It Could Happen Here Weekly 184
02:44:16 Share

Who's holding them?

Enough of that nonsense. Now listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

Want to feel more creative but don't have the right laptop? Lenovo.com can help.

Look through our legendary lineup of AI-powered PCs and devices and find the one that fits your passion. Our PCs, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, as well as cutting-edge AI tools, allow students to focus, learn, and create with ease. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel inside. Plus, college students and teachers can get 5% off their order. Shop now on Lenovo.com. The future's waiting, and it needs you. ♪

Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP. PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

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.

Hey, this is Mia from the future. This was recorded in the now halcyon days of January, 2025. Lots of things have changed. Basically everything everywhere has gotten worse. This, this is the story about, about the oppression of trans people in the United Kingdom. Um,

that is very bleak in many ways. The United Kingdom has gotten worse since then. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the definition of sex in the Equality Act of 2010 is, quote, binary and is decided by, quote, biological sex.

So whatever the sex that some fucking doctor assigns you at birth is your sex specifically under the Equalities Act. A bunch of people in the UK have decided that this means that like the courts have ruled that like sex in general means quote unquote biological sex. That's actually not what they ruled, but they're doing it anyways. So there's been a whole bunch of things where, for example, the Labour Party has started purging trans women from any like one of their bodies that's supposed to be a woman's body and

So the oppression of trans people continues to escalate. Yeah, our only path out is just open and active resistance against them. In a more positive note, Mira, our guest for this episode, has since this episode has struck out on her own and is now the mind and genius behind the outlet Free Radical, which we will link to here. And you should go support her work because it's great. Now to our episode.

It could happen here, a podcast that is largely about the U.S., that might exaggerate the extent to which it's about the U.S., but it is. Most episodes are about the U.S., but sometimes it's about other places. And one of the frequent places that it's about is the United Kingdom. And specifically, we're here to talk about the United Kingdom because the U.K. is both an image of the present and the future of the oppression of trans people.

And there have been a bunch of just absolutely horrible things happening there that have gotten very little press attention. And one of the one of those things is what appears to be a like, I guess I would call it like a two stage cover up of a bunch of suicides of trans kids on waiting lists for health care. And with me to talk about this fucking terrible shit is Mira Lazine, who's a freelance trans journalist. Mira, welcome to the show.

Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so, I mean, God, this is one of those... I always am excited to talk to people, but I swear to God, like, one out of every four times this happens, it's like a... I have to pollate you. I want to say I'm excited to talk to you about this because, like, Jesus Christ, this is the most depressing shit I've seen in ages. Yeah, it's not a fun story. It's an important one. Probably one of the most important I've ever poured it on, but not remotely fun.

Yeah, so let's go back to the halcyon days of mid-2024.

I don't know. Things were really bad then, too. They're worse now, but they were also bad then. Yeah. So can you talk a bit about how this story started and about what was going on with the National Health Service, the NHS, which is the British... Basically, the British healthcare system is run out of National Health Service. Can you talk about the whistleblowers there and what was going on with them? So, yeah. I first became aware of what was going on independently. I was working...

with Alejandra Caraballo, the clinical instructor of Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard. She's a friend of mine and we work together on some decks. She and I and some other people were talking about the horrific wait lists going on with the NHS. It's

terrible there. I mean, not even just for trans stuff. There's probably millions of reports of people having to wait months to get essential health care. Some people have died just from their conditions being on the wait list.

We had both stumbled upon some old news reports from years prior about trans kids who had unfortunately committed suicide as a result of not getting the essential help they needed on the wait list. These stories were not talked about in the media at all. They got one art mentioning what happened to them, and then that was it.

So we started to investigate it. She was compiling a spreadsheet of everything she could find, every news report of kids who experienced this. I was pitching help and contribute to that spreadsheet some.

And then right around the same time, the director, then, of the Good Law Project, a civil rights organization that does a lot of legal stuff in the United Kingdom, his name is Jolyon Mogham, apologize if I mispronounced that. He came out with a Twitter thread revealing, and this was very suddenly, he hadn't contacted anyone about this, he just kind of posted it right when he got enough of a story and everything.

he revealed that he was talking to a couple whistleblowers within the NHS about what was going down. And not only did he talk to some whistleblowers, but he also gained some independent evidence from himself, his own investigation, from meeting minutes from officials in the NHS. And so what he found kind of began with the first whistleblower. This one...

was someone who did not reveal much about who they were publicly, presumably to protect their job. But Malcom said that with his whistleblowers, he independently confirmed that they did work for the NHS. He saw their IDs. Malcom's not the type of guy to lie. He's a trusted figure in the UK political scene. First one said that there was only one reported suicide prior to 2020. Significance of 2020...

in relation to trans healthcare at Night Kingdom was that the infamous case Bell v. Tattestock. Not going to go into detail of this case because it's convoluted and messy and hellish, but the gist of it is that it led to tightened restrictions on gender reform and care for minors, particularly in the realm of puberty lovers.

This ruling ended up kind of restricting how it might act as puberty blockers. It was later overturned, but it already led to lasting damage. Even after it was overturned, a lot of doctors were hesitant to even prescribe puberty blockers because they were worried about political consequences. So a lot of minors weren't getting the care they need. Yeah, and we should also mention here, too, because I think this has been lost in a lot of the reporting on this, because like,

I mean, I guess this is a story where a lot of the reporting was done by trans people just because, like, nobody gives a shit. But, like, the thing about puberty blockers is that puberty blockers with the healthcare trends were always a sort of compromise measure.

that was, you know, sort of put in place as a compromise of like, instead of letting kids actually transition and like, you know, go on hormones, which is, you know, the thing that kids need, right? If your goal is to like improve the health outcomes of trans kids, like the thing you actually want for them, like maximally is for them to have the ability to get gender affirming hormones. But, you know, the sort of compromise thing that was happening was like, well, you could have puberty blockers, but, you know, you can start hormones later. And that...

is not a good compromise to begin with, but losing it is even worse because the alternative to that is like you are now spending even more time with a bunch of fucking hormones in your system that you don't want. That explanation is more of the hormones that you fucking want and you're being forced to go through puberty, which fucking sucks shit if you're going through I don't know, I don't know if the wrong puberty is the correct language or whatever, but it fucking sucks. It's

And but now, you know, and this is something that's happening in the US, too, is also happening in the UK, is that the compromise solutions are being knocked out. And we're seeing the sort of knock on effects of these kids losing even the sort of compromise stuff they were supposed to be getting.

Yeah, and they use complete bogus justifications for this. They're like, we don't see any benefits of puberty blockers. And it's like, the point is not that they are benefiting these kids directly. No kid is like, oh boy, I get to be five years behind on puberty for my peers. I get to look like a 10-year-old while all my peers have full-on beef with everything. Oh boy. Like, no. The point is that

These kids are being deprived of the care they absolutely need to stay alive, and it's being targeted just for the sole purpose of getting cheap political from whatever the hell is in office. Yeah. But more back to the whistleblowers. So prior to 2020, when the Bellevue Tavistock ruling came into effect, only one transmiter died from suicide.

I don't quite remember the time frame they used to estimate it, but it was broader than the one they used after. I believe it was like seven years, I think. And the years after, which was measured up to like the very beginning of 2024, like January 2024, so not even four years, more like three years and two months, they recorded 16 deaths. 16 transgender minors committed suicide.

And they were all able to be linked to restrictions on community quarters and NHS waitlists. This whistleblower says this data came directly from a doctor who...

analyze this stuff professionally as part of his job in the NHS. The doctor also wanted to be anonymous, understandably. He named himself the, quote, named doctor for safeguarding children. He tried to warn people in the NHS about this. He was like, hey, there's something wrong. This isn't right. We are fucking up. And he talked to so many different people, including Dr. Hillary Cass, who I'll talk a bit about later.

This is a literary device called foreshadowing, et cetera, et cetera. Giant clip flashing thing here. Giant ominous music surrounding her name. He just warned of people, basically. And they all ignored him. They all just, according to him,

And this is all alleged, I have to say, you know, this has not been verified in the court of law or anything. This is according to the whistleblowers in Monaghan, but we have no reason to believe they lied or fabricated this.

about this was not even revealed publicly. There's no public outcry. There was no action taken by the NHS or any of these clinics. So that is the first whistleblower and the whistleblower's connection to that doctor. The second one basically can and gave independent verification of this. They were like, yeah, I've seen the data for myself too. I can confirm this is legitimate. Now,

Now, it wasn't just these three staff members who were trying to raise alarm bells. According to the second whistleblower, staff in the NHS were like, hey, whoa, this is not cool. We need to do something. And so they got an open letter, sent it to their higher-ups, and reportedly, the director of the Tavistock Clinic, which was at the time the only gender-affirming care clinic for minors in the entire United Kingdom, said,

Since there's more opened up, but it's a really complicated thing that's a headache to deal with. But head honchos at Tavistock completely retaliated. They threatened them with disciplinary action. They suppressed material. They basically were like, you go public about this. If you continue talking about this, you're going to face consequences. The thing I instantly came to mind here, and I think it's just specifically because of number 16, but

Like the first time I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was there, you know, there's the sort of famous Chicago story of the police killing of the Clint McDonald, where the slogan afterwards was 16 shots in a cover up. And this is fucking 16 dead in a cover up. And.

The amount of fucking rage that I have for all of this fucking shit that these people covered this up, that they knew this was happening, and not only knew this was happening, and not only didn't do anything about it, but actively contributed to fucking making it worse by threatening anyone who tried to talk about it is just so unbelievably disgusting. Yeah, I was the first one who broke this story. I basically reported on it almost immediately after Maldon Republic about this because...

I knew not many people were going to report on this right away, and it was going to kind of be a headache. I didn't know how few would, but I was the first one to report on it. I did it for journalist Aaron Reid's Subsec Aaron in the Morning back in June of last year.

And I had to stop writing it multiple times. Like, I spent the entire day working on it because it was stomach-wrenching, reading some of these stories and doing everything. The only reason I even got through it was because I dissociated the entire time and just kind of compartmentalized the anger a bunch because it's like, Jesus Christ, this is horrifying. But Morgan was not talking out of his ass with this, too. He brought receipts. Right in the initial thread, he...

Showed leaked meeting minutes and like you can see watermarks from the NHS on these meeting minutes. Like it is unless someone wants to suggest that he did a giant conspiracy and fabricated a bunch of very accurate meeting minutes that reflect publicly available meeting minutes elsewhere. It's pretty reputable. Yeah. These minutes show that NHS officials were aware of.

Every single one of these deaths, every single one of them. People were in these meetings calling for an independent investigation into each of these deaths, into gender affirming care for minors, into the restrictions. They wanted to investigate everything and had detailed data. They had information on the type of care they received.

which was basically negligence. And instead of reporting on this publicly, instead of doing an investigation, they covered this up. They didn't do anything. And they just pretended like everything was fine. Like there was nothing.

No deaths as a result of this. They were active. Nothing wrong was going on. And these meeting minutes are still public, too. Magen does not believe in it. It's still on his Twitter account. Good Law Project is not fully a thing anymore. They're kind of dissolving their stuff right now. But Magen is still keeping all his information up. It's all detailed. It's publicly there. People can see for themselves these minutes. And it's horrifying seeing the physical proof

It's horrifying. Yeah. And we need to go to ads. And when we come back, we'll get to the second fucking cover-up because there is a second one. They did it again. This time with the British Broadcasting... What the fuck does the C stand for? Corporation. That one. British Broadcasting Corporation leading the charge.

And we are back. So let's talk about the fucking second cover-up. Because normally you only get one cover-up when your fucking healthcare policies kill a bunch of people. But no, two. I got multiple cover-ups. Before we get to the second cover-up, we need to talk about what the cash report is. Because that's also part of this that we kind of bounced around a little bit, but then didn't... Yeah. Well, yeah. So the cash report is...

Probably one of the worst things to come out of the anti-trans crowd in the past decade. Yeah. The gist of it is it's essentially a supposedly independent report commissioned by the Nightwing government to investigate the efficacy of puberty blockers and gender-affirming care for minors. Authored by Dr. Hilary Cass, who...

they claim is an expert in this subject. I'll get to that in a second. The gist of what it was claiming is that, nope, puberty blockers do anything to actually hurt the kids. They don't improve mental health. They don't protect anything. Suicides stay the same. It's all bad. Get rid of them. And actually restrict gender-affirming care, too. And also, maybe we should detransition these kids, too. It's a very...

long documents, actually a set of documents, but the primary one isn't incredibly long. I remember when it first, it came out last year. It's been in the works for the better part of the last decade, most of the 2010s. It's been in the works. I don't remember the exact year that it was initially commissioned.

But it's been something the United Kingdom government has been waiting on for a while to take action for gender-affirming care. Now, to understand the Cass report, you gotta understand a little bit about Hillary Cass. Hillary Cass is not an expert in gender-affirming care, seeing that for minors. She has never treated a transgender patient in her professional practice whatsoever. Which, thank God, because holy shit...

Oh, she is such a transphobe. Oh my God. Yes. But yeah, also utterly unqualified. Completely unqualified. While she was writing it.

Instead of talking with a single trans person as part of the consult, because she didn't do it by herself. It's way too long for anyone to do it by themselves. She got a bunch of unknown advisors to help her with this. One of which is a Finnish psychiatrist who has been campaigning against transgender rights for the past 20 years. Yep. But...

She did not have any trans people on the consulting board, not a single one. Well, of course, why would you talk to a trans person about trans healthcare? Like that's... Yeah, why would you? Trans people don't know anything. They need to be regulated and told exactly what's best for them by people who have never even talked to them before. She actually, while she was writing it, she talked to Florida healthcare officials during the Ron DeSantis administration.

for information on what to do. And these officials, by the way, they weren't just leftovers from the prior governor. They were appointed by Ron DeSantis and have literally been Jews bidding and restricting healthcare. Appointed by the guy who in the last campaign cycle had a fucking ad with a saunin' rat in it. So like, you know, the level of Nazi we're dealing with here. Ugh.

And not only did she work with them, but there's even more. She worked with numerous people who were tied to anti-trans hate groups, most notable of which is the, quote, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Oh, God.

They are probably one of the leading anti-trans groups right now. They are a Southern Poverty Law Center desiccate group. They're not very fun people. They all have a financial interest in opposing transgender rights. Many of the people with them have been quite well-paid to oppose transgender rights in courts.

There's a whole rabbit hole to get into there. The point being, she's worked with hate groups, she's worked with the Sanchez appointees, she talked to no-trans people, and she often lied. A lot. When the cast review first came out, I was one of the people who was working around the clock to try to be like, hey, let's not just assume that this is immediately accurate because we should wait for independent scholars to evaluate this. There's a lot of shady stuff going on here.

And wouldn't you know it, a lot of things were wrong. For starters, Cass misrepresented a lot of what she did for the review. It was supposed to be a systematic review into all the literature on pubic blockers. The problem is she left out a bunch of studies, especially more recent ones with better analogies.

She, in her method to grade them, basically changed it up last minute and didn't seek peer review for it from her institution's review board. She didn't seek any

ethical verification on anything. Yeah, which is amazing. It's like, do you know how fucked your report has to be to, like, your anti-trans report has to be to not be able to survive a British peer review board? Like, Jesus Christ! It's like... Yeah. Like, it's... It gets even worse because...

As time went on, a lot of journalists, myself included, found a bunch of little factual narratives there. She was misrepresenting this study. She was misrepresenting that study. Lots of little information. She at one point cited a YouTube channel that is dedicated to opposing trans rights.

Send me the YouTube channel in her fucking citations. It was a tangential citation, but the point being the fact that she even discovered that shows her allegiances. She was in the cast review.

She was trying to cast doubt on the leading medical association for trans people, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. She was like, oh no, they're actually not good. They're politically biased. I'm not though. Don't worry guys, don't investigate me. Yeah.

And in the time since, there's been a shit ton of medical experts coming forward opposing the cast review being like, no, the methodology is garbage. Not just journalists saying it. There have quite literally been hundreds of medical experts who have come forward to publicly oppose the cast review. These are people across a variety of fields, psychiatrists, pediatricians,

endocrinologists, basically everyone you could imagine who would be relevant to the study of transgender health and minors, they have come forward against it, including most of the leading researchers in the field, including people who have actually worked with trans people in a professional capacity. Yeah, wow. And this review, it's the reason the United Kingdom went on last year

to ban puberty blockers in all four countries within it. They started in England, then they spread it out to Scotland, Wales with their puberty blocker ban, and most recently, right before New Year's Day,

banned it in Northern Ireland. And because of this, so many clinics are now just not treating trans people, including transgender adults. There are now transgender adults not getting the care they need. Yeah. Because of something that didn't even discuss trans adults in a meaningful capacity. Yeah, and that's part of the thing with the cash review, right? Is that like, you know, it literally, like it could have just been

700 pages of fuck you over and over again, and it would have had the same effect. Because the point of the cast review wasn't actually to establish anything medically. It was to just have a document that you could point at and then justify any policy whatsoever. It's kind of like the way the gambits and the bell curve works, where like...

None of the actual policy recommendations follow from any of the arguments that they're making, but it exists so that you can make those policy arguments and then point to like, oh, it's because of IQ. And this is the same like bullshit IQ, like fake IQ science, right? Like there's literally IQ science used to justify the puberty blocker ban. Of course there is. They are claiming that puberty blockers reduce IQ using a study from like 2001.

And a separate study on sheep. Oh my god. A separate study on fucking sheep. How are you measuring the IQ of sheep? Like, yeah, okay, we wheeled in the sheep to do the fucking RB standard amplitude test. Like, ah, it scored real bad. We gave it a few new bloggers and it scored even worse. It's garbage science. Yeah, but one of the important things, like, conclusions here is that, like, so one of the sort of things that's happening now is that

Fucking feral attack dog. I don't know. Fucking sue me, you motherfucker. We won the revolution. Eat shit, West Streeting, who's now running British health care, issued a fucking thing to ban puberty blockers for trans youth. You know, and he cites the cash report. Do you know what's not in the cash report? A recommendation to ban puberty blockers. You know what he's fucking doing anyways? Because that's the actual sort of purpose of the report is to serve as sort of like just...

kind of like talisman you can hold up and say, ha, see, this is justified. Yeah. And can you talk about the whistleblowers and the cash report too? Because this is a thing that has seen very, very little coverage that is extremely important. Yeah. So the whistleblowers...

They literally reached out to TAS while she was writing the review. She had to be like, hey, restricting puberty blockers isn't good. And like you said, TAS did not recommend to ban puberty blockers. She called for more research into it and some restrictions, but not an outright ban. That was not anywhere within it. Even with her extremism, she's like, maybe we shouldn't restrict...

everything completely you know maybe we should just detransition some of the kids but she did not advocate for a full-on ban and she has even gone public into the media to clarify that she has does not believe in a full-on ban and yet she ignored the whistleblowers she ignored them when they came to her being like hey there's evidence that

Restricting puberty blockers is causing these deaths directly. And she didn't do anything. We don't know the specifics of that conversation. That's not public information. But you read the cast review, you're not coming away with it thinking, oh boy, she's really concerned about kids who are...

killing themselves. Yeah. You're coming away with it thinking she doesn't believe a shit and she has her own agenda. Yeah. And so, okay, we're going to take another ad break and then we're going to get to the promise second cover up and we're back for cover up number two. So, okay, we have now introduced briefly the fucking spawn of Satan himself. West reading. Can you talk a little bit more about him and the cover up that he commissioned of this? So, yeah, I mean,

When I dripped this story, it was getting no coverage. No other news outlet wanted to touch it. There were actually some journalists I talked to. I'm not going to name any names, but journalists I talked to who were trying to get their editors to publish a story

on these claims and they were like, I don't think so. I think we're going to do that. It's too speculative and things like that. People were actively shutting it down, especially in the British media. And for about a month, the NHS was ignoring this and not giving public comment. Enter Wes Strating. You said he is the head of British Healthcare Association.

um officially he's like fucking the head of the secretary of state for health and social care some shit like that but he's a sellout he's a labor guy you know the party that's supposed to be at least kind of left wing in some way and he threw trans people under the bus the first chance he got right after turf started pressing him for it west reading in all his awful awful glory looked at

Morgan's thread and thought, what if I denied this? So he commissioned Professor Lewis Albee or Albi. He is a leading suicide researcher. He at the University of Manchester,

Except, even though he's been in the field of suicide research for decades, in the past year or so, he's been cozying up to a lot of anti-trans people. Yeah. There's a shit ton of tweets of him basically talking to TERFs, repeating the, oh, we can't have men and women sports nonsense. You can witness him going down the pipeline. Yeah, he's just a TERF. Yeah, like, that's the... Yeah, he's not the TERF. He's a TERF who... I do...

does not professionally really work with trans use commit suicide. He does not discuss LGBTQ issues in his research as his primary focus. He does it for the general population. Yeah. I haven't reviewed every single study of his, so it's probably like one or two that talk about LGBTQ suicide rates, but by no means is he like the guy you go to to learn about why suicide attempts and suicide rates are a thing in the LGBTQ population.

West Street-ing of like, hey, Lewis, do you want to write a quote-unquote debunking of Malcom's Dread?

So enter the, I have it up right now, the quote, review of suicide and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust independent report. This guy, he basically claimed that, nope, there's no data to support this. Actually, Malcolm's wrong. It's the data pans it out. The data doesn't lie.

It's also funny because his argument is that trans people were already killing themselves. Yeah. Which is like, which is really fucking bleak when you think about it. But now there's a million drugs people could have with this.

For starters, the dataset is obviously too small to analyze fucking statistically. Makes no sense to try to do a fucking in-depth statistical analysis on what Mogg was claiming was 16 kids. That's not... You're not going to get shit out of that. That's not really the big issue with it. The big issue that Mogg himself actually pointed out in the same day that this came out...

Malkin pointed out that his analysis was just wrong from the start. For starters, this guy analyzed, quote, current and former patients of gender identity service. Malkin's claims weren't about that.

Baldum's Claims were about those who were on the waiting list. Which is just nuts. Like, I need to stop here for a second. It's like, the difference between, again, on the waiting list and have finished care. Like, what? Yeah. What are we doing here? Like...

God, how did this get past any media outlet? I mean, transphobia, but like, really? Yeah. Now, there's other problems with it. For one, it's kind of suspicious. So, Appleby, Appleby, however he pronounces his last name, he's gonna call him Applebees, because fuck him. Applebees, fuck it.

He used data directly provided by NHS England. Now, student viewers will notice something. Mollicum never claimed to access data directly given to him from NHS England. He was given data from whistleblowers.

Malcolm actually in this direct because he wrote a whole slide debunking this debunking and Morgan was like, he revealed that he actually a month before this was published, he reached out to NHS England to be like, hey, can I have your data?

on this subject. I've gotten a lot of information. I want to try to corroborate it. They denied him the data. They just denied him it. Yeah, if I remember incorrectly, part of it was they claimed the data didn't exist. Yeah, yeah, they claimed it didn't exist, that they just didn't have it at all. And suddenly they pulled out of thin air for good old Applebee's. There's some other ensure inconsistencies.

As we know, Mogum had receipts. He provided information on minutes directly from NHS meetings discussing these suicides. The minutes don't match up to the data Applebee's has. Applebee's is underestimating everything. And very recently, this has not gotten any media coverage at all.

Those who have been following UK politics for a while, especially trans politics, will remember the unfortunate case of Alice Lippman. She was a young trans woman who committed suicide as a result of NHS waitlists years ago. Her mother, Claire Lippman,

has been a staunch ally of trans people since. She's been one of the fewest people in the UK to be like, hey, no, I'm putting my all behind trans people. She's wonderful. She came out publicly revealing that Alice Lipman was not included in Applebee's data set, even though she should have been. She was within the years. So what this says is that Applebee's had...

Bad data that didn't include every kid. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. We don't know about that, right? It's, it's possible he had bad data. It's possible. He's also just been falsifying his data because like, again, he won't show it to us. So we have no fucking idea what, like what he was, what he was actually provided with and what he was like, you know, what, or what, what things he did to the data sets that he was given beforehand to produce what he's analyzing in his report. True.

And there was, of course, a bunch of smaller issues you could point out with Applebee's reveal. But the crux of it, it's bogus. Data doesn't match up. As you said, he could be falsifying it. He could have just been giving bad data. We don't know. He's not sharing anything. The NHS isn't sharing anything. Yeah. But all we know is that there's major inconsistencies and they're not doing shit with it. And this is where we enter everyone's fear.

favorite mainstream media, the lovely British media. Specifically, outlets like the BBC. Right, literally within the first 24 hours of this review coming out, they reported on it. At this point, my coverage has been there for a month. It...

Mogum's claims have been out there for a month. They weren't touched. And yet, the moment someone came out with the NHS trying to be like, um, actually it's false, they were rushing to report on it. Something they claimed was not newsworthy previously. Yeah. And mind you, Mogum's rebuttal to this review was posted publicly at this time, at the time that this media coverage was going up. At the BBC article breaking the story up.

The only discussion they give to basically any issues with this is just a couple brief sentences talking about Mogum's issues with it. At the beginning, they just claimed that Mogum had profound difficulties. And at the very end of the article, buried at the bottom, they gave Mogum like three sentences and...

They left out a lot of information. Like the minutes Mogum showed that he got from whistleblowers, the exact claims he got from whistleblowers, they just didn't report on it. They gave such intense coverage to Applebee's claims in the review, and then they just flat out ignored everything Mogum was saying, everything everyone else was saying. Now again, I add, sure, we don't know for sure.

whether who's telling the truth. But the NHS has an incentive to lie here. Mogham doesn't. Mogham is getting...

His career torched, basically, because of going forward about all this. And you can tell which side the BBC is on. You know, they give the game away at the end where they give the last word of this article to Ken Barker, who is the chief executive of the LGB Alliance, which is an anti-trans hate group. And, you know, they give her the last sentence saying that trans people are spreading misinformation to serve a dangerous and homophobic ideology. And I, like, quite specifically, like,

Kate Barker, if you ever fucking listen to this, fuck you, eat shit. Like, this is direct evidence of the BBC's fucking political line here. Because, again, they're giving the closing statement to a group that is literally just an anti-trans hate group. Because the BBC is the institutional fucking media arm of the British government, and the British government is institutionally transphobic. Yeah. And I'm not going to say that the information right now we have is definitive. That's not the problem. The problem is it's been being investigated.

Any non-biased fucking NHS, any non-biased British would look at Morgan's claims and think, oh, wow, we should look into this. We should independently verify it.

Yeah, we should try to cooperate everything saying or at least see if he's accurate, which which again and I want to put this up. This is the job of a journalist. The job of a journalist is not to fucking literally reprint a press report from fucking like commissioned by the fucking government. Your job is to go find the fucking whistleblowers and talk to people. Did the British did the fucking BBC do this? No, of course they didn't because they're fucking PR hacks. Yep. They're PR hacks for a transgenocide.

And like, quite frankly, and I will say this on the fucking record because I'm not a journalist. Fuck these people like this. This is what the BBC wants. Like, like fucking dead trans kids in a cover up is what they institutionally what this fucking organization wants because they fucking hate trans people and they are completely OK with all of this shit happening as long as long as they fucking get to do another story about how fucking J.K. Rowling is a brave truth teller or whatever.

Like, this is what these people want. I agree. And I also agree with your statement. The British media can all go fuck themselves, and I hope they rob them hell. Yeah. I don't know how you can, as a journalist, someone trained to prioritize the truth and nothing but the truth, look at all this and think, hmm, there's something suspicious going on here. There's nothing that warrants further investigation. Even if Malcolm's claims are false, right? Even if everything Malcolm says...

He made it up. He's an influential guy. He has been covered by the media for his lawsuits with the Good Law Project countless times before. He's made national headlines there. And they don't investigate this at all. Like, they're rushing to report on everything fucking J.K. Rowling says, everything some random fucking TERF is saying, Maya Angelou...

whatever turf you want to run. Oh yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm realizing there are people listening to this. I don't, maybe you're still listening to the episode and you don't know about the JK Rowling turf stuff, but like to, to, to get an understanding of like how vehement of like an anti-trans hate figure she is like anti-trans groups literally wear her face as a mask. Like I'm, I'm not joking. She, she, she fucking retweeted them. An anti-trans group literally wearing like printed out copies of her face as a mask. Like,

Like, that is the status that she has in the anti-trans world, right? Like, and the BBC fucking loves her. Everything she does. And she's not even an expert in anything. She's a fucking author of children's books. Like...

You know, it's like, well, we'll talk to the authors of children's books. Will we talk to trans people? No. I mean, that's what everything about this is like. The BBC never talked to a trans person. They did talk to an anti-trans hate group, though. So, you know, you know, you know what fucking side of this is considered valid by the British political media establishment.

Oh, and also at the bottom, and like, I know that they're doing this because this is just like standard policy for like, if you're doing a story about suicide, but the very end of the article is a link to a bunch of suicide and crisis hotlines. So one last fuck you to every trans person reading this.

Yeah. But the one-two punch of we quoted an anti-trans hate figure, here is a suicide hotline is like real. Yeah, it's a fucking insult. It just gets me how they didn't report on these claims at all when they were initially made.

Like, it didn't even have to be a big story. Like, most fucking outlets I've written for would have just reported as like, oh, this guy said this. We're waiting more information. Okay, whatever. It wouldn't be a good reporting, but it'd be the bare minimum. They didn't even do that. They rushed to just report

repeat whatever the fuck a commissioned review from the government said that's more reputable I guess than you know leading advocates who actually cited their sources instead of just throwing shit at the wall

Yep. And I think that's as good of a place as Endy to stop unless you have anything else you want to make sure people know about about this. No, I think that's it. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And where can people find you and your work? Yeah. Thank you for having me. I...

I can primarily be found on Blue Sky. That is the main place I post now. Yeah, I'm at mirrolazine.bluesky.social. Beyond that, you'll probably see one of my articles published around because I am constantly working my ass off. Yeah, so this is a bit of a kidapid here. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's still time for this not to happen here. So...

Yeah, go organize and go make West Streeting and the BBC have a bad day. Hell yeah.

I'm sure you know that identity theft is a growing problem, and it's not just your grandma who's at risk. It can happen to anyone, even the rich and famous. Victims of identity theft include famous actors, politicians, talk show hosts, and one very famous golfer. None of us are safe. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock U.S.-based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf.

guaranteed, or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the million-dollar protection package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft.

You can't control how diligent others are with your personal information, but with LifeLock, you can help protect it. Act now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code ICHH or go to lifelock.com slash ICHH for 40% off. Terms apply. Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen.

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, who the fuck is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay. That is your Capricorn talking.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice. Bloody Mary mix. Coconut. Grapefruit. Diet freaking cola for crying out loud. The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. That is so true. You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company. White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

You're a hustler. You get things done, but you don't always do things for yourself.

With JLo Beauty, it takes just a few minutes a day to look like facials are a regular part of your routine. JLo Beauty's Fresh and Flawless Skincare Kit includes six skincare products that work as hard as you do. They'll hustle to brighten, firm, and hydrate your complexion morning and night. This skincare kit is a one-and-done solution that is clinically proven to visibly tighten and lift for instant and long-lasting results. Cleanse, treat, moisturize, protect—

The fresh and flawless skincare kit does it all. See why the kit's a bestseller today. Visit jlobeauty.com slash deluxe and get an extra 25% off your first shipment plus free gifts with code deluxe. If you're not satisfied, return the bottles within 60 days for your money back. See the website for details. That's jlobeauty.com slash deluxe to get that J-Lo glow.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today, here to bring you more terrible news about migration and deportation. And I'm joined to share that terrible news by Gillian Bruckhell, a journalist who has been tracking immigration.

deportation flights to Djibouti. Hi, Gillian. Hi, how are you, James? I'm good. Well, amidst the crumbling of everything, it's wonderful. Yeah, I mean, this is terrible news, but I'm also very excited to be in the Cool Zone universe. I love all of the shows. Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the Cool Zone universe. It's the Sophie Lichterman comic universe. Oh my God, such a fangirl. Okay. The United States government

government attempted to deport 12 men, none of whom are Libyan, to Libya on the 7th of May, right? It got so far as to take them to the airport, right? In San Antonio. In San Antonio, Texas. And then thanks to a court injunction, those people were not taken to Libya.

Those people were instead returned to a detention center where, as listeners of the show will now be aware, they were informed that they were being deported, renditioned, however you want to say it, to South Sudan. This news broke a couple of days ago now, I think Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon, yeah. Yeah.

And that was when you were able to begin using your OSINT aviation knowledge to

looking for this flight that was taking them to South Sudan. Because at the time, the United States government was claiming the flight was classified or a state secret. And even in court, the judge wasn't aware if the flight was in the air, on the ground. Could it turn around? The judge in the end said he wasn't going to ask it to turn around. So I wonder if you could walk listeners through this.

the timeline of this deportation and then how you were able to find out of millions of, maybe not millions, thousands of planes in the sky, the one that was taking these people to, as it turned out, to Djibouti. Sure. Yeah. So I've been a journalist for 15 years, but before that I was a flight attendant. And, you know, I'm an av geek, an aviation enthusiast. The shorthand, you know, the hashtag for that is av geek. And

And so, you know, I'm always looking at Flightradar24. It's an app where you can track different aircraft. And so when I heard that the flight might still be in the air, I just thought, oh, I wonder if I can find it. So I went, first I went on to Flightradar24.

Flight Radar 24. And first I looked at all of the departures out of San Antonio for like the previous 24 hours. Since the previous flight that was supposed to go to Libya that was stopped, that departed from San Antonio. And so I was looking there and, you know, didn't see anything, just commercial flights, very obviously military flights. And I know they've used...

military aircraft sometimes, but I said, I'm not going to try and touch that right now. I want to see if it's one of these charter companies, you know, Global X, Avelo, that have been doing these deportation flights. Can you explain those to people? Because I don't think everyone's aware of those. So these are, you know, commercial carriers, but they're contracting with DHS and

to deport people on their aircraft. So, you know, the A320 that you take across the country is sometimes used to deport people to other countries. And the main companies that are doing that right now are Avelo, Global X, I think Omni does some of them sometimes,

And I should say, there are a lot of people, especially on Blue Sky, a lot of avgeeks, who are tracking and cataloging all of these flights. I wasn't even aware of that community until I started looking for it. So...

I didn't see anything, you know, in San Antonio. And then I realized, oh, these people had been transferred to Port Isabel in the last few weeks. So they would have departed out of Harlingen Airport, which is nearby. It's, you know, deep, deep South Texas. And so I looked at departures out of Harlingen. It's a small airport. They have like

10 departures a day, and it's generally puddle jumpers from one small Texas town to another small Texas town, you know? And there was one Global X flight to Miami the day before. The timeline wasn't exactly right, but I know that DHS, you know, has been slow to notify attorneys. So I thought, well, maybe this is the flight, and they just didn't tell the attorneys till the next day.

So then I spent way too much time looking at all of the departures out of Miami to see if there were any Global X flights. I saw a few things, but nothing heading across the Atlantic. And so at that point, Flight Radar 24 will show you publicly available information on flights. It won't show you all flights.

But there is another, you know, for like deep, deep avgeeks, there's another website called ADS-B Exchange. And this is a pool of all feeder data all over the world of all aircraft in the air that aviation enthusiasts maintain themselves.

And they will have military flights that aren't going to be on Flightradar24. They also have a lot more information about planes that have a LAD designation, which...

stands for Limited Aviation Data Displayed. I don't know how much you want me to explain about that. Yeah, explain. I think it's interesting for people. Sure. So a LAD designation is used most often for private jet owners like celebrities and the ultra-rich. And basically it means that they have an extra layer of privacy for their movements in their private jets. So if you try and find...

a specific private jet on flight radar 24, it won't come up. You know, so like the, the tail of this plane that did the Djibouti flight is N5AA88AT.

If you search for that in Flightradar24, you won't see it. Nothing will come up. However, if you know what you're looking for, if you know like, oh, I think the flight is heading to Djibouti right now, you can see on Flightradar24 that there's a Gulfstream 5 headed to Djibouti right now, but the registration information is obscured. It's not like that on the ADS-B. You

You can see it. Yeah, your filters have a lot more power, basically. Okay. You know, your search terms.

They're going to go around different designations. And so some people hate that. You know, Taylor Swift had beef with some guy a couple of years ago because she has a lad designation on her private jet. He was using ADS-B exchange to post her flights, you know, ostensibly to shame her for her carbon footprint. But then she like threatened to sue him. And she was like, I have stalkers. Like, I don't want them to know when I'm landing in Nashville.

You know, not going to get into that, but you know, that's basically the lad designation and ADS-B doesn't care. And so I went on ADS-B and I said, well, since I've already seen all the publicly available flights, let me just look at lad flights. Okay. And so I set that filter and that took it down to a couple hundred planes in the air. And I honestly just got lucky. I just started clicking on planes.

Because I don't know how to search for all departures out of one airport on ADS-B Exchange. I'm sure avgeeks who are better at it do. But I just started clicking on planes. And I clicked, I think like the third plane that I clicked on had taken off out of Harlingen a couple hours earlier and was over the middle of the Atlantic. Yeah. Which is not a usual departure for Harlingen. Right. Yeah. It's quite unusual. And so...

You know, I posted on Blue Sky to the other avgeeks who were looking for it. I think this might be it. You know, it's a private jet with a LA designation that took off from this very obscure airport and is traveling internationally. Nothing else really fit the profile. Right.

So we all started looking at it. Another reporter named Jacqueline Sweet. You know, I looked up the registration. It's registered to a man named Igor Smirnov, which there are a lot of Igor Smirnovs. Yeah, it's a pretty common name. He's not the chess guy. He's not the Moldovan guy. He appears to have once owned an airline in Uzbekistan and has been in the U.S. for some time.

So he has, you know, this private jet. And then Jacqueline Sweet looked up that, yes, he has DHS contracts. Then the other thing was, I just Googled the tail number. M588AT. One of the first things that came up was that this was the private jet

Yeah. Yeah.

like, I think, I think this might be it. Yeah. So that's when I posted, once I realized the Brittany Griner thing, then I posted it and other people, other avgeeks were saying, yeah, I think that might be it. And then, you know, Jacqueline got more info on, on the contracts and, and,

And so this is for about two hours we watched it. And JJ and DC said, I think it's about to land in Shannon. And, you know, soon enough it descended and landed at Shannon. Yep. So Shannon Airport in Ireland is...

a frequent refueling stop for the U.S. military. And, you know, that's something that a lot of Irish people really fucking hate. Yeah. Not a U.S. base, to be clear, if people aren't aware. Yeah, it's not a U.S. base. This is U.S. military that are just refueling. But they're refueling to, you know, do a lot of things that the Irish...

are not okay with. And so there's, there's an organization there called Shannon watch who, you know, they're watching all these us activities and, you know, pressuring the government to, uh,

stop this. So, you know, I tried to email them before the plane even landed. And I don't know if it was user error on my end or, you know, if I don't know why it didn't work, but they didn't get the message. I only found that out like half an hour ago. Um, yeah.

But so I messaged them and then I like messaged a couple friends in Ireland, like, hey, wake up, wake up, call somebody, you know, but there's 2.30 in the morning. I'm glad my friends were asleep. And yeah, so...

I don't know how much I wanted to get into my personal hedging or my journey, but I used to be a neutral, objective journalist at the Washington Post for 10 years, and I left a year and a half ago, and I've been enjoying being an opinionated journalist.

I've been writing a book, but, you know, there's a difference between being an opinionated journalist and actually interfering in a story. And so I kind of hedged for a minute of like, should I do anything else? Should I actively participate in trying to stop this flight? You know, am I not going to get a columnist job someday if I do that? Yeah. You know, I'm ashamed to say that, but I have to tell the truth. That's what I thought.

And then I just decided, you know, screw it. I have to do the right thing. So I called the Shannon Airport Police. I called the Shannon Garda. They call the police the Garda in Ireland. And I talked to, you know, whatever man answered for like a minute. And then he was like, let me, let me, you know, knock you up the chain. And I was forwarded to someone else to...

woman who, you know, she sounded smart, urgent, interested. It sounded like she was taking notes. It sounded like she was taking this seriously. And I was saying, there is a plane with this tail number that landed 15 minutes ago that may have people on board who are

have been illegally removed from the United States, who have not consented to go to their destination, who are being sent to South Sudan when they are not from South Sudan,

You know, and I made clear that like, I don't know that this is the right plane, but I'm pretty sure that it is. This plane has been used before for U.S. government business. And I said, I know that our judges' orders don't matter in your sovereign country, but a judge has said this is not allowed and it might be happening. And I don't know what your human trafficking laws are like.

But you should know that if there are human trafficking or kidnapping laws in Ireland that might apply to this, like maybe check the plane. And, you know, I didn't record the call and I didn't take notes, but I did.

Do you recall her saying that she was trying to send someone to check the plane and she was, you know, taking detailed notes? What are their nationalities? How many are there? Yeah. You know, and so, you know, the call lasted 13 minutes and then I waited, you know, was talking with the other avgeeks on Blue Sky who were at this point, you know, this is around 10 p.m.

it's getting a little late. And then, yeah, I don't know what happened, but the plane taxied to a parking stamp near the terminal for a while. And I thought, Oh, it's been, it's been turned off. It's parked for the night. I don't think they're going to let him leave. And then the plane took off. It was two hours after it landed. Um,

Yeah. Yeah. And it went to Djibouti where it remains at the time of recording. Yeah. It's been raised since you first kind of identified this plane. It's been raised. I talked to Darla, so like an Irish member of parliament raised it today. I saw there was an exchange about it. I spoke to...

Paul Murphy, who's the TD for Dublin Southwest. Paul gave me a statement I'm just going to read here. The very least the Irish government must do is to inform the US authorities that no more deportation flights are permitted to use our airspace and our airports. We must not facilitate this inhumane and illegal deportation policy.

So it does seem like even if nothing was done in this instance, hopefully this isn't something that will be able to happen again. I know, as you said, people have been upset about that use of Shannon. I think they used Knock Airport as well for a long time because the US used them a lot in its war on terror. And Ireland has been a neutral country for a long time. And there's a feeling that it compromises that among some people. But this raises a really interesting question.

question for those of us who are following the deportations, right? Which is like, we'd been thinking that it was happening on military or commercial flights, like you said, but there's this possibility that these smaller planes are being used for deportation. And like,

That's very concerning. It means we could have missed things. Absolutely. It also shows the timeline here is extraordinarily rapid, right? Like from the people being informed at 6 p.m., I believe it's 6 p.m. Pacific. I've been spending a lot of time on Pacer this week. Yeah.

Good old Pacer. Yep. A lot of the money generated by the adverts in this show on Pacer. So at 6.35 Central Time, NM, who is one of the Burmese people in this class action lawsuit, right? So the lawsuit...

a number of people trying to get a tentative restraining order against being sent to South Sudan now, previously Libya. At 6.35 central time, that person's lawyer was told that they had an order of removal. At 9 a.m. Pacific, the lawyer had scheduled a video conference, but at 8.27 Pacific, they were told that that person had already been removed. Yeah. So pretty fast and like,

perhaps that's why they're using these like

Can you give an idea of like, I guess a lot of people wouldn't have flown on a small aircraft, but these are quite like, this isn't a usual thing, right? No, this is a luxury jet. Yeah. That, you know, is moonlighting as a prisoner vessel for kidnappers. And I just, I'm so struck by the dichotomy of the luxury of this vessel, transporting them

to hell to a country where they do not speak the language they have no family or friends to you know a prison where people are being tortured that is about to descend into civil war may already be in civil war i mean the dichotomy of that is so striking to me yeah and so perverse yeah perverse is the right word it is like it's uh perversely ludicrous i don't know like it's

So striking to me as well that somebody who has the financial means to own a private luxury jet to fly themselves around the world is also profiting off the rendition of people who are trying now to plead in convention against torture, right? They will be tortured if they are flown via luxury private jet.

to South Sudan. And the South Sudanese government seems to have stated that it would just return them to their countries from which they have withholding of removal in the first place, which is why the U.S. can't send them to their countries. Right. That's why the U.S. hasn't done it. Right. It's like, you know, it's a diplomatic pickle, but like the solution isn't, we'll just, you know, dump them somewhere else. Right. Yeah. And then have someone else do our dirty work, like send them back. Right.

You found these contracts. Do you know how much DHS is spending per flight on these things? I have no idea. I mean, that is something that other reporters, I think, are going to be better sources of that information. I've really just begun tracking these flights. Right. You know, I like to track flights all the time just because I have ADHD. You know, it's...

A wonderful activity if you're neurodivergent to spend some time on ADS-B exchange. But like I said, I was just like, I wonder if I can find this plane. Yeah. And I did. Yeah. And that has opened up a whole...

world to me of, you know, really dedicated people. Tom Cartwright is one and then JJ and DC is another. He wants to remain anonymous who have been tracking these planes for some time. And I'm really inspired by them and, you know, want to join them and help them.

We see a number of issues, questions that we can answer with these things, right? The United States deporting people to Venezuela. Well, there are lots of entities in Venezuela which are under sanctions, right? So, like, how is it doing that? Who is it paying to do that? Like, where is our taxpayer money going? How much is it costing...

to achieve this rendition of a dozen people. Right. Who at the current time, VAR recording, which is Thursday afternoon Pacific time, the 22nd of May. There you go. I just checked the pacer again, which is what I do all day now. And Judge Murphy's most recent order had clarified that these people would have 10 days to,

to present their reasonable fear, right? So to present their reasonable fear and convention against torture proceedings that they would be, they could face torture, right? If they were sent to these places. If the Department of Homeland Security determined that they didn't have credible fear, then they would have 15 days to again petition for reopening of their migration case, right?

so that's 25 days for those who are counting, that these people will presumably now have to be accommodated in Djibouti. The DHS is claiming that they can do all these interviews and that will necessitate translators. Like one of them speaks Karenne.

not a language that we have i mean that there are lots of korean-speaking people in the united states but it's uh you know it's not language that many immigration lawyers speak so i'm guessing there will have to be a translator provided and so all that is now happening in chibuti and like we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't been able to track these flights right and so it it's a very interesting way of of approaching this and i think like

Increasingly, the government recently lost a number of FOIA requests, I guess. Public records do not move at the same speed as a news cycle does. I file a lot of public records requests.

Most of them, I don't get anything back. The ones that I do... Oh, they can take like eight years sometimes. Yeah, literally. Yeah. I mean, I have public records requests that I made under the previous Trump administration that I believe are still ongoing. Yeah, it's infuriatingly slow. You have a right to inspect these records, but you don't have a right to inspect them at any particular time period. And so doing this kind of open source tracking...

offers us a window into this deportation machine that the government is building, right? Exactly. In cooperation with the super rich, like using your taxpayer resources. I wonder if people are interested in doing this, like how would you suggest they kind of get going?

They're good explainers out there. I mean, the first thing I would do is that I would follow Tom Cartwright and JJNDC on Blue Sky. Then, you know, get the Flightradar24 app. You can see a lot of the charter planes online.

on that app. ADS-B exchange is pretty buggy and hard to use if you don't have any aviation experience at all, but you know, you can learn. And yeah, I mean, like I said, if you're neurodivergent, this is a terrific activity to just kind of like massage your brain and hyper-focus and, you know, putting it to good purpose to,

maybe witness or maybe even stop some of these activities from happening, you know, would be great. Yeah, no, I think that's like there are countries which have strong

legislation that could possibly prevent these you know these either planes transiting their airspace or if they're refueling there as you as you said in ireland like perhaps prevent these people being renditioned to somewhere where they might face torture i think it's a really valuable absolutely thing to try like we should try whatever we can right now yeah and i mean now that ireland knows this is happening you know i don't know what happened

with the Garda on Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning. I don't know if they were able to board the plane, if they tried to stop it and couldn't. I have no idea. Now that they know this is happening, maybe they can look a little bit deeper into their laws and regulations and find a justification so that if this happens again, they can be prepared to respond. I know that the Irish are...

exemplars in human rights. And so, you know, if anybody is going to do something, it might be them. Yeah, yeah. I know RTE are now camped out at the airport waiting for the plane to come back, which... Yeah, I know. I wish they had checked with the avgeeks first because the plane's not on the way. Yeah, no. It's not in here. It hasn't left the building. Look at the court proceedings. It's going to be three weeks. But yeah, it's great. You've made this an issue there, which...

I think it helps. Like all this stuff makes a difference. I mean, I just, I want the Irish people to realize because none of their, their,

lawmakers have said it yet that Irish authorities knew when the plane was on the ground at Shannon, that there were people who are possibly being illegally detained on this specific airplane. I just want them to know that. Yeah. You know, and I'm,

I hear that their public information laws are also not great, but the police there recorded the call. So there's a recording somewhere if they can find it. Right. I guess I can't find anyone who can answer the satisfactory question of like whose jurisdiction the plane is under. Yeah. I mean, and it really depends too. Like was the plane parked in the international transit area? Was it in a place where, um,

you know the Garda didn't even have authority I have no idea right you know yeah these are all questions we can now ask because we know right that it was there and I think that's very valuable Gillian where can people follow your work so you publish this on your ghost newsletter first right

Yeah, I'm writing a book, so I post extremely sporadically. But I do have a ghost newsletter. It's hardghistory, because it's hardgillian. hardghistory.ghost.io And then I'm on Blue Sky at G. Brock Hill. Nice. Do you want to plug your book while you have the opportunity? I mean, there's not like a pre-order link. I'm very much still writing it. But, you know...

My agent will be mad at me for saying this. The working title is People Didn't Know What Was Wrong Back Then, The Lie at the Heart of American History. I will look forward to reading that. Thank you. Thanks for having me, James. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. What?

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice. Bloody Mary mix. Coconut. Grapefruit. Diet freaking cola for crying out loud. The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. That is so true. You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company. White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

You're a hustler. You get things done, but you don't always do things for yourself.

With JLo Beauty, it takes just a few minutes a day to look like facials are a regular part of your routine. JLo Beauty's Fresh and Flawless Skincare Kit includes six skincare products that work as hard as you do. They'll hustle to brighten, firm, and hydrate your complexion morning and night. This skincare kit is a one-and-done solution that is clinically proven to visibly tighten and lift for instant and long-lasting results. Cleanse, treat, moisturize, protect—

The fresh and flawless skincare kit does it all. See why the kit's a bestseller today. Visit jlobeauty.com slash deluxe and get an extra 25% off your first shipment plus free gifts with code deluxe. If you're not satisfied, return the bottles within 60 days for your money back. See the website for details.

That's jlobeauty.com slash deluxe to get that J-Lo glow. When you're in HR, it can feel like nothing is easy. From payroll to PTO, from onboarding to benefits, and everything in between. It's a constant juggle of tasks, systems, and spreadsheets. But your HR software? That's the easy part. Meet Bamboo HR. Trusted by over 34,000 companies, it handles all your HR tasks.

payroll benefits and time tracking so your team and your company can grow as fast as well bamboo and bamboo HR software is actually easy to use one simple system that pulls all your people data together in one place so you can ditch scattered systems and wasted hours on tasks that should only take minutes because when HR is easier you can focus on what matters most your people

HR is hard. Bamboo HR is easy. Ready to simplify all your HR tasks? For a limited time, get a $100 Visa gift card when you complete a free demo at BambooHR.com slash gift card. Again, that's BambooHR.com slash gift card. Terms and conditions apply.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined once again by Kirsten Zittlau. We've heard from her before. She's an immigration lawyer who takes asylum cases. I'm going to talk about the asylum system or, I guess, what's left of it today. Kirsten is representing somebody I met in the Darien Gap, Primrose, who you've heard from before. So we're going to talk about that case, and then we're going to talk a little bit about

ICE Detentions Inside Immigration Court. Welcome to the show, Kirsten. Thank you, James. It's good to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming. I know you're extremely busy. Can you explain to us, like, the asylum system is essentially coming to an end, right? We are not getting new asylum cases. What is the situation for people in the asylum system right now? Yes, that's a correct statement, James. So there are

No new asylum cases. In other words, people who cross at the southern border are now detained only to be removed immediately, basically, or as soon as possible under what's called 212F authority. It's under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Trump has used this authority, which basically broadly says that if the president finds a certain class of immigrants or the entry of immigrants would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, they may by proclamation suspend all entry of said immigrants. So that was the purpose and the effect of the executive order discussing the invasion at the border and all the other executive orders discussing the

invasions and criminal aspects such as cartels and Tren de Aragua, which we all know now, is the justification for, alleged justification for just shutting it down at the border. So whereas people used to get credible fear interviews or were paroled into the United States to be allowed to fight an asylum case,

None of that is happening anymore. And people are, if anything, only screened for what's called Convention Against Torture screenings to just determine like, hey, are they going to be tortured by their government?

or with the acquiescence of their government if they return to their home country. But even then, they are not allowed to remain in the United States or fight any relief in the United States. That just means that they will be deported to a third country. So that was the situation, like when we saw the Iranians sitting in the hotel room in Panama. That's what happened there, most likely. So that's the situation at the southern border. Whoever is still in the United States, you know, who came in before Inauguration Day is still allowed to fight their case as of now.

but there are no new asylum cases, essentially. Right. So for those people fighting their case,

the asylum system was already an uphill battle right and it became harder after biden's asylum ban um it was already harder after title 42 like people who listen to the show would have known about the people who crossed in 2023 and of course they would have followed those people who i met in the darien gap some of whom very few of whom crossed before january i've

literally one I believe that I'm aware of. Can you explain what the asylum system is like for those people now? Yeah, so I think the biggest two factors affecting asylum cases these days is what you just referred to, which is the asylum ban called the circumvention against lawful pathways that barred people essentially from asylum if they did not use CBP1.

the application to apply for an appointment, which, of course, only allowed, I think, $1,500 a day or something absurd, forcing most people to cross unlawfully. So that's still very much in place. The litigation has been stalled forever. There's no hope of, you know, I don't think there's no movement on that. I haven't seen or heard anything. Most likely intentionally, because when Trump did a similar ban, it was overturned immediately. So this is like a new strategy that we're seeing where things are just lagging in court.

Right.

This is all, I think, strategic. So that circumvention against lawful pathways ban is still very much an impediment. You know, we all, of course, argue that every migrant in Mexico was in danger and thus qualifies for the exception to the CLP that their life was in danger and that they couldn't afford to wait the many, many months for the CBP1 appointment.

But judges, it's been met with mixed reviews. They generally like to see somebody basically near death for the exception to apply. And of course, the immigration bar argues that all migrants are basically under threat of death. I mean, any cartel or even immigration official contact in Mexico could have been a death sentence very easily, as we all know. So that's a big thing affecting the latest thing that's also being implemented as a result of this

Cartel terrorist organization designation is, you know, where it's not just the cartels, it's MS-13 and 10 de Aragua.

is that there's what's called a trig bar that's applied then also to asylum. And the bar is basically about material support of any of these groups. But it's construed to an absurd degree where even if you made a bowl of food for some Maras under duress, or you made payment because your kid was about to be killed, that's considered material support and you're barred from asylum. Jeez, I wondered if they would do that, yeah. So we're seeing that too.

Other than that, I mean, I have been fortunate to win asylum for folks under Trump 2.0. I mean, I don't know how long that'll still last, but judges are still, you know, granting cases. So I'm glad to see that. Yeah. So that's generally what it's looked like these past four months for asylees. Okay. And yeah, I think it's really important that we do, there are still possible victories to be had within the court system. And asylum is one of the places where like,

There's no more getting on the train, I guess. The people who are on the train now, we can and people should if they have the financial means. And we'll talk about how they can do that later. People should support those people because there's no one else who can go through that system. And there are people who have gone through horrific things to get here and horrific things in the places that they came from and

Even if it's not everyone we would like to keep safe, we should do everything we can to keep those people safe. 100 percent. You know, just to say, I mean, and funding somebody's legal fees. I mean, an attorney makes all the difference in navigating these types of issues that I just talked about and other issues in presenting your case. I mean, asylum cases are still incredibly difficult to win. And so representation of counsel is often key.

Yeah, I think that the rates of success for people who don't have counsel are dramatically lower. I haven't looked on track recently, but you can normally find that on the, I think track is no longer the University of Syracuse, but it's a place where you can find information, statistics, etc.

let's talk about one of those cases, if that's okay. And obviously, you know, we won't intervene in anyone's privacy any more than we have to. But like, I want to talk about Primrose. Primrose is a Zimbabwean woman who I met in Pahojikito when I was in the Darien Gap reporting on my series. People heard from her in the series. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water. Then I can just go. Both the genuine staffs.

Really, really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all. It's not very... I don't even recommend someone to say, use that and give. No. And even myself, I did know about it. Yeah. I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God...

I don't know my family and my family they don't know where I am right now but I make it yeah now you're here thank God I make it you're safe yeah

She is now in the asylum process, right? Can you explain a little bit about like where she is in the process? And I will eventually do a scripted series on this, but like, I guess, can we get an update on her situation and how it's progressing? Absolutely. So I came into the case about, I want to say a month or two ago, she had somebody supporting her, a friend living in Texas and,

And that situation, a living situation has changed, I believe, which is also not the worst thing. She will be moving with a friend to Southern California or moving in with a friend rather, but just...

The situation is very different in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and those types of states, markedly so. And her case is a good example of that. And there's a reason that people like Mahmoud Khalil and many others are sent to detention centers in that area because it's in the Fifth Circuit, first of all, which is a widely renowned place.

to be not a favorable circuit, a court of appeals to immigrants. But more so than that, even the judges themselves are very different from what we would encounter in California, for example. So my first encounter with the judge was, you know, and this is all virtual, I submitted a motion to appear for her. She had a master calendar hearing in June. I submitted a motion to appear for that telephonically.

explaining I was representing her at low or no cost, you know, whatever funds could be raised. And could I please appear for a status? It's a status type conference.

telephonically. And that motion was met with a really strange response. I don't know, to this day, I don't really know exactly. It was sort of approved, but then moot because eventually a final court hearing was set. So that's where we're at right now. She has a final court next year and about a year and a couple months. But in ruling on my WebEx motion, I was emailed the order of the judge along with a notice that primers should self-deport.

So judges are sending out these notices with routine other orders in cases where the immigrant has counsel, is fighting their case. Yeah. It's obvious they're fighting their case. Jesus. And yeah, so it's one of the things where you just feel very strongly about.

this administration's influence are they obliged to do that or is that a choice that the judge is making not at all and in fact it's completely inappropriate so all of us are okay the immigration bar is taking a different approach to it you know some are filing motions to recuse telling the judges hey you need to recuse yourself you're you're a non-neutral judge to send this out in the middle the case is absurd it's a due process violation they're entitled to a neutral judge yeah

I think my approach would be more one of playing dumb because often this has happened. The system, if you will, of ECAS, the electronic system that we use for court immigration filing systems that Elon Musk briefly had access to or whatever was going on there. But anyways...

I digress. You know, we'll send out automatic notices with the emails, with the judge's order. So my approach, I think, will be to give the judges the benefit of the doubt and ask them if this was an electronic notice. And if they say no, then I've gotten it on the record. And if they deny the case, I have that in there for the appeal. But yeah, it's happening all over the country with all sorts of different judges. And it's definitely something that we're grappling with right now. And it's just it's very ballsy. Yeah, for sure.

A judge to say, hey, leave the country. And oh, by the way, I'm a neutral arbiter. Yeah. I mean, what's the point of having the judge or having the whole process, right? If then they're going to declare this clear bias. Yeah, it's absurd. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, it's such a violation of due process rights. And I know everybody in this country now knows the importance of due process, whereas before only attorneys threw that term around. But no, I mean, this stuff really matters, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And then also another thing that happened in Primrose's case is that when you have a work permit clock, right, which is another absurd thing for asylees, that once they file their asylum application, they have to wait 150 days before they can apply for asylum.

a work permit, and of course they're expected to be independently wealthy during those five months or, you know, or starve or I don't know what they're expected to do. Yeah, rely on the generosity of others. Exactly. So if you do something like try to change venue or a motion to continue, if you do something in your case that the judge perceives as not moving the case along and rather like kind of trying to stall it or possibly pausing it or slow it down, the judge will stop the work permit clock.

The days and it's a whole thing. So Primrose's was stopped because the judge wanted her to get an attorney. So usually when the case is set for a final hearing, that code, adjournment code, they call it. I know from we have the access to the codes and what stops the clock and what doesn't. And it always restarts the clock because you moved your case along because you're setting it for trial. It's obviously moving your case along. Hers was not restarted.

for whatever reason. And my only remedy would be to write some court administrator who may or may not ever respond. I can't even go to the judge about this. You know, it's absurd. So that's just the situation that

one asylum seeker is dealing with in Texas. So you can only imagine what goes on in detentions, detained cases in those states. Yeah, or people who don't have counsel. Getting that self-deportation notice if you don't have counsel, you could assume that you are just obliged to leave, that your process is over. 100%. And there's no legal basis for the judge to be issuing that. In fact, it's completely...

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Like it kind of nullifies the whole system. And plus, I should mention real quick that it's disingenuous and harmful and that with these, you know, this administration on purpose isn't telling people with the thousand dollars, take the thousand dollars in self-deport and, you know, we'll pay for your flight and all this stuff. What they're not telling people is that when you leave, you're then subject to a deportation order. And that comes with a 10 year bar. Yeah.

This is not mentioned, and that's a big deal. Yes, yeah. I mean, it seems even like

I think the executive order said permanently leave the United States, right? Well, it did. And then but then they switched tactics a little bit with the app to self-deport, saying like, you know, leave now, leave now so you have a chance to come back later or something like that. Right. But, you know, without mentioning that, hey, no, you're barred from the United States for 10 years. And if you ever return unlawfully, then you're subject to a whole series of

I mean, it's just there's all these warnings that need to come with the deportation order that are strategically left out of all the administration's latest messaging on this topic. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Let's take a break for advertisements here and then we'll come back.

All right, we are back. And we've spoken about these self-deportation orders, right? For other people who have entered more recently, right, entered within the last two years, this has been happening, we're recording on the 22nd for the last two days now. It seems like ICE is dismissing the cases against them and then detaining them directly in court, if I'm correctly informed.

Yes. So this has been happening periodically throughout the past four months. But in the past few days, like this week, it's been dramatically ramped up. Like right now, as we're recording this, ISIS arresting people in the downtown San Diego court and also courts throughout the country. It's been reported everywhere happening widely this week. And this is another thing the administration said they were going to do and is doing. I mean, you know, they're doing what they said they were going to do. Yeah.

And it's to use what's called 235 authority more broadly. So INA Section 235 applies to people who entered within less than two years, like you said, and they can be then subject to what's called expedited removal.

That means that they have to take a credible fear interview and be detained and that they only get to fight a case if they pass their credible fear interview. And then they do not qualify for an immigration judge bond. So they only get out if ICE lets them out, which, of course, ICE is letting nobody out. So the administration wants to have people detained under this authority, this 235 authority, as much as possible to have them have to fight their case detained and either lose the will to do so.

And or not be able to afford an attorney because detained cases move along a lot quicker and are very costly as well for that reason. So what they're doing is anybody who was here two years or less but was paroled in. So they're in the regular immigration court proceedings. They got out there under 240 proceedings. That's called paroling.

So DHS attorneys in court are terminating those proceedings. They are asking the judge to terminate the 240 proceedings. So then that case is closed and then they immediately restart a case under Section 235. And the second they do that, the person is subject to mandatory detention and ICE is right there in the courthouse to arrest them and detain them. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought ICE couldn't arrest people in California. Is that California state courts, not federal courts, which are in California? I believe so. And colleagues and I have been talking about this. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but I think also the nature of these proceedings, like the 235 proceeding, like you are mandatory detention, like you were taken into custody. It's

It's as if you just crossed the border and, you know, are taken into custody. It's treated like that type of situation, like no warrant is necessary, I don't believe, you know. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. So they have very broad authority to detain people like anywhere. That makes sense. Exactly. So the real issue here is the ethical, I mean, a lot of us are grappling with this and, of course, fiercely opposing these motions, right?

in that the justification that the DHS attorneys are attempting to use is that circumstances have materially changed since the issuance of their initial case that they're in now, which of course is not the case. Right. Like, whose circumstances? Exactly. Exactly. Like, the rise of fascism doesn't constitute a changed circumstance. Yeah. So...

It's just there's no there's no basis for this motion. And secondly, the only basis like there's zero justification for this other than filling detention centers, lining core civic and geo groups pockets. Yeah. And intentionally prejudicing an immigrant to have to fight their case detained. I mean, right. There's no there's no good or legitimate justification for this period. The end, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

And fighting it detained will be a lot harder. They will be obviously in a terrible situation. They are, as we've covered before, often moved to a different state from their council. It will make it a lot harder for them if they choose to go that route. I'm guessing that ICE is hoping that people won't fight or DHS is hoping that people will just choose not to fight. 100%. That's the whole point is this whole administration's

The messaging and their actions are all about forcing people, breaking people's spirits and forcing them into a situation where they feel their only option is to self-deport. Yeah, it is heartbreaking. It's very sick. Yeah, it's very disturbing. It's very, very different from Trump 1.0. Yeah, I think that's worth sort of focusing in on that this is a completely distinct and

much more radical disassembling of the asylum system as we know it. Absolutely. I mean, I think we can all agree or disagree as far as how we feel about the past four months and what has happened, but I think everybody can agree that the pace at which it has happened is extremely concerning. Right. We are four months into four years and we have seen

like a constitutional crisis, like a full-blown defiance of the courts. The day we're recording, the Trump administration is attempting to deport people to South Sudan, many of whom, 11 of 12 of whom are not South Sudanese, right? I guess, from what I understand, their attempt at giving those people a credible fear screening...

that they didn't hear them shouting from the cells they were detained in that they were afraid of being tortured. Yeah, they're supposed to give them opportunity to be heard, essentially, and give notice of this third country that they're going to be deported to that

nobody and no judge has ever considered whether they have a fear or if they would be in danger or deported to this country. Right. So again, this is a due process situation where, hey, before you can be sent to some random country, especially South Sudan, maybe you should be given an opportunity to present why you have a fear and

Or that something bad might happen to you over there to a judge. And so this was recently ordered. I believe the case is called DBD versus DHS was what stopped the Libya situation from happening. Where, yeah, a judge said this is exactly what needs to occur. These people need to be given...

real notice, not this whatever has been, you know, and an opportunity to be heard. And then, yeah, they immediately thereafter attempted to, as you said, or I think, I don't know if they actually accomplished it with South Sudan. Yeah, my understanding is they are in a country which is neither the United States nor South Sudan on an aircraft at this time. And DHS is arguing that they can do their credible fear screenings there on the aircraft and

I don't know how they plan to give those people privacy, translation, access to counsel. I just looked on Court Listener right before we recorded and Judge Murphy clarified, Massachusetts District Court Judge, that 10 days would be the amount of time that they would need to assert a credible fear. And then if DHS determined that they didn't have credible fear, they would then have 15 days to ask for the reopening of their case.

Is the United States going to somehow accommodate them in where they are? People are speculating they're in Djibouti, which is the largest US military base in the continent of Africa and close to South Sudan. And so if that's the case, yeah, I don't know how they will get due process. We will find out if they will get due process, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, they they probably won't. But we'll be told that they they did. Right. Or we'll be or we'll be told that they were criminals in the first place, which is the other theme of this administration. Right. With the the Alien Enemies Act, which has basically been put on pause by a number of Satan judges who have said there's no invasion, there's no war. This is absurd. This just flat out doesn't apply anymore.

And I have to say that the immigration bar is very, I think, not just the immigration bar, I think all of us are very frustrated that the Supreme Court has not yet come out with a definitive substantive ruling on this because...

For the people who don't know, the Alien Enemies Act allows the administration to circumvent the INA, which is the whole immigration court system, and immediately deport supposed criminals who were invading the country. I mean, we all know this with the Venezuelans who were accused of being Trinidad and Aragua just for having tattoos. And so that is...

To me, and I think all of us, the biggest threat to just be able to put somebody on a plane to another country and in a prison in another country, as we've seen with Seacott in El Salvador. I mean, we need our Supreme Court to speak on this and we need it quickly. Yeah, like if we no longer have habeas, it's a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, like most of them. And there's so many assaults on the Bill of Rights. And we need our Supreme Court to really...

to step up. And I think I'm not the only one who's extremely frustrated by that because we're, we're in crisis. And as we've seen, it's fallen on courts and lawyers and judges to try to defend the semblance of democracy in this country. But the highest court in the land needs to help out soon. Yeah. And like,

This is where the rubber meets the road for maintaining people's basic rights, dignity, and the right not to be sent to a labor camp in El Salvador or South Sudan, a country which is rapidly descending into conflict again. I thought the government was barrel bombing.

Well, and just real quick, another note on the Supreme Court is that they're also concerning. I mean, as we know, there's a lot of Trump appointees there. And so, I mean, it's not even that that's the answer. It's just we're, you know, but we need answers more quickly than what they're giving us. And it's just...

given the rate that this administration is working at, I don't know that they will, if they ever get the case for the asylum ban at the border, would even overturn that because historically they've sort of supported his 212F powers

So I'm not saying that's the answer to everything, but it's definitely frustrating to not have basic things already decided, like the use of the Alien Enemies Act. Yeah, like just not to know where we're at. Like when, you know, people are trying in good faith to move forward with the legal processes that they have spent their entire life savings on to get here and do the right, quote unquote, the right way. You're still fighting a number of asylum cases, as we said before the call, like

you probably won't be forever, right? Like at some point, there's just not going to be any more asylum cases. I know that you're accepting donations, I think through Venmo on behalf of Primrose that we'll be sure to link to that Venmo account in the description of this show so people can donate if they'd like to. Now is the time to do it, right? It's not like this is going to be an ongoing thing. Like if people don't help now, then there won't

be migrants to support or asylees to support later? So like, how can people materially support maybe in other ways, right? If they're like on hard times and don't have the financial resources, what else can people do to just to make this a little bit less cruel to some people who are among the most unfortunate people on the planet often?

I think even mental and emotional support for the immigrants in your life, I think, is something that that is underestimated because speaking as a very privileged white woman attorney, U.S. citizen, this has taken a tremendous toll on me and the mental toll that is taken on the actual undocumented community and asylees.

This messaging is so harmful and so disgusting that I think I would just caution people to not underestimate the power of human kindness to those already in your life. And just empowering them, distributing know your rights cards and information that still matters. But also, I think the people who are, as we've been discussing, going to be at the most disheartened

disadvantaged in terms of being able to keep up morale are these people who are going to be mandatorily detained. So in terms of what we were talking about, I believe before we started recording, reaching out to any organizations. I know in San Diego there's Detention Resistance.

Or even reaching out to the detention center that's near you to be able to determine how you can send a letter, how you can put money on somebody's books so that they can have phone calls with their family or phone calls with you even. I think these types of things are key in light of the administration's clear messaging that

immigrants are very much unwanted and criminals. So I think that's where I would come at this from. If you cannot donate, again, like we were talking, if you have a few dollars to spare, I mean, if everybody has a few dollars to spare, there is a finite number, like we were saying, of asylum cases left, like from roses. So if people can spare...

a few dollars here or there whenever they can. Um, it does make the difference. Yeah, no, it does. And it shows that like, even if the government doesn't want you here, a lot of people want you to be protected. We want you to be safe. Like yeah, the mental damage it does. I think it's hard to overstate. Like I was talking, I remember to a young woman in and like, she was the only surviving member of her family. The government had killed everyone.

And so she came to the U.S., right, to be safe. And now the government is coming after her in addition to the trauma she already has from watching her entire family die. Like now the most powerful government in the world is coming after you. I can't imagine how that feels. That's a very good point. I mean, yeah, people are coming after.

already traumatized only to be further traumatized by this administration and the system. And yes, I mean, emotional and mental and any kind of support is not to be underestimated in the slightest during these times. Yeah, like have people over for dinner if you can, or yeah, like call the detention center and put money on someone's commissary. Like just showing people that they're welcome is important. Like I know a lot of

the migrants like if i look at my phone right now in the time we've been recording one of the migrants i met the darien gap will probably have texted me they're in mexico right and they just want the world to know about the situation they know they can't come to the us anymore but sometimes people will say i guess the americans don't want us anymore and like that breaks my heart because i think most people if they knew these people's circumstances right like hundreds of people have reached out to me since the darien gap stuff to ask how they can help and like

Most people do want those people to be their neighbors. And it breaks my heart that they think that we don't want them, that we would rather leave them to die wherever they're at. Like it's genuinely really horrible for me to think of that. So yeah, I would really encourage anyone listening, if you can, to do what you can. Absolutely. And just remembering that, again, these asylum cases are finite. So if you know any asylum seeker or can support any asylum seeker right now,

They made it in. Let's give them their best shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we can still help those people. Well, we can, we should. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We do appreciate it. I know that your time is very valuable and you're really busy right now. So yeah.

We really appreciate your time. You're always welcome back. And if there's anything else you'd like to say before we finish up. Yeah, thank you, James. I think the only thing I just want to emphasize is that, you know, from the standpoint of immigration attorneys, like I feel that we're obviously a subject of an executive order and, you know, big law firms are being extorted by the administration to represent causes that the administration believes in and not pro bono immigration work and so forth and so on.

So it's not like too many of us have been personally attacked, although, you know, judges have been arrested, even judges for just hiring an immigrant to do work around the house. So,

It is a scary time to be practicing immigration law, but unfortunately, I do see there being a time when it won't happen. I mean, I see the writing on the wall where I will not be able to continue mentally and or economically because a side effect of all this and a very intentional side effect is to make it so that we can't do much for people anymore and or they can afford us or there's not people here to do anything for because...

their spirit was broken or their finances and, or all of the above and they had to leave. So it is a very intense time, but I came from different areas of law. I've only been in immigration seven years and it's the first time I've thought of, okay, where am I going to go to next? Um, yeah, in these seven years. And it's, it's a very real thing. So if you, like I said, it feels very different than Trump 1.0. So no, yeah, it's,

this is considerably more severe. So, in other words, take care of yourself if you are an ally. Yeah. Because, you know, the attack is on immigrants and anybody who advocates, supports, and so forth. And it's a very targeted, direct attack.

attack and it's very easy to get run down and consumed by it and so definitely do what you need to do to take care of yourself and if that means stepping back then you know I mean I want to keep my foot in the door as much as possible these next four years on something immigration and asylum related but

there's also economic and other realities that are happening. Yeah. Intentionally so. Yeah, definitely. And I think it is important for people to do whatever they need to do to self-preserve and take care of themselves as well. I think that's a good place to end. Thank you so much for your time. And again, like if you're listening, please check the description of the show and we will have a link to Primrose's GoFundMe if you'd like to help. Thank you so much, James. Thank you.

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. What?

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice. Bloody Mary mix. Coconut. Grapefruit. Diet freaking cola for crying out loud. The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. That is so true. You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company. White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

When you're in HR, it can feel like nothing is easy. From payroll to PTO, from onboarding to benefits, and everything in between. It's a constant juggle of tasks, systems, and spreadsheets. But your HR software? That's the easy part. Meet Bamboo HR. Trusted by over 34,000 companies, it handles all your HR tasks. Payroll, benefits, and time tracking. So your team and your company can grow as fast as, well...

And Bamboo HR software is actually easy to use. One simple system that pulls all your people data together in one place so you can ditch scattered systems and wasted hours on tasks that should only take minutes. Because when HR is easier, you can focus on what matters most, your people.

Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies. I got it. No, I got it. I got it.

Seriously, I insist. I insisted first. Oh, don't be silly. You don't be silly. People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash Credit Card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited 2% cash back on purchases. Okay, rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. No! The Wells Fargo Active Cash Credit Card. Visit wellsfargo.com slash activecash. Terms apply.

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. Hello. What's up, everybody? Who's got ED?

Us. You. Everybody. We're giving you ED. This episode, we're covering the week of May 21 to May 28. It was a really busy news week for the latter half of that week, so we're going to be mostly catching up with that. Jesus, yeah. And let's start with the...

Biggest news from late last week domestically, the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. The shooting took place around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21st, outside of an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum. Prior to the shooting, the suspect was seen pacing outside of the building and

Jesus.

While he was reloading, she sat up and then Rodriguez shot her several more times before throwing his gun into a bush. He ran into the museum after the shooting. Security let him in thinking that he was a victim. Witnesses say he appeared traumatized and in shock. People from the museum event brought him water. And when they asked him if he was okay or if he was injured, Rodriguez requested the police. When cops arrived, he allegedly admitted to the shooting.

And according to witnesses, quote, grabbed a red keffiyeh out of his pocket and started free Palestine chants. Quote, there is only one solution, antifata revolution, unquote. While being arrested and taken out of the building, he chanted free, free Palestine.

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

Rodriguez is a lifelong Chicago resident. He got an English degree at the University of Chicago, legally bought a gun in Illinois, and flew with it to D.C. the night before the shooting. This event was an American Jewish Committee Access D.C. Young Diplomats Reception event.

The description for the event reads, quote, This special event brings together Jewish young professionals aged 22 to 45 and the D.C. diplomatic community for an evening dedicated to fostering unity and celebrating Jewish heritage. Join us for heavy appetizers, cocktails, conversations, and a special guest speaker. We are excited to introduce this year's theme, Turning Pain into Purpose. Hear from members of the Multifaith Alliance and Israel.

as they delve into humanitarian diplomacy and how a coalition of organizations from the region and for the region are working together in response to humanitarian crises through the Middle East and North Africa regions, unquote.

The two victims were a young couple, Sarah Milgram and Yaron Lysinsky, 26 and 30, who met through their work at the embassy. Lysinsky identified as a Christian, though he was born in Israel and moved to Germany as a kid, then returned to Israel and served in the IDF. There is an alternative claim that he was born in Nuremberg and then moved to Israel as a teenager, but most reporting says that he was born in Israel.

In the aftermath of the shooting, politicians widely condemned this as anti-Semitic violence. The acting U.S. attorney said that they are investigating the case as a hate crime and an act of terrorism. Dan Bongino, deputy FBI director, said the shooting was a, quote, act of targeted violence.

The Israeli foreign minister in Netanyahu have laid blame at college protesters and foreign government officials, including the leaders of France, Britain, and Canada, accusing them of blood libel for talking about Israel's, quote, supposed genocide and crimes against humanity, unquote, and calling such rhetoric critical of Israel, quote, unquote, incitement.

Netanyahu said, quote, free Palestine is just today's version of Heil Hitler. Jesus Christ. They don't want a Palestinian state. They want to destroy the Jewish state. They want to annihilate all Jewish people who have been in the land of Israel for 3,500 years, unquote.

This is obviously, I think, in a lot of ways, the kind of thing Netanyahu has been waiting for and probably the kind of thing that a number of folks that Trump has put in federal law enforcement have been waiting for because it provides them with some opportunities.

to continue their push to criminalize student organizing and organizing against Israeli war crimes, right? Like the argument they want to be able to make is that just saying free Palestine is an act of terrorism. And there was an act of terrorism here, right? Like shooting two embassy employees, right?

Yeah.

It's the murdering people that's terrorism. Yeah, and that is already illegal, by the way, and quite heavily. I'll be interested. We don't seem to know much about where he got the firearm yet that I've come across. He legally purchased it in Illinois. Yeah, he bought it in Illinois. Yeah.

which has like fairly strict gun laws. Yeah. Some of the strictest in the U S so it's one of those things where there's already quite a bit of regulation around everything that he did here. But fundamentally, if you're able to buy guns, which you are because of the, you know, there's an amendment, uh,

there will be people who carry out attacks like this. And I don't really know. There certainly didn't seem to be outside of this guy's personal chats with his friends, a lot of evidence that would have set him on anybody's radar. He had been at like a PSL party for socialism and liberation March in 2017 or something, but like this wasn't a guy who had a history of violence or anything like that. And,

Quite frankly, that's just a reality of the country that we live in, is that when people like this decide to carry out shootings for whatever reason, the odds of catching them are extraordinarily low. It's very hard to flag for a guy specifically like this because there's a lot of them out there. Yeah. Yeah.

And most of them don't do shootings. Yeah. This act has been widely condemned. Like pro-Palestine commentators have said that this style of like adventurous terrorism does nothing to help the Palestinian people and in fact only hurts them and plays into what like the Israel lobby and Netanyahu have been like wanting to happen for a while. Yeah. I think Kat

Abou Ghazala, a Parisian-American woman who's running for office in Illinois. Worked for Media Matters for years. Yeah, does a lot of videos. Yeah. Anyway, I saw that she'd shared something about how this was something that evidently should be condemned, right? That is wrong and is not advancing the cause of Palestinian freedom. I think adventurous terrorism is a good way to describe it. And was just getting panned by people on Facebook.

The internet, which like, I don't know, people engaging with this, like from a place it doesn't come from, like it's bad when random folks get shot and killed. No, people have, have used the horrific genocide as a way to like channel their general societal frustration and find a way to like, just to act incredibly hostile, like to actual Palestinians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

who don't share the exact same anti-imperialist TM views that they might have. It's just permission to abuse people online. Yeah, deeply verbally violent and psycho shit. And this guy engaged in that kind of stuff as well, as we'll see. Let's talk about that. Let's get a little bit into his background. So...

He has a manifesto that he posted on his Twitter account. And it's cogent, like in terms of it's not the ramblings of like a madman or something. There's nothing like it at all. He has an English degree, right? He knows how to write. Yeah. He has worked as a writer for like almost a decade. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that in terms of like, it's very clear what he's trying to say. There's not any evidence here of like a disconnect or whatever. He's not doing this because he's blaming Israel for making the weather bad or whatever. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

The manifesto is titled Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home, and he attempts to explain the rationale behind his actions. He starts by discussing the unknown total scale of dead Palestinians, writing that, quote, atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification, unquote. He writes about how, despite protests and shifts in public opinion, the U.S. government has continually refused to rein in Israel and instead moved to criminalize dissent.

He talks about armed action, quote, an armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares in many unarmed actions, unquote.

Yeah, and I do find, you know, one of the first things that happened when this attack was carried out was people started theorizing that this had been some Nazi who was using this to using the pro-Palestinian cause to like camouflage his Nazism. And I don't think that the preponderance of evidence suggests that there are two weird things. One of them is that this guy's previous Twitter name is.

was Habbo 88, and he was not born in 88. Obviously, whenever you see an 88 in the curse millennial and the other is the bring the war home reference in his manifesto, which is basically a reference to something that I believe was Louis Beam, who was a neo-Nazi organizer.

about trying to get Vietnam veterans to essentially bring the war home to the United States in order to spark a race war. And those two little things are weird. However, the rest of this guy's fairly well-documented history and background does not suggest anything like that. So I don't think that that's the credible thing to blame this on, quite frankly. Yeah, I'll go over some of that background in brief. Yeah.

He also talked about targeting government representatives, quote, the impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion. He then tells the story of a man who tried to throw Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara off a boat into the sea.

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

Quote, this action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during protective edge around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans, such an action would have been illegible. It would seem insane.

I'm glad that today, at least, there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do, unquote. I did find it interesting that on December 5th, 2024, Rodriguez posted on his Twitter account that, quote, 80% of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance executive, unquote.

As for his political background, Rodriguez identifies as a Maoist third worldist and believes that the global South alone has quote unquote revolutionary potential.

A friend of Rodriguez described his politics to journalist Ken Klippenstein like this, quote, he was a big proponent of the emerging resistance axis of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Assad, Syria. How'd that go? He seemed pretty vocally in favor of Hamas for years, way before 2023. He'd always hated Israel and would call it, quote, the little Satan, unquote. Fuck.

For fuck's sake. The Assad test arranged supreme as a fucking A-B test for someone having shitty politics. Yeah, with the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Assad. Yeah, Assad who gassed his own people, who murdered little children. Including thousands and thousands of Palestinians, by the way. Yeah, yeah. But

But again, you shouldn't expect coherence or particularly well-informed opinions out of folks like this. His online presence mirrors what I would call the typical anti-imperialist TM poster, where he airs most of his frustration at the Democrats, sometimes at Republicans, but mostly posts about being pro-Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, pro-Assad, and particularly the past few years,

posting a lot about Palestine. Right. With explicit defense and like veneration of Hamas. The same friend that talked to Klippenstein also said, quote, it's driving me crazy that people are calling it a false flag. This development is shocking, but not completely out of character. He always had strong political convictions. From the sound of the manifesto, he's the same as he was, unquote. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, that that seems true. Again, we still don't have like a perfect knowledge of all of this guy's, you know, online life. No, this is just a week away. But based on what Ken's posted based on this interview, that makes complete sense. Yeah. Right.

I don't have any trouble believing that for a number of reasons. No, absolutely. This is not a false flag attack. That's conspiratorial nonsense. Yeah, I think that if this guy did a thing that he sincerely believed in, and it seems like everything he'd been expressing in the year or two leading up to doing this, you know, was consistent with what he did. Rodriguez was affiliated with the Chicago PSL, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, back in 2017 and spoke to the media on their behalf.

Though he would later regret his association with the group, telling friends, quote, PSL sucks shit. I wish I had just done a misadventure with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization rather than the PSL, LOL, unquote. Yeah. Rodriguez remained somewhat politically active in Chicago. In 2023, he posted video from a local pro-Palestine march on his Twitter account.

Klippenstein spoke with at least five friends of his who all claimed that they never heard Rodriguez express anti-Semitic sentiments. Now, one of Rodriguez's friends gave Klippenstein access to a years-old private WhatsApp group chat that Rodriguez frequently posted in, including up to a day before the shooting. Klippenstein says, quote,

who hated all sorts of other things, especially Israel and its war in Gaza, unquote. And from what we can see of the chats that Kenneth posted, this matches pretty well. A chat member wrote, quote, I'm almost surprised you're not anti-Semitic, Elias.

It usually goes hand in hand with the whole Stalin did nothing wrong mantra. Yeah. And his response to this was like Stalin ended, you know, among other things, Stalin ended the greatest anti-Semitic state in history, which I've seen as evidence that he wasn't pro-Stalin. He just supported Stalin himself.

you know, defeating the Nazis. But he says, like, among other things. So he's clearly got a number of reasons he likes Stalin. Yeah. From the exchanges with his friends, this guy's clearly like a tanky anti-imperialist type. Yes, yes. Yeah. A million times.

such examples. The only time he talked about race explicitly was to lambast white people. Quote, LOL, you probably would have to actually genocide white people to make this a normal country. Like even a very targeted and selective rehabilitation program would probably have to lead to the lifetime imprisonments of tens of millions of white people. There's the Stalin did nothing wrong brain type that we were looking for.

Well, and again, it's one of those things. We're talking about this because there's a bunch of guys who express similar views. This is the only one who's done a shooting. When we talk about this making sense, we're not talking about this as evidence that someone who's a fucking tanky type is likely to commit a mass shooting. Right, that they go hand in hand. No, this is the first time a tanky's done anything. This is the first one of these I've heard of in quite a long time. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just this guy. There's a bunch of people who express similar things to this guy, right? Yeah, yeah. On October 7th, he celebrated the Hamas attack. Quote, just saw an incredibly gory video of the aftermath of Israeli troops trying to get dressed for the ambush. Absolutely massacred by Hamas fighters. I am a. Oh, love checking back in with the news every few hours. Like, hmm, I wonder if Israel still exists. You don't often get to credibly wonder if Israel is over yet today or not.

Unquote. Yeah. And again, like that just kind of shows the general lack of knowledge. A level of political delusion. Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of kind of telegram propaganda consumption type worldview here. Yes. And can convince you that what's happening is different from the reality. Yeah. In this chat, he lamented to friends and expressed sorrow at the deaths of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.

And sometimes his ire was directed at other members of this leaked chat. At one point, going on an unhinged ableist rant attacking one of his friends for being privileged after they discussed the challenges of having a brother with schizophrenia. Quote, why not just have him committed? You can't possibly be gaining anything from a relationship with a person like that.

Just put him in a padded room and forget about him. Jesus Christ. If there was a person you loved, he's gone now. Let it go. Can you just chain him in the basement and slide meals under the door? I'm just tired of hearing about this guy. He's useless. We get it. Stop complaining and just dispose of him. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I mean...

this goes with the like people who I don't know aren't useful to me or of no value right like people don't have inherent value and you know they don't agree with or are useful to him then fuck them they can die like I guess there's some kind of coherence there well Robert do you want to mention the something awful yes I do Garrison so the other thing that came out in Ken's article is that

This dude was a poster. Well, his friends described him as a dedicated poster, which is the worst thing you can be described as being and noted that he had been there had been some when it came out that like his former Twitter username had been like Habbo 88. That was very clearly a reference to a game called Habbo Hotel that.

If you're if you're Gen Z, there's very good odds you don't remember. But it was a big thing for people who were on 4chan and who were on Something Awful. And Something Awful was the website that gave birth to 4chan. It's where I was raised on the Internet. And many, many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, I think.

I don't remember the exact year, but we started gathering on this game for children. It was like an MMO for little kids and like pretending to be members of a cult in order to like confuse small children. And then 4chan did their own version of that that was a bit more racist, which is often the case. Yeah, many such cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many such cases.

Anyway, when this came out, there was a debate. Was this guy a channer or was this guy a goon, you know, a member of the Something Awful forums? And a lot of people thought I called goon. A lot of people thought channer because of his age. He was a little bit young to have been a part of the Something Awful Habbo Hotel things. I think it's actually likelier he did both. But his friends described him as somebody who was really into Something Awful, right? As somebody who had been influenced by that and particularly a subset of the Something Awful forums.

called FIAD, which stands for Fuck You and Die, which kind of pioneered a lot of the most toxic aspects of online discourse. Apparently, Jesus. Now, folks have found at least one of his accounts that doesn't have a lot of posts, although that doesn't mean much because number one, he could have deleted a lot of stuff, which many people did when they got older. Number two, he could have had another account, which is also the

case. The one account that people know was his was banned for shooting and killing two embassy employees. There's reasons given in the ever lengthening something awful ban list when somebody gets banned.

Obviously, again, I don't think there's like a causative thing to him being like him being on something awful didn't cause him to shoot two people. But him being on something awful was a natural part of the progression that led to him being the kind of like

toxic online asshole that he was. And sort of an evidence of that is that one of the last things he had done online before the shooting was he had gotten briefly onto Blue Sky and then gotten in trouble for repeatedly harassing Will Stancil, who's another annoying asshole on the internet, who was also a something awful goon who was raised in this same chunk of the internet and who became a similar kind of asshole just with wildly different politics. Yeah.

And these two hated each other. And Elias, like, threatened to murder him over the internet.

because he's like again these guys he's that type of guy he's that type of guy which doesn't mean again which doesn't mean this is why he did a shooting or anything to do with that because there's a lot of this type of guy and almost none of them commit acts of terrorism it just like his background makes complete sense for the kind of guy that we can see that he was online the last thing i'll say about this is that you know beyond this like senseless loss of life which is like

an issue in and of itself, obviously. This also contributes to further loss of life in the way this plays into media capture, right? Now we have a whole week where the news cycle is dominated by two people getting murdered in the streets of D.C. And this does not help the Palestinian people currently being killed by Israel. The exact same day that this happened, Wednesday the 21st, 93 people were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip.

And that type of stuff does not really get reported anymore because that's how media capture works. Americans are really good at getting desensitized to this in a large-scale media environment. But stuff like this only serves as a distraction and fuels Israel's own motivation for their continued actions. Talking of media capture, Garrison, we have been captured by the advertisers in this show. It's true. There you go. And we are back.

Another big news item from last week was the passing of the big, beautiful budget bill in the House. We'll talk more about this bill as it churns through the Senate. But first, our co-host Mia Wong has a special report on how the bill targets trans healthcare.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the budget bill that's currently working through a bunch of processes in the Senate that's been passed by the House. I am Mia Wong. And with me to talk about how this budget specifically is unbelievably bad for trans people is Maddie Kastigan from Maddie Kast and Mira Levine from The Free Radical. Glad to have both of you two here. You've both been doing a bunch of journalism about this stuff specifically and what people can do about it.

First, can you explain what is going on in this budget with the ban on trans healthcare using Medicaid? Yeah, absolutely. So the budget bill, also known as House Resolution 1, is this year's reconciliation bill, which is Congress basically deciding next year's budget and how they're going to allocate all their funds.

This time around, Republicans decided it would be a great idea to push through. So what it was at first was an intense limitation on what Medicaid covered, essentially just humongous Medicaid cuts. And this is what I began investigating first.

Me and Maddie were talking about it a bunch. She's the one who took me off to it. They started off by implementing huge cuts to Medicaid that would result in millions of people losing access to their health care, not even just trans people. Shortly after they announced these cuts, for instance, ADAPT, a group of disabled activists, they are famous for being the ones who climbed up the steps of the, I believe it was the Capitol building in the 90s to...

raise awareness and help get the American Disabilities Act passed. They staged a protest on the United States Capitol during a hearing for this bill, where Republicans were just talking about it and praising themselves. Multiple activists got arrested. They're all fine now, apparently. Apparently they weren't treated too bad either, which is good to hear. But what ultimately happened is more and more came out and it came revealed that

Not only would disabled people be affected, but basically every marginalized group. Poor people, of course, being what we were focusing on, given the beat. But this will impact essentially everyone, especially if you're low income, especially if you are a person of color. You are more likely to be impacted just by virtue of this bill and how sweeping it is. And Republicans implemented a ban for...

gender-affirming care for minors on it. It was a very milquetoast ban that at the time was projected to pretty much get overturned in court right away if we were to pass. They didn't stop there, though. They quickly evolved it, and they tried to implement it into a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care for all ages on Medicaid and for any health insurance received through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. And ultimately...

This led to a lot of panic and a lot of people assuming that their care is going to be taken away immediately. That wasn't what was going to happen. The minimum effective date that's currently in the bill is 2027. I'm telling people to prepare if it passes for 2026 because there's a decent chance Republicans will try to expedite it because it passed through the House. It passed through committees in the House. It was sent to the Senate. And I think that's what we'll give to Maddie to talk about kind of what next steps for that are.

Yeah, so like Mara was saying, there's a lot of really, this bill is tremendous. I could talk for hours about it. But focusing on the trans parts, there's a ban on Medicaid funding, and there's also a ban on including trans cares and essential health benefit and ACA plans.

And the thing about both of these provisions is that normally with reconciliation bills, they're supposed to be focused on budget items, not policy items. So, for example, you couldn't say, hey, weed is legal everywhere now or something like that, or raise the minimum wage, which Democrats tried to do in 2021, and they failed because there are rules regarding how this process works. And so what we argued in our article was that there's a possibility that

you know, if activists and advocates reached out to their senators and advocated to point out that this part of the bill is completely against those provisions, against those procedural rules, then

The Senate parliamentarian could rule against it and basically strike that portion of the bill without it ever even becoming law. And, you know, that would save people a lot of stress and anxiety. And you don't have to worry about the court battles and what happens with Scrimeti versus U.S., which is a Supreme Court case that's going to be ruled on on gender affirming care soon.

So what we've been telling people, and, you know, including listeners for your show, is that people really need to reach out to their senators every single day, email calls, and ask them to vote no on this bill on H.R. 1.

and specifically mentioned the trans healthcare aspects. And if you're, if you want, there's templates online on our website, or you can just, you know, ask them, Hey, we don't think this bill is good. We don't, we want you to challenge specifically the parts that are attacking trans people. And I can confirm with you, I can't share too much information, but I can confirm with you that we are making real legitimate progress on killing this provision. And, and,

The more people we have calling in every single day, the better our odds are. But there's still more ways to fight back. And I want Myra to pick up on how people can fight back on the ground. Yeah. So in addition to reaching out to your senators, of course, do that. There's an email template. Maddie wrote up a great one. It tells you everything you need to do. You can even leave a phone call if it's correct.

It takes like five minutes, but more long-term is this is not going to be the only attack on gender-affirming care. It's not going to stop here. This is just the latest attempt that they're trying to do. Ultimately, we cannot rely on the government to give us essential health care. We cannot rely on the government to protect us and give us what we need because fundamentally, the government and the laws that it aims to uphold are about protecting the rich, protecting the powerful, protecting the wealthy.

The law is functionally something that gives police power to act as essentially an occupying army on the state and to persecute anyone who deviates from what those who are disproportionately rich and powerful decree. And we need to start focusing on building long-term solutions.

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

There are long-term solutions. My beat at this point is essentially just telling everyone to get plugged into your local mutual aid network. Get plugged into people doing work on the ground, in your state, in your area, who are focusing on a plethora of different issues. Bit of a self-plug here, but I wrote an article, for instance, last month where I interviewed a seasoned activist in the Twin Cities.

who told me just a lot about the history of radical practice in the cities, especially in light of the George Floyd riots, and especially in light of corporate pride, franco-capitalism,

Whole nine yards. Recommend reading it. It's on thefreeradical.org. Check it out. But beyond, of course, my own writing and my own interviews, there are so many people doing work that doesn't get covered because it either isn't palatable to mainstream news audiences or it isn't seeking coverage for a variety of reasons. In every single major city, this I can guarantee, there are people doing work.

Most of the time, it's not going to be able to publicly visible, but they are there. I would recommend that everyone who is not currently plugged in get started with something that is much more entry-level and something that is much more like...

meant to be kind of for everyone who may not be willing to do more in-depth and more crazy type of stuff. Food Not Bombs is the great thing I recommend for everyone to check out. Not every city has one. Most do. Every state has one. Beyond that, there are plenty of local mutual aid groups in every single locality. And if there's not one directly by you, there's probably one in your nearest major city. I would specifically recommend...

I'm a bit biased here, but I would recommend focusing on ones that are decentralized and non-hierarchical, ones that don't revolve around centralizing power and placing that power in the hands of people who are either good at smooth talking or who have a lot of money. Ultimately, the way forward for people of all different marginalized groups, not even just trans people, undocumented immigrants,

Blocking dishes, people of color, low-income people, disabled people, and so forth. The way forward is by recognizing that our issues affect all of us. Attacks on trans healthcare are not limited there.

inevitably, let's say they ban trans healthcare overnight, they're going to come for intersex people next. They're going to come for gay people next. They're going to come for everyone. So I would just say, get involved in your local groups and reach out. There are resources out there. If you need some, check out thefreeradical.org. I recommend a ton of them. Thank you. And yeah, our website for Maddycast is madycast.com and you can find our templates for contacting your senators there.

Thank you so much for helping yourself and helping your community. Yeah, thank you so much for that. I want to close on... I want to read the road, I want to read a line from a fucking Namix manifesto from Andor. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest insurrection pushes our line forward. And one of the arguments that Namix makes here that I think is just true is that in order to maintain their holds, these people have to...

win a hundred battles across a hundred friends. You know, but this means that there are so many different things that you can do to resist them and to make sure that this fucking budget they're trying to pass to make sure that everyone in this country suffers and specifically the trans people cannot use the health insurances that we need. Use Medicaid, use the Affordable Care Act to pay for stuff. This stuff can be resisted in so many different ways. You can, as we've talked about, you can call your senators, you can yell at them, you can make their lives miserable until they agree to not do this.

And then also you can join your local mid-year wage groups. You can join local activist groups. You can start, you know, getting seriously organized in other ways. You can, again, like we've talked a lot about unions and the role of unions and trans struggle on this show. We've talked, oh God, we've talked about so many things. I'm going to do a one second plug for the episode I wrote last year called You Already Know How to Organize because you do already know how to organize. And yeah, none of the things that are happening here are inevitable. They can be stopped. And there are so many different ways for you to start stopping them.

Yeah, so we're back and we're talking about Gavin Newsom and particularly the intersection of the governor of California and Donald Trump, which is a lot more shameful than you'd expect. So if you remember a little earlier this year, there was a big brouhaha publicly because a California transgender high school athlete said,

One at the woman's eight feet triple jump. This is an 11th grade transgender athlete from Yoruba Valley High School near Riverside, California. And she won the Division three girls long jump and triple jump and placed seventh in the high jump at her Southern Section Championship. A few weeks later, there's going to be I don't think it's happened yet. A championship meet that she qualified for as a result of this.

And when this happened, it was immediately leapt on by the Trump administration and by right wing media as evidence of this thing that they've been trying to push for forever, which is that trans athletes are a threat to women's sports. Right now, this is something that, number one, there's just not.

A lot of and this is also something that like think something like two thirds of Americans when polled say that they don't feel like trans athletes should be competing with, you know, quote unquote, naturally born women in women's sports. Right. Like this is a thing that the right has built a lot of support for because they have made this a political issue for so long and they've been largely successful in that.

The state of California and California lawmakers have been pushing back against this. There have been state bills in order to allow these girls to continue to compete. But Gavin Newsom has not expressed the same degree of support. And this kind of largely came out earlier this month when he had a meeting with conservative personality Charlie Kirk on his new podcast.

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

Now, this brought a backlash against Newsom. He was attacked for flip-flopping because, again, like the California Democratic Party's position on this has been to defend trans athletes. But Newsom kind of flipped as soon as he was in a room with Charlie Kirk. Now, Newsom will argue that he also tried to stick up for trans athletes to Charlie Kirk.

To be clear about that, this is exactly what he said to Charlie. Completely fair on the issue of fairness. I completely agree. So that's easy to call out the unfairness of that. There's also a humility and grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression.

And the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with as well. So both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think, you know, is inherent in you, but not always expressed in the issue. And first of all, there's no decency inherent in Charlie Kirk. And second, there's also a humility and grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide. What does that mean? What does that mean, Gavin? That's not a sentence. Also, like, just like I,

made my living exercising for most of my twenties, right? Like you're a professional athlete. Yeah. Like, and then I've done all kinds of other shit where I still got paid to race my bike, right? Like, yeah, sports are unfair. It fucking sucks. I coached people who worked way harder than me. They trained super hard. They slept well. They ate better. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they were not able to get

to the same level. That sucks. But like sport is inherently unfair. The idea that like the only difference is like this, like your XX or XY chromosomality is nonsense. Like, especially in high school sports, kids will develop at different times. That is unfair. Some kids will excel and then other kids will get better.

The function of high school sports is not to find who can go higher, faster, stronger. It's to teach people to play nicely with one another and to communicate inclusion. And excluding trans kids is completely contrary to that. Yeah. And that's like...

Yeah, I think that's a great point, James, is that, like, number one, this is all being entirely made about, like, who places how, which is always going to be based largely on things that, like, people can't control because, like...

people's bodies are different, you know? Yeah. And they develop differently. Like there are people who I beat at bike races when I was a kid who have won stages at the Tour de France. Yeah. Like if our bodies develop differently, that's completely normal. Yeah. And it's this, again, the thing that should matter here is not treating a

a community of people hatefully, which is the entirety of the reason the right has made this an issue. It has nothing to do with fairness. It has nothing to do with sports. It's entirely about hurting a group of people. Yeah. If these people gave a single shit about women's sports, they'd have been there when women weren't getting paid the same. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same TV coverage. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same prize money. And they were mostly making fun of women's sports at that point in time. Yeah.

Now, I do think one thing that's funny here is that when Newsom was when people asked rightly, like when California legislators were pushing to protect trans athletes, why didn't you bring up that you felt this way? And his answer was, I didn't have a podcast. I wasn't having that conversation. I was out there on the campaign trail and the big blue bubble on the big blue bus and the big blue crowds having big blue conversations.

And then he went on to say that basically the backlash to him agreeing with Charlie Kirk on this has convinced him. I always thought the right overstated how judgmental my party was. And I'll be candid with you. I have a deeper understanding now of that critique than I ever, ever, ever understood. It was like now that people are angry at me, I believe there's a problem with my party being judgmental. Yeah. Now that I've faced a consequence for my shit, I hate trans people even more. Yeah. Yeah.

It must be so hard to be Gavin Newsom. It's got to be tough. And betray your constituents to get the approval of a millennial right-wing...

podcaster who goes around who still hates you touring college campuses to debate 17 year olds that must be so hard for you it's gotta be tough gotta be tough gavin he did say in his podcast that his his kid likes charlie kirk not surprising maybe this is all just a ploy to be a cool dad yeah i'm not surprised he sucks at being a dad yeah gavin usermix huge wants to be a cool dad and it's embarrassing reminds me that uh jake dapper just said his kid's not really into

politics he's just into world war two and gaming great part of world war two tap curious curious

Many such cases. Doesn't his kid want to be a cop? Is that Jake Tapper? Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like Jake fucking Tapper's kid. Yeah. So look, earlier this week on Tuesday, President Trump shared a truth social post. A truth. Threatening to, yes, he re-truthed a post threatening to withhold federal funding from California over the participation of this high school trans athlete in the upcoming California Interscholastic Federation State Track and Field Championships.

Right. And he said that under the leadership of radical left Democrat Gavin Newscum, California continues to illegally allow men to play in women's sports. The governor himself said it is unfair.

Trump wrote. First off, the fact that Gavin agreed with Charlie and his podcast did nothing to change the rhetoric around him. He's still radical left Democrat Gavin Newsom because you can't make these people unhappy because it's not about fairness. It's about hurting people, right? You can you can fight this. The governor of Maine has been. I wanted to talk about Maine. Yes. Yeah. So Trump made this same threat to the state of Maine when the governor of Maine refused to stop allowing trans people to compete in women's sports.

And the administration attempted to freeze funds intended for a Maine child nutrition program. No more food for your kids because of what? No more food for poor kids because woke. And in response, the governor of Maine was like, all right, let's fucking go to the mat. And they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the Trump administration settled like they they backed down. They agreed to stop freezing the funds if Maine dropped

The lawsuit, right? Like, as soon as Maine sued, Trump backed down, right? And rather than attempting to do that, even though there's ample evidence that the administration backs down, and to be fair, nothing against Maine, California's got a lot more weight to throw around. Yeah. It's the fifth largest economy on the planet. They have some fucking heft behind them. Yeah.

And like Newsom clearly has no moral principle other than advancing his own career and personal power and wealth. Right now. But like, even if that is the case, it's so easy to be like, yeah, I'll fight him on this. I'll fight for the trans kids and get some like resistor points. But he's just too much of a fucking coward. Yeah.

The first rule of fighting these people is don't give them anything. Don't treat them like people. They're monsters. They're scum. You fight them every step of the way, right? Like, it doesn't matter what you feel about the issue. You never give pieces of shit like this a win, right? That's just not the way you fight them. This is the problem with people like Gavin, whose entire politics is just chasing the zeitgeist. Yeah. So then when you interpret the zeitgeist as like swinging against your previously held progressive DEI woke,

LGBTQ plus values, then you just go along with that swing and you actually don't even care about getting those points anymore because you think the culture is going in a different direction. And all you care about is being in the cultural zeitgeist. You don't actually stand for anything. Like, you're just...

You're just nothing. Yeah. And everyone can see that as opposed to understanding what governor fray of Maine understands, which is that, no, you stand there. You accepted the zeitgeist as a scream door and it's going to bounce off of you and back in another direction. If you stand for something, right. Gavin decided not to stand for something. And immediately after Trump made that tweet threatening to withhold funds from the state of California. Um, and again,

And, you know, the Department of Education has opened Title four investigations into leagues that have allowed trans athletes, including CIF, which is California's high school governing sports governing body. Right after Trump made this most recent truth, the CIF released a statement saying that it had made the decision to pilot an entry process for the championship that's coming up.

that will alter the way they hand out awards. It will expand qualification opportunities for biological female student athletes is the exact way that they have phrased this. And basically what they're going to be doing is giving an award for biological men, biological women, and then trans competitors, right? So there will be like three long jump awards.

It's like a segregated scoring field. Yeah, it's it's I guess you could say it's not as awful as trying to ban people, but also it's kind of like you're not even taking any kind of stance here. It's not just it's nothing. It's nothing.

Now, Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardens said the CIF's proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness. The governor is encouraged by this thoughtful approach. And I should note here, this has done nothing to actually calm the right or get conservatives

conservatives to back down, right? No, because they don't want trans kids competing at all. They don't want trans kids in public life. They don't want trans kids existing. Yes. And so, like, conservative Californians are still angry. You can't take them for their word for it. Yeah. They don't care about fairness in sports. This is all about just eradicating transgenderism from public life. Like, as...

as Michael Knowles said at CPAC like two years ago, like that's what they actually care about. Yeah. And there's, you know, there's been a bunch of statements. Some, some Democrats and the legislative LGBTQ caucus have been like, well, Gavin's, you know, otherwise been a good ally, you know, for LGBTQ people. And I don't agree with, this is something that a assembly member, Chris Ward said, basically, I don't agree with this particular move, but he's been a good ally for a long time. Has he though? Has,

Has he, though? Yeah. I mean, when it's convenient to him, I guess. I prefer caucus member Alex Lee said that Newsom was, quote, just commenting on how he personally feels. He mentioned it on his dumb podcast. He never intended it to be a policy direction announcement. Hell yeah. Yeah. It is a dumb podcast. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you should be concerned that he has a dumb podcast where he demoralizes trans people like, yeah, he signs vetoes all the time. Again, I found a KCRA article on this that quotes Republican Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez, who wrote a bill that would have banned trans athletes from competing in girls high school sports earlier this year. And this is what she said about CIF's rule chains pilot policy.

It's incredibly weak. We're angry. We're pissed at this. How every day that goes by, no one is protecting our girls. This is inexcusable. We need to have something done. Governor Newsom needs to pick a side, do something, do the right thing. So again, this gets you nothing with them, right? It benefits you not at all. There's another quote I want to read here from State Senator Scott Weiner, who is the leader of the Senate Budget Committee and again, a member of the LGBTQ Rights Caucus.

Trump is now targeting California just like he targeted Maine, threatening to withhold federal funds if California doesn't follow his illegal edicts targeting transgender people. California law protects trans people. That won't change. Maine won in court, so will California. There's only one answer to a bully, no. And as Maine Governor Janet Mills said, see you in court. Sorry, I got, I don't know why I said Governor Frey earlier. But anyway, the point here is that you have Californian legislators saying the right thing, and then you have

fucking Newsom being like, no, no, no, actually, we're totally going to cave and in a way that won't even make the Republicans happy. It's just frustrating to me that you do have Democrats trying to do the right thing here in California politics and Newsom absolutely having CIF do a run around on them out of pure cowardice. Anyway.

That's what I got. Get him out of there. Get him out of there. Fuck Gavin Newsom. We tried to. There was a recall, but it was not for the right reasons. Yeah. The last time we recalled a California governor, it was a real mixed bag. Yeah. Speaking of a mixed bag. That's right. And we're back. Okay. We're back. We're back. James, do you want to finish us up here? I do, Garrison. I would like that very much. I want to talk about a couple of things. I'm going to try and keep this fast. I know it's already been a long episode.

Let's start with ICE agents have been arresting people in immigration court around the country and placing them in expedited removal proceedings. If you want to know more about exactly what the expedited removal proceedings are and how they work, you can go back to our episode, which will have aired the day before you hear this. And that would explain and I talked to an immigration attorney there and explain a little bit more about how that works.

This includes people whose cases were not dismissed. So previously it was reported that ICE was dismissing cases of people who had arrived less than two years ago and placing them under 240 expedited removal proceedings in

Apparently, they are also detaining other people. I am not sure how that works. I have not seen any justifications for this to give me an explanation for it. I'm not sure how much that matters anymore. These people are going to have to fight their removal from detention, which is obviously going to be

a pretty unpleasant experience, right? Detention in these core civic or geo-group facilities is pretty bad. I'm aware of cases where I misidentified the person being detained, cuffed the wrong person, and I'm aware that there are

Spectrum Services, who are an ICE detention officer provider, offices at least outside some of these facilities, I believe also inside. Spectrum Services, I've noticed, have been posting a lot of job adverts recently. This is something I sometimes keep an eye on, right? Like right before the end of Title 42, I saw they were advertising for ICE contractors to transport detainees, right? So this is sometimes...

A sign that bad things are afoot in the immigration world. I'm guessing in this case, it's either this or a plan to further...

expansion capacity, which is also something the Trump administration has been talking about, right? So they also have these various executive orders authorizing more budget and the budget bill authorizing more budget for detaining migrants. Secondly, the South Sudan case, right? We covered this last week, DVD at Al versus Nome. We also covered it earlier in this week. If you go back to our episode, which aired on Wednesday, you can hear more about the sort of blow-by-blow timeline of that case. We

In the South Sudan case, the Trump administration seems to have gone directly to the Supreme Court to try and get an emergency stay on the injunction which afforded due process rights to the migrants who are currently detained in Djibouti. The administration asked for a stay of the court's injunction. The court's injunction had given them 10 days to assert their reasonable fear of torture and then a further 15 days to ask to reopen their case immediately.

If the Department of Homeland Security determined that fear not to be credible, Justice Supreme Court Justice Jackson has given the plaintiffs a week to respond to the United States. The DOJ's call for a stay. Right. So in practice, these people will still have that 10 days from the injunction to make their claim.

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

Talking of returning people to places where they will be tortured, unfortunately, the Trump administration has deported 20 people to Myanmar. This is according to reporting in Myanmar Now. I've also written about it on my page, Patreon page. I've linked both of those in the show notes, but it should be noted that Myanmar Now broke the story and it's getting very little coverage in the United States.

I can speculate as to why, but you probably don't need to hear me to sort of join the dots there. This is atrocious. Robert and I have both spoken to people with extensive experience of detention in Myanmar. And yeah, like,

when we talk about the worst detention conditions in the world, we get to a point where it doesn't really make any sense for us to say like, A is worse than B. Right, right. That this is worse than Sednaya or whatever, but it's on like the level which was Assad's torture prison in Syria. Yeah, Assad's butchery for human beings. Yeah. Like we're talking about that level. Yeah. Like, I mean, things that I have heard, people have been electrocuted to death. People are waterboarded. People have acid poured in their mouths. Bodies are found without organs. Yeah.

People are beaten to such an extent that their entire bodies are covered with bruises and contusions. Many times people will only know that their family member is detained when they disappear. And then a few days later, they get a call telling them to pick up the body.

Conditions in Burmese hunter detention facilities are atrocious. These people are currently being held at the Ong Ta Piai Interrogation Center. It appears that seven of the earliest, so this has been happening since March, it appears that some of these people have been released.

The rest are being held by SAC, that's the Burmese Hunter Military Intelligence Units, who will almost certainly torture them. Myanmar does have a temporary protected status, but I think I've seen a couple of posts about this, so I just want to clarify. The TPS doesn't apply to people who entered after the TPS was granted or to people who have committed certain crimes. We know that at least one of the men they arrested

returned had been convicted of a crime. Not all of these crimes are like particularly heinous felonies, right? You can do a certain number of misdemeanors and also be deported under a DPS. But I'm trying to find out who these people are. I know that you can't download our podcast in Myanmar, which is a huge dub for us. But, you know, I know a lot of Burmese people do listen. So, you know, if you have any particular insight into this, you could reach out to us. We'll drop the email address in a little bit here.

It does seem very unlikely that these people were given a chance to make a claim of fear of torture, right? Because it would be a very easy claim to make given every major human rights organization on the planet has documented torture of detainees in Myanmar. I was just reading a report this morning about harassment of trans women in prisons in Myanmar.

But the same thing goes for cis folks, for straight folks, for everyone, right? No one comes out of there the same they went in. I can't believe that these people were given a chance to claim a credible fear because it would have been such an easy claim to make. And they wouldn't have been returned there. So, yeah, I wish this story was getting more reporting. I wish more people in the media in this country cared about Myanmar. But that's a drama I have been beating for four years now. And I think shit's going to change anytime soon. So, again...

I guess all there is to say is that I really appreciate those of you who do, especially those of you who listen to the show and take an interest in all things Myanmar. But yeah, if these people had been returned to a country that the US press was more familiar with, there'd be a lot more noise about this. But this is absolutely unconscionable. Yeah. Yet these people will be tortured. It would not shock me if some of these people died. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, this is I mean, there have been cases so far of I think at least seven of the people that have been sent over previously in the last year or so by the U.S. have been released from this prison. So it's not necessarily a death sentence, but for a good number of them, it will. Right. Yeah. Especially since there are also

Rohingya people who will be deported in the near future and presumably directly back to the same place. Yeah. I mean, it's documented that people deported from Thailand are immediately conscripted and sent into the military, right? So if they get out of prison, there's a good chance of that, especially if they're men, that they will be, and women do get conscripted too in Myanmar, but there's a good chance that that will happen too.

They've been conscripting a lot of Rohingya people. So yeah, the outcomes of this will be very poor. And yeah, the only way torture stops in Burma is when the revolution succeeds and liberates the prisons. There is no reasoning with the Burmese hunter.

Yep. That's a bad all I got. It's pretty fucked. Speaking of fucked, let's listen to the Tariff song. There's no tariffs this week. No. Fuck it. Well, let's just listen to it and then have the end of the episode. Just gets a nice song. Let's just listen to it now. We don't have time to listen to it. This is the end of the episode. Wow. Garrison took it away from you. Complained to them online. The constant ageist attacks on the Clash have not stopped. Sorry, fellas.

All that money for nothing. We reported the news. 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.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

Let your imagination take flight with an AI-powered PC from Lenovo.

Whether it's creating digital art, designing new software, or building a portfolio for a future career, our PCs are powered by Intel Core Ultra processors to help students unlock smarter learning and unleash their creativity. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel inside. All you have to do is choose the one that fits your passion. Head to Lenovo.com to shop AI PCs and find your perfect companion. Plus, get 5% off when you create an education account.

Hello, it is Ryan. And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up now at chumbacasino.com.

That's ChumbaCasino.com. Millions of people have turned to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic, because it just feels different. Where other AIs often sound a little robotic, Claude has been designed with special research that informs its character, meaning that Claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence.

That's why Clawed has become the if-you-know-you-know choice for dating advice, career coaching, gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions, and more. Give Clawed a try for free at Clawed.com. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot com. And let us know how you feel the difference. This is an iHeart Podcast.