BONUS: Abolish ICE

Ryan and Grant discuss the latest in Minneapolis after ICE shot and killed Alex Pretti – the second Minnesota resident to be killed be ICE in a matter of weeks. This bonus is on the house! But if you want to support the show, sign up for a membership at: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld and you'll get access to more ad-free and bonus and extended episodes as well as access to the Garbage Day Discord. And grab a Panic World tee at: https://store.couriernewsroom.com/products/panic-world-tee Subscribe to Panic World wherever you get your podcasts including here or on YouTube. Panic World is a production of COURIER. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Right. Do you want to say why we're releasing this on a Thursday evening?

• 0:33Ryan Broderick?

  Because we are joining the general strike. And I'm still sort of putting my thoughts together about that. I asked the employees of Garbage Media, you know, what do you guys want to do? It was a resounding, we want to join the general strike. Okay. As a journalist, it's always kind of weird and tricky to figure out like how you participate in these things. But our production coordinator, Josh, I think, said it quite well. Where he was like, yeah, like a newsletter and a podcast, like going dark on a Friday, like, doesn't really... Okay, yeah, we do that from time to time. But we have a megaphone and we have a platform. And it is important for people to know

• 1:18Ryan Broderick?

  that a general strike is a political tool that can put pressure. So that's kind of where my head's at with it is like we are, I am, I am, I think this is the right thing to do. I, we have seen, Grant and I have seen up close, what it looks like when a community is occupied by ICE. It is, it is unconscionable. And if that makes us worse journalists or something, less objective journalists for being part of the general strike, so be it. But something has to change here. So we are offline tomorrow. All of the content you see from us tomorrow will have been written ahead of time and primarily used to tell you about the general strike. And you can fight online about whether or not general strike includes posting or not.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  So Ryan, if we lived in a better world, like a moderately better world, would you rather be talking about milk being back or about Jester maxing?

• 2:15Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, milk's back, brother. Milk is so back. Um, I think the next meta after Jester maxing is drinking whole milk at the club.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Can you mog while drinking milk?

• 2:26Ryan Broderick?

  I don't see why not.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I refuse to learn what mogging is, so I will not learn. Uh.

• 2:34Ryan Broderick?

  My girlfriend correctly pointed out that it's basically male smizing.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  If only, if only we could be talking about that today. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality. With me, host of the show, longtime Jester Maxer.

• 3:08Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Ryan Broderick.

• 3:10Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks for having me on my show.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  But instead, we're talking about the American occupied city and another American citizen being killed for giving a shit. Last Saturday, Alex Preddy was killed by ICE officials.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You see the alerts. It's a Saturday. You're supposed to be off. What is your first reaction?

• 3:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not off anymore, like ever. Um, this is a weird one because like we were there and we left. And so whenever you're, you're talking about going somewhere, you're inevitably sort of thinking like, how long do I stay? Do I get there in time for what I need to be there for? Like as a journalist, like these are sort of the thoughts you, you have to think. And so when I see, okay, another person has been killed in Minnesota, I immediately think like, do we go back? Do we like, is there more for us to do there? If this is going to be sort of a prolonged news story, like how do we handle it? And then the other issue that is, you know, a problem.

• 4:13Ryan Broderick?

  Problem for small media companies like ours is like, okay, we've written extensively about Minneapolis. And we've written extensively about sort of the political environment that created the occupation of Minneapolis. How do we continue to write about it? You know, how do we find fresh ways to write about it? How do we not tie our own audience out with this stuff? And it's tough because like you want to, you want to be early and you want to sort of be comprehensive and you want to keep following the story, but like readers are fickle and this job is tricky. When you get into week three and week four of coverage. And so like, that's how I felt professionally as a human being, obviously I was horrified.

• 4:55Ryan Broderick?

  And then you sort of just think like, okay, what's next on the ground? Like what's going to happen? How are people going to respond to this? So all of those things were sort of cycling through my brain as I tried to also save as many. This is another sort of, I think, dimension of these kinds of stories in the 2020s, which is like before news would break and you could kind of like wait for it to develop and sort of like wait for like the important stuff to like surface to the top. Now, particularly on platforms like X, but also Blue Sky has this issue too. Things are moving so quickly that you kind of have to just be like online as the story is developing

• 5:37Ryan Broderick?

  and save anything you think is interesting and then go through it later. So like, that's my current process is like news breaks, go online. I did this with Charlie Kirk, news breaks, go online, save as many links to as many different sort of angles of what the story might look like as you can, and then go through them the next day. Or, you know, whenever you've, you need to file your story. So yeah, all of that was sort of happening as I was on the couch on Saturday.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's just how people experience the world too. Instead, but instead of saving it, they're responding because they are processing and that is their like, like you're, you're thinking of like, I had this experience this week of being like, boy, I have a lot of feelings and thoughts to express and I don't know exactly when I will get that chance. You're, you're thinking what like, I will have an outlet. I imagine for other people who are locked in and they are seeing this. And like, you feel like you are just reposting or responding to the void. But like, there's nothing else to do, but you have to stay locked in.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  It's a crazy making feeling and I don't know that there's any solution to that at this stage, but.

• 6:50Ryan Broderick?

  Well, no, it's more like it's more like you don't know. You don't know what's going to be important and it's very hard. Like the internet sort of operates as like, you know, purple monkey dishwasher, like that Simpsons joke, like all the time now. And so it's not just like, oh, will I want to use this post or I want to talk about this post, you know, one poster, someone's video begets another post and more videos and more posts. And so if you aren't following it from the beginning, it's very hard to understand what's going on. And so if we're talking about like the average news consumer, like, don't bother. Like, like if you're a normal person, like you actually like, can't really understand what's going on anymore. Like, I can barely

• 7:32Ryan Broderick?

  understand what's going on. Like, like I remember, I think the day that Charlie Kirk died is a really useful example here where I watched in real time as the conspiracy theories that it was carried out by Mossad spread across the web. And I watched as like the third or fourth round of users encountered them not knowing who was spreading them, why they were spreading them, what they like, why they even thought that. And with Alex Preddy, like same deal, like you can see these narratives forming. And the average person is just encountering those narratives and has no idea that like, they were started by like Walter Bloomberg, the guy who like LARPs as the Bloomberg terminal on X, right? Or like, because the information

• 8:12Ryan Broderick?

  ecosystem is so broken and still so dependent on X, Twitter, and now people who buy a verification check mark and like, pretend to be news agencies, or God forbid, prediction markets pretending to be news agencies, like all of these core sources for discourse are totally rotten. And so like even on Blue Sky, like I'm seeing people sharing stuff that I saw first on like, right wing op accounts. And the average person, you know, who might be getting this on Instagram hours later, you know, or, or siphoned through their favorite TikTok influencer who's talking about it in a vlog, like, they're just like, hearing shit that like is wrong or incorrect or totally hyperbolic. And it's a mess. It's a nightmare. It's a, and, and, and so as a journalist,

• 8:56Ryan Broderick?

  if you're trying to cover it, like, and you want to cover it at the speed at which you can compete with other news agencies, like that's the only way you can do it really right now, is by following the insane discourse that happens every time something newsworthy, you know, hits the web.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're hit by the immediate storm. You're following everything. You're calculating, are we going to try to get on a flight before a snowstorm hits New York where you can't leave? Has this week played out different? So we're recording this Thursday morning. Has this week played out differently than you anticipated than from the first reaction? Has anything surprised you over the course of this week?

• 9:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's funny. We, um, garbage days managing editor Kate's Holiness got stuck in Miami. You know, steak too juicy, lobster too buttery during the snowstorm. So our head of like research for our new consulting group was sort of pitch hitting as the editor on Monday. And we were having an argument about my take on the weekend, which is like, I think the Trump administration is, is kind of giving up the goat a little bit. I think they're kind of gonna back off. They're gonna try to figure out a way. I think this has gone really badly. And Lester, who was, who was guest editing was like, I don't really know if that's true. And I was like, I think this, I think that's what's about to happen here. And it did happen, you know? I love being right. Um, that was my take.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I feel like you're both right.

• 10:19Ryan Broderick?

  Well, yeah. So that was my take. And that is clearly what the Trump administration was trying to do, you know? So as of right now, we're recording this on Thursday. As of right now, Greg Bavino, the little man with the SpongeBob voice that has been cosplaying as a neo-Nazi across the Midwest, has been removed from his post as the head of, of essentially on the ground operations for ICE.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Can you imagine the shipping fees of those Nazi green wool clothing? They're so heavy, like moving them.

• 10:49Ryan Broderick?

  Not even good jacket for Minnesota. It's a bad jacket for Minnesota. Like, wearing a big pea coat in Minnesota is stupid. Anyways, so he's been removed as the head of ICE. There's talk that Kirsty Noem's head is on the chopping block. And there's even talk that Stephen Miller might be, if they can't figure out a way to squash this, might be, you know, moved or, or, or sort of minimized. They've sent, uh, the White House borders are Tom Homan to Minnesota where he is both trying to like, act like he's reasonable and also act like he is gonna squish. Wash things and get things worked out. It's like the party is clearly trying to figure out like how to move the chess pieces around to not admit that they're wrong, but also they under like

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  they clearly understand the optics here are bad. And my feeling was like, okay, like if this is gonna happen, maybe it'll be like Trump won where they do all this song and dance and actually things kind of die down. In fact, like that happened with the Muslim ban. Remember where like everyone is like storming airports and trying to like block the Muslim ban and Trump kinda, you know, kinda backed down and like it didn't become like a prolonged occupation of America's airports. Minneapolis has not gone that direction. They had, they have locked in. They have, they have become even more militarized. They were, we are getting sort of autonomous zones popping up across the city. The vigils are becoming, you know, more barricaded like we saw, you know,

• 12:14Ryan Broderick?

  with, with, with CHAZ in Seattle. So that is happening. I would say, I would describe the, the vibe right now is a standoff. The Trump administration is reorganizing how they're doing things, but they're not backing down and Minnesota is not backing down. Uh, at the same time, based on like leaks we're getting out of DHS from friend of the show, Ken Klippenstein, there is a desire to make ICE activity less noticeable by doing surveillance or what have you. So there's a lot of things at play right now and we, we just really don't know how it's gonna turn out.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  The other thing to mention in there is that the rhetoric of immediately after the murder and, and over the week has simmered down into a weird lukewarm place that the Trump administration never finds itself in where it went from, he's an assassin, don't believe your eyes to, well, ICE has a hard job. You know, you just can't appreciate how, how difficult it is to be armed to the T against people with whistles. Do you think that the groundswell reaction this time is because these two murders have happened in such short succession, the gender dynamics, or that the video, and I don't mean in terms of like what happened, but I turn, I mean in

• 13:29Speaker 01

  terms of like clarity within the video in Alex's killing was, was starker to, to, to watch. It was, I, I mean that in terms of like, like you have less obscure, obscured angles. What do you attribute that it's after Alex, not after Renee, that we're seeing this, this pivot and this sort of step back?

• 13:51Ryan Broderick?

  Some of the best writing I've seen about what you're talking about was in a New York Times opinion piece of all places, a week before Alex Preddy was killed.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Sometimes there is gold in the sewer, you know?

• 14:04Ryan Broderick?

  It's a piece called "An Old Theory Helps Explain What Happened to Renee Good." It's written by David French, and it is about this idea. The term was coined by a Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Frankel, and it's called "The Dual State." Have you heard of this?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Do you think I'd heard of that because I'm learned or because I'm Jewish, Ryan?

• 14:25Ryan Broderick?

  Moving on.

• 14:28Ryan Broderick?

  The idea of the dual state, to simplify, is like, in an authoritarian fascist regime, there are two states happening simultaneously. There is the primary state where everyone feels like everything is normal, you know? You can walk down the street, you can go to the supermarket. Things might be getting objectively worse around you, but like, life kind of goes on. And then there's the secondary state, where you are a victim of state violence, and the full powers of the fascist regime are pointed at you. And at any moment, you can go from living in the primary state to the secondary state.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:06Ryan Broderick?

  What I think is so interesting about that concept applied to current-day America is that we have the technology to film the moment someone transitions from one state to the other, whereas in Pinochet's Chile, in Mussolini's Italy, in Hitler's Germany, there was not the ability to immediately transmit images of the dual state at play. And so when we talk about, like, you know, why are people responding to one thing and not the other, there are dimensions of this about gender and about race. Like, the white victims of ICE are getting more attention.

• 15:51Ryan Broderick?

  The man who is killed by ICE a week, two weeks after, gets more attention than the woman. Like, that is just, I think, part and parcel with how the media works and how visual media works. Like, those biases are just baked in. But the people that are caused, like, the deaths that are causing the biggest reactions are the ones we can film, because we can film the exact moment the dual state goes into effect on an individual. And I want to, I want to read-

• 16:21Speaker 01

  When the escalation happens, that's the shockwave. The other things become normalized.

• 16:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so I want to read this this section from French in a discussion he had with the Times about his initial piece. So here he says, what Frankl's arguing is that one of the things that aided the rise of the Nazi party was that it was it is not as if the Nazis came into power and then everything changed for everybody. Most Germans were still living under what he calls the normative state. That would be the normal life and existence that we all enjoy where you can start a business and you can enter into a contract and you can go to court and enforce your rights against somebody who's violated your rights. It's all normal. But what he said is that along this normative state that was still existing, there was something called the prerogative state. The prerogative state

• 17:09Ryan Broderick?

  was the zone of lawlessness. This was the zone of aggression for the state. So where the state's interests intersected with the normative state, then the prerogative state would take over and this would impact only a minority of citizens. For example, Jews in Germany were subject to the prerogative state. This is where the law didn't really protect them. They were at the mercy and the whim of the government. They were at the mercy and the whim of the shock troops of the Nazi regime. If we don't want to use Nazi analogies, we can actually use an American analogy that works really well, and that would be the Jim Crow South. And he goes on basically to say Renee Good and people like her don't seem to realize yet that the existence of the dual state. So they they don't they don't seem to know that they can be thrown into the prerogative state without

• 17:54Ryan Broderick?

  any warning. And the shock and the outrage that we're seeing across the country is, I think, a lot of white, middle class Americans realizing that this prerogative state, this sort of the state of lawlessness and government aggression is not just for immigrants anymore. It is for any enemy of the Trump administration, whenever you are deemed an enemy of the Trump administration.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  I've been thinking about this so much since we left Minneapolis.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I was asking people all the time, are you worried about us having a file on you being labeled a domestic terrorist? And they were taking it like, why would I care if somebody I don't like has an opinion of me that I'm a terrorist? Like, you know, like I have, I have negative words for Trump. Like, what do I care what he calls me? And I was thinking, like, you're not, I meant it more like, do you, are you afraid of a knock on a door? Are you afraid of this and this? And I think a part of it is like, I don't, I like, don't, I don't believe that can happen to me. But I also think what we're seeing now, now that like, things have gotten realer, and people are seeing where it is, is this refusal to accept? It's not, it's not a shock that like, oh, this could happen to me. It's a refusal

• 19:05Speaker 01

  to believe, to say like, no, this is not happening. We are still going to film as if we have the right to film as if these laws matter. We are still going to say like, I'm not covering my face, because I'm not doing anything wrong, because I believe in an America where like, you can go and shout at a federal building, and like, that's just your right to protest. I think the, the, the fight is, is saying like, we don't accept this form of reality of which you're labeling it. Yeah. Not, not so much, uh, like, oh, this could, I, I don't think it is naivety. I think it is a, the, the fight is like, a refusal to say like, that is not the America we're living in. Pushing back like, at the concept.

• 19:46Ryan Broderick?

  I disagree. I think maybe now, you could make that argument.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  That's, that's what I'm saying.

• 19:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think everything up until Alex Preddy, though, that I.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  I agree. I, I, I agree. I think.

• 19:59Ryan Broderick?

  In a lot of ways, this sort of, a lot of ways, this sort of distilled for me, the, the weird feelings I've had about No King's Day protests, actually. Like, this sort of unlocked, like, the tension that I felt, where I was like, I, I still have trouble, like, articulating the, the tension I have around No King's Day. And I think it, I think it is closer to this, which is like, really, I had this thought in Minneapolis, when we were in one of the protests that was sort of taking over the neighborhood. And I just thought like, okay, right now, I don't have signal on my phone. So like, you and I weren't really in contact for, because it was just too many people and, you know. I have T-Mobile. So, you know, it's just gonna go out. Okay. Now, I can't.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And if you want to sponsor this show.

• 20:40Ryan Broderick?

  T-Mobile wants to give me a better connection. Yeah, sure.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Or if anyone wants to say, we're the cell phone provider that you can rely on in a protest.

• 20:48Ryan Broderick?

  In a protest.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  We will fucking test that.

• 20:50Ryan Broderick?

  Absolutely. So I had this feeling where I was like, okay, I can't check the internet to see what's happening. I'm following the, the, the, the action of this protest as you're sort of trained to do as a journalist. And I'm just gonna keep going and I assume I'm gonna find you when we can find each other. But I also thought, oh, I have no idea. I will have no idea if ICE decides to really ramp up the aggression and just kettle a section of this protest. There were countless times where it was like, we're turning a corner. And so it's like two, two ends of a street are totally exposed. And there's nothing stopping an ICE convoy from going, pulling up on both sides and being like, show me your papers.

• 21:30Ryan Broderick?

  And like, the average person, I don't think still is totally really getting that like, that's where this goes. Like, there is no world where like, that doesn't eventually happen with the conditions that currently exist. If they are allowed to exist. Like, there's no world where you get to like, not be a part of this anymore. Like, there will be a moment when, when, actually, I mean, no, there, there have been several moments now where people believe that they're expressing their democratic, you know, rights in America and they're killed for them. And, and I think people are slowly getting the sense like, this is not business as usual.

• 22:12Ryan Broderick?

  My funny sign is not gonna protect me when an ICE agent with 47 days of training unloads his entire clip into me. Like, that's, that's what's happening now. And, and, and I, I hope that the average person is understanding that. And I hope that doesn't mean that like, it scares them, but I assume it's, it's scaring a lot of people.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think that means, as you said, we're at the standstill. Like, like, but both sides are entrenched. We could very well be there. They could pull out.

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And you can stay at a knife's edge for a long ass time.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 23:12Speaker 03

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• 23:42Speaker 01

  So normally for a bonus, this is when we would put everything behind the paywall to try to get you to give us five bucks.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Considering everything, we're just gonna put it all out here. But if it makes you feel good to give us five bucks and feel like we're helpful, Patreon.com/panicworld, we do appreciate it. If you want to buy a t-shirt, the link's in the show notes. My boss will be mad at me because I forget how to say the website the way he wants it. Anyways, let's talk about things that are not merch. I will show you merch on a different day, I promise. When we were there, the frustration I think both of us kept running into is like, the feds do not care about your whistles or your videos. If anything, they are using them for their own propaganda. And I was really...

• 24:37Speaker 01

  I was heartened by how much people cared and were showing up and I was terrified by how much it seemed to not matter. Seems like it's, it's the videos, the, the showing up, the whistles are, really are mattering and it's, it's, it's stacking pressure in a way that is relieving, moving, but it kinda, it's really blowing my mind to, to like, we're at a time where more mainstream media is now under right wing control. The internet is, the, the main social media apps are cracking down on saying things about ICE. You, you can

• 25:19Speaker 01

  talk about this more specifically than, than I will in the summary. And yet the, the most powerful weapon right now is DIY journalism and citizens filming and uploading to these, to these sites. It's very hard to square and it also makes me wonder things like, what if they were able to livestream when an addict was being raided in Germany? You know, like, what is the, like, is this the most effective thing that we've ever had to, to find an authoritarian, authoritarian government?

• 25:52Ryan Broderick?

  I, I've been thinking about this as well because I, I don't, I don't think that we were necessarily wrong in our initial assessment of like, this stuff doesn't feel like it matters. But I, but I think we were judging it based on the wrong criteria. There's an old editor of mine that used to say that like, the reporting on the current election is always actually reporters covering the last election. Like, like you never sort of, like you, you always kind of accidentally judge the current story based on the last time it happened and you're kind of always wrong. And like, that's just sort of how things work unfortunately. And I, and I do think that we,

• 26:31Ryan Broderick?

  and, and I think a lot of other journalists and pundits in particular have been judging Minneapolis based on

• 26:42Ryan Broderick?

  Previous protest movements and I, and I, and I, I think the no King's Day stuff is interesting because it's, it is very much a protest movement from the before time, trying to tackle the issues of right now. And so what I mean by that is like, the two, the 2010s to me, basically from everything like after occupying the Arab Spring. So like all of this stuff after the second Trump, the second Obama administration and the first Trump administration and like kind of even into the, to the Biden administration. But like, I think COVID is like a useful cutoff there. Like all of the, or like the 2020 protests, like all of that stuff, all those different protest movements were like very emotional. They were very sort of like about communicating like, I

• 27:27Ryan Broderick?

  mean, it sort of became a punchline about like awareness, but like it was, it was about creating an emotional narrative that could get people interested. But it's not wrong. It's like, it's, it's, and I wouldn't say wokeness. No, it's like, it's like, we have to communicate an emotional narrative so that it's picked up by television and it's like transmitted the way we want it to be transmitted. And like, it can get people involved. And, and by doing that, we have to tell an emotional story. And the media, I think over that period of time, over that decade or so, got very used to judging protest movements based on the effectiveness of the emotional narrative that was being told. And what I think, and then how effective that emotional narrative

• 28:12Ryan Broderick?

  would be at changing the minds of people in charge.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:16Ryan Broderick?

  And so when we went to Minneapolis, I think that, you know, subconsciously, unconsciously, like that was on our mind. Like, okay, could this emotional narrative change the Trump administration's mind? And we both know from covering this stuff every week for the last, you know, two years of our lives or whatever, that it can't. We know that, we know that it can't. What I think Minneapolis has really cracked, though, is unemotional protest and disruption. It is not emotional. It is purely pragmatic. It is whistles. It is very effective noise protests outside of different businesses to pressure their, you know, deals with ICE.

• 28:57Ryan Broderick?

  It is alerting the neighbors that ICE is coming. It is extremely, extremely pragmatic. And pragmatic protest and pragmatic disruption is a totally different ballgame with a totally different set of concerns and realities than emotional protesting. And I'm not saying that emotional protesting is bad. I'm not saying this to discredit it. I mean, there are issues with it. There are issues with pragmatic protesting. But emotional protesting is about can this sign, if I take this photo of this sign, will it become the front page of the New York Times and be played on CNN? And will this like one moment, this, I remember writing about the Baltimore Black Lives Matter protests

• 29:42Ryan Broderick?

  and like, and like finding like emotional photos to tell the story because like people were sharing them and like it could change the minds of people and it could, it could create awareness. That is not this. That is not this. And in fact, like if you are any, like I've had, you know, emails with like people in like the, you know, progressive spaces who are trying to like, look at Minneapolis, be like, what should we do? How do we get involved? All this, that. It is straight up like get a whistle, get a neighborhood watch going, find an encrypted messaging platform, like mess with the businesses, like, you know, any way you can put pressure on the businesses and like,

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Go up to people with, with license plates from out of state like we experienced.

• 30:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, lock in. Like this is not, this is not like I'm going to change Trump's mind. Everyone knows it's impossible now to change the mind of the administration. So what do you do? Well, you lock in. You gotta just, you gotta go a different track.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  So on this note, I have friends in DC who live in a part that were victimized by many of the raids and I was there for a moment and my friends are just. Telling me like all of their neighbors are just like, yep, like everyone just, uh, these two moms or these two neighbors don't even have kids. They just are out there at, uh, with cones at 7 a.m. to make sure ICE doesn't come when like kids are getting in and out of school. Like they just like added really sort of like PTA-esque activities to their daily lives that all the parents just like had like, it just became extremely practical and extremely normalized. Kind of talking about this middle ground of like, we live in a different world. These things could happen.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  And yet like, we're gonna get like, we're holding up the things we can to live as normally as possible. And it means like texting with your neighbors a lot and just setting up some like really basic things that that are actually outstanding.

• 31:37Ryan Broderick?

  I watched a video this week of a superintendent in Minneapolis.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:41Ryan Broderick?

  Like basically blocking the door of the baseball bat in her hand, trying to get the kids out of the school so that ICE couldn't pick them up like the like, and, and so as I say, like, okay, we have moved from the 2010s emotional protesting, the narrative based protesting, the changing the hearts and minds based protesting to the like, I have a baseball bat and a whistle and a cell phone and like, I am like, I am locking the fuck in. With that though, comes the, the new risk of the dual state. And so like the, the big lesson for I think all of us watching Minneapolis, and this even applies to journalists who believe that they are still on like some sort of like, you know, neoliberal, like, you know, referee space like

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Call them, call them but balls and strikes. Yeah.

• 32:24Ryan Broderick?

  Well, ICE detained the, the fucking diaper girl. What's your face? Caitlin Bennett, the diaper girl. Turning Point USA's diaper girl. She got detained by ICE and she had to like do some stupid post online being like, while I respect their decision to detain me, I'm not one of the bad ones. And it's like, there's no such thing. Like if you are a right wing influencer, you do have obviously like special privileges that we like, we do not have by not being right wing influencers, but like Charlie Kirk, your end job is to be a meat for the meat grinder. Like you. Like you, you are getting influencer money to eventually die for Trump. That is the entire game and like, that's going to happen.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Why did they arrest this woman who, who reeks of subway, subway mayonnaise?

• 33:13Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, so according to her post, it was kind of, oh, we have to go on. She was, she was in Florida at St. Augustine, Florida, and she writes, "When I was detained on Tuesday by a federal agent with a gun in St. Augustine, I complied with his orders to leave a certain area and did not return. I knew he was acting unlawfully and that I did nothing wrong, but you fight that in court, not the street," which is just such bootlicker shit. Uh, she then like explained further that she was federally charged by Democrats for being in public. You were not federally charged by a Democrat in Florida during the Trump administration. I am so sorry. Like that is just a ridiculous, that's a ridiculous frame. I, I'm, that's so dumb. She claims that she was charged with a federal crime by the National Park Service in St. Augustine

• 33:57Ryan Broderick?

  for committing the grave offense of asking Democrats questions on public property. Keep federal agents out of our cities unless they're locking up conservatives for different opinions. Thinking face emoji.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:09Ryan Broderick?

  Like, the whole thing is fucking stupid and like, it doesn't matter. Also, like, as a community note points out, she was at a national monument that is federal property. And so, yeah, like, these people don't get, these people get protections up to a point. But like, all these right wing influencers, like, their job is to cause chaos and eventually die on camera for the Trump administration. Like, that's, that's the job. And I hope you make a lot of money before you eventually, it happens to you. But like, they don't care about you. They, they, the ICE will like throw you in a Gulag just as fast. They don't give a shit.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Before we move on to, uh, less fun matters, your, your brother in podcasting while wearing a beanie, Tim Poole this week.

• 34:56Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, shit.

• 35:00Ryan Broderick?

  I'm wearing a beanie right now for audio listeners, by the way.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Uh, you said, uh, bootlicker and it reminded me. Would you like to respond to Tim Poole's statement that, uh, "I'm not a bootlicker. I'm the boot coming down upon you."

• 35:13Ryan Broderick?

  Donald Trump's not gonna fuck you, bro.

• 35:17Ryan Broderick?

  He, you know that he wears that hat, like even when it's hot out. I, I, I ran past him in Barcelona in like 2018 or 2019 during the Catalan separatist movement protests. And it was like 95 degrees in the shade and he was still wearing his little beanie. He's also like, gotta be like five, six at the most. Like he's a wee lad. He's a little guy.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  We've, uh, we've made a new rule in the show that we're allowed to body shame these men specifically.

• 35:46Ryan Broderick?

  I'm not body shaming him. I just think it's important to note that he wears a beanie when it's hot out. And he's a wee lad. He's a, he's a little guy. He's a, he's a, he's a diminutive little man.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So I want to talk about the White House PR disaster response relief, something from immediately after the shooting and then later in this week, it was reported that people who just happened to be there filming when Alex was being killed were taken to Whipple and had their phones confiscated, which seems like a real escalation in things. And then in an attempt to like get the narrative back on track, uh, I think it was Kristi Noem, I forget exactly who was reporting that they, they are arrested 16 protesters who got out of line and then made them take pictures with the ICE cops

• 36:38Speaker 01

  facing away and, and posted the mugshots everywhere. I see a blurry line between these two things. Can, can you sort of connect the dots and, and do you feel like this is, to me, it's, it seems like an escalation and, but it also feels like, uh, like both moves of desperation.

• 36:57Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, Kristi Noem is trying very hard to protect her job. She is clearly being set up as the fall woman for all of this. She is a woman. She is very visible. She's got Omarosa vibes. Like I could easily see her getting through another bus. She probably knows that that's a possibility and is trying to do everything she can to like create spectacle because there is a certain amount of protection you get in the Trump administration by, by creating news and being part of the headlines. But as we've learned from Greg Bavino, like there is a limit. And if you like, you have to cause, it's a very unique position. It's very reality show, actually in a way. I've

• 37:38Ryan Broderick?

  been watching a lot of traitors recently. So this is, it's very traitors-esque, which is you have to cause chaos.

• 37:46Ryan Broderick?

  While not looking chaotic. Like it's, it's very like old man logic. Like he wants spectacle and he wants to be entertained. But if you do too much to do it, he's gonna cut you loose. So Greg Bavino, we now know like, and I think the question, I think the question this first year of the second administration has been like, what is the limit? Like where is the line? Because in the first administration, we had these like constant firings. It's like very like seasonal approach to government where people would come in. You know, the whole joke about like three scare moochies long or whatever, like all that shit, right? So, but what those firings I think did in a lot of ways was create a useful rubric,

• 38:29Ryan Broderick?

  at least partially for understanding like where the line is, like what is the limit? What are, what is Trump willing to accept? And there really hasn't been a lot of firings, high profile ones that we've heard about in the first administration and the key players that came in, other than Elon Musk, like have kind of all stuck around. And even Elon like is smart enough to know, like, I should like have my little bitch fights with him and then like kind of get back in his good graces. And he does that like, you know, on a, on a fairly regular pattern. So we haven't seen up until Greg Bavino, like what it takes, what, what is the line? What is the limit? And now we kind of know. And, and I think, I think Kirsty Noem is probably next. And, and I have read, you know, different sources reporting that like Stephen Miller was on the chopping block in the first administration

• 39:13Ryan Broderick?

  and they kind of pushed him to the background. And it's very possible that like Stephen Miller goes to, cause he's like an out of control, like psycho. And Trump wants to make money and pillage the state. He doesn't want a lot of like complications around that.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like the, he's like, this is playing badly on TV. And you know, the thing we heard is this is, this is taking away my airtime. It's becoming not the Trump show, which I think might be what's bothering him.

• 39:41Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, maybe, but also it's like, if you're trying to like rob a bank and you have a bunch of people causing a distraction.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Ryan Broderick?

  If that distraction starts to like make people look at you. Like it doesn't really work anymore. And, and, and, you know, I think the, the, the deal that the Trump administration made with the Project 2025 people was, okay, you create, you create the distraction for me and you get to like turn America into a white ethno state and is, and you can do that and I will let you do that with all the powers of the federal government. If you allow me to just make as much money as humanly possible. I mean, to the point where like this week, like Visa just announced that like they have a deal with the Trump card. You can get like a Visa Trump card now. Like that's like, like Don Jr. And, and, and, uh, what's his face? Little boy?

• 40:31Ryan Broderick?

  What's the little boy's name? Not Baron, like the, the little boy, Jared, Jared Kushner. Like Jared Kushner is like wanting to turn Gaza into a, into a Trump themed beach resort. Like these, they're like, these people are, are thieves and crooks and they are working with like blood and soil white nationalists because they have like similar goals. But the minute those goals break down, the crooks are going to kick them out. As we just saw with Greg Bavino. It's very Putin-esque. It's, uh,

• 41:02Speaker 01

  This, this is where I was going to go is like, except the crooks are the currently the people who get, who are able in the position to kick people out, not the blood and soil people.

• 41:12Ryan Broderick?

  But that's still true. That's, I mean, no, that's what I'm going to say. That's true in Russia. So like masculinity, sort of white nationalism, you know, the, uh, imperial conquest. These are tools of the kleptocracy, like tools of the oligarchy. We, we talk all the time about how, you know, masculinity looks like a pyramid scheme on the internet and like, that's not an accident. The idea is like, you create these cultural silos, you know, to move people in the direction you want. So you, like, I think Trump is probably racist. I think he's probably a racist man, but I don't see him as this

• 41:52Ryan Broderick?

  like ideologue. I, I think he is an old racist man who wants to ransack the federal government and our natural resources and enrich himself and his family.

• 42:04Ryan Broderick?

  Because he is, there's nothing inside of him. He's just like a void, right? And he is smart enough to know that like hatred and xenophobia are very useful tools to give him the cover to continue to ransack our country and countries around the world. And now we know this week that like, he is happy to pivot to another cultural silo. So if, if hatred against immigrants isn't working because it's causing too much chaos, you know, he'll, he'll go back to his Greenland project, or his Venezuela project, or his,

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Bathroom bills to distract us.

• 42:39Ryan Broderick?

  Bathroom bills, or crypto scam. And, and I want to be very clear. I am not saying that he is doing these things to distract from anything else. Like, we just did an episode about the Epstein files. I, I agree with Representative Kana that like, it is not like him doing these things to distract us. It's, all of these projects are running simultaneously and he is P T Barnum swinging the spotlight from one to the other to make sure that no one is paying attention to him robbing the audience. Like that's, they're all happening simultaneously.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 00

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• 44:07Speaker 01

  How's your dad feeling?

• 44:09Ryan Broderick?

  He's a little turned around right now. We have conversations about it. My dad worked like in the courthouse for a very long time. He's very familiar with the criminal justice system, like up close. He knows that like cops are like difficult to deal with or trust. Growing up, I was told all kinds of things about like how to protect myself from the police. He also, I think is quite frightened by how they're treating journalists. Cause his son is still a journalist.

• 44:41Ryan Broderick?

  But he can't resist sort of some of the propaganda. I think it's very hard, but I I've seen it from like even more reasonable people like, you know, we haven't even talked about the Democrats trying to like find a reasonable way to manage ICE. You know, through like the QR code bill that was suggested or the the the newest one that's been kicked around like about like how they need better training or like body cams like the but but I will say this about the the mainstream position on ICE, right? I went to a show on Monday night for the singer songwriter I really like named Jason Anderson. And his music is like not political. It's like just kind of nice folky kind of music.

• 45:27Ryan Broderick?

  And he was like, I wrote this song. I don't know if I'm ever gonna play it again. But like, I'm really mad about what happened in Minneapolis. And it was about Alex Preddy and

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Was it better than Bruce Springsteen's?

• 45:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it was. The best, the best anti ICE song though is definitely Waterparks, the pop punk band that did a song that I hate Waterparks. I think they're losers. Like I hate their music. But their ICE song is insane. And some of the lyrics are like unbelievable, including "Doc's every fucking agent ready when they knock. Say they don't need papers, live above the law. Put you on the pavement, break your fucking jaw, protect your fucking neighbors before everybody's gone." And then has like a whole section of how they're like

• 46:18Ryan Broderick?

  they have like a whole section of just like going to the White House to kill the president.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Allegedly.

• 46:25Ryan Broderick?

  Allegedly.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Uh, I just want to say, I love the boss. Just, just give money somewhere. You, you.

• 46:31Ryan Broderick?

  Actually, no, no, Grant, no. Uh, no, I actually don't agree. Because of what happened on Monday, I like, I actually don't agree with that at all. The, the way that this works is this. Bruce Springsteen making a song about ICE is important. The awful pop punk band Waterparks making a song about ICE is important. And this singer songwriter that I've loved since I was a teenager, writing this like beautiful piano ballad and playing it for a room full of people in Brooklyn on Monday. And watching that entire room start sobbing is important. Like, I, I, I understand the like, you're like, Brooklyn leftist, you know, knee jerk, smirking man reaction to this and how normal people process politics.

• 47:15Ryan Broderick?

  But like, this is important because if this doesn't go that, if, if this, if these things don't happen, that's how we get the Hakeem Jeffries version of this with body cams and better training. The only way this works is by abolish ICE, becoming the mainstream liberal and leftist position. And the only way that happens is by every fucking idiot doing their corny little version of it. Because as we said in the first half, like emotional protesting does not change the mind of Trump. And we know it can't. But emotional protesting, once you've already kind of covered the pragmatic protesting, emotional protesting can change the minds of Democrats to actually do something about this.

• 48:00Ryan Broderick?

  And that's, that, the only thing that can change Democrats' minds is Bruce Springsteen. And that's because they're all old and demented.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  There's one other thing. Write your sign as if you're Aaron Sorkin. You have to.

• 48:12Ryan Broderick?

  Whatever it fucking takes. Like, that's why right now, like, I don't have a problem with the Lincoln Project, guys. I don't have a problem with the Bulwark, guys. Any fucking Never Trumpers who also believe that this is fucked up. The mainstream position has to become abolish ICE. Because if we don't, I can't believe I'm quoting the Libertarian Party right now. But like, who, who had a state? Come out this week about it. The tools of ICE will be used for nefarious purposes if they are not abolished. It is a, it is a, it is too dangerous of an organization to exist. And we can't just go like, well, let's go to like a lesser version. No, like we've seen, we like

• 48:54Ryan Broderick?

  in the same way. All right. I'm going to get really galaxy brain with this. In the same way that the founders were like, if the average person can't get a gun, you can't defend yourself against an authoritarian regime, which is, which is basically the basis of the second amendment.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're with Kyle Rittenhouse here. I got you.

• 49:13Ryan Broderick?

  It because it was, it is too dangerous. It is, it is too much power. ICE as it exists, this thing that they've created is too powerful and it is becoming more and more powerful. And the only way to break the, the surveillance state that they, that they are trying to build using ICE with it, with ICE as its shock troops is to make abolish ICE the mainstream position. And, and one of the best ways you can do that is for Bruce Springsteen to write a shitty little song about it.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  I just need to defend this one point that is not important.

• 49:44Ryan Broderick?

  Is it like something about you being from Philadelphia and having like thoughts about Bruce Springsteen?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  It's about, yes, it's about that. He named the song very similar to maybe his greatest song, Streets of Philadelphia, that I listened to when I want to cry. It's as, it's as a, it's as a person who loves most of his discography to be drawing the line between the two. I just felt like was a, okay, just, it is not out of a smugness left to sing. It's as, it's as a, it's as a fan of the boss.

• 50:13Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sorry, that 76 year old man wasn't cool enough for you, Grant.

• 50:19Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sorry, that's 76 year old man.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  And I knew that did not be.

• 50:23Ryan Broderick?

  Didn't find a cooler way to make a song.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Something else. Just don't, just don't invoke, just don't, don't do a sequel to one of your best songs that captured a moment. Anyways, yeah, let's, let's keep talking about the, the anti ICE different, different world right now. I hear your point. A part of me feels like when I log on to Blue Sky and everyone's talking about like how we should deal with them once we're back in power. A part of me is like, Can we focus on getting them out of Minneapolis right now? Is this, is this, is this a, is this distracting from the most immediate threat in this moment? Is this like, I'm, I'm, I'm pro abolishing ICE. I'm not, I'm, and I'm not against this conversation, but it kind of feels sort of like, uh,

• 51:11Speaker 01

  talking about the, like, what furniture you want to buy when, when like the house is currently sinking.

• 51:17Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think that's true.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Ryan Broderick?

  I just don't like, they're not going to leave Minneapolis. They're not going to leave Minnesota. They're not going to leave Maine. They're not going to leave Philly. Like they're saying that they're toning it down or whatever. And we actually know that they're using pretty sophisticated data surveillance to target people and, and steal them, you know, without anyone noticing because they don't want video evidence of the dual state at play. Like they don't want it and we know they don't want it. They, and it actually, they want it, but they want them to film it and them to have it so that they can use it. So filming these things, super important, but more broadly, right now the Democrats like don't have any real power. There, there's kind of only one thing they have, which is like government shutdowns.

• 52:03Ryan Broderick?

  And I've read competing arguments of like, actually that's what Trump wants. Trump wants a government shutdown. And it's like, yeah, he probably does eventually, but like right now it is kind of the only real thing the Democrats can do to put pressure on the Republicans before the midterms. I just said, go for it because like this, like they can't get ICE out of Minnesota. They can't get it. They, they can't do it. They, they, if they could do it, it already have happened. They can't do it. Governor Tim Walz has to call Donald Trump on the phone and beg him over and over again to, to, to tone it down and they're still not doing it. So like, yeah, go for it. Like shut the government down. Like if, if, if, if you can't, if like enough, like enough of this, like this, like come on, man. I don't know.

• 52:46Ryan Broderick?

  We don't know how this is going to play out and, and there are examples from history, none of, none of them good of how this goes, but I hope, I hope there is a way forward without this becoming more violent at this point, like anything to sort of tone that down. But also at the same time, if we, if you give in, then you get a bunch of, you know, more ICE overreach. So I don't know. I don't, I don't. It's above my pay grade, I think, of what should happen next.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Well, one thing we can take some stock in is that The Atlantic has finally agreed that this is fascism. And so I think that's going to have a lot of sway. Uh, Ryan, I hope to not have to talk to you until Monday.

• 53:29Ryan Broderick?

  Me too. And every time I don't hear from you, it's a good day.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, if you're listening to this and you've given us $5, uh, thank you.

• 53:40Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:43Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected].

• 54:24Ryan Broderick?

  Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 54:30Speaker 04

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