It Could Happen Here Weekly 236

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of The What Happened to Her Podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. "You never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise, sometimes it's a police uniform." And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I Heart True Crime+ subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to I Heart True Crime+ subscribers. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime+ and subscribe today. It's all just a joke, what is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season 2 of The Podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers, and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received a scholarship and money to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast, what is Miss America at this point? Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the hosts of Out of Character, the best podcast in the world. That's what they said. Wait, they said that? Yeah, yeah, they said that. The best podcast was two best friends who jabber and talk about topical, trendy, funny stuff, give our input on it. That's what you've needed, I think up until now, listener. Listen to Out of Character on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Sometimes I just feel like a burden. You're a bird. You fly. You're a bird. You're a bird. You're a bird. And we are. Out of character. Thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worst with Kyle Pru on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool, so media. 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. Mia, are you excited today to learn about Gregory K Bavino? You know, I would describe myself going into this as an amateur, but enthusiast, Greg Bavino Hader. Okay. I am very familiar with his work in Chicago. I'm familiar with his work in Minneapolis. I am less familiar with his other work. I'm excited to tell a higher tier of Hader of one of the worst people we've ever had. Yeah, really a gem of the American law enforcement system. We're going to talk mostly today about Greg Bavino's post-career pivot, which seems mostly to be asking to have his old career back, but we can talk also a little bit about his previous career work when he was down here. He was in IB, he was in El Centro, he was in Blythe for a while. But last week, Mia, he was in Portugal. Oh, boy. Yeah. Do you want to guess why? You know, okay, I, going through my, my, my history of Portugal, it's country that had a left-wing military coup that didn't go far enough by which they never quite got rid of all the fascists. Yeah, a country that notably has a long history of fascism, which is why he was there. He was there in a remigration summit. Oh, no. Yeah. Like, so I'm just going to use the conference's own website here. It is a set fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical policies whose objective is to prevent population replacement through the reverse sort of migratory flows. There's nothing there about undocumented people. There's nothing there about visas, right, because this isn't about that. This is about race and ethnicity and removing people who do not line up with what you consider to be the national race. Yeah, this is, this is the method cleansing campaign. Yeah. There's like a lot of parallels in the history of all of these countries, but like, you know, I think if you look at the most immediate one, it's, oh, this is like the shit the Nazis were talking about doing while they were building the concentration camps with like, Jewish people, right? Is it they were going to like, deport them all to Israel or whatever? Yeah, we'll keep moving them east and at the very least, this is an ethnic cleansing plan. Yeah. That's the explicit goal, right? Like, there is not mention in that definition of undocumented people or even the way that they have been ever first to refer to it as illegal aliens, a term he uses a lot. And I think he sometimes uses it in quite elastic fashion, but even in this case, that is not what this conference is about. No. Yeah. This is very much a conference about a white Europe. Yeah. It was organized by Martin Selmer. He's a neo-Nazi who famously exchanged emails with Brent and Tarant, the Christchurch shooter. Oh, great. Yeah. But Vino spoke about this at the conference and he said that they hadn't met in person before but after talking for a little while, they found they were on the same sheet of music. Incredible. Yeah. You got a Google people, man. And like, he Google Martin Selmer and the first thing that comes up is that he emailed Brent and Tarant, unless I guess that's not an issue. Yeah, right. He's judging by the general company he kept. I don't think that's an issue because he's doing like the Spanish vox party there, after their AFD, the German far right party, racist from all over Europe. We also saw the sort of racist in America who I would describe as like fancy racists. The race science guys, right? Oh, they're kind of like the beret people. Yeah. Is it those guys or is it the kind of newer gen like tech, fascist people? So there's overlap between them. No, it's like the V-deat kind of tend to see. What? Yeah. Should we explain with the V-deert, yeah, a little bit? Go ahead, man. Yeah. Take it. Yeah. Well, I was just going to say at some point we're going to have Molly on. I am what you would call a, I guess, technically a professional Nazi identifier or whatever, but I'm like a low level one and everyone else in this network is a very high level one. We'll probably have Molly on at some point to like actually really go into V-deer and like that kind of shit. But yeah, it's broadly speaking, it's Peter Brimelow's anti-immigration website. We're not talking about anti-immigration terms and discussions about what visas we should give, right? We're talking about like white nationalism. Yeah. These are like Nazi Nazis. These are people that, you know, I don't think the US has ever really had what in Europe is called like the Cortons sanitaire, which is supposed to separate out like the mainstream right wing parties from like the Nazis. Yeah. Like we've never had that. So V-deer has been kind of more in anti-immigration circles, but it's also like those are people that, you know, even your kind of like really, really far right. Like people on the radio or politicians don't associate with because they are fairly open Nazis. Yeah. And there was some stuff that traced back to V-deer in a gender 47, I remember thinking like this ain't good. Yeah. V-deer just for people who like have lived a blessed life and don't know refers to Virginia and dare, who is, I believe the first white child or the first child, first girl, I don't know if maybe there's a word before, but I think it was the first white child born in the United States as settlers, one of the, one of the row and oak people, right? Yeah. Which is, I don't know. Maybe, maybe you motherfuckers could have made like the row and oak people and disappeared. But, yeah, yeah, that would be nice. Unfortunately, Mayor. No. Unfortunately, they didn't, and they didn't. Unfortunately, it's assimilated into indigenous cultures the way that the row and oak people almost certainly did. Yes. And instead, the side of the, yeah. In fact, quite the opposite. Yeah. Half a millennia long campaign of terror and bloodshed. Yeah. It's interesting to see Bavino, I guess, like aligning with these European anti-immigration discussion is different. It's not really dealing so much in undocumented people, it's dealing with people under various legal statuses. I'm not saying there aren't undocumented people in Europe, there are, but the discussion there has moved past that in a toxic way. Yeah. In a way that is like, we need to remove these people, even though they do have like legal documentation that allows them to be here. If the state says you're cooler, you're not cooler, that's not my concern. Yeah. But we're still alarming to see that the bigotry move passed even that, right, like without the pretence of enforcing the law. Yeah. And just simply being about removing people who we don't think we want to live next to because they're not white. But, you know, one of the groups that you talked about there, like the AFD in Germany, like this, this has been happening for like a long time, but one of their, like, slogans or to remove kebab. Yeah. And that's just literally like, remove all Turkish people from the country. Yeah. If we want to do this, there are documents that have leaked from them that have been planning at conferences to, okay, this is how we're going to remove the non-white people. This is how we're going to remove the Jewish people. This is not even like the pretense of anything I do with a law. This is just like, we are the original Nazis. If we want to do ethnic cleansing against not white people. Yeah, most of the people at the conference are peddling great replacement shit, right? And they, yeah, they genuinely believe that it's something that exists and that they can reverse it. At the conference, Pavito gave an interview. I found it on a website called Braze Info, the EIZH. It's a Breton and French language website. It's also published. I saw in a couple of other substacks. So I wonder if it was a pool interview that he gave. And the very few were translated it. I should note that I translated it from French. I don't think of, you know, speaks French. So I'm imagining they translated it from English to French. And there is an editor's note that says the editor was an AI. Oh, great. So any of the quotations here, we can't attribute them directly, right? Like, yeah, we can't assume that those are the words he said in English because it's been through three layers of bullshit. And so I understand that going in nonetheless. I think it's a very interesting insight into how Greg Pavino sees the world. And what's interesting about that is like, Greg Pavino was very popular in Border Patrol. He was by the standards of the patrol, a good border patrol agent, right? He was liked and I don't think he developed these opinions in a few months since he retired. No, yeah. And like a lot of the way he talks is not dissimilar to the way Border Patrol agents talk among themselves, right? I think that like what is interesting about this is not like Greg Pavino is essentially sharing a platform and agreeing with Nazis. It is after 25, 26 years in more than 30 years in the Border Patrol. This is what the Border Patrol formed him into. Yeah, because the point I want to make here is this shit is not something we can easily reform. This is not something we can train. If this country gets through this and in 2028, yes, we have another election. God, we can't fucking let this keep happening, right? The tool that Pavino was deploying in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Charlotte, in all these other cities in Los Angeles, right? Yeah, Memphis, New Orleans, like, yeah, like all over the country. Yeah, yeah, it is a tool that Democrats built as well as Republicans. Yeah. And at the place he's at, he got to with eight years working under Barack Obama with four years working under Joe Biden, like, we need to understand what we are doverting a fire hose of money towards. Yeah, with the Border Patrol, right? And I guess we can just start with where Greg Pavino started, which was comparing himself to Nazi general Irwin Rommel. Great. Yeah, right at the gate. He also compared himself to Patent and T. Lawrence, you know, like historically, it makes you wonder. Yeah. I think he probably has some kind of clean vermarked thing going on in his head where they're just soldiers. And he can respect both of them for their tactical prowess, you know, like, he says, quote, they grasp the overall strategy were others in government or in the political class did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic exposed events is very rare. I also listened to a couple of podcasts that Pavino did with a former Border Patrol agent who used to work in San Diego sector. And you hit us a lot right, talk about battles, talk about soldiers. Pavino sees himself as like a general, a Border Patrol as his soldiers fighting in a in a war. Yeah, that's not what they do. Oh, it clearly they see it as that. I understand why, because like they've, they've got around the country generating so much ill will that yeah, everywhere they go, people fucking hate them. Your actual job and there's a link we saw in Chicago is dragging screaming babies out of their fucking homes and putting them in camps. Yeah, I think this is going back to the thing you're talking about earlier about this not being something that's reformable is that. Yeah, that task is what Border Patrol was built for. That's what it was doing under all of these administrations is fucking dragging people screaming from their homes in the dark of the night. And like the only way you can get people to do that is by creating a crucible that creates Nazis. You kind of have compassion for the people whose families you're tearing apart, right? Like, yeah, people should read Jen Budsburg if they want to know what going through Border Patrol Academy. It's like, I'm just going to trigger warning that Jen was sexually assaulted and writes about that. Border Patrol has very high rate of sexual assault, right? Border Patrol is 95% male. Yeah, I have seen people in Border Patrol who do have compassion and then I have not seen them anymore. Like it drives those people away, yeah, they have a high dropout rate. And like, I think there are people who genuinely believe that what they will do is keep their community safe and rescue people who get stuck crossing the border in the desert, adjudicate them a fair process, deliver them to a fair process and they will do the best they can. I don't see those people remain in the patrol for very long, right? Like, I interact with obviously like the stance of this podcast is that you should remain silent and not talk to cops. But like, I interact with Border Patrol agents more often than most people do, right? That is the nature of my job and the place I live and the places I go. And like, I think these days, they're recruiting, they're doing, they're getting a lot of people who are coming in and starting like this. Yeah. But I don't think that's always been the case. Like, I understand that there are people also in communities along the border where there's very little economic opportunity. And then this is the only chance they have, but I see those people get spat out. Like you said, Mia, if you are going to train people to tear families apart, then you have to train them to hate. And I think that is what we see in this, right? Yeah. It's really interesting, but Vino tells his own story a little bit and he tells his own story on this podcast a little bit too as well. He starts with Operation Don't Let Him Ride. Are you familiar with Operation Don't Let Him Ride? No. Okay. So, you have to go all the way back to 2010. Oh, God. And last, Vegas, Nevada. Little, little tiny baby Mia. Yeah. 13-year-old Mia. Oh, God, fuck me. I feel old. I was in grad school. And Greg Bavino, I think he's the live station at that time. And they do this operation at a bus station in Nevada. It lasts for 60 minutes. It gets called off the Nevada Senator is pissed off about it. Their goal, they said, was to apprehend traffickers and to rescue people who have been trafficked or smuggled, right? In a community meeting, which was convened because the whole Latino community in Las Vegas was like the fuck, right? This internal enforcement was not a common thing at the time. Paul Beeson, who was chief agent of the humor sector at the time, said, quote, in that short period of time, we did not apprehend anybody. We felt was actively engaged in alien smuggling. We did not encounter any human trafficking victims. So, to me, then sound like a, like a win. Yeah. So, so, so they like, they were just rounding people up the bus stops. Correct. They went to like a bus, like a bus step host station. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the big buss. Yeah. Yeah. And they just rounded people up and yeah, exactly. So his interview with this former Border Patrol agent, he said that they apprehended more than one alien per minute of the operation. That was called operation. Don't let him ride. And that operation was set for about three days. It lasted 60 minutes, but the interesting thing is we caught more aliens than there were minutes in the operation. It was a very successful operation. Very successful. Yes, sir. Harry Reid called Hussein Obama and had that shut down immediately. But we never forgot that. We never forgot the vast amount of criminals that we apprehended in 2010 on those bus checks in Las Vegas. And the pervasive problem, even then that we saw and a lot of that problem came in under under Barack Hussein Obama, as well as Billy Flynn. I want to note the newspapers at the time reported a number that was more than two dozen. Technically, let's say the operation lasted 60 minutes, that is more than two dozen. It will be unusual to report a number of 60 by saying more than two dozen, right? Yeah. What is more interesting to me is that this operation was supposed to find people who had been trafficked and people who were trafficking and it failed. Greg Bavino seems to have seen it as a success because it just found people, right? People who were undocumented, people who were otherwise in infraction of immigration laws, but who were not involved in trafficking. Because for him, it seems like the goal was slightly different and therefore the criteria for success are slightly different, right? And this kind of fits into this narrative of him. So like I can see why he it is, especially in the context of him talking to the remigration conference, for him, it's a win. But for the explicit goals of the board of control at that time, it's not. So he cites this as the beginning of his journey to where he is, right? As a guy they went to for massive surges of board of patrol agents into city's tearing families apart. And I think if we see it the way he sees it, then we can see where he sees it as a success. Bavino in his early career had worked a lot in the El Centro sector, right? [BLANK_AUDIO] became chief patrol agent in the centrist sector. He was in Bortak for a while. I've read a defense university paper that interviewed him. He was in Honduras with Bortak training Bortak patrol there. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Everyone should read Empire of Borders. Everyone should read Bortak patrol nation. But like the DHS has done this for years, right? Funded, armed and equipped and trained Bortak patrol units all over the Americas because that is how America externalizes its border. Yeah. And in a very similar way to the way Europe does with the frantacts and, you know, like the deals like with Gaddafi and then the success of governments and Libya and stuff like that. Yes. And the people they're training there, it's like school of the Americas share just like actual monsters. Like, yeah, I mean, the Sally Hayden's book, my third time we drowned is one of the more heartbreaking books that's available for a human to read. But like if you want to know about the fucked up stuff, Europe's doing in Libya, it's a good book. Yeah. Yes, you know, it moves the violence away from the metropole, right? It moves it further. I've seen this from my own eyes, right? I've seen what happens in Panama, not necessarily, but the actions of any border patrols there, but just by forcing people to take that route. Like, I've seen how the externalization of our borders kills people. And I have seen how the Biden administration funded deportations of people who I can't find any criminal record for. And I have seen literally babies taken out of people's hands. Yeah. And they were deporting young men at that point. But I look at it, I've literally watched families torn apart right there, just after crossing the Darien gap. And it's heartbreaking. Yeah. Talking of heartbreaking, we haven't done ad pivot. Oh, boy. And hopefully these these products services will fix your heart break. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, here's an advert for whiskey. Okay, we are back. So one of the things Pavito did a lightness into you, is he sort of to kind of distinguish himself from what he calls the status quo bureaucrats. He's not wrong that like one of one of the roles of a chief in a sector is to speak to the press, right? He seems to be very upset that Roddy Scott and Tom Homan didn't speak to the press when they started these big operations. He says quote, CBP commissioner Roddy Scott and boarders are Tom Homan. Not only had no experience as full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak publicly during operations. Their reluctance triggered the unique situation I mentioned above. And either sort not asked to become the public face of the operation, but for this type of operation, there can only be one. Their responsibility fell to me. When you listen to this interview, did when he was in the patrol, he was in his critical of his leadership as he is now. Yeah. Probably for the very obvious reason. But like, the led down by leadership thing is a thing we've seen this on the right so many times, right? Yeah, it's like the classic backstab in this employed by one Adolf Hitler. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And in many cases thereafter. And he kind of seeks in this to differentiate field agents from like what I guess he called status quo bureaucrats, right? And he is genuinely very popular among field agents. And he did grow through the board patrol. He's not a guy who came from somewhere else. He has a 30 year career. He's done mountain interdiction stuff down in the Hukumba wilderness. Like he's he's definitely like had his boots on the ground. I think they like that. And I think for him, that gives him like like the he feels like he speaks for the board of patrol and that like these people who are like bureaucrats are what is constraining him and his guys from doing what they want to do. And like, it's really interesting to see the terms how he describes what they want to do, right? He called the withdrawal from Minneapolis or surrender. He called protesters the opposition in this podcast I listened to. He calls protesters pro fascist. Which is very given the company he keeps his fucking ridiculous. Like the other people at that conference can't be happy with that. That's a thing, right? Like, where are the fascists here? Yeah. Yeah. They're not hiding it. Like, it's very interesting to see him like not willing to kind of surrender that term. You know what I mean? Like to not quite say it at the same time as like, yeah, there are other people like conference who are like, no, we're the fascists. What are you talking about? They're not pro fascists. They hate us. Like, like, he's still like one step removed from joining his buddies there. Another thing they found interesting was that he says what a patrol is often referred to as quote, the federal law enforcement Marine Corps. What? Does anyone say that? I've not heard them say that. I never heard that. It's a very strange. I'm guessing what he's referring to is like the Marine Corps has these expeditionary units, which can deploy very quickly to conflict zones. Like we saw in Iran, right? Yeah. And I'm guessing that's what he means. Like they're the the hit squad. Yeah. They're the they're the like, oh my god, we found like four children sleeping in a bedroom. We have to go. We have to go send their like tactical squad after them. Yeah. There are there are first line of defense against against tiny babies. Yeah. And again, for Americans exercising their first amendment rights. Yeah. When people were in the street in Portland, it was border patrol. They said. Yep. It was Bortac. Yeah. Yeah. Right. They do have something of a history of being the federal government's hit squad. Yeah. When they want to stamp on Americans, they do send the border patrol. Interestingly, he went on to site the old misriot. You familiar the old misriot? It sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, you can surmise what's going to happen. It's a university in the south. Yeah. Yeah. What happens is that James Meredith, a black man, had attempted to register at the school several times. He had been prevented by racists, including the governor. And at one point, JFK sent border patrol agents along with federal. I think they were cross-worn as marshals maybe to accompany him to register. They ended up surrounded in the LICM. 28 federal agents were shot. Jesus. Yeah. No. They had a fucking fight about it. Two of the people surrounding the LICM were killed. I'm not sure I've ever in my entire life seen a government deployment and thought you should have sent the national guard. But yeah, I guess you should have sent the actual guard. Jesus. Yeah. The one that's on the racist really. I guess love shooting beds to oppose integration. Yeah. In this case, they sent the regular ass army to come get him out. Yeah. I think this was the era when they felt like national guards in the south were not entirely trustworthy. Yeah. Well, yeah. You'd have to do a Trump style. We're sending the fucking California national guard to Mississippi or whatever. They normally send like one of those Q or F like 82nd Airborne or something like that. Yeah. Wow. I can't believe I'm in a position where I support the deployment of US troops against America. I know. It's wild. I know. It's a wild scenario. I guess it's like because they're trying to do a lynching. So yeah. Like in that case, yeah, maybe stop the lynching. But it's a really interesting choice because he talked about how board patrols, you know, they had this long history of doing this. And again, he's not wrong. And I guess maybe the Ole Miss thing plays a part in their mythos because they were fighting against the racists. I can see where they would want to hold onto that. It's interesting to see him doing that at the racist conference. Yeah. It's like, oh, no, no, no, we are a different kind of racist. We are California. We are racist. We are not like the primitive Southern racists. We have advanced for a level of racism to 20 levels. Yeah. And he's very popular amongst the like we're a different kind of racist racist, right? Yeah. The V-Dare tendency is the like quote unquote scientific racists. Yeah. And by the way, I want to clarify before I get screamed at the thing I just said was like his perspective, not mine, Jesus Christ, fuck these people. Yeah. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Please don't clip me around in context. So like he then goes on after he's explained this to explain like his history of migration. He says that around in the year 2000, quote unquote, the floodgates opened. His basic thesis is summed up in his statement from 2000 to 2026. Our borders were nothing but speed bumps. Illegals and smugglers need it once they cross the border. They were virtually safe from any consequences. Couple of things there that obviously includes Trump's first term and part of the second term. And these are about Trump having a first term seems to be quite a common issue on the right. It's really astonishing. And the left two. I don't know. I'm seeing a word more certain certain people who will go on mentioned who were working for black water under the first Trump administration. Yeah. It's very interesting to see this narrative, but again, not an uncommon one. Right. Like he talks about how he wrote a paper called Illegal Aliens Attraction of Natural Resources. So he has two master's degrees. One is from the National Defense University. And I'm not sure if that's his second master's thesis, which it would be, I'd be interested to read it, but I haven't been able to find it. And I'm not sure. And you make master's stuff public. And I think generally how it works is you have to opt to make it public. Like I'm interested to know is this kind of ecognativism? Is it like carrying capacity shit? Like what? Yeah. It kind of feels like it reminds me. It's like you get like you get this from like Scandinavian races where they're like they have this line about the welfare state where like the welfare state is a fire and you can only have so many people huddled around the fire. Yeah. And it's like, yeah. Well, God. But we see We saw a lot from Mike Lee, right, when he was attempting another pathetic excuse for selling off our public lands, like, Lee was saying how like so much of a wilderness area is destroyed by migrants, so we have to destroy them and sell them to protect them. The logic of Mike Lee is unknowable, but I'm interested to read that. If you have said anyone's like a Libre ninja, get in touch, I'd love to find that out. He spent a great deal of time explaining his 100 million number, and he refers to these people as illegal aliens, right, that he contrasts this with the number of 20 million. He says that comes from pure research and he says it hasn't changed since the 1970s. That is not a statistic which is played out in Pew's published documents. I'm looking here at a 2023 paper from Pew, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 1993.5 million, 2008.6, 2015.11.0, thanks Obama, and up to 14 million in 2023. He claims it's been 20 since the 1970s, obviously he's not giving a source here, but he claims Pew has said that and that's not what I found from Pew. He sort of arrives to this 100 million dollar number, first he said he was looking for stuff from investment bank, their stones, and I don't know what he was looking at. Why? Yeah, it's very strange. He then goes on to give the only hard statistics he gives, if he's talking about Charlotte North Carolina here when they were doing Operation Charlotte's web, estimates indicated that 30% or more of commuters were no longer traveling. This means at least 30% that they were most likely illegal immigrants. What? This is based on traffic delays. The number, he's getting that the amount of time people spend in traffic, like he's going on Google maps. This is a massive logical leap. He then says that's about a quarter of Charlotte's commuters, 30% not a quarter, and this figure you guessed it fits perfectly with the total of 100 million out of 420 million people in the United States. I estimate that 100 million are illegal immigrants, same as the observation for children absent from Charlotte schools, more than 30% of students were missing. These were of course illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. The category of illegal children, uh, fascinating choice of words, oh God, I'm guessing he's talking about like undocumented kids or kids whose parents are undocumented separate categories there, but like, there are many reasons, I don't think we have to explain this to listeners where some people might not have wanted to be out and about or at school, when board patrol and dragging people out of cars and smashing their windows. Yeah, this is a really strange way common thing, which is like, yeah, yeah. Like not wanting to die. I want to put this out too. Like they shot like American citizens, not that it's like worse to shoot an American citizen than an honest citizen, but like, no, but everyone knew that they had done that. Yeah. Like they did that in Chicago. Yeah. Like, yeah, they did in Chicago. They were going to go do it again in Minneapolis. Yeah. Obviously they shot protesters. They also just shot random people like who they were like, oh, you're a non-white fuck you, right? Like it's like that kind of shit. We are people who got in most of the instance we've seen that what they have said is a person tried to ram them with their car. And most of the times we have seen video evidence, it certainly doesn't look like that to me. No. Yeah. Yeah. This idea that 30% of students are there for undocumented people to salute a Chris. Yeah. They were in Charlotte in like middle to late November, like there's a time when Americans often travel, don't go to school, right? They have this Thanksgiving thing here and people like to enjoy time with their families. [MUSIC] He then goes on to talk about the differences between US and Europe. There's a phrase here that I want to read. Again, I want you to understand that this is translated twice. Uncontrolled immigration to the United States now poses the greatest threat to our culture and our very existence. This goes for you in Europe too. Even when we manage to get past these cumbersome bureaucrats and politicians, the grassroots will take care of it for us. The precise tactics for removing those who need to be removed may take different forms in Europe in the United States. The grassroots will take care of it for us is between empaches. I don't know if he means the grassroots will vote them out. Otherwise that seems like a pogrom, right? Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, that just seems like an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by people. I want to be like, because that's a really scary concept, right? Yeah, but also, yeah, it's an AI translation that was then translated by you. I don't know how your French is these days. My French is fine, but like, I forget who said all translation is an act of violence, but yeah, like, humans doing translation is an act of violence. AI doing translations is like the fucking future terminator. Yeah, bullshit for the machines have killed everyone. Like, yeah, a lot of really is lost in translation in between the M dashes. The French is La Basse populaire sans Châtillera pour nu. So, yeah, come at me, French speakers. Let me know if you think there's a better translation for that. They then goes on to try and like, not blame Trump, which is interesting. I said, I don't believe Trump has abandoned his campaign promise. I believe that his advisors do not bring him back to reality on the ground. And then I've skipped a little here. If I had to do it again, I would have briefed Trump directly several times rather than relying on this inner circle who might have interests elsewhere. Trump is the best president I've ever worked for. I believe he will return to that campaign promise soon. Again, it's kind of a fatty thing, right? Like, it wasn't the leader. It wasn't the dear leader of some people who failed to reflect the dear leaders thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very interesting to see him speaking so clearly this way. Like, there's two ways he could be going with this. He could be angling for his job back. To be clear, right? The reason we don't have no money for Fino anymore, in my opinion, is that after ICE and then CBP, both murdered U.S. citizens in the plane light of day on camera, and then took to the television to lie about those U.S. citizens and the hours after they murdered them, they became too toxic for even the Trump administration to touch. Yeah, they were staggeringly unpopular. Everyone fucking hated them. Yeah, you literally lost, like, the old guys with NRA hats at the gun range, who I sometimes talk to, like. Yeah, fucking, again, I can't keep coming back to, like, they lost fucking Kurt Warner, who, like, is, like, a quarterback who has never once talked about politics ever and is, like, made, like, a documentary that was, like, a bunch about, like, his, like, faith journey, right? And they, like, when, when, when, when Kurt Warner is being, like, "Hey, what the fuck?" Yeah, you've lost your, you're losing the conservative football, guys. Yeah, I mean, you shoot a white man on his knees in the street in the back. Yeah, it's. While you're beating him up. Yeah, that's how you lose Americans. Yeah, that's how you lose barstool. Like, it's. Yeah, hideous. Yeah, he kind of has two choices, right? Like, he can, and he can go into the consulting world. He can go into the grifting world, right? And just become, like, a podcast grifter. Welcome to the club. Or he can go into politics. And I wonder which, like, he's kind of left two of those pathways open, right? Like, he kind of. Yeah. pogcast grifter or politics. Well, and you can do both now, too, I guess. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, see, see the head of the FBI. Too much, it was too much for Dan Boncino. He retired and returned to the pod phase. I guess, I guess, I guess, I guess it's like our noble health and human services secretary, the latest shit-eating candidate or whatever, like, can still do that shit. But. Yeah, the serial podcast guest, I just want to come back to, like, we need to reflect on this now, right? Like, we're doing primaries for the midterms right now. The Democrats have doubled down on same old shit, almost everywhere across the country. Like, we have seen some better candidates, right? Like, I understand that, like, the pathway to a beautiful life is not through the Democratic Party. But if they are incapable of seeing that this isn't something that we can reform, if they do what Biden did in 2020, which is like, oh, they just need more money. Yeah. This ratchet will continue to only move in one direction, which is towards the brutalization of more people. Yeah. Just on a very basic level, like, having a massive institutional apparatus that produces Nazis and gives them the authority to do the thing that the Nazis want to do, is not a way that any kind of democracy can survive. Yeah. And that's what we've seen. To paraphrase, we have created an entity which you can exempt from the law in order to enforce it. Yeah. We can't keep up with that. And, like, now is a moment, I guess, that demands bravery, and from the Democrats, I've seen cowardice. Yeah. If they continue to be cowards right now, we're going to go so far down this path, there's no coming back. Yeah. And I don't fucking know, but I think that's something we really need to reflect on. Yeah. We have 20,000 Latinos who we've given guns and training and authority to. Yeah. If allowed to kill people in our streets and not face accountability, right? Yeah. Like, I am not a county attorney appreciated generally, but like, it makes me think to see that Hennepin County attorney go after the ICE agent who shot someone through their front door and their light about it. Like, if liberal democracy can't do any of that kind of stuff, then it's worth this. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Yeah. And it won't be a democracy after. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It made his own bed to die on. There's examples of this fucking everywhere, right? But like, the Biden administration was tragedy is farce of like, I end a promoting Pinochet. Yeah. Like, that's a thing that he did. He promoted Pinochet. Right. Yeah. Like, if you don't get rid of the people who want to fucking kill you and you instead give them more power, they're going to fucking kill you. Yeah. And like, what Biden tried to, that they tried pretty hard to retire Pino because he would talk a lot about the situation at the border and Biden administration, but they didn't. No, they didn't. And then also like, they made more of them. Yeah. And also they threw as much money like the money that your kid doesn't get for free meals. It's because Border Patrol has black orcs like. Yeah. Yeah. That was a heartwarming and inspiring episode of it could happen here podcast about things falling apart. Yeah. But hey, we beat the Nazis once we can do it again. Yeah. And Minneapolis beat these people. That's the other thing, right? Like they won. Yeah. They came out and they stood together as a community. They didn't focus on trivial bullshit that divides them. They looked out for one another. Border Patrol thought they were in a battle. And if they were in a battle, then they did lose it. They surrendered, right? Yeah. And like that's that's also not to say that there aren't still like horrifying shit happening there, right? Like there's still raids going on. Yeah, absolutely correct. Yeah. And that like people aren't dealing with the many other ills for capitalism and they just had some other state as it is today. But like. Yeah. They were not able to make those people cower in fear. Yeah. And that has shown the rest of the country how brave we can be together. And I just don't think we should forget that. Yeah. I'm Melissa Jeltsin and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed, they can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives like the cool Uber driver we just had or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters and so does yours and this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen to Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Well, are you ready, ladies? Here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America pageant. I never received a scholarship I need to pay for my student loans. He looks and he goes, you don't look like you suffered a needing disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Prue is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love, bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury, get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them with a gun. Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing. You look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the get worse podcast. Listen to get worse with Kyle Pru on the iHarm Radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. ISIS, I'll shouldn't you, and Christian, sign this off. At least glance, these movements appear to have almost nothing in common. One is transnational, but territorially weakened, terranet work, most active in the 2010s. One was a fringe Japanese Doomsday cult from the 90s, and one remains a powerful political movement embedded in the heart of the US, the world's premier imperialist power. The ideologies may be irreconcilable, their enemies may be different, and their methods even may vary from guerrilla warfare to political lobbying, and yet they have more in common than meets the eye. Welcome to get up in here, I'm Andrew Sage, Andrew is on YouTube, and I'm joined today by. Gerasa Davis, hello. Welcome. Welcome. So my goal is to try to understand these movements through the lens of ideological totalism, which was a specific theoretical framework developed by Robert G. Lifton, to identify the outcome of a successful thought reform process, characterized by denesterish and Tim Warforth in On the Edge, as a "mood of absolute conviction", which embeds ideas so deeply in people's heads, that they grow inoculated against doubt. Ideas cease to be provisional theories about the world, and instead become secret convictions, dependent on the world of how authorities for their violation rather than evidence. And good. Lifton saw the potential for the emergence of ideological totalism within everyone, but he noted good, "totalistic convictions are most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claims, whether religious, political or scientific." The 8th criteria that he identified for thought reform were milieu control, which is the control of communication and information within the environment, mystical manipulation, which is the orchestrating of spontaneous events to serve the group's message, the demand for purity, which divides the world into black and white, good and evil categories, the cult of confession, which pushes members to confess past sins and personal failings to the group, the secret science, which elevates the group's dogma to an unquestionable truth, loading the language, which is used in jargon or cliches to minimise critical thinking, doctrine over person, which subordinates individual experiences and identity to the group's beliefs, and finally the dispensing of existence, declaring that only those in the group have the right to exist. Now, not all of these factors may be at play for each of these specific movements that I would have mentioned, but we still see the outcome of this ideological totalism in each of these movements, to very an extent. The systematic erosion of individual autonomy in favour of an unassailable authority, whether speaking about ISIS or Amstricule or Christian Zionism within the evangelical movement or on any other case, we will see how movements replace individual identity with a collective programme persona, where loaded language and thought-terminating cliches make dissent literally unthinkable, where the enemy other is manufactured, and where power is concentrated so tightly that leader or the dogma becomes the only source of truth. So the foundation of ideological totalism is the destruction of nuance. To build a cohesive us and them, there must be clearly defined and definition. polarized. First comes the categorization where the complexity of human identity is reduced into a single non-negotiable trait, the it-religion or nationality or ideology, and then comes the humanization which is stripping the other of human qualities, transforming them from a person into a threat, impure, an infidel and obstacle. And finally there's enclosure which creates social or psychological walls that prevent the us from interacting with them. This ensures the only information the group receives is that of the others perceived malice. In the context of groups like ISIS, the us versus them in Genesis expressed both ideologically and through physical violence. By committing acts of terror, the group forces the rest of the world to recognise their boundary. There's no cross-contamination to be had with the infidel world, no middle ground, either part of their struggle for a global caliphate or your own enemy to be eradicated, whether you consider yourself a Muslim or anything else. With armature EQ, the cults us versus them in-gen operator through isolation in communes and the severance of external ties. The them was defined as the corrupted world or the spiritually dead, and the group sought purity and enlightenment, so they targeted the individuals existing social networks, family, friends, mainstream society, labelling them as sources of contamination. By cutting off the member from the outside world, the cult ensured that the only reality that existed was the one provided by the leader. And with the political religious Christian Zionists, the us versus them in-gen is built through a historical and eschatological narrative that sees the entire secular world as enemies to the apocalyptic ambitions of Christ's retune. They are frequently warned to avoid willfully influences, temptations from the devil that may skew them from the righteous path. The other, in all these cases, is successfully stripped of their humanity. The destruction of the them becomes a logical necessity for the survival of the us. And the isolation ensures the group's total control over an individual's interpretation of reality. Interesting how all these various cultish elements build on or use the techniques written about by Carl Schmitt, the front enemy distinction, and how creating groups like this, you have to choose a border point to choose the point that determines what we are and what our enemy is, and then in order to keep your group active or safe, that border has to be moved, it has to always be pushing. It can't actually stay at the same point. And you see that movement with all these groups, right? They have this like millenarianist apocalyptic focus, but they're still like moving towards this larger enemy population. Yeah, I mean, you see it in, like I mentioned, ISIS has erected this barrier that separates them even from Muslims who may share some of their other religious convictions, but do not share their political ambitions. Yeah. You see with the evangelical movement, which distinguishes themselves from other Christian sects as being heretical or not fully committed to the world or to have gone astray in some way. Yeah, I mean, you can see that with the evangelical leaders and like the president picking fights with the literal Pope of the Catholic church. Yeah, I mean, the beef between the Catholics and the Protestants go kind of far back. You suppose that these share this scripture or this overarching religious framework, and yet there's still a desire to delineate, to separate, to define an enemy eaten within that cohort. And a lot of those like current differences, they can do relate to like military action in the Middle East and what's happening in Palestine, like specifically. And I found that to be an interesting connection as you're talking about, you know, specifically like Christian Zionists and how the situation in the Middle East is extremely important for their apocalyptic worldview. And that is like one of the key differences between between like evangelical Christians and the current stuff like that. The Pope is saying, which is very much opposed to what's happening in the Middle East. Yeah, because they've constructed this very robust eschatological framework, which is the next thing that I want to get into. The language that these movements use helps to control their people. The controlling people not just through physical barriers, but through psychological barriers. Yeah. If you can control the vocabulary available to a person, how a person understands the meaning of words, how they understand the meaning of their scriptures, you can control the range of thoughts that they're capable of having. You know, that was kind of the point that, and I just cliche at this point, is the point that George Orwell was making when they had the ministry of truth in 1984 that you limit even the language available so that even descent cannot be fully expressed. You don't have to censor anybody because you've already censored their minds. Yeah. And you see that even their own creation of like phrases in terms across all these groups, like they come up with specific turns of phrase, they just get repeated. And that just starts like replacing language. It turns to filling in the gap of language in communication. So thought terminating cliches. Exactly. Exactly. Thoughts to any cliches and also just a broader cognitive and closure. So in the case of Om Shinriku, you had the group using this dense pseudo scientific and pseudo religious jargon that blended spirituality, quantum physics, biology, and those who are most elevated in that group were able to wield that language and make themselves sound so sophisticated and elevated and on a higher plane of truth and reality that made it very easy for them to swindle people within their circle. It created a linguistic barrier of the entry so that you couldn't participate even in the group's truth without committing to the incomprehensible dogma. Yeah. And if you don't commit to their incomprehensible dogma, then you just you don't get it. You're going to be an outsider for you are not enlightened. You are outside of the truth. Yeah. I mean, that this is a problem across a lot of a lot of different groups, including groups that are not this apocalyptic or fascist or like religiously based, but they even see versions of this among like the contemporary left. Yeah. Which creates like, yeah, it's like barrier to entry by using certain like phrases like academic language. Yeah. And very idiosyncratic definitions of woods that have otherwise common definitions. Yeah. No, and how much politics is like the subcultural purpose of like maintaining a certain like subgroup like a social circle versus actually building like mass politics and how idiosyncratic, small like purity of groups with their special language and these like barriers to entry makes it very hard to do larger political organizing that actually goes towards like a working class movement. Yeah. Lifting points out that there is a tendency for ideological totally salmon, a lot of movements, as I was already mentioned. So something we have to be on guard for if we want to avoid falling into these traps. And so we look at the example of an issue here in this case, but I says also has a kind of a total elimination of new ones through polarized emotionally charged vocabulary. You don't have the believer, you have the infidel, which again includes fellow Muslims. You have the pure and you have the corrupt. Every dynamic every binary is zero or some. You know, you either with the caliphate or you had an enemy of God to be wiped out. And within the eschatological framework of Christian Zionism opposing the apocalyptic informed geopolitical ambitions is tense about opposing God's plan. You know, it's like how dare you? They use these thoughts emanating clichés as you would have mentioned things like it is written. Yeah. It's in revelation. You know, it's God's will. And there's no way to actually challenge their policies or actions in their minds on whether it be humanitarian, legal or logical grounds because it's like you speak in Greek. I mean, doing something like that is like arguing with God. It's like attacking their faith. And so we also see these movements stripping individuals of the agency for the sake of a transaction. The exchange of the self with all its very real vulnerabilities and mortality and its limitations for a higher purpose that is eternal and absolute. In the case of Anshun Rikyo, the destruction of the self was achieved through the redefinition of morality that used a distorted interpretation of Vajrayana Buddhism and placed the masters will above all conventional ethics. To follow the master and achieve spiritual evolution, one had to abandon the ego with its moral compass and its human attachments. And in its place, Anshun Rikyo offered the merit of absolute obedience by following their leaders' commands, even those of mass violence that would expose the wider world to their threat. The practitioner believe that they were performing a ritual act of spiritual cleansing to become an instrument of a higher cosmic order. You see the same thing with the rise of ISIS. The destruction of the self achieved through the total absorption of the individual into the monolith. The individual stripped of their specific context, whatever nationality or background they may have had, and being reduced to a singular functional component of the struggle. Being given a purpose that was compensated with the promise of eternal significance, the promise of martyrdom, of fighting and dying for the Caliphate. And with that, the individual could bypass the mundane struggles of earthy life, to secure a police in a permanent, divine reality. And the political, theological sphere of Christian Zionism, the destruction of the self has more to do with relinquishing the self's agency, and become an instrumentalized for the sake of God's plan. By freebing Israel's ascendance in the Middle East as an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, and when everything in their power to lobby for and support it, the movement disregards the genocidal costs for the reward, being the fulfillment of a divine apocalyptic timeline. As in all three cases, the follower is convinced of the destruction of this world as they know it, and the destruction of the self within it is not a tragedy, but actually a kind of liberation. But all three of these movements have been tragedies for the rest of the world. Amshenrykyo deployed chemical weapons in Tokyo subway system. They killed 13 people and injured over 5,800 others. It's still in a long-term anxiety for those living in the city that their shared space could be the sight of potential terror. And the person sitting next to you could be the vessel for a hidden lethal ideology. ISIS has forcibly displaced millions, killed tens of thousands, and destroyed ancient heritage sites, all in an effort to erase the other. And the Middle East and Africa in particular continue to be scarred by its violence. Christian Zionist ideology has introduced a variable to the political equation that is immune to reason and negotiation, that cannot question its theological justifications. Of course, Zionism is not entirely dependent on Christian Zionist support. You know, Jewish colonial settlements were predated, British support, American support, and Christian Zionist support. But the political cosine that Christian Zionists provide within the premier superpower does aid in the continued support for the Palestinian genocide. So ideological totalism seeks to eliminate pluralism, eliminate shared truth, and to literally kill. But we should not view the rise of totalizing ideologies as some freak-isolated phenomenon, because it deprives its strength from the very framework and conditioning embedded in our existing social structures. The mechanisms of milieu control, loading the language, and other techniques used by cult activities exist in subtle forms within our mainstream institutions. We see the seeds of thought or form in the echo chambers of media ecosystems. We see the loading of language in the polarized rhetoric of politics. We see the demand for purity in the most aggressive forms of cultural and religious tribalism. The extremist can sometimes be the most honest, uninhibited expression, the natural endpoint of our world's authoritarian tendencies and subtle lifelong conditioning. At home in the classroom, at work in civic life, we are trained in the soft visions of the very deference that totalise and leaders eventually demand. We are conditioned to respect authority without question, to prioritise the greater good of the institution over individual agency and to accept official narratives as the only valid reality. So when a leader arrives, who promises to replace the complex, messy and certain tier of political and social reality with the clarity of absolute truth, the most conditioned minds naturally find the offer at a seductive. And so this disease caught through social conditioning must be treated by a fundamental reclamation of the individual's capacity for critical thought and autonomy. We have to move beyond the mere consumption of information to the active interrogation of it. This means cultivating the ability to recognise the traps of thought reform, the logical fallacies, the loading of the language, to recognise when an ideology is attempting to bypass our reason in favour of our emotions. The primary defence against thought reform is the refusal to let any authority, religious but color otherwise, become secret and beyond a question. I think that point that you made towards the end there, but this thing just being the most visible consequence of the contradictions of our current social system is really important. We're all sorting through the same sorts of causes that produce groups like this, or the people that move into groups like this. And we might sort these out in different ways. But in the way that they do it, it's not fully alien. It's just a very visible outward manifestation of the same sorts of internal contradictions. And fascism feeds on these same things. You can see how much fascism overlaps with a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here. And it seems suicidal tendencies, this destruction of the self. That is dealing with those same sorts of social tensions and internal contradictions that produce outbursts of anti-social behaviour like this, or in some cases, like genocidal behaviour. Yeah, yeah. I think it's very much a result. And so there's the structure of a world system. You know, these stresses, the anxieties, the pains and pressure points. And, you know, we are all different as individuals. And I think that some people respond to these conditions in ways that are very much either self-destructive, externally destructive or both. I think a part of our task in like a general sense is providing some alternative to this, right? You didn't like look at the way the really like on like a global level. Like the left has really receded a lot in the past 50, 60, 70 years. And that leaves a lot of people who are trying to look for this sort of purpose, right? They're trying to understand the contradictions of the world. And there may not be a humanistic option for that. So it gets directed into much more destructive ways sometimes. You can see like what happened in Rojava with the Democratic Confederalism. They actually did that, right? They saw what was needed and they did it. And it's directly opposing the sort of alternative version, which is, which is ISIS, which is like super interesting, right? But I think we have, we have the same problem here. And but we don't really have like a strong, a strong like alternative to that, right? Like a healthy, a healthy and growing, like working class movement, which attempts to actually solve the sort of problems that are in the world that these sorts of other things like feed on, right? They they grab onto these, onto these very, very present problems and apply an emotionally soothing response to it, even if it is self-destructive. Yeah. The work of building an alternative and demonstrating it and showing people living it, I think is very, very important. Yeah. I also think that when you consider the fact that the whole mark of totalizing systems is the elimination of the other and the criminalization of descent, our antidotes, our alternative has to embrace, has to be committed to the diversity of thought and expression. And I also think that it has to be willing to sit with conflict, to sit with tensions, to allow them to engage with each other without trying to just override it with some false unity. Those tensions and conflict are like important, and that is, that is how we will like develop our thought and develop our movement forward. You have to, you have to have those tensions, you have to have that, that conflict and disagreement, which will, you know, hopefully produce more positive outcomes. Yeah, hopefully it's its generative conflict and non-destructive conflict. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, and some conflicts can be generative if we accept that they can't be resolved. Yeah. I think part of what makes some conflicts destructive is this effort to kind of just paint over them with some whom by our sense of, oh well, just, will you just unify? Like, that's not consequential or we'll figure it out or that's just how it is. I think we, yeah, we have to be willing to be uncomfortable with not having the answers. I mean, we never have any answers in some cases. There are those who I think will have the capacity to engage into deraticalization of ideological totalists. I don't think I'm among them. And I think that there are others that we can care outreach towards. Yes. I get irritated sometimes when I see people who believe that the focus of our attention right now as people trying to build on alternative, trying to build a better tomorrow, that our focus should be on trying to deraticalize right wingers. Yeah. The vast majority of people are politically unaffiliated, politically uncommitted, apathetic, disengaged. And I think that we can far more if we were to focus on reaching those people and having those people see the problems of this system and the solutions that we have on offer, then engaging in fruitless debate with right-wingers or-- Yeah, and I think that's actually the most effective form of de-radicalization. Exactly. Exactly. There is a lot of problems with the sort of de-radicalization framework that emerged in like 2018 to kind of meet the rise of like the alt-right. A lot of it doesn't work, a lot of it can be fruitless, but there is like a noble intention behind it, and I think the best way to actually do that is by just providing a healthy alternative. That does appeal to most people. It doesn't-- it doesn't need to be catered towards someone who's on like the right or like the far right. Because in a lot of cases, those people are suffering from the same sorts of problems that the rest of people are, they've just found a false solution for it. And so if you're able to provide a better solution, a lot of them will move over. There's really very few that are like through and tried like ideologically committed, right? There's some and they're maybe very vocal on the internet, but that's not actually like most-- Yeah, and also the internet is at least half-bots at this point. So, you know, you take some of those internet discussions with her grain of salt in terms of being representative of any population significantly. But I did have some tips with regard to outreach for those who may have a special interest in it, or maybe have a loved one that they really want to help, where they see being immersed in an ideologically totalistic environment. For one, directly attacking a person's core beliefs are going to trigger something called the backfire effect, which is where contradictory evidence actually strengthens their conviction because their identity is now fused to their ideology. So, an attack on the idea is perceived as a mortal attack on the self. Debating them is not going to help. It's better to think of yourself more as a connecting force rather than a correcting force. You're a lifeline, yeah. To gently guide them out of their radical mindset rather than trying to instruct them out of it, to berate them out of it. And when you notice that they are experiencing doubt in their ideas, it can be very exciting to try and rush in and show them the way, which you don't want to overwhelm them. Doubt, especially for people immersed in that mindset, might literally collapse their entire social and cognitive world. So your focus, I think, needs to be on providing a safe harbor, where their doubts can be expressed freely, without judgment, or any pressure to immediately betray all that they've ever known. You also need to consider the conditions that led the person into that situation in the first place. If you know what they were like and what their situation was like, prior to indoctrination, where they had certain relationship issues, financial issues, systemic abuses, traumas, isolation, some kind of union for meaning or purpose, that can help you contextualize this situation. And well, you can always fundamentally disagree with their conclusions. It's good to recognize the needs that drove them to those conclusions. But in addition to that, you can try to find out what their passions and hobbies will or are outside of that doctrine, so that they have some kind of psychological, land and pad, if they were to escape the environment, so that they're not without a sense of self. So they're not floundering for some form of identity. These movements and this tendency for ideological totalism derived from hierarchy will not be overcome in one fell swoop. It is a continuous, daily struggle within the human mind and the social fabric. It's a struggle to remain unconditioned by the temptations of certainty, to all on to the messy, the diverse, the complex, to create a social foundation of individuals who are capable of saying nope. And that's it for me. All power to all the people, peace. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? And we were babies. She did all of these grave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. Sometimes it's a pollution form. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about. Trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama music or TV shows or the Med Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country a fantasy. Okay, here we go. But over the past decade, the crowd's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, an uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. I never received a scholarship. I need to pay for my student loans. He looks at me and goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. An exploitation of our Miss America's is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So, if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in black male love bomb and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Kill them. Kill them. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships, you don't need them. You only need one thing and that's the Get Worse podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHarm Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we think of globalization, we often think of trade and late 20th century technological interconnection and the movement of capital. But there was another kind of globalization emerging in the late 19th century. That was the globalization of resistance. In the closing decades of the 1800s, a network of ideas, outlaws, and revolutionaries would emerge to challenge the empires of the time. Welcome to Ikar Appen here. I'm Andrew Siege. Andrew is on YouTube. I'm joined again by Gerasa Davis. Hello. Welcome again. And in this episode, using the research of Historian Bandit Anderson in chapter five of the Age of Mobilization, I want to look at this period in history where the tools of empire were appropriated by the very people the empire sought to suppress. To link anarchist prisoners, it's Montrrich to intellectuals in Paris to agitators in Cuba to nationalists into Philippians. Now the story doesn't actually begin in Montrrich prison in Barcelona Spain, but our narrative begins there. Following the June 7, 1896 bombing in Corpus Christi, 300 people were imprisoned in a wave of Spanish state repression. Among those caught in the crackdown was Fernando Tareda Del Marmol, a Cuban Creole whose background connected him to both Metropole and Colony. His imprisonment was a direct consequence of the state's attempt to suppress the bourgeoisian anarchist movement in Catalonia, but only end up fueling the movement, thanks to the efforts of the radical international press. Tareda was a maths teacher, which actually helped him out when he got arrested because a young lieutenant warden recognized his former teacher and managed to sound the alarm of his incarceration. Tareda also happens to be the cousin of a conservative senator who used his influence to ensure Tareda's release, but Tareda didn't let these privileges cause him to forget his less privileged fellow prisoners because he immediately upon release went to Paris, the city of duality, a city that was both the central capital of colonial power and a premier global hub for political descent. So then Paris to read again access to la review blanche, a very popular periodical of the year. He'd been a recognized writer from before his imprisonment, as he'd popularly advocated for anarchism without adjectives, and he had gotten into a back and forth about workers' associations and bureaucracy and propaganda of the deed with a certain gene grave, who was another popular French anarchist of the period. So in la review blanche, Tareda published his pucino brutal experience of imprisonment and contextualized it as a broader political indictment by connecting the gruesome suppression of descent in Barcelona to the exact same mechanisms being deployed in the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Thus he demonstrated that repression in Spanish provinces was not an isolated domestic issue, but a fundamental characteristic of Spanish colonial policy. And his narrative was taken up and amplified by the efforts of Fili Fignon and Georges Clemenceau. Fili Fignon was an influential art critic and prominent anarchist intellectual who helped frame the struggle against sparse repression as a significant moral crisis. He also wrote strongly against French imperialism and revanche nationalism. And Georges Clemenceau was a radical journalist and politician, considered a formidable figure in the defence of political prisoners, as he had the capacity to mobilize public opinion around his use of justice, state authority. So together these figures helped ensure that the grievances of Tareda and the sparse prisoners were integrated into the global conversation. Now historian Benedict Anderson situates these events within the long 19th century, which had a lot of high-profile political violence, specifically anarchist bombings and targeted assassinations, which prompted a corresponding escalation in state power through much more stringent legal frameworks and surveillance apparatuses. Parallel to the rise of anti-terror legislation was the emergence of a new structured infrastructure of dissent, consistent of legal organisations and radical press, which sued as a vital node in the global network, capable of circulating revolutionary ideas and coordinating resistance across borders. In addition to the Montreux affair, the Dreyfus affair would also be amplified by this network. The Dreyfus affair was an incident in French history where in 1894, a certain Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish captain in the French army, was accused of treason, alleged to have passed sensitive military documents to the German intelligence services. The evidence against him was largely based on forged documents and a high degree of anti-Semitic prejudice. So Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Deville's island. But the radical press began calling this out, especially when evidence surfaced suggesting that the actual spy was another officer, Fredinand Wilson, Esther Heisee. But the French military high command had covered it up, suppressing evidence from the leading court proceedings and intimidating witnesses to ensure that Dreyfus remained convicted. A pivotal moment in the affair was the publication of non-radical Emil Zoller's open letter Jack Hughes in the newspaper La Roire in 1890. As Zoller used the power of the press to directly challenge the military high command after the real culprit was acquitted the day after his trial began. This landed Zoller in jail for libel, where he eventually got out on a plea deal, but it also linked him to the tenuous respect of some critical left-wing intellectuals. Meanwhile, Tareda had already left Paris for Belgium, then London, where he made use of his contacts around the world to create a coalition of court liberals, freemasons, socialists, anarchists, anti-imperialists, and anti-clericals, and court against the Spanish government, and especially against Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo. The conservative who was the chief architect of the brutal repression of Spanish anarchists, socialists, and labor activists domestically. His aim was to ensure the stability of the Spanish monarchy amidst growing pressures of anarchism, labor and rest, cloner rebellion, and American aggression. On August 9, 1987, the Italian anarchist Michel Anguelilo assassinated Canovas. Anguelilo was a real monarchy hater. He had traveled to Barcelona under a fake name and was working as a freelance printer when the Corpus Christi Bombenacut. The city was put under martial law, and his anarchist friends were incarcerated in Monjuice. After hearing about how they were being tortured, he fled for Paris, was expelled to Belgium, then moved to London, where Tareda's agitation against the Canovas regime was at full strength. He continued to work as a printer and engage in activism in London for some time, where people asked who would avenge those tortured and murdered by the Spanish state, including the recently executed Jose Rizal, who was a Filipino nationalist. So after hearing this, Anguelilo was like, "Okay, bet." And he makes his way back to continental Europe with a pistol in his pocket. In France, he meets Dr. Ramón Betanzis, who was a Puerto Rican physician, revolutionary, who sought the independence of Puerto Rico and the dismantling of Spanish colonial authority in the Antelites. He spent his life country-hopping, helping the sick and fleeing Spanish spies. And although he was an anarchist, he was connected with a lot of anarchists, particularly French and Italian anarchists, through the heterogeneous front against the Spanish state, against imperialism and monarchical tyranny. The European anarchists and socialists found a natural ally in the anti-colonial movement he was part of. As the liberation of Puerto Rico and Cuba would represent a vital blow against the same imperialist structures they were fighting to dismantle in Europe. Now, Betanzis claims he redirected the target of Anguelilo's planned assassination from the Spanish queen regent and infant son to the prime minister, but Benedict Anderson calls this narrative into question because there doesn't seem to be any corroborating evidence. Anyway, so Anguelilo gets to Madrid, he learns kind of his location, he stalks him for a bit, and then he shoots him dead with the pistol he brought from London. In his trial, Anguelilo defends himself with reference to Monjuice and Cuba and the Philippines and says quote, "Canovas personified in their most repugnant forms, religious ferocity, military cruelty, the implacability of the judiciary, the tyranny of power, and the greed of the possessing classes. I have rid Spain, Europe, and the entire world of him. That is why I am no assassin, but rather an executioner." That does go pretty hard. It does go hard. When is this? Is this late 1800s or early 1900s? Late 1800s. Late 1800s, okay. Yeah. So, after his rose in speech, he was then himself executed at just 26 years old. Now, beyond being a symptom of imperial crisis, Canovas' assassination functioned as an accelerant. I remove in such a central figure of the political machinery of Spain in the midst of its war against the US, Anguelilo's act triggered the volatility that would culminate in the loss of Spain's final colonial possessions. In 1898, Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico were in the hands of the United States, and the bullets that killed Canovas just kept going. Well, into the decades to come. Now, speaking of the Philippines, we can turn out that specific node of the movement network. Isabella de los Reis was a moderate liberal of his time, somewhat privileged as a businessman, publisher and journalist, but he wasn't afraid to advocate strongly against Spanish colonial rule, and was arrested in connection to the Philippine Revolution of 1896 as part of a broader repression against rebels, intellectuals and activists. The revolution had begun prematurely after the Spanish authorities discovered their plot, and so many of the revolutionaries who imprisoned as a result. Now, while imprisoned, Isabella had to deal with the death of his wife and was Unable to attend her funeral or do anything for their children. Naturally, after an experience like that, he would be pissed at the colonial injustices that he and his people suffered at the hands of the government and at the hands of the religious orders. He demanded political reform and was met with relocation, first to a Barcelona municipal jail and then to the infamous Montuís. While in Spain, he met several brave anarchists who had been imprisoned for various crimes. Crimes include an advocating for Cuban independence, protest in trials by military courts, and open in secular schools, gasp for children. Which I mean, it was Catholic Spain at that point in time. So that was like the worst thing you could possibly do. There was some anarchist who were in jail for assassinations, but I mean, come on. What's a little assassination between friends? I mean, the assassination and opening a school, I think, is the same level of danger to the state at this point. Indeed. And these dangerous criminals demonstrated a level of solidarity that really inspired Isabello. And while in prison, he also got access to anarchist literature and was able to take part in discussions with anarchists, where he learned about their ejection of state authority, colonial domination and class hierarchy. Now, in this exile period, I don't think he ever became an anarchist, and I mean later in his life even sued as a senator, but he was profoundly influenced by the anarchists and did come to admire them for decades to come. Eventually, following the assassination of Canova's and the change in government, in 1898, Isabello was freed. He then moved to Madrid and started a fortnightly publication "Philippines ante Europa", an anti-imperialist critique with particular focus on the growing American Empire. And it's funny because after Spain lost their colonies to the US, all of a sudden, public opinion in Spain started to become sympathetic to the Philippine fight. It was like, "Oh, now we can start to feel bad for you all." You know, the Americans embarrassed us, so now we have some sympathy for the applied. And so Isabello criticized America's claim to be liberating the Philippines and Cuba as hypocrisy by pointing to the regular occurrence of lynchings and racist institutions within the US. And he also criticized the Filipino elite for their willingness to collaborate with the new colonial rulers. The Philippine revolution was basically over by 1901, as a key leader named Emilio Aguinaldo was captured and had to swear allegiance to the US. By the way, Aguinaldo would also prove to be a collaborator later in his life, as he worked with the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines during World War II. So it's a pattern of behaviour with that guy. Anyway, so after the end of the revolution, Isabello decided to finally return to the Philippines. To reunite with the six children he had with his first wife, who he hadn't seen in years, and to continue the struggle. Also, when he was in Spain, he got married. Isabello arrived in Manila with the works of Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Pedro Saph-Bredon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin and Erika Malatester. He might have been the first person to bring the works of some of these thinkers to the Philippines. And I think we cannot understate that luck of the draw, I suppose, when we talk about the movements of ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries. You know, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have the anarchist library. It takes a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't have all these accessible means of learning about these ideas. So if you didn't happen to know somebody who could bring in that kind of literature for you, well, first of all, you wouldn't even know that literature existed unless somebody told you about it. Yeah. The access to information was severely limited. And so, fortunately, Isabello brought these ideas to Philippines, that he was the first to do so in his time. But as we'll soon see the history of the Philippines could have gotten a slightly different trajectory if he had not brought in that literature, learned about those ideas, started engaging and agitating on that basis based on, you know, his experiences. I mean, he ended up in a Spanish prison of all places. So the Spanish Empire that imprisoned him ended up sewing the seeds for rebellion in the former territory later on as it happens, a not uncommon turn of events actually. Indeed. So Isabello pulls up in Manila and his reputation as an anti-imperialist preceded him. He was labeled a dangerous anarchist and it really didn't help that the U.S. President McKinley had literally been shot to death by an anarchist just a month prior. This whole period of time is just while every time that I've done an episode with you about the late 1800s to early 1900s, it's always stuff like this. It's like an unbelievable collection of happenings. Like history really has such a momentum during this period, like it's unbelievable. Yeah, I just really enjoyed drawing those connections because I mean, he came to Manila with all these organizational plans. He was going to start a party. He was going to launch a news people. But as he pulls up and he realizes, he's literally on a list. Yeah. You know, he kind of had to scrap those ideas and pull back a bit. Lenin's doing the same stuff like in Germany and Russia during the same time. Everyone understands the mission. Yeah. Everyone knows what has to happen. And this is like before the standardization of passports. Yeah. This is before the global visa system. And so people are literally just moving around. Yeah. I mean, I always marvel at the fact that Erich Romano Testa was like, he was getting active in Egypt. At one point he pulled up in Brazil. You know, everybody has to come to Brazil eventually. He was everywhere. Right. And these ideas were everywhere too as a result of the movement of people bringing these books, bringing these ideas, getting involved in conversation, and it also helped, of course, that a lot of anarchists were print meekers. Still are. Still. Yeah. Many such cases. So Isabella switched strategies. In his words, he took advantage of the occasion to put into practice the good ideas that he had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona, who were imprisoned with him in the infamous fortress of Montruch. So he started organizing the work in class in Manila. He had the benefit of actually being able to speak the language of the swaths of workers in Manila, because he happened to come from the same region of the vastly linguistically diverse Philippine subaided. He was from the in-local region of the island of Luzon, and he natively spoke the in-locano language like many of the workers that had migrated to Milan. Though he was technically part of the intelligence here, Isabella had a connection to the roots, you know, to the people, the streets, until he began by organizing the printers, of course, and helping them with their strikes. And from there, the efforts very quickly snowballed far quicker than the elites could have anticipated, into a cross-industry worker federation called the Union Obreira Democratica, the first of its kind in the entire country. The federation was flexible and loosely structured, which made it quite suited to undertake in various strike actions, but beyond demonstrations and strikes, Isabella also incorporated a little local flavor, because the Union was also involved in festivals and theatre and music events. So it was a combination of worker and non-worker-based organization. You get a little bit of everybody involved when you do that, rather than strictly focusing on just one plane of struggle and connection. Eventually, however, the Americans got their act together and met this movement with surveillance, arrest, and trials. And though they couldn't legally justify keeping him in jail for very long, they did throw Isabella back into jail for a short period. Another worker federation would eventually collapse, but the ideas remained, and those ideas fed directly into various level organizations, socialist parties, and guerrilla movements going forward. As for Isabella, his second wife, the one he married in Spain, died, and two years later, he married again, 2018-year-old. Isabella married and was widowed three times. He actually outlived all of his wives and had a grand total of 27 children. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I have no comments on what kind of father he may have been, but that's just. I mean, yeah, you can kind of assume based on those numbers, but yeah, that is what it is. And the fact that he was in Spain, got married in Spain, had six children back home who had lost their mother. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't in Spain by choice, right? But you know, he was middle class. He may have had family back at home taken care of his children, but still has rough. Yeah. That is rough. So, laid on his life, like I mentioned before, he got into electoral politics on the municipal level and the senate level, and he also in his life got to work in religious reform, eventually found in the aglit pie. and church, which was the first ever Filipino independence Catholic Christian church. Yeah, I was wondering because like you mentioned he brought over Thomas Aquinas. Yeah. Yeah. He was very critical of the religious orders, the Spanish Catholic religious orders, but he ended up performing an independent Catholic church. So a Catholic church that is not associated with Rome. Hmm. You said he didn't identify as an anarchist. Did he identify as a socialist? What kind of was his self-defined politics around this point and when he started running for office on the municipal level? I didn't see how he defined himself. I think he considered himself to be a petriot. You know, a petriot, somebody who was pro-labor. I don't know that he assigned himself necessarily the title of socialist or anarchist or liberal or anything like that. Yeah. He has, however, been called the father of the Philippines movement and the father of Philippine socialism. But what do we take from all of this? You know, the empire might globalize trade, might globalize capital, might globalize various forms of suppression, but it inadvertently globalizes resistance. The same infrastructure that empires use to extend their reach across the claim territories is the same infrastructure that radicals can use to fight. You know, even prison was used as a site of connection. A literal place of oppression became a place that connected people across multiple countries. I think the lesson that I take away from this kind of narrative I've spun here between the Cuban Creole, Finland, Rotarito, the Puerto Rican, Dr. Ramón Betanzes, the Italian, Michelanguilo, and the Filipino Isabella de los Reis is that the globalization was not a one-way imposition. We could potentially adopt the empire's tools to fight back and to network our resistance. People who are doing resistance, but on the other side of the political spectrum do this the same thing, like the formation of ISIS in prisons because of how we imprisoned Al Qaeda members is a pretty key example of this. Yeah. This is a very common thing. Like, it turns out, very often the master's tools actually are used to dismantle the master's house. That phrase still has some like, I think, metaphorical uses. But in a sort of like literalist sense, I occasionally push back on it because yeah, it does view movement as a one-way thing. It has no dialectical analysis. I think part of our job is adapting and moving as empire and capital adapts and moves to the flow of history. 100% and with that, as always, all power to all the people. Peace. Stories of survival. These stories all start in the same place. With a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. And we were babies. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a podcast. I swear. I know. Bold. But why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode. Trust me. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. Here we go. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." It's great, but looks too ethnic. But if you're interested in blackmail, love, bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Kill them. Kill them. You look the bear in the eye and you say this isn't you. You don't need them. You only need one thing and that's the GetWerse podcast. Listen to GetWerse with Kyle Pru on the iHearRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone and welcome to it. It happened here. My name is Denelle Curd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I have with me, Andrew Lieber. Andrew Lieber is a non-resident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East program and an assistant professor in Tulane University's Department of Political Science and their Middle East and North Africa Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa region with that particular focus on Saudi Arabia. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I wanted to have you on today because well, the war in Iran, but also because I think there's been a lot of reporting and some that's not very well sourced in mainstream media, like the New York Times about the GCC states, GCC Gulf Corporation Council, so the Arab Gulf states about their motivations and the actions of the Gulf states during this war. I think that there's been a lot of obfuscation for a variety of reasons. So I wanted to bring you on giving your expertise to kind of clarify fact from fiction on some of that. We're recording May 28th. So maybe people have seen this. Trump also recently threatened to bomb men who were acting as mediators initially. So yeah, I wanted to go through all the main GCC actors and get your analysis of their behavior during this war, what they want to happen when it's over. Sure, yeah, happy to do so. I think one thing that has been a little hard for people to follow maybe has been the tendency for U.S. and English language. Media outlets is talking about the Gulf states or the GCC is what they want from this conflict. But even heading into this war, there were already key differences among these countries. There was a diplomatic and increasingly potentially a military riff between Saudi Arabia and the neighboring United Arab Emirates. There have been past disputes between different Gulf countries as well. And even though initially the Iran war seemed like it would paper over the cracks in these divisions. In many ways, it's also deep in the divides as different countries have interpreted the threats posed by Iran and by Israel and potentially even the United States in different ways. So at present we can maybe think of three. broad camps within the GCC. So there's Saudi Arabia, the largest by landmass of these countries. And to a lesser extent, Kuwait and also Qatar have taken the approach of trying to just get things back to quote unquote normal or like a new normal supporting mediation efforts by other countries like Pakistan. And now at least for Qatar increasingly engaged in direct mediation to try to lock in some kind of agreement that restores loads of energy and other goods in and out of the straight of Hormuz, the key body of water that allows things in and out of the Persian Gulf. You know, in one direction, you've had the united air of Emirates, which has presented itself as kind of much more hawkish in terms of its willingness to potentially use military force against Iran or to join the United States in a military effort to open the straight of Hormuz. In the past few days, it's been quietly walking back some of those positions, but it has tried to draw a contrast between its more assertive stance towards Iranian actions in the region and Saudi Arabia. And then the other direction has discussed the development of Oman, which lean much further in the other direction during the war, being the only country that criticized openly from the start. Both the US and Israeli let attacks on Iran and Iran's reprisals on the other side of the Gulf. Omani Foreign Minister, but Earl Boussaidi, went on US television prior to the war to make the case that he was the possible ongoing toxin in the US and Iran could bear fruit. That was unsuccessful as an intervention, but also Omani diplomats and various points have offered much more critical commentary of the United States, but they have likewise kind of walked that back or at least not emphasized it as much in recent weeks, but clearly there is a narrative critical of their role that circulates in some parts of DC, which percolated its way up into the president saying, well, if Oman is not going to cooperate with certain things, then you will just bond them until they do, which is not the nicest way to ask for the cooperation of other countries in a sensitive geopolitical issue, but so it goes. Right, we're not the most effective of these days, let's say. Yeah, so thank you for kind of laying that out. There are so many questions I have. I want to talk about how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, you've already mentioned different on this issue, but also how their differences speak to different visions for the region, especially vis-a-vis Israel, but also just like before we get to that, there's been a lot of reporting about how Saudi Arabia is secretly really gunned home about the war and is encouraging the Trump administration to be more aggressive. What weight do you put on those reports? Yeah, those have been around since the start of the conflict. I'll preface this when getting a major caveat, which is that every week that goes by, we learn more about what we didn't know earlier in the war. Like, you know, we know now that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have carried out air strikes on Iran. It's certain points that they didn't publicize that, but I'm broadly skeptical of accounts that Saudi Arabia and specifically Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman advocated for this war, pushed for the war. Saudi Arabia and Iran have not always had very great relations, but they nominally reestablished diplomatic ties in 2023, and generally, I think, Saudi Arabia's view is they want to keep the geopolitical peace in the surrounding neighborhood because otherwise Saudi Arabia can't get the kind of foreign investment or the kind of economic partnerships it needs, the generate economic growth and employ its citizen population, a major political concern. And I think even the United Arab Emirates prior to this war was not pushing for it actively. I think these countries also don't want to tell with the possible exception of Obama. I don't want to tell prison Trump no directly. So my understanding of things is that everything prior to the war was phrased in a kind of conditional. We would recommend you don't do this, but just make sure if you just think this is a good idea that you can militarily defeat Iran in a rather quick and decisive fashion. Of course, that banked on the United States as current policy makers having an accurate view of their own capabilities, which seemed to be not a threat to the subject, but I think that also during the war you had a kind of a panic in different directions, like a belief that, well, I guess if the United States has gone to war, clearly they can they can solve this militarily, right? So I think you had some leaders, especially the United Arab Emirates pushing the United States to like finish the job, don't leave the conflict in a state where it's very clear that the United States can militarily force Iran to do certain things, but you also haven't kind of secured meaningful concessions from Iran. And that I think is I guess one thing that the United States now again with the possible exception of a mine is concerned about where they get left if there is any kind of deal. It's very clear that they do not have a seat at the table in terms of these negotiations and there's certainly a lot of complaints online or in media outlets in the Gulf about that fact, but it doesn't change the reality that these are U.S. Iran negotiations with maybe some consultation with Israel, you know, maybe some communication with Saudi Arabia with the UA, but not a ton of consultation of them. And just to be clear, they've paid the brunt of the price here and Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure and desalination plans and all those things. Yeah, no, I mean, Iran calculated, I think, well, we could attack Israel, but most of the rockets and missiles be shot down. Israel's farther away. It's harder to hit them with a larger payload, whereas you can hit a lot of infrastructure in the Gulf. It's been very clear that Iran targeted not only U.S. military bases, but also civilian infrastructure in an attempt to put a lot of economic pressure on these countries, especially the UAE. And even countries that had sought to mediate between the conflict, there had been more openly, you know, critical of any U.S. military adventure is like Qatar basically have their entire economy frozen right now because they can get very little of the liquid natural gas they produce in or out. Same thing with Kuwait, same thing with Bahrain. One interesting, maybe unintended consequence of this though is that some of the Gulf states are doing better than others economically from this. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made up, you know, a significant portion of the ground lost from lost oil exports because they can export some oil over land. And Oman is exporting about as much oil as before, but at a much higher price, so economically or even doing perhaps better. But yeah, these are the countries that have primarily paid the price in direct terms. And then by extension, every country that relies on their energy supplies is also paying the price in terms of higher costs for cooking gas, diesel, fertilizer and so on. Right. Really, this is an American Israeli war, even if the United States kind of holds the final say, but you know, recently on social media and in a number of repeated statements, President Trump himself and his administration have talked about the Abraham Accords and normalization with Israel, tying it into possible outcomes for this war. How do you explain that? I'm sure you're right. It's just familiar with the Abraham Accords, but the diplomatic conversation between the UAE Bahrain and some other countries end Israel back in 2020. I think we're President Trump. This is mode of talking about this now is motivated by a sense of, you know, there's a real loss of face and status by having talked out how he was going to have this decisive victory against Iran and then it being a disaster on every single front. So I think there's now going to be a hunt for like some other kind of quick win that he can show. But I think also the lead up to this war demonstrated that the Abraham Accords is a framework for U.S. policy towards the Middle East was pretty bankrupt in every direction. On the one hand, all of the like carrots that the United States was supposed to offer to encourage countries to normalize ties with Israel and it effectively already been given out. So if it's not the Arabian people, it's like here are other concessions that we were going to use in order to encourage these normalized ties with Israel. We can just give those two as long as you promise to invest money in the United States. So that's already been allowed to happen. At the same time, the downside for these countries in normalizing ties with Israel is pretty high. There's nothing that Israeli leaders at present can do to guarantee that there won't be another catastrophic and genocidal war against the Palestinian population. That's something that a Saudi leadership that is dealing with potentially rising unemployment that other countries dealing with ethnic or sectarian divides within their borders, not something they really want to take on as well. And I think that the war has kind of created divergent perceptions of Israel as well. I think for countries like Saudi Arabia and especially Oman, there's a view of Israel. Even for a newer generation of leadership like Muhammad bin Salman who were not particularly opposed to a greater role for Israel in the region, greater ties with Israel, we're just now concerned about Israel as a chaotic and unreliable partner in the region that will throw the security interests of its allies to the wind, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, their interpretation of the Abraham Accords is that it did nothing to protect the UA and Bahrain from attacks by Iran or from getting dragged into an Israeli letter, partly Israeli-led war. In the other direction, however, the UA itself kind of views its ties with Israel is more important than ever. Their view is like, well, this is a region of unreliable actors. Israel has a capable military, even if they don't admit it openly. Israel's the only nuclear armed actor in the region and Israel did send, what's it called, the iron dome defense technology to the UAE during the conflict. On the one hand, I think we're just as we saw during the Biden administration, the Abraham Accords remains this kind of like cargo cult for American foreign policy makers. This idea that we'll just say the Abraham Accords and it'll magically make countries kind of change their foreign policy. policy orientation. But I think the Abraham Accords as a UAE Israeli security, economic, political alliance in the region is stronger than ever and will continue to be the case into the future. But that Saudi Arabia will not participate in the way that the Trump administration assumes. Yeah, I think that Saudi Arabia is will continue their policy they've had ever since October 7th or at least since roughly thereafter of saying like, well, we're not ruling out. We just have some conditions in order to move on that. And then, you know, I don't think those are unreasonable conditions of making progress towards a Palestinian state, but they're not anything that Netanyahu or even probably any other political coalition that comes to power in Israel is willing to even think about. So, you know, I don't really see it happening soon. I guess opposed to thinking is so unpredictable that he could just like lash out and declare that he's going to do something to Saudi Arabia if they don't normalize. But then it's a real question of like, well, how long is he going to sustain that? And like, what does he do if Saudi Arabia or Mohammed bin Salman himself like snaps back over this past winter? We saw, for example, as part of that diplomatic riff between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, we saw Emirati back forces in Yemen make gains, a lot of commentary online about like, oh, Mohammed bin Salman is willing to do anything about this. And then ultimately wind up the Saudi foreign ministry condemned the UAE's role in Yemen and Saudi forces bombed like an Emirati shipment coming into Yemen. So there's also the potential here as well. Like these are two political systems where power is highly personalized around specific individuals. And so if President Trump decides to go down that route, there's the possibility for this to become a very personalized conflict. Right. And I think it's important for listeners to understand the connection. Why the Palestinian issue holds such weight for Gulf leaders. You mentioned, for example, ethnic and sectarian divides in particular countries, I'm thinking Bahrain or rising unemployment and dissent and discontent in places like Saudi Arabia. It's because either explicitly or implicitly the Palestinian issue in some parts of the Gulf is connected to people's anti-regime sentiment, which of course, the Iranian regime is very good at stoking and exploiting. And so it's not just that they're worried about regional instability outside their borders. It's also, like you said, there are domestic implications for all of these regimes. Yeah, I think if we want to turn back the clock to like the first Trump administration and even right up to October 7th in places like Saudi Arabia, I think there was a belief that you could just suppress people's solidarity with Palestine or that this was like a dead issue for most Saudi citizens. But what kind of October 7th showed or changed was that that sentiment had really never gone away as much as it had seemed. And also that there's now an entirely new generation that has seen the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza over the past few years that is now well aware of everything that's been done. This is not something you can hide from people or pretend that it will go away. And it's even harder to do so if people aren't seeing kind of rapid economic gains in their own lives. So it becomes yet another thing that yeah, if you wanted to fault Saudi leaders for kind of weakness and the international stage, if you wanted to fault them for not demonstrating political courage, that could be a cudgel to use against them. So inside Saudi Arabia, the one consistent thing over the past five, six, seven years is the complete suppression of talking about the Palestinian issue because political authorities are so worried that if people start talking about one political issue, maybe they start linking it to other concerns. At the same time, there has been a shift among kind of regime-aligned commentators from, you know, this were back in 2019, 2020, you would hear them say, well, Saudi Arabia is now a country that acts in its own national interest. That means we don't have to listen to the Palestinian leadership. That's their own concern. Now you hear kind of same tune like different variation where it's like because Saudi Arabia is acting in its own national interest, we can decide that we want to act in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, not just do whatever the West tells us to do. But then this leads into I think kind of the polarization among some of the Gulf countries because it's the exact opposite dynamic for the UAE or the UAE goes the route of presenting itself as closer than ever to the United States, very aware that they can use Saudi skepticism towards Israel as something to attack Saudi Arabia in U.S. commentary and U.S. media markets. And then even if the country seems to be able to patch these differences up from time to time, it's going to keep driving them apart as well. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but during the first Trump administration, the propaganda around Palestinians emerging from the UAE was extremely vehement, let's say, like there was so much rhetoric coming out of UAE like government officials and associated influencers and things like that, that was attempting to kind of change the image of the Palestinian to an Arab audience. And even though you're right that they are clinging more than ever to the Abraham Accords, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that like they can't do that as much anymore. I'm not seeing as much of that kind of rhetoric and kind of anti-Palestinian racism that I used to see. Yeah, and it used to be that you could walk this like, I don't want to call it a fine line, you could play this game, I'm more familiar with this in the Saudi case, but the rhetoric would go, of course, Saudi Arabia stands with the Saudi issue, but the Palestinian leadership, they would basically adopt the same tropes we were familiar with the United States. Like the Palestinian leadership never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity or they would just direct translation of that. Yeah. But yeah, it's much harder like you can't get away with that anymore because the push back online would be incredibly intense. And likewise, even from the UAE, we see continued coordination with Israel, but it's interesting how the UAE denies or doesn't confirm certain things. So bombing Iran during the war, the UA Foreign Ministry kind of does a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Like, well, look at our policies where we said we were retaliated if we were attacked by our own conclusions. Whereas when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, like visiting the UAE, they're like, absolutely not. This is false news. It did not happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that points to the extent to which especially Netanyahu has become extremely toxic and hard to separate from that. And that, you know, even though I don't think the UAE is going to be hosting any like major Palestinian solidarity events anytime soon, at the same time, they're not like, you know, this is not like a warm piece in terms of how they're approaching Israelis either. I'm pretty sure the UAE even condemned the recent law, like basically allowing executions of the death penalty here. You will specifically define to basically be Palestinians in the West Bank, also condemned Israel's actions in Lebanon as well. So it's become harder to mount the kind of media campaigns against Palestinians. I think, you know, partly because they backfire and then partly in recognition that like this was done for years and years. And then ultimately what distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the UAE is not that their citizens and publics have different views about the Palestinians. But just that in the UAE, you can surveil coerce and bribe your citizen population so much better than in Saudi Arabia. It's like, sorry, we can't cross about it. But like the juice just isn't worth the squeeze in terms of the Saudi monarchy relative to at least being in this kind of middle path where they're maybe not wishing the United States too much for Palestinian statehood, but are like doing at least the bare minimum to keep, I guess, the idea of a two-state solution alive. Yeah, and to stay adhering to the air peace initiative in some capacity. What's kind of the takeaway, do you think, for all of these countries in the aftermath of this war, do you foresee a change in their positions vis-a-vis the United States in particular? For years and years analysts have been talking about like these states hedging, and I think in one direction this war showed that like most of that amounted to just trying to get like more concessions from the United States. Like you had a couple European countries show up, you had like Pakistan get involved a little bit, but their strategies for the course of this war still revolved around trying to influence US thinking, you know, frame how they were viewed in the United States. But I do think it is going to trigger changes down the line. Like we saw Saudi Arabian normalized ties with Iran four years after the United States failed to intervene after Iranian line groups attacked Saudi oil fields. I think something similar here, we're going to see developments three or four years down the line that have been cooking in the background as a result of what has happened in 2026. I think we're starting to see some of that now, and it's not going to be like, oh, we're going to get a Chinese military base in the Gulf. It's going to be other things like we're seeing Saudi Arabia try to work with what it views as the other regional middle powers that can trust and work with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, the UAE meanwhile is trying to like double or triple down on its direct security ties with Israel. But I think the way these ghost states are going to react is going to figure out how can we shape the diplomas here on the region, how can we shape our own security in ways that don't rely on the United States, but aren't like how to put it. I think in Washington DC, because of the obsession with Chinese influence in the world, there's always a belief of like, oh, like if not us, then it will be like the Chinese will be involved. And I think the reality is going to look very different. I don't think China wants to get involved in a security fashion in the Gulf, but there are other countries that have an interest in like some degree of peaceful economic development or some degree of like maximalized security, and that's gonna be the future of these state security relations. - Well, thank you so much, Andrew. Really appreciate your expertise. I'll link your profile at Carnegie in the show notes, as well as given that we talked about kind of the Palestinian question in relation to some of these other issues domestically in the Gulf states. I'll also link to some of my own research on this topic. So thank you so much. - Thanks for having me. (upbeat music) - I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. 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Kill 'em with a gun. - Listen, it's already over. - The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. - Do not preserve relationships, you don't need them. - Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Garrison thinks. - That's good, that's good. If we were brave, if we-- - You know, you Halloween cocktail unlocked. - That's not happening, I would. - This is, it could happen here, the 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 Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. - Ew. - This episode, we're covering the week of June 3rd to June 10th. James, some small news items to start? - Yeah, many small things this week comes. New details have emerged about the Santa Rosa Island fire. Did you remember the fire was started by Marina? At first, it was reported that the Mariner had started the fire by firing the stress flares. It now appears that the Mariner's engine caught fire, starting to fire, then he fired to stress flares, but there's more. - Okay. - How many fires did this guy have involved in his boating? - Well, he ran into the island next door a week before. - Okay. - Oh boy. - And it was towed by Coast Guard to their harbor, where they found that he didn't have a number of items that you have to have on his boat for safety equipment reasons, right? - Right. - Actually, it pounded his boat for six days until a good Samaritan donated those items. He then left the harbor and crashed into the next island. - I think that good Samaritan made a mistake. I think we can agree. - This is not the man now. - Yeah, I think doing anything's been able this man to re-explote on the seven seas. - Should not be in the sea. - Yeah, this guy listened to too much Jimmy Buffett. - Yeah. - Unfortunately, this seems to be one of those which have teabot the boat for a single dollar. (laughing) - We don't really don't give advice on this podcast, but I will say. - You couldn't have said a funny thing the next. - It's not uncommon it's over California for people to buy boats in order to find a cheaper place to live. - Yes, of course. - Things like slip fees or registration. People don't really see things that up. - I have worked on some old diesel engines on these boats. - Not particularly straight. I'm not a great diesel mechanic to begin with, but they're not particularly straightforward. And this results in what I think we have seen here which is a delta between confidence and ability on the seven seas. - Uh-huh. - This isn't a boat that one should be saving alone much less of the only boat a couple of years ago for a single American dollar. - No. - Unfortunately, to destroy a large group of Tory pine which only exists there and here. So yeah, I know. Be careful out there would be pirates moving on now. ISIS reported to 19th in custody death this year when correctional centers scored you. - Yeah. - Uh, continuing to set all the worst records. A court has vacated the president's $100,000 H1 to be these attacks. Case is bought by California at Al, but it's more than a dozen states. It will be impacted by attacks. This is a good one. Gregory Bavino appears to be eyeing the run of the presidency. - Sure. - This is interesting. So he launched an experiment to website. - Yeah, why not? - His website, pavino2028.com. The campaign appears to have originated from Jacob Engles. Engles is a right way. He's kind of registered in protegey. They put ways. Engles appears to be charged with methamphetamine possession earlier this year. - Oh wow. - It was Engles who was first posting this House Bavino 2028 thing in Bavino's replies. And Engles now pissed his listed on Bavino2028.com. - Oh God. - In this House Bavino thing, he's just, he watched too much Game of Thrones, right? That's why he's saying that. - He thinks so. - 'Cause I looked into it night. That's as far as I can tell. It's him trying to do like a nightly, like with a new nightly order. I mean, it's part of his assets cosplay. That's how I kind of interpreted it. 'Cause he clearly is obsessed with the fucking shoot stuff. And they were like a nightly order. And that's, I get those vibes from Greg. - Yeah, like if you look at the website, right? Like you get, like he's prominently featured wearing its now infamous great coat trench coat. - Yeah. - Whenever you want to call that, like fucking coat, yes. - I don't know if Bavino, like Bavino, maybe he's just trying to run this as far as it'll go. Right, he just lost his job. So maybe he's looking for like something new to do. - Oh, sure, like I'm not sure how serious Bavino is. With this, I do think he's definitely trying to continue to I guess influence the national discussion, I guess. - Well, in the internet, I mean, he's hanging out with the fucking Martin Selmer over in Portugal. He's hanging out with like straight up, like Christchurch, the mass shooting. - Yeah, he did Nazis, you know? - Yeah. - Like he's going for it. Everyone should just scroll down to the, of sound. section of this website. - Okay, hold up, before we do that, this link has now appeared in our group chat. That is the most Nazi-ass profile picture thing I have seen in a long time. - It's like a Wolfenstein. - Very Wolfenstein, that's that thing. - Yeah, right, like. - But like in the same way that they're also clearly aping from like communist aesthetics, like in a wet background, the way he's kind of framed is this like weird. - Yeah, this is a kind of West German. - I would almost say it's like generic propaganda now, which is sort of like a mix of like West German and U.S. Eastern, or Eastern, like U.S. Eastern, like the use of red, the use of the olive branches, the sun rays from his body, the oak leaves. - It's just kind of like generic propaganda, House Bavino, Men Fight Back. - Well, it's an AI generator, it's right, so it is. - Based on the way the text is formed, it does appear to be an AI generator. - It looks AI. - It's not properly framed, right? The framing on the left and right is thicker than the framing of the top. There is no framing at the bottom, like xanator our shit. - Oh my god, no, I think we're all missing something, which is that's right underneath the big propaganda image. - Yeah, there are tiny texts in very tiny texts. Almost hidden, Bavino knows what America needs. America's men. - What? - It's not in quotation marks, but. - No, the slogan of the campaign is Men Fight Back. - Yeah, or the slogan of House Bavino, it's a little unclear. - Yeah, right, maybe it's House Bavino. Maybe it's struggling to make rent, having lost his job at the board patrol and this is setting up a pack to pay his rent. But yeah, incredible. - Wow. - That I've found a section, really. - Oh my god. - Okay, I have scrolled down to the hour of founder section. And there is an incredible specimen. - The abold national strategy part is really upsetting to me. 'Cause he's calling himself the commander in capitalizing the VN, the C in a very, like here's the way it's following the commanders, maximum effectiveness in quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation's cities, but large and small. The American people witnessed what true leadership powered by a warrior mindset actually looks like as the commander endeavored to restore order and national sovereignty. That is one sentence. Second sentence. America as a whole has already fallen to the grasps of the foreign global one world hellscape ushered in by Barack Hussein Obama. However, we believe that the commander can not only usher in the great restoration of America, but also cement the continuity of a strong and sovereign United States that will last a millennia. A thousand year right, in other words. And that also was one sentence. That is two sentences that I just read. - Yeah. - I need to be clear. - Yeah, become pain. I'm talking to GMAT addresses they're using here. - Some really small font by the way. - Well, teaching consistently, right? - Yeah, it's very inconsistently. This looks like they had AI layout his website too. - Well, they have one woman on their founder's page. Like everyone else in size of 20 and she's like size 11. - Yeah. - Like the set will have images of him or of his post where you can see his name, but it refers to him only as the commander. So like there's a post of Greg's where it, like it's that post that he made at the airport where he's like pointing at the flight to Newark when he was obviously at a Portugal being like, "Should I just handle it myself?" And you know, go to Jersey to deal with this. And above that is, perhaps I must resolve this personally as a quote, the commander challenging the inertia of the open borders bureaucracy in response to it. Like it's written like Greg Bovino became the overall dictator of America and this is a history book 60 years later. Like that's the way his website is written. - Yeah, it's incredibly low effort. - I know quite concerning. And he really has a high opinion of himself. - Yeah. - I gotta say that. - Yeah. - I do wonder how much this is just angles just writing this because of Fad. - Yeah, I wonder how much he had to do with this. - But yeah. - This does not seem like he had nothing to do with it. I will say that based on my knowledge of Greg Bovino. - Yeah. - He's shared it on his own social media. - Great. - In other news, the month's long fight over ice and CBP funding has come to an end. And a 214 to 212 vote on Tuesday. The House has passed a reconciliation bill funding ice and CBP. - Yeah, this is the so-called Secure America Act, right? It'll give them $70 billion. So if we look at that combined with the big beautiful bill, there's about 240 billion allocated in Minnesota year. - It doesn't mean they have to spend it all this year, right? The Secure America Act gives them a window up to September 30, 2029 with no particular allocations for any given year. To me, that strikes me as a hedge against funding after the midterms. I think that is what that's about. Also notable, like Harrison said, that they use reconciliation to allow simple majority in the Senate. - We went over the details of a previous version of this bill a few weeks ago. This money's gonna go towards hiring, and arming new officers, hiring more administrative staff, attorneys, and this is all gonna be towards immigration enforcement, as well as some money allocated for acquiring new border technology. The $1 billion of, quote unquote, "security funding" for Trump's ballroom was removed from the bill by the Senate last week. Two other short things I wanna mention yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted two people in relation to stop cop city protests and alleged crimes in 2022. And Wednesday morning, the FBI raided about seven people in Michigan related to pro-Palestine protests at the University of Michigan and protests against University of Michigan officials. As of recording, like this just happened a few hours ago and it relates to an indictment that was unsealed this morning as well, which charges eight people will cover this more in detail in the future. - We're gonna do one more quick segment here and then when we return, we're going to talk about the pogroms in Belfast. - Yay. - Some updates related to primary elections. In Maine, Graham Platner is won the Democratic primary with about 72% of the vote. The governor's race is too close to call with the ranked choice voting yet to be tallied, but I'm keeping my eye on the Sanders and labor-backed candidate Troy Jackson, who campaigned with Platner. Jackson is about 9,000 votes behind the pre-ranked choice, so candidate, Dr. Nirav Shah. After a week of counting, we have more definitive results from the elections in California last week. - Yeah, which a lot of people are saying is an unforgivable backup of democracy that they counted all of the votes and it took them a while. But yeah, guess, please continue and we'll talk about the chaos that is being justified by the fact that this took a while to count. - Tom Steyer will not be making it onto the ballot this coming November, with 91% of the votes counted, Steyer has earned 1,928,381 votes or 22.5%. Republican Steve Hilton, former Fox News host, has edged Steyer out by about 200,000 votes, earning 25% of the vote and advancing to the general election where he will go up against liberal Democrat Javier Basera with 27.9% of the vote. Katie Porter won just under 400,000 votes. Karen Bass still leads the LA mayoral primary with 95% of the votes counted. Bass has nearly 300,000 votes, earning 34.3%. Progressive Nithya Rahman has moved into second place with 29%, beating Republican Spencer Pratt with 25.5%. So the general election will see Rahman go up against bass. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt was up in the early vote, but as Rahman started to pull ahead, Trump and others began claiming the election was being stolen from Republicans. Pratt has insinuated that Rahman's lead came from LA's homeless population and must grow to that quote. The level of fraud here is mind blowing. - Yeah. - Also, almost people can vote. - Like, yes. - It was, yeah, yeah. - Provided they are U.S. citizens, like, yes, yes. It's all lies. I mean, and a lot of what's even what's being reported in the Washington Post is straight up lies. They just published an article today that includes this line. And again, the theme of the article is like, well, you know, obviously this election wasn't stolen, but the fact that it's taken so long is really a problem. You can't actually blame all these people if they think it's suspicious. This is not evidence of a rigged election, but it creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root. It didn't help that Rahman hearfully conceded last Tuesday, but it's irresponsible for Pratt to intimate on social media. - She did not concede. She didn't hearfully concede. - That did not happen. - That never happened. The Washington Post lied. Like, that's just in a post article. That's just a lie by the Washington Post. Like an intentional lie. I would argue. - Incredible. - I guess to just go into this to people understand, like, you know, like I've written for broad sheet newspapers, several people, this is not one person fucking up, right? This is an institutional fuck up. - This was a choice. - Yeah, there was a choice to get this wrong. - The person whose name is on the byline wrote that yes. And editor then edited. A copy editor then edited it. And then somebody laid it out for the website. - Yep, and you know this. If you're listening and you work for the post, you know this, you know that your. or editors, your bosses and your colleagues chose to lie and are choosing to continue to lie and spread lies through their publication. You're aware of this. If you weren't there still. Anyway. I know. Benny Johnson, Temple or Ingram and Sean Hannity are alleged that Democrats stole the election and Trump has continued to make claims that the election was rigged. Quote, "Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail-in ballots." You know, shit. Truth. Sorry. Yeah, man. Convenient. Yeah. Eternal 2020. Trump's truth earlier this week, quote, "Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had, third world nation," unquote. Did he understand what the word "nation" means? No. No. Okay. I didn't think. They stutth these truths that don't think he understands how election works, obviously. Or he does and he's just saying what he needs to say here. Portably on Sunday, Trump stormed out of an interview on Meet the Press when asked if he had any evidence of, quote, unquote, cheating in California. The election was rigged. It was a dirty election. And it's happening again right now in California. It's happening right now in California. Right now it's looking. Look at what's happening in California. Where's the evidence to that? It's four days. Four days. In California. It's, well, they're not there. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. And let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up with it. That's how they can't. You know why they're doing that? Because they're cheating on the election. What do you have evidence to support? All I have to do is look. All you have to do is look. Is he in front of a green screen that depicts a John Deere tractor and plant? No. They are in Wisconsin in some kind of barn and it's raining outside in this barn with the John Deere tractor and like, hey, bells, it's an interesting kind of like real world set they have. Yeah. Okay. And the focus is very weird like that. Yeah. Trump later called vote counting in California, quote unquote crooked, just like how the press is crooked. Quote, you're either crooked or you're stupid. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they're rigged. You were like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked. At least the press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. Mr. President. You're one sided crooked network. Right. Let's go on a quiz because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please I travel all the way to Wisconsin. Oh God. That's embarrassing. Yeah. Just be a mean to him. Be rude. Yellow at him. Call him a fucking liar. Scream at him. Stop doing this bullshit. Like, I'm sorry. I have no sympathy for that. Like, people boot him, drain the national anthem at a Nick's game. You can fucking do this. Scream at him. Call him a piece of shit. Yeah. No. You're not getting anything out of just letting him talk. Call him a liar. Shout over him. Yes. Not pretending. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking cowards. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I think we should definitely pay attention to the fact that Trump did cause the next to lose that game. Oh, yeah. He did. He did. Yeah. He did. And honestly, that's what I like about him. Because it continues James Joel in streak of. How Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these claims on Monday and said that the vote accounting in California, quote, unquote, stings to high heaven and that the schemes are so, quote, unquote, diabolical that it's impossible to prove election raking. The president keeps saying that there's election fraud in the California Marrow's race is what evidence is there to prove that? You tell me, Manu, they are counting votes weeks after the election. We have entire nations with huge populations like India that can count their votes in 24 to 40 years. You're saying it's rigged like the president? I'm not saying it's rigged. Stings to high heaven and everybody knows that let's, let's, let's, let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have what, what a, what a concept. Let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this. But what evidence is there to prove that that it was right? Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. So this is, I think, very clearly a preview of what's to come in the term election for sure. And they are kind of laying this out here. It's, of course, impossible to prove, but we all know that it's wrong. Yeah. This is going to be every election for the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah. But there's going to be anything that happens that does not meet the increasingly fanciful version of reality they have to believe, right? It's not just elections. It's literally any fact that is inconvenient, it's any storm that shouldn't have happened based on when they think a storm should happen, right? Yeah. This is just life now. Yeah, it's necessary to create the version of reality that they're existing in. Yeah. We're going to go on break and then discuss the pogroms in Northern Ireland. Oh, yeah. On Tuesday, July 9th, this is the day before we are recording this, which is important because we don't know how that's going to proceed from here when you're listening to it. But on June 9th, there were widespread attacks on the homes of non-white people in Ireland in what I and many others have described as a pogrom. Mass the salons kicked down doors, forced on white people from their homes and lit houses and cars on fire. People were being stopped in the streets. I'm going to read a little bit from a report from Hennell Othman, who was on the scene reporting on what was going on. Quote. Because a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down. With the attack thick with smoke from fireworks, they attacked the downstairs windows with bricks as they stormed the property, some claimed to be, quote, "liberating it," profiting nearby demanded, quote, "local homes for local people." A woman in the crowd said to her friend, quote, "There's wee girls inside." Yeah. It is an extremely bleak and worrying event. The nominal cause of this pogrom was a video of a stabbing in Belfast that has gone viral on social media, which has been amplified by right-wing forces, both in Ireland, the UK, and across the world, probably most famously by Elon Musk. We will touch on that more in a second. But before we say anything about the broader context, I think it's important to state two things. One, Ireland, and also particularly the factions of Irish politics are going to be getting to here, has had racism problems long before any of these events, famously, if you want to look at the most immediate stuff in the recent past, exactly one year ago today in Northern Ireland, there was a smaller race riot. There was a smaller-scale version of the thing we're seeing here with less damage, but still absolutely terrifying effects. This very much rhymes with the race riots that we saw in the UK a couple of years ago, similar deal, similar motivation, mobs attacking hotel. That point is more focused on hotels that refugees were believed at, but like you were saying, we have basically the same idea. Yeah. These are white mobs. It's also, I think, important to note, on top of just the general sort of racism of our society, on this program's largely taking place in oilless neighborhoods. These are places with very, very long-standing far-right paramilitaries, with very close ties to the police. A lot of the people in the streets are parts of old oilless paramilitary and criminal networks. These are, in many cases, believed to be the same networks that we're doing shit during the troubles and have been active in various forms throughout the occupation of Ireland. N deportations, bellfast notes, that leaked emails from police after the 2025 riots, from the riots themselves, and they said, quote, "is important for you to understand our expectations. Unless there is an obvious article to issue, we do not expect you to expose yourself to significant unnecessary risk." So what that in effect is saying is that this is in effect a stand-down order, if you think that anything would be even— Let the mobs do what they're going to do. That's just the stuff, this is from the 2025 riots, presumably similar orders went out during these riots, and that's just the stuff that they sent via email that has been leaked out. The police, again, very notably did very, very little while all of this was happening while people's houses were being burned down while people were being dragged out of their homes. These attacks also come after weeks of far-right discourse in the UK about the killings of two white men by non-white men. Yeah. On the BBC, they are having debates about whether there is a, quote, "too-tiered police system," which when I initially saw that I was confused because, yeah, "too-tiered police system" has been the way that anti-police violence activists have talked about the way the police system functions, where there is a way the police function for white people, which is that it treats them stiffing better, and then there's the way it works for non-white people. The far-right has flipped this on its head and is now arguing to an extent that his now-national discourse on the fucking BBC is arguing that there is a "too-tiered police system," where non-white people are looking. off the hook for their crimes and where white people aren't protected by the law. This is nonsense, but it has been spreading rapidly pushed by far right actors like Tommy Robinson and of course Elon Musk. Yeah. Musk specifically has been really pushing. Yeah. He was he was a big figure too in what happened in the UK a bit ago. Yeah. And the 2025 Irish riots too. Right. That's exactly right. And he's been nonstop pushing and making posts, making claims to the extent of like we need to the only way things will get better is if we keep protesting, you know, this has to be handled like forcefully, yada, yada, like that sort of shit. Like he has been. Yeah. He's been basically devoting as far as I can tell the week that he is about to have and that he is having his IPO devoting the majority of his time to inciting up a grom. Yes. Seems to be. Yeah. He retweeted a post from Restore Britain, which is a somehow even further right just yeah straight up effectively fascist party. But even further right then the already horrifying reform party saying quote do not make peace with evil destroy it. Yeah. Yeah. That's not the one where it's like either you fight back or you die. That's what it comes down to. There's been a lot of comparisons between Elon Musk and Radio Rwanda, which is a radio outlet that was broadcasting calls for the red laundry. Just like well, and that's that's not accurate really. But you're referring to RTLM, right? Radio television Libre Melculea. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Radio Rwanda is a different thing. Oh, sorry. Am I like it? Radio Render is a currently existing corporation. So we should we need to be extremely clear in our terminology. Let me let me be very clear here because I actually had this pulled up for this RTLM was the radio station that is often accused of helping to coordinate or some people will just a straight up incited the genocide. Yeah. It was owned by a guy named Felicia and Kubuga who was an extremely wealthy Rwandan man and who was personally very much involved in like wanting to push for the genocide. RTLM regularly called tootsies cockroaches. Yeah. And encouraged people to cut down the tall trees. However, there are also good reasons why this is not quite as direct as it seems. Yeah. RTLM did not coordinate attacks. They did not plan specific actions. And analysis in the modern day has shown that a lot of the worst massacres. In fact, majority of the worst massacres did not have any direct relation to RTLM. Now RTLM's propaganda and broadcasts played a role in the genocide and incited and continued to like escalate the violence. But it's not exactly I would argue it looks like and we also we don't have perfect analysis of what's just happened in Northern Ireland. So maybe this will prove to be wrong. It looks like what musk is doing has more of a direct causative effect. Yeah. But that's also not clear to me at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. My estimation so far again like this is changing. My estimation so far is that I think it is actually closer to it in that I think I think even if musk isn't there something like this happens. Sure. Because I think a lot of this is mobilization through like very local Irish political forces in these sort of unionist networks. But it's also really difficult to say just because all of those networks have been heavily influenced by musk's ex in the last two. So it's yeah. I don't know how you want to. Yeah. And it's feeding off of like a decade of intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment across the UK. Right. Including Ireland and Northern Ireland. Yeah. And this is also something what people will point out when you're talking about Rwanda and RTLM, which is that like well as much blame as you want to give RTLM and some of these other media organizations that unquestionably had some role in in motivating and fueling what happened. I mean the root of the Rwandan genocide comes from the period of colonialism when the Tootsies were like a favored group of people within the country, which is what started a lot of these like underlying hatreds, right? Is the way in which the colonial power played these different groups off of each other. So anyway, whatever. This is always the case. It's always going to be deeper than some guy has a media outlet. Right. But that doesn't mean the media outlet is not really involved in what. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same in Rwanda, right? Like we had the interraham way. Like like they existed and they get to like distinct from RTLM, but like the environment that allow those two things to happen. Nothing's monocausal. People want to do this in history. No, and it's the difficult thing of both it's very important to point out when something like this rhymes with something that happened in a genocide that killed a million people. And also the more you learn about stuff like this when people make those comparisons, the more learned it, people are like, well, that's not quite right. It was a little different thing, you know. Yeah. The genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali is the most moving museum of its student in my life. It's incredible. If you have the chance, everyone should go. We need to do more in bastards on Rwanda, but yeah. Anyway, wonderful country. Yeah. The one thing I also want to mention sort of in closing here is that, you know, again, like part of the reason this is happening, part of the reason it's been a lot of, you know, these of these Unionist networks part of the reason it's happening the way that it is, is that this is a very, very old white supremacist project going back, like, you know, like through the British occupation of Ireland, right? And it's a project that's been aligned with like the Rwandaans were once British in the sense of like, like, you know, this is carrying on this sort of long imperial British tradition is like, yes, one of the world's largest and most bloody and brutal white supremacists organizations. Yeah. We talked about this in the meeting. We were having beforehand, but like loyalists in Northern Ireland have regularly made a habit of particularly in the 70s and 80s, displaying Rhodesia flags in the 90s, the partite South Africa flags. It's very common to find flags. Yeah, like partly as a direct response to the internationalism of republicanism, they just decided to align with the worst people on the planet. Yep. Yeah. There'll be another episode up on this Monday that goes into more detail and we'll have more information as it comes out. This is again a rapidly training situation. There might be more days of this. It's possible that the police will crack down harder because there's been some pressure put on them by basically every government's involved in this. But we just simply don't know that at this time. And yeah, it's a absolutely horrifying day. Yeah. Pretty horrible to see. Let's do immigration in the US now. Another country where things are going great. So a judge has ruled that Trump administration's broad restrictions on asylum and work permit these were issued after the shooting of two national guards, people in NDC are unlawful. It's quote from the court order here. More than six months ago, the United States citizenship and immigration services enacted a series of policies through the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo. The agency announced that it will be placing indefinite pause on the adjudication of immigration benefit requests from individuals from 39 African-Asian Latin American and Middle Eastern countries. Since then, individuals from these countries have been categorically barred from receiving final decisions on among other things. There are asylum, work permit, green card and citizenship application. And USCIS is hold on adjudication to cannot be attribute to anything that these individuals did wrong rather it arises solely by the happensance of their birth. And then I found this interesting in the court documents here. In ruling on these motions of court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussion around immigration policy. If people wish to immigrate to United States, they ought to follow the law and do things the right way. This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that that they went on to say that the USCIS had used what they called pretextual concerns of national security that mask anti-immigrant sentiment that is forbidden from letting influence its decision making legal terms. That means that USCIS is action to a contrary to law arbitrary and capricious. There's a fairly like emphatic court response, right? This will affect a great deal of people. This has affected great deal of people in limbo, right? Most famously, I guess there were people who were at the state of their naturalization where they take the oath to become American citizens, right? The very final step. It is obviously a formality. You've passed a background checks done the interviews, et cetera, et cetera, but it's still a necessary step without doing it. You do not become a citizen and those people had been delayed and unable to do that. They will be able to proceed with that. Other people will be able to proceed with their process with the caveat that USCIS, if we have reported before in the show, is heavily focused on de-naturalization, and it might be very hard for them to actually make that progress and get USCIS to move on stuff. Talking of de-naturalization, the DOJ has begun proceedings against 17 people, these people are either accused of convicted of serious crimes. What it seems that in most cases, people have been adjudicated to have committed crimes, in some cases they have played guilty to crimes, after they naturalized, but that they were doing before they naturalized. What they are arguing here, the DOJ's arguing is that therefore they lied when they were naturalized because they were asked if they had committed any crimes, which they had not been arrested. By not confessing to those crimes in their interview, they were therefore lying on the form. Yes, on the form or in the interview or both, and therefore that is why they are trying to de-naturalize. This is a large de-naturalization. 17 people is a lot. A couple of the more so are alleged to have applied for immigration benefits under multiple different identities. One that I found particularly interesting is a Catholic priest who abused a minor parishioner. It's interesting because it's interesting to see them going there. I'll follow these and kind of keep tabs on how these progress, but that they have been ramping up denaturalizations. We are beginning to see them kind of reaping the work the USCIS has been doing since the Trump administration fundamentally turned that agency around and pointed out a denaturalization. Meanwhile, a GAO report on immigration detention and camp East Montana. I've never seen it written like Montana, so I'm guessing it's camp month like Joe Montana. Yeah. Well, like I don't they write it says Montana. So like I don't know, but it's it's in bliss, right? Like it's inside Fort Bliss. So like one would expect to normally like a Spanish style pronunciation given the region. Yeah. But maybe they just like a fucking end yet. I don't know. Like why they're not anyway. It's camp. It's named as spelled like the state, not the not the Spanish word for mounted. Some of the things detailed in the sport are pretty shocking. A guard lost a loaded gun. Oh boy. Yeah. People with diabetes and HIV did not receive treatment plans and quote on Jesus. Yeah. On February 20, 2026, I issued a discrepancy report for a detained nonsense and death by use of force in January of 2026. The coroner's autopsy found the death to be a homicide due to a fix yet. However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ice as required in addition evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed. Yeah. Like one of their guards strangled someone to death. It appears. Yeah. It is a there's a range of fur of ways someone can be as fixated, right? Like I. Yeah. That's true. But I'm guessing they attempted to restrain this person. Finally, and like as we've seen many other times in American history murdered them. Yeah. And then evidence of that was destroyed. What is allowing this to happen? It's that the contract was solicited using a worldwide expeditionary multiple award contract vehicle. That's a generally like a military contract vehicle. It allows and experience pool of military contractors to apply for the contract. They probably did it like this to expedite the awarding implementation, right? Like Camp East Montana is a soft side of facility on Fort Blaser. I've talked about it before here. Soft side of facility means tents, right? It means keeping hundreds of people in tents. They hired a contractor who had no experience using what's called a lowest price technically acceptable evaluation approach. So they they filter out people who can't do the requirements that they have for the contract. And then they look at which which of the ones that does meet your requirements has a lowest price, right? This has resulted very clearly in them contracting someone who's completely incapable of managing a facility like this. And even among ice facilities, this one appears to be particularly heinous. And this has resulted in very, very predictable and easily foreseen human tragedies, right? They are capable of doing better than this. Conditions were very bad at bliss for Afghan people, where who came here after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wrote about that for the nation. You can look it up. I didn't interview someone who was there, but this is even worse rather than learning from that. They've they've just gone deeper. This has resulted in at least one person being killed. It's pretty horrific. Let's go on break. And then we will return for some stories about trans healthcare and war with Iran. Alright, we are back. I have a sort of honch podge collection of stories related to trans healthcare and trans rights in the United States that I'm going to go kind of sequentially and they some of them tied together. But let's start with the Transmilitary ban. We've been updated on this. A federal appeals court has at least temporarily blocked the Pentagon from expelling transgender members of the military though trans people may be barred from enlisting. So this is kind of sort of like a new form of don't ask, don't tell in a way of you can get in if you're not trans. But once you're in and you are trans, there's no legal grounds to remove you from the military. This was a 2-1 ruling that found Hague Sets anti-trans policy was quote driven by the bear desire to harm a politically unpopular group and quote both arbitrary and based on animus. For those reasons, the policy violates the plaintiff appellys constitutional right to equal protection of the law unquote. The last bit is very important like the equal protection clause in cases like this is going to be the main thing that trans people are able to rely on. Now circuit judge Robert Wilkins an Obama appointee wrote that the Trump admin claimed their anti-trans policy is solely about whether the military can disqualify people from service due to a mental health condition like gender dysphoria. Judge Wilkins wrote quote, but the record shows that the purpose of the Hague Sets policy is to target applicants and service members who express what the administration believes is a quote unquote false gender identity. And the policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification. Unquote. Hague Sets almost immediately announced he is appealing to the Supreme Court. Oh boy, we will see where this goes. Yeah. Last month the DOJ announced a settlement with the Texas Children's Hospital as part of an ongoing national investigation into violations of federal law for providing gender affirming care to minors. The Texas Children's Hospital has entered into agreements with both the DOJ and the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxden that includes a commitment to not perform quote-unquote sex-rejecting procedures on minors, which the DOJ says includes puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. This is a new term that they're really, really rolling out. Sex-rejecting procedure is that's you're just going to see this a lot more in these next few weeks to months. Yeah. The hospital in Texas also agreed to pay over $10 million in damages and civil penalties to quote, resolve allegations that it submitted false billings to public and private payers to secure insurance coverage for pediatric sex-rejecting procedures. The department alleges this conduct violated the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, and Federal fraud and conspiracy laws on quote. So they're saying that by billing insurance with their public or private for quote-unquote sex-rejecting procedures, trans health care, that this was an act of fraud. Now, this is a settlement and at the end of the settlement, they do note that these are just allegations, that these have not actually been proven, liabilities not been proven in a court, but these are the allegations that resulted in the settlement. As a part of the settlement, the Children's Hospital will also open the first ever quote-unquote D-transition clinic. So D-transition care is the same as transition care, right? It is the same type of care. I know this. This is what I do. There's not enough D-transitioners out in the world to have sustained an actual full clinic, which points to the fact that this clinic is not going to be used for consenting D-transition. It's mainly going to be used as a conversion therapy clinic for kids who want to transition, but are now going to be forced to go to a clinic like this because they're not able to get their health care through this hospital or really like in Texas as a minor. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio settled a very similar case last week paying $308,000 fine and agreeing to dedicate $2 million in funds for the transition care while promising to not provide gender-affirming health care to minors for 20 years. That is the part of the settlement in the Cleveland Clinic case. In mid-May, Oklahoma passed a bill prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, including surgery and HRT, as well as offering this care in state-owned facilities. The bill does not cut funding to doctors at private health care facilities to provide HRT as I've seen some claim online. This, like many of the Medicaid restrictions, primarily affects poor trans people on state Medicaid and may make care hard to access in the future, depending on how private hospitals react to this bill, even though it does not necessarily force them to change the way they operate. Lastly, later this summer, New York City will begin testing a pilot program for a direct low/no-cost gender-affirming care clinic for adults, opening in a low-income neighborhood in Queens. I think this is a good first step in providing access to care, considering the Trump administration's threats to restrict Medicaid and Medicare coverage, or remove Medicare Medicaid eligibility from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care services. But as we know, trans youths have borne the brunt of these threats. Now, Bose Momdani and the City Health Commissioner have said they are working to expand, city-provided gender-affirming care services to cover trans youth. Commissioner Martin told the City Council last Friday, "We are committed to this issue and want to make sure that we provide the services and resources for youth, as well as making sure we don't expose ourselves to claw backs from the federal government, which disrupt the rest of the care we can give. There's much more to come on this, but rest assured we are working on this." Something that is worth understanding here is that this new pilot program, this city run, low/no-cost drop-in clinic, is completely separate from the city's H&H municipal hospital system, which already operates multiple H&H price centers that currently offer youth gender-ferming care, including HRT. I called one this morning to confirm that they are still offering services to children, people of all ages. Now, H&H is funded through city subsidies and patient revenue through Medicare. The new pilot program is attempting to launch an alternative care service that isn't reliant on insurance or federal funding, if that comes into question. They're trying to get this clinic up and running off the ground as soon as possible, and then, once the pilot program is tested, expanded. Last week, Mamdani announced a $15 million investment in gender-ferming care, "as a first step," and said that the funds would be used to "a lock care for youth who have had their health care restricted by private hospitals." That's currently unclear how exactly these funds will be used. For a while, advocates in New York City and state were fighting for care in the state budget, which delayed some of the process on this city-provided care, because they were expecting about $8 million of care from the state budget, which eventually fell through, so now the city process is ramping up on us. Earlier this year, two major hospital systems in New York City stopped providing gender-ferming care to trans youth, ahead of prospective HHS federal rule changes that would prevent hospitals from receiving federal funding if they offer gender-ferming care services to youth. These rules have yet to go in effect, but two major hospitals essentially complied beforehand. The risks from the federal government aren't just isolated to restricting federal funding. The Trump administration has employed a variety of threats in an attempt to intimidate patients and care providers. Last month, the two hospitals that discontinued care for trans youth received a criminal grand jury subpoena from the U.S. office in the Northern District of Texas, requesting information on patients under 18 years of age. At least one of the hospitals' Mount Sinai is complying with the subpoena. Though telling parents the records would be anonymized, whatever that means. Oh, yeah. A group of trans New Yorkers who have received care at NYU Langone and their parents have filed a class action lawsuit to protect their medical records. Though patients at Mount Sinai could also sign on to this lawsuit. The suit has extended the deadline for the subpoena till late June, as both the hospital and patients fight this in court. A similar administrative subpoena, requesting records for youth patients was challenged and successfully blocked in Rhode Island. These subpoena should be fought on the strongest grounds by both the patients, the state, the city, and the hospitals themselves. And beyond the all-ages care currently offered by the H&H Health System, I think it was also fair to advocate that the direct, low-no-cost drop-and-clinic expand to cover all ages once the pilot program is up and running this summer. We'll briefly discuss the detention of an ICE officer and the war on Iran. We do have a good ICE arrest for you this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the one good ICE arrest, right? Let's just start there then. So the H&H Png out to attorney has filed charges against ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro was arrested in Texas. He was arrested by Texas Rangers with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Abrahension Investigators and DHS, the security office of the Inspector General Staff at the scene, according to a statement by the H&H Png County Attorney's Office. Castro is charged with quote four counts of second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for an incident on January 14th, 2026, when he discharged his weapon through a different door of a home, knowing there were people who had just run inside. The bullet traveled through the door and struck one victim in a leg for making its final impact in the war of a child's room. They didn't know in this that the case might be removed to federal court, but they say that he would still be ineligible for presidential pardon. It is not usual when announcing any prosecution to consider the impact of a presidential pardon. It is interesting that they did. The case in question refers to Castro shooting of Julio Sosa-Seles in which the DHS claimed that Sosa-Seles and two others attacked Castro with a broom at a snow shovel and that Castro, quote, fired the defensive shot to defend his life. DHS very quickly dropped its case, put two H's on leave for providing accounts that were contradicted by video evidence. Probably Castro was one of them, right? This is interesting either they were able to like obtain the DHS OIG support. I'd forgotten the DHS OIG was still doing stuff like this to be honest. I didn't think they were, so this will be one that we will follow. That only leaves us with Iran, where this week a United States Apache helicopter was they would have been using shot down. I'm not sure if it was shot. It would take a down reportedly by an Iranian drone and reportedly by a collision with that drone. It's possible that this happened accidentally but given other things we've seen right with in Ukraine, for example, it is possible to take down a helicopter with a FPV drone. That would be my guess as to what happened here. It's crew were then rescued from the Strait of Hormuz by another drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. The US only bought these online in March of this year. This is the first time that we're aware of that they were using this capacity, right? This is like a boat drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. I didn't scoot them up. They got on it. It collected them and then it took them to a second location where a helicopter was able to lift them up. As a direct result and according to St. Combatty Director of the President, the US then began self-defense. I'm quoting here, quote-unquote self-defense strikes against Iran. They claim these strikes were a quote-unquote warning shot and will not impact negotiations. But as we record this and Wednesday afternoon, they have just announced another series of strikes. This all comes after Israel and Iran exchanged missile solos when Iran responded to Israeli bombing in Beirut and the Houthis have also claimed the missile attack on Israel and have said that they would begin targeting Israeli shipping. Again, we are already teaching around the edge of this becoming a massive international conflict in a region again, but it is a massive international conflict, but returning to this full scale conflict that we saw until the ceasefire, which has been repeatedly violated, but nonetheless has reduced the amount of bombing that's happening. Israel also bombed Palestine this week. Among the people killed was an eight-year-old boy named Judge Solomon in Northern Gaza, which is tragic. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on this. I've tried really hard not to make our coverage of especially what's happening on Iran Twitter review because real people are killing and real people are dying and it's focusing on the stupid shit that the President said or that Netanyahu said on Twitter like isn't or true social converted to Twitter or whatever. That's not really what's such stake here, like what's such stake is people's lives and so I want to kind of avoid doing the back and forth social media review. But yeah, that's what I got this week. Cool. Oh, breaking news. As we go to press here, the Berlin Zoo has announced the name of its new born Pygmy hippopotamus. And I thought Hitler was a mistake. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I don't think that's an appropriate name for them. A drop a link in the chat so you're going to appreciate it. It's like a new moodang just dropped moment. They are calling it brooch and brooch and I need to speak German. Sure. Okay, guys. That's that's more than a brochure. Yeah, great. Good work, guys. That sounds like a handy children aren't legally allowed to eat in my country. Another dub for German marketing. It means bread roll, I guess. It's a very cute hippopotamus. That's a pretty cute name. Bread roll would be a cute name for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess if you're German, it's a cute name. Yeah. Hit us up, German language listeners. Does it seem cute to you? No, don't because you'll just get angry at us for not understanding a strange language. In my defense, you live outside of America, the only other country in the world. Right? Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah. I'm just going to ignore the Iran reporting. Yeah. Yeah. We just did. Yeah. Yeah. We're not. We'll not mention that. Email us at full zone tips at proton.me. Some of you marketing fuckers are still trying remarkable. I'm pretty sure it's one person who just creates new new aliases, but I'm playing whack-a-mole over there in the block list. Okay. I will read your name. This is out if you keep doing it. All right. Well, I think that's going to be it for all of us here at it could happen here. That's the it in it could happen here is this is us doing it. podcast. Goodbye. We're trying to score on your couch. 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 CoolZone Media. From our podcast from CoolZone 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. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. 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