's why i boot up ff7 remake to stare at cloud strife for hours on end when i'm feeling sad but you know what the problem with what's happening here right is that like the right like that we're experiencing violence in sort of different ways but it's like the systemic

violence from the gender system that is the same system, but these people's solution to it is to blame it on women, right? And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from. And like, I would compare it to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right? And deal with this violence. But like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters. Most, most, yeah. I would say that's true. Yeah, right. And so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like, fuck them. Like,

like, eat shit. Like, I'm sorry, you've become Nazis. Like, fuck off. Skill issue, in some ways, among other environmental factors. Yeah, yeah. But also, a lot of times, these people aren't fucking, like, they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right? I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is, to some extent, because of the gender system, right? But, like, also, he's the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived, right?

And he still has the same sense of like a grievance that powers all these people. And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right? Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now it's been shifted to this. Not anymore. Yeah. Now they believe that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities. Yeah.

Right. And it's actually the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the top of the system now. We've had a full uno reverso. But the thing is, these people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right? But it's this affect. It's this feeling they have of them being the ones who are oppressed that made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate. If you're going to read one Vicky Oswald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best

critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good, but like as a medium, there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music. But if you're going to read one thing from her, read a piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out.

And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being, I mean, they're literally being used as like scabs and Pinkertons against people who make video games. And, you know, and this expands out to like workers more broadly that they're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game that like when cyberpunk 2077 came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it was, it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken shitty game.

And, you know, they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist harassment campaigns. And that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life, too. And that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right? Is that they're also like signaling to their base that like I am one of you, etc., etc. Like you should fucking support me for this shit.

Now, pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman Freed because like many, yeah, many such cases. Yeah. Like the last, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamer stick thing. Totally. Like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now.

And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I would say. Like he sort of plays video games...

he's a ketamine user he's a twitter power user he is the shadow president um yeah the richest man in the world richest man who's ever lived yeah also he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like he's an elite video game player in like multiple games he's obsessed with this he's also uh i believe the term is a meme lord uh

if I'm reading this right. Oh, God. One of his Path of Exile 2 characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named Kekias Maximus.

So like this is the level of mind. That is one of his favorite names. In his White House office, he has a Cacius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated image of like Pepe the Frog and like Roman, like Caesar attire. I hate everything. So yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now. Yeah. Oops.

So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games. And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually, he's like for a long time been doing a like I'm a gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're going to get to in a second.

This is something that BlueSkyUserGayDog reminded me of, because I'd forgot... He has so many gaming scandals, I'd forgotten about this one. Which is that he, at one point, posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is a very difficult game. And he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over-encumbered... Like, it's...

Okay, like, the best explanation I've tried to figure out for, like, how bad at this game he is, is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going, like, hey, look at my fucking sports car and stepping into, like, the shittiest car you've ever seen and then, like, slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on. Hey, I love the Mazda Miata. Like, that's, that's, like, the game equivalent. Everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived.

This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing. He is just, like, unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game. Like, just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit. And this was, like, kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't, like, a huge one, but, like, especially, like, this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot, and people were giving him shit about it. So...

The next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4. I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile are like very much the same kind of game, basically. Like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things and it does attacks.

But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the best Path of Exile 2 players in the world. And he was doing this on his alt account, which has the handle, it's CyberGamer420, but all the E's are 3's. So it's CYB3RGAM3R420. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again?

It's at C Y B three R G a M three R four 20. So I think I found something. I think the four 20 at the end is actually a reference, um, to Hitler's birthday, uh, April 20th. So, um,

Okay, he claims to have one of the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of Exile where if you die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. To prove that he actually did this, he does a livestream where he tries to play Path of Exile on a Twitter livestream.

And it is immediately obvious that like, he has no idea what he's doing. Like, it's not just obvious people who play the game. I hadn't played Path of Exile 2 at this point, right? I had only played the original one like a decade ago, like a little bit of it. And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before. Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing.

Like, it was so unbelievably obvious. Like, he, like, walked past one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just, like, walked past it, didn't notice it. It's, like, staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him. And eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile 2 account, and then he claims that he never claimed that it was his Path of Exile 2 account.

And this Jenny Wiley has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like asthma gold, who was like a, he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass. Like he's like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry.

And fucking Asmogold is watching this video and being like, this guy is a lying piece of shit. What the fuck? And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this, to like to Elon like this. And like, again, like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying. Now, what's interesting about this,

about this to some extent is that like again his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like there's no way I mean okay I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of the path of exile player on a stream using someone else's account

But like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And a lot of people he talks to about this stuff are people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people, right?

It's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with. And so he's really on the one hand. Yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist base. But on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like.

pretend to be a gamer but the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on youtube that is very very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games

Cheated records of video games? And Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right? And that means we got him, folks. Mission accomplished. Wrap it up. We beat Elon Musk. We fucking got him. It's over. He's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game. He has lost all respect among the farthest reaches of the right.

So, what's next? We have one. He has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about. Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?

which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story, in my opinion. Which one are you talking about? The one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play GTA 5. Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that. Because he doesn't like, quote-unquote, doing crime, and GTA 5, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene just couldn't do it, unquote. Oh, I completely forgot about that.

So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God. Now, some gamers might be sick individuals acting out, you know, violence power fantasies, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GTA 5. That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times strange behavior.

Yeah, that's also him signaling to the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violence in video games is bad. Because he's trying to signal to all of his groups simultaneously. And all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass.

and we hate him. It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy because, again, he is the most powerful man in the world. No. But it is mildly amusing. Yeah, but, so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that, like, the pushback he is getting here is, like, I think actually kind of insignificant.

So the last thing I want to talk about is him pretending to have been like a Quake pro. It's the thing that he did. Quake pro. And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs, who is like... His thing is like people who fake things in video games, basically. And he is like not a leftist. He's like a center-right guy, basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is. But he did a video about Elon claiming to be a Quake player. And what he found...

So Elon, like, apparently did actually play in an early Quake tournament, but none of the good players were there. And his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better Wi-Fi than everyone else. And so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good Wi-Fi and then he got destroyed. Which I just think is funny, right? That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran into someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.

But the reason I bring this up is that, like, at the end of this video, Jobs just, like, goes on this whole thing about how, and this is, this is a, like, a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press, where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie. And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know?

And this is a real shift, right? I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this. And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left.

about what Elon Musk is doing and like just the willingness to just be like this guy is a fucking just a serial liar like everything he says is a lie he literally calls him a con like says his activities like a con man he says the things that he's saying are like either lies or delusional there is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him

There's a thing that happened literally today where Ubisoft, you know, Ubisoft is a famously like not a leftist company, right? Like they've done a lot of horrible fucked up sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a, as like a character in it. And, and the, the literally the official assassins creed accounts replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your path of exile to account told you in like replied in reply to a thing about Hassan.

Like we are we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space. Right. This thing that had been like a really, really consistent basis for people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him. It's sort of being polarized against him by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is.

And, like, obviously, like, I don't think, like, the gamers are going to, like, fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this, other than, like, looking at the ways that fascism, like, why these people do this, like, gamers is, like, a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right?

That doesn't happen that often. But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents, allies, to stay home.

And that was enough. Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks came for currency's government was enough for them to take power. And I think the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes...

There are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they can be stopped So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the start of Gamergate 2 Gamergate 2 is already happening dammit. This is Gamergate 3. This is an open call to begin Gamergate 2.5 right now on behalf of Mia Wong make sure you @mia Oh no

And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we get enough gamers to stay home. Or even better, rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with a fist holding a controller or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it. Gamers are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not back the regime. Right.

That's actually the February Revolution where they stood down. But, you know, same point. Same point. Come on, Mia. Jeez. Fuck. I am one of the biggest things of like people need to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist guy who was from the provisional government in between the. OK, we're done. We're done here. We're done here. We're fucking out. We're leaving.

What games are you playing? What games am I playing? Path of Exile 2. Don't play Rotato, it will consume your life. Play RoboQuest. RoboQuest is great. RoboQuest dares to ask the question, what if the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with Doom's combat? That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that then.

I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Core 6. Armored Core 6 rules. Love that game. Love that game. Sonic X Shadow Generations. Final Fantasy 7. And I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for their official release now that the beta is closed.

Unfortunately, the character selection is very gooner coded. Many, many such cases. So I made sure to make the smallest, the smallest chest size available on my model. But the gameplay is fun. Oh, this has been a kid happen here. I...

Good Lord. They pay me for this. I had to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this.

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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, I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yeah, you are. This week, we are covering the week of March 20 to March 26. Short week because we did a late recording last week. Yep. We did. So it's minus one day if my math is correct.

It's been a hard week for many of us because we all really care about group chats and group chat security is super important. Oh, yeah. To kind of anyone involved in politics. And whenever we see a breach of this magnitude, it's really a warning and like a threat to all of us.

So it has been a tough week. Yeah, like a threat to one is a threat to all. So like the way I see it, any group chat that gets compromised. First they came for Hoothy PC small group. That's right. Next they're going to come. Could be any of us. Could be any of us. Jeffrey Goldberg could be lurking in your small group. That's you and your girlfriend talking about what kind of pizza to order. He could be there.

reporting for the Atlantic. You wouldn't know unless you like looked at who was in there and saw his name. Then you would know, which is true of all of the people in the Who the PC small group. I guess it is actually pretty easy. You don't know. Maybe, maybe Jeffrey Goldberg's signal name is like CIA super spy or something and everyone just assumed he belonged there.

I'm going to start at the beginning because I do assume that actually, like, as impossible as it sounds to those of us who, like, wake up and imbibe fucking social media in the morning, like an addict takes their first hit of crack cocaine, but in a way that's less healthy for both our hearts and our brains.

a decent number of people who listen to this podcast have just kind of like heard vaguely like some bits about this. Yeah, they're wondering what the fuck we're talking about. What are you doing? What are you guys doing this? So we're going to talk about this group chat. So first off, a couple of basics. So Signal is an app that is end-to-end encrypted. That means that if you have Signal and your buddy has Signal and you're messaging each other, it's encrypted. And it is very hard at this point

Unless one of your phones is directly compromised by a non-state actor or an ex who's really good with computers, no one else can see what you're messaging each other. So if you and a friend are like planning what to order on fucking Grubhub tonight when you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can keep that secret.

or if you and a friend are planning what substances to buy that the government might not want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if you and your friend simply don't want various media companies taking every detail, and phone carriers taking every detail of your life's conversations,

and turning that into analytics data, you can stop them from doing that. And if maybe one day you might be engaged in speech that the government might not like, you can continue to engage in that speech privately without danger. Or with less danger. Yeah. Or with as little danger as it is possible to do. Especially if your messages automatically explode after anywhere between five seconds to one week. Yeah.

Right. Which is a feature Signal has. Yes. You can automatically set it to delete stuff over a period of time. You want to, if you're going to use it, turn off the thing where it like pushes messages so that you can like see on your locked phone. Visible notifications. Yeah. Turn them off because that'll fuck shit up. Because then your operating system can read the messages without the encryption. Yeah.

Similarly, never open a QR code. This is really the only way that Signal can get compromised on scale right now beyond physical infiltration, right? Like what accidentally happened with Houthi PC Small Group. But the main other way that Signal can get compromised is through malicious QR codes and unknown links. So really be careful about links, as always, on the internet. And especially...

Be skeptical of QR codes. Yeah, there's a quote from Herman Goering. I think it was from Herman Goering. When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver. And I have adapted that Goering quote to the modern era. When I hear QR code, I reach for my Glock 19. That's right. Do not use QR codes. Yeah.

Yeah, the work of Satan. Let's explain what who these PC small group is for the people. I'm getting to it. So you've got, you've got this app, which is normally used by and has been used for a long time by like protesters and dissidents and journalists to communicate with sources because it's very secure. The

The Trump administration takes office. One thing that they are annoyed about is that when you are government employees, even if you're doing top secret shit, especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of meetings about national security planning for like military actions that you are supposed to only have in something called a skiff. And a skiff is basically a room that

in, you know, the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right? I'm not 100% sure where all the skiffs are, but it's like a room that is incredibly secure and it is the only place that you are supposed to have certain kinds of conversations. And in fact, if you are having one of those kinds of conversations in a skiff, no one, not even the president or the vice president, is allowed to have a phone in there. It is a very strict rule. You don't take phones into the skiff because none of them are fucking secure. Yeah.

Now, the problem is all these communications, all of this stuff is documented and potentially FOIA-able. Maybe not immediately because there's always security concerns. They have the ability to redact stuff. But in 20 years, perhaps. But at some point. Yeah, it might be archived even if it's not FOIA-able. People who are in charge of our military now didn't like that. And we're like, hey, what if we all just did it through a single group?

And they did to plan for an attack that started March 15th against the Houthis. Now, you will remember the Houthis from the episode James and I did. I mean, from other stuff, too, because they're all over the news. From, you know, the Houthis. The Houthis stuff. James and I did an episode recently about a regular naval warfare. And you check it out. That's all still pretty relevant. Better known for their other work. Yeah, better known for their other work. The Biden administration was like, we can probably take care of these guys with airstrikes. And it didn't really work.

And the Trump administration was like, we can do a better job of taking these guys out with airstrikes. And at this point, it's too early to say if it worked or not. But I'm going to guess probably didn't. Probably not. Just generally given the history. Maybe they say they killed a lot more high value targets and top missile guys. Main missile guy quote. I don't know.

I'm not, I don't know. I'm not privy to the information they're working off of or how much it matters at this point, right? So we'll see. You're not in that signal chat, Robert? I'm not in that signal chat. They have not accidentally added me. I'm in too many signal chats, frankly. Yeah, yeah. I could be and I might not know. We all are in too many. I might be in several government ones and be totally unaware of it because there's too many notifications on my phone. That shit's muted. I'm not seeing that. Yeah.

So they decide we're going to plan an attack on some Houthis. We're going to be hitting them with stuff. And we should probably all get we need to get all of these different kind of people from different chunks of the, you know, the government together. So we got to have J.D. Vance and his representative because usually Vance is too busy to respond. And we got to have the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his representative.

We got to have the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, her representative. We got to have the head of the CIA, his represent, you know, that kind of thing. There's a few more people in there. Mark Rubio. Mark Rubio, right? Sex estate, you know, and his representative, right? Miller, Stephen Miller. I don't,

know that Miller had a representative. He feels like he handles a lot of this stuff on his own, but on his phone too much, Stephen Miller. Chronically online, Stephen Miller. Yeah, and you have the head of, I think, Cintcom was in there. Anyway, you got all these people in there. And while they're setting this up, all the invites are going out, because the way you do it with Signal is you click a button that says, like, start a new group. You name the new group. In this case, they named the group Hoothie PC Small Group, right? Yeah.

And, shit, what does PC stand for in this? Politically correct, which honestly I thought that we were over. Yeah, you'd think so, huh? Don't say any slurs in the group chat. It's just a reminder. Yeah, yeah, no slurs in the small group chat. Planning committee, I'm guessing? Yeah, planning committee. Houthi planning committee, small group. Sorry, I had that written down somewhere. So they make this group chat and they invite a bunch of people. And here's the way, one of the ways Signal works is that like,

If you're just importing your contacts into Signal, it'll find the guys who have Signal, and it'll just show you based on whatever name you have for them in their phone, right? That they're on Signal, and you can just invite them. Otherwise, you can set what your Signal name is going to be. And so when people type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that. Or if you send them an invite, that's the name they'll see. And...

This brings us, I got to take an aside to talk about a guy who is not a member of the Trump administration and who is not a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg, born in 1965. He is currently the co-editor of The Atlantic. Prior to this, he had a...

what some people would call an illustrious career. He grew up in Malvern on Long Island. Surely Malvern. Malvern, yeah. I'm looking at his wiki here, which just has the line that his neighborhood was mainly Catholic and he described it as a wasteland of Irish pogromists. Oh, Jesus.

I bet he had a fun childhood. Okay. Interesting. Interesting, Jeffrey. Fascinating stuff there. Interesting. So after college or kind of while he's in college, he leaves and he goes to Israel because he wants to serve in the IDF during the Intifada, the first one, as a prison guard.

Jesus Christ. Which is where Palestinian participants in the Intifad were being held. And yeah, he he had like an interesting conversation with this PLO leader who is also like a math teacher who I guess they they were able to like discuss their Zionism or whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy, not a I bring this up to be like not a

Not a left-wing radical. Not one of, quote-unquote, our guys. Not one of our guys. Not a guy who's probably broadly opposed to most of, and in fact, to most of what the Trump administration is doing overseas. Especially with the airstrikes, frankly. Yes. Now, he has pissed off. It's fair to say he has really pissed off Trump a number of times, right? Because he wrote some articles. He wrote that 2020 article in The Atlantic about when Trump said...

got caught saying that Americans who died in wars are losers and suckers. Yes. Which is, you know, based on sourcing that he had. So he's also attracted their ire, but he's again...

Generally, I would say like more on the bootlickery side of things. Like he's just kind of like a NatSec cheerleader, right? That would be a fair way to describe Jeffrey. Totally. I don't know that he would entirely disagree with that description of himself, you know? Yeah, like a neolive guy. That said, he's not so much of one that he's unwilling to report critical stuff, which is what happens here. So he gets an invite on his phone that it just takes...

takes him into this PC Houthi small group. And people have done the work. There's another guy in the Trump administration whose initials are JC. John Greenbrier, I believe. Yeah, I think it was John Greenbrier. And the person who, because there was some debate initially about like who invited him, because after this came out, there were allegations that he snuck his way in or whatever. We now know based on the evidence that he was inadvertently invited by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Right.

Right. Yeah. As evidenced by the signal screenshots. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's lots of screenshots. Jeffrey did his, you know, the job of document eventually. Right. Yes. Well, he documented it right away. Yes. So now here's the thing from

from the beginning here, Jeffrey is having the natural reaction. I will say this for all my critiques of him. He has the reaction I think any minimally competent journalist would have. Someone's fucking with me. Yeah, yeah. This is like something to get me. Yeah. You don't get invited into a chat with the sec def and the head of the CIA planning a military strike, right? That just doesn't happen.

I've been a journalist for a while. That's not occurred to me. Yeah, it's not does not really go down. So he's like trying to figure out what the fuck's going on, like what's happening. And he's like, he's making a note. He's documenting stuff is there. And they're talking about like weapons packages, like these are the kind of weapons. This is where they're striking. And then as the strikes go in, they're being like this guy headed into his girlfriend's house. We're hitting it. House blew up.

He's dead. Right. That particular exchange was very funny because the way he phrased it was like it completely baffled J.D. Vance. Yes. Let me pull this up because it was it was pretty funny. No, please. Please. Michael Waltz, VP. Full stop. Building collapsed. Full stop. Had multiple positive ID. Full stop. Pete Carrilla, the IC. Amazing job. J.D. Vance replies. What?

Michael Waltz, typing too fast. Full stop. The first target, M-Dash, their top missile guy, M-Dash. We have positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed. And then JD Vance replies, excellent. At this point, Michael Waltz responds with the fist emoji, American flag emoji, flame emoji. Yeah. So it's great. And once it becomes very clear what's happening, number one,

rather than stay in the group, see if maybe he could get invited to other groups, just kind of like keep track of what was going on. Again, being a guy who's like primary concern, and I really do think Goldberg's primary concern here was the security of U.S. soldiers. The national security of the United States. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, as opposed to like, is any of this legal? Like his is just like these people are not being secure, like with guns.

I mean, like this, this could if the wrong person got invited to a group like this, it could potentially endanger the lives of airmen and stuff. That's not my primary concern with all this. Right. But that is his, you know. And so he hops out of the group. He leaves and he puts out this article and he redacts most other than what's happened, which is a story in and of itself.

He, like, goes out of his way, like, there's people who are, like, in intelligence that are in this that he has their names, and he's like, I am not naming them because they're serving intelligence officers, and that's a no-no. He doesn't, like...

specifically give up other than that this is happening anything that's like particularly dangerous right but this is the kind of thing as soon as it comes out obviously it's a it's a furor and it's unlike most of the time when everybody gets like pissed it seems that like it might have some legs because it's just such a what the fuck moment right and it's so contrary to like

so much of the messaging coming from the Trump administration regarding, you know, like digital security, Hillary's emails. Prosecuting individual soldiers for any, like, losing a night vision goggle, right? It's kind of the classic one. Leaking information, how

how this administration is going to crack down on all information leaks, you know, that sort of stuff. At one point, Hexer says, we are clear for OPSEC, which I thought was pretty funny. The funniest message in this signal group is that we're all good on OPSEC. Yeah. That he says in a group chat with a journalist. Yeah. Yeah. It's super funny. Everything that's happening here is very funny. I basically want to move on to like, what's going to happen next, which is they are going to try to nuke

Jeffrey Goldberg. Like they're going to try to send him to a prison, if not a literal like El Salvadorian work camp. Right. Like that that is going to be their next goal here. Yeah. He embarrassed these people like to an extent that it's I mean, anyone in uniform would have been court-martialed for this kind of security fuck up. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, in times of war in the past, if like the version of this had happened in World War II, they would have just executed whatever soldier did this. Like, yeah, you don't have to be a spy if you're incompetent enough to just bumble into shit. It's the same result. I did want to address really quickly, like a couple of things. One, I saw this USA Today article that was like, oh, it's so relatable that they made this mistake of adding someone to the group chat. That was not the mistake. The mistake was coordinating things that should be classified, things that should be quote unquote high side.

on personal devices using Signal as opposed to a State Department or government-issued device which doesn't have your personal contacts to avoid all this. Like a device which is not hackable, a device which has not been exposed to QR codes, for example. Yeah, make sure that in your contacts there's not two guys named JG. Yeah, yeah. So you might add the wrong JG to your Yemen bombing chat. Haven't we all added the wrong person to a group chat? And it's like, I mean, yeah, but I've never like bombed

Yeah, yeah. Not for bombing Yemen. Yeah, yeah. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as a birthday party. Yeah, like, I have two friends named John and I added the wrong one to a group about, like, planning a mutual friend's birthday party. But, like, again, minimal damage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No service people's lives are put at risk. I did also want to point out this...

At one point, Waltz says, or Michael Waltz, who's a national security advisor. Yeah, not the other one. That would be pretty funny if they'd have him as well. If he was just in there, they'd say, yeah, he seems cool. Put him in the group. Fuck it. What, a dude likes to shoot pheasants, apparently? Seems nice. He seems to be friends with J.D. Vance. Wouldn't be surprising. So one of the things Waltz says, which is bizarre, is that European navies are incapable of defeating Houthi weapon systems, which just isn't true. Right.

there was a, a coalition of 20 different states running operations in the Red Sea last year. And again, like France has a Navy, like they've got nuclear submarines. They could end the world. Just to cite one example, HMS Diamond, which is a British ship, uh,

shot down a Houthi missile last year. The UK also airstruck Houthi targets last year. I've watched the UK carry out airstrikes. I feel like they're very capable. What the Houthis have is Iranian 358s to just get really nerdy for a second, right? Which are not really a threat to modern fighter aircraft. It's like a loitering munition. Maybe a drone. Yeah, but

No, no, like aircraft, not a manned or personned aircraft. The primary point of like how the Houthis are conducting their strikes is not we're going to knock all of these ships out of the sea. It's it will it will create an unsustainable insurance situation for a lot of merchants. If there's just always kind of missiles, even if we never really or almost never hit anybody, that doesn't really matter. You got to deal with the insurance thing. Yeah, they're going to make that.

Much more expensive and that particular part of global trade much more difficult to conduct. So far, the Trump administration has doubled down on its response. This is pretty funny. Carolyn Leavitt on Twitter, ex, I guess, called Goldberg. She's the White House press secretary, I believe. That's correct. Yeah, White House press secretary. She called Goldberg a, quote, Trump hater and also claimed the story was a, quote, hoax and a, quote, sensationalist spin.

They are also right now claiming that "war plans" and "attack plans" are different things. The information they leaked was too specific to constitute a war plan. Both of these things are kind of ludicrous claims. Very clearly this is stuff that should be classified. Very clearly it's stuff that put those people's lives at risk.

in the event that the Houthis had any means to respond to like F-18s, which I don't think they do really. But, you know, Iran, who absolutely is a state backer,

of the Houthis does have the ability, at least in theory, they've kind of shown their ass a bit in the last year or two with Israeli strikes in Iran. Yeah, it's not the ability to easily interdict these kinds of strikes, but certainly the ability to, and more importantly, kind of the ability to survive them, to mitigate the damage that they can do. Sure, sure, to go underground or go somewhere else. And those planes are vulnerable when they're like

certain points in their trajectory, I think. So, you know, it's generally very poor to broadcast exactly what you're doing, when, where and how. It's kind of just a basic of like military stuff that you really don't want people to know exactly when you're sending dudes in to do what. Yeah. Yeah. There was a very funny meme going around, which basically had like imagined if the same discussion had been had about D-Day in 1944.

And yeah, that wouldn't have gone so well if they had broadcast. There's been a lot of great posts. I'm looking at one by Katie Notopolis on Twitter right now. Having read through the full Houthi PC small group logs, I've come to the sad realization that I am the JD Vance of my group chats. Overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up. Continually derails plans with late objections. That's so good. Yeah.

Oh, that's so good. That is really funny. That is brutal, yeah. It is interesting to see their dynamics. It's interesting to see kind of Stephen Miller seemed to have the decisive word on like, let's go ahead with this, Miller. Oh, yeah. Speaking directly for the president. That's it. What's interesting is no one ever says the president has approved this. The president has said, do this. Like Miller says something along the lines of like, we're going forward with this, or I've been told we're going forward with this. Yeah. Which is, again, not...

Not in terms of like, it's a very Hitler way of doing things. Right. Yeah. Like there's this, I talk about this in the show. There's this decades long debate about like, did Hitler literally order the Holocaust or did he just kind of like keep making it clear to people that if they kept moving in a more Holocaust direction, that would like endear them to him. Yeah. Yeah. Intentionality. Yeah.

aspects of both are true, but like, yeah, this is definitely kind of example of that latter thing where Trump is probably like, yeah, somebody should probably fuck up those hoothies. And then Stephen Miller goes like, yeah, Trump said, you know, we're good. Keep moving forward. But he's also, Miller's not dumb. He's not going to say Trump said to do this. He's going to say, he's been delegating so much more than his first term to the point where his presidency is just,

projecting a certain vibe that then other people have to carry out all of the details for. Yeah, this is very similar to the Hitler regime. Yeah. Yeah, there is a term for this at the time in the Third Reich. It's called working towards the Fuhrer, right? Where you're not going to get direct guidelines. You're supposed to figure out what he wants and move closer to it. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. No, that's kind of been his new governing style. It's a lot smarter. It's a lot smarter.

In terms of, like, just, like, you know, getting documents to sign and then projects certain, like, slogans or vibes that then everyone who works under him, which is at this point, it's maybe, like, roughly 200 people tops, have to all, like, figure out to, like, how to enact this thing that they think he wants. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Like even to the extent that he himself was saying he didn't sign the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act that Rubio did. His signature's on it in the federal record, but clearly it's kind of a Rubio, or it seems from that that it's a Rubio concoction that he just greenlit. Just a quote from Miller in case anyone's wondering exactly what he said. As I heard it, the president was clear, colon, green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. So yeah, it's...

He never specifically says the president has okayed this. But yeah, that's obviously people in Europe really pissed. I've seen some statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom, like the sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers is obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing people off, should we pivot to advertisements? We should, which does not piss me off. It makes me really happy to consume. Mm-hmm.

Garrison personally consumes all the products and services that support this show. Yeah, that's definitely not true. It's the only thing that Garrison consumes. That's also not true. Which is why they have pellagra. I don't know what that is, but sure. Here's the ads.

All right. We are so bad. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's rending my additions? James. Yeah. Okay. I'll just start. So, very amusingly, that's probably concerningly for him, Judge Boasberg, the same person who issued a tentative restraining order against the Trump administration for the rendition of people to Venezuela, has also been assigned the signal lawsuit, American Oversight versus Hexeth. So, the

That guy, the one who Trump already called for his impeachment, right, has another crucial case in front of him. What the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoke the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic, very, very ironic. They're talking about state secrets now, having just added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what they have done. You can go back.

last week to understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from. If you didn't listen to last week's. Yeah, we did. We did a whole episode on it last week. It's also continuing to claim that it didn't quote unquote remove migrants after the tentative restraining order was issued because they'd already been removed. The removal happened when they were loaded onto the plane is this argument concurrently with this as a panel hearing.

So that's a panel of three judges, right, which the government is appealing the tentative restraining order. During this hearing, Second Court Judge Patricia Millett said, quote, quote, the Nazis received better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings in the 1930s. They didn't just get led on to play in the central work camp.

Not a great reflection on where we're at. The Trump administration is trying to challenge the jurisdiction of Boasberg, saying that he should have filed the same claim in Texas.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan government attorneys are filing a legal claim in El Salvador to liberate their citizens from Secod. It's worth noting, of course, that these people, some of them have been tortured by the Venezuelan government, right? And chose to flee at no small risk to their lives. Like if people haven't listened to some of our older stuff, like I've been to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to my episodes about that if you want to know more about why people are leaving Venezuela.

We have a little more information on some of the people detained. One of them is a makeup artist who's a gay man who was beaten by guards as a US photojournalist. Watch. Another one, the Miami Herald is reporting, had been granted legal refugee status. So it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed Venezuelans. Some of these people are

been through background checks already, right? At which they will have disclosed their tattoos. That's one of the things that they'll be asked about. And they will have disclosed those. So whether they control F'd it or how quite how they came across these people is still a little bit unclear. A couple of other things regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across my radar, but probably

probably don't merit a whole episode. It's been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement to hand over the tax records of undocumented people. It has claimed for decades that it won't do this. This is why most of the

most undocumented people pay taxes, right? Yeah, which is something that the conservatives just don't believe. Yes. They're like, all these undocumented immigrants aren't paying taxes like the rest of us. No, actually they are. What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes. Yeah, and yes. And this is a great way to have people want to pay less taxes if they're going to get their information sent over to like

the Gestapo. Yeah, exactly. The whole point was to not provide a disincentive. This is similar to why California gives driver's licenses to undocumented people and allows them to insure vehicles, right? Because you don't want to provide a disincentive to have a driver's license. You don't want to provide a disincentive to have insurance. We have now provided a disincentive to pay your taxes for undocumented people. So yeah, that will have consequences and it will have consequences especially in industries, right? Like agriculture and construction where large numbers of people tend to be undocumented. Yeah.

Talking of undocumented migration, the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, reports that he said this on the All In podcast, he has claimed to have already sold 1,000 gold cards. So gold cards, if you didn't listen to our previous recording on that. Oh, I feel like I'm getting dizzy. I'm just like... Yeah, I'm ill. Yeah, yeah. There is no process for applying for or receiving a gold card yet. So it's extremely unclear what this means in immigration law terms. So...

He just got like a thousand texts from millionaires being like, yeah, I'll buy one maybe. Well, multi-millionaires, they're five million each, right? So yeah, apparently, not quite clear. And he claims that he sold them. Is he going around shopping these around? Is this how they're going to replace the tax revenue from undocumented people? Oh my God. No one knows. No one knows what this means. Who do you pay? Like, very unclear. So...

Yeah, that's great. That is the current situation with immigration. I also wanted to add that at least three people who are aware of died in San Diego County on the 14th of March in a storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived was found next to the remains of her father who died of exposure in a winter storm out here. So yeah, the border continues to be doing violence to some of the most marginalized people alive, which is great.

We should pop in here. A story just dropped. Michael Waltz, the national security advisor who invited Jeffrey to that group chat. Journalists have found his public Venmo. No. Every time with the Venmo. Always the Venmo. Quote unquote, it's full of journalists. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

I'm just going to read a quote from an article on prospect.org. Unsurprisingly, Fox News holds the highest headcount for reporters in Mike Waltz's phone. Griff Jenkins, whose Fox.com bio lists him as a Washington-based national correspondent for Fox, is joined on the list by Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox and Friends. Porter Berry, president and editor of Fox Digital, also made the cut.

But white right-wing reporters are not the only ones represented in Waltz's Venmo list, which appears to be less than clean on Obsec, as Secretary of Defense Hank Seth wrote. Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as is Brianna Keeler, an American journalist who currently serves as co-anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central. Lauren Pykoff,

an executive producer at MSNBC is also in walls as contacts earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network. Wow. Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon, but amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name stands out from the crowd, Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from the New York times after it was revealed that her reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from vice president Dick Cheney. Her dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close to an administration set on war. Uh,

It's just like, okay. We don't check any of this. We haven't locked anything down. Good. Having your public Venmo itself is crazy. The fact that he's like, the fact that he's like getting like dinner with journalists to be like, I'll send you a Venmo request for this sushi. Yeah.

Oh man, they've downloaded his entire friends list and you can just scroll it. Yeah, I know, you can see everybody. Oh my god, he's sending in like a $15 Venmo request from Brian Kilmeade for getting drinks at a bar. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Yeah, also, how well these people make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. They make so much money. $15, just get the van, it's just one drink in DC. It's so funny. Oh my god.

Now, I think it's time, folks, that we take a little bit of a detour and talk about tariffs. Tariff, don't like it. Rockin' Casbah, Casbah. Tariff, don't like it. Rockin' Casbah, rockin' Casbah.

Oh my God, I love playing that song. I love playing that song. We don't actually have anything to say about tariffs. Mia's not here. I will note there's a graph going around about the potential cost of Guinness under Trump's tax plan, which is usually around $7 per pint in the US and will now be $22 to $27 after Trump's new tariffs for imported alcohol. That reflects its true value because it's also a meal. Yes, absolutely. Anyway,

We're done. That's all I have to say on tariffs. As long as the twisted tea pricing doesn't get affected, I'll be fine then. That's good. Good. Now, in some more upsetting news, another student at Columbia has been forced into hiding as ICE targets her for deportation. Yoon Seo Chung is a 21-year-old permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from Korea with her family when she was seven.

On March 9th, she received a text message from Homeland Security Investigations reading, Hi Yunsao, this is Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward. When are you available for a phone call? So this message was allegedly in reference to being arrested among others at a recent sit-in protest at Bernard College at Columbia. She was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction.

So after receiving that like sketchy text, right, something that you should never, never respond to, you should immediately send to your lawyer. But after receiving this text, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading, quote, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest.

Consistent with the university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you. If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS. Now, that same day, ICE agents showed up at the home of Chung's parents, and Chung's lawyer called, quote-unquote, Audrey from the police, who revealed she was actually an ICE agent, and stated that there was an administrative warrant for her arrest, and that the State Department can revoke Ms. Chung's residency status.

We're going to talk more about what's happened with Ms. Chung after this at break. All right, we're back.

So when ICE failed to locate this Columbia University student, they started to enlist the help of federal prosecutors. I'm going to quote from The New York Times who broke this story. Quote, On March 10th, Perry Carbone, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office, told Ms. Ahmad, Ms. Chung's attorney, that the Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, had revoked Ms. Chung's visa. Ms.

Ms. Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Carbone responded that Mr. Rubio had quote, revoked that as well, unquote. So this similar to like a,

Mahmoud Khali demonstrates that they have no idea of the actual residency status of the people that they're going after. They are just going after non-citizens and may eventually start going after citizens too. They are just going after people that they assume have the least amount of protections, whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on a student visa or a work visa. They don't really know going in. They're just going after people. Yeah.

Then on March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants citing a statute for harboring non-citizens. The Trump administration is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda. One 21-year-old student who was the valedictorian at her high school is hindering their foreign policy agenda for attending a sit-in protest.

Her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means like a movement leader. She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyers write, quote, Ms. Chung has not made any public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests. She was rather one of a large group of college students raising, expressing and discussing shared concerns, unquote.

Chung herself had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung was not in violation of any university policy.

So in response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to try to locate and deport her, Chung went into hiding. Her whereabouts are still unknown as of time of recording. And her lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional. The lawsuit reads, quote, officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike.

including Ms. Chung's speech. ICE's shocking actions against Ms. Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech, unquote.

Now, this past Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The judge said that there is, quote, nothing in the record indicating that Chung is a danger to the community or a, quote, unquote, foreign policy risk, or that she has communicated with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there would be, quote, no trips to Louisiana here, unquote.

referring to the movement of Khalil to ICE detention in Louisiana. A DHS statement said that ICE is going to quote, investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, unquote. The statement also claimed that Chung would have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge.

Which is, like, contrary to incidents of ICE just deporting people before their legally required hearings, even, like, in defiance of, like, extra court orders mandating those hearings. Like, ICE is just lying here. And I think it's worth pointing out, like,

what types of people they are going after, right? Now, one type of person that ICE is going after is like non-citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of what they actually did, right? This can be anything from standing in the street to doing a sit-in protest to just like being arrested on campus and removed by campus police or NYPD, right? Like just any arrest like on record that shows you at one of these protests. The other, in the cases like Khalil, like he was never arrested, right?

He was the subject of a mass doxing campaign by other students at Columbia, professors and other, you know, quote unquote, anti-Semitism organizations, which target high profile activists.

to create like public pressure against them. And those same lists are now being used by the Trump administration to target students. Yeah, Etar had one, right? Or Betar, the ultra Zionist people who are going around like attempting to fucking present people with pages. I think they were one of the groups that had created like a quote unquote deportation list.

So we should just mention that a tough student, Ramesa Ozturk, was essentially abducted on her way to university, right? There's video which we'll link in the show notes here. Very, very frightening video of her just standing on the sidewalk as first one man approaches her in like a navy hoodie. Put up mask on his face. Approaches her, stops her. And then as soon as they start engaging in conversation, she gets surrounded by like five other people all wearing like

what I would describe as like a gray man block, essentially. Yeah. That they then like pull out badges and they like, like detain her. And it's interesting, like as they approach, most of these people are unmasked. And then as soon as people realize what's happening, like, like, like people in the neighborhood, realize, realize what's happening. They all start pulling up like, like half face masks, like gators. Yeah. Yeah. They, they looked to me more than anything, like,

the way Proud Boys dressed a lot in like 2019, 2020. Yeah. It's, yeah. Like, it's extremely concerning. Like when you start seeing these people, masked people snatching people off the street, right? She asked if we can, she asked if she can call the cops and they say we are the police.

It looks like her phone falls out of her hand at some point. They take her bag. We know this because it seems like somebody was filming from a building just above. And you can hear that people say, like, why are you covering your... That person said... Why are you wearing masks? Why are you covering your faces? Yeah, the guy filming is like doing about what he can... Given the fact that you have to assume he had no real idea what was happening initially, other than like something visibly fucked up, like...

I'm glad he said the things that he said, but... Yeah. Yeah, she's a Turkish citizen who is in the States on a student visa in Boston, Massachusetts, or outside Boston, Massachusetts. Yeah, she's on an F1 visa.

So just a couple of days, just a few days before she was seized, her name was published by Canary Mission, right? Canary Mission is a Zionist group that has been doxing pro-Palestine or anti-genocide people for several years now. She had co-edited an op-ed in the Tufts Daily last year. That seems to be how they were able to identify her. But as Garrison said, right, like in terms of how they're picking their targets right now, it seems to be heavily tied

to these vigilante Zionist far-right groups. I did see that a judge has already ruled that she shouldn't be left. She shouldn't be removed from Massachusetts without further consultation with that judge. And we don't know if she has been or not already. But this is continuing to happen, right? We talked about this last week. I'm going to do a whole episode next week about this issue. She is in Louisiana. Sorry, update.

She has already been moved to Louisiana. Yeah, so I'm just reading a truth out piece here. Officials initially did not specify where else Turk had been taken. Hanabi, it's her lawyer, was unable to reach her. Later on Wednesday, Hanabi said in a motion that she was informed by a senator's office that the student was already transferred to Louisiana. It's like in a matter of hours, they worked to get her outside of her home state. Yeah.

where she probably has more legal protections. Yeah, it's not something that's super uncommon. I've seen them do this with what they called lateral transfers under Title 42, where they would move people. Under Title 42, they could immediately return people to Mexico, right? And what they would do is laterally transfer them along the border and return them to another location in Mexico, which obviously led to them being completely dislocated when they were dropped in Mexico.

Something else that I want to note is the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant. Like one problem that ICE can run into often is that people can choose just to not answer the door. ICE usually likes to rely on people that have like already been arrested or already detained by like police, right? That makes it much easier for immigration officials to find people.

Without that, locating people can be a little bit harder with the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant that shows they're trying to create this precedent for being able to actually break into more people's homes, even though she had a permanent resident status. This is...

In terms of the tactics being used, similar to all these gray man block people approaching you on the street one by one, that's a tactic to take note of. The use of this type of warrant is also something to take note of. We are already at the point where people are going into hiding. This is very dystopian YA coded stuff. As a 21-year-old junior,

Being forced to go into hiding because federal agents are after you because you sat down. You sat down in front of a building in protest of a genocide. You're not even a movement leader. And this type of thing shouldn't even happen to quote-unquote movement leaders, right? Yeah, the very First Amendment protects your right to do that. Exactly. But like...

Regardless of whether or not you're involved in the planning, the organization, whether or not you're making statements to press, whether or not you're giving speeches, if you just attend these sorts of things, you are a target by...

what is very obviously a modern version of Gestapo-like actions. Yeah. I think it's also quite revealing that she's somewhat successfully gone into hiding, right? It suggests that their intelligent operation is not so advanced that they were able to immediately find her. Well, no, because again, the resources to do stuff like

trace somebody down by their shoes from like surveillance camera footage exists. We saw it used on those lawyers who lit a police vehicle on fire back in 2020. But like, there's not,

really much in the way of crimes going on here. And there's so many of these people, like the idea that you would pull all of the footage that you would need to track every one of these, it's just not feasible. And I think they'll just go after someone else, right, to get the headline. But I'll be following this one with interest because it's sort of an alternative outcome to the other ones that we've seen so far. So it'll just be revelatory to see how it goes. Yeah.

So if you want to contact us about any of this, maybe if you're seeing things happening on your campus, if you have anything you'd like to share or things that you think we've missed, you can do so. The email address is coolzontipsatproton.me.

ProtonMail is an encrypted email service. It's only end-to-end encrypted, like Signal, if you send it from a ProtonMail address. Don't copy any Atlantic journalists on your email, and you should be good to go.

Thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages. It does take time for us to go through all of them. Not all of them will have a response, but we are reading them. Thank you. I am still working on a piece on the Lavender Scare. There's a lot of stuff happening regarding suppressing

And going after trans people in the military, this takes time. But we are working on that slowly but surely, as well as stuff regarding ICE targeting students and what's going on in Colombia. So we appreciate that. The last thing I want to talk about is this past Monday, the IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate airstrikes.

Mohammed Mansour, who works for Palestine Today, was killed, quote, in his house in southern Gaza alongside his wife and his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeera. Later that day, the IDF killed 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassam Shabbat in a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in northern Gaza.

I want to read this statement from Hossam. Quote,

Bye.

By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest, something I haven't known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now, do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting.

Keep telling our stories until Palestine is free. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.

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