It Could Happen Here Weekly 243

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait and hold up. They changed all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's wrong. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast. Or wherever you get your podcasts. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos. And I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dancing with the Stars is looking for a new pro. And since last season, I came in eighth place. I'm basically an expert. I'm Daniel Fischel. And I'm Vouch Murkowski. And we have a new podcast called Stepping on Toes with Daniel and Val. Every week, we're breaking down Dancing with the Stars the next pro. To find out who I'll be sharing the boring with next season. Listen to Stepping on Toes on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Stepping on Toes and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. Hi, I'm Dr. James Stout. You might know me as a host of the podcast, it could happen here. But I'm hosting a brand new show now called Natural Causes, where we explain how going outside is political and look at how we can live together with nature and take care of one another in a world that's on fire. You know, we feel uncomfortable saying something like culture and wildlife, but that's what it is. We're going to explain how a take can make you sick and how a lizard might be able to help you. And what mountain lines can teach us about zombie deer? You can see the very faint out my insid the aurora. What a magical place. Listen to Natural Causes on the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome to it. Could happen here. My name is Dan Alcurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arabic Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Eli Yub, who is a Palestinian Lebanese writer and researcher, as well as a podcaster with the podcast The Far These Times and from the periphery media collective. And today he's speaking to us about the recent agreement between Lebanon and Israel related to Israel's continued occupation of the southern part of Lebanon and continued bombardment. So he's going to talk to us about what the agreement says. Why there are so many problems and concerns related to this agreement and how it fits into the broader regional war against Iran. Ilya, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me again. So today we're going to be discussing, as I mentioned in the intro, the agreement between Lebanon and Israel, the framework, which has been quite controversial. So I wanted to just give you an opportunity to give a brief explainer. What is this agreement? So it's taking you like a trilateral framework in the sense that it includes where legally anyway, the US, Israel and Lebanon. Ostensibly like what it says it does is that it proposes some kind of future in which Lebanon and Israel, which have been in a de facto state of war for basically forever to no longer be in that de facto state of war. The problem, which probably won't surprise like the organs of this podcast. The problem is sort of in the details. Like what is it that Lebanon has signed? If you look on the website itself, it's on the American government's website. There are 14 points. It's roughly 1,300 words or so. And already you see what's absent, which is the terms like withdrawal and of occupation, any of that. There's basically no stipulation whatsoever that the Israelis have to leave Lebanon. And you will have people who support the zealus. So technically that's not true because it says here in number two, the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon commit to a reciprocal sequence process with key conditions whereby the LAF, which is the Lebanese armed forces, will restore effective sovereign authority over all of Lebanon's territory. And here is the grub, I'm quoting, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed routes and dismantlement of associated infrastructure enabling the idea of Israel defense forces to progressively redeploy out of Lebanon's territory. What it essentially says and the various points we don't have to go through all of them essentially confirm this time and time again, is that Israel will get to define, will get to decide when an area that Israel is occupying as an Lebanese territory that Israel is occupying, when that area is officially disarmed, when it is no longer a quote-unquote security threat. The Lebanese state has no say in the matter. There's no independent UN-type mechanism that would determine that. It's just easier to get that gets to define that. And what they're currently doing, which is what the Lebanese government has agreed to, which is part of the controversy that we'll get into, is that they are creating these two so-called pilot zones, which are among the in the territory that Israel is currently occupying in Lebanon, in which they will allow the LAF, the Lebanese armed forces to progressively assert its, I'm putting this in quotation, you can't see it, like assert is a sovereign territorial control. But, and here again, is the kind of the devil in the detail, the Lebanese army cannot actually enforce anything that would still be the authority of the Israeli army, which again is the one that this currently illegally occupying southern Lebanon. So yeah, we can get into more of the details, but that's sort of in and not sure why it's so bad, but I can get into more why it's bad as well. - Oh yeah, we'd like to talk about all the bad. So before we get into all the bad, where does Hezbollah play into any of this? - Well, unsurprisingly, Hezbollah opposes this. In fact, I don't think a majority of the political parties currently in the Lebanese parliament support this, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of their reasons why I don't think this particular agreement, which is the latest of so many agreements between the Americans, Israelis and the Lebanese, at least at the official level. I don't see this lasting very long. Hezbollah has immediately said that this is a humiliation, it's surrender, it's defeat, which is not that unusual, that's sort of how they've been talking about these negotiations for since they started really. And it declared this agreement null and void, which they cannot get more straight forward than that. Their main ally in parliament, IE, the Amal movement has also come out to oppose this, which is a big deal because that's the speaker of parliament. Lebanon is ruled by this kind of troika, so he's won one out of three, which is a big problem for the other two. And yeah, I kind of generally don't see this lasting, but I am also worried about what can come next. - I mean, the fact that Israel is again, the unilateral, you know, judge jury executioner here, obviously is a very big problem, but what other issues do you foresee with this agreement? - I worry that the Lebanese government, in at first having some, I think, understandable concerns over Iran's role in Lebanon, and we can get into that, has solved of either, I don't know how you would describe it, maybe over-corrected and gone a bit to anti-Iran, which in and of itself, I wouldn't necessarily oppose. I'm not a fan of the Islamic Republic to put it mildly. And I've always opposed Hasbullah for as long as I can remember. But the timing of doing what they've been doing, and I can get into it now, has been, I think, very, to put it charitably, very puzzling, but I think also, like, very, very short-sighted and frankly, reckless and dangerous. This is all while Israel is bombing Lebanon, I should say. If this was any context where there was no active war, I wouldn't have as big of an issue with it. But they've declared the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon to be persona non grata. They've taken down photos of the Ayatollah by the airport and replaced it with Lebanon, a war then, which, like, Lebanon first, they've deported, like, members of the IOTC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and done a bunch of, like, other, even, like, rhetorical things, like, the President would go on Twitter and say, like, Iran, get out and stuff like that. The President of Lebanon, which, again, I have a thousand and one issues with the Iranian rule in Lebanon, including my issue with Hasbullah. But there is only one country that is currently actually occupying Lebanon militarily and actually bombing Lebanon militarily with its military, I mean, and that country is not Iran. So the priorities of the government in wanting to distance itself from Hasbullah's actions, which I should say have been controversial from the beginning, because Hasbullah took a unilateral decision to enter the war against Israel, a decision that was not made with, like, the rest of Lebanon's approval. So it's been, like, controversial from the start. Man, that's why I meant by, like, the charitable interpretation is that the Lebanese government sort of over-corrected. And instead, by attempting supposedly to distance itself from Iran, what has actually done is made us even more dependent on the United States than we used to be before. Right. So that's where the things you're describing at a normal circumstances would be like. like yeah, like why is Iran so embedded in a lot of these different countries in the region and why does it have such an interventionist role but you're saying it's reckless in this context where the Lebanese government is basically making itself more at the mercy of actors like the United States and Israel by proxy. Yeah, as of now like and I really tried my best to look for some leverage that Lebanon might have but as of now I don't actually see any leverage that Lebanon has it's basically we hope for the best like I wish I could I could put it differently but it essentially is under the hope that like the Trump administration is tired of Netanyahu that it might fall, you know, on Thursday Israelis to to either withdraw from Lebanon or to at the very least stop the bombing or what not which I've seen no evidence of and as of now every time a so-called ceasefire has been signed that even has what I agreed to the only thing that it's done is that has what law would not respond to Israeli bombings so the Israeli bombings have been a constant throughout this entire thing ceasefire or no ceasefire since the agreement was signed they've continued they haven't stopped as of time of recording over 4,200 Lebanese have been killed since the beginning of this latest war so not even since the beginning since 2023 but since in 2026 alone because Israel does not discriminate on how they bomb so to give you the example of those two so-called pilot zones are they even inhabitable as of now I don't know because of the 54 towns and villages Lebanese towns and villages that the Israelis military occupy at least 46 of them that we know of are either partially or entirely demolished so what are those security zones what does that even mean you know but again is this the entire problem now is that they get to decide all of that and again with all of my issues with Iran the agreement that the Lebanese have signed with the Israelis I think is objectively worse than the memorandum of understanding that the Iranian signed with the Americans that actually also included Lebanon because at least in that MOU and that moment of understanding it included the sentence territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon as well as a calvo ceasefire which was a nightmare for Netanyahu Let's talk about Iran more specifically for a moment I mean Lebanon has taken out the ambassador has made all of these kind of rhetorical shifts away from the Iranian regime obviously a display for the US and for Israel but Iran how has it responded how has the government responded and how does this agreement relate to the MOU that Iran signed with the United States so it's quite complicated because the MOU was signed just about a week or so before so the deal between the Iranians and the Americans was signed roughly a deal agreed upon I don't know if they signed these things roughly a week before this one the one between Israel and Lebanon of the America the tripartite one as they call it one interpretation that I've seen is that by going directly to Lebanon America actually managed to bypass these these kind of bullet points that Iran was putting forward so like let's say Iran is saying what Lebanon should be ceasefire in Lebanon and that this should be like territorial integrity and sovereignty in the meantime the Lebanese state is saying to Iran like you do not negotiate on our behalf so their Americans go to Lebanon directly or the Lebanon goes to the American and they supersede this and they do an negotiation or they rather they get the Lebanese to sign this latest agreement directly which of course does not include Iran anyway so the main differences between the MOU between America and Iran and the agreement between let's say Israel and Lebanon is that Israel had no parts whatsoever in the MOU and if it had come to pass if the Iranians had basically gotten what they were asking for the Americans would have been forced at least legally to to pressure the Israelis to leave Lebanon all together no ifs and buts no no negotiated exit whatever that means no making up pilot zones none of that stuff it would just be you you've been doing this occupation illegally you need to leave as simple as that that's been the Iranian position which is not a position that most Lebanese would disagree with because it is just a fact right and it's interesting I mean obviously we don't want to speculate but it is interesting that Iran made the ceasefire in Lebanon so kind of central to a lot of their demands right yeah it's not that surprising to me I think because they they see this as saving Hasbullah so like it's it's like it's almost like an easy thing to to do it doesn't cost them anything in a sense it would have of course put pressure on the Israelis which they're happy to do since Israel and America started the war against Iran in the first place and it would you know give some kind of a breathing space for their their main ally in Lebanon which has Hasbullah yeah so any of itself I don't think it's surprising that they included it maybe they knew that Lebanon would be rejected officially given their position of the Lebanese government you know thus far and I can't know for sure but yeah any of itself it doesn't surprise me that they went for this because one one other thing I should say that they were proposing in that MOU is a so-called deconfliction cell the details of which are not entirely clear to me yet and at this point may never happen anyway but the way it's been interpreted that I saw is that it would see its influence in Lebanon restored so there's also like a self-interest in all of that but not in a military occupying way so for me it's not that the option has been either an amazing option or a bad option it's more like either we get the Iran option which is not ideal but self-functional or a catastrophic option which is the one that we actually got with the Israelis right and I mean we've had some episodes about Iran I've hosted a few people about Iran and I think it bears repeating that their strategy their ability to kind of withstand even this level of severe you know warfare in the latest escalation has depended on their allies in the region and kind of the diffusion of Iranian power to non-state actors essentially yeah so what was the public reaction to the Lebanese government signing this agreement the Lebanese public reaction to be clear yeah the most immediate reaction on the streets has been by of course by Hasbullah and its ally Amal in which they you know they burned stuff down they yelled they threw stuff at the cops and stuff like that the secretary general of Hasbullah as I said as they clear did not avoid and so on as for the rest of the country there hasn't been any kind of mobilization against it but they shouldn't be interpreted as consent it's more I think in my view that the Lebanese population as a whole has been exhausted by nearly three years of war now and there is an appetite for kind of diplomacy in fact there's been a poll a nationwide poll that was just released a few days ago that says that roughly 54% of the population support diplomacy versus 35% so that support on resistance now the 54% that support diplomacy which you know just over half it's not because they believe this is the best option it's more than they believe I think this is my interpretation it's more than I think most people genuinely believe that there are no other options so it's more than I think a reflection of how desperate the situation is more than anything else it should not be confused with any kind of like warming up towards Israel and that same poll which again was nationwide 87% of people in Lebanon identified Israel as their main enemy versus 51% that identify America and 38% that identified Iran and this is across sects so usually when you see the reporting you could be led to believe that it's only Shias and Lebanon that oppose Israel but actually it is really across sect that Israel is the deeply unpopular state in Lebanon which is not surprising because it's been bombing Lebanon for on enough of decades now right you've written about this for 972 mag you have another article coming out I'm sure or it's already out I'm not sure but I will definitely link it in the show notes by the time this this episode airs is there anything you feel like we missed and that listeners should know it's very difficult to know where things are heading in terms of the security situation in Lebanon I would argue that kind of the spectre of a civil war whatever that actually looks like is never too far away and hasn't been too far away for a while now I don't think it's likely in the traditional sense of like multiple armed actors in the near future it largely because I think the population is really exhausted but the Israeli war on Lebanon has created kind of this fault line that's very very difficult I think to overcome now and it's not again a fault line between pro-Israel and anti-Israel both sides of this fault line are technically anti-Israel it's more of like what the priorities should be for the Lebanese state and it's created a sense for a lot of people who are from southern Lebanon that is currently as we're speaking still being bombed it is giving the sense that the rest of the country is abandoning them and this sort of grievances is quite literally what gave us Hasbada in the first place right Hasbada was created in the mid 80s this was a couple of years to three years after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon really started which was not even the first one it was the second one it was just the biggest one it would last for 18 years and in those 18 years this obscure group that did not really exist grew in popularity because they were the most effective one thanks to the fact that Iran was backing them until they became the de facto king makers of Lebanese politics for a couple of decades after that so the worry here is not even that I feel that like history would just repeat itself and whatnot it's more that there doesn't seem to be any actual path forward that proposes any alternative to people from southern Lebanon, which is roughly a fifth of the country in terms of both sides more or less and population more or less. Those people have nowhere else to go, they will go back to their homes when they can, they go back to their lands if their homes are destroyed and they will try and rebuild as they have done already in the past, if not once, sometimes more than once. And if there isn't a solution for them, that is just a fair solution that brings them justice that stops the Israeli bombings and permanently forces the Israelis out of Lebanon, there's going to be some force somewhere that's going to find a way to appeal to that population. And if they're not offered an alternative, they will seek that alternative, which again is the history of Hezbollah in the first place. So as much as I oppose Hezbollah for very Lebanese reasons, like in As the Lebanese myself, because of the sectarianism and authoritarianism and so on, that's a complete separate question for me, then the right of people who are under military occupation to resist that military occupation, because that is actually a right that's guaranteed under international law. And I'm really worried as of now, and I'm not just speaking for myself here, that's virtually everyone I know that the situation is getting to the point where essentially the Lebanese state is hoping that the Americans would just pressure the Israelis. And the way it's been happening as of now is that they would pressure them here and there a bit, but not much. And then the rest of the time they just let them do whatever they want with American tax money, of course. If they don't actually force the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon, it can create like a, you know, a whole different political beast in a sense that would be even more violent, I think. We're specifically talking about Lebanon, but this is the case in so many contexts in the region is that when the conflicts are unresolved, when the violence is unresolved, then it'll only perpetuate more violence. Everyone I know has been warning about that in every context in Palestine in Lebanon. So it's extremely depressing, but thank you so much for sharing your insights with us, and I will link it as work in the show notes and yeah, I hope you all stay safe. Here's what you missed and the argument is do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's wrong. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same way. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network, 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 23. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now and download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app Apple podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko, where we have real conversations just like this. Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-choose spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. Is that weird? This week is Human Connection Week. We're taking a peek into the lives of various strangers who found my phone number online. We'll hear their funny moments, their difficult ones, and their unexpectedly profound ones. These are real conversations with real people figuring out life one call at a time. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On big lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor, and we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's Fast Archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer, I'm educating, I can talk all week on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. And when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible, because it makes me dance better for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jocci. I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. That call was really pivotal for me. Hey, it's Emily Tish Sussman, and this season on She Pivots, the podcast where women share bold career moves and personal turning points that changed everything. I sit down with culture-shifting women who share their pivots, like Para Olympian Alley Truett. I was like, I'm on month out from a shark attack. There's no way in 11 months I'm making the verbal index. Advocate Elizabeth Smart. I still feel that drive that I can still make a difference, so I'm gonna keep going. Celebrity chef Carla Hall was that scary to walk away from such a stable career after just two years? No, I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke and in a dead and job that I didn't enjoy. An feminist legend, Gloria Steinem. All of us were trying to express women's real lives. We need a meeting place of our own, and if I can contribute to that, I'd like to maintain that and leave this house for that purpose. Listen to She Pivots on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart. And that's happening in a lot of places right now, but not every place also has things regularly unfortunately falling from the sky. But that's life in Ukraine for a lot of people, including our guests today, every single day, because they are still under invasion from the Russian federation, which I guess we're still calling the federation. Romeo Kokriatsky. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing? I mean, I know it's not great, so I don't know why I'm asking. Yeah, thanks for having me back on. It's been a while. Yeah. Yeah, like you mentioned, it's it's not great, especially for me personally. My neighborhood's been targeted by Ballistics twice in the past two weeks, one of which hit a improperly stored munitions dump and blew up half the neighborhood. So that's been that's been fun to deal with. I mean, we have other stuff to talk about, but I do want to just kind of talk about what life has been like. Like in terms of dealing with that, I mean, thank God you have not been hit and either has your home, but like on a day-to-day basis, how are y'all enduring, you know, so many years past when this escalated most recently. Honestly, I had thought prior to half my neighborhood being blown up that I basically got numb to the bombing. Yeah, turns out that's not true. Yeah, that makes sense. Turns out I was just completely lying to myself. Yeah, I have mortal dread pretty much all the time every night. I am desperately checking every single monitoring channel I have access to and praying that the Russians aren't going to shoot us and if they do shoot us, I then have to think, hey, should I wake my wife and son up? Should we go down to the shelter? Is there any point we live in the 15th floor? So we'd have to walk what if a missile hits while we're in the stairwell? Yeah, and it's a little tiring. It's a little tiring. Yeah, to constantly live your life with the feeling that you may die at any goddamn moment. I'm not even in the military. Yeah, I am pretty much constantly afraid for my life and, of course, the life of my family and friends every morning after a mass attack, I have to call or text every single journalist who works for me, make sure that they're still alive. Yeah, it's so far. Everything's been clear. Everything's been clear for five years, but you really have to wonder how long can one's luck last? Yeah, it's like you were talking about the moment you start to feel like, maybe I've hardened or maybe like I've gotten past the point that this can affect me as the moment where something happens. I feel so awful that the constant state of panic fear arousal that everyone has to be in over there because they're just shooting missiles into your home every day is just it's hideous. Yeah, it's not great. I haven't left the country since the start of the full scale. Yeah, and to be quite honest, I'm not sure how I would do once this threat is no longer above my head. It's hard to imagine going to sleep and not wondering whether I'm going to wake up in the next like the next morning. It sounds a little absurd, but then I think someone about 300 kilometers away has made a decision to lob multi hundred kilogram warheads at the general area of where I live within two to three kilometers. That is not allergic. no, no, it really isn't. No, I mean, ballistic missiles, you know, often can go thousands, like that's so easy to build something that you could just fire blindly into a city at this point. That's why war looks like this. For most of the people involved in it, right? Like for all the movies or about the guys like kicking indoors and shit on the front lines, the vast majority of everyone's experience of war is shit falling on you from the fucking sky or exploding in traffic or something like that, right? Like that's the reality. I'm fucking sorry, man. Yeah, and in Kiev, honestly, we don't even have as bad. Yeah. Here's some, they're just doing a human safari. They've been doing that for like six months now. The front line is right over basically the river. And they, the Russians just send drones to hunt people in the streets just for fun, you know, funsies for the lulls. So as bad as I can be here, sometimes I read the stories I'm publishing, and I'm like, man, thank God, I don't live in that place. I don't know anyone from that city. Everything becomes so relative after a while. I mean, it's the only way to stay sane. Even though your situation is objectively unreasonable and impossible, you kind of naturally just look over to whoever's got it worse. I mean, which says something beautiful, I guess, if you'll let it, but, you know, that's one way of looking at it. Fuck, man. I'm sorry. Yeah. I know. I brought you on today to talk about some of the, the political changes that have been pretty massive that have just just hit the Ukrainian government as the result of the sacking of Michaela Fedorov. But that also feels like we should talk about that some I just, I don't know, talking to you reminds me of how much I even let myself over here focus on war in terms of stuff like that, right? These like moves by governments and moves by forces, which by default means excising the majority of what's happening from your mind, because in some, I mean, sometimes it's just too big to think about otherwise, right? But like it's, you know, that's exactly right. Yeah. Whenever there's any sort of domestic political intrigue, I am just overjoyed. I'm sad against what he was doing. Something. I know a lot of people wanted to be war correspondents and like be there in the trenches and I have a lot of friends. My buddy Dylan Burns, I saw a clip of him just getting shelled last week, somewhere I think comes up a razor front. Yeah. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. I became a journalist because I love politics. I know the envy, the pettiness, the egos, all the little, like garbage bullshit that makes up the, the experience of human politics. That took calls to me in my dark little shriveled. So whatever I have the chance to engage in just domestic political bullshit, I feel overjoyed. That is fantastic. Well, good. Okay. Well, let's let's talk about some domestic political bullshit because there's been a wild train of it in the last couple of days. I'm just going to let you go after starting this off, but like kind of what prompted this is on July 15th of this year. Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president fired or dismissed Mikaela Fedorov, who was the minister of defense of Ukraine and Fedorov. He'd been the president's social media marketer initially, right? Like back during he was, when he was campaigning way before his involvement in the military, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah. He was a not just social media. He was the young like IT guy. He was the IT guy. Did all the IT infrastructure from S&M, from social media to the actual physical infrastructure itself? That was all Fedorov. He was like the IT dude for the Zelensky administration. Yeah. And he's only had the position for about six months. He was appointed in January, but it's been an incredibly popular six months, right? He is widely popular in Ukraine. There were large protests following his dismissal, and he got a lot of credit for his use of drone warfare. And particularly some of the promises he was making and some people would say some of the promises that he fulfilled about drone warfare, right? And one of the issues that he had as he kind of clashed as I understand it with an older general Searsky, who was much more of a conventional weapons guy. I think like the big fight that spurred a list came over like a fight over munitions, right? Fedorov was canceling an order of artillery shells or something like that, and it kind of embodied the greater conflict between them. It seems like. Yeah. That's basically right. Fedorov prior to taking the Ministry of Defense position. Like I said, he was the IT guy and he had the Minister of Digital Transformation, because we have a whole ministry set up to digitize our government. We've got the DIA app and a couple of good results from it. So he had a relatively high level popularity compared to the typical Ukrainian official coming into the MOD position. And he became popular, or I guess his popularity grew not so much because he was doing drones. Like the transformation to drones occurred pretty much from the start of the first. Right. Yes. Every single unit has been ordering and begging and getting drones, however they can since literally the the full scale started. However, what Fedorov promised to do and what he did, which is what won him a lot of accolades with the the the common soldier, is he said we would actually get you drones instead of you know, you having to go through 15 layers of bureaucracy and procurement to maybe sign up for a list where you might get delivered something in four months somewhere will set up a simple direct system where you can request the equipment you want and you'll get it. Well, it's not quite as simple. He developed some gamification crap, which you can get into later. I'm not. Yeah. I'm not a fan. It is really interesting. But yeah, yeah, he's tried some really fascinating stuff. Yeah, he's he's tried a lot of things and it has worked. Yeah. People have started getting drones. Like I know guys in the front who had complained previously that they were unable to get equipment, even though they're posted, they're deployed. They have a mission and commands just like, oh, we don't know where your drone is that started to be resolved. However, in order to do this, you need money, right? To buy drones, you need money. Right. So the Ministry of Defense controls the actual monetary flows. They have to actually sign off on whatever the request from the general staff or the military is to to purchase this or that equipment system. Right. You know, the way it typically works because the Ministry defences a civilian institution and the military is obviously a military institution. Typically speaking, in wartime, civilians are intended to defer to military expertise. Right. So if the army goes, we need, I don't know, 100,155 millimeter shells. The Ministry of Defense is not really supposed to say, you know what? No, we think you need this instead. This is the kind of the crux of the conflict here. Is that federal off seeing these requests from Sresky? Like you said, he's a very conventional guy, a very conventional Soviet general. He grew up in Moscow, went to the Moscow Red Army Academy to be quite honest. He's pretty much a Soviet general through, you know, my understanding is he has a reputation for accepting pretty gnarly casualties. Yeah. There were unfair. He's gotten that reputation. I'm not like an expert on his record. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. He has that reputation. Yeah. Like you, I'm not a military guy. Yeah. I'm not an army expert. I've never studied strategy or tactics aside from mean posting. So I have no idea how, you know, true or not true. It is obviously you can look at the lost records of the units that Sresky has said to personally favor and you can't see that they are higher, but are they hired because they are simply being used more often? Like it's a war there are going to be casualties that are simply no way to remove that fact or are they higher because his commanders are incompetent throwing away human meat. You know, you've got people that'll say one way you've got people to say the other way, but regardless, Sresky would continue to request these kind of conventional munitions and according to Sresky's version at least, federal off will just completely ignore this and by whatever he wanted the ministry by typically this was drones. There was a funny meme I saw of Sresky complaining to federal off with a text reading, the buzzing of your stupid drones are hurting the infantry to advance to give you a sense of how Ukrainians viewed this. Oh, man. That's beautiful. I really love that being really. That's beautiful. That's going into history book. From the federal side, what they say the conflict is, which knowing how Ukraine works, I tend to believe them. Right. Is that in federal attempts to move these cash flows from buying conventional munitions to buying drones, he started stepping on a lot of toes and the general staff. Right. Because this is Ukraine, because this is defense procurement, if you want to buy something from a domestic supplier, the chances are that supplier is owned somehow via shell company connected to some general or some highly placed military officials. That's just the nature of the game. Obviously, let's say if the general staff requests 100,000 shells and they source half of it from Ukraine and firm, there's a good chance that there's a lot of generals that are going to be building themselves and you fill up after this. If, however, you don't put that order on And instead by, you know, drones from the 500 or a thousand different garage manufacturers, which is how the drone industry works here, that money is not going into people's pockets. And those people get upset. Those people start complaining that you are not a team player, that they can't work with you, that you don't listen to them, they stop taking your calls, et cetera, which is exactly what we saw in the conflict between Fedoroff and Sursky on the reporting of it. So that's basically the gist of it, is Fedoroff tried to use his own judgment and stepped on people's toes, redirected money, and Sursky and the journal staff were not fans. I doubt Sursky cared really all that much. However, he needs to keep everyone happy, and the semester class is very heavily involved in this. Military salaries, even officer salaries are not great. No, and there's a lot of corruption and procurement and a lot of allegations of corruption and procurement, which is not something any military doesn't have to be honest. But yeah, that makes sense. So finally, gets to the point where Sursky went to the Lensky and said, look, you have to get rid of this guy. I can't work with him. Then Fedoroff separately went to the Lensky and said, look, you have to get rid of this guy. If you work with him, then the Lensky goes to a private meeting with his party in Parliament and says, hey, well, they both said they can't work with each other. And I kind of need them to work with each other. So I should fire them both, but I can't fire Sursky yet. So instead I'll fire Fedoroff. And that's what picked off this whole shabby. How much do you buy? Because the times had a piece recently that was kind of, I mean, quoting some insiders, alleging that this was partly to do with the Lensky being jealous of Fedoroff popularity. And I've heard rumors of that before that has not seemed to be like the most, I don't know, believable answer. So I was kind of surprised to see the times give so much credence to it. But I mean, do you feel like that's credible? Is that something you hear a lot or is that, where's that coming from, I guess? I mean, I have considered this a lot because it has been something saved before. When Valeri's Illusiony was made to step down as a top general, and he was replaced by Sursky, a lot of the kind of speculation why this move was made was because Illusiony was very quickly becoming the most popular political figure, public figure in Ukraine. And then we saw Budanov, Carol Budanov, the head of military intelligence, who is now Zelensky's chief of staff, when his star was rising. And Zelensky had to fire your mock. He took the country's top spy, basically, and put him as chief of staff. Now you don't hear about Budanov at all, except for some unflattering rumors on anonymous telegram channels. So there is kind of a pattern, you can see, with Zelensky seemingly diffusing popular people around him, so they are no longer in a position where they can be so popular. And in Illusiony's case, he recently announced that whenever we do have presidential elections, he does plan to stand to them, right? So he has, in fact, directly declared, he will be politically opposing Zelensky whenever we get back to normal politics. So how do I say this? I am a cynical bastard. I will believe the worst about anyone, especially a ego-driven TV star/politician. It is not difficult for me in my cynicism to look at a man and say, huh, you know what? He probably doesn't like being outshown on the stage. Yeah. At the same time, I like to hope that Zelensky has the understanding that we're fighting a full-scale war, and that his ego is unnecessary and detrimental to the war effort. But the truth of the matter is, I have no idea. It certainly can be construed that way. Let's say that I don't think construing events that way is unfair to Zelensky. I think that's a reasonable interpretation based on the action that he's taken and based on, you know, the rumors and so on that come out of the office of the present. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense what you're saying. I don't have trouble believing that. Now, one of the things I have noticed is I've kind of read it into Fedorov, and I'm wondering and this is we're kind of our veering into some military theory here, but it is something that concerns me when I kind of look at some of the allegations about what he believes. And I'm not sure if this is entirely fair to him, but it seems like his critics within the Ukrainian military seem to believe that he basically is a believer that drones and robotics can handle a huge amount of the fighting load, right? And that this is like a major solution to the manpower crisis to the extent that is sometimes accused of believing that they can handle much more of the load than is really realistic. And a way that sometimes sounds similar to me to what some people said about like Air Force generals and kind of the post World War II period where there's this big understanding that all we need is air power. That seems to be like the allegations against Fedorov. He's saying, all we need is drone power and robotics. And we can kind of use that to fill in every gap. And there's a very reasonable critique that that's not sufficient. Now, I don't know if that's fully fair to Fedorov, but it seems to be like that's how he's being characterized, certainly by his opponents. And I have a listen to him speak. I'll say that the characterization is a little bit off like he might honestly believe that drones and robotics have to completely replace human warfare, but it's not like he lives in a fantasy world where he understands that that's a possibility that we can implement right now. Right. It's more that he faces the banal mathematical fact that we cannot match Russia. We are a much smaller country. That is mathematically impossible, add into that the general unpopularity of mobilization, the whole busification stuff, the fact that no one trusts our aging Soviet officer class to value their life or contribution or drafted or joined the military. Right. That together leads Fedorov to the, I think pretty obvious conclusion that the only possible thing we can do to even start to match Russia in manpower is heavily embraced robotics. Now, I do want to say a couple of things, Fedorov is a libertarian in the American sense. Right. And he's very young. He's 35. He's literally my age. Jesus. And this was back, I think, 2017 or 18. He ran as part of we had a tiny libertarian movement called the five ten party, which their idea was a flat five percent, that tax, flat ten percent, something else. I mean, it's stupid libertarian. I didn't ever pay much attention to it because I always asked them how old their girlfriend is and if they need to use the car seat is by paying you libertarians there. Yeah. And again, he made very well believe that this is the case that humans need to be taken out of or what's the military euphemism. Humans have to be taken out of the kill chain. Right. Kill chain. Yeah. I love the term kill chain. He made very well believe that he is good personal friends with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. That's very true. That's very true. Obviously the Omni Surveillance Corps were headed by the ordevil himself Peter Teal. So there's a lot of red flags. One of the first agency made after getting sacked was that he's been already gotten a bunch of offers from different Silicon Valley companies. Someone close to him said that. Not that he isn't taken. I don't know. He said that during the briefing. I was listening. Yeah. I was him. Alex Karp has already called me and offered me a job. Oh, he said Alex Karp. Okay. Great. Great. I'm just remembering from a news article, right? No, that said, I wanted to be fair to him because one thing he also gets a lot of credit for is over the last six months, which he was not in his position for long, but it's been a reasonably good six months compared to some of the previous couple of years, right? The front is stabilized in a lot of areas, and there's been an incredibly successful campaign to damage Russia's oil refining capacity that's taken out out a quarter of it, right? And those are seen. Part of why he's so popular, I would imagine that there's a debate as to how much credit does he deserve for both of those things? Both of these things have happened right over the last six months. Yeah. Exactly. And the hope was that if he was allowed to complete his reform. So his, the next big thing that he had planned to focus on was ground robotics, ground drones. The, the hope was that if he had actually been able to implement plans, we would see the same kind of sea change away from human soldier, really human infantry into robotic soldiers. Just as we saw drones replace the sniper team, the artillery team, the mortar team, you know, so many of these kind of fundamental roles that we thought a modern military, modern lines armed military needs, turns out you could replace all of them with drones. We don't know if that's going to be true for ground drones, but that was going to be his, his next project. And it definitely helped bolster his standing, let's say, when he goes, well, first off, I'm getting you the drones. And second off, we don't need to throw away Ukrainian lives on worthless meat assaults to win back half a kilometer of territory. We can choose is it'll keep you replaceable robotics instead? Yeah, that's a very hard thing to argue with, I mean, especially given how it's functioned. You know, it is worth kind of noting that he was brought in as well to solve the manpower crisis and that that, that certainly has not been solved. Although, you know, he was in there for six months, but like there that still continues to be a significant issue even with the advent of a lot more robotic fighters, which is, you know, proven successful in certain areas of the front, certainly, but it continues to be a pretty contentious and mobile front in some areas as well. Yeah, exactly. And the fact is we still have, I don't know, maybe let's say another 10, 15 years to reach the Terminator feature where you just, you don't need human infantry. It is a liability if you have flesh and blood guys on the battlefield, but we're not quite there yet. You still do need flesh and blood meets that humans to do things. So realization is obviously a thing, but I got to say every single minister of defense we've had since the start of the full scale has had the brief of reforming mobilization. So he is hardly the first guy to fail it. Right. The general staff was given the brief of reforming mobilization, Zelensky himself said that the office of the president had the brief of reforming mobilization, fed her off during his kind of exit press conference that he gave after being fired. He said this a very interesting thing. He said that in order to do mobilization for him in Ukraine, we need a new social contract. The fundamental social contract between Ukrainians and the state is seen by the average Ukrainian to be broken because of the continuous and constant corruption scandals because of the seeming, you know, Soviet indifference and callousness towards human life. All of these factors make the Ukrainian populace not especially want to die for the state. It's not that we don't want to die for Ukraine, but no one wants to die for the Ukrainian state. And this is the fundamental issue. And until that is addressed, there is, there is no solution for mobilization except for greater repression, like round people up even more use greater force. That's the only thing you can possibly do. There is no soft handle to fix that. It's not even really a question of money, because if you think that once you're drafted, they're going to throw you in the back of a van, driving them to force, stick you there for two weeks, not teach you anything, yell and beat you, then drive you to the zero line and leave you there. That's what the average Ukrainian man thinks is going to happen to them if they're drafted. And the fact is we have lots of stories exactly like that. So it's not exactly an unfounded fear. And until that's addressed, until the Ukrainian state can, you know, possibly tell the Ukrainian people, look, we care about your lives. We are doing this because we are doing this to survive, not because some general wants an extra badge or an extra villa or something. And at that point, mobilization reform can start, but without that change, you're not going to see anything. No, no amount of bureaucratic wrangling or racing salaries is going to result in any kind of mobilization bump. Well, man, is there anything else you wanted to get to today? I think that was a really good point to make. I'll say this that we did see that the protests did pay off. So I think that's the one aspect of this we haven't talked about. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a very good point. Why is actually doing this or why he is actually taking steps to remove Sursky is because of the protests? So we didn't even get to that, I'm so much because that just happened hours before we recorded this. But he is announced that Sursky is now being removed. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Just happened. Sorry. It was always going through case once Sursky's name was out in public. Right. The country's top general cannot be this controversial. He cannot be the guy everyone is talking about derogatorily international war. You just need to have the trust of both the people and the troops in Sursky. Once this scandal had reached the level, it was clear that he no longer had the Jews to continue. But again, the reasons a lumpy made these changes is because of the protests. So we learned about federals dismissal like late at night. I want to say in the 15th. And then that evening, a couple of, I think it was one X volunteer, one ex-soldier posted that we everyone should gather out on Twitter, I think. And then that that game steam that was the start of the kind of five day protests. I don't know if they're going to continue today now that Sursky's been replaced. But they've been happening every single day this week. And again, people came out first to kind of keep to protest federal removal, to say, hey, keep federal. Then it became clear that federal himself had refused to continue to work with his Lensky team. He he pretty much told the Lensky that I don't want any job. I wanted the job that I had. But since you made that no longer possible, I don't want to work for you. Once that dynamic became clear, the protests shifted more towards trying to get Sursky fired were to get him to resign than to get federal back in office, which is unlikely to happen. But the protests have been, first off, they, they occurred not just in Kiev, but pretty much in every major city, even the frontline cities, even in Zapparizia, in Harkiv. One of my journalists was in Harkiv and did a report from their protest, and these are people who were getting air bombed during the day, and they're gathering in the center of the city and protesting. The scale of it, the speed of it, and the general societal agreement is really what what gave these protests their steam. The same with the pro-Naboo protests that we saw a couple of years back or last year. The same kind of dynamic, same kind of protesting class, let's say it's younger people, you know, from 18 to like 30, typically more liberal, more progressive, however we come out in protest, not for, I mean, sometimes we do come out for gay rights, but currently it's more to correct our government's personal choices than anything else. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess it is positive that it matters still, you know, which is certainly in some ways a legacy still lingering of the Maidon, right, is that the government's not going to ignore that. Yeah. Yeah. I want to just say it's positive. It'd be quite honest. I cannot think of a single other democratic country on the planet that is as responsive to the undifferentiated random cries of the masses than you were. There's this huge negative to that, yeah. Sorry. I mean, I say like this and it might sound like I'm saying this derogatory, but I'm not. No, I think quite frankly, pretty much all liberal democratic nations in the 21st century have almost completely abandoned the democratic part, right? Either people vote for local parties that simply don't matter and all the decisions are made in boardrooms that they have less than zero impact in. They got unprotest and nothing happens except some kids get beaten up by cops and then nothing fundamentally changes. That is not true in Ukraine. We have seen multiple times where protesters go out with a concrete call and the government heats that call. Yeah. It doesn't simply ignore us. It doesn't just beat us up. It's fundamentally democratic in a way that I have not seen any other country in the world replicate so far. Yeah. That is very much worth continuing to know to acknowledge, although as you said, a mixed bag because the voice of the people is not always correct about aspects of strategy and governance, as a lot of places have learned. Yeah. Exactly. All right, man. Well, do you want to plug anything before you come out here, tell people where they can find you? Yes. I am the managing editor of the new voice of Ukraine, which is Ukraine's best and premier English language, a daily use site. You can read us at english.nv.ua, really easy to remember. That's english.nv.ua and listen to Ukraine without hype, which is a podcast from my self and my colleague, Anthony Bartoway. And you can find us wherever podcasts are listened to just search Ukraine without hype. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Romeo, for showing up again. And we'll be back tomorrow with something else. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. We have the issue of transgender athletes, was not going well with a lot of black men. I went off. You all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. And I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. my girlfriend, pre-tube, spicy food, and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. Is that weird?" This week is Human Connection Week. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. "That call was really pivotal for me. Hey, it's Emily Tish Sussman, and this is an unsheapivots, the podcast where women share bold career moves and personal turning points that changed everything. I sit down with culture-shifting women who share their pivots, like Para Olympian Alley Truett." I was like, "I'm a month out from a shark attack. There's no way in 11 months I'm making the verilandix." Advocate Elizabeth Smart. No. I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke and in a dead and job that I didn't enjoy. And feminist legend, Gloria Steinem. "All of us were trying to express women's real lives. We need a meeting place of our own. And if I can contribute to that, I'd like to maintain that and leave this house for that purpose." Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educating. I can talk all week on millions of subjects." And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. "Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary." "We're here for the messy, brilliant, the human version of our heroes." "When I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance better for some reason." "I'm Immanuel Jochi." "I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives." Listen to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcast. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the show. My name is James. We're starting again because I forgot to press the record button, and I am very lucky to be joined by Wendy Fry, and we're going to talk about a piece that Wendy did for Cal Matters about the Fed's DHS buying detention centers in California. Hi, Wendy, welcome to the show. Hi, James. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Okay, so let's begin, I suppose, by summarizing this article. We'll link to it right, and I think everyone should read it, and it's a really good piece for reporting. But can you explain what is happening here with these two detention centers? Sure. Yeah, thank you so much. So, last week, Core Civic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country and the nation, a publicly traded company, announced that they had sold two of their properties to the Department of Homeland Security for a billion and a half dollars. And those two facilities are two of the largest immigration detention facilities in California, Otay Mesa, detention center in San Diego County, that has a capacity of just a little under 2000 beds. And then, the other one is the newly opened California City facility up in Kern County. And that one's just a little bit bigger with the capacity of 2500 beds. And we learned the details about this health through this filing with the Security Exchange Commission. Like I said, because it's a publicly traded company, they have to make some of the information about this deal public. And we learned that the federal government paid $739 million, I think, for Otay Mesa. And then the other one was I think about $730 million per California city. And we've done some additional reporting to since that article came out. And we just last Friday, we're talking with the San Diego County appraiser, the assessor's office. And Kern County found out that the last appraise value on these properties was about a quarter of what the federal government paid for them. So the last appraise value, I think, about 160 million for Otay Mesa, not, I don't have the exact number, but around that. So they paid maybe four times. And of course, the praise value, we have to take it sort of with a grain of salt because it's not the market value, but it would be very hard to figure out what the market value is on a property like this because they're just aren't very many of them. Both places are these huge, sprawling federal prisons that don't get sold very often. So it's hard to figure out what the market value is. But those were the last appraise value. Yeah, sure, not much, not much of a market for a giant prison as opposed to best guess. Yeah, not much to compare it to you as far as the sale, right? Like, and on the federal government side, on course of excite, they said that this whole thing went through a very rigorous process of governmental review and that everything is above board there. Yeah. So, of course, they'll say that. Yeah. So these facilities, like, they spend a lot of money on them, right? And they have a lot of money right now. They're sitting on a giant pile of money. Actually, before we talk about what they spend on them, people will remember when President Biden came into power, him saying he was going to end private prisons, right? So we should just, I guess, begin by explaining how that didn't include immigration detention and how these places have like, as you say, they haven't just continued, but in the last two years, I guess, they're trying to expand immigration detention capacity, right? Right. Yes. So in California, particularly, California state officials have tried to ban private prison companies from from operating within the state of California. And the night circuit didn't, didn't uphold that. Like the California pass a law, governor knew some signed it. It went ended up in court, a geo group, and of course, I think the two largest private prison companies were fighting against this. And they, they, they won the night circuit upheld that California can't ban these facilities from operating, but they have pushed back a lot in and California lawmakers are trying to write a series and pass a series of laws that would require, you know, more of the talks revenue from these companies to be, you know, absorbed by the state and disincentivized basically financially disincentivized these private prison companies from operating. And that is one of the reasons why DHS in a statement that they put out Jason Sweeney with ice told me, you know, it's financially infeasable has become too burdensome from their point of view for the private prison companies to operate in California because of all the oversight and because of all the, you know, pushback the California officials have tried to do and have done as much as they can basically on. Let's talk about this new like attempt to grow detention capacity right because their previous attempt was these warehouses where we spoke to some folks in social circle on this show, social circle, Georgia, a while ago about that. Can you give people who haven't been following their little synopsis of where they've moved away from the putting human beings in warehouses models? Sure. So the spending bill, the federal spending bill that President Trump signed last year included just the insanely unprecedented amount of money for immigration enforcement. Like more than even the entire budget of the entire federal prison system, right? It includes about $45 billion just for detention capacity alone. So they poured a ton, like you said, they're sitting on just this huge pile of cash that they have to spend. They have to do something with that money. The plan at the beginning of the year were, as you mentioned, these warehouses, right, that they wanted to, from their perspective, sort of more intelligently design the both detention capacity and the deportation machine. And I think I'm not 100% sure which DHS officials said this. I think it was Tom Holman in Phoenix, but it could have been another DHS official, but basically they said they wanted to design the quote Amazon prime for humans. So like they want to make this as fast and as efficient as possible. They want to have a capacity to stay up to 100,000 people on any given day. And they have a ton of cash. Cash that they've never even seen before, right? So buying up this billion and a half dollars of real estate in California is feasible to them. And they've signaled the owning it rather than leasing it or having coercive and run it is more beneficial to them in not having to comply with the oversight, the different inspections and laws that California officials have tried to put into place that allows, for example, inspectors with the California Attorney General's office. And there was a 2024 law that California passed that would allow local health inspectors to go in and do a health inspection. San Diego County is the only place where they've actually tried to do that. And the private company pushed back. So they've said, do you just have said in their statement that owning this in rather than another entity owning it gives them the upper hand as far as avoiding some of this oversight and the federal courts have upheld that actually. Right. And let's dig into that a little bit, right? A lot of people have started paying attention to immigration detention, approximately halfway through January in 2025, right? Right. And if you had been paying attention before in California, you would have known that thousands of people were detained without food, water, or shelter in the open air for months. Not not like an individual duration stay was was a most like a week, but that the practice continued in her. And then I see the road. Yeah, yeah, in at least three places in Hukumba, I believe there were also other OAD sites that we didn't find. At least I didn't know about it. And then they'd also happened in Arizona as well. But at that point in time, there was not a great deal of inspection by the county. I saw a office of the immigration detention ombudsman person once. Their visit didn't seem to result in any changes. But like has California committed on why they suddenly care about the, I guess the conditions migrants are detained in when they didn't seem to care in a way that mattered three years ago. Right. They certainly weren't coming out in statements and pushing back as hard as we have seen them push back against the Trump administration. That's true. And I have asked like top California officials that in an interview I did with the California Attorney General Robonta. I did ask. And I was like, this is my really hard question for you is, you know, it didn't seem like you were pushing back in the same way when, you know, there were babies sheltering in Porter Potts, right? Oh, yeah. One night in September, I remember a lady breastfeeding a baby. The baby was shivering, which like it does not a good sign when babies are shivering. And like, I was warming up milk in the camping stove in my truck. And my friend was cycling toddlers in and out of like a little warming station they built. Like I've been through the Darien gap and that's still some of the worship that I've ever seen. It was horrific. Right. I remember thinking like where is the year and like where is like the red cross like what this is a humanitarian crisis out here. Yeah. And it was in such a remote area. It was so it lacks so much visibility both from the media and, you know, public officials. So we did talk about that at one point. And Bonta's response was, you know, we had a working relationship with the Biden administration that wasn't controversial or wasn't adversarial in the way that our relationship is with the Trump administration. And so we could work on that stuff behind the scenes. Now, I know you were out there. Anybody who is out there would say nobody really ever saw the results of that collaboration or that work, right? And, you know, it is a concern for sure that it does seem like California politicians do get more bang for their buck and opposing the immigration policies of the Trump administration. When it's important to note that a lot of this infrastructure, including especially a lot of the AI infrastructure that are being used to surveil people who are against these policies. And the Palantir, the AI technologies that is being used right now to find people and detain them without making the headlines in and quite as high profile ways we saw last year. All that was put into place by the Biden administration, right? And so it is important to note that for sure that a lot of these systems that now the Trump administration is able to utilize were handed to them. Let's entertain the idea that we have a midterm election and a presidential election, and they are conducted in a way that we kind of are accustomed to with elections and the results are respected. Let's imagine we have a Democrat in 2028, let's do the math there. The feds will still own these two giant detention centers, right? The way that immigration in my experience works is like it only seems to move in one direction. I guess like this is why this is such a concern. They're saying themselves, DHS is saying themselves that this is a deliberate strategy to make their detention build out more permanent and harder to roll back with the changing political wins, right? And so they're acknowledging that, that that's what they're trying to do. That's not great. Yeah, yeah. It's, but yeah, so it's from their own mouth, right? So yeah, deeply concerning. I wonder though, like previously they've had a practice of moving people out of San Diego County. I guess the practices are on wood. There is like a number of incidents that I'm aware of where they've moved people away from their lawyer in San Diego County, right? To a detention facility like Delhi or somewhere in Texas or somewhere like that. I guess I wouldn't make that impossibly. It did the same as it was before. It just be from federal prison to a private prison, maybe. Well, it's a less favorable federal jurisdiction, right? A district. So in San Diego, I would say probably it's a more favorable outcome to go before a federal district judge in San Diego for a possible habeas petition and to slow down the process as far as being deported, right? I think that that probably happens faster in a federal district in Texas than it would here. Yeah, yeah. I heard a lot from families about family members being moved out to, you know, these very remote, I mean, there's been an effort for a long time to make sure that these facilities are set up in very remote areas of California and in other parts of the country in remote areas that are hard for advocates, hard for attorneys, hard for journalists like me to get to to report what's going on in them. You know, it's like six hours to get to California city. As a driver, I've made way more times than I've want to now at this point, right? So, you know, it does. It does impact the amount of resources that people can be connected to. It is the biggest expense that ICE has is moving people around the country. I remember Senator Padilla did say like it seems sort of illogical the way they're moving, like they're moving people from California out of California while they're moving people in other places into California. And it seems illogical the way they're moving people around. But the impact of that, I don't know what their purpose or their intention is of doing that. But the impact of is, is it really disorient people, right? It's like, where am I? What am I doing? What are the rules here? How do I get my phone card set up? It takes them days where they're kind of pushed back on their heels trying to figure out what the system and the guards in the new place where they go. And then, like I said, it's definitely makes it harder for people when they get moved around to these different facilities. And it's something that we're definitely seeing happen a lot more. Definitely hearing it from a lot of families in LA, they have concern about people being moved way out to California city, which is like in the middle of the Mojave Desert, right? It's hard for families to get out there. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's been current county, I think, right? But like it, it's a hike from anywhere, from any major population center in California. It's a long drive. Yeah. It's like an hour and 40 minutes from like the farthest Eastern community in LA, like cheerly, they have an office in like Eastern LA. And it, I think it was like an hour and 20 to an hour and 40 to get to that office from California city. So it's just, it's just remote. It's in the middle of nowhere, you know? Yeah. And if you think about where would I put a place that's in the middle of nowhere, where I'd have the least amount of oversight, right? Like that, that's the place. Like that's definitely where you would pick. Yeah, definitely. Compared to like Auto Mesa detention center, very bad things about what happens there, but like it is relatively close. People can get to it. There are almost always people there, like outside. If someone is released or people protesting, what's happening there? Like you say, like it's hard even to do things like for someone to get money on their on their phone card or like someone I've reported on many times on the show was detained at Dilly and like it's difficult to work out how to like put money on their commissary so they can buy food because the food they get is absolutely awful and things like this. And every time you move that that's different again, right? Like it's, I was talking to an individual in El Salvador and they were saying that you know, they were moved around, maybe nine times before they were deported and each time they got to the different facility. It was like, where am I? And who are kind of the leaders in this in this place? They're like, who do I talk to? Because I need to get, I need to get this worked out. And sometimes they wouldn't even be able to get the phone card set up before the next time they got loaded back on a bus to go somewhere else. Yeah. So even let their family know where they are. And that's why it's so concerning that ice is going around opening facilities. Like we had one facility open. I think also in Kern County is like right next to Golden State Annex. So it's like kind of part of that property. But they didn't tell anybody, right? Like nobody knew that this facility was open until we reported on it opening. And you know, if you're a family member and you're looking on that ice detainer, you're trying to find your family member. If we have these, you know, almost, almost like black site ice detention facilities opening up that nobody knows or running, how are you going to find your family member? If it's not even listed there in the facilities, right? I mean, there's been a lot of reporting about how sometimes people are disappearing into these systems. But that's one of the reasons why California has tried to set these laws to say like you have to give the public a certain amount of notice before you open a new facility so that people are aware that it's coming and they can have an opportunity to just, you know, say go to the California City Council meeting and make their opposition known. But we've seen both ice and the private detention companies have in some cases been able to find ways around those rules. Yeah. One of the, I guess, the interesting things that we have seen in the last maybe six months, even maybe somewhere that, mostly this year, right? It's like communities coming together to oppose these things and data centers, right? Or like across a wide swath of American politics. Like there's a lot of the folks organizing in social circle, not people who I think would generally identify as progressive politically, but they were opposed to all the local consequences as well as the like abuses that happen in these detention centers. Like it's definitely getting harder, I guess, for them to build from scratch detention centers, right? That's correct. I mean, some of these when at the beginning of the year when they had the Weirhaus plan and they were planning some of these mega detention centers, which like they were trying to hold, you know, 10 to 12,000 people, which is more than rikers, right? Great. Yeah. like the largest would be the largest facility anywhere and you know they were talking about even making their own wastewater treatment plans, bringing in their own services because the cities where the local municipalities wouldn't be able to handle the influx of people, of employees, of you know, the roads, all the all the different services. And so I think that's one of the things that people are realizing is that these properties have an impact outside of just the people that they're detaining, right? They have an impact, a ripple effect on the entire community. And I think people are becoming aware of that now. Yeah, definitely. And it seems like, yeah, they're trying to do other things. I know they saw some of those warehouses are lost as well, but it doesn't matter in the in the grand scheme of how much money they have. They have to get rid of 45 billion dollars, so they really aren't stressing this. The losses, you know, it's a weird problem to have, but they feel like they have to spend this 45 billion, or it's kind of like use it or lose it if they don't buy the next. I think I think it's three years that they have. So I think we will see them buying more properties for sure. I think they really have their eye on Adolanto. I said a script that like scans the SEC to like automatically alert me if any of those companies sell anything, right? No, cool. The other thing to keep in mind too about this is, you know, the federal government doesn't pay local and state taxes. So where they go into these small cash-strapped cities like California City and say, hey, you're going to get $2 million a year in tax revenue from this facility opening. That's kind of how they convince or like they try to win over the local politicians. With, hey, we need this money, we need this facility to lower our water bills and stuff like that. But none of that is going to it's like a bait and switch, right? They're not going to be getting that $2 million tax revenue anymore because, you know, other than the income tax of the employers, maybe that might. But yeah, so that's another, you know, part of it. Yeah, yeah, bait and switch is a good way to describe it. Like people think they're getting one thing and they end up getting another thing. You talked about the employers, like when these facilities change hands, will it then be like federal employees or will they still be stuffed by Core Civic? Yeah, so that's the that's the interesting thing is the federal government is going to own the real estate, but Core Civic has said in its SEC filings that it expects it thinks that it's going to be keeping those contracts to continue operating the facilities. So the contract for California City runs through August, 2027. The one for Otay Mesa is supposed to end in 2029, but there's an option to extend it in other five years. And my impression is that ICE is is quite happy with the way Core Civic is running these facilities and Geo Group is running these facilities. So that would mean the same guards, the same medical directors, the same kind of operations and day-to-day at both facilities and they plan on keeping their existing management content. Now, they have knowledge, they acknowledge in the SEC filing that there's no guarantee that they get to keep it, but that's it sounds like that's the deal that they've worked out and negotiated with the federal government. Sure, like even when they've done these like they stood up that one camp east Montana, they call it, which is still run by a contractor, even though it's on Department of Defense, land, and the conditions are atrocious from from will be so with the Inspector General report and it doesn't seem to be a concern. Yeah, that's the one outside of El Paso. Yeah, I'm bliss. I've seen it. The tent camp. Oh, okay, outside of Perplex. Yeah, the white tent camp. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it seems like they're violating their own rules, right? When they they have these rules, they have these set of standards that they have set up. And that's the first thing Core Civic or Geo will say is like, hey, we follow all the federal standards that are set up for us, right? For detention standards. Yeah, but it seemed to especially with that one that you're mentioning that they violated all their own standards and setting that place up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that places is particularly egregious, like even among immigration detention facilities, some of the stuff in the Inspector General's report was genuinely shocking. I thought I'd lost a capacity to be shocked by this stuff. But yeah, there's lots of terrible things have happened. Like, I think you reported on the the Mongolian person, right? Who was who used sign language and was detained for I think months without an interpreter of them, if I'm remembering correctly. Right. Yeah. He had never gotten a chance to even tell his story on how he'd cross the border because CBP had like really confused his story. He was telling them about his sister and they thought that that it was his daughter and they were using like a, I don't know, AI because I'm kind of online translation thing that was not even close to what his actual story was. And yeah, he spent months without able to tell anybody what happened to him. And, you know, finally, yeah, after we did our story, like, finally, the ICE attorney was trying to set up like a relay team of translation. But the federal judge was just said, like, doesn't he have a right to participate in his own proceedings? Like, doesn't he, shouldn't he be an active participant in the proceedings against him, right? Yeah. And not just a bystander in that. And then so then he the judge ruled that they had to get him. And the interpreter, I guess they decided it was too hard to do that because they let him out fairly quickly after that ruling. But yeah, I mean, some of the conditions that we've heard about, you should, I mean, obviously, I think everybody's heard like the overcrowding really severe lack of access to medical care. Yeah. The horrific food, we've been hearing about how bad the food is for decades now in there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, smelling moldy waters, particular problem in California city. And just sometimes just like kind of the realliation that people face for if they try to bring an issue up or if they try to. Yeah. You know, advocate for somebody else. They feel like oftentimes they sit, they tell us that they feel like, you know, they get sort of retaliated against for that. You know, Mesa Verde is one of the have one of the most egregious violations that we've ever heard of of like the hunger strike. The hunger strikeers got dragged out and according to them, you know, beat up or handled very roughly and then taken to Texas and forced bed with a tube down their nose, right? Like, yeah, there's definitely been some very egregious things that have happened inside these detention centers. And that's why it's so important for people to be able to, you know, especially the Congress members or in the local state inspectors. It's very important for somebody to be able to get in there and see what the conditions are like inside. Yeah. This court case doesn't matter anymore. With this new development, right? The court case, at least it matters in other detention facilities, but not in, in Otamasa specifically in San Diego County. Yeah, it's going to remain to be seen. I think, like I said, the federal courts have upheld that the state can't overstep their authority and like step on federal authority to carry out immigration enforcement, right? Yeah. I think that those health inspectors, they already have done their health inspections, so they already did one. And the report, I think, is coming out at the end of July. So there will be that. But and then I think my understanding is you need to go county plans to fight. It's what I thought they were going to peel it. Yeah. Yeah, they're trying to, you're going to try to plus the issue in court to see if they can continue going in there and doing their inspections. But like I said, you know, the courts haven't tended to rule that way. And do you just think like we know from their own statement that they think that this will sort of put an end to the different inspections and oversight stuff that the state and the local officials want to do? Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty bleak, pretty big outlook for immigration detention, which was not really a great outlook to begin with, I guess. Yeah, but it's not come 100% decided. I guess still there's an open question whether these inspection laws will survive the federal ownership or not remains to be seen, I think. Right. Yeah. And you said they had plans for other locations. I'm guessing they have plans for geo group locations as well. Do you think this is their plan going forward to try and acquire all of these private immigration that they have the money to as you? Yeah. I think everything points to us on that. I think a course of it said in their statement that they are already in talks with ICE about selling more of their facilities. Yeah. Geo group has said on earnings calls that they would like to sell their facilities. And like you mentioned, you know, DHS definitely has the money thanks to that massive appropriation from the federal government. So, you know, really, they've already said that it's kind of their preference to outright own them, rather than lease them or have a private company operate them in California. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we will see more of it and I'm definitely, you know, trying to monitor it as much as possible to see when that happens. I wonder if this also changes the legal environment for people who are either protesting or like they're in a sort of mutual aid capacity for the migrant trailer. Sometimes people can hear migrant shouting from inside and they can hear them like asking for someone to put money on their phone card or what have you or just describing their conditions relating them. Will it being a federal owned facility? Do you think that change is like because it's legal to stand outside a thing, right? But if it's a fed facility, maybe it's even harder. Yes. I do think it will change. I do think we'll see the federal government trying to crack down harder on protesters that come at No 10 days that they had the people were putting information about how they were being held in bottles and throwing the bottles over the gate. I do think for sure that the federal government will operate differently now that it's federal property. Another thing that's very interesting, you know, they already hold people who are not immigrant detainees in California city. So, they have a section of that facility that are like people who are in the custody of the US marshals already. So there are already people in there who aren't immigrants. I wonder if we might see more of an effort. for to detain more people in these facilities who are not immigrants, right? - Yeah, yeah. - 'Cause they have promises made to Corsific and Geo Group that they are gonna try to give them a certain population of detainees per day, right? - Right. - So that's another part that remains to be seen. - Yeah, that's also super concerning. - Yeah, it really is super concerning of where it could all go, right? Especially you see the federal government calling protesters domestic terrorists and stuff like that. It is really concerning. - Yeah, and we saw that in like I was in Minneapolis in Lake January, and the same thing happens there, right? They have their federal building, it's called the Whipple Building, and like they do immigration detention there, but then there was also where people who were detained for protesting against that immigration. Those immigration actions were taken, right? Like they used the same facility and like, there's a certain kind of menace to that, right? Like, it's really alarming where it could go. Do you think about it, right? - Yeah, it's really concerning. Like this is one of those things that sort of a little people can do much about, right? It's a like willing seller willing buyer kind of situation where unfortunately like there's pretty few means for redress, like I hope California is successful with being able to inspect them. At least that would be something. And I know there are lots of really good groups doing work to keep people out of detention, to help with habeas, to improve conditions and detention, et cetera. So like people can help out those groups that they want to, but yeah, it does seem like if this is a particularly kind of bleak area of immigration enforcement right now. - Right, and especially since, you know, one of the first things that Trump did is shut down the mechanisms that people can appeal or report. Like, you know, when you have a complaint about something that's happened to you within immigration detention, you complain about it either to the office of civil rights and civil liberties. There's another DHS and both of those have been shut down right now and not funded right now. So those mechanisms with which you can get any oversight from within the federal government right now are not operating. - Yeah, yeah, it's a OIDO, the other one. - Yeah, that might be it, yeah, that's right. - Yeah, I've seen them precisely once. Wendy, if people want to follow your work, you've done lots of good stuff on California. A Kalmatist does some really good reporting, yet great reporting about the Operation Return to Sender, for example, back when that was shocking. - Thank you so much, yeah. - How can people find you? - Yeah, that's right. So all those stories are there on Kalmaters.org. Thank you for that. And then our Operation Return to Sender documentary is on YouTube so you can find that there. We did a lot of work to show kind of what Bovino was seeing and what was actually happening on the ground. So that's a really good one to watch. - Yeah, and you guys publish also in Spanish, right? - Yes, we do. More recently, we started translating more of our stories into Spanish so that folks who want to read it in Spanish can find that there too. - Yeah, that's great, that's super nice. - And I see fluent Spanish, if people need to contact me in Spanish, I can communicate there too. - Nice, yep. And there's a contact link for you on the website. I'm guessing if people want to talk to you about some of this stuff, right? - Absolutely, or yeah, I can just share my email, for sure, it's windyactilematters.org. And I am always hoping to hear from people so we can do more in-depth reporting about what's going on inside these facilities. So thank you so much for that opportunity to share that. - Yeah, of course, thanks for doing this, thanks for taking time to talk to us. - Anytime. (upbeat music) - Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. - Here's what you missed. - And the argument is, do you want to win? - It's real. - Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. - It's raw. - I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. - Roland Martin unfiltered. - I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. - Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van. - Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. - 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. - And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts. - Wherever you get your podcasts. - That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. - Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-choice spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. - Is that weird? - This week is Human Connection Week. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - That call was really pivotal for me. I sit down with culture shifting women who share their pivots, like Para Olympian Alley Truett. I was like, I'm a nun out from a shark attack. There's no way in 11 months I'm making the very long text. - Advocate Elizabeth Smart. - No, I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke in a dead and job that I didn't enjoy. - And feminist legend, Gloria Steinem. - All of us were trying to express women's real lives. - Listen to she pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - On big lives, we take a single cultural icon. - People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. - And we pull apart the story behind the image. - And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. - I'm not just a boxer, I'm educating. I can talk all week on millions of subjects. - And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. - Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. - We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. - And when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible, 'cause it makes me dance better for some reason. - I'm Emmanuel Jocci. - I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives. - Listen to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get podcasts. (upbeat music) - Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. For the past few weeks on executive disorder and some regular episodes of this show, most notably the DSA RedScare, I've been covering the ongoing battle for the future of the Democratic Party, spurred on by a recent wave of electoral victories by DSA in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and most notably New York City. Where last month, the DSA doubled their block of socialists in office. This episode is another installment in this informal series, and this time we are going straight to the source by talking with the co-chair of the New York City chapter of DSA Grace Mauser, in an interview where we talk about everything from the chapter's electoral strategy to their theory of power, and what organizers can learn from New York City DSA's recent string of success. So without further ado, here is my interview with Grace Mauser, co-chair of NYC DSA. To start on the most broad picture aspect, what is the Democratic Socialists of America if people are not super familiar with what the organization actually is or what the point of the organization is? - Sure, thanks so much for having me. So DSA, Democratic Socialist of America, is a political organization. Legally we're a nonprofit, we're a 501C4, which enables us to engage in a lot of different types of campaigns, including electoral campaigns, but also we're very involved in labor work, and we often partner with unions and with rank and file workers for both internal union reform purposes and external demands. We do issue-based campaigns. For example, in New York City, our immigrant justice working group ran a very successful effort to conduct know your rights trainings earlier this year, that trained over 5,000 people in the city. So we do a lot of different types of things, including social things. We have like book clubs and top all leagues and things like that. - The run club is very formidable. political group in the city. -The run club is very popular, it's true, it's true, they've really taken off, and how we are structured is that there's a national DSA, so national organization, and then there are, I believe, over 200 chapters all across the country. New York City is by far the largest, I think, for more than twice as large as the next big S, which is LA, and the chapters engage in localized work, but then we also try to have participation from chapters on national campaigns and questions. I would say we're not a party, not usually Americans, that some people call us a party or think we're a party. We don't have a ballot line, but we do run people in primary elections, usually in democratic primaries, because we want our members to select and endorse candidates that they think will represent. Not only their interest, but the interest of a broader working class space, and then we want people who are elected to actually collaborate with DSA and other outside organizations, in a real and serious way that the Democratic Party simply does not encourage and sometimes even tries to stop. So obviously within the name of DSA, there's democratic socialism, socialism more broadly. What does DSA mean by socialism? I mean, I've seen multiple articles, specifically in the Atlantic, really concerned about what socialism means and the quote unquote "trotskiest tactics" that DSA is employing. There's been a whole bunch of media coverage being scared of communism and socialism. But what does DSA mean by socialism? So DSA is what we call a big tent organization. There are a lot of different ideologies that our members embrace. Some people are more social democrats that you might find to be the standard in some European countries. Some people identify as communist, for example. So what we mean by socialism we try to make really concrete and demand base. We're looking at things like universal health care, passing bills, like Medicare for all. We are trying to make housing more affordable, by expanding the role of government in the housing market through things like what's around Maldonne just help do after seeing the rent. We are trying to make universal childcare free, right? Like public education as it currently exists is functionally socialist, right? It's the government providing free education and childcare for millions of children. And for some reason it arbitrarily starts at five years old. We're saying what if we had that but a little bit sooner? So we try to center our demands on these really material ideas. One, because it enables not only leftists of all different stripes but all sorts of people to come in and identify with these ideas because they know it would help their lives. But also because wanting these things will take a very long time. So my update today is not so much concerned with or the economy should look like in 100 years but what we can achieve in the next five, 10, 20 years. And even if I'm not a communist but if I were, we're not going to be communist in 10 years, right? So what matters is actually making people's lives better now and using the government to do that, which American politicians, socialists and not have done for many decades before. You were talking about how DSA is organizing to see what the country could be like in five to 10 years. And I think something that people might not be aware of is the past work that New York City DSA has done the past five to 10 years, right? I think people certainly saw a redrawn to DSA around the election of Zoran and maybe this most recent slate win. But this has been kind of a long-term project of building power and experimenting with electoral strategy and canvassing and this specific path to victory. So could you speak a little bit how and why CDSA has achieved like this winning streak, especially like in the past year and all like the build up to that winning streak? Definitely New York City DSA really got serious in 2016, both because many people were inspired by Bernie Sanders and then many people were horrified by the ultimate victory of Donald Trump and that presidential election. In 2017, we took on our first electoral races in the modern era. There was two city council races. We lost both of those, but we did learn a lot. And we ganged in new members around the Donnie via one of those races, but something we learned is that we could certainly run field campaigns and by field, I mean, canvassing and door knocking. But we also saw that, hey, actually a lot of the skills that are required in other parts of the campaign, like communications, political, maneuvering, fundraising and budgeting. These are also things we think that our members can do. And we really tested that out in 2018. We endorsed AOC that year, but in some ways, the bigger chapter project was who we were selling with our state senate race, where we had members, not only on staff, but also basically helping in the volunteer capacity, almost every aspect of that race, and we won. So from there, we learned that we could teach ourselves and begin to replicate the skills of not only canvassing, but all these other skills that the political class and the consulting class in particular, want to believe that they have a monopoly on that they're so hard to understand that you simply must pay them tens of thousands of dollars. So we have built out from there. We have now 16 Socialist and Office at the state legislature level, not only in New York City, but also in Midh Hudson Valley and in Buffalo. And we have four city council members and now three congress members. Some of those came post-oran, but most of them came pre-oran, and it was just really knows to the grindstone kind of work. Knocking on a lot of doors, replicating skills, fundraising from small-dollar donors. And we lost some of our races. I think we've probably lost a little less than half of the races we'd won, but we took some big swings, both strategic swings. So these kind of skills developed over time and really formed the foundation and the backbone of Zeron's campaign. So for many, Zeron seemed to come out of nowhere, but his first campaign event, his field launch, in December of 2024, when no one had really heard of him as a serious candidate, had 500 people at it, which I would guess is bigger than any other candidate had at any point in the race. And that's because DSA members knew him were really excited about what this meant, and also knew exactly what kind of work would be required to make this race accessible. And it was work of basically building out huge infrastructure and knocking on millions of doors so that we could talk to voters. Yeah, one of the most impressive things is this sort of like parallel campaign structure that DSA has developed that you don't need to go through the regular channels of consultants to sort of like inside baseball of politics. And I got people go off to get very confused about like what the word like party means, right? This party in Europe is something very different than what it means in the US. But in terms of running in primaries, the DSA often has to go up against the party infrastructure of the democratic party establishment itself. And the fact that DSA has been able to, especially in the past two years, like out organized the local political establishment has been like one of the most impressive feats. And like I've been able to see this in person. I'm in Brooklyn in the, you know, the past two months I had multiple DSA canvassers come to my door. I received a truly absurd amount of mailers. There was, you know, people canvassing on the sidewalk, you know, all the time, you know, same thing, same thing in Ridgewood and Queens. A lot of canvassers there, especially going into the mayoral race. Something that stuck in my mind a lot is, I used to live in Atlanta. Some like friends of friends, people I didn't know, but people I kind of loosely knew of, were paid to do canvassing for the 2024 presidential election for the democratic party. They were basically just operating kind of like a scam. Like they did not actually do any of the work. They basically sat in like a parking lot and scrolled on their phone. And something that makes the DSA's form of canvassing is that the people who were actually involved in it actually care about the political project, right? They're actually like invested in these candidates, invested in, you know, putting forward this like working class politics and are not just getting a paycheck from the DNC. And that changes the way that they do canvassing on the ground. I know this is-- something that you refer to as like the DSA difference. Could you guys briefly touch on like what the DSA difference like represents? Yeah, it really for for me is starts from the endorsement process, which is very long and fight rigorous, but also extremely democratic and because of that people really feel bought in to the races that we endorse. I mean, if you come to an endorsement forum, it's said over and over again. If you would not personally be interested in can we sing for this candidate, do not vote to endorse and that's a kind of an easy standard, we tried to share with members on top of a lot of strategy and data consideration, and there's a lot of things that go into it, but for as that, like, will you go to this? If not, how can we expect the others to? That initial buy in not initial ownership that members have over what races we've run and why really extends then into the entirety of the campaign, so our campaigns, do you have staff and of course larger campaigns have more staff, but we also have a practice of really elevating volunteers who show capacity and interest to be more engaged in strategy. So, canvassers are also strategic actors, that's what are the first wrong of engagement. I mean, canvassing could just be like, oh, go out and do this, but we really actively seek to create a feedback loop between canvassing and other parts of the campaign. So, not only is canvassing data, of course, very critical and tracking ID, progress and things like that, but we also teach our field leads who lead canvases to solicit feedback and to systematize that feedback. What are you hearing on the doors? Did you meet anyone interesting, should we follow up with that person and I've seen in real time our messaging overall change because of feedback that canvassers are getting on the doors. From the next rung, if a canvasser is really great and excited, we often encourage them to become a field lead. These are pretty intensive and high responsibility jobs. So, these people manage logistics, they run trainings, they move materials around. If there are problems or questions that come up during a canvas or after, they're the first point of contact for these volunteers. They're really quite skilled leaders and we try to create as many of these people as possible and that's kind of the next rung of engagement from there it sort of varies from campaign to the campaign, but on most of the campaigns that I've seen you have robust volunteer teams around all of these functional areas. There is a fundraising team for trying to execute not only comms and digital strategy, but also peer to peer fundraising and house parties. There is a communications team who yes works closely with staff often but is drafting and helping produce a level of content that, you know, if you're a state assembly race and you have two staffers, it's pretty hard to produce as much content as you might want. There's research who are helping do auto and helping figure out what stories we might be able to place in in the press. So, these areas that can be pretty opaque in some ways and are not often a visible part of the political process, we really try to open up and invite people into and then we talk openly about that and our debriefs and also in our endorsement forms themselves. I guess something else that people might not be fully aware of, there's kind of like two ways of like fielding candidates candidates can be dsa endorsed and then you can have dsa members who then run for office and for the people who are more kind of like outside of the organization, but seek a dsa endorsement. If they secure it, they then get access right to this to this this whole like on the ground like organizing network and that can be very appealing, but there's certain things that endorsement is like contingent on in terms of like platform. As you said, it's a pretty it's a pretty intensive process actually to get a dsa endorsement. After the series of victories near to you say has had the past few months, has that affected the size of the membership in like any like notable ways is that grown the amount of on the ground volunteers like that whatever the next campaigns are. Oh absolutely I mean of course we are we are subject to like macro political trends right we see large jumps when there's a presidential election like we saw in 2016 I saw it again in 2020 and then 24. Or but you know not every campaign results in a huge membership boost I think it they do all results in a large capacity boost because even for not gaining new people numerically we're expanding the skill set of people who are there. Last year certainly we gained a lot of lot of members between the time that Zaron announced his campaign in the fall of 2024 and now we've almost tripled in size in New York City and between the primary elections this year. June 23rd and today so about a month we have gained over 1000 members so we are obviously helped along by like high profile wins to that the media is really interested in covering and then we get kind of more eyeballs on on our ideas and more interest in the project overall. So there are some some wins that result in a lot of members but every win I think expands capacity and even losses expand capacity because we're teaching people these skills and we're able to better replicate ourselves for future cycles. I'm sure most people are aware we're right in the middle of like a huge debate right now over the future of the democratic party and you know this debates being waged on minds being waged in the newspaper on TV news TV and most importantly right in the in the primaries right and then eventually the general elections you know it seems like every week the Atlantic has a new article out about how scary the democratic socialists are as I mentioned I think today they put out a brand new article. About like the secret like trotschism of of TSA I saw that which I mean all these articles suggest to me that they neither understand DSA nor do they understand the history or ideology they're comparing us to yeah but it's been really interesting especially after the the wins in New York and Colorado and Pennsylvania. Hopefully in Wisconsin but this past month we've seen more and more like establishment Democrats join people like president Trump and Fox News in effectively declaring war on the DSA and like the left wing of the party and you know there's this idea that you see in the Atlantic Washington Post that you know communist and socialists are taking over the democratic party. But I think for a chunk of the people listening to this show their concerns are probably more of the opposite that by running as a Democrat these democratic socialist candidates risk being captured and like brought into the very party establishment that they're trying to oppose. I guess I'd like you to speak on like what is the nature of the DSA's relationship to the democratic party. Yeah I mean the thing about the democratic party that I think a lot of media and political pundits miss is that there's no one to have a relationship with right like the democratic party is three boys in a suit like there's no one to talk to. That's why they can't act like a party does in Europe I mean of course there are electoral and ballot reasons for that as well but the democratic party does not really organize either voters who are Democrats right like no one has ever attempted to organize me as a Democrat because I am a registered Democrat. That nor is there really a serious effort to organize democratic elected officials as a block and move in the same direction like that infrastructure simply doesn't exist so I feel like the risk of being captured is only a risk in so far as DSA does not try to keep our own people organized and acting as a block. Which is very much central to our project and in New York City for example we have weekly meetings with both our state legislators and our city council members and now we have regular meetings with administration officials as well and that mayoral administration. That try to keep us all on the same page when we have a big project that we're moving on together like tax the rich was this last legislative session. We do really active organizing in those meetings like okay have you talk to your colleague about. this bill, will they move? Do we need to pressure them some way from the outside? Or do you think you'll get somewhere in internal conversations? So to me, I don't feel worried about being captured by the Democrats, because the Democrats don't have the infrastructure to capture people, the people who can capture you are like, money to interest, right? Big corporations, ensure sometimes they act through the Democratic Party. But for us, that's such a clear red line, that they don't feel super concerned about it. The more complicated questions are not so much of capture, but of when do we compromise, right? Sure. We could be a block of people who vote no on every budget, right? Every state budget, every city budget is politically compromised. It's not enough. They never tax the rich enough. They never fund public services enough. Yeah. It's it's never good. But if we always say no, then come and get any, any wins, what kind of wins are the, you know, the non-reformist reforms we might be looking for? And deciding that collectively doesn't mean our choices always correct. But I think it's much more likely to be correct than if we let even someone who's a committed democratic socialists kind of go out on their own and try to make those decisions by themselves. The collectiveness and the connection to DSA, I think is the biggest barrier to the capture that people are worried about. Whereas if we just say no to everything, if we ran this third party, I think, well, if we ran this third party, I don't think we'd ever win. But if we just say no to everything in our orientation is as like a morally upstanding group that doesn't achieve anything, I think we lose our credibility, not only in the eyes of like the political class and of other politicians, but in the eyes of voters. Right now, we can look at a voter, have a conversation on a door about how we are a different type of politician, because look at what's around has already done. So Ron throws your friends. Yeah, we are the group behind Z Iran, don't you want more people like him? And if Z Iran hadn't frozen the rent, that would be a much harder conversation to have. No, it is really easy to point to the like the delivering of goods and be like, yeah, this is what we are about. And this is actually, you know, improving the lives of workers. And like that is what matters. What else is this whole project for? I can understand that, you know, people are concerned with like the idea of like holding politicians accountable, right? Holding politicians accountable to this, you know, working class platform that they're running on, that they were elected to represent that the organizing put them into office to fulfill. But I think one of the biggest ways to do that is through a mass membership organization like DSA, because not only does it provide, you know, campaign infrastructure, which could help them get reelected if they stick to this vision. But it also provides this sort of like, like, like social bond, this internal process to stay being tethered together while they are serving or occupying a seat of power. And once you're occupying a seat of power, there is obviously constraints on that power. And there's going to be contradictions that arise. And I think a lot of people, especially online view those contradictions as like a bad thing. That's like a reason to not engage in this project. Alternatively, I think those contradictions are actually very often a good thing. Like this, that is a sign that histories and progress that we are actually moving forward. And we're going to seek to resolve those like over a time and dealing with those contradictions is good in the sense that we have to deal with them. We actually, we are at a point in our strategy where this is something to be dealt with as opposed to not engaging in this sort of strategy like at all, right? And the power that a politician has that is running on a working class platform. Their power comes from the working class. And the DSA is a manifestation of that. And DSA can be an anchor. But I think there also is these like questions of like this, like long term vision, right? Or if DSA candidates are just going to have to like administer capitalism in a more equitable way. Or if there really is like this is the kind of bigger vision to increase the power of the working class towards some sort of, you know, ultimate class struggle for socialism. And I guess like, is that like balance in their heads between this sort of like equitable administration and like this ultimate class struggle? Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, thinking about how we actually permanently change power structures and not just kind of mitigate harm. I think it was one of the things that separates a socialist from a progressive. Sure. Some ideas that I'm really excited about that I would point to that that do some of this. This didn't pass. But I think something like the pro act. Absolutely. Would that expand the makes it easier for workers to organize themselves and empowers unions is part of that structure and central to what what democratic socials want to do. In fact, right now, actually in New York City, there is a bill held by city council member Tiffany Kaban, who's a DSA member and a city socialist and office called the delivery protection act that would functionally make it extremely difficult for Amazon to consider last mile delivery workers as individual contractors. Yes, they force them to be employees of Amazon, which one makes sense. Like it's crazy that all these people in Amazon trucks that you see all this time are contractors. Yeah. When, and functionally, they're not everything that they have to do is controlled by Amazon. And doing that, we're partnering with the teamsters on it because doing it would make those workers unionizable. Yes. And that's a huge workforce in New York City. So that's kind of the labor example. Another piece that I'm really excited about. So yes, Ron froze the rents. That's an extension of government power in the market. But one thing that is really promising is that the administration is exploring how to legally recognize and empower tenant unions in a way that, you know, workers unions are recognized. So that tenant unions actually have bargaining rights with a landlord. And we don't have all the answers for how that would look. But that's I think another example of a type of reform, a type of policy that is explicitly socialist and is actually trying to permanently change the power of relationship between tenants and landlords. Just is joining a workers union changes the power relationship between a worker and a supervisor. So I'm not saying we have the perfect answers across all policy areas. And certainly there are policy areas that socialist will will advocate for and get behind that I would consider more progressive because our country and society is a very harsh environment for many people and mitigating harm is in fact something good to do. Yeah, but it cannot be the soul thing we do. And backing these types of non-reformist reforms ideas that change power structures is central to our work. Yeah, I think there's this sort of tension between this sort of more like social democratic administration of capitalism and like just pushing for, you know, like the revolution or something is of false dichotomy. And oftentimes, it can resemble the, this is bad from referencing Twitter, but there's there's this old tweet that's like, don't siege Lenin grad, take it immediately. Like don't build working class power. Just do the revolution. But if you look at like where the labor movement in the US is right now, we are so behind where the movement was in the 20s and 30s that allowed workers to extract the new deal. We have a long way to go to be able to really threaten capital in a serious way. And these minor social democratic policies, rather than being a release valve could in fact provide workers more autonomy and the extra time needed to organize and keep building power. Like another thing from Zoron's rent reforms is that the administration is advancing a new rule that landlords could only request proof of income or a credit check, but not both in apartment applications. And like that would be huge for people, right? And there is there's there's ways to do small stuff like that. Well, also, you know, in a bigger sense trying to just increase the amount that our society is socialist, right? That's through public ownership of utilities and key industries, commodifying necessities of life, like housing or food and democratizing the workplace. I've been yelling about the protect the right to organize act in my personal life a lot lately. I've been kind of just like evangelizing about the pro act because that that is something that like if that if that gets passed, that would be one of the biggest boosts to working class power that we've seen in probably decades. Yeah. And I mean, having querival does is a labor organizer. Like that was her first organizing experience and yeah, there's no one like that in Congress right now, you know, so I don't know that her first move will be the pro act, but it's certainly top of mind for her that kind of relates to one of the last questions I want to get to, but first let's do one last ad break. Okay, we are back. How does the DSC actually communicate with and relate to a broader working class base, like a broader working class coalition? Because this is the politics that DSC is about, and this is the class that DSC is trying to like uplift. What exactly is like the nature of the relationship between DSA and the working class? DSA is striving to be a multiracial working class organization. I would say that right now, the majority, if not entirely, of our membership, not only in New York City, but also nationally are working class. We embrace it pretty broad definition of that because the only way you get class solidarity is by, you know, refaining from nitpicking, who is middle class, who's working class, who's working poor in like separating the interests of those groups and recognizing that basically anyone who relies on their own labor in order to live is working class and they have a lot more in common than the people who live off of their own wealth and that we should be united in basically finding the interests of the Uber wealthy who run our lives and run our economy. So I would say we're already a working class organization, but we want to become one much bigger and also more diverse, more people in different types of industry, more people from across different demographics. It's trending that way over the last couple of years, but we need to get more of the people who vote for our candidates to also take the plunge into becoming a member and into actively organizing to better their own conditions. So I'm excited about how things are heading in that direction. It's also true that becoming an ultiracial working class organization in the US is notoriously difficult, you know, country that's divided violently, not only by class divisions, but also by racial ones. So we have a we have an uphill battle, but I think we're moving in the right direction and voting trends to show that too. Like Clare Valdez won a majority of Hispanic election districts in her area, sorry, it leads to one a majority of black election districts in her district. So I think we're seeing that these ideas have more and more mass appeal. Yeah. As voters are looking, especially at establishment Democrats who are really just continuously failing to stand up to Trump. And more people are saying, maybe we need to try something different. What's what's the socialism all about? There is an article in your Times. By the time you're listening to this, like a few weeks ago, looking at like the voting data from the last June primary and it showed like the divisions in voter behavior between like DSA candidates and either progressive or establishment candidates was not largely divided by race, but rather by age. Yes. And I think that is another significant factor in this. And we're also, I notably holding on to millennial voters. I mean, trend show that unlike previous generations, millennials tend to stay fairly left as they age. In part, perhaps because millennials aren't really gaining wealth as we are. The capital system has nothing to offer them. Yeah. So yeah, why? Why would you make like the fiscal conservative turn to close out a few weeks before the June primary canary mission started getting very scared of the DSA. They put out this big, this big opposed on the slate candidates. But once something that I found to be more interesting, rather than just like, you know, talking about who these candidates are, they focused a lot on like the organizational structure of New York DSA. And how, quote, New York is the testing ground. The machine is already being built. The machine doesn't stop, unquote, which sounds kind of cool. Yeah, right. They made, they made a sound for cool. If you ignore all of the like horrible evil parts of the canary mission right off, they kind of make New York DSA sound pretty cool. How, you know, it has all these members, almost like a hundred thousand volunteers, all these field leads that coordinates with candidates once they get into office and maintains that connection helps them, helps them stay accountable. It's funny, too. They treat it like a big secret, like they're revealing something when like I literally just told you the same thing, right? Like it's not a secret. But, you know, considering stuff like this and the DSA momentum we're seeing across the country and the reaction is getting from the GOP, the president and the Democratic Party establishment. What can organizers and chapters around the country learn from New York City DSA's electoral strategy? Or like what's what's something that I think New York DSA is doing that you would like more people to kind of understand, or you would like people to learn from or take something away from what we've seen in these past few campaigns. Yeah. One thing, especially after Zoran won that I noticed is a lot of people were really focused on his charisma and his communication strategy, which Zoran is certainly charismatic. And his communication strategy was really strong and very intentional. But to me, his communication strategy would have not gone anywhere. If one, he hadn't been saying something real that people resonated with. I mean, people are not totally fooled by an empty charismatic vessel. I mean, otherwise Jack Schlossberg would have won in the year 12, I think. But also there was an extremely robust yield strategy that meant when someone saw a video was inspired or interested, they could immediately find something to do to act on that feeling. And often they could find something to do basically within a mile and within a week of where they lived and what day it was. The core of the Zoran campaign was not communication that was field. And building up that structure and that muscle can take a lot of time. You know, it's hard to jump from zero to a mayoral race. But it is possible if you build out the kind of deep ownership from like an endorsement process. And also a culture of not only valuing volunteers, but really like depending on volunteers. The campaign doesn't work if volunteers are expendable, if volunteers are treated as like an ancillary nice to have. It only works if volunteers are both treated and truly are essential. And that kind of creates a culture where people are valued, where they become friends, where they keep coming back, where they talk to their friends and family about the campaign or things spread out from there. So what I would say both to DSA organizers in other parts of the country, but also just general organizers who are interested in replicating some of the success. I think culture is really key. Centering people who are not staff or not the politicians, making sure that the experience of the campaign is actually built around the experience of a canvasser and moving up from there. And that's how you get a campaign that is not only accountable to the people who are building it, but that's really fun and positive and grounded and people in place and not just in like kind of ideas and videos and things like that. So yeah. Yeah. No, there's a real material aspect. It's not just like idealistic kind of abstract thing that you're participating in or you believe in. It's a real like material process. It's a real engagement. One of the funniest things I've seen recently is that there was a Wall Street Journal article where they sent one of their like hit piecewriters to attend all these DSA events. And the write-up is essentially, yeah, I had a great time at all these events. Everyone was really nice. I saw that. Yeah. There was like one of our one of our incoming assembly members, the Yapa Zardubak was like given a shout out because he like remembers someone's name. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know. Organizers remember people's names. That's a central part of our work. Where can people learn more about DSA or New York DSA? Online or by any other means. So yes, if you're in New York City or even near New York City, you can go to socialists.nyc. There you can see. I joined DSA. You can look at our events calendar, which is robust at random point where we have basically at least three events every single day. That cover a wide range of geographies across the city, but also interest. there's a run club event on on Friday if that's an interest to people. If you're not in New York City, there is almost certainly a chapter where you live. You can go to dsausa.org to join, but also to find your chapter, find out about national work that's going on, especially as it relates to the ongoing imperialist wars we have that's often held by national dsa. So definitely encourage everyone to check those things out. Thank you Grace for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. And the argument is, do you want to win? It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing to receive. It's wrong. I went off. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. 12 seats. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHOT radio app, Apple Podcast. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos and I cannot decide if I like him or not. These are real conversations with real people, figuring out life one call at a time. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. I'm not just a boxer, I'm educating, I can talk all week on a million of subjects. And when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance better for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I was like, "I'm on month out from a shark attack. There's no way in 11 months I'm making the verbal index." Advocate Elizabeth Smart. No, I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke in a dead and job that I didn't enjoy. Bradley Whitford-Hot. This is it could happen here, executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Sophie's also here. Sophie's also here. Allegedly. We were talking West Wing before this, and. Sophie has been excommunicated. Sophie said something that Robert will not let us repeat. Yeah. Allegedly can't repeat it. You'd all go to prison, and we would be right to send you there. West Wing is in the TV show. At this episode, we're covering the week of July 22nd to July 29th. James some small things to start. Yeah, let's do it. So today, on the day that we are recording, which is the 29th of July, the United States and Saudi forces conducted strikes inside Iraq at what they are calling Iran-backed terrorists. It comes after a Iraqi national security adviser earlier this week suggested that Ukraine was responsible for strikes inside Iraq, which is a thing that isn't true. Iran again attempted to target US bases in Jordan today, but at the time of recording the US military reporting that its missiles were all intercepted, Iranian strikes on Kurdistan have continued, and Reuters is reporting that Iran is soon to receive Chinese shodafired. Man-pads, it's man-portable air defense system. Women can use them too, probably not in Iran. But these are part of what Reuters is saying is a recently signed deal between the two states. China, of course, denying it, but that would be very interesting, right? It's interesting that it was a shod-a-launched man-pads who shut down the jet that triggered the massive sea-star mission a few months ago. Yeah, it's always funny when something comes around like this in the history of like military colonialist adventures overseas. It wasn't that so long ago that we were sending man-pads into Afghanistan and the Soviets were going, oh no, all of our helicopters. And yeah, it's just beautiful how cyclical nature is. Yeah, here we are. Finally, I want to talk about the TPS, temporary protected states of the Haitian people. So a few weeks ago on our Supreme Court special, we spoke about the court case that effectively ended this protected status, right? And it is set to expire this week. We know that this will impact as many as 350,000 people are going with a number from Haitian bridge alliance there. A lot of these people are going back as an option. It's not in any way going to be safe for them or they just don't simply have a place to go back to there. Many of these people will have U.S. citizens and children who therefore will not lose TPS, right? But it's unclear. What exactly, I mean, I think the administration probably doesn't give a shit what happens to their children. I'm going to keep reporting on this. They're already rumours of ice-raid targeting Haitian people. I'm going to try and get some folks on from HBA or one of the other advocacy organizations, but I'm going to wait a little bit just to see how things play out in a couple of days, but I'm afraid whatever happens won't be great. The House approved the $1.15 trillion 2027 National Defense Authorization Act and a 216 to 212 vote largely on party lines, though six Democrats voted in support. The version of the bill that passed includes section 219, which expands cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, specifically the co-development of military technology and joint training and information sharing to deploy jointly develops technology. The budget contains 750 million for these U.S. Israel joint programs that bills currently stalled in the Senate. Core documents revealed that last October, the Trump administration canceled nearly $8 billion of clean energy grants by explicitly targeting states whose electoral college votes went to Kamala Harris in 2024 or who have two senators who caucus with the Democrats. That is Georgia and lawyers for the Department of Energy just explicitly late this out in court, doc saying that's how these grants were selected was was on these political lines. Yeah, incredible. Last Friday saw the White House press correspondence dinner take two. President Trump delivered a rambling monologue with what were supposed to be jokes to a very tepid reactions from a largely friendly audience. Once again, Trump joked about running for president in 2028. Wolf Blitzer presented an award to the Wall Street Journal and their reporters for their reporting on the Trump signed Epstein birthday card, sparking a $10 billion defamation suit from the president. As Wolf Blitzer presented the award, Trump laughed from his seat on stage before shaking hands with all the winners. The dinner, which ostensibly is to celebrate the free press in the first amendment took place the same week that the Trump administration subpoenaed New York Times journalists, their spouses and one of their moms following times reporting on the security capabilities of the Katari gifted Air Force one the DOJ. withdrew those subpoenas last Thursday after pressure from a federal judge. But that was not the only instance of press freedom coming under attack from the government just this last week. On July 22nd, the nonprofit newsroom Breakthrough News reported that they received a congressional subpoena from the Republican-controlled Houseways and Means Committee, demanding, quote, "internal communications, financial records, and more." A letter to the outlet from the House Committee said they were, quote, unquote, "disturbed by the outlet's connection to, quote, Chinese Communist Party linked organizations," unquote, and that the committee was investigating connections between, quote, unquote, tax-exempt groups and foreign nations. This was, of course, following the State Department's left-wing terrorism summit that we covered last week and parallel to Mark Rubio's crusade against Cuba and what he sees as Cuba-aligned left-wing organizations. The People's Forum, a PSL-linked left-wing anti-imperialist protest organization and community space in New York City, which was named in Rubio's Cuba report, was also subpoenaed by the House Committee. The People's Forum was one of the organizers of the humanitarian aid trip to Cuba earlier this year. I've got a fun thing to talk about. All right, let's do it. What's fun? There's an article in the Guardian that just came out July 28th that is about this new company based out of Austin, called Campus Guardian Angel, which is taking lessons from the Ukrainian war and applying them to U.S. public schools. Specifically, in Ukraine, they've seen a lot of luck in stopping breaches of areas of like the front of trenches and stuff using waves of small drones. Oh, I've seen this video. I know what you're talking about. I haven't. Hit me with it. Come on, I want to see this. These are waves of drones that can launch mace and pepper balls and have like, they've got glass breakers so they can fly through windows. They want to fucking send a drone swarm to stop a school shooter. Well, they wanted to. Yeah, they didn't think it was with a drone swarm. It can't be a coward, which has historically been an issue for the cops, right? It is true. This could work better. The problem is that in terms of actually stopping school shooters, this actually might be a lot more effective than calling the cops. I'm not going to say I don't think it's possible that this could work. Yeah. But everything about the like press around this says tells me this company is also building itself as a way that like school administrators can use drones to fuck up kids who miss pay. Sure. No, I can see that being it. That's that's kind of the what I'm expecting, right? Yeah. Yeah, you're going to get maced by a drone. I want to read a quote from the article here. They could be flown from thousands of miles away and support two-way communication through an embedded speaker phone, allowing the company's response team to engage verbally with the threat or communicate to teachers and school staff, Campus Guardian Angels website stated. This allows our team and our ops center to communicate to law enforcement officers verbally with messages such as follow me and I'll take you to the suspect or open the door and we'll go in and clear the room and I'll tell you what you see. And it's the whole thing about going after the suspect that I'm like I can see this also just these drones being swarmed after some kids smoking pot or or somebody like suspicious looking backpack to some shitty AI like visual identification system that because you can't have a guy on the cameras at all times. I don't know. I don't think this is going to wind up saving as many lives as it is causing drone related assaults in public schools. But I guess we'll see. Fascinating. The video's great. Yeah, I want to see the video. Can I? You should you should look up the video. Campus Guardian Angel. Let's get alive. Yeah. There you go. And when someone I hear that phrase, the first thing that comes to my mind is pedophile. Yeah. That's what I that's what I'm thinking when I hear some. Okay, watch video. The first active shooter suppression service. I'm sure that's true. All right. Here we go. Got a couple of cops. Yeah. It's still blurry. I still can't quite. It's still wow. It's having a long thing. Okay. Here we are. Here we are. Okay. Yeah. This does make me think about what if the latency is bad between the camera and the drone operator flying an arm to drone throughout public school. Okay. We're here. We're watching a bunch of news clips. Bold man is giving a talk. That's the Navy seal who runs the the company. Okay. I see. Okay. Wow. The drone's moving down the corridor. Fuck me. He's sitting some little boxes. I was a cop. Cop has a guy. Oh, there's someone in a balaclava. He's surrendering to the drones. He's down. Yeah. He's done. Yeah. He's done right from front footage of like Russian soldiers surrendering to drones. They don't. Yeah. He's doing it. These guys. Okay. There's a this guy's playing a shooter. He has a BB gun. Couple of drones have got him cornered. He's not shooting at them though. Cowards. Cowards. Okay. Here's someone from Seminole County Public Schools. So the drones live in a little box. Yes. And it opens. And I like that they've done blue lighting. It's like a white box with blue lighting. Like it's very game. It's a little drone carrier. Yeah. A little little drone box. Here he comes. He's breached through the window. Whoa. They're fucking up a dummy. That's the clip. Yeah. Look at it. Go. They've missed. They've missed a few times. I noticed if you look closely. Yes. Your way off. He's fucking way off. All right. I don't trust these drones about this. They're like, what if there was a child nearby? No. Literally. That was my my first thought. It was like this just makes it easier for cops to shoot people accidentally. Yeah. Or an AI drone to shoot someone by accident. They're going off the same dude again. He's running away. Oh, he's cornered. He's gone to ground. He's surrendering. Wait, it's probably guys that couldn't pass the cop exam. The ones flying the drones. Yeah. In this POV, it looks like someone's manually firing because the drone has like a crosshairs in its video. Now we're seeing the drones POV. They're coming out that little box. That's the Navy Seal in through the window. And he's surrendering as this shooter again. He's surrendering. They haven't really engaged with the hypothetical of what if the shooter doesn't surrender to the drone or they're flying laps around him. Whoa. They took out the whole dummy. The whole dummy fell over. Okay. Yeah. That's the clip. Wild stuff. Well, they can strobe them as well. I guess. Wow. There's a lot of cops in tactical gear. None of them have gone in. They've sent the drone in instead. Yeah. That seems realistic. Okay. Yeah. The guys, the guys like baffled by the number of targets and just live down. Serenades. This is great. I can't see this being used to harass teenagers for doing things that every teenager does. So I wanted to talk a little bit about an article that just came out very recently on the New York Times about embedded data center in Louisiana. Now, obviously, I've talked about data centers a few times. In the fairly recent past, I did a dedicated article on the fight against or the different kind of grassroots activism campaigns against new data center construction. One of the ones that is not really in any danger of being canceled through local protest is a massive Facebook data center in Richland Parish. It was originally planned to be like a $10 billion data center and has now ballooned to like a $50 billion project. Facebook was not originally planning to construct in Louisiana. They were taking bids back during the Biden administration. I don't think the state was really on the map, but officials, particularly in the very poor county of Richland Parish had a problem, which is that they had at least 1,440 acres to Toyota to build a factory. But Toyota had decided not to around 2006. I think in part because the factory was proven to be uninsurable because it's a floodplain. So basically, they were like, we're not going to spend billions of dollars in a factory. We literally can't ensure in a place that's famous for having infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes. Yeah. So Richland Parish had a problem. The area was already economically depressed. And Intergy, which is a Louisiana state power company, also had an issue, which is that they were not making enough money. So their CEO, Philip May, decided he wanted to put Louisiana through as a dark horse contender for this massive fucking meta data center. Yeah. And they wound up winning. And they basically wound up winning through promising to be corrupt on behalf of meta, right? There was a bill being pushed at the start of 2024. Because like the thing, they offered meta a bunch of incentives and the only thing they couldn't offer them was like a tax break on the different kind of materials you buy when you're building a data center. And everywhere else that meta was considering had already offered those. So in April of 2024, Richard Nelson, the state revenue secretary was kind of helping to shepherd through a bill that was a tax rebate for fiber optic equipment. And they just wound up changing it two months to a massive tax rebate for data center equipment. Amazing. Super fucking corrupt. But also here's the thing, nobody in Richland Parish really cares because these people are incredibly fucking poor and Facebook is bribing basically the entire county. There's some sort of local law they have that if there's like an over funding in county tax revenue, then like teachers get a bunch of money. And so because of how much money Facebook is pumped in, a bunch of teachers in the parish got like a $50,000 bonus. And that's like the lowest level of what is effectively like legal bribery going on at every level of life in the parish. So I there's no chance really that anyone is going to protest or stop the construction of this. People are enthusiastic because meta has turned a fire hose of money on one of the poorest counties in the United States. The problem is that as I've said, the project is really obviously fucking doomed. Again, it's uninsurable because it's in a fucking flood plain. And the actual like text of the arrangement that meta ink basically gives them the ability to bounce and leave the project within like four or five years, leaving energy and a bunch of other Louisiana interests on the hook for this entire massive project. If say a hurricane comes through and renders the entire site and operable. So it seems like that's kind of thing that's going to cause a massive problem and like destroy the local economy at some point. But there's so much money being slalomed out to people right now that I don't think anything's going to stop that. So I guess we we hope that obvious thing doesn't happen. But I kind of think it's going to. Anyway, Louisiana. Nice. let's talk about the public charge rule. So the Trump administration has announced that it will do away on September the 18th with the DHS rule on public charge determination that rule came into effect in 2022, so under the Biden administration, they're not making a new rule at this time, they're taking away the old rule. So what we will have to go off now is to text in the Immigration Nationality Act and presumably they will issue some guidance soon, right? Whatever guidance issue is likely to be more restrictive than what we have in 2022 rule, right? They did publish a public notice about this last year, so we knew that this was coming, that they had planned to rescind this rule. And we should talk about what public charge is. We can go back to the 1999 guidance, and that's what was clarified in 2022 for a definition. That guidance says that someone who is likely to be quote, primarily dependent on the government for subsistence as demonstrated by either the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalisation for long-term care at government expense can be inadmissible to the United States or ineligible for permanent residency. This doesn't apply to some permanent residency applications like SIGA, Special Immigrant Juvenile, Green Card Applications, TOU visas, Asalis or Refugees, some other categories including those in the Violence Against Women Act. Public charge has generally been understood to mean cash benefits, right? So SSI or TANF would be the ones that like generally understood to be that if somebody received those DHS, I guess it would be USCIS, could find that they would be inadmissible. Somebody who is found inadmissible for this reason previously could post a bond and still be admitted, right? Just to the bond is basically saying, I'm not going to be at like a burden on the United States state, right? We're not exactly clear what they're going to do next, but we can look at the DHS presser for some clues, which says quote, "Aligning immigration with law and congressional intent that aliens of the United States be self-reliant and not dependent on taxpayer-funded government benefits." This could be really bad, right? There are a lot of different benefits. People take advantage of to include free school meals, to include things like a snap, to include WIC, to include rent-controlled housing even, right? They could draw, I think what they are probably going to move towards is a sort of looking at the whole case thing as opposed to a looking for specific things in the past. Another thing that we should understand is that this is forward-facing, right? It's not just how they use this. It's, are they likely to? An extremely broad interpretation of this could be very bad for people. Definitely. Looking to adjust their status, right? So this is something we'll keep an eye on. It's not ending yet. I just want to reinforce that. It's on September the 18th. So for people who are in these proceedings, this is something you should discuss with your immigration lawyer. If that is pertained to you, I will include links to all the government press releases and the federal register pieces about this if you want to read it yourself. Should I take a break? Yeah, I think so. And we're back. I want to talk about Texas. And normally that's not a hopeful thing when I say I'm going to talk about Texas. In fact, about 80% of the time when I come on to talk about Texas, it's because either someone in Texas committed some sort of horrible violent crime or everyone's getting excited about an election. And I need to tell them not to because it's Texas. Sure. This time I'm here to tell you there's an election in Texas you might want to get excited about. The election between Ken Paxton and Talleriko. What's his first name? I want to say Tommy or James Talleriko. I can't stop every time I hear his name. But no, James Talleriko is not a grifter. James Talleriko might be a US senator in the very near future because Ken Paxton is not doing too well. And if you aren't taxing the name Ken Paxton may not immediately conjure dread and disgust. But it should. I would be a hard press to name a more scandal written corrupt and evil elected leader in the United States. And that includes Donald Trump. Before we get into Paxton's latest race for a US Senate seat, I want to tell you a little bit more about Ken, friend of the pod Ken Paxton. K Pax, as we call him. I don't think anyone actually saw the movie K Pax. So that's not really a joke that's going to land. But didn't know that was a movie. It was a movie, James. Okay. In 2008, when Paxton was a new Texas House member for McKinney, where my mom used to teach, the AP reported that he and another state representative had been accused by ethics watchdog Fred Lewis of greasing the skids to settle a contract with Watchguard, a company that made in-car video systems that record video directly to DVD for like the cops and stuff. Paxton and Byron Cook, two state representatives were both found to have disclosed ownership in Watchguard. But in Paxton's case, he didn't disclose his ownership until well after his 2008 personal financial statement was filed. Shortly after the deal was made, Watchguard net earnings increased year over year by 250 percent and Paxton and Cook sold their shares of the company for an undisclosed amount, but a lot of money. Paxton denies any knowledge of the company's state contracts and claims he did nothing shady. However, per the barbed wire, quote, "Paxton claimed he had no knowledge of the company's state contracts at the time, which he would have been required to disclose with the Texas Ethics Commission under state law. However, associated press reporter that Watchguard's website boasted that the company was held by an influential shareholder group that includes three state representatives." Perfect. He hated when your dry snitch done by the company that brimed you. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, after coming under scrutiny, Paxton shifted his investments, including those in Watchguard into a blind trust. A blind trust is an account managed by a third party trustee without the beneficiary's knowledge to prevent a conflict of interest. However, the journal uncovered text between Paxton and the trustee, who was a friend of his concerning stock trades in 2020, a violation of the blind nature of the agreement. Paxton received $2.2 million from his investment. So, that's more like a see-through trust. Yeah, yeah. It's more of a see-through trust. That's so blind. It's more just here, you're committing a series of crimes. So, he's going to get charged with securities fraud for this, and that case has got a wind on for a while. But not long, you know, kind of actually in the middle of this whole process of corruption in 2013, when he's a state senator, he's entering the courthouse like the state courthouse. Yeah. And a lawyer who'd just been ahead of him in line at like the metal detector leaves behind a thousand dollar Montblanc pin in the metal detector tray and Paxton steals it. And he's on video stealing it. Like the Dallas Morning News gets access to the video and publish it. It's really funny. Oh, what a series of events. Yeah. In like 2014, Ken runs for and wins attorney general of the state of Texas, and his opponent in the campaign Justin Nelson runs video ads using the footage. It is really funny to have top cough be like the most corrupt criminal in Texas politics. Yeah, I'm really dedicated to it. You know, don't just a big risk criminal too. Just seeing an opportunity and taking it without a second thought is really beautiful. Yeah. And now despite this, Paxton was still narrowly elected thanks in part to spending twice as much as his opponent on the campaign. Yeah. In 2022, Paxton faced a primary challenge from George P Bush, one of the sea list bushes and nephew of the most recent former president bush. Huh. This would prove to be one of Paxton's easier victories, even though he had been charged with and was still under investigation for security's fraud, as well as at this point, a separate federal investigation for alleged corruption in favor of an Austin real estate developer. I'm going to quote now from an AP article by Thomas Beaumont, quote, Paxton responded by portraying himself as a Trump era Republican and bushes the air to a privileged political legacy. Yeah. Pro Paxton organizations spent more than 20 million dollars about twice as much as Bush and his allies. The race went into a runoff in which Paxton defeated Bush by 34 percentage points. So just a panseic on the cap of George P Bush and one of the worst ass kickings in Texas state political history. It's beautiful stuff. Yeah. I mean, this is a very, very clear sort of like Neocon versus the new like mega Republican party matchup. Yeah. Which the Neocons have just no no ground to stand on. Well, and it's, it's also just like purely on like the shallowest basis of like what sounds good to a dummy. George W Bush W is a nickname. That's trustworthy. George P Bush. He wants to be Bush. He's just a bad idea. I do think 20 years of of war in the Middle East have maybe, maybe like drop the value of George X Bush stock as if they're being in the George Bush anywhere in the 20 to 30. If we're doing George Bush, I guess. Guys, we're talking about Texas. I mean, even, even there. Yeah. Even in Texas. A whole lot of people from Texas died and was really, we didn't need to have actually. I mean, even when Texans were voting for him, people had a tendency to say the man was all had no cattle. So I'm not super surprised about this. But anyway, Paxton beats Bush handily in the, the primary and then he runs against Democrat Rochelle Garza in the general and Garza entered the campaign with a 300 page opposition research bio on Paxton, but also faced a really difficult quandary, which is like, what can you say about Ken? The voters haven't already heard and evidently decided they don't care about, right? Yeah, yeah. This is like the same thing with Trump, right? This is like, Yeah, how do you attach this all of this all of this stuff that's fucked up that we all know about? Yeah, that like is it worth just retreading all this all the same stuff? No, and it just wasn't right. She loses to not by his badliest George B. Bush obviously and Paxton continues to cling to office and scandal now in the years after his victory his wife divorced him citing the Bible He was impeached by the state house but then acquitted by the Senate his fraud case ended in 2024 with a judgment that he paid $300,000 in restitution But through it all he maintained enough Republican support to squeak by I mean because he's he's been very powerful as the attorney general of that state Yes, yes, done a lot to help the Republicans in that state and like a lot of yes really ugly stuff has been done at the Behast of and the help of Paxton. Yeah, he's wielded his power And I'm leaving a lot of that out. I don't mean this as a comprehensive look at his past We're kind of doing a greatest hits. I'm going to have to do a BTB on the fucker. Oh, yeah, absolutely J PAX deserves it So in that AP article Thomas Beaumont interviewed two Paxton supporters David and Nancy lap who are retired conservatives from Woolworth, Texas or Wolfer, Texas And quote from that article they described him as a conservative warrior who has been a victim of persecution He's had a share of scandals and almost all of them have so it's not necessarily disqualifying anymore said David lap 86 he's a flawed person no doubt about it, but he fights for traditional American values. Oh, man He added that nowadays as long as you're not in jail. They'll elect you Which is very true. Yeah, yeah, that's not a wrong statement But also you you'll elect him David. Yeah, yes, they they You're making a choice Now there is much more to the tale of Ken Paxton scum and villainy and this is in an episode of BTB So I'm going to save us some time and just discussed arguably his worst and most famous call as a dirty general Ken was elected after promising to be tough on crime and attacking his predecessors in opponents for being weak on crime And then in 2025 Awakeo attorney named Adam Hoffman went on trial for sexually abusing his son's best friend during multiple sleepovers from the age of six or seven up to age 10 Jesus the victim initially told a forensic interview where he believed Hoffman had ejaculated over 1300 times in his presence And deny the alligator although they did like a so it's Siemens They looked for Siemens and it didn't find much any so like I don't know, but also you get a clean stuff who knows Hoffman denied the allegations and called the boy a liar the jury wound up deadlocks the judge ordered them to keep deliberating and long story Sure, it becomes a mistrial because the victim did not want to testify a second time Paxton's prosecutors struck a plea deal with Hoffman So often please guilty But the plea deal includes no jail time or registry for as a sex offender for Hoffman So that's pretty fucked up and obviously it's Paxton's people doing this, but Paxton's the attorney general Yeah, so this this really grosses a lot of people out in the case becomes a major avenue attack when he undergoes a primary challenge By John Cornon earlier this year in the Senate race, right? Yeah, he challenges Cornon the incumbent for Senate The attention around this caused critics of Paxton to look into other cases per the texture's Tribune quote For instance attack ads from Cornon's allies highlight the case of a man originally charged with child sex trafficking He received a deal for a probation sentence and judge Roy Sparkman brought up another case in open court last month Noting Paxton had also taken over a murder for higher case that he oversaw Which resulted in a misdemeanor plea at a four-day jail sentence and of course Paxton still beat Cornon so You could be forgiven for being like what could take fucking this guy out, right? Yeah, what could matter? And I'll be honest. I was really hesitant to have any hope about this race until extremely recently But within the last few days a bunch of new polling has come out that makes this look not just competitive But winnable the most striking example of evidence, you know in favor of that would be a recent Texas public opinion research poll The Chotelarico leading Paxton 45% to 40 after multiple other polls had consistently shown a nail-biter of a race Now TPOR is officially a non-partisan research group, but it is run by a democratic strategist So there's reason to suspect some favoritism here The Texas Tribune and a separate article had this to say about the survey Quote, "The group surveyed 1048 likely voters between July 15th and July 17th And as a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points Of those poll respondents 53% voted for Donald Trump and 42% voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 Making the sample only slightly bluer than the 2024 electorate Which favored Trump by a 14-point margin in Texas Trump carried Texas by 5.6 percentage points in 2020 Two years after the last midterm held there during his presidency And a recent New York Times see a poll from June found an overall tie And the race 47 to 47% with TPOR winning about 5% of Republicans The most significant data from this recent batch of polling that has be hopeful though Is that TPOR seems to be doing really well among non-college educated voters Which is traditionally like the strongest group for Paxton That's the group that has carried him over the line consistently And from that same article, Quote, "Perhaps the biggest outlier was Talleriko's lead among non-college educated voters Who favored the Democrat by 9 percentage points, 45% to 36% He led by 1 percentage point among those with at least a bachelor's degree I don't want to suggest that the other races in Texas are going to go this well Right, Ted Cruz is currently about 18 points ahead of his opponent Call an Outred right now among non-college educated Texans in 2024 Man Yeah, like so I don't have a lot of faith that this is going to extend past Talleriko versus Paxton But there is evidence that like Paxton's longevity with the specific group that's Carried him past the line is at its end like maybe there's just too much scandal For him to stand up next to someone who seems as like relatively squeaky and nice as Talleriko Now there's other things to credit Talleriko's successful. One of them is that He's doing a lot better than Paxton in terms of like money right now As of the most recent disclosures Talleriko's campaign is about 21 million dollars on hand Paxton has less than eight huh And if you remember every other election I've got or any other campaign of Paxton's I've run through He usually had like a two to one advantage in funding over his opponents Yeah, so the fact that that's kind of falling apart for him too Suggest this might be a really winnable race now. There are some reasons to doubt that too Most polls I've seen show a number of undecided Republicans large enough to close the gap Or a tie between the two candidates led by Paxton And if that group all breaks for kin and historically they're likely to Things could be really close or wind up in favor of Paxton right One of the polls found about 14% of voters of all political stripes are unsure of their picks And among undecided voters it looks like Paxton has the most room to grow about 19% of that blocks that they lean towards the Republican Compared to 10% to lean towards Talleriko but most of them were just totally on the fence Or at least that's what they said so a lot is going to depend on how those people break I'm not saying this is definitely going to go Talleriko's way But if you're talking about like what is a race where maybe the Democratic Party might want to actually invest money in I'd say here this thing seems winnable and I don't say that about Texas races often It is a very particular matchup Yeah Paxton has a lot of unique vulnerabilities Talleriko's also doing very well in polls for Latino voters up like 45 points ahead of Paxton And that will be very crucial especially considering ice like that's going to be a big factor in this race Yeah There was an ice killing in Texas just a few weeks ago Certainly a lot of funding could come to Paxton towards the end of the race Sure The campaign finest ratio could could change dramatically over time But I do wonder if the sort of strategy from the GOP right now just as like paint Paint Talleriko very early on is it's like you know woke gender ideology maniac will kind of run a little bit hollow Now that Trump is in charge and Republicans control all branches of government And the sort of like economic issues that cannot be Blamed on like a woke liberals sending you know money to sex changes in prison It's going to be an interesting race Very close Another close race next Tuesday the Michigan Senate primary with I see Israel in my dreams Haley Stephens versus dr. Have to allow Said They had their last last debate on on Monday I'll see it continually hit Stephens for her corporate funding 60 million dollars outside spending 46 million dollars of a pack funding And the the moderator was really going after Stevens for this too Asking if if all this a pack funding will result in Stevens quote-unquote doing their bidding Referring to a pack and with the pro-Israel lobby And she also lied about receiving funding from the local utility company during the debate So early voting for that's already started the primaries next Tuesday We'll cover that on next executive disorder Francesca Huang in the Wisconsin Gobernatorial race also had a debate on Tuesday Had not seen that yet, but she is really pulling ahead in polls right now But that that primary is still a few weeks away But to stay on the topic of evil Republicans On July 21st speaker Mike Johnson dismissed domestic violence allegations against Republican representatives Max Miller and Cory Mills saying quote Well, the key word there is allegation And then said that the House ethics committee would shake things out Of those two reps Max Miller of Ohio is facing re-election in the midst of escalating legal issues Including restraining orders the deformation case and a custody battle Max Miller's ex-wife Emily Morano of the America First Policy Institute and daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Murano has accused Max Miller of abusing her and their daughter. While investigating suspected child abuse, Murano told Bay Village Police that Miller yelled and held a gun to her head after she turned on the lights to change their babies diaper. Jesus. According to a police report, Murano told police, but another domestic violence incident from earlier this year, where during a custody exchange, Miller, quote, "grabbed and threw her against the wall," which resulted in an obvious grab mark on her upper arm and bruising to her stomach and side where she hit the wall, unquote. This legend also was in front of their daughter and the police report later states that Murano's daughter told her, quote, "Daddy kill you." Murano and Miller were married in 2022, and Murano filed for divorce in August of 2024. After telling Miller that she wants a divorce in June of 24, Murano alleged that he threw hot steaming water at her. In a recorded phone call, Miller admits to what he refers to as "the water incident," after his wife said on the call that he abused her and, quote, "pored steaming hot water on her neck." On the call, Miller said that the, quote, unquote, "water incident" wasn't done with, quote, unquote, "intent" to hurt his wife. Murano told police she moved out of the house because she was, quote, "scared of him." Now, all of these allegations came to light earlier this year. After Murano discovered her two-year-old daughter's collarbone was broken, after the child came back from Miller's house this past February. This prompted a cascade of investigations and back-and-forth court filings, which eventually made their way into news reporting. A Bay Village police report investigating suspected child abuse stated that a child protection specialist found that the two-year-olds broken collarbone was accompanied by a bruise that, quote, "appears to be in a handprint and appears to have been inflicted." According to another police report obtained by Mother Jones, Murano recounted her daughter saying, quote, "Daddy's house is scary." Miller, of course, denies all claims of abuse or domestic violence and has theorized that the broken collarbone was possibly caused by a seat belt. Why is a kid wearing a seat belt? Shouldn't they be in a cosy when they're two? Yes. This was part of the investigation because Miller said this, and he had to show police that he had properly installed a car seat. After news outlets reported on the spousal and child abuse allegations, Miller filed a defamation suit against his ex-wife, and this is not the first time Miller has used a defamation suit to shut down allegations of abuse. In 2021, Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary in Trump's first term, wrote in the Washington Post that her "unnamed boyfriend" from 2019 to 2020, "got physical with her," that their relationship "turned abusive," and that her ex-boyfriend "had anger issues and a violent streak." These claims were later included in a book, but earlier that year, Politico reported that Max Miller, "pushed Grisham against a wall and slapped her in the face at his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her." Max Miller sued Grisham for "liberalist and defamatory false statements made about him," but he dismissed the case in 2023 after agreeing to a settlement. Though Grisham is now suing Miller for breaking the settlement's NDA by publicly claiming that Grisham fabricated abuse allegations against him while defending himself against new allegations of abuse by his ex-wife. Max Miller's abuse allegations have been a sort of open secret in Washington for a while. When George Santos was dealing with his whole thing a few years ago, on the House floor, he referred to Max Miller as a woman beater. I talked about how he didn't want the public apology to just turn into repeating media attacks against each other as he was being kicked out of Congress. Wild. He is running for re-election in Ohio. And Miller has maintained support from Republicans in Congress, and it's been backed by the president for years. Let's go on a break and then discuss some more news. All right, we are back. And I want to update people on the Iranian-American Legal Defense Fund versus Rubio Case. We spoke about a few weeks ago. So I have reached out to public citizens about this and they haven't got back to me. I'd love to do an interview with them. I have worked with them before and some access to med stuff. So hopefully someone from public citizens will listen and reply. But we have learned a lot from the new filings in this case. One of the things we learned was that people were required by eyes to be Iranian government officials. The very people they had fled to the USA to be safe and protected from. It seems that the person who met them was introduced as a consul, but Iran obviously doesn't have a consulate in the United States, right? They have the Iranian Interest section, which is in the Pakistani embassy. This person had information about their cases. In other cases, they were told they had to take calls from the Iranian Interest section and they wouldn't be allowed to return to their housing pod until they spoke to them on the phone. In one of these calls, the Iranian officials had a transcript of the person's credible fear interview. That is wild, right? So the credible fear interview is when people explain why they fear going back to where they have fled, i.e. what it is that they think the Iranian state in this case is going to do to them. So what the credible fear interview will have detailed for these people would have been their participation in Gina Amini protests. I saw that in several of the testimonies. I've also spoken to dozens of Iranian migrants who participated in those protests. They were arrested, released and realized that they were going to be arrested again and fled or fled before they were arrested. Or their participation in the Christian faith, you see that in a lot of the testimonies in this case. If the Iranian government have them right down, they are Christians. They were distributing bibles. They were evangelizing. Like it is absolutely not safe for these people to go back. Some of these meetings actually appeared to have occurred right here in San Diego, the Otai Mesa Detention Center facility. People were brought to the Iranian government official and the official then sat down with them and tried to persuade them to return to Iran. The official had a list of names of people who they were going to meet and they read it out. So even some people who weren't there, their names were read out. So it was only officials either selected these people or were told by I see these people were. One of the people named the individual is Mr. Mehrabadi and he threatened that they would be sent to quote Africa. So this is the United States doing either it's chain refinement or it's sending people to third country's deportation, right? We also see a lot about the current state of the asylum system in these declarations. One person attests that she has been and will be tortured in Iran. The judge responds to her that everyone gets tortured in Iran. In their interview with the quote, quote, console one person said they were told by the console even in the US if you are political, the same things can happen to you, which is very clearly a threat, right? The regime agent also knew when her husband was being deported and to wear. So he had that information before he met this woman. In another case, I would testify then I say agent said, I will force you. This is my job and this was with reference to signing self deportation papers. They cuffed the woman and then quote, he literally forced my fingerprint by forcing my finger to a stamp and then on a paper, no matter how much I tried to take back my finger, which is pretty wild. It's not the first time I should add that we've heard allegations that I'm doing exactly this. So many of the people in this document are women who have stories exactly like the Iranian women I met in the Darian gap. Many of them also say they took that route. They went from Iran to either Venezuela or Brazil and then traveled north from there. They also give details of their detention conditions, which are predictably appalling, right? With one writing quote, water here smells very bad and we are always itchy. We all have red dots on our skin that have also gone away on my body after I started antibiotics. And then skipping a bit, the dental care here is unbelievably dangerous. Any happening with teeth and they only extract, the doctors here have already extracted three of my teeth and have told me they will extract another three more when my antibiotics are over. I have always taken care of my teeth. They also talk about the, I was just quote from one of their one of their statements here, this disclosure and then I'm adding this other silent information to the Iranian government, returning to the quote here, has materially increased the likelihood that I will be tamed interrogated or tortured or killed if I ever returned to Iran. Another said, when I saw him talking about the Iranian consul, I was disgusted with the US government by forcing us to be with agents of the regime, which I told my pod manager. Many of these people have been in detention for more than a year. It seems like most of these people entered in 2025. A member of staff at the Iranian Interest section also called the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and informed them that the United States State Department had approached the Interest section to ask for help getting rid of Iranian detainees, that's a quote that last getting rid of. The Iranian officials said they met monthly with ICE to select individuals for deportation and the ICE provided their asylum applications to the Iranians at these meetings. They said they met with someone of Indian descent with a Georgetown degree who is described as the general director of the Middle East section. The meetings stopped when the war with Iran began, but apparently they still deliver documents or at least they were delivering documents in March. This call from the Iranian Interest section to the IALDF is wild. It involves this Iranian official recounting, for instance, that on the first deportation flight in September of last year, two people cut their wrists with razors, presumably attempting to end their lives where I think go back to Iran. It also details how, in many cases, the United States can't get the people's travel documents together because if they fly via a third country to Iran, there's no direct flights to the U.S. and Iran, and so these flights end up not being as full as the United States, no doubt, hopes. He also says that the clothing and state of the detainees were so poor that the Iranian government official purchased some clothing from Costco with his own money. He also said that no point did the United States ask Iran to guarantee their well-being in Iran. The official kind of posits himself as intervening on behalf of the Iranian people to make sure they're treated correctly, which is how generally one would expect the consular administration of a state to intervene on behalf of the citizens. This, though, is different because these people are fleeing the very government that he represents. I will keep covering this. I will also link to the court. Listen to a page where you can read these testimonies. They're all handwritten. They can be a little harder to read sometimes, but there's some really shocking and upsetting stuff in there. Forgive me if you've talked about this already. Maybe this will help for some listeners, too. How does this relate to the asylum laws that the United States has? Have they been denied asylum in so-called immigration courts, and this is the process for removal, and how is that actually decided? Because these people seem to have, in his testimony as you're reading, very credible theories to the point where they're attempting to calming themselves to avoid going back to this state. Yeah. It seems like most of these people entered after Trump came in with his day one, effectively, like southern border crossing asylum ban. They are having to fight their cases from detention, which is what they are doing. In some cases, they are already appealing because the government has found that they don't have a credible fear, or that they're otherwise not eligible for asylum. The reason the IALDF knows about these people is that that is what it is doing as a non-profit group is helping them fight their cases. Sure. It shows a pretty fucking bleak situation. Like people do still get asylum. I hear about it occasionally. I hear from friends in the community who do court accompaniments that they occasionally have a success still, but with the way that the Trump administration is purging the ranks of immigration and quote unquote judges, that's getting less and less likely. So like these people are in that system. Many of them are either in ever spiraling delays, right? Because we have fewer and fewer of these judges because they're getting purged. More judges are coming on board now, or they are already appealing, going through the cat process, clenching against torture process. These are the asylum claims that are in the bullseye of what an asylum claim is. All of these people in there, I didn't want to read them out, because I don't think there's any reason to traumatize people. Nearly all of them detail torture. Most of the women detail sexual abuse, they talk about the horrific things they went through and the way here too. This is front and center of what you would think a textbook asylum case would be normally. And there are exemptions for some Christian minorities, religious minorities from Iran who largely Christian people rating some of these visa bans, but these people didn't come that way, right? They didn't come by applying for a visa. They came across a sudden border. Like it's very possible that one of the people in this case is somebody I met in the Darien gap at the timing would line up. It's been really fucking upsetting for me reading these things. Thank you for that context. Earlier in this episode, we talked about attacks on the first amendment as a part of the Trump Edmonds crackdown on the left. But before we close, I want to go over a novel case of state repression against an Atlanta-based activist. This is a first of its kind case, focusing on an extreme privacy feature of graphene OS, an open source operating system for Android phones. This feature is known as a "dress password", a special code that when inputted into a phone's locked password screen triggers a wipe of certain data on the phone. Last November, a federal grand jury indicted an Atlanta activist for allegedly wiping the data on his phone after being detained at the airport upon re-entering the country in January of 2025. US attorneys say this was in violation of Title 18, USC Section 2232A. That is the destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure. The short single paragraph indictment reads that the defendant, quote, "did knowingly destroy damaged waste dispose of and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone for the purpose of preventing and impairing the government's lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control before and during the search for and seizure of property by Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team Supervisory Officer JC." That's the name of the officer. Last week, this case had its first hearing, which was focused on emotion filed by the defense to suppress evidence and statements for violations of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments. According to the motion, the FBI, Atlanta, joint terrorism task force coordinated with CPB to question and search US citizen Samuel Tuneck as he was returning to the United States from the Dominican Republic because of his associations with the Defend the Atlanta Forest Movement or StopCop City, which we have covered on this show. Basically, after arriving at the airport, CPB put Tuneck in secondary inspection, where their tactical terrorism response team, quote, "proceeded to question Mr. Tuneck, search Mr. Tuneck's body, and all his belongings, and insisted that he provide the password for his phone. Despite Mr. Tuneck's request to speak with his lawyer and not engage in any further questioning, the officers insisted they could question Mr. Tuneck and search his phone to determine whether he had child porn. Evidently, this was a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr. Tuneck's connections with the Defend the Atlanta Forest Movement." A journalist Timothy Pratt reported in the Guardian that during last week's hearing, it was revealed that unbeknownst to Samuel Tuneck, the federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watch list, and that a Homeland Security agent circulated an email three hours before Tuneck arrived back in Atlanta, containing his name and photo, and indicated that he was being investigated for, quote, unquote, "suspected terrorism activities." I think it is important to mention that Samuel Tuneck, to this point, has not been charged with terrorism and does not face any charges directly related to protest activity for Defend the Atlanta Forest or stop cop city. According to the defense's motion, Tuneck early and repeatedly during questioning so that he would not speak without his lawyer, but the officers ignored these requests and never Miranda to Tuneck. The motion states that the officers told him, "Because you're refusing to talk, which is your right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we're looking for." After officers demanded his phone pass for the second time, Tuneck asked again why he wasn't allowed to call his lawyer, and the officers responded, quote, "When it comes to immigration and customs, right, it's a whole different ballgame. And we have search authority, we don't need a warrant," unquote. I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. If this is something you are concerned about, then you should seek out legal counsel. I'm just going to give you my best understanding of it. This is a civil situation. Well, it's also a criminal situation for him now. But like, when you're entering the border, these are civil proceedings. And so that's why you're Germany. No, Miranda is depending on where you enter the United States and what circuit you are in, they can inspect your telephone. My general understanding of it is should you refuse to unlock that telephone, you can expect to leave without your telephone. The general way that they do this is for them to put the phone on airplane mode and then search it because they are searching the device that is entering United States, not the remote cloud stuff, that is not on the device, because they are inspecting a thing that is crossing the border. And that is within their purview in most circuits in the United States right now as federal immigration officers. And then the other thing I would add, at some point, I think we're going to see a Supreme Court case about it and this might be the one, right? That's very possible, yeah. Or be it that there'll be other elements to this case, right? Like, as you said, like, who destroyed the data that was on the phone is something that's very much not legally clear to me, right? Did graphene destroy it? the data to the BP agents when they entered that pass code destroy the data right or did the person destroy the data. Yeah, this this case is a whole bunch of legal gray areas. Yes. This is the first time we've seen a case about a duress password. The exact way this interrogation went and it introduces a lot of questions on when exactly this regular you know border patrol questioning turned into an actual interrogation based on allegations of a crime right with this mention of child sexual abuse material. Yeah. And all those things could possibly trigger different legal statutes in various court cases. Now the motion says that officers explained to Tuneck that he would have to give over access to his phone quote whether it was done with his cooperation or not. Eventually Mr. Tuneck provided a password to his cell phone and e reader according to the government when the CPP officers entered the password on his cell phone quote the screen went blank flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart on quote after this another officer entered the room to conduct a pat down which Tuneck did not consent to but they did anyway then a DHS agent arrived with three other individuals to conduct another interview which Tuneck did not consent to and pointed to his attorney's card to quote from the motion again quote the agent explained that he was seizing Mr. Tuneck's electronic devices and that they would be returned to Mr. Tuneck after 30 days notably the DHS agent explained that Mr. Tuneck was quote not under arrest but once these gentlemen are done with you pursuant to your entry into the country you're free to leave unquote. So this motion to express evidence argued that the border questioning became quote unquote custodial in nature when Mr. Tuneck was not able to leave was never informed of his rights and was denied access to his lawyer and so any quote evidence obtained from his phone or lack thereof should be suppressed as fruits of unlawfully obtained evidence the specific statute that he's being charged with 18 USC 2232 refers to quote the government's lawful authority to take such property so this motion is arguing that the exact way this property was taken was not lawful yeah to quote from the motion again that's what I think we'll expound on this quote cvb officers introduce themselves to Mr. Tuneck and explain that they were looking for people who are pedophiles officers justified their questioning and demands to search Mr. Tuneck's phone by stating that they had to confirm whether he possessed child porn the government's reports do not indicate any suspicion whatsoever that Mr. Tuneck was in possession of child porn but rather that their purpose in detaining Mr. Tuneck and excusing his belongings was to investigate his ties with the defend the Atlanta forest movement to next unmarriedized statement the alleged wiping or encryption of the contents of his phone by providing agents with a specific password is testimonial in nature Mr. Tuneck had not been charged with committing a crime in connection with the defend the Atlanta forest movement but law enforcement see me took advantage of the relaxed constitutional protections at the border to try to dig up evidence on quote and the motion states that circuit courts have contradictory rulings if this sort of search is permitted if you if you can search someone's phone at the border not to actually intercept digital contraband but to fish for evidence in an unrelated criminal investigation you know something that may come up at this goes to trial is technically using graphene's dress password it does not delete all of the data on the phone but rather the phone loses the ability to access its encrypted data graphino s wrote on ex the everything app quote are duress pin slash password leaves all the encrypted data on the device intact it only wipes keys in the hardware key stores the secure element and encryption metadata it's an ear instant and then it powers off the device to wipe ram unquote so basically it wipes with the phone needs to decrypt its contents and read the data the graphene followed up on twitter quote we doubt that's legally different from wiping data on quote so this technicality may or may not actually matter to the court but this might not be a sort of get out of jail loophole that I see some people online presenting it as the graphino s further explained that the dress password wipe should be legal not because of this quote unquote tech loophole but because the defendant quote wasn't being investigated for any actual crime wasn't under arrest wasn't right as rights before being interrogated wasn't under oath etc adding that it's quote near impossible that they get anything of value if the phone was in before first unlock with a strong passphrase plus second factor fingerprint unlock setup unquote whether or not this dress password was used it is very unlikely that federal authorities would have been able to break into a phone running the graphene operating system yeah that means that the device has been fully turned off and has not been unlocked since being turned back on similarly it is very hard to break into an iPhone running iOS is locked down mode with a complex alpha numeric password before first unlock the combination of all those things can make it really hard to break in we saw that right reason with a reporter from get who one of the broadsheets whose phone was using lockdown mode they've said they couldn't open right yeah I guess I will just say that like if people want to know more about border searches and telephones I would suggest going to electronic frontier foundations page eff.org they have a great deal of information and you can find a lot there it's currently the southern district of New York which is the one that requires warrant but there are various other degrees that we don't have the time nor is this the place for us to go over so yeah eff.org is a good source for this shit yeah but like James said this is a case that could become supreme court precedent over time this is this is invoking a bunch of yeah legal gray areas the motion here to express evidence probably will be decided on until at least October so this is going to go on for quite a while this is another new frontier in digital privacy and how that relates to the law which the supreme court has taken up a lot of cases on recently so this this could become a very influential case going forward so I wanted to go over some of these details now and we will certainly be covering this in the future as this as this case progresses yeah the outlook hasn't been great so far I would say with this like the the U.S. versus Belmont take card also was the most recent case that was I think this week or last week again not the place to go into this but I will include a link in the source notes if you want to read about some of the case law I think that does it for us today sick add a good happen here good yeah if you would like to email us it's cool zone tips at proton.me I'll include the legal fundraiser for Sam to the next case below we reported the news the news reported we reported the news hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media from more podcast from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts and now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions thanks for listening didn't catch the latest 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