Pod Insights Behind the Bastards It Could Happen Here Weekly 236 About this episode All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.
- Bovino’s Visit to Europe
- Idealogical Totalism with Andrew
- The Globalization of Resistance with Andrew
- The Arab Gulf States in the Line of Fire
- Executive Disorder: Pogrom in Belfast, Trans Healthcare, Denaturalization Cases
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Sources/Links:
Bovino’s Visit to Europe
https://remigrationsummit.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/16/christchurch-shooters-links-to-austrian-far-right-more-extensive-than-thought
https://www.breizh-info.com/2026/05/28/260619/gregory-bovino-lhomme-qui-a-pilote-les-operations-trump-contre-limmigration-illegale-parle-a-leurope-interview/
http://www.toddmillerwriter.com/border-patrol-nation/
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/08/RE_2025.08.21_Unauthorized-Immigrants_REPORT.pdf
https://www.cbp.gov/about
https://www.startribune.com/fact-check-federal-officials-claims-about-fatal-minneapolis-shooting/601570444
https://youtu.be/OYIK2-pO_7Y
The Arab Gulf States in the Line of Fire
Andrew Leber’s profile and articles - https://carnegieendowment.org/people/andrew-leber
How Palestine is linked to domestic grievances - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2022.2038567
Executive Disorder: Pogrom in Belfast, Trans Healthcare, Denaturalization Cases
https://www.independent.com/2026/06/04/new-details-emerge-about-leadup-to-largest-fire-in-channel-islands-history/
https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-reports-19th-death-of-2026-georgian
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.293201/gov.uscourts.mad.293201.106.0.pdf
https://x.com/JacobEngels/status/2062157399255847030?s=20
https://wcca.wicourts.gov/caseDetail.html?caseNo=2026CF000289&countyNo=55&index=0&mode=details https://wcca.wicourts.gov/caseDetail.html?caseNo=2026CF000289&countyNo=55&index=0&mode=details
https://www.whois.com/whois/bovino2028.com
https://x.com/CBSNews/status/2064422223541154065?s=20https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2/text
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2/text
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/whats-in-the-secure-america-act/
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/compromised-votes-still-being-counted-right-wing-media-promote-election-misinformation
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116690027934241490
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28199744-dorcasopn060526/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-moves-strip-us-citizenship-17-naturalized-sex-offenders-fraudsters-drug
https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-108886/index.html
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/06/25-5087-2176040.pdf
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-landmark-resolution-end-pediatric-gender-affirming-care-andhttps://www.acluok.org/news/senate-bill-904-faq/
https://www.acluok.org/news/senate-bill-904-faq/https://www.aclu.org/qa-coe-et-al-v-blanche
https://www.aclu.org/qa-coe-et-al-v-blanche
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-parents-say-mount-sinai-plans-to-share-trans-childrens-records-with-trump-administration
https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-admin-weighs-how-to-provide-care-for-nyc-trans-kids-amid-trump-backlash
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/06/transcript--mayor-mamdani-appears-on-wnyc-s-the-brian-lehrer-sho
https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/metropolitan/services/lgbtq-health-center/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/us/julio-sosa-celis-ice-minneapolis-shooting.html
https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/May/castro-arrested
https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2064457103134343170?s=20
https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/2064393192162660733?s=20
https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2064290478091067601?s=20
https://t.co/lY0s8D3jZy
https://x.com/DanLamothe/status/2064336646376505687?s=20
https://x.com/Reuters/status/2064794729477447978?s=20
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/europe/northern-ireland-knife-attack-belfast-intl
https://bsky.app/profile/enddbelfast.bsky.social/post/3mnxbrtzgsk2y
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 30,532 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:33 Speaker 03 Call Zone Media.
1:35 Robert Evans? 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.
2:00 Robert Evans? Mia, are you excited?
2:01 Speaker 05 Today to learn about Gregory K. Bovino.
2:06 Speaker 06 You know, I would describe myself going into this as an amateur but enthusiast Greg Bovino hater. I am very familiar with his work in Chicago. I'm familiar with his work in Minneapolis. I am less familiar with his other work. I'm excited to have a higher tier of hater of one of the worst people we've ever had.
2:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, really a gem of the American law enforcement system. We're going to talk mostly today about Greg Bovino's post-career pivot, which seems mostly to be asking to have his old career back. But we can talk also a little bit about his previous career work when he was down here. He was in IB, he was in El Centro, he was in Blythe for a while. But last week, Mia, he was in Portugal.
2:48 Speaker 06 Oh, boy.
2:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. Do you want to guess why?
2:51 Speaker 06 You know, okay, going through my, my, my history of Portugal, it's country that had a left-wing military coup that didn't go far enough. I wish to say they never quite got rid of all the fascists.
3:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, a country that notably has a long history of fascism.
3:08 Speaker 06 Yes.
3:09 Speaker 05 Which is why he was there, actually. He was there in a remigration summit.
3:14 Speaker 06 Oh, no.
3:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, like. So I'm just going to use the conference's own website here. It is a set fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical policies whose objective is to prevent population replacement through the reversal of migratory flows. There's nothing there about undocumented people. There's nothing there about visas, right? Because this isn't about that. This is about race and ethnicity and removing people who do not line up with what you consider to be the the national race.
3:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, this is, this is the ethnic cleansing campaign. Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's like a lot of parallels in the history of all of these countries, but like, yeah, I think if you, if you look at the most immediate one, it's, oh, this is like the shit the Nazis were talking about doing while they were building the concentration camps with like Jewish people, right? Is that they were gonna like deport them all to Israel or whatever.
4:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, we'll keep moving them east and.
4:16 Speaker 06 At the very least, this is an ethnic cleansing plan.
4:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the explicit goal, right? Like, there is not mentioned in that definition of undocumented people, even the way that they Bovino prefers to refer to it as illegal aliens. A term he uses a lot, and I think he sometimes uses it in quite elastic fashion. But even in this case, that is not what this conference is about.
4:38 Speaker 06 No, yeah.
4:39 Speaker 05 This is very much a conference about a white Europe.
4:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
4:43 Speaker 05 It was organized by Martin Selner. Selner is a neo-Nazi who famously exchanged emails with Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter.
4:53 Speaker 06 Oh, great.
4:54 Speaker 05 Yeah. Bovino spoke about this at the conference and he said that they hadn't met in person before. But after talking for a little while, they found they were on the same sheet of music.
5:05 Speaker 06 Incredible.
5:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, you gotta Google people, man. And like you Google Martin Selner and the first thing that comes up is that he emailed Brenton Tarrant. Unless I guess that's not an issue.
5:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, right.
5:16 Speaker 05 Judging by the general company he kept, I don't think that's an issue because he's joined like a Spanish Vox party there, AfD there, AFD, the German far-right party. Racists from all over Europe.
5:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
5:30 Speaker 05 We also saw the sort of racists in America who I would describe as like fancy racists, the race science guys, right?
5:38 Speaker 06 Oh, the kind of like the beret people?
5:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:40 Speaker 06 Is it, is it those guys or is it the, the kind of newer gen like tech fascist people? So there's overlap between them.
5:47 Speaker 05 No, it's like the Vida kind of tendency.
5:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, no. Should we, should we explain what the Vida, yeah, a little bit?
5:56 Speaker 05 Go ahead, man. Yeah, take it.
5:58 Speaker 06 Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say, at some point, we're gonna have Molly on. I, I am a, I am what you would call a, I guess technically a professional Nazi identifier or whatever, but I'm like a low level one. And everyone else in this network is a very high level ones. We'll probably have Molly on at some point to like actually really go into Vidaire and like that kind of shit, but.
6:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's broadly speaking, it's Peter Brimelow's anti-immigration website. We're not talking about anti-immigration in terms of like discussions about what visas we should give, right? We're talking about like white nationalism.
6:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, these are like Nazi Nazis. These are people that.
6:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:39 Speaker 06 You know, like, I don't think the US has ever really had what, what in Europe is called like the Cordon Sanitaire, which is supposed to separate out like the, the mainstream right-wing parties from like the Nazis. Like, we've never had that. So Vida has been kind of more in anti-immigration circles. But it's also like, those are people that, you know, even you're kind of like, really, really far right, like, people on the radio or politicians don't associate with because they are fairly open Nazis.
7:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, there was some stuff that traced back to Vida in Agenda 47. I remember thinking like, this ain't good.
7:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
7:19 Speaker 05 Vida, just for people who like, have lived a blessed life and don't know, refers to Virginia Dare, who is, I believe, the first white child, or the first child, first girl, I don't know, maybe there's a way before, but I think it was the first white child born in the United States to settlers. One of the, one of the Roanoke people, right?
7:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, which is, I don't know, like, maybe you motherfuckers could have made like the Roanoke people and disappeared, but...
7:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, but, yeah, that would be nice. Unfortunately, Mere.
7:47 Speaker 06 No, unfortunately, they didn't, and they didn't unfortunately assimilate into indigenous cultures the way that the Roanoke people almost certainly did.
7:54 Speaker 05 Yes.
7:54 Speaker 06 And instead, decided to...
7:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, in fact, quite the opposite.
7:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, half a millennia-long campaign of terror and bloodshed.
8:01 Speaker 05 Yeah. It's interesting to see Bovino, I guess, like aligning with these. European anti-immigration discussion is different. It's not really dealing so much in undocumented people. It's dealing with people under various legal statuses. I'm not saying there aren't undocumented people in Europe, there are, but the discussion there has moved past that in a toxic way.
8:24 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:24 Speaker 05 In a way that is like, we need to remove these people, even though they do have like, legal documentation that allows them to be here. If the state says you're cool or you're not cool, like, that's not my concern.
8:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:36 Speaker 05 But it's still alarming to see the bigotry move past even that, right? Like, without the pretense of enforcing the law.
8:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:46 Speaker 05 And just simply being about removing people who we don't think we want to live next to because they're not white.
8:51 Speaker 06 You know, one of the groups that you talked about there, like the AFD in Germany, like this, this has been happening for like a long time, but one of their like slogans was remove kebab.
8:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:59 Speaker 06 And that's just literally like, remove all Turkish people from the country.
9:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:03 Speaker 06 And the AFD wants to do this. There are documents that have leaked from them that are them planning at conferences to, okay, this is how we're going to remove the non-white people, this is how we're going to remove the Jewish people. This is not even like the pretense of anything I do with the law. This is just like, we are the original Nazis if we want to do ethnic cleansing against non-white people.
9:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. Most of the people at the conference are peddling great replacement shit, right? And they
9:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
9:31 Speaker 05 They genuinely believe that that is something that exists and that they can reverse it. At the conference, Bovino gave an interview. I found it on a website called Breezinfo, B R E I Z H. It's, it's a Breton and French language website. It's also published, I saw, in a couple of other Substacks, so I wonder if it was a pool interview that he gave. The very few who translated it. I should note that I translated it from French. I don't think Bovino speaks French, so I'm imagining they translated it from English to French. And there is an editor's note that says the editor was an AI.
10:06 Speaker 06 Oh, great.
10:07 Speaker 05 So any of the quotations here, we can't attribute them directly, right?
10:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
10:12 Speaker 05 We, we can't assume that those are the words he said in English, because it's been through three layers of bullshit.
10:17 Speaker 06 Yeah.
10:18 Speaker 05 So I understand that going in. Nonetheless, I think it's a very interesting insight into how Greg Bovino sees the world. And what's interesting about that is like Greg Bovino was very popular in Border Patrol. He was, by the standards of the patrol, a good Border Patrol agent, right? He was liked, and I don't think he developed these opinions in the, in the few months since he retired.
10:44 Speaker 06 No.
10:45 Speaker 05 Yeah. And like, a lot of the way he talks is not dissimilar to the way Border Patrol agents talk among themselves, right? I think that like, what is interesting about this is not like Greg Bovino is essentially sharing a platform and agreeing with Nazis. It is after 25, 26 years in more than, actually 30 years in, in the Border Patrol, this is what the Border Patrol formed him into.
11:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
11:12 Speaker 05 Because the point I want to make here is this shit is not something we can easily reform. This is not something we can train. If this country gets through this and in 2028, yes, we have another election.
11:27 Speaker 06 God.
11:28 Speaker 05 We can't fucking let this keep happening, right? The the tool that Bovino.
11:34 Speaker 06 Yeah.
11:35 Speaker 05 Was deploying in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Charlotte, in all these other cities in Los Angeles, right?
11:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, Memphis, like.
11:44 Speaker 05 New Orleans, like.
11:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, like all over the country. Yeah.
11:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, it is a tool that Democrats build as well as Republicans.
11:53 Speaker 06 Yeah.
11:54 Speaker 05 And the place he's at, he got to with eight years working under Barack Obama, with four years working under under Joe Biden, like, we need to understand what we are diverting a fire hose of money towards.
12:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:08 Speaker 05 With the Border Patrol, right? And I guess we can just start with where Greg Bovino started, which was comparing himself to Nazi general Erwin Rommel.
12:16 Speaker 06 Great.
12:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, right out the gate. He also compared himself to Patton T Lawrence, you know, like historically, it makes you wonder.
12:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:26 Speaker 05 I think he probably has some kind of clean vermark thing going on in his head where they're just soldiers and he can respect both of them for their tactical prowess, you know, like. He says, quote, "They grasp the overall strategy where others in government or in the political class did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic exposed events, is very rare." I also listened to a couple of podcasts that Bovino did with a former Border Patrol agent who used to work in San Diego Sector. And you hear this a lot, right? Talk about battles, talk about soldiers. Bovino sees himself as like a general on Border Patrol as his soldiers fighting in a in a war.
13:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's not what they do.
13:09 Speaker 05 Oh. Clearly, they see it as that. I understand why, because like they've they've gone around the country generating so much ill will that, yeah, everywhere they go, people fucking hate them.
13:19 Speaker 06 Your actual job, and this is a thing we saw in Chicago, is dragging screaming babies out of their fucking homes and putting them in camps.
13:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:26 Speaker 06 I think this is this is going back to the thing you were talking about earlier about this not being something that's reformable is that. Yeah, that task is what Border Patrol was built for. That's what it was doing under all of these administrations, just fucking dragging people screaming from their homes in the dark of the night. And like, the only way you can get people to do that is by creating a crucible that creates Nazis.
13:51 Speaker 05 You can't have compassion for the people whose families you're tearing apart, right?
13:54 Speaker 06 Like, yeah.
13:55 Speaker 05 People should read Jen Bird's book if they want to know what going through Border Patrol Academy is like. Um, so just give a trigger warning that Jen was sexually assaulted and writes about that. Border Patrol has a very high rate of sexual assault, right? Border Patrol is 95% male.
14:10 Speaker 06 Yep.
14:11 Speaker 05 I have seen people in Border Patrol who do have compassion. And then I have not seen them anymore, like it drives those people away.
14:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:21 Speaker 05 They, they have a high dropout rate and like, I think there are people who genuinely believe that what they will do is keep their community safe and rescue people who get stuck crossing the border in the desert. Adjudicate them a fair process, deliver them to a fair process and, and they will do the best they can. I don't see those people remain in the patrol for very long.
14:41 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:42 Speaker 05 Right? Like I interact with, obviously like the stance of this podcast is that you should remain silent, not talk to cops. But like I, uh, I interact with Border Patrol agents more often than most people do, right? That is the nature of my job and the place I live and the places I go. And like, I think these days the recruiting they're doing, they're getting a lot of people who are coming in, starting like this.
14:59 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:59 Speaker 05 But I don't think that's, that's always been the case. Like I understand that there are people also in communities along the border where there's very little economic opportunity. And then this is the only chance they have. But I see those people get spat out. Like you said, Mia, if you are going to train people to tear families apart, then you have to train them to hate. And I think that is what we see in this, right?
15:20 Speaker 06 Like, yeah.
15:21 Speaker 05 It's really interesting. Vivino tells his own story a little bit and he tells his, his own story on this podcast I listen to as well. He starts with Operation Don't Let Him Ride. Are you familiar with Operation Don't Let Him Ride?
15:33 Speaker 06 No.
15:34 Speaker 05 Okay. So you have to go all the way back to 2010.
15:37 Speaker 06 Oh God.
15:37 Speaker 05 Uh, Las Vegas, Nevada.
15:39 Speaker 06 Yeah. Little, little tiny baby Mia.
15:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:42 Speaker 06 13 year old Mia.
15:44 Speaker 05 Oh God, fuck me. I feel old. Yeah, I was in grad school.
15:51 Speaker 05 And Greg Bovino, I think he's at the Blythe Station at that time. And they do this operation at a bus station in Nevada. It lasts for 60 minutes. It gets called off. The Nevada Senator is pissed off about it. Their goal, they said, was to apprehend traffickers and to rescue people who have been trafficked or smuggled, right? In a community meeting, which was convened because the whole Latino community in Las Vegas was like, the fuck, right? This internal enforcement was not a common thing at the time. Paul Beeson, who was chief agent of the Yuma Sector at the time, said, quote, "In that short period of time, we did not apprehend anybody we felt was actively engaged in alien
16:36 Speaker 05 smuggling. We did not encounter any human trafficking victims." So to me, that didn't sound like a win.
16:44 Speaker 06 Yeah, so they were just rounding people up at bus stops.
16:48 Speaker 05 Correct. They went to like a bus depot station.
16:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, like one of the big bus.
16:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:54 Speaker 06 Yeah. And they just rounded people up and...
16:55 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. So his interview with this former Border Patrol agent, he said that they apprehended more than one alien per minute of the operation.
17:04 Speaker 07 That was called Operation Don't Let Them Ride. And that operation was set for about three days. It lasted 60 minutes. But the interesting thing is we caught more aliens than there were minutes in the operation. It was a very successful operation. Very successful. Yes, sir. Harry Reid called Hussein Obama and had that shut down immediately. But we never forgot that. We never forgot the vast amount of criminals that we apprehended in 2010 on those bus checks in Las Vegas and the pervasive problem even then that we saw.
17:45 Speaker 07 A lot of that problem came in under Barack Hussein Obama as well as Bill Clinton.
17:50 Speaker 05 I want to know the newspapers at the time reported a number that was more than two dozen. Technically, let's say the operation lasted 60 minutes. That is more than two dozen. It would be unusual to report a number of 60 by saying more than two dozen, right?
18:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:05 Speaker 05 What is more interesting to me is that this operation was supposed to find people who had been trafficked and people who were trafficking and it failed. Greg Bovino seems to have seen it as a success because it just found people.
18:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:20 Speaker 05 Right? People who were undocumented, people who were otherwise in infraction of immigration laws, but who were not involved in trafficking. Because for him, it seems like the goal was slightly different and therefore the criteria for success are slightly different. Right? And this kind of fits into this narrative of him. So like, I can see why he, it is, especially in the context of him talking to the remigration conference, for him it's a win. But for the explicit goals of the border patrol at that time, it's not. So he cites this as a beginning of his journey to where he is, right? As a guy they went to for massive surges of border patrol agents into cities tearing families apart.
19:03 Speaker 05 And I think if we see it the way he sees it, then we can see why he sees it as a success. Bovino in his early career had worked a lot in the Alcentro sector, right? And he eventually became chief patrol agent in the Alcentro sector. He was in Bortak for a while. I've read a Defense University paper that interviewed him. He was in Honduras with Bortak training border patrol there.
19:25 Speaker 06 Oh, Jesus Christ.
19:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, everyone should read Empire of Borders. Everyone should read Border Patrol Nation. But like, the DHS has done this for years, right? Funded, armed and equipped and trained border patrol units all over the Americas. Because that is how America externalizes its border.
19:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, in a very similar way to the way Europe does it with Frontex and, you know, like the deals they cut with Gaddafi and then the successive governments in Libya and stuff like that.
19:50 Speaker 05 Yes.
19:51 Speaker 06 And the people they're training there, it's like School of the Americas shit are just like actual monsters. Like.
19:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, the. Sally Hayden's book, My Third Time We Drowned, is one of the more heartbreaking books that's available for a human to read. But like, if you want to know about the fucked up stuff Europe's doing in Libya, it's a good book.
20:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:08 Speaker 05 That, yes, you're, it moves the violence away from the metropole.
20:12 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:13 Speaker 05 Right? It moves it further. I've seen it from my own eyes, right? I've seen what happens in Panama, not necessarily with the actions of any border patrols there, but just by forcing people to take that route. Like, I've seen
20:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:24 Speaker 05 how the externalization of our borders kills people. And I have seen how the Biden administration funded deportations of people who I can't find any criminal record for. And I have seen literally babies taken out of people's hands.
20:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:38 Speaker 05 And they were deporting young men at that point. But I look, I've literally watched families torn apart right there, just after crossing the Darien Gap. And it's heartbreaking.
20:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:48 Speaker 05 Talking of heartbreaking, we haven't done ad pivot.
20:50 Speaker 06 Oh, boy. Hopefully, these, these products and services will fix your heartbreak.
20:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:55 Speaker 06 Oh, God.
20:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, here's an advert for whiskey.
21:09 Speaker 05 Okay, we are back. So, one of the things Bovino did a lot in this interview is he sought to kind of distinguish himself from what he calls the status quo bureaucrats. He's not wrong that, like, one of the roles of a chief in a sector is to speak to the press, right? He seems to be very upset that Roddy Scott and Tom Homan didn't speak to the press when they started these big operations. He says, quote, CBP Commissioner Roddy Scott and Borders Chair Tom Homan not only had no experience with full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak publicly during operations. Their reluctance triggered the unique situation I mentioned above. I need a sort nor ask to become the public face of the operation.
21:49 Speaker 05 But for this type of operation, there can only be one. The responsibility fell to me. When you listen to those interviews he did when he was in the patrol, he wasn't as critical of his leadership as he is now.
22:00 Speaker 06 Yeah.
22:01 Speaker 05 Probably for the very obvious reasons. But like, the letdown by leadership thing is a thing. We've seen this on the right so many times, right?
22:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's the classic backstab myth employed by one Adolf Hitler.
22:14 Speaker 05 Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, and in many cases thereafter. And he kind of seeks in this to To differentiate field agents from, from like, I guess he, what he calls status quo bureaucrats, right? And he is genuinely very popular among field agents, like, and he did like grow through the border patrol, right? Like, he's not a guy who like came from somewhere else. Like, he has a 30 year career. He's done like mountain interdiction stuff down in the Hacumbia wilderness. Like, like he's, he's definitely like had his boots on the ground. I think they like that. And I think for him, that gives him like, like the, he feels like he speaks for the border patrol.
22:53 Speaker 05 And that like these people who are like bureaucrats are what is constraining him and his guys from doing what they want to do. And like, it's really interesting to see the terms, how he describes what they want to do, right? He called the withdrawal from Minneapolis a surrender. He called protesters the opposition in this podcast I listened to. He calls protesters pro fascist, which is very, given the company he keeps is fucking ridiculous. I feel like the other people at that conference can't be happy with that. Yeah, that's the thing, right? We're the fascists here, damn it. Yeah, they're not hiding it. Like, it's very interesting to see him like not willing to
23:34 Speaker 05 kind of surrender that term. You know what I mean? Like to not quite say it. At the same time as like, uh, yeah, yeah, there are other people at the conference who are like, no, we're the fascists. What are you talking about? They're not pro fascist. They hate us. Like, like, he's still like one step removed from, uh, joining his buddies there. Another thing I found interesting was that he says border patrol is often referred to as, quote, "the federal law enforcement Marine Corps." What? Does anyone say that? I've not heard them say that. I, I, what? I've never heard that. It's a very strange. I'm guessing what he's referring to is like, the Marine Corps has these expeditionary units which can deploy very quickly to conflict zones. Like we saw in
24:14 Speaker 05 Iran, right? Like, and I'm guessing that's what he means. Like they're the, the hit squad. Yeah, they're the, they're the like, oh my God, we found like four children sleeping in a bedroom. We have to go, we have to go send their like tactical squad after them. Yeah. There, there are, there are first line of defense against, against tiny babies. Yep. And again, like Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.
24:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
24:37 Speaker 05 When people were in the street in Portland, it was Border Patrol, they said.
24:40 Speaker 06 Yep. It was BORTAC. Yeah. Yeah.
24:43 Speaker 05 Right. They do have something of a history of being the federal government's hit squad.
24:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
24:47 Speaker 05 When they want to stamp on Americans, they do send the Border Patrol. Interestingly, he went on to cite the Ole Miss riot. Are you familiar with the Ole Miss riot?
24:59 Speaker 06 It sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure.
25:02 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, you can surmise what's gonna happen, right? It's a university in the South.
25:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:08 Speaker 05 What happens is that James Meredith, a black man, had attempted to register at the school several times. He had been prevented by racists, including the governor. And at one point, JFK sent Border Patrol agents along with federal, I think they were cross sworn as marshals, maybe, to accompany him to register. They ended up surrounded in the lyceum. Twenty-eight federal agents were shot.
25:32 Speaker 06 Jesus.
25:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, this is like, they had a fucking fight about it. Like, uh, two of the, the people surrounding the lyceum were killed.
25:40 Speaker 06 Dude, I'm not sure I've ever in my entire life seen a government deployment and thought you should have sent the National Guard, but like, yeah, I guess you should have sent the National Guard. Jesus. Yeah. But the one, the one southern racist really, I guess, loved shooting beds to oppose integration.
25:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, like, uh, in this case, they sent the regular ass army to come get him out.
26:01 Speaker 06 Yeah.
26:02 Speaker 05 I think this was the era when they felt like National Guards in the South were not entirely trustworthy.
26:07 Speaker 06 Yeah. Well, yeah, you, you, you, you'd have to do a Trump style, like we're sending the, the fucking like.
26:12 Speaker 05 California National Guard to Mississippi or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. They normally send like one of those QRF, like 82nd Airborne or something like that.
26:21 Speaker 06 Yeah. I, wow. I, I, I can't believe I'm in a position where I support the deployment of US troops against Americans.
26:27 Speaker 05 I know. It's wild. I know, but it's a wild scenario.
26:34 Speaker 06 I guess it's like, because they're trying to do a lynching. So, yeah.
26:38 Speaker 05 Like, in that case, yeah, maybe stop the lynching. But it's a really interesting choice because he talks, he's talking about how border patrols, you know, like they had this long history of doing this. And again, like, he's not wrong. And I guess maybe the old miss thing plays a part in their mythos because they were fighting against the racists. I can see why they would want to hold on to that. It's interesting to see him doing that at the racist conference.
27:02 Speaker 06 Yeah. It's like, oh, no, no, no, we are a different kind of racist. We are California racist. We are, we are, we are not like the primitive southern racist. We have advanced our level of racism to cleansing levels.
27:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, like, and he's very popular amongst the like, we're a different kind of racist racist, right? Like, the VDA tendency is the like, quote unquote, scientific racists.
27:24 Speaker 06 Yeah. And by the way, I want to clarify before I get screamed at, the thing I just said was like, his perspective, not mine, Jesus Christ, fuck these people.
27:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
27:33 Speaker 06 All of them.
27:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please don't clip me or out of context. So like, he then goes on after he's explained this to explain like his history of migration. He says that around in the year 2000, quote unquote, the floodgates opened. His basic thesis is summed up in his statement from 2000 to 2026, our borders were nothing but speed bumps. Illegals and smugglers knew that once they crossed the border, they were virtually safe from any consequences. Couple of things there that obviously includes Trump's first term and part of the second term.
28:07 Speaker 05 Amnesia about Trump having a first term seems to be quite a common issue on the right.
28:10 Speaker 06 It's really astonishing and on the left, too. I don't know. I'm seeing a more and more certain, certain, certain people who will go unmentioned, who were working for Blackwater under the first Trump administration.
28:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's very interesting to see this narrative, but again, not an uncommon one.
28:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
28:27 Speaker 05 Like, he talks about how he wrote a paper called Illegal Aliens: Destruction of Natural Resources. So he has two master's degrees. One is from the National Defense University. And I'm not sure if that's his second master's thesis, which I'd be interested to read it, but I haven't been able to find it. And I'm not sure N D U makes master stuff public. And I think generally how it works is you have to opt to make it public.
28:51 Speaker 06 Ooh.
28:52 Speaker 05 Like, I'm interested to know, is this kind of eco-nativism? Is it like carrying capacity shit? Like what?
28:57 Speaker 06 Yeah. It kind of, the other thing that kind of reminds me is like, you get like, you get this from like Scandinavian racists where they're like, they have this line about the welfare state, like the welfare state is a fire and you can only have so many people huddled around the fire. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, God.
29:13 Speaker 05 We see this, like, we saw a lot from Mike Lee, right? When he was attempting another pathetic excuse for selling off our public lands. Like, Lee was saying how like so much of our wilderness areas are destroyed by migrants. So we have to destroy them and sell them to protect them. The logic of Mike Lee is unknowable, but I'm interested to read that. If anyone, if you have anyone that's like a library ninja, get in touch. I would, I'd love to, I'd love to find that out. He spent a great deal of time explaining his hundred million number. And he's, he refers to these people as illegal aliens, right? But he contrasts this with the number of 20 million. He says that comes from Pew Research and he says that it hasn't changed since the 1970s.
29:57 Speaker 06 What?
29:57 Speaker 05 That is not a statistic which is played out in Pew's published documents. I'm looking here at a 2023 paper from Pew, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. 1993.5 million, 2008.6, 2015, 11.0, thanks Obama, and up to 14 million in 2023. He claims it's been 20 since the 1970s. Obviously, he's not giving a source here, but he claims Pew has said that, and that's not what I found from Pew. He sort of arrives at this hundred million dollar number. First, he said he was looking at some stuff from investment bank Bear Stearns. I don't know what he was looking at.
30:37 Speaker 06 Wow.
30:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's it's very strange. He then goes on to give the only hard statistics he gives. And he was talking about Charlotte, North Carolina here when they were doing Operation Charlotte's Web. Estimates indicated that thirty percent or more of commuters were no longer traveling. This means at least thirty percent of them were most likely illegal immigrants. This is based on traffic delays. It's the number he is getting the the amount of time people spending traffic jet like he's going on Google Maps. This is a massive logical leap. He then says that's about a quarter of Charlotte's commuters, thirty percent, not not a quarter. And this figure, you guessed it, fits perfectly with the total of one hundred million out of four hundred twenty million people in the United States. I estimate that one hundred million are illegal immigrants, same as the observation for children absent from Charlotte's schools.
31:22 Speaker 05 More than thirty percent of students were missing. These were, of course, illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. The category of illegal children, uh, fascinating choice of words.
31:34 Speaker 06 Oh, God.
31:35 Speaker 05 I'm guessing he's talking about like undocumented kids or kids whose parents are undocumented. There's separate categories there, but like. There are many reasons. I don't think we have to explain this to listeners why why some people might not have wanted to be out and about or at school.
31:48 Speaker 06 Uh huh.
31:49 Speaker 05 When border patrol are dragging people out of cars and smashing their windows.
31:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, this is an extremely common thing, which is like, yeah.
31:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, like not wanting to die.
31:56 Speaker 06 I want to point this out, too. Like, they shot, like, American citizens, not not that it's like worse to shoot an American citizen than a noncitizen, but like.
32:02 Speaker 05 No, but it doesn't matter.
32:03 Speaker 06 Everyone, everyone knew that they had done that.
32:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 06 Like, they did that in Chicago.
32:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:08 Speaker 06 Like.
32:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, they did it in Chicago. They were gonna go do it again in Minneapolis, like.
32:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, obviously, they they shot protesters. They also just shot random people, like, who they were like, oh, you're nonwhite, fuck you, right? Like, it's like that kind of shit.
32:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, people who got in most of the incidents, we've seen that what they have said is a person tried to ram them with their car. And most of the times we have seen video evidence. It certainly don't look like that to me.
32:30 Speaker 06 No, yeah.
32:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, this idea that thirty percent of students are therefore undocumented people is ludicrous.
32:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
32:36 Speaker 05 They were in Charlotte in like middle to late November, like there's a time when Americans just often, uh, travel. Don't go to school, right? They have this Thanksgiving thing here. Uh, and people people like to, uh, to enjoy time with their families.
32:50 Speaker 06 Oh.
33:01 Speaker 05 He then goes on to talk about the differences between US and Europe. There's a phrase here that I want to read again. I want you to understand that this is translated twice. Uncontrolled immigration to the United States now poses the greatest threat to our culture and our very existence. This goes for you in Europe too. Even when we manage to get past these cumbersome bureaucrats and politicians, the grassroots will take care of it for us. The precise tactics for removing those who need to be removed may take different forms in Europe and the United States. The grassroots will take care of it for us is between M dashes. I don't know if he means the grassroots will vote them out.
33:45 Speaker 05 Otherwise, that seems like a pogrom, right?
33:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's, that's not, that's not good.
33:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, that just seems like an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by people.
33:56 Speaker 05 I want to be like, like, but because that's a really scary concept, right?
33:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, but also, yeah, it's an AI translation that was then translated by you. And I don't know, I don't know how your French is these days.
34:06 Speaker 05 My French is fine, but like.
34:08 Speaker 06 Yeah. I forget who said all translation is an act of violence, but yeah, like humans doing translation is an act of violence. AI doing translations is like the fucking future Terminator.
34:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:22 Speaker 06 Bullshit where the machines have killed everyone.
34:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, like a lot really is lost in translation in between the M dashes. The French is la base populaire, son charrier a, connu. So yeah, come at me, French speakers. Let me know if you think there's a better translation for that. He then goes on to try and like not blame Trump, which was interesting, said, I don't believe Trump has abandoned his campaign promise. I believe that his advisors do not bring him back to reality on the ground. And then I skipped a little here. If I had to do it again, I would have briefed Trump directly several times rather than relying on this inner circle who might have interests elsewhere. Trump is the best president I've ever worked for. I believe he will return to that campaign promise soon. Again, it's kind of a fatty thing, right? Like it wasn't the leader, it wasn't the dear leader, it was the people who failed to reflect the dear leader's thought.
35:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:12 Speaker 05 It's very interesting to see him speaking so clearly this way. Like, there's two ways he could be going with this. He could be angling for his job back. To be clear, right? The reason we don't have Norman Baffino anymore, in my opinion, is that after ICE and then CBP, both murdered US citizens in the plain light of day on camera, and then took to the television to lie about those US citizens in the hours after they murdered them. They became too toxic for even the Trump administration to touch.
35:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, they were staggeringly unpopular. Everyone fucking hated them.
35:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, you literally lost like, uh, the old guys with NRA hats at the gun range who I sometimes talk to, like.
35:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, fucking, again, I can't keep coming back to like, they lost fucking Kurt Warner, who like, is like a quarterback who has never once talked about politics ever, and is like, like, made like a documentary that was like, a bunch about like, his like, faith journey, right? And they like, when Kurt Warner is being like, hey, what the fuck?
36:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
36:17 Speaker 06 You've lost, you're losing the conservative football guys.
36:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, you shoot a white man on his knees in the street in the back.
36:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:25 Speaker 05 While you're beating him up.
36:27 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:28 Speaker 05 That's how you lose Americans.
36:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's how you lose Barstool. Like, it's hideous.
36:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, he kinda has two choices, right? Like, he can, and he can go into the consulting world, he can go into the grifting world, right? And just become like a podcast grifter. Welcome to the club. Or he can go into politics. And I wonder which, like, he's kind of left two of those pathways open, right? Like, he could kind of,
36:54 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:55 Speaker 05 podcast grifter or politics.
36:57 Speaker 06 Well, and you could do both now, too, I guess.
36:59 Speaker 05 That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:00 Speaker 06 See, see, see the head of the FBI.
37:02 Speaker 05 Too much. It was too much for Dan Bongino. He retired and returned to the pod phase.
37:06 Speaker 06 I guess, I guess, I guess, I guess it's like our noble, like, Health and Human Services Secretary, the latest shit-eating Kennedy or whatever, like, can still do that shit, but.
37:17 Speaker 05 I, yeah, the serial podcast guest. I just want to come back to like, we need to reflect on this now, right? Like, we're doing primaries for the midterms right now. The Democrats have doubled down on same old shit almost everywhere across the country. Like, we have seen some better candidates, right? But like, I understand that like, the pathway to a beautiful life is not through the Democratic Party. But if they are incapable of seeing that this isn't something that we can reform. If they do what Biden did in 2020, which is like, oh, they just need more money.
37:48 Speaker 06 Yeah.
37:49 Speaker 05 This ratchet will continue to only move in one direction, which is towards a brutalization of more people.
37:54 Speaker 06 Yeah. Just on a very basic level, like, having a massive institutional apparatus that produces Nazis and gives them the authority to do the thing that the Nazis want to do is not a way that any kind of democracy can survive.
38:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:10 Speaker 06 And that that's what we've seen.
38:12 Speaker 05 To paraphrase, we have created an entity which is exempt from the law in order to enforce it.
38:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
38:17 Speaker 05 We can't keep up with that. And like, now is a moment, I guess, that demands bravery. And from the Democrats, I've seen cowardice.
38:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
38:26 Speaker 05 And like, if they continue to be cowards right now, we're going to go so far down this path, there's no coming back.
38:35 Speaker 06 Yeah.
38:35 Speaker 05 And I don't fucking know, but I think that's something we really need to reflect on.
38:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, we have 20,000 bovinos.
38:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:46 Speaker 06 Who we've given guns and training and authority to.
38:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, and who we've allowed to kill people in our streets and not face accountability, right?
38:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
38:57 Speaker 05 Like, I am not a county attorney appreciator generally, but like, it makes me happy to see that Hennepin County Attorney go after the ICE agent.
39:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
39:06 Speaker 05 Who shot someone through their front door and they lied about it. Like, if a liberal democracy can't do any of that kind of stuff, then it's worthless. It doesn't mean anything anymore.
39:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it won't, and it won't be a democracy after, right?
39:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, it made its own bed to die on.
39:21 Speaker 06 There's examples of this fucking everywhere, right? But like, the Biden administration was tragedy as farce of like, allende promoting Pinochet.
39:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:32 Speaker 06 Like, that's a thing, that's a thing that he did. He promoted Pinochet, right? Like, if you don't get rid of the people who want to fucking kill you, and you instead give them more power, they're going to fucking kill you.
39:46 Speaker 05 Yeah. And like Biden tried to, they tried pretty hard to retire Bovino because he would talk a lot about the situation at the border and Biden administration, but they didn't.
39:54 Speaker 06 No, they didn't. And then also like they made more of them.
39:58 Speaker 05 Yeah. And also they threw as much money, like the money that your kid doesn't get for free meals is because Border Patrol has Blackhawks like.
40:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
40:07 Speaker 05 Yeah. That was a heartwarming and inspiring episode of It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.
40:16 Speaker 06 Yeah. But hey, we beat the Nazis once, we can do it again.
40:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. And Minneapolis beat these people. That's the other thing, right? Like they won.
40:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
40:24 Speaker 05 They came out and they stood together as a community. They didn't focus on trivial bullshit that divides them. They looked out for one another. Border Patrol thought they were in a battle and if they were in a battle, then they did lose it. They surrendered, right?
40:37 Speaker 06 Yeah. And like, that's, that's also not to say that there aren't still like horrifying shit happening there, right? Like there's still raids going on.
40:43 Speaker 05 You're absolutely correct. Yeah. And that like people aren't dealing with the many other ills of capitalism and existence under the state as it is today. But like,
40:52 Speaker 06 Yeah.
40:52 Speaker 05 they were not able to make those people cower in fear.
40:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
40:57 Speaker 05 And that has shown the rest of the country how brave we can be together. And I just don't think we should forget that.
41:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
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42:47 Speaker 06 ISIS, Al-Shinriqiyo and Christian Siniso. At first glance, these movements appear to have almost nothing in common. One is a transnational but territorially weakened terror network, most active in the 2000s and 2010s. One was a fringe Japanese doomsday cult from the 90s. And one remains a powerful political movement embedded in the heart of the US, the world's premier imperialist power. Their ideologies may be irreconcilable, their enemies may be different, and their methods even may vary from guerrilla warfare to political lobbying. And yet, they have more in common than meets the eye. Welcome to Get Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, or Andrew is on YouTube.
43:32 Speaker 06 And I'm joined today by...
43:35 Speaker 06 Hello. Welcome, welcome. So my goal is to try and understand these movements through the lens of ideological totalism, which was a specific theoretical framework developed by Robert J. Lifton to identify the outcome of a successful thought reform process, characterized by Denis Sturridge and Tim Warforth in On the Edge, as a quote "mood of absolute conviction which embeds ideas so deeply in people's heads that they grow inoculated against doubt. Ideas cease to be provisional theories about the world and instead become sacred convictions, dependent on the word of hallowed authorities for their validation rather than evidence," end quote.
44:18 Speaker 06 Lifton saw the potential for the emergence of ideological totalism within everyone, but he noted, quote, "Totalistic convictions are most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claims, whether religious, political, or scientific." The eight criteria that he identified for thought reform were milieu control, which is the control of communication and information within the environment, mystical manipulation, which is the orchestrating of spontaneous events to serve the group's message, the demand for purity, which divides the world into black and white, good and evil categories, the cult of confession, which pushes members to confess past sins and personal feelings
45:03 Speaker 06 to the group, the secret science, which elevates the group's dogma to an unquestionable truth, loading the language, which is using jargon or cliches to minimize critical thinking, doctrine over person, which subordinates individual experiences and identity to the group's beliefs, and finally, the dispensing of existence, declaring that only those in the group have the right to exist. Now, not all of these factors may be at play for each of these specific movements that I would have mentioned. But we still see the outcome of this ideological totalitarianism in each of these movements to varying extents. The systematic erosion of individual autonomy in favor of an unassailable authority. Hmm.
45:47 Speaker 06 Whether we're speaking about ISIS or Al-Shri Qur or Christian Zionism within the evangelical movement, or in any other case, we will see how movements replace individual identity with a collective pro-round persona, where loaded language and thought-terminating cliches make dissent literally unthinkable, where the enemy other is manufactured, and where power is concentrated so tightly that leader or the dogma becomes the only source of truth. So the foundation of ideological totalitarianism is the destruction of nuance. To build a cohesive us and them, they must be clearly defined and definitionally polarized.
46:30 Speaker 06 First comes the categorization, where the complexity of human identity is reduced into a single non-negotiable trait, be it religion or nationality or ideology. And then comes the humanization, which is stripping the other of human qualities, transforming them from a person into a threat, impure, an infidel and obstacle. And finally, there's enclosure, which creates social or psychological walls that prevent the us from interacting with them. This ensures the only information the group receives is that of the other's perceived malice. In the context of groups like ISIS, the us-versus-them engine is expressed both ideologically and through physical violence.
47:11 Speaker 06 By committing acts of terror, the group forces the rest of the world to recognize their boundary. There's no cross-contamination to be had with the infidel world, no middle ground. You're either a part of their struggle for a global caliphate, or you're an enemy to be eradicated, whether you consider yourself a Muslim or anything else.
47:33 Speaker 06 With Amish Rikyu, the cult's Us vs. Them engine operated through isolation in communes and the severing of external ties. The Them was defined as the corrupted world or the spiritually dead, and the group sought purity and enlightenment, so they targeted the individuals existing in social networks, family, friends, mainstream society, labeling them as sources of contamination. By cutting off the member from the outside world, the cult ensured that the only reality that existed was the one provided by the leader. And with the political, religious, Christian Zionists, the Us vs. Them engine is built through a historical and eschatological narrative that sees the entire secular world as enemies to the apocalyptic ambitions of Christ's return.
48:18 Speaker 06 They are frequently warned to avoid worldly influences, temptations from the devil that might skew them from the righteous path. The other, in all these cases, is successfully stripped of their humanity. The destruction of the Them becomes a logical necessity for the survival of the Us, and the isolation ensures the group's total control over an individual's interpretation of reality. Interesting how all these various cultish elements build on or use the techniques written about by like Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction, and how like creating groups like this, you know, you have to choose like a border point, to choose the point that determines
49:00 Speaker 06 what we are and what our enemy is, and then in order to keep your group active or like safe, that border has to be moved, it has to always be like pushing, it can't actually stay at the same point. And then you see that movement with all of these groups, right? They have this like millenarianist, like apocalyptic focus, but they're still like moving towards this like larger enemy population. Yeah, I mean, you see it in, like I mentioned, ISIS has erected this barrier that separates them even from Muslims who may share some of their other religious convictions, but do not share their political ambitions. Yeah. You see with the evangelical movement, which distinguishes themselves from other Christian sects as...
49:43 Speaker 06 Being heretical or not fully committed to the word or have gone astray in some way. Yeah, I mean, you can see that with the evangelical leaders and like the president picking fights with the literal Pope of the Catholic Church. Yeah, I mean, the the beef between the Catholics and the Protestants go kind of kind of far back. You supposedly share this scripture or this overarching like religious framework and yet there's still a desire to delineate, to separate, to define an enemy even within that cohort. And a lot of those like current differences, they do relate to like military action in the Middle East and what's happening in Palestine.
50:25 Speaker 06 Like specifically, and I I found that to be an interesting connection as you're as you're talking about, you know, specifically like Christian Zionists and how the situation in the Middle East is extremely important for their apocalyptic worldview. And that is like one of the key differences between between like evangelical Christians and, you know, the current stuff like that the Pope is saying, which is, you know, very much opposed to what's happening in the in the Middle East. Yeah, because they've they've constructed this very robust eschatological framework, which is the next thing that I want to get into.
51:07 Speaker 06 The language that these movements use helps to control their people. You're controlling people not just through physical barriers, but through psychological barriers. Yeah. If you can control the vocabulary available to a person, how a person understands the meaning of words, how they understand the meaning of their scriptures, you can control the range of thoughts that they're capable of having. You know, that was kind of the point that, and it's cliche at this point, is the point that George Orwell was making when he had the Ministry of Truth in nineteen eighty four, that you limit even language available so that even dissent cannot be fully expressed.
51:50 Speaker 06 You don't have to censor anybody because you've already censored their minds. Yeah, and you see that even their own creation of like phrases and terms across all these groups like they come up with specific terms of phrase that just get repeated and that just starts like replacing language if it turns filling in the the gap of language and communication. It's a thought terminating cliches. Exactly, exactly. Thought to many cliches and also just a broader cognitive enclosure. So in the case of um Shinrikyo, you had the group using this dense pseudo scientific and pseudo religious jargon that blended spirituality, quantum physics, biology.
52:32 Speaker 06 And those who were most elevated in that group were able to wield that language and make themselves sound so sophisticated and elevated and on a higher plane of truth and reality that made it very easy for them to swindle people within their circle. It created a linguistic barrier of the entry so that you couldn't participate even in the group's truth without committing to their incomprehensible dogma. Yeah. And if you don't commit to their incomprehensible dogma, then you just you don't get it. You're going to be an outsider forever. You are not enlightened. You are outside of the truth. Yeah, and this this is a a problem across a lot of a lot of different groups.
53:13 Speaker 06 Including groups that are not this, you know, apocalyptic or or fascist or like religiously based, but they even see versions of this among like the contemporary left. Yeah. Which creates like, yeah, this like barrier to entry by using certain like phrases or like academic language. Yeah, and and very idiosyncratic definitions of words that have otherwise common definitions. Yeah, no, and how much politics is like this subcultural a purpose of like maintaining a certain like subgroup, like a social circle of versus actually building like mass politics and how the idiosyncratic small like purity of groups with their special language and these like barriers to entry makes it very hard to do larger political organizing that actually
53:58 Speaker 06 goes towards like a working class movement. Yeah, lift ten points out that. There is a tendency for ideological totalism in a lot of movements as, as already mentioned. So it's something we have to be on guard for if we want to avoid falling into these traps. And so we look at the example of Omshenrikyo in this case, but ISIS also has a kind of a total elimination of nuance through polarized emotionally charged vocabulary. And you have the believer and you have the infidel, which again includes fellow Muslims. You have the pure and you have the corrupt. Every dynamic, every binary is zero sum. You know, you're either with the caliphate or you're an enemy of God to be wiped out.
54:44 Speaker 06 And within the eschatological framework of Christian Zionism, opposing the apocalyptic informed geopolitical ambitions is tantamount to opposing God's plan. You know, it's like, how dare you? They use these thought emanating cliches, as you would have mentioned, things like it is written. Yeah. It's in Revelation, you know, it's God's will. And there's no way to actually challenge their policies or actions in their minds on whether it be humanitarian, legal or logical grounds, because it's like you're speaking Greek. I mean, doing something like that is, is like arguing with God. It's, it's like attacking their faith.
55:23 Speaker 06 And so we also see these movements stripping individuals of their agency for the sake of a transaction. The exchange of the self with all its very real vulnerabilities and mortality and earth limitations for a higher purpose that is eternal and absolute. In the case of Omshenrikyo, the destruction of the self was achieved through the redefinition of morality that used a distorted interpretation of Vajrayana Buddhism and placed the master's will above all conventional ethics. To follow the master and achieve spiritual evolution, one had to abandon the ego with its moral compass and its human attachments.
56:05 Speaker 06 And in its place, Omshenrikyo offered the merit of absolute obedience. By following their leader's commands, even those of mass violence that would expose the wider world to their threat, the practitioner believed that they were performing a ritual act of spiritual cleansing to become an instrument of a higher cosmic order. You see the same thing with the rise of ISIS, the destruction of the self achieved through the total absorption of the individual into the monolith. The individual stripped to their specific context, whatever nationality or background they may have had, and been reduced to a singular functional component of the struggle, being given a purpose that was compensated with the promise of eternal significance,
56:50 Speaker 06 the promise of martyrdom, of fighting and dying for the caliphate. And with that, the individual could bypass the mundane struggles of earthly life to secure a place in a permanent divine reality. And in the political theological sphere of Christian Zionism, the destruction of the self has more to do with relinquishing the self's agency and becoming instrumentalized for the sake of God's plan. By framing Israel's ascendance in the Middle East as an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, and doing everything in their power to lobby for and support it, the movement disregards the genocidal costs for the reward, being the fulfillment of a divine apocalyptic timeline.
57:33 Speaker 06 And so in all three cases, the follower is convinced that the destruction of this world as they know it, and the destruction of the self within it, is not a tragedy, but actually a kind of liberation. But all three of these movements have been tragedies for the rest of the world. Amshinrikyo deployed chemical weapons in Tokyo's subway system. They killed thirteen people and injured over fifty-eight hundred others. It's still in a long-term anxiety for those living in the city that their shared space could be the site of potential terror. And the pool sun sitting next to you could be the vessel for a hidden lethal ideology. ISIS has forcibly displaced millions, killed tens of thousands, and destroyed ancient heritage
58:17 Speaker 06 sites, all in an effort to erase the other. And the Middle East and Africa in particular continue to be scarred by its violence. Christian Zionist ideology has introduced a variable to the political equation that is immune to reason and negotiation, that cannot question its theological justifications.
58:37 Speaker 06 Of course Zionism is not entirely dependent on Christian Zionist support. You know Jewish colonial settlements would have predated British support, American support, and Christian Zionist support. But the political cosign that Christian Zionists provide within the premier superpower does aid in the continued support for the Palestinian genocide. So ideological totalitarianism seeks to eliminate pluralism, to eliminate shared truth, and to literally kill. But we should not view the rise of totalitarian ideologies as some freak, isolated phenomenon,
59:19 Speaker 06 because it deprives its strength from the very framework and conditioning embedded in our existing social structures. The mechanisms of milieu control, loading the language, and other techniques used by cultic tendencies exist in subtle forms within our mainstream institutions. We see the seeds of thought reform in the echo chambers of media ecosystems. We see the loading of language in the polarized rhetoric of politics. We see the demand for purity in the most aggressive forms of cultural and religious tribalism. The extremist can sometimes be the most honest, uninhibited expression, the natural endpoint of our world's authoritarian tendencies and subtle lifelong conditioning.
1:00:00 Speaker 06 At home, in the classroom, at work, in civic life, we are trained in the soft versions of the very deference that totalitarian leaders eventually demand. We are conditioned to respect authority without question, to prioritize the greater good of the institution over individual agency, and to accept official narratives as the only valid reality. So when a leader arrives who promises to replace the complex, messy incitancy of our political and social reality with the clarity of absolute truth, the most conditioned minds naturally find the offer at a seductive. And so this disease, caught through social conditioning, must be treated by a fundamental
1:00:41 Speaker 06 reclamation of the individual's capacity for critical thought and autonomy. We have to move beyond the mere consumption of information to the active interrogation of it. This means cultivating the ability to recognize the traps of thought reform, the logical fallacies, the loading of the language, to recognize when an ideology is attempting to bypass our reason in favor of our emotions. The primary defense against thought reform is the refusal to let any authority, religious, political, or otherwise, become sacred and beyond questioning. Yeah, I think that point that you made towards the end there, but like this thing just being the most visible consequence
1:01:25 Speaker 06 of the contradictions of our current social system is like really important. Uh huh. Is because, yeah, I mean, we're all sorting through the same sorts of causes that produce groups like this or produce the people that move into groups like this. And we might sort these out in different ways, but in the way that they do it, it's not fully alien. It's just a very visible outward manifestation of the same sorts of internal contradictions. And like fascism feeds on these same things. You can see how much fascism overlaps with a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here. Yep. And it seemed kind of like suicidal tendencies, this destruction of the self, right? That is dealing with those same sorts of like social tensions
1:02:07 Speaker 06 and internal contradictions that produce like outbursts of antisocial behavior like this, or in some cases, like genocidal behavior. Yeah, yeah. I think it's very much resultant of this, the structure of our system, you know, the stresses, the anxieties, the pains and pressure points. And, you know, we are all different as individuals. And I think that some people respond to these conditions in ways that are very much either self-destructive, externally destructive, or both.
1:02:51 Speaker 06 I think a part of our task in like a general sense is providing some alternative to this, right? You can like, look at the way the, really like, on like a global level, like the left has really receded a lot in the past fifty, sixty, seventy years. And that, that leaves a lot of, you know, people who are, who are trying to look for this, for this sort of purpose, right? They're trying to understand the contradictions of the world. And there may not be a humanistic option for that. So it gets directed into much more destructive ways sometimes. You can see, like, what happened in Rojava with the Democratic Confederism as like, right? They, they actually did that, right? They, they saw what was needed and they did it. And it's directly opposing the
1:03:33 Speaker 06 sort of alternative version, which is, which is ISIS, which is like, super interesting, right? But I think we have, we have the same problem here. And but we don't really have like a strong, a strong like alternative to that, right? A healthy, a healthy and growing like working class movement, which attempts to actually solve the sort of, sort of problems that are in the world that these sorts of other things like feed on, right? They, they grab on to these, onto these very, very present problems and apply an emotionally soothing response to it, even if it is self-destructive. Yeah. The, the work of building an alternative and demonstrating it and showing people live in it, I think is very, very important. Yeah.
1:04:17 Speaker 06 I also think that when you consider the fact that the hallmark of totalizing systems is the elimination of the other and the criminalization of dissent, our antidote, our alternative has to embrace, has to be committed to diversity of thought and expression. And I also think that it has to be willing to sit with conflict, to sit with tensions. Yeah. To allow them to engage with each other without trying to... To just override it with some false unity. Those tensions and conflict are like important. And that is, that is how we will like develop our thought and develop our movement forward. You, you have to, you have to have those tensions.
1:05:01 Speaker 06 You have to have that, that conflict and disagreement, which will, you know, hopefully produce more positive outcomes. Yeah, hopefully it's generative conflict and not destructive conflict. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and some conflicts can be generative if we accept that they can't be resolved. Yeah. I think part of what makes some conflicts destructive is this effort to kind of uh just paint over them with some kumbaya sense of, oh, we'll just, we'll just unify. Like that's not consequential or we'll figure it out or that's just how it is. And I, I think we. Yeah. We have to be willing to be uncomfortable with not having the answers. And we never have the answers in some cases.
1:05:44 Speaker 06 There are those who I think will have the capacity to engage into deradicalization of ideological totalists. I don't think I'm among them. And I think that there are others that we can care outreach towards. Yes. I get irritated sometimes when I see people who believe that the focus of our attention right now as people trying to build an alternative, trying to build a better tomorrow, that our focus should be on trying to deradicalize right wingers. Yeah. The vast majority of people are politically unaffiliated, politically uncommitted, apathetic, disengaged. And I think that we can do far more
1:06:30 Speaker 06 if we were to focus on reaching those people and helping those people see the problems with the system and the solutions that we have on offer than engaging in fruitless debate with right wingers or. Yeah, and I think that's actually the most effective form of deradicalization. Exactly, exactly. There is a lot of problems with the sort of like deradicalization framework that emerged in like 2018 to kind of meet the rise of like the alt-right. A lot of it doesn't work, a lot of it can be fruitless. But there is like a noble intention behind it. And I think the best way to actually do that is by just providing a healthy alternative. That that does appeal to most people.
1:07:12 Speaker 06 It doesn't, it doesn't need to be catered toward someone who's on like the right or like the far right. Because in a lot of cases, those people are suffering from the same sorts of problems that the rest of people are. They've just found of a false solution for it. And so if you're able to provide a better solution, a lot of them will move over. There's really very few that are like true and tried, like ideologically committed, right? There's some and they're maybe very vocal on the internet. But that's, that's not actually like most. Yeah, and also the internet is at least half bots at this point. So, you know, you take some of those internet discussions with a grain of salt in terms of being representative of any population significantly.
1:07:54 Speaker 06 But I did have some tips with regard to outreach. For those who may have a special interest in it, or maybe have a loved one that they really want to help, where they see being immersed in an ideologically totalitarian environment. For one, directly attacking a person's core beliefs are gonna trigger something called the backfire effect, which is where contradictory evidence actually strengthens their conviction because their identity is now fused to their ideology. So an attack on the idea is perceived as a mortal attack on the self. Debating them is not gonna help.
1:08:33 Speaker 06 It's better to think of yourself more as a connecting force rather than a correcting force. You're a lifeline, yeah. To gently guide them out of their radical mindset rather than trying to instruct them out of it, to berate them out of it. And when you notice that they are experiencing doubt in their ideas, it can be very exciting to try and. And and rush in and show them the way, but you don't wanna overwhelm them. Doubt, especially for people immersed in that mindset, might literally collapse their entire social and cognitive world. So your focus, I think, needs to be on providing a safe harbor
1:09:14 Speaker 06 where their doubts can be expressed freely without judgment or any pressure to immediately betray all that they've ever known. You also need to consider the conditions that led the person into that situation in the first place. If you know what they were like and what their situation was like prior to indoctrination, whether they had certain relationship issues, financial issues, systemic abuses, traumas, isolation, some kind of yearning for meaning or purpose, that can help you contextualize the situation. And while you can always fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, it's good to recognize the needs that drove them to those conclusions.
1:09:58 Speaker 06 But in addition to that, you can try to find out what their passions and hobbies were or are outside of that doctrine. So they have some kind of psychological landing pad if they were to escape the environment, so they're not without a sense of self. So they're not floundering for some form of identity.
1:10:21 Speaker 06 These movements and this tendency for ideological totalism derived from hierarchy will not be overcome in one fell swoop. It is a continuous daily struggle within the human mind and the social fabric. It's a struggle to remain unconditioned by the temptations of certainty, to hold on to the messy, the diverse, the complex, to create a social foundation of individuals who are capable of saying no. And that's it for me. All power to all the people. Peace.
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1:12:40 Speaker 06 When we think of globalization, we often think of trade and late 20th century technological interconnection and the movement of capital. But there was another kind of globalization emerging in the late 19th century. That was the globalization of resistance. In the closing decades of the 1800s, a network of ideas, outlaws, and revolutionaries would emerge to challenge the empires of the time. Welcome to Icarapane here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube. I'm joined again by Garrison Davis, hello. Welcome again. And in this episode, using the research of historian Benedict Anderson in Chapter 5 of The Age of Globalisation,
1:13:25 Speaker 06 I want to look at this period in history where the tools of empire were appropriated by the very people the empire sought to suppress, to link anarchist prisoners in Montjuic to intellectuals in Paris, to agitators in Cuba, to nationalists in the Philippines. Now, the story doesn't actually begin in Montjuic prison in Barcelona, Spain, but our narrative begins there. Following the June 7, 1896 bombing in Corpus Christi, 300 people were imprisoned in a wave of Spanish state repression. Among those caught in the crackdown was Fernando Tardida del Marmol, a Cuban criollo whose background connected him to both metropole and colony.
1:14:10 Speaker 06 His imprisonment was a direct consequence of the state's attempt to suppress the burgeoning anarchist movement in Catalonia, but it would only end up fueling the movement, thanks to the efforts of the radical international press. Tardida was a maths teacher, which actually helped him out when he got arrested because a young lieutenant warden recognised his former teacher and managed to sound the alarm of his incarceration. Tardida also happened to be the cousin of a conservative senator who used his influence to ensure Tardida's release. But Tardida didn't let these privileges cause him to forget his less privileged fellow prisoners, because he immediately upon release went to Paris, the city of duality,
1:14:50 Speaker 06 a city that was both the central capital of colonial power and a premier global hub for political dissent. So there in Paris, Tarida gained access to La Revue Blanche, a very popular periodical of the era. He'd been a recognized writer from before his imprisonment, as he popularly advocated for anarchism without adjectives. And he had gotten into a back-and-forth about workers' associations and bureaucracy and propaganda of the deed with a certain Jean Grave, who was another popular French anarchist of the period. So in La Revue Blanche, Tarida published his personal brutal experience of imprisonment and contextualized it as a broader political indictment by connecting the gruesome suppression
1:15:32 Speaker 06 of dissent in Barcelona to the exact same mechanisms being deployed in the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Thus, he demonstrated that repression in the Spanish provinces was not an isolated domestic issue, but a fundamental characteristic of Spanish colonial policy. And his narrative was taken up and amplified by the efforts of Philippe Finon and Georges Clemenceau. Philippe Finon was an influential art critic and prominent anarchist intellectual who helped frame the struggle against Spanish repression as a significant moral crisis. He also wrote strongly against French imperialism and revanchist nationalism. And Georges Clemenceau was a radical journalist and politician, considered a formidable figure
1:16:16 Speaker 06 in the defense of political prisoners, as he had the capacity to mobilize public opinion around issues of justice, state authority. So together, these figures helped ensure that the grievances of Tarida and the Spanish prisoners were integrated into the global conversation. Now historian Benedict Anderson situates these events within the long 19th century, which had a lot of high-profile political violence, specifically anarchist bombings and targeted assassinations, which prompted a corresponding escalation in state power through much more stringent legal frameworks and surveillance apparatuses.
1:16:53 Speaker 06 Parallel to the rise of anti-terror legislation was the emergence of a new structured infrastructure of dissent, consistent of labour organisations and radical press, which served as a vital node in the global network, capable of circulating revolutionary ideas and coordinating resistance across borders. In addition to the Montjuiré affair, the Dreyfus affair would also be amplified by this network. The Dreyfus affair was an incident in French history where in 1894, Assistant Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish captain in the French army, was accused of treason, alleged to have passed sensitive military documents to the German intelligence services. The evidence against him was largely based on forged documents and a high degree of
1:17:38 Speaker 06 antisemitic prejudice. Sir Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. But the radical press began calling this out, especially when evidence surfaced suggesting that the actual spy was another officer, Ferdinand Walson-Esterhazy, but the French military high command had covered it up, suppressing evidence, manipulating court proceedings, and intimidating witnesses to ensure that Dreyfus remained convicted. A pivotal moment in the affair was the publication of non-radical Emile Zola's open letter, "Jacuse", in the newspaper Le Roi in 1898. As Zola used the power of the press to directly challenge the military high command after
1:18:21 Speaker 06 the real culprit was acquitted the day after his trial began. This landed Zola in jail for libel, where he eventually got out on a plea deal, but it also lent him the tenuous respect of some critical left-wing intellectuals. Meanwhile, Thérèse had already left Paris for Belgium, then London, where he made use of his contacts around the world to create a coalition of "liberals, freemasons, socialists, anarchists, anti-imperialists and anti-clericals", against the Spanish government and especially against Prime Minister Antonio Canova del Castillo, the conservative who was the chief architect of the brutal repression of Spanish anarchists, socialists, and labour activists domestically.
1:19:05 Speaker 06 His aim was to ensure the stability of the Spanish monarchy amidst growing pressures of anarchism, labour unrest, colonial rebellion, and American aggression.
1:19:16 Speaker 06 On August 9th, 1897, the Italian anarchist Michel Angiolillo assassinated Canovas. Angiolillo was a real monarchy hater. He had travelled to Barcelona under a fake name and was working as a freelance printer when the Corpus Christi bombing occurred. The city was put under martial law and his anarchist friends were incarcerated in Montrich. After hearing about how they were being tortured, he fled for Paris, was expelled to Belgium, then moved to London, where Tarida's agitation against the Canovas regime was at full strength. He continued to work as a printer and engage in activism in London for some time, where people asked who would avenge those tortured and murdered by the Spanish state,
1:19:58 Speaker 06 including the recently executed Jose Rizal, who was a Filipino nationalist. So after hearing this, Angiolillo was like, "Okay, bet", and he makes his way back to the continent of Europe with a pistol in his pocket. In France, he meets Dr Ramon Betances, who was a Puerto Rican physician and revolutionary who sought the independence of Puerto Rico and the dismantling of Spanish colonial authority in the Antilles. He spent his life country hopping, helping the sick and fleeing Spanish spies. And although he wasn't an anarchist, he was connected with a lot of anarchists, particularly French and Italian anarchists, through the heterogenous front against the Spanish state, against imperialism and monarchical tyranny.
1:20:40 Speaker 06 The European anarchists and socialists found a natural ally in the anti-colonial movement he was part of, as the liberation of Puerto Rico and Cuba would represent a vital blow against the same imperialist structures they were fighting to dismantle in Europe. Now, Betances claims he redirected the target of Angiolillo's planned assassination from the Spanish queen regent and infant son to the prime minister. But Benedict Anderson calls this narrative into question because there doesn't seem to be any corroborating evidence. Anyway, so Angiolillo gets to Madrid, he learns Canovas's location, he stalks him for a bit, and then he shoots him dead with the pistol he brought from London.
1:21:23 Speaker 06 In his trial, Angiolino defends himself with reference to Montjuic and Cuba and the Philippines and says, quote, "Canovas personified in their most repugnant forms, religious ferocity, military cruelty, the implacability of the judiciary, the tyranny of power, and the greed of the possessing classes. I have rid Spain, Europe, and the entire world of him. That is why I am no assassin, but rather an executioner." End quote. That does go pretty hard. It does go hard. What is this? Is this late 1800s or the early 1900s? Late 1800s. Late 1800s, okay. Yeah. So after his rousing speech, he was then himself executed at just 26 years
1:22:07 Speaker 06 old. Now, beyond being a symptom of imperial crisis, Canovas's assassination functioned as an accelerant. By removing such a central figure of the political machinery of Spain in the midst of its war against the US, Angiolino's act triggered the volatility that would culminate in the loss of Spain's final colonial possessions. In 1898, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico were in the hands of the United States. And the bullets that killed Canovas just kept going, well into the decades to come.
1:22:55 Speaker 06 Now, speaking of the Philippines, we can turn now to that specific node of the movement network. Isabel de los Reyes was a moderate liberal of his time, somewhat privileged as a businessman, publisher, and journalist, but he wasn't afraid to advocate strongly against Spanish colonial rule and was arrested in connection to the Philippine Revolution of 1896 as part of a broader repression against rebels, intellectuals, and activists. The revolution had begun prematurely after the Spanish authorities discovered their plot. And so many of the revolutionaries were imprisoned as a result. Now, while imprisoned, Isobelo had to deal with the death of his wife and was unable to attend her funeral or do anything for their children.
1:23:38 Speaker 06 Naturally, after an experience like that, he would be pissed at the colonial injustices that he and his people suffered at the hands of the government and at the hands of the religious orders. He demanded political reform and was met with relocation, first to a Barcelona municipal jail and then to the infamous Montjuic. While in Spain, he met several brave anarchists who had been imprisoned for various crimes. Crimes including advocating for Cuban independence, protesting trials by military courts, and opening secular schools, gasp, for children. Which, I mean, it was Catholic Spain at that point in time. Yeah. So that was like the worst thing you could possibly do.
1:24:22 Speaker 06 There were some anarchists who were in jail for assassinations, but I mean, come on, what's a little assassination between friends? I mean, the assassination and opening a school, I think, is the same level of danger to the state at this point. Indeed. And these dangerous criminals demonstrated a level of solidarity that really inspired Isobelo. And while in prison, he also got access to anarchist literature and was able to take part in discussions with anarchists, where he learned about the rejection of state authority, colonial domination, and class hierarchy. Now, in this exile period, I don't think he ever became an anarchist, and I mean, late
1:25:06 Speaker 06 in his life, he even served as a senator, but he was profoundly influenced by the anarchists and did come to admire them for decades to come. Eventually, following the assassination of Canovas and the change in government, in eighteen ninety-eight, Isobelo was freed. He then moved to Madrid and started a fortnightly publication, Filipinas Anti-Europa, an anti-imperialist critique with particular focus on the growing American empire. And it's funny, because after Spain lost their colonies to the US, all of a sudden, public opinion in Spain started to become sympathetic to the Filipino fight. It was like, oh, now we could start to feel bad for you. You know, the Americans embarrassed us, so now we we have some sympathy for your plight.
1:25:50 Speaker 06 And so Isabeau criticized America's claim to be liberating the Philippines and Cuba as hypocrisy by pointing to the regular occurrence of lynchings and racist institutions within the US. And he also criticized the Filipino elite for their willingness to collaborate with the new colonial rulers. The Philippine Revolution was basically over by nineteen oh one. As a key leader named Emilio Aguinaldo was captured and had to swear allegiance to the US. By the way, Aguinaldo would also prove to be a collaborator later in his life as he worked with the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines during World War Two. So it's a pattern of behavior for that guy.
1:26:32 Speaker 06 Anyway, so after the end of the revolution, Isabeau decided to finally return to the Philippines to reunite with the six children he had with his first wife, who he hadn't seen in years, and to continue the struggle. Also, when he was in Spain, he got married. Isabeau arrived in Manila with the works of Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Pedro de Pudon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, and Eric Co. Malatesta. He might have been the first person to bring the works of some of these thinkers to the Philippines. And I think we kind of understate that luck of the draw, I suppose, when we talk about the movement of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You know, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have the anarchist library.
1:27:18 Speaker 06 It takes a lot of work, yeah. Yeah, they didn't have all these accessible means of learning about these ideas. So if you didn't happen to know somebody who could bring in that kind of literature for you, well, first of all, you wouldn't even know that literature existed unless somebody told you about it. Yep. The access to information was severely limited, and so fortunately, Isabeau brought these ideas to Philippines, and he was the first to do so in his time. But as we'll soon see, the history of the Philippines could have gone on a slightly different trajectory if he had not brought in that literature, learned about those ideas, started engaging and agitating on that basis, based on, you know, his experiences. I mean, he he ended up in a Spanish prison of all places. So the Spanish Empire that imprisoned him ended up so in the same
1:28:03 Speaker 06 For rebellion in the former territory later on. As it happens, a not uncommon turn of events, actually. Indeed. So Isabelle pulls up in Manila and his reputation as an anti-imperialist preceded him. He was labeled a dangerous anarchist. And it really didn't help that the US President McKinley had literally been shot to death by an anarchist just a month prior. This this whole period of time is just while every time that I've done an episode with you about like the late eighteen hundreds to early to early nineteen hundreds, it's always it's always stuff like this. It's like. Yeah.
1:28:43 Speaker 06 An unbelievable collection of happenings, like like history really has such a momentum during this period, like it's it's it's unbelievable. Yeah, I just I really enjoy drawing those connections because I mean, he came to Manila with all these organizational plans. He was gonna start a party. He was gonna launch a news people. But as he pulls up and he he realizes he's literally on a list. Yeah. You know, he kind of had to scrap those ideas and and pull back a bit. And like Lenin's doing the same stuff like in Germany and Russia during the same time, like everyone, everyone, like everyone understands the mission. Yeah, yeah. Everyone knows what has to happen. And this is like before the standardization of passports.
1:29:28 Speaker 06 Yeah. This is before the global visa system. And so people are literally just moving around. Yeah. I mean, I I always marvel at the fact that Eric Cumanatesta was like, he was getting active in Egypt. At one point, he pulled up in in Brazil, you know, everybody has to come to Brazil eventually. He was everywhere, right? And these ideas were everywhere too, as a result of the the movement of people bringing these books, bringing these ideas, get involved in conversation. It also helped, of course, that a lot of anarchists were printmakers. Still are, still.
1:30:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, many such cases.
1:30:17 Speaker 06 So Isobelo switched strategies. In his words, he took advantage of the occasion to put into practice the good ideas that he had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona, who were imprisoned with him in the infamous fortress of Montjuic. So he started organising the working class in Manila. He had the benefit of actually being able to speak the language of the swaths of workers in Manila, because he happened to come from the same region of the vastly linguistically diverse Philippines that they did. He was from the Ilocos region of the island of Luzon, and he natively spoke the Ilocano language, like many of the workers that had migrated to Milan.
1:30:58 Speaker 06 Though he was technically part of the intelligentsia, Isobelo had a connection to the roots, you know, to the people, the streets. And so he began by organising the printers, of course, and helping them with their strikes. And from there, the efforts very quickly snowballed, far quicker than the elites could have anticipated, into a cross-industry worker federation, called the Unión Obrera Democrática, the first of its kind in the entire country. The federation was flexible and loosely structured, which made it quite suited to undertaking various strike actions. But beyond demonstrations and strikes, Isobelo also incorporated a little local flavour,
1:31:41 Speaker 06 because the union was also involved in festivals and theatre and music events. So it was a combination of worker and non-worker based organisation. You get a little bit of everybody involved when you do that, rather than strictly focusing on just one plane of struggle and connection. Eventually, however, the Americans got their act together and met this movement with surveillance, arrest and trials. And though they couldn't legally justify keeping him in jail for very long, they did throw Isobelo back into jail for a short period. Now, the worker federation would eventually collapse, but the ideas remained, and those ideas fed directly into various labour organisations, socialist parties and guerrilla movements going forward.
1:32:26 Speaker 06 As for Isobelo, his second wife, the one he married in Spain, died, and two years later, he married again to an 18-year-old. Isabello married and was widowed three times. He actually outlived all of his wives and had a grand total of twenty seven children. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I have no comments on what kind of father he may have been, but that's just. I mean, yeah, you can you can kind of assume based on those numbers. But yeah, that is what it is. And the fact that he was he was in Spain, got married in Spain, had six children back home who had lost their mother. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't in Spain by choice, right? But.
1:33:12 Speaker 06 Yeah. You know, he was middle class. He may have had family back at home taking care of his children, but still that's rough. Yeah. That is rough. So late on in his life, like I mentioned before, he got into electoral politics on the municipal level and the senate level. And he also in his life got to work in religious reform, eventually found in the Aglipayan Church, which was the first ever Filipino independent Catholic Christian church. Yeah, I was I was wondering, because like you you mentioned he brought over Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, yeah. He was very critical of the religious orders, the the Spanish Catholic religious orders, but. Yeah. He ended up forming an independent Catholic church, so a Catholic church that is not associated with Rome.
1:33:58 Speaker 06 Hmm. You you said he didn't identify as an anarchist. Did he identify as like a socialist? Like, what what what kind of was his like self-defined politics like around around this point? And like when he started running for office on the municipal level? I didn't see how he defined himself. I think he considered himself to be a patriot. You know, patriots, somebody who was pro labor. I don't know that he assigned himself necessarily the title of socialist or anarchist or liberal or anything like that. Yeah. He has, however, been called the father of the Philippine Labour Movement and the father of Filipino socialism. But what do we take from all of this?
1:34:39 Speaker 06 You know, the empire might globalize trade, might globalize capital, might globalize various forms of suppression, but it inadvertently globalizes resistance. The same infrastructure that empires use to extend their reach across their claimed territories is the same infrastructure that radicals can use to fight. You know, even prison was used as a site of connection. A literal place of repression became a place that connected people across multiple countries. I think the lesson that I take away from this kind of narrative I've spun here between
1:35:23 Speaker 06 the Cuban Creole Fernando Torrida, the Puerto Rican Dr. Ramon Betances, the Italian Michel Angelino, and the Filipino Isabel de los Reyes is that the globalization was not a one-way imposition. We could potentially adopt the empire's tools to fight back and to network our resistance. People who are doing resistance but on the other side of the political spectrum do this same thing, like the formation of ISIS in prisons because of how we imprisoned Al Qaeda members is a pretty key example of this. Yeah. This is a very common thing.
1:36:06 Speaker 06 Like, it turns out very, very often, the master's tools actually are used to dismantle the master's house. Huh. That phrase still has some, like, I think, metaphorical uses, but in a sort of like literalist sense, I occasionally push back on it because, yeah, it does view movement as a one-way thing. It has like no dialectical analysis. And I think part of our job is like adapting and moving as empire and capital adapts and moves to the flow of history. Hundred percent. And with that, as always, all power to all the people. Peace.
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1:38:32 Speaker 06 Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I have with me Andrew Lieber. Andrew Lieber is a non-resident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East Program and an assistant professor in Tulane University's Department of Political Science and their Middle East and North Africa Studies Program. His research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa region, with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks. So I wanted to have you on today because, well, the war in Iran, but also because I think there's been a lot of reporting and some that's not very well sourced in mainstream media like the New York Times about the GCC states,
1:39:15 Speaker 06 GCC Gulf Cooperation Council, so the Arab Gulf States, about their motivations and the actions of the Gulf States during this war. I think that there's been a lot of obfuscation for a variety of reasons. So I wanted to bring you on, given your expertise, to kind of clarify fact from fiction on on some of that. We're recording May 28th, so maybe people have seen this. Trump also recently threatened to bomb Aman, who were acting as mediators initially. So yeah, I wanted to go through all the main GCC actors and get your analysis of their behavior during this war, what they want to happen when it's over. Sure, yeah, happy to do so. I think one thing that has been a little hard for people to follow maybe has been the tendency for US and English language.
1:39:59 Speaker 06 Media outlets just talk about the Gulf States or the GCCs or what they want from this conflict. But even heading into this war, there were already key differences among these countries. There was a diplomatic and increasingly potentially a military rift between Saudi Arabia and the neighboring United Arab Emirates. There have been past disputes between different Gulf countries as well. And even though initially the Iran war seemed like it would taper over the cracks in these divisions, in many ways, it's also deepened the divides as different countries have interpreted the threats posed by Iran and by Israel and potentially even the United States in different ways.
1:40:38 Speaker 06 So at present, we can maybe think of three broad camps within the GCC. So there's Saudi Arabia, the largest by landmass of these countries, and to a lesser extent Kuwait and also Qatar have taken the approach of trying to just get things back to quote unquote "normal" or like a new normal, supporting mediation efforts by other countries like Pakistan and now, at least for Qatar, increasingly engaged in direct mediation to try to lock in some kind of agreement that restores flows of Energy and other goods in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. The key body of water that allows things in and out of the Persian Gulf.
1:41:17 Speaker 06 You know, in one direction, you have the United Arab Emirates, which has presented itself as kind of much more hawkish in terms of its willingness to potentially use military force against Iran or to join the United States in a military effort to open the Strait of Hormuz. In the past few days, it's been quietly walking back some of those positions, but it has tried to draw a contrast between its more assertive stance towards Iranian actions in the region and Saudi Arabia. And then in the other direction, as discussed, we have the Sultan of Oman, which leaned much further in the other direction during the war, being the only country that criticized openly from the start, both the US and Israeli led attacks on Iran and Iran's surprises on the other side of the Gulf.
1:42:03 Speaker 06 Omani Foreign Minister Badrul Bouzayidi went on US television prior to the war to make the case that these was the possible ongoing talks between the US and Iran could bear fruit. That was unsuccessful as an intervention, but also Omani diplomats at various points have offered much more critical commentary of the United States, but they have likewise kind of walked that back or at least not emphasized as much in recent weeks. But clearly there is a narrative critical of their role that circulates in some parts of DC, which percolated its way up into the president saying, well, if Oman is not going to cooperate with certain things, then you will just bomb them until they do, which, you know, is not
1:42:43 Speaker 06 not the nicest way to ask for the cooperation of other countries in a sensitive geopolitical issue, but so it goes. Right. We're not the most effective these days, let's say. Yeah. So, thank you for kind of laying that out. There are so many questions I have. I want to talk about kind of how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, you've already mentioned, differ on this issue, but also like how their differences speak to different visions for the region, especially vis a vis Israel. But also just like, before we get to that, there's been a lot of reporting about how Saudi Arabia is like secretly really gung ho about the war and is encouraging the Trump administration to, to be more aggressive. What weight do you put on those reports? Yeah, I mean, those have been around some
1:43:27 Speaker 06 The start of the conflict, I'll preface this by giving a major caveat, which is that every week that goes by, we learn more about what we didn't know earlier in the war like, you know, we know now that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have carried out airstrikes on Iran at certain points that they didn't publicize that. But I'm broadly skeptical of accounts that Saudi Arabia and specifically Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman advocated for this war, pushed for the war. Saudi Arabia and Iran have not always had very great relations, but they nominally reestablished diplomatic ties in 2023. And generally, I think Saudi Arabia's view is they want to keep the geopolitical peace in the surrounding neighborhood.
1:44:09 Speaker 06 Because otherwise Saudi Arabia can't get the kind of foreign investment or the kind of economic partnerships it needs. To generate economic growth and employ its citizen population, a major political concern. And I think even the United Arab Emirates prior to this war was not pushing for it actively. I think these countries also don't want to tell, with the possible exception of Oman, don't want to tell President Trump no directly. So. My understanding of things is that everything prior to the war was phrased in a kind of conditional. We would recommend you don't do this, but just make sure if you just think this is a good idea, that you can militarily defeat Iran in a rather quick and decisive fashion.
1:44:49 Speaker 06 Of course, that banked on the United States is current policymakers having an accurate view of their own capabilities, which seem to be a not a correct assumption. But I think that also during the war, you had a kind of a panic in different directions, like a belief that, well, I guess if the United States has gone to war, clearly they can, they could solve this militarily, right? So I think you had some leaders, especially the United Arab Emirates, pushing the United States to like, finish the job. Don't leave the conflict in a state where it's very clear that the United States can militarily force Iran to do certain things. But you also haven't kind of secured meaningful concessions from Iran. And that I think is. I guess one thing that United States and DCC states now, again with the possible
1:45:31 Speaker 06 exception of Oman, is concerned about where they get left if there is any kind of deal. It's very clear that they do not have a seat at the table in terms of these negotiations. And there's certainly a lot of complaints online or in media outlets in the Gulf about that fact, but it doesn't change the reality that these are US-Iran negotiations with maybe some consultation with Israel, maybe some communication with Saudi Arabia with the UAE, but not a ton of consultation of them. And just to be clear, they've paid the brunt of the price here. And Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure and desalination plans and all those things. Yeah, no, I mean, Iran calculated, I think, well, we could attack Israel, but most of the rockets and missiles be shot down. Israel's farther away, it's harder to hit
1:46:15 Speaker 06 them with a larger payload, whereas you can hit a lot of infrastructure in the Gulf. It's been very clear that Iran targeted not only US military bases, but also civilian infrastructure in an attempt to put a lot of economic pressure on these countries, especially the UAE. And even countries that had sought to mediate between the conflict or had been more openly critical of any US military adventurism, like Qatar, basically have their entire economy frozen right now because they can get very little of the liquid natural gas they produce in or out. Same thing with Kuwait, same thing with Bahrain. One interesting, maybe unintended consequence of this, though, is that some of the Gulf states are doing better than others economically from this. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made up, you
1:46:55 Speaker 06 know, a significant portion of the ground lost from lost oil exports because they can export some oil over land. And Oman is exporting about as much oil as before, but at a much higher price, economically or even doing perhaps better. But yeah, these are the countries that have primarily paid the price in direct terms. And then by extension, every country that relies on their energy supplies is also paying a price in terms of higher costs for cooking gas, diesel, fertilizer, and so on. Right.
1:47:36 Speaker 06 Really, this is an American-Israeli war, even if the United States kind of holds the final say. But, you know, recently on social media and in a number of repeated statements, President Trump himself and his administration have talked about the Abraham Accords and normalization with Israel, tying it into possible outcomes for this war. How do you, how do you explain that? I'm sure your audience is familiar with the Abraham Accords, but the diplomatic normalization between the UAE, Bahrain and some other countries and Israel back in 2020. I think for President Trump, this is motive. Talking about this now is motivated by a sense of, you know, there's a real loss of face and status by having talked up how he was going to have this decisive victory against Iran and then it being a disaster on every single front. So I think there's now going to be a hunt for like some other kind of quick win that he can show.
1:48:21 Speaker 06 But I think also the lead up to this war demonstrated that the Abraham Accords as a framework for US policy towards the Middle East was pretty bankrupt in every direction. On the one hand, all of the like carrots that the United States was supposed to offer to encourage countries to normalize ties with Israel had effectively already been given out. So for Saudi Arabia, it was like, here are all their concessions that we were going to use in order to encourage you to normalize ties with Israel. We can just give those to you as long as you promise to invest money in the United States. So that's already been allowed to happen. At the same time, the downside for these countries in normalizing ties with Israel is pretty high. There's nothing that Israeli leaders at present can do to guarantee that there won't be another catastrophic and genocidal war
1:49:05 Speaker 06 against the Palestinian population. That's something that, you know, a Saudi leadership that is dealing with, you know, potentially rising unemployment, that other countries dealing with ethnic or sectarian divides within their borders, not something they really want to take on as well. And I think that the war has kind of created divergent perceptions of Israel as well. I think for countries like Saudi Arabia and especially Oman, there's a view of Israel, even for a newer generation of leadership like Mohammed bin Salman, who were not particularly opposed to a greater For Israel and the region, greater ties with Israel. We're just now concerned about Israel as a chaotic and unreliable partner in the region that will
1:49:48 Speaker 06 throw the security interests of its allies to the wind, you know, at a moment's notice. You know, their interpretation of the Abraham Accords is that it did nothing to protect the UAE and Bahrain from attacks by Iran or from getting dragged into an Israeli-led or partly Israeli-led war. In the other direction, however, the UAE itself kind of views its ties with Israel as more important than ever. Their view is like, well, this is a region of unreliable actors. Israel has a capable military, even if they don't admit it openly. Israel's the only nuclear armed actor in the region. And Israel did send, what's it called, the Iron Dome Defense Technology to the UAE during the conflict. On the one hand, I think we're, just as we saw during the Biden administration,
1:50:31 Speaker 06 the Abraham Accords remains this kind of like cargo cult for American foreign policymakers. This idea that we'll just say the Abraham Accords and it'll magically make countries kind of change their foreign policy orientation. But I think the Abraham Accords as a UAE-Israeli security, economic, political alliance in the region is stronger than ever and will continue to be the case into the future. But that Saudi Arabia will not participate in the way that the Trump administration assumes. Yeah, I think that Saudi Arabia will continue their policy they've had ever since October 7th, or at least since roughly thereafter of saying like, well, we're not ruling out. We just have some conditions in order to move on that.
1:51:13 Speaker 06 And then, you know, I don't think those are unreasonable conditions of making progress towards a Palestinian state, but they're not anything that Netanyahu or even probably any other political coalition that comes to power in Israel is willing to even think about. So, you know, I don't really see it happening soon. I guess, opposed to thinking is, Trump is so unpredictable that he could just like lash out and declare that he's going to do something to Saudi Arabia if they don't normalize. But then it's a real question of like, well, how long is he going to sustain that? And like, what does he do if Saudi Arabia or Mohammed bin Salman himself like snaps back? Over this past winter, we saw, for example, as part of that diplomatic rift between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, we saw Emirati-backed forces in Yemen make gains.
1:51:58 Speaker 06 A lot of commentary online about like, oh, Mohammed bin Salman isn't willing to do anything about this. And then ultimately wound up, uh, the Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned the UAE's role in Yemen, and Saudi forces bombed like an Emirati shipment coming into Yemen. So there's also the potential here as well. Like, these are two political systems where power is highly personalized around specific individuals. And so if President Trump decides to go down that route, there's the possibility for this to become a very personalized conflict. Right. And I think it's important for listeners to understand the connection, why the Palestinian issue holds such weight for Gulf leaders. Uh, you mentioned, for example, ethnic and sectarian divides in particular countries.
1:52:39 Speaker 06 I'm thinking Bahrain, or, uh, you know, rising unemployment and dissent and discontent in places like Saudi Arabia. It's because either explicitly or implicitly, the Palestinian issue in some parts of the Gulf is connected to people's anti-regime sentiment, which, of course, the Iranian regime is very good at stoking and exploiting. And so it's not just that they're worried about regional instability outside their borders. It's also, like you said, there are domestic implications for all of these regimes. Yeah, I think if we want to turn back the clock to like the first Trump administration, um, and even right up to October 7th, in places like Saudi Arabia, I think there was a belief that you could just suppress people's solidarity with Palestine,
1:53:24 Speaker 06 or that this was like a dead issue for most Saudi citizens. But what kind of October 7th showed or changed was that that sentiment had really never gone away as much as it had seemed. And also that there's now an entirely new generation that has seen the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza over the past few years, that is now well aware of everything that has been done. And this is not something you can hide from people or pretend that it will go away. And it's even harder to do so if people aren't seeing kind of rapid economic gains in their, their own lives. So it becomes... Yet another thing that, yeah, if you wanted to fault Saudi leaders for kind of weakness and international stage,
1:54:06 Speaker 06 if you wanted to fault them for not demonstrating political courage, that could be a cudgel to use against them. So inside Saudi Arabia, the one consistent thing over the past five, six, seven years is the complete suppression of talking about the Palestinian issue because political authorities are so worried that if people start talking about one political issue, maybe they start linking it to other concerns. At the same time, there has been a shift among kind of regime-aligned commentators from, you know, if this were back in 2019, 2020, you would hear them say, well, Saudi Arabia is now a country that acts in its own national interest. That means we don't have to listen to the Palestinian leadership. That's their own concern. Now you hear kind of same tune, like different variation where it's like,
1:54:49 Speaker 06 because Saudi Arabia is acting in its own national interest, we can decide that we want to act in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, not just do whatever the West tells us to do. Uh huh, uh huh. But then this leads into, I think, kind of the polarization among some of the Gulf countries because it's the exact opposite dynamic for the UAE, where the UAE goes the route of presenting itself as closer than ever to the United States, very aware that they can use Saudi skepticism towards Israel as something to attack Saudi Arabia in US commentary and US media markets. And then even if the country seemed to be able to patch these differences up from time to time, it's going to keep driving them apart as well. Uh huh.
1:55:44 Speaker 06 I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but during the first Trump administration, the propaganda around Palestinians emerging from the UAE was extremely vehement, let's say. Like, there was so much rhetoric coming out of UAE, like government officials and associated influencers and things like that, that was attempting to kind of change the image. Of the Palestinian to an Arab audience and even though you're right that they are clinging more than ever to the Abraham Accords again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that like they can't do that as much anymore. I'm not seeing as much of that kind of rhetoric and kind of anti Palestinian racism that I used to see.
1:56:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it used to be that, you know, you could walk this like, I don't want to call it a fine line, but you could play this game. I'm more familiar with this in the Saudi case, but the rhetoric would go, of course Saudi Arabia stands with the Saudi issue, but the Palestinian leadership, they would basically adopt the same tropes we were familiar with the United States. Like the Palestinian leadership never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, or they would just do a direct translation of that. Yeah. But yeah, it's much harder. Like you can't get away with that anymore because the pushback online would be incredibly intense. And likewise, even from the UAE, we see continued coordination with Israel, but it's interesting how the UAE denies or doesn't confirm certain things. So bombing Iran during the war, the UAE Foreign Ministry kind of does a wink, wink, nudge, nudge,
1:57:09 Speaker 06 like, well, look at our policies where we said we were retaliated if we were attacked, dire conclusions. Whereas when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, like visiting the UAE, they're like, this is false news. It did not happen. Yep. Yeah. And I think that points to the extent to which especially Netanyahu has become extremely toxic and hard to separate from that. And that, you know, even though I don't think the UAE is going to be hosting any like major Palestinian solidarity events anytime soon, at the same time, they're not like, you know, this is not like a warm piece in terms of how they're approaching Israelis either. I'm pretty sure the UAE even condemned the recent law, like basically allowing executions of The death penalty. Yeah. It was specifically defined to basically be Palestinians on the West Bank. Also condemned
1:57:54 Speaker 06 Israel's actions in Lebanon as well. So it's become harder to mount the kind of media campaigns against Palestinians. I think, you know, partly because they backfire and then partly in recognition that like, this was done for years and years. And then ultimately, what distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the UAE is not that their citizen publics have different views about the Palestinians, but just that in the UAE, you can surveil, coerce and bribe your citizen population so much better than in Saudi Arabia. It's like, sorry to be kind of crass about it, but like the juice just isn't worth the squeeze in terms of the Saudi monarchy relative to at least being in this kind of middle path where they're maybe not pushing the United States too much for Palestinian statehood,
1:58:38 Speaker 06 but are like doing at least the bare minimum to keep, I guess, the idea of a two-state solution alive. Yeah, and to stay adhering to the air peace initiative in some capacity. What's kind of the takeaway, do you think, for all of these countries in the aftermath of this war? Do you foresee a change in their positions vis a vis the United States in particular? For years and years, analysts of the Gulf have been talking about like these states hedging, and I think in one direction, this war showed that like most of that amounted to just trying to get like more concessions from the United States. Like you had a couple of European countries show up, you had like Pakistan get involved a little bit, but their strategies for the course of this war still revolved around trying
1:59:20 Speaker 06 to influence US thinking, you know, frame how they were viewed in the United States. But I do think it is going to trigger changes down the line. Like we saw Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Iran four years after the United States failed to intervene after Iranian line groups attacked Saudi oil fields. I think something similar here, where we're going to see developments three or four years down the line that have been cooking in the background as a result of what has happened in 2026. I think we're starting to see some of that now, and it's not going to be like, oh, we're gonna get a Chinese military base in the Gulf. It's gonna be other things like we're seeing Saudi Arabia try to work with what it views as the other regional middle powers it can trust and work with.
2:00:02 Speaker 06 Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, the UAE meanwhile is trying to like double or triple down on its direct security ties with Israel. But I think the way these Gulf states are going to react is going to figure out, how can we shape the diplomacy around the region? How can we shape our own security in ways that don't rely on the United States, but aren't like, how to put it? I think in Washington DC because of the obsession. With Chinese influence in the world, there's always this belief of like, oh, like if not us, then it will be like the Chinese will be involved. And I think the reality is going to look very different. I don't think China wants to get involved in a security fashion in the Gulf, but there are other countries that have an interest in like some degree of peaceful economic
2:00:43 Speaker 06 development or some degree of like maximize security. And that's going to be the future of these state security relations. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate your expertise. I'll link your profile at Carnegie in the show notes, as well as, given that we talked about kind of the Palestinian question in in relation to some of these other issues domestically in the Gulf states, I'll also link to some of my own research on this topic. So, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
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2:02:56 Speaker 05 Garrison Thinks.
2:02:57 Speaker 06 That's good. That's good. If we were brave, if we-
2:03:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, new Halloween costume unlocked.
2:03:03 Speaker 06 That's not happening.
2:03:04 Speaker 05 Howard.
2:03:05 Speaker 06 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 Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
2:03:18 Speaker 05 Heyo.
2:03:18 Speaker 06 This episode, we're covering the week of June 3rd to June 10th. James, some small news items to start?
2:03:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, many small things this week. Some new details have emerged about the Santa Rosa Island fire. If you remember, the fire was started by a mariner. At first, it was reported that the mariner had started the fire by firing distress flares. Now appears that the mariner's engine caught fire, starting to fire.
2:03:43 Speaker 06 Oh.
2:03:44 Speaker 05 Then he fired distress flares, but there's more.
2:03:47 Speaker 06 Okay, how many fires did this guy have involved in his boating trip?
2:03:51 Speaker 05 Well, he ran into the island next door a week before.
2:03:55 Speaker 06 Okay. Oh, boy.
2:03:56 Speaker 05 And was towed by Coast Guard to their harbor, where they found that he didn't have a number of items that you have to have on his boat for safety equipment reasons, right? So they pounded his boat for six days until a good Samaritan donated those items. He then left the harbor and crashed into the next island.
2:04:14 Speaker 06 I think that good Samaritan made a mistake. I think we can agree. He's not the man now.
2:04:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think doing anything to enable this man to re-float on the seven seas.
2:04:25 Speaker 06 He should not be in the sea.
2:04:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, this guy listens to too much Jimmy Buffett.
2:04:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:04:31 Speaker 05 Unfortunately, like, this seems to be one of those situations, he bought the boat for a single dollar.
2:04:38 Speaker 06 What?
2:04:41 Speaker 05 We generally don't give advice on this podcast, but I will say-
2:04:44 Speaker 06 You couldn't have said a funnier thing than that?
2:04:50 Speaker 05 It's not uncommon in Southern California for people to buy boats in order to find a cheaper place to live.
2:04:56 Robert Evans? Yes, of course.
2:04:56 Speaker 05 Things like slip fees, registration. People don't really see things add up. I have worked on some old diesel engines on these boats. They're not particularly straight. I'm not a great diesel mechanic to begin with, but they're not particularly straightforward. And this results in what I think we have seen here, which is a delta between confidence and ability on the seven seas. This isn't a boat that one should be sailing alone, much less so if they only bought a couple of years ago for a single American dollar.
2:05:25 Robert Evans? No.
2:05:26 Speaker 05 I'm pointing to destroy a large grove of Tory pine, which only exists there and here. So, yeah, I know. Be careful out there. Would be pirates. Moving on now. ISIS reported its 19th in custody death this year with correctional centers. Georgia, yeah. Continuing to set all the worst records. A court has vacated the president's $100,000 H1B visa tax. Case is bought by California et al, but it's more than a dozen states that will be impacted by the tax. This is a good one. Gregory Bovino appears to be eyeing a run at the presidency.
2:06:02 Robert Evans? Sure.
2:06:03 Speaker 05 This is interesting. So, he launched an extraordinary website. Yeah, why not? Why? Like, his website, bovino2028.com. The campaign appears to have originated from Jacob Engels. Engels is a right where he's kind of Roger Stone protege. They broke ways. Engels was appears to have been charged with methamphetamine possession earlier this year.
2:06:27 Robert Evans? Oh, wow.
2:06:29 Speaker 05 It was Engels who was first posting this House Bovino 2028 thing in Bovino's replies. And Engels now appears is listed on bovino2028.com.
2:06:41 Robert Evans? Oh, God. In this House Bovino thing, he's just, he watched too much Game of Thrones, right? That's, that's why he's saying that.
2:06:49 Speaker 05 I think so.
2:06:50 Robert Evans? Because I looked into it and that's as far as I can tell, it's him trying to do like a knightly, like with the new knightly order. I mean, it's, it's part of his SS cosplay is how I kind of interpreted it. Because he clearly is obsessed with the fucking Schutzhoffel and they were like a knightly order. And that's, I get those vibes from Greg.
2:07:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, like, if you look at the website, right, like, you could, like, uh, he's prominently featured wearing his now infamous grey coat, trench coat, whatever you wanna call that.
2:07:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, his big fucking coat, yes.
2:07:18 Speaker 05 I don't know if Bovino, like Bovino, maybe he's just trying to run this as far as it'll go, right? He just lost his job, so maybe he's looking for, for like, something new to do.
2:07:27 Robert Evans? Oh, sure.
2:07:28 Speaker 05 Like, I, I'm not sure how serious Bovino is with this. I do think he's, he's definitely trying to continue to, I guess, influence the national, uh, discussion, I guess.
2:07:39 Robert Evans? Well, in the internet, I mean, he's hanging out with the fucking, uh, Martin Selmer over in Portugal. He's hanging out with, at, like, straight up, like, Christchurch mass shooting affiliated Nazis, you know?
2:07:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:07:51 Robert Evans? Yeah, like, he's going for it.
2:07:53 Speaker 05 Everyone should just scroll down to the "Our Founders" section of this website.
2:07:57 Speaker 06 Okay, hold up, be, be, before, before we do that.
2:08:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:08:00 Speaker 06 This link has now appeared in our, in our group chat.
2:08:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:08:02 Speaker 06 That is the most Nazi-ass, like, just profile picture thing I have seen in a long time.
2:08:09 Speaker 05 It's like a Wolfenstein.
2:08:11 Robert Evans? Very Wolfenstein.
2:08:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, right, like.
2:08:14 Robert Evans? But, like, in the same way that, like, they're also clearly aping from, like, communist aesthetics, like, the, the good background, the way he's kind of framed is this, like, weird.
2:08:24 Speaker 06 Yeah, is it kind of West German?
2:08:25 Robert Evans? I would almost say it's like generic propaganda now, which is sort of like a mix of, like, West German, USSR, or, or East German, yeah, USSR, like, the, the, the use of red, the use of the olive branches, the solid, the sun rays.
2:08:39 Speaker 06 Body.
2:08:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, the Oakley.
2:08:41 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:08:41 Robert Evans? It's just, yeah, kind of like generic propaganda, House Bovino, men fight back.
2:08:46 Speaker 05 It's an AI-generated image, right, so it is.
2:08:48 Speaker 06 Based on the way the text is formed, it does appear to be an AI-generated image.
2:08:52 Robert Evans? It looks AI, yeah.
2:08:52 Speaker 05 It's not properly framed, right? The, the framing on the left and right is thicker than the framing at the top, there is no framing at the bottom, like, zanacarao shit.
2:09:00 Robert Evans? Oh my God, no, I think we're all missing something, which is that right underneath the, the, the big propaganda image.
2:09:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, the, the quote.
2:09:08 Robert Evans? Tiny text, the words, in very tiny text, almost hidden, Bovino knows what America needs, America's men.
2:09:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's not in quotation marks, uh, but.
2:09:19 Robert Evans? No.
2:09:20 Speaker 05 The slogan of the campaign is men fight back.
2:09:23 Robert Evans? Yeah. Or the slogan that House Bovino, it's a little unclear.
2:09:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. Uh, unclear. Maybe it's House Bovino. Maybe he's struggling to make rent, uh, having lost his job at the boy patrol and this, he's sending up a pack to pay his rent. Uh, but yeah, incredible. Uh, the
2:09:39 Robert Evans? Wow.
2:09:39 Speaker 05 Our founders section, really.
2:09:41 Speaker 06 Oh, my God.
2:09:42 Robert Evans? Okay, I have scrolled, I have scrolled down to the our founders section and there is an incredible specimen. The bold national strategy part is really upsetting to me. Yeah. Cause he's calling himself the commander and capitalizing the V and the C in a, in a very, like, here's the ways, following the commander's maximum effectiveness in quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation's cities, both large and small, the American people witnessed what true leadership powered by a warrior mindset actually looks like as the commander endeavored to restore order and national sovereignty. That is one sentence. Second sentence, America as a whole has already fallen to the grasps of the foreign
2:10:24 Robert Evans? global one world hellscape ushered in by Barack Hussein Obama. However, we believe that the commander can not only usher in the Great Restoration of America, but also cement the continuity of a strong and sovereign United States that will last a millennia. A thousand year Reich, in other words. And that also was one sentence. That is two sentences that I just read.
2:10:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:10:42 Robert Evans? I need to be clear.
2:10:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, the campaign, uh, a couple of Gmail addresses they're using here.
2:10:47 Robert Evans? Some really small font, by the way.
2:10:50 Speaker 05 It's inconsistent, right?
2:10:51 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's very inconsistently. This looks like they had AI layout his website, too.
2:10:56 Speaker 05 Well, they have one woman on their founders page and like everyone else who decides like 20 and she's like size 11.
2:11:02 Robert Evans? Yeah, like the site will have, you know, images of him or of his post where you can see his name, but it refers to him only as the commander. So like, there's a post of Greg's where it like, it's that post that he made at the airport where he's like pointing at the flight to Newark when he was on his way to Portugal, being like, should I just handle it myself? And, you know, go to Jersey to deal with this? And above that is, perhaps I must resolve this personally as a quote, the commander challenging the inertia of the open borders bureaucracy in response to, like, it's written like Greg Bovino became the overall dictator of America and this is a history book 60 years later. Like, that's the way his website is written.
2:11:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's incredibly low effort.
2:11:41 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:11:42 Speaker 05 Concerning.
2:11:42 Robert Evans? And he really has a high opinion of himself.
2:11:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:11:45 Robert Evans? I gotta, I gotta say that.
2:11:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, I do wonder how much this is just Engels just writing this like as a fan.
2:11:51 Robert Evans? Yeah, I wonder how much he had to do with this, but.
2:11:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:11:54 Robert Evans? This does not seem like he had nothing to do with it. I will say that based on my knowledge of Greg Bovino.
2:12:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's shared it on his own social media.
2:12:03 Robert Evans? Great. In other news, the months-long fight over ICE and CBP funding has come to an end. In a 214 to 212 vote on Tuesday, the House has passed a reconciliation bill funding ICE and CBP.
2:12:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, this is the so-called Secure America Act, right? It'll give them $70 billion. So if we look at that combined with the big, beautiful bill, it's about $240 billion allocated to them in a single year. It doesn't mean they have to spend it all this year, right? The Secure America Act gives them a window up to September 30th, 2029, with no particular allocations for any given year. To me, that strikes me as a hedge against funding after the midterms. I think that is what that's about. Also notable, like Karissa said, that they use reconciliation to allow a simple majority in the Senate.
2:12:56 Robert Evans? We went over the details of a previous version of this bill a few weeks ago. This money is going to go towards hiring and arming new officers, hiring more administrative staff, attorneys, and this is all going to be towards immigration enforcement, as well as some money allocated for acquiring new border technology. The $1 billion of quote-unquote "security" funding for Trump's ballroom was removed from the bill by the Senate last week. Two other short things I want to mention. Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted two people in relation to Stop Cop City protests and alleged crimes in 2022. And Wednesday morning, the FBI raided about seven people.
2:13:42 Speaker 06 Michigan related to pro Palestine protests at the University of Michigan and protests against University of Michigan officials as of recording like this just happened a few hours ago and relates to an indictment that was unsealed this morning as well, which charges eight people. We'll cover this more in detail in the future. We're going to do one more quick segment here and then when we return, we're going to talk about the pogroms in Belfast.
2:14:09 Robert Evans? Yay.
2:14:11 Speaker 06 Some updates related to primary elections in Maine. Graham Plattner has won the Democratic primary with about 72% of the vote.
2:14:19 Robert Evans? Mm hmm.
2:14:19 Speaker 06 The governor's race is too close to call with the ranked choice voting yet to be tallied, but I'm keeping my eye on the Sanders and labor backed candidate Troy Jackson, who campaigned with Plattner. Jackson is about 9,000 votes behind the pre-ranked choice vote candidate, Dr. Nirav Shah. After a week of counting, we have more definitive results from the elections in California last week.
2:14:47 Robert Evans? Yeah, which a lot of people are saying is an unforgivable fuck up of democracy that they counted all of the votes and it took them a while. But yeah, Gears, please continue. And we'll talk about the the chaos that is is being justified by the fact that this took a while to count.
2:15:05 Speaker 06 Tom Steyer will not be making it onto the ballot this coming November.
2:15:09 Robert Evans? Nope.
2:15:09 Speaker 06 With 91% of the votes counted, Steyer has earned 1,928,381 votes or 22.5%. Republican Steve Hilton, former Fox News host, has edged Steyer out by about 200,000 votes, earning 25% of the vote and advancing to the general election where he will go up against liberal Democrat Javier Becerra with 27.9% of the vote.
2:15:40 Speaker 06 Katie Porter won just under 400,000 votes. Karen Bass still leads the LA mayoral primary with 95% of the votes counted. Bass has nearly 300,000 votes, running 34.3%. Progressive Nithia Ramon has moved into second place with 29%, beating Republican Spencer Pratt with 25.5%. So the general election will see Ramon go up against Bass. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt was up in the early vote, but as Ramon started to pull ahead, Trump and others began claiming the election was being stolen from Republicans.
2:16:22 Speaker 06 Pratt has insinuated that Ramon's lead came from LA's homeless population and Musk wrote that, quote, "The level of fraud here is mind blowing." Yeah.
2:16:33 Speaker 05 Also homeless people can vote, like, what? Yeah, yeah. Provided they are US citizens, like, yeah.
2:16:40 Robert Evans? Yes, yes. It's all lies. I mean, and a lot of what's even what's being reported in the Washington Post is, is straight up lies. They just published an article today that includes this line. And again, the, the theme of the article is like, well, you know, obviously this election wasn't stolen, but the fact that it's taken so long is really a problem. You can't actually blame all these people if they, if they think it's suspicious. This is not evidence of a rigged election, but it creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root. It didn't help that Ramon tearfully conceded last Tuesday, but it's irresponsible for Pratt to intimate on social media as the race is being stolen. She didn't tearfully concede.
2:17:20 Speaker 06 That did not happen.
2:17:21 Robert Evans? That never happened. The Washington Post lied. Like, that's just in a Post article? That's just a lie by the Washington Post. Like, an intentional lie, I would argue.
2:17:30 Speaker 05 Incredible. I guess to just go into this, to, to people understand, like, you know, like, I've written for broadsheet newspapers, several people, this is not one person fucking up, right? This is an institutional fuck up.
2:17:41 Robert Evans? This was a choice.
2:17:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:17:43 Robert Evans? It was a choice to get this wrong.
2:17:44 Speaker 05 The person whose name is on the byline wrote that, yes. An editor then edited it, a copy editor then edited it, and then somebody laid it out for the website.
2:17:51 Robert Evans? Yep. And you know this, if you're listening and you work for the Post, you know this. You know that your editors, your bosses and your colleagues chose to lie and are choosing to continue to lie and spread lies through their publication. You're aware of this, if you work there still.
2:18:05 Robert Evans? Like, anyway.
2:18:06 Speaker 05 I don't know.
2:18:07 Robert Evans? Benny Johnson, Tim Poole, or Ingram and Sean Hannity are alleged that Democrats stole the election, and Trump has continued to make claims that the election was rigged. Quote, "Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail-in ballots."
2:18:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, no shit.
2:18:22 Robert Evans? Truthed.
2:18:23 Speaker 05 Sorry.
2:18:24 Robert Evans? Yeah, man, it's convenient.
2:18:26 Speaker 05 Yeah. Just eternal 2020.
2:18:29 Robert Evans? Trump truthed earlier this week, quote, "Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had. Third world nation," unquote.
2:18:38 Speaker 05 Does he understand what the word nation means?
2:18:41 Robert Evans? No. No.
2:18:43 Speaker 05 I don't think.
2:18:44 Robert Evans? They've told these truths. I don't think he I know. understands how election works, obviously. Or he does, and he's just, you know, saying what he needs to say here. Notably, on Sunday, Trump stormed out of an interview on Meet the Press when asked if he had any evidence of quote-unquote cheating in California.
2:19:01 Speaker 02 The election was rigged. It was a dirty election. And it's happening again right now in California.
2:19:07 Speaker 03 You've never presented evidence that the 2020 election was rigged.
2:19:11 Speaker 02 Right now, it's looking, look at what's happening in California.
2:19:13 Speaker 03 Where's the evidence to that?
2:19:14 Speaker 02 It's four days.
2:19:15 Speaker 03 The Republicans are doing well in California.
2:19:17 Speaker 02 In California, it's, no, they're not, they're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days, and they aren't even close to coming up with it.
2:19:26 Speaker 03 That's how they capped the votes in California.
2:19:28 Speaker 02 You know why they're doing that? Because they're cheating on the election.
2:19:29 Speaker 03 There's, what, do you have evidence to support that?
2:19:31 Speaker 02 All I have to do is look.
2:19:33 Robert Evans? All you have to do is look.
2:19:34 Speaker 05 Is he in front of a green screen that depicts a John Deere tractor and planter?
2:19:40 Robert Evans? No, they are in Wisconsin in some kind of barn, and it's raining outside in this barn with the John Deere tractor and like hay bales. It's an interesting kind of like real world set they have.
2:19:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, okay. And the focus is very weird, like the
2:19:54 Robert Evans? Yeah. Trump later called vote counting in California quote-unquote crooked, just like how the press is crooked, quote.
2:20:02 Speaker 06 You're either crooked or you're stupid. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they're rigged.
2:20:09 Speaker 02 We're like a third world country. But sir. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Meet the Press is crooked. But Mr. President. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. But Mr. President. Your one-sided crooked network. So let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please. I traveled all the way to Wisconsin.
2:20:29 Robert Evans? Ah, God, that's embarrassing.
2:20:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:20:32 Robert Evans? Just be mean to him. Be rude. Yell at him. Call him a fucking liar. Scream at him. Stop doing this bullshit. Like, I'm sorry. I have no sympathy for that.
2:20:41 Speaker 06 Like, people booed him, dreamed the national anthem at a Knicks game. You can fucking do this.
2:20:46 Robert Evans? Yeah, scream at him. Call him a piece of shit.
2:20:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, you know?
2:20:49 Robert Evans? You're not getting anything out of just letting him talk. Call him a liar. Shout over him.
2:20:54 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:20:54 Robert Evans? Stop pretending.
2:20:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
2:20:56 Robert Evans? Fucking cowards. I'm sorry.
2:20:58 Speaker 06 And yeah, Mia, you're right. I think we should definitely pay attention to the fact that Trump did cause the Knicks to lose that game. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
2:21:06 Robert Evans? He did. He did. He did. And honestly, that's what I like about him because it continues James Jolyn's streak of...
2:21:13 Speaker 06 House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these claims on Monday and said that the vote counting in California, quote unquote, "stinks to high heaven" and that the schemes are so, quote unquote, "diabolical" that it's impossible to prove election rigging. The president keeps saying that there's election fraud in the California mayors race. Is what evidence is there to prove that?
2:21:35 Robert Evans? You tell me, Manu. They are counting votes weeks after the election. We have entire nations with huge populations, like India, that can count their votes in 24 to 40 hours.
2:21:45 Speaker 06 You're saying it's rigged like the president?
2:21:46 Robert Evans? I'm not saying it's rigged. I'm saying it stinks to high heaven and everybody knows that. Let's, let's, let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a, what a, what a concept. Let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.
2:22:03 Speaker 06 But what evidence is there to prove that there was this rig?
2:22:06 Robert Evans? I don't, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream, it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is...
2:22:13 Speaker 06 Wrong here. So this is, I think, very clearly a preview of what's to come in the midterm elections.
2:22:18 Robert Evans? Yeah, for sure.
2:22:19 Speaker 06 Um, and they are kind of laying this out here. It's of course impossible to prove, but we all know that it's wrong.
2:22:26 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:22:27 Speaker 06 This is gonna be every election for the rest of my.
2:22:29 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yep. Yep. But this is gonna be anything that happens that does not meet the increasingly fanciful version of reality they have to believe. Yeah. Right? It's not just elections. It's literally any fact that like is inconvenient. There's any storm that shouldn't have happened based on when they think a storm should happen, right? Yeah. This is just life now. Yeah, it's necessary to like create the version of reality that they're existing in. Yeah.
2:22:57 Speaker 06 We're gonna go on break and then discuss the pogroms in Northern Ireland.
2:23:13 Speaker 06 We are back.
2:23:15 Robert Evans? Ooh.
2:23:16 Speaker 06 Yeah. On Tuesday, July 9th, this is the day before we are recording this, which is important because we don't know how events are going to proceed from here when you're listening to it. But on June 9th, there were widespread attacks on the homes of non-white people in Ireland in what I and many others have described as a pogrom. Mass assailants kicked down doors, forced on white people from their homes and lit houses and cars on fire. People were being stopped in the streets. I'm going to read a little bit from a report from Henel Othman, who was on the scene reporting on what was going on.
2:23:57 Speaker 06 Quote, "As a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down. With the attack thick with smoke from fireworks, they attacked the downstairs windows with bricks. As they stormed the property, some claimed to be, quote, liberating it. Graffiti nearby demanded, quote, 'local homes for local people.' A woman in the crowd said to her friend, quote, 'There's wee girls inside.'"
2:24:27 Speaker 06 It is an extremely bleak and worrying event. The nominal cause of this pogrom was a video of a stabbing in Belfast that has gone viral on social media, which has been amplified by right-wing forces, both in Ireland, the UK, and across the world, probably most famously by Elon Musk. We will touch on that more in a second. But before we say anything about the broader context, I think it's important to state two things here. One, Ireland, and also particularly the factions of Irish politics you're going to be getting to here, has had racism problems long before any of these events. Famously, you know, if you want to look at the most immediate stuff in the recent
2:25:10 Speaker 06 past, exactly one year ago today in Northern Ireland, there was a smaller race riot. There was a smaller scale version of the thing we're seeing here with less damage, but still, you know, absolutely terrifying effects.
2:25:26 Robert Evans? This very much rhymes with the the race riots that we saw in the UK a couple of years ago.
2:25:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:25:32 Robert Evans? Right? Like a similar similar deal, similar motivation of mobs attacking hotel. At that point, it was more focused on hotels that refugees were believed at. But yeah, like you were saying, we have basically the same idea.
2:25:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, these are white mobs. It's also, I think, important to note, on top of just the general sort of racism of Irish society, this program's largely taking place in loyalist neighborhoods. You know, these are places with very, very longstanding far-right paramilitaries with very close ties to the police. A lot of the people in the streets are, you know, sort of parts of old loyalist paramilitary and criminal networks. These are, in many cases, like believed to be the same networks that, you know, were doing shit during the troubles and have been. Active in various forms throughout the occupation of Ireland. And Deportations Belfast notes that leaked emails from police after the 2025 riots.
2:26:26 Speaker 06 They're from the riots themselves. They said, quote, "It is important for you to understand our expectations. Unless there is an obvious Article Two issue, we do not expect you to expose yourself to significant unnecessary risk." So what that in effect is saying is that this is in effect a stand down order if you don't, if you think that anything would be even-
2:26:48 Robert Evans? Let the mobs do what they're gonna do.
2:26:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, right. And that's, that's just the stuff. This is from the 2025 riots. Presumably similar orders went out during these riots. And that's just the stuff that they sent via email, right? That has, that has been leaked out. The police, again, very notably did very, very little while all of this was happening, while people's houses were being burned down, while people were being dragged out of their homes. These attacks also come after weeks of far right discourse in the UK about like the killings of two white men by non white men.
2:27:22 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:27:23 Speaker 06 I mean, on the BBC, they are having debates about whether there is a, quote, "two-tiered police system", which, you know, when I initially saw that, I was confused because, yeah, two-tiered police system has been the way that, you know, like anti, anti-police violence activists have talked about the way the police system functions, where there is a way the police function for white people, which is that it treats them significantly better. And then there's the way it works for non-white people. The far right has flipped this on its head and is now arguing, to an extent that is now sort of national discourse on the fucking BBC, is arguing that there is a two-tiered police system where non-white people are let off the hook for their crimes and where white people aren't protected by the law. This is nonsense, but it has been spreading rapidly, pushed by far-right actors like Tommy Robinson and-
2:28:08 Speaker 06 Of course Elon Musk.
2:28:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:28:11 Robert Evans? Yeah, Musk specifically has been really pushing this.
2:28:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:28:14 Robert Evans? He was, he was a big figure too in, in what happened in the UK a bit ago.
2:28:18 Speaker 06 Yeah, and the 2025 Irish riots too.
2:28:20 Robert Evans? Right, that's exactly right. And he's been non-stop pushing and making posts, making claims to the extent of like, we need to, the only way things will get better is if we keep protesting, you know, this has to be handled like forcefully, yada, yada, like that sort of shit. Like he has been, he's been basically devoting, as far as I can tell, the week that he is about to have, and that he is having his IPO, devoting the majority of his time to inciting up a Grom.
2:28:44 Speaker 06 Yes, seems to be. Yeah, he retweeted a post from Restore Britain, which is a somehow even further right, just
2:28:53 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:28:53 Speaker 06 Straight up effectively fascist party, but even further right than the already horrifying Reform Party, uh, saying, quote, "Do not make peace with evil, destroy it."
2:29:05 Speaker 05 Yep.
2:29:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, there's another one where he's like, either you fight back or you die. That's what it comes down to. There's been a lot of comparisons between Elon Musk and Radio Rwanda, which is a radio outlet that was broadcasting calls for the Rwandans.
2:29:18 Robert Evans? Well, and that's, that's not accurate really, but.
2:29:22 Speaker 05 You're referring to RTLM, right? Radio Television Libre Melcoline.
2:29:26 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:29:26 Speaker 05 Yes. That Radio Rwanda is a different thing.
2:29:28 Speaker 06 Oh, sorry, am I?
2:29:30 Speaker 05 Uh, like Radio Rwanda is a currently existing corporation, uh, so we should, we need to be extremely clear in our terminology.
2:29:36 Robert Evans? Uh, let me, let me be very clear here, cause I actually had this pulled up for this. RTLM was the radio station that is often accused of helping to coordinate, or some people will just say straight up incited the genocide.
2:29:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:29:49 Robert Evans? Uh, it was owned by a guy named Felician Kabuga, who was an extremely wealthy Rwandan man, and who was personally very much involved in like wanting to push for the genocide. RTLM regularly called Tutsis cockroaches.
2:30:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:30:02 Robert Evans? And encouraged people to cut down the tall trees. However, there are also good reasons why this is not quite as direct as it seems. RTLM did not coordinate attacks. They did not plan specific actions and.
2:30:18 Robert Evans? Analysis in the modern day has shown that a lot of the worst massacres, in fact, the majority of the worst massacres did not have any direct relation to RTLM. Now, RTLM's propaganda and broadcasts played a role in the genocide and incited and continued to like escalate the violence, but it's not exactly, I would argue it looks like, and we also, we don't have perfect analysis of what's just happened in Northern Ireland, so maybe this will prove me wrong. It looks like what Musk is doing has more of a direct positive effect.
2:30:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:30:49 Robert Evans? But that's also not clear to me at the moment.
2:30:51 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah, my estimation so far, but again, like this is changing, my estimation so far is that I think it is actually closer to it in that I think, I think even if Musk isn't there, something like this happens.
2:31:01 Robert Evans? Sure.
2:31:02 Speaker 06 Because I think a lot of this is mobilization through like very local Irish political forces and these sort of unionist networks.
2:31:09 Robert Evans? But it's also really difficult to say just because all of those networks have been heavily influenced by Musk's ex in the last eight years too. So it's, I don't know how you wanna.
2:31:20 Speaker 06 Yeah. And it's feeding off of like a decade of intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment across the UK.
2:31:27 Robert Evans? Right.
2:31:27 Speaker 06 Including Ireland and Northern Ireland. Yeah.
2:31:29 Robert Evans? And this is also something that people will point out when you're talking about Rwanda and RTLM, which is that like, well, as much blame as you want to give RTLM and some of these other media organizations that unquestionably had some role in motivating and fueling what happened. But I mean, the root of the Rwandan genocide comes from the period of colonialism when the Tutsis were like a favored group of people within the country, which is what started a lot of these like underlying hatreds, right, is, is the way in which the colonial power played these different groups off of each other. So anyway, whatever. As is always the case, it's always going to be deeper than some guy has a media outlet, right? But that doesn't mean the media outlet is not involved in what's happening.
2:32:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:32:12 Speaker 05 It was the same in Rwanda, right? Like we had the Interaham way, like, like they existed and they existed, like distinct from RTLM, but like the environment that allowed those two things to happen, nothing's mono-causal. People want to do this in history.
2:32:25 Robert Evans? No, and it's the difficult thing of both, it's very important to point out when something like this rhymes with something that happened in a genocide that killed a million people. And also, the more you learn about stuff like this, when people make those comparisons, the more learned people are like, well, that's not quite right. Actually, this is, it was a little different, you know?
2:32:44 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:32:44 Speaker 05 The Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali is the most moving museum I've ever seen in my life. It's incredible. If you have the chance, everyone should go.
2:32:53 Robert Evans? We need to do more in bastards on Rwanda, but yeah, anyway.
2:32:57 Speaker 05 Wonderful country.
2:32:58 Speaker 06 Yeah. The one thing I also want to mention sort of in closing here is that, you know, again, like part of the reason this is happening, part of the reason it's been a lot of, you know, these of these unionist networks, part of the reason it's happening the way that it is, is that this is a very, very old white supremacist project.
2:33:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:33:14 Speaker 06 Going back, like, you know, like through the British occupation of Ireland, right? And it's a project that's been aligned with, like, the Rwandans were once British in the sense of, like, like, you know, this, this is carrying on the sort of long imperial British tradition is like, yes, the world, one of the world's like largest and most bloody and ruthless white supremacist organizations. Yeah.
2:33:36 Robert Evans? We talked about this in a meeting we were having beforehand, but like loyalists in Northern Ireland have regularly made a habit of, particularly in the seventies and eighties, displaying Rhodesia flags. In the nineties, apartheid South Africa flags. It's very common to find Confederate flags, like, you know.
2:33:55 Speaker 05 Yeah, like partly as a direct response to the internationalism of republicanism, they just decided to align with the worst people on the planet.
2:34:02 Robert Evans? Yep.
2:34:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, there'll be another episode up on this Monday that goes into more detail and will have more information as it comes out. This is again a rapidly changing situation. There might be more.
2:34:12 Speaker 05 By the time you hear it.
2:34:14 Speaker 06 Days of this, it's possible that the police will crack down harder because there's been some pressure put on them by basically every government's involved in this, but we just simply don't know that at this time. And yeah, it's a absolutely horrifying day.
2:34:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, pretty horrible to see. Let's do immigration in the US now, another country where things are going great. So a judge has ruled that Trump administration's broad restrictions on asylum and work permits, these were issued after the shooting of two National Guards people in DC, are unlawful. Quote from the court order here, "More than six months ago, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services enacted a series of policies that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo. The agency announced that it would be placing indefinite pause on the adjudication of immigration benefit requests from individuals from 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries. Since then, individuals from these countries have been categorically barred from receiving
2:35:14 Speaker 05 final decisions on, among other things, their asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship application. And USCIS's hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong, rather it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth." And then I found this interesting in the court documents here. "In ruling on these motions, a court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy. If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to follow the law and do things the right way. This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that." They went on to say that the USCIS had used what they called pretextual concerns of national
2:35:56 Speaker 05 security that mask anti-immigrant sentiment that is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making. In legal terms, that means that USCIS's actions are contrary to law, arbitrary, and capricious. There's a fairly emphatic court response, right? This will affect a great deal of people. This has left a great deal of people in limbo, right? Most famously, I guess, there were people who were at the stage of their naturalization where they take the oath to become American citizens, right? The very final step. It is obviously a formality. You've passed the background checks, done the interviews, et cetera, et cetera, but it's still a necessary step. Without doing it, you do not become a citizen. And those people had been delayed and unable to do that, they will be able to proceed with that.
2:36:38 Speaker 05 Other people will be able to proceed with their process with the caveat that USCIS, as we have reported before on this show, is heavily focused on denaturalization, and it might be very hard for them to actually make that progress and get USCIS to move on stuff. Talking of denaturalization, the DOJ has begun proceedings against 17 people. These people are either accused or convicted of serious crimes. What it seems that in most cases, people have been adjudicated to have committed crimes. In some cases, they pled guilty to crimes after they naturalized. But that they were doing before they naturalized. And what they are arguing here, the DOJ is arguing is that therefore they lied when they were
2:37:22 Speaker 05 naturalized because they were asked if they had committed any crimes, which they had not been arrested. So by not confessing to those crimes in their interview, they were therefore lying. They were lying on the form. Yes, on the form or in the interview or both. And therefore that is why they are trying to denaturalize. So this is a large denaturalization. Seventeen people is a lot. A couple of them also are alleged to have applied for immigration benefits under multiple different identities. One that I found particularly interesting is a Catholic priest who abused a minor parishioner. It's interesting because it's interesting to see them going there. I'll follow these and then kind of keep tabs on how these progress. But they have been ramping up denaturalizations.
2:38:04 Speaker 05 We are beginning to see them kind of reaping the work USCS has been doing since the Trump administration fundamentally turned that agency around and pointed it at denaturalization. Meanwhile, a GAO report on immigration detention in Camp East Montana. I've never seen it written like Montana with, so I'm guessing it's Camp. Like Joe Montana almost? Yeah, well, like they write, it says Montana. So like, I don't know, but it's in Bliss, right? Like it's inside Fort Bliss. So like one would expect normally like a Spanish style pronunciation given the region. Yeah. But maybe they just like fucking N E. I don't know like why they're not. Anyway, it's camp.
2:38:47 Speaker 05 Its name is spelled like the state, not the, not the Spanish word for mountain. Some of the things detailed in this report are pretty shocking. A guard lost a loaded gun. Oh, boy. Yeah. People with diabetes and HIV did not receive treatment plans and quote on. Jesus. Yeah. On February 20. Twenty twenty six ICE issued a discrepancy report for detained nonsense and death by use of force in January of twenty twenty six. The coroner's autopsy found the death to be a homicide due to asphyxia. However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE as required. In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.
2:39:24 Speaker 06 She's yeah, like one of their guards strangled someone to death. It appears.
2:39:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a range of ways someone could be asphyxiated, right? Like I.
2:39:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's true, but.
2:39:36 Speaker 05 I'm guessing they attempted to restrain this person violently and like as we've seen many other times in American history murdered them.
2:39:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:39:43 Speaker 05 And then evidence of that was destroyed. What is allowing this to happen? It's that the contract was solicited using a worldwide expeditionary multiple award contract vehicle. That's a generally like a military contract vehicle. It allows an experienced pool of military contractors to apply for the contract. They probably did it like this to expedite the awarding implementation, right? Like Camp East Montana is a soft sided facility on Fort Bliss. I've talked about it before here. Soft sided facility means tents, right? I mean, it means keeping hundreds of people in tents. They hired a contractor who had no experience using what's called a lowest price technically acceptable evaluation approach. So they like filter out
2:40:26 Speaker 05 people who can't do the requirements that they have for the contract and then they look at which which of the ones that does meet the requirements has the lowest price, right? This has resulted very clearly in them contracting someone who's completely incapable of managing a facility like this. And even among ICE facilities, this one appears to be particularly heinous. And this has resulted in very, very predictable and easily foreseen human tragedies, right? They are capable of doing better than this. Conditions were very bad at Bliss for Afghan people, right? Who came here after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wrote about that for the nation. You can look it up. I interviewed someone who was there. But this is even worse. Rather than learning from
2:41:09 Speaker 05 that, they've they've just gone deeper. This has resulted in at least one person being killed. It's pretty horrific.
2:41:18 Speaker 06 Let's go on break and then we will return for some stories about trans healthcare and war with Iran.
2:41:38 Speaker 06 All right, we are back. I have a sort of hodgepodge collection of stories related to trans healthcare and trans rights in the United States that I'm gonna go kind of sequentially and some of them tie together. But let's start with the trans military ban. We have an update on this. A federal appeals court has at least temporarily blocked the Pentagon from expelling transgender members of the military, though trans people may be barred from enlisting. So this is kind of, sort of like a new form of don't ask, don't tell, in a way. Oh, boy. Of you can get in if you're not trans, but once you're in and you are trans,
2:42:20 Speaker 06 there's no legal grounds to remove you from the military. This was a 2-1 ruling that found Hagseth's anti-trans policy was, quote, "driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group," and, quote, "both arbitrary and based on animus. For those reasons, the policy violates the plaintiff's appellate constitutional right to equal protection of the law," unquote. The last bit is very important, like the equal protection clause in cases like this is gonna be the main thing that trans people are able to rely on. Now, Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote that the Trump admin claimed
2:43:01 Speaker 06 their anti-trans policy is solely about whether the military can disqualify people from service due to a mental health condition like gender dysphoria. Judge Wilkins wrote, quote, "But the record shows that the purpose of the Hagseth policy is to target applicants and service members who express what the administration believes is a, quote-unquote, 'false gender identity,' and the policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification," unquote. Hagseth almost immediately announced he is appealing to the Supreme Court. Oh, boy.
2:43:42 Speaker 07 We will see where this goes.
2:43:44 Speaker 05 Yep.
2:43:45 Speaker 07 Last month, the DOJ announced a settlement with the Texas Children's Hospital as part of an ongoing national investigation into violations of federal law for providing gender-affirming care to minors. The Texas Children's Hospital has entered into agreements with both the DOJ and the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, that includes a commitment to not perform, quote-unquote, "sex-rejecting procedures" on minors, which the DOJ says includes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This is a new term that they're really, really rolling out. It's sex-rejecting procedures. That's, that's, you're just gonna see this a lot more in these next few weeks to months.
2:44:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:44:29 Speaker 07 The hospital in Texas also agreed to pay over $10 million in damages and civil penalties to, quote, "resolve allegations that it submitted false billings to public and private payers to secure insurance coverage for pediatric sex-rejecting procedures." The department alleges this conduct violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, and federal fraud and conspiracy laws, unquote. So they're saying that by billing insurance, whether public or private, for, quote-unquote, "sex-rejecting procedures," trans healthcare, that this was an act of fraud. Now, this is a settlement, and at the end of the settlement, they do note that these are just allegations, that these have not actually been proven, liability's not been
2:45:13 Speaker 07 proven in a court, but these are the allegations that resulted in the settlement. Now, as a part of the settlement, the Children's Hospital will also open the first-ever, quote-unquote, "de-transition clinic." So, detransition care is the same as transition care, right? It is the same
2:45:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:45:32 Speaker 07 type of care.
2:45:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:45:33 Speaker 07 I know this. This is, this is like what I do. There's not enough detransitioners out in the world to, like, sustain an actual full clinic, which points to the, the fact that this clinic is not gonna be used for consenting detransition. This is mainly gonna be used as a conversion therapy clinic for, for kids who
2:45:53 Speaker 05 Yep.
2:45:53 Speaker 07 want to transition, but are now gonna be forced to go to a clinic like this because they're not able to get their healthcare.
2:46:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:46:02 Speaker 06 Through this hospital, or really like in Texas as a minor. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio settled a very similar case last week, paying a $308,000 fine and agreeing to dedicate $2 million in funds for detransition care, while promising to not provide gender-affirming healthcare to minors for 20 years.
2:46:26 Speaker 05 Jesus.
2:46:27 Speaker 06 That is the part of the settlement in the Cleveland Clinic case.
2:46:29 Speaker 05 My god. Yeah.
2:46:31 Speaker 06 In mid-May, Oklahoma passed a bill prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, including surgery and HRT, as well as offering this care in state-owned facilities. The bill does not cut funding to doctors at private healthcare facilities to provide HRT, as I have seen some claim online. This, like many of the Medicaid restrictions, primarily affects poor trans people on state Medicaid and may make care hard to access in the future, depending on how private hospitals react to this bill, even though it does not necessarily force them to change the way they operate.
2:47:11 Speaker 06 Lastly, later this summer, New York City will begin testing a pilot program for a direct, low-no-cost, gender-affirming care clinic for adults, opening in a low-income neighborhood in Queens. I think this is a good first step in providing access to care, considering the Trump administration's threats to restrict Medicaid and Medicare coverage or remove Medicare/Medicaid eligibility from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care services. But as we know, trans youth have borne the brunt of these threats. Now, Bose Maldani and the city health commissioner have said they are working to expand city-provided gender-affirming care services to cover trans youth. Commissioner Martin told the city council last Friday,
2:47:56 Speaker 06 quote, "We are committed to this issue and want to make sure that we provide the services and resources for youth, as well as making sure we don't expose ourselves to clawbacks from the federal government, which disrupt the rest of the care we can give." There's much more to come on this, but rest assured, we are working on this, unquote. Something that is worth understanding here is that this new pilot program, this city-run, low-no-cost drop-in clinic, is completely separate from the city's H&H Municipal Hospital. Which already operates multiple H and H pride centers that currently offer youth gender affirming care, including HRT.
2:48:36 Speaker 06 I called one this morning to confirm that they are still offering services to children, people of all ages. Now, H and H is funded through city subsidies and patient revenue through Medicare. The new pilot program is attempting to launch an alternative care service that isn't reliant on insurance or federal funding, if that comes into question. And they're trying to get this clinic up and running off the ground as soon as possible. And then, once the pilot program is tested, expand it. Last week, Mom Donnie announced a $15 million investment in gender affirming care, quote unquote, "as a first step," and said that the funds would be used to, quote unquote, "unlock care for youth who have had their health care restricted by private hospitals."
2:49:20 Speaker 06 Though it's currently unclear how exactly these funds will be used. For a while, advocates in New York City and state were fighting for care in the state budget, which delayed some of the process on this city-provided care, because they were expecting about $8 million of care from the state budget, which eventually fell through. So now, the city process is ramping up on this. Earlier this year, two major hospital systems in New York City stopped providing gender affirming care to trans youth ahead of prospective HHS federal rule changes that would prevent hospitals from receiving federal funding if they offer gender affirming care services to youth. These rules have yet to go into effect, but two major hospitals essentially complied beforehand.
2:50:05 Speaker 06 The risks from the federal government aren't just isolated to restricting federal funding. The Trump administration has employed a variety of threats in an attempt to intimidate patients and care providers. Last month, the two hospitals that discontinued care for trans youth received a criminal grand jury subpoena from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Texas, requesting information on patients under 18 years of age. At least one of the hospitals, Mount Sinai, is complying with the subpoena, though telling parents the records would be anonymized, whatever that means.
2:50:39 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
2:50:40 Speaker 06 A group of trans New Yorkers who have received care at NYU Langone and their parents have filed a class action lawsuit to protect their medical records, though patients at Mount Sinai could also sign. On to this suit. The suit has extended the deadline for the subpoena till late June, as both the hospital and patients fight this in court. A similar administrative subpoena requesting records for youth patients was challenged and successfully blocked in Rhode Island. These subpoenas should be fought on the strongest grounds by both the patients, the state, the city, and the hospitals themselves. And beyond the all ages care currently offered by the H H Health System,
2:51:23 Speaker 06 I think it was also fair to advocate that the direct low no cost drop in clinic expand to cover all ages once the pilot program is up and running this summer.
2:51:36 Speaker 05 We'll briefly discuss the detention of an ICE officer and the war on Iran.
2:51:42 Robert Evans? We do have a good ICE arrest for you this week.
2:51:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, the one good ice arrest, right? Let's just start there then. So Hennepin County Attorney has filed charges against ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro was arrested in Texas. He was arrested by Texas Rangers with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Investigators and DHS Security Office of the Inspector General Staff at the scene, according to a statement by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. Castro is charged with, quote, "four counts of second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for an incident on January 14th, 2026, when he discharged his weapon through the front door of a home, knowing there were people who had just run inside. The bullet traveled through the door and struck one victim in the leg before making its final impact in the wall of a child's room."
2:52:31 Speaker 05 They didn't note in this that the case might be removed to federal court, but they say that he would still be ineligible for presidential pardon. It is not usual when announcing any prosecution to consider the impact of a presidential pardon. It is interesting that they did.
2:52:48 Robert Evans? Oh.
2:52:49 Speaker 05 The case in question refers to Castro shooting of Julio Sosa Celis, in which DHS claimed that Sosa Celis and two others attacked Castro with a broom and a snow shovel and that Castro, quote, "fired the defensive shot." To defend his life, DHS very quickly dropped its case, put two agents on leave for providing accounts that were contradicted by video evidence. Probably Castro was one of them, right? This is interesting, A, that they were able to like obtain the DHS OIG support. I had forgotten that DHS OIG were still doing stuff like this. To be honest, I didn't think they were. So this will be one that we will follow. That only leaves us with Iran, where this week a
2:53:31 Speaker 05 a United States Apache helicopter was, uh, people have been using shot down. I'm not sure if it was shot. It was taken down reportedly by an Iranian drone. And reportedly by a collision with that drone. It's possible that it's happened accidentally, uh, but given other things we've seen, right with, uh, in Ukraine, for example. It is possible to take down a helicopter with FPV drone. That would be my guess as to what happened here. Its crew were then rescued from the Strait of Hormuz by another drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. The US only bought these online in March of this year. So this is the first time Yeah.
2:54:14 Speaker 05 That we're aware of that they were using this capacity, right? So this is like a boat drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. And it scooped, well, it didn't scoop them up. They got on it. It collected them. And then it took them to a second location where a helicopter was able to lift them up. As a direct result, and according to CENTCOM, at the direct order of the president, the US then began self-defense. I'm quoting here, right? Quote unquote, self-defense strikes against Iran. They claim these strikes were a quote unquote warning shot and will not impact negotiations. But as we record this on Wednesday afternoon, they have just announced another series of strikes. This all comes after Israel and Iran exchanged missile salvos when Iran responded to Israeli bombing in Beirut.
2:55:00 Speaker 05 And the Houthis have also claimed a missile attack on Israel and have said that they would begin targeting Israeli shipping. Again, we are already teetering on the edge of this becoming a massive internet. National conflict in a region again. I mean, it is a massive international conflict, right? But returning to these full scale conflict that we saw until the ceasefire, which has been repeatedly violated, but nonetheless has reduced the amount of bombing that's happening. Israel also bombed Palestine this week. Among the people killed was an eight year old boy named Jadd Soleimani in northern Gaza, which is tragic. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on this. Like I've tried really hard not to make our coverage of especially what's happening on Iran.
2:55:44 Speaker 05 Twitter review because real people are killing and real people are dying and like it's focusing on the stupid shit that the president said or that Netanyahu said on Twitter like isn't true social converted Twitter or whatever like that's not really what's at stake here. Like what's at stake is people's lives. And so I want to kind of avoid doing the back and forth social media review. But yeah, that's what I got this week.
2:56:09 Robert Evans? Cool.
2:56:11 Speaker 05 Oh, breaking news as we as we go to press here. The Berlin Zoo has announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus.
2:56:20 Robert Evans? And I thought Hitler was a mistake. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I don't think that's an appropriate name for them to use.
2:56:31 Speaker 05 He's called, I'll drop a link in the chat so you all can appreciate it. It's like a new moodang just dropped moment. They are calling it Brochen, Brochen. I'm going to speak German.
2:56:42 Robert Evans? Sure. Okay, guys. That's that's marketable share.
2:56:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:56:47 Robert Evans? Great. Good work, guys. That sounds like a candy children aren't legally allowed to eat in my country.
2:56:54 Speaker 05 Another dub for German marketing. It means bread roll, I guess. It is a very cute hippopotamus.
2:56:59 Robert Evans? That's a pretty cute name. Bread roll would be a cute name for, yeah.
2:57:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess if you're German, it's a cute name. Hit us up, German language listeners. Does it seem cute to you?
2:57:08 Robert Evans? No, don't because you'll just get angry at us for not understanding your strange language. In my defense, you live outside of America, the only other country in the world, right?
2:57:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think that's it.
2:57:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, I'm just going to ignore the Iran reporting that you.
2:57:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, we just did. Yeah, we'll not we'll not mention that. Email us at [email protected] . Some of you marketing fuckers are still trying. Remarkable. I'm pretty sure it's one person who just creates new new aliases, but I'm playing whack a mole over there in the block. List.
2:57:40 Robert Evans? Okay.
2:57:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, I will read your name. This is out if you keep doing it.
2:57:45 Robert Evans? All right. Well, I think that's gonna be it for all of us here. And it could happen here. That's the it and it could happen here is this is us doing it.
2:57:56 Robert Evans? Podcast. Goodbye.
2:57:57 Speaker 06 Who are trying to scroll on your couch?
2:58:00 Robert Evans? We reported the news. We reported the news.
2:58:11 Robert Evans? Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonenedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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