It Could Happen Here Weekly 194

Summary

Behind the Bastards: It Could Happen Here Weekly 194 – Detailed Summary

Release Date: August 9, 2025
Host/Authors: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Introduction

In episode 194 of "It Could Happen Here," hosted by Andrew Sage (also known as Andrewism on YouTube), James, and Robert Evans, the discussion delves deep into the pervasive issue of militarism and its implications on global and domestic fronts. The episode emphasizes the urgent need for anti-war strategies and the dismantling of militaristic policies entrenched within societies.

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1. The Pervasiveness of Militariusm [02:42 – 08:35]

Definition and Implications

Andrew Sage begins by defining militarism as the belief or policy that a nation should maintain a strong military and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote its interests. This often entails glorifying military virtues and prioritizing military strength over other societal aspects.

• Quote:
  "Militarism is a system that consists of having and maintaining military personnel. Its essential and avowed goal is the preparation for war." – Andrew Sage [06:15]

Global Consequences

The hosts illustrate the global repercussions of militarism by citing various conflicts:

• Syria: Alevis (Alawites) face substantial persecution.
• Palestine: Israel's actions amount to genocide.
• Ukraine: Russia's invasion causes widespread devastation.
• Myanmar and Sudan: Ongoing civil wars and ethnic conflicts.
• India and Pakistan: Struggle over Kashmir.

Colonialism and Militarism

They discuss how militarism is intertwined with colonialism, leading to oppression and suppression of dissent both abroad and domestically.

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2. Historical Context and Lessons [08:36 – 14:35]

Anarchist Anti-Militarism

Andrew Sage references the anarchist movement's historical stance against militarism, highlighting efforts to:

• Denounce Militarism: Combat the glorification of war.
• Abolish Militaristic Regimes: Redirect resources from military to societal benefits.
• Promote Solidarity: Build international support against war.

Case Study: CNT in Spain

James shares insights from the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the 1930s Spanish Civil War, where anarchists:

• Avoided a Standing Army: Formed affinity groups and defense committees instead.

• Resisted Militarization: Maintained anti-militaristic principles even amidst escalating conflict.

• Quote:
  "We didn't establish anything more militarized than affinity groups to defend the community." – James [11:50]

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3. Modern Anti-War Strategies [14:36 – 25:11]

Challenges of Traditional Protests

The discussion moves to the declining effectiveness of traditional protests in today's highly militarized and technologically advanced society.

• Counter Messaging: Importance of disrupting militaristic narratives through alternative media and trusted networks.

  • Quote:
    "The media will not be with you. It'll be trying to manufacture consent against any action you take." – Andrew Sage [17:22]

• Labor Power: Emphasizing the pivotal role of labor movements and strikes in combating militarism.

Building Alternatives

Andrew Sage advocates for:

• Social Revolution: Creating and supporting alternative social structures.

• Community Solidarity: Building strong local networks that resist militaristic influences.

• Protecting Labor Rights: Strengthening unions and worker cooperatives to undermine the military-industrial complex.

• Quote:
  "We have to build something else, something better, to replace the capitalist, statist, militarist order." – Andrew Sage [25:11]

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4. The Future of Anti-Militarism and Solidarity [25:12 – 39:35]

Innovative Approaches

Exploring beyond traditional activism, the hosts discuss:

• Sabotage and Strikes: Implementing more direct actions like strikes and sabotage against militaristic systems.

  • Quote:
    "Wartime strikes and sabotage bring rank and file workers together outside of union structures." – Andrew Sage [35:35]

• Digital Solidarity: Leveraging alternative media and online platforms to spread anti-militarist messages without government interference.

Challenges Ahead

They acknowledge significant obstacles:

• AI and Surveillance: The rise of AI and increased surveillance make organizing more difficult.
• Union Domestication: Modern unions are often too reformist and scared to engage in radical actions.
• Global Solidarity: Building international alliances is crucial but challenging.

Hope Through Solidarity

Despite the challenges, the hosts remain optimistic about the potential for global solidarity movements to counter militarism. They stress the importance of:

• Material Support: Providing aid and support to communities affected by militarism.

• Educational Efforts: Continuing to educate the public about the dangers of militarism and the benefits of peace.

• Quote:
  "Our efforts to oppose are going to be the toothless as long as we don't have an underlying structure that we are building upon." – Andrew Sage [38:00]

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Conclusion [39:00 – 39:35]

Andrew Sage wraps up the episode by reiterating the necessity of building alternative structures and fostering international solidarity to effectively combat militarism and promote a peaceful society.

• Final Quote:
  "What you do to oppose and what you propose, including counter messaging and building the commons, is essential for a social revolution." – Andrew Sage [39:00]

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Key Takeaways:

1. Militarism as a Global Threat: Militarism not only fuels conflicts but also perpetuates systems of oppression and colonialism worldwide.
2. Historical Lessons: Movements like the CNT in Spain offer valuable lessons on resisting militarism without succumbing to it.
3. Evolving Strategies: Modern anti-war efforts must adapt beyond traditional protests, utilizing labor movements, alternative media, and direct actions.
4. Building Alternatives: Creating robust, alternative social structures is crucial for sustainable resistance against militaristic and capitalist systems.
5. Global Solidarity: International alliances and support systems are essential in the fight against global militarism.

This episode serves as a comprehensive exploration of militarism's impact and offers actionable strategies for individuals and communities striving for a peaceful, equitable world.

Transcript

[Noah de Barrasso]

This is an iHeart podcast Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer. This Saturday, 4pm Eastern on CBS, with playoff elimination on the line, the most physical, fiercest and competitive basketball in the world. Miami's Michael Beasley and Lance Stevenson must win to make the playoffs, and breakout star Dwight Howard of the LA Riot will battle Gary Payton's Boston squad in a do or die match for both teams. Six teams are allowed for four spots and all must win.

[James]

There's no crying in the big three.

[Noah de Barrasso]

And the no holds barred action starts Saturday at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific.

[Sarah Spain]

Presented by iHeart.

[Noah de Barrasso]

I'm Noah and I'm 13, and I.

[Sarah Spain]

Started this podcast because honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know what Noah de Barrasso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it.

[Noah de Barrasso]

And what it means.

[Sarah Spain]

For the rest of you, it's not the news, it's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Politics is wild and I'm definitely not.

[Sarah Spain]

Here to tame it, but I'm here to make sense of it.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Listen to now youw Know with Noah de Barrasso on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get Podcast. Get fired up, y'. All. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon Megan Rapinoe, to the show and we had a blast.

[Robert Evans]

Take a listen.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Sue and I were like riding the lime bikes the other day and we're like, wee people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. Summer's here and with the kids home and off to camp, it's easy for moms to get lost in the shuffle on Good Moms Bad Choices. We're making space to center ourselves with joy, rest and pleasure. Take the kids to camp.

[James]

You know what?

[Noah de Barrasso]

It was expensive, but I was also.

[James]

Thinking, you have my kid.

[Noah de Barrasso]

This is kind of priceless. Take her, feed her, make core memories. I don't have to do anything. Main thing, I don't have to do it. Anything to hear this and more. Listen to Good Mom's Bad Choices from Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast, Cool Zone Media.

[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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

[Andrew Sage]

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, also known as Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here with.

[James]

See, it's James.

[Andrew Sage]

And honestly, I shouldn't say welcome to It Could Happen Here. I should really say welcome to it is happening here because I mean. Just a second with you, James. How you doing? You safe?

[James]

I'm okay. I'm yeah, I'm safe right now. We are living through wild times in the United States. Every day is a new hell.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed, indeed. And although I'm not in the US the flames of that hell definitely lick the rest of the world in ways big and small.

[James]

Yeah, they definitely do. I was just talking to some people in Syria yesterday and like the, the Alevis Alawite, whatever you want to call, if you want to say it, are facing quite substantial persecution currently. And like one of the larger refugee accepting countries in the world just isn't doing that anymore. Unless you're a white South African, of course. And like that has these massive trickle down effects for everywhere. It's just one example of how America so goes to us, so goes to world, you know.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed, indeed. And not just in Syria. Are the flames of conflict tearing our world apart. I think most people, I now know about the situation in Palestine, the way that Israel is carrying out a genocide there. You know, the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the civil war in Myanmar, in Sudan, the struggle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and the Kashmir people who are, you know, left on the, on the wayside. You know, the Tamil genocide.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Andrew Sage]

Taking place in Sri Lanka. I mean, there's so many things happening across the world right now, it's really difficult to keep up.

[James]

Yeah, the friends in Myanmar would prefer the framing of revolution to civil war. They're pretty explicit about that.

[Andrew Sage]

Okay, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. I should be using that, that terminology.

[James]

Yeah, it's not, it's not appropriate everywhere. But in their case, like there has been a Civil War since 48 and it's a substantial change with the 2021 revolution.

[Andrew Sage]

Right, right, right, right. Thank you for that, Kraksha.

[James]

Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Andrew Sage]

I think now is a really good time to have a general, almost strategic discussion on anti war struggle. And so today I really want to look at how we can counter the propaganda around war, the actions that are possible to take against militarism at home, and how we can build solidarity across oceans and borders. So to understand how to agitate against war, we first need to agitate against militarism. And for those who don't know, militarism is the belief or policy that a nation should maintain a strong military and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote its interests. It often involves glorifying military virtues and ideals and prioritizing military strength and readiness above other aspects of society. So that's your basic Google definition. My copy of the Anarchist Encyclopaedia is the English version, which is abridged, sadly, but the original French has the full unabridged anarchist encyclopedia. So with a bit of shaky online translation magic, I managed to pull its definition of militarism as well. Militarism is a system that consists of having and maintaining military personnel. Its essential and avowed goal is the preparation for war, the recruitment of a standing army, the organization of the cadres of reserve army, the accumulation, the putting in place, the maintenance and a state of service of ever more modern, more perfected war material. In short, it is the preliminary organization of war. What are the implications of that? Well, all over the world I think we can see, you know, the consequences of statism, the might makes right pursuit of conquest, the fighting wars abroad or at home for strategic interests, ideological commitments, resource claims, whatever the case may be, the rivalries within the ruling class and how that plays out and how it's that that blows back on all of our faces. You know, the, the profits, the military industrial complex which keeps this whole system turning on, you know, the blood of innocence, of course, the longstanding consequences and continued work of colonialism, and of course the ways that militarism gets turned inward with the suppression of strikes, of activism, of popular unrest. When the now militarized police aren't enough, they often bring in the military itself. Yeah, and of course with militarism you also have the narrative component, you know, the building of patriotism that so plants the seed of fascism. States can survive without militaries, it's true the state typically depends upon some effort or some attempt at a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a territory by some definitions. But states which do not have militaries often can do so because they've outsourced their military functions to another state and. Or because they have other systems in place to control dissent, to develop a certain degree of social conditioning and pacify the population.

[James]

I'm just trying to think of states without militaries. Like in my experience, I guess you have like the, the Panama. Right. Doesn't have a military. It has center front, which are like the frontier protection, I guess, but essentially like a militarized border patrol. And they do have Marines and stuff as well. I guess so they kind of do have a military, but it's a kind of a renaming exercise more than anything.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed. The same thing with having a militarized police. But it's not a military technically.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Or half of the militarized Coast Guard and it's not a military technically, you know.

[James]

Yeah, yeah. You have countries like the Republic of the Marshall Islands which just outsources its militarization to the United States. Right, like the U.S. well, I think that is a distinct thing. The people in the Marshall Islands have seen the horrors of war very closely and also the dangers of militarization. Right. Like the United States nuked the Marshall Islands. A country with which it had no quarrel, with which it was not at war, just to practice in case it needed to nuke. A country with which it did have a quarrel. I guess the legacy of that is very obvious and continues to this day there. But if Marshallese people wish to join a military, they can join the US military and the US guarantees their security in theory. But yeah, it is distinct. Like for instance, if you join the US military in the Marshall Islands, wish to access your veterans benefits, the easiest way to do so is take a five hour flight to Hawaii. They don't have any, any, any, any benefits for actual veterans there. So I guess in that case, like, maybe it does give people a different relationship to like state violence.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, it's, I mean obviously different places have different histories as to how they came to those arrangements. But you definitely see.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

A relationship between colonialism and the outsourcing of military functions.

[James]

Yeah, definitely.

[Andrew Sage]

Now historically, anarchists have been anti militarist. The encyclopedias called this aspect of the anarchist struggle the aim to disqualify militarism, to denounce its terrible and painful consequences, to combat the warlike and barrack spirit, to stigmatise and dishonour war, to abolish the regime of the armies. So abolishing militarism looks like material relief from the oppression of military violence, the redirection of resources that go toward military Toward instead things that actually benefit the lives of everyday people. You know, the reduction of pain and suffering throughout the world, the abolition of borders, which so often are the motivating force behind military exercise. And while no anarchists would deny that armed struggle is necessary for defense, it's not the same as having an imperialistic or hierarchical ambition toward, you know, power over, toward dominating populations of people.

[James]

Yeah. This reminds me of the discussion that happened in the CNT in Spain in the 1930s, previous to the civil war. Even before that. Right. Where they there was a very profound and obvious discussion on like how to defend the revolution, how to defend communities whilst maintaining anti militarism. And that's why we didn't see like there was not a scientific standing army beyond. You had affinity groups. Right. And then you had like defense committees of six, six to eight people. And those people like took on the role of organizing for a potential violent like in order to defend the community. Right. Like to use violence to defend the community against violence. But even as it became clearer and clearer that Spain was like spiraling towards conflict, they resisted the idea of establishing anything more militarized than that.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. And I think civil war Spain is a really good place to look at for the way some experiments or efforts or ideas would have played out. Strategies that have played out. And I think it's really important to take those experiments and see how we can iterate on them.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And build upon them. Because I mean while I've always admired that we've carried on this anti militarist torch, it's very important to remember the landscape has changed from wartimes past. You know, we're not in world war times anymore.

[James]

Yes.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, the strategies and the discussions and the approaches that may have worked back then, it doesn't work in the same way now. You don't even have to declare war officially anymore. In this day and age you can just say that oh, you're doing a special military operation or you can just send billions of dollars of aid to a country that you want to support and even troops to countries you want to support. And technically you haven't declared war yet.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And you know, not only that, you also get to unleash generational trauma and poison upon generations of people. But it's okay because you were going after some terrorists. You know, you just get to push money and supplies toward this camp or that. And where the US is concerned, it at least used to have to seek congressional approval. But as we see that's not really a thing now. Especially post 9 11. You know, back in the day, people thought putting pressure on the elected officials through protests would be enough. And, you know, there's a debate to be had to the extent to which that worked for situations like the Vietnam War. But as we've seen with this song and dance again and again and again, the protests are not hitting like they used to. You know, the response to the protests has been so routine at this point. You know, you just send the police to bash some heads in, or better yet, the military, because the movers and the shakers aren't the people who can actually be reached with these protests. You know, and no matter how peaceful we proclaim our protests to be, we're talking about moneyed interests here. You know, a military industrial complex that has to have line go up. You know, who. Yeah, who doesn't have to give a damn about some people walking on the road. You know, the system has grown since the 1910s, the 1940s. It has grown in such size and complexity to the point where, you know, you don't have to care necessarily about a single movement part, about a single action or protest.

[James]

Yeah. And the two kind of combine and like, what we're seeing in the United Kingdom right now. Right. Like, there's the. The complete dismissal of protests and this, like, I'm thinking of a better word than imprecise. But, like, the vagueness of the definition of terrorism has allowed the government of the United Kingdom, in combination with the absence of a bill of rights in the United Kingdom. Right. To just be like, oh, Palestine action on terrorists. You are the same as the Islamic State because Palestine action undertook in nonviolent direct action. Right. But it's ludicrous to suggest that that was terrorism, and that doesn't meet any reasonable definition of the term. But yet we're in a stage now where governments can declare anyone the enemy without any particular oversight. And that's the logical conclusion of two decades of this.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I mean, to an extent, that has always been the case. I think what's different now is that they're not even really attempting to hide behind any sort of consistent principles or consistent standards. Cause even back then, the anarchists were being called terrorists and being true, you know, chastised for that.

[James]

Yeah. I guess. Also, like, our class system is more entrenched than it ever has been, in a sense. I'm just thinking, like, wars are not fought by the mass of middle class and like the people who become senators for the most part.

[Sarah Spain]

Right.

[James]

I mean, in the US Sometimes senators will have done military service. It can sort of boost their career opportunities. I get that. But like, it is not, for the most part the sons of the people who start the wars who die in the wars. Right. Indeed, it's people of a different class in a way that even in a distinct way from the era of the world wars, when large numbers of people of the middle class, especially maybe not the very privileged people, did die in those wars. And I think the memory of the first World War probably did have some impact on, like the reticence of some politicians to dive into the second one, but we don't really have that now.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed. So we criticize this particular approach of the protest. And I know that the inevitable question is, so what can we even do at this point? And, you know, this is why I consider it very important to take a step back and look at what is actually keeping the system going. Right. And what's keeping the system going is. And it's always been labor.

[Sarah Spain]

Right.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Not to say that labor and labor struggles to be all and end all of our politics, but is to say that if we want to make a significant impact, that is what we have the greatest control over our labor. And so when I talk about things we can do to affect change, I always have to take it back to the ongoing process of social revolution. The things you do to oppose and the things you do to propose, you know, on the opposing side of things. That includes counter messaging. You know, even though we may not have the resources of mainstream media or government communications, we have word of mouth, we have trust between ourselves, and we have alternative media that can be, especially in this day and age, just as powerful if sparked.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Right.

[Andrew Sage]

Especially considering the fact that the general sentiment, the populist sentiment has, whether you're coming from a leftist direction or a rightist direction, the general sentiment has been moving toward anti establishment politics. The anti establishment sort of momentum is what's growing right now. And the issue, of course, being that sometimes that anti establishment momentum can be hijacked, such as what Trump did, you know, to get himself elected the first time. Yeah, he rode that wave. And, you know, this whole Epstein situation, we may see that foundation of his base potentially crumbling apart a bit. But we have to look at what is actually motivating people right now and how they can be reached. And alternative media with an anti establishment message. Message is I think, one of the better ways to do so. Yeah, you know, wherever you see it, you need to be out there, you know, on social media or through other avenues calling out the ridiculous Cassius Bellies used To manufacture consent for war, you know, to be wary of potential force. Flags can be used as a justification for military action, to consistently poke holes in the narratives that have allowed, you know, nationalist and xenophobic sentiments to become the force that they have become today. And of course, even engaging in that messaging, of course, try not to let camp ism infect your counter messaging either.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, that's how you get people who are, you know, they gung ho about a free Palestine and then they start when you ask them about Ukraine, all of a sudden it's actually really complicated. It's actually the fault of the US and the EU and NATO and not Russia. Even though Russia is the one who actually invaded and is actively killing people and destroying infrastructure as we speak.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Right. I mean, this conversation to be had about the US and what the EU and about NATO, obviously, but it's very clear.

[James]

Yeah, it's very uncomplicated.

[Andrew Sage]

Who's actually killing people right now, you know?

[James]

Yeah. There is one country which is taking children. Right. Like, and trying to like, re educate them, give them to families in Russia, which is committing murders of civilians. Like, we don't have to like, resort to like 10 year geopolitical trajectories to say that it's wrong and it should be opposed to.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly, exactly. And also I want to make this point about counter messaging because it's a consistent gripe I've had. In fact, one of the main reasons I started my channel in the first place with your counter messaging, whether it's in person or on the Internet or wherever those stay perpetually on the back foot. In other words, don't just counter message.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, right now, and this is what irritates me so much. The right wing sets the conversation.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, you have people, they say, oh, we want to talk about critical race theory. And then everybody's talking about critical race theory because they talk to them or they want to target trans people. And all of a sudden we have to scramble to respond to all their erroneous and ridiculous claims about trans people.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

That counter message is important. Is important, but it cannot be all that we do. Right.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And this is a bit out of left field, but, you know, of course, I'm not one who is partial to electoral approaches, but you can see some of that, not just counter messaging, but also actively messaging taking place with Zoran Mamdani strategy.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, when you look at how he speaks, how he addresses some of the bad faith arguments that are made against him, his rhetorical Strength and popularity, in part, lies on his refusal to carry on the conversation on the enemy's terms.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, so they will go at him for something, and he's gonna spin it right back around to talking about the things and issues that really matter to people, to set the conversation to get people to respond to that. Because a lot of the responses toward him have been trying to distract from his actual messaging. And his ability to stay on message is something I find really admirable, despite, you know, my concerns about the investment of energy in electoral strategies.

[James]

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are still things we can admire about these people if we don't agree with everything. And I do think, like, in that sense, something I think about a lot with, like, messaging and counter messaging, especially around war. It's like, I spent some time in the AANES and what people call Rojava, and like, one of the framings that I've consistently seen, and it's mostly in, like, the leaning mass media, I guess, is that people went to Rojaba to fight against IS or DASH or isis, whatever you want to call it. Right. And, like, in doing so, that is how the revolution Rajaba is not understood by most people.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Right.

[James]

And they have taken the power away from it in their framing of it, because people didn't just go. Some people did go just to fight is Right. They went because they saw what is was doing. They understood it as inhumane, and they wanted that to stop. And that's admirable. But people also went because they saw what people were building in Rojava and they thought that was beautiful and they wanted to defend it. And that's admirable, too. And sometimes the messaging around, specifically Rojava, Myanmar, to an extent. Right. There are international volunteers there, too, and of course, folks from Myanmar who have picked up weapons who never thought they were. And they didn't just do it to oppose the hunter, they did it because, like, in the. Despite all the horrible things about war, and it should be avoided at all costs in the conflict, they have built liberated spaces and they've experienced freedom, and they have experienced how that feels, and they've built a revolution that is beautiful in spite of the war, not because of it. And they want to defend that. And I think that's a messaging that we should consider. Right. Because the messaging that everything has to be against something bad always sort of, it presupposes that there can't have been something good. And in some cases, there has been something good, and we won't fully understand what was happening. There, unless we understand that. And I think we should push back on that messaging when we see it, especially in legacy media.

[Andrew Sage]

Absolutely, absolutely. And that really connects to the, you know, the other aspect of the social revolution paradigm because it's not just about opposing, it's also proposing that something different.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And that is often far more energizing than simply talking about everything that's wrong with the world.

[James]

Yeah, definitely.

[Andrew Sage]

And I think also for those who maybe have concerns about the risks of oppositional messaging, there's another area where you can direct your energy to support the opposition without necessarily actively being involved in it. You know, because it's not enough to just oppose the system, you have to build something else and you could be part of that building something else, you know, so when we're messaging, we want to be able to redirect people's energies to their actual frustrations and interests, you know, to recenter the conflict and the lens on the actual divisions of society such as class, to make moneyed interests known. And you know, even though it's never been easy to be anti war, you know, especially in the center of empire, and in many ways technologies of today have empowered much greater oppression. You know, in Russia, individual and mass protests are met with severe oppression. Massive fines, jail sentences, et cetera. In the US you can face police brutality, censorship, even deportation. And in Israel, well, I haven't seen or heard anything from the Israeli populace in terms of resisting what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. But I know that those who do stand against the mandatory conscription do face jail time for their refusal. So it's not easy to be anti war, especially in militarized and empire building territories. I get that stress and that worry that opposition is still necessary, but there's other things that we can be doing than just messaging. Yeah, you know, there are things that take on less risk, such as building an alternative and there are things that take on more risk now. Protests, even peaceful protests, are no longer risk free endeavors. And I know when most people hear about, you know, we need to push back, they hear, okay, let's organise a protest. Honestly, we could use a bit more imagination in this day and age. Like I said, the protest is not hitting like it used to. It's become like a pressure valve or a tool of pacification that could be tolerated for a time and then met with repression the moment it's time to wrap it up. And there are a couple reasons why protests are not, you know, able to do as much. You know, they have the moneyed interests, you know, they can end up being divided according to various arguments over strategy. And I'm sorry to say this, but protests as of late haven't accomplished very much besides getting people mutilated or jailed or worse in the past few years. And in fact, a lot of the resources that could be spent, you know, building alternatives are being spent instead on you know, paying people's bonds and getting people out of jail, prison relief, that sort of thing. Not to say those things are not necessary. You know, don't leave your comrades to rot in jail. But I think we need to consider the free data that we've basically been giving away to the ruling class in the form of pictures, names, addresses, identifying data that can be used to repress or disrupt or infiltrate protesters and protesting organizations down the line. As James Harrod. And so another James, as James Herod wrote in the Weakness of a Politics of Protest, where I've been getting some of these critiques of protests from, he says, thus, instead of powerfully concentrating our mental and physical energies on solving this problem to eliminate this obstacle to defeating capitalism, we are taken to the streets once again, merely protested, merely engaged in what is basically mindless activism, end quote. Later, he says it's easy to agree on what to protest against. The list of things that need to be stopped under capitalism is long. So long, in fact, we don't even need to agree. There's plenty to choose from, so just pick something that suits you. Perhaps this is why so many activists got involved in protesting. It's not so easy, though, to figure out what we want to replace capitalism with, to work out convincing arguments about how it will plausibly work and to set about creating such a social world, especially since so little energy is being devoted to the task, end quote. And, you know, I get why protests are popular. You know, as he says, it has a low barrier to entry. You just have to show up. And in a society that has been so deliberately atomized, where mass collective action has been made so difficult, protest has become pretty much a very easy avenue to get those things done.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And, you know, protests can work in certain instances for limited goals, but I think that those uses are diminishing day by day in the cost benefits analysis.

[James]

Yeah, I'm just thinking about, like, there was a letter George Orwell wrote to one of his readers on the subject of anti fascism, where Orwell was lamenting that the anti fascism that he was encountering in England in between his participation in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War was always centered on hate. And like, it's sort of an idea. Like we get the two minutes of hate later in 1984. Right. But maybe it comes from here. And like it never proposed an alternative, it just said it pointed to something and said bad. Something I've tried not to do in my journalism. Right. Very often we do this with journalists who we point something and say bad. We don't look for the ways that it could become better. And so like protesting can become such an identity for people. You see it. I'm just thinking of every time I get sent a link to Instagram, which is a platform I don't really participate on, but I will look at things and they'll be like, oh, San Diego protest news, San Diego protester, SoCal protester. And I think we should resist that being an identity because we want to build something beautiful as well as oppose what is bad. And if we don't have something beautiful to propose, what are we doing out there?

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly, exactly. And you know, there's room for protests. I don't want to give off the impression that there isn't. You know, but for all the lovely talk about peaceful protest, that works when there's an actual threat backing up those protests, you know, you don't just do the peaceful protest. You know, Gandhi didn't single handedly win India's independence by marching peacefully.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, there has to be something back in its up or else it's going to be very easy to ignore and suppress.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And I think that protests should not be our default right now. They are our default. And I think they are better uses of our collective time, energy and resources. Even though protests are very easy compared to some of the things that are more necessary right now. You know, but if protest is where you're dead set on funneling your energy, I would just say that you should at least learn DRS strategies. You know, there are resources online to get some information on that, on the arrest strategies. You can look it up. But if it's possible, if you see the situation playing out, you know, try not to sit by and let your comrades get pulled away. You know, it is very possible, the numbers on your side to prevent the police from harassing targets and, and taking away people. You know, there's other stuff you can do as well besides protests that I keep alluding to because, you know, sadly the media is no longer, you know, a safe space to share things in depth in some cases. But just remember that the key is actual disruption. You know, the media will not be with you. It'll be trying to manufacture consent on Everything that you do, manufacture consent against any action taken on the things that you do. And the only way to counteract that is to maintain relationships on the ground, to maintain actual local solidarity. Because once you have those local relationships and that local solidarity, there's no amount of things that the media can do, the media could stir up that can prevent the people who see that you're on their side, see that you're standing up for them to turn against you. Right. What problem happens is when you don't have any relationships, you don't have any networks, you don't have any community building, you just doing stuff. The messaging is unclear. You know, that's where I think the media could really pounce on that. I would also say, you know, sabotage, you know, hit their pockets. And the main thing, the thing that I've been alluded to earlier, is to strike.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, to organize strikes, to use the labor power. Workers power still comes from our participation in production and the threat of withdrawing our participation. We have to realize that in this time we're living in, even the effectiveness of strikes have come under threat in two ways. The first way is that the permanence of employment is not what it used to be. And with the rise and spread of AI, you have to ask yourself, how long will strikes in certain fields be effective anymore? You know, I have my doubt that AI will ever reach a point where it can replace people. But honestly, for a lot of these companies, they don't necessarily care about whether it's capable of replacing people or not. They will still try and use it to replace people. So we have to be cognizant of the fact that this is the direction they're pushing things in. And we have to be able to stand up against that before we reach a point where between AI and, you know, the nature of temporary work, of the gig economy, it becomes harder and harder to organize ourselves.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

The other thing that I've noticed that has made striking so difficult and that we have to be aware of is the pacification or the domestication of unions.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Right.

[Andrew Sage]

There was a time historically where unions were a powerful, influential, revolutionary EVA force. Such is not the case today, unfortunately. There has been legislation put in place that many unions are terrified of crossing. Every I has to be dotted, every T has to be crossed. And so the things that would actually make union action the most effective are often things that unions nowadays will refuse to do. Sympathy strikes, general strikes. And so what can we do if we are in an industry where the union is collaborating with management, where the Union is utterly reformist, where the union refuses to actually step up and represent the people it's supposed to be represented. And this is where historically, wildcat illegalist strikes have had to come into play. Strikes that do not depend upon legality, that do not sit back and waive permission, that carry far more risk, of course, that are far more difficult to organize, but are gonna be necessary if we want to liberate ourselves from this constant capitulation toward the machine. In the article Striking against the Work War Machine by Jeff Schantz and PJ Lilly, they said wartime strikes and sabotage, partly because of their illegal and unsanctioned nature, bring rank and file workers together. Outside of union structures. Workers have to make crucial decisions about running this strike directly, in face to face meetings or on the picket lines. Bureaucrats who are left to their fundamental role of brokering with the bosses can be relegated to the sidelines in such situations. In Germany in 1917, illegal strikes helped to sweep the union structures right out in workplaces. Strikes increasingly took on an anti union as well as anti boss character, with wildcats occurring in growing numbers throughout the armistice and beyond. So I wanted to, of course, pull on this example because this is not a unique issue. Right. Even historically where unions have stood against the struggle of workers against war or against, you know, actually defending their class interests, the rank and file have had to organize themselves accordingly. So that's also something to keep in mind.

[James]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And last but not least, I just wanted to touch very briefly on the proposed side of the social revolution equation when it comes to anti war struggle. And as usual, this is going to take solidarity materially, not just saying that, oh, we stand in solidarity with such and such and such, actually sharing aid, sharing notes, supporting refugees and going further, because this, I think, is where a lot of our energy needs to be right now. Our efforts to oppose are going to be, for the most part toothless, as long as we don't have an underlying structure that we are building upon, that we are seeking to defend and to expand. You know, we are not at a position right now where we pose much of a threat yet. And we also have to consider that merely posing a threat is not going to liberate us by itself. So I want you to consider, as we wrap up this episode, what you can do to put forward that alternative to actually try to create the new social arrangements that we think should replace capitalist, statist, militarist order. And this is something that I talk about on my channel, of course. I talk about building the commons, building alternative media, also into the economy and developing our powers, our drives and our consciousness and so you can check that out if you'd like. Unfortunately this is it is happening here. And don't forget you can check out the YouTube, the Patreon, etc. All power to all the people.

[Noah de Barrasso]

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[James]

Witness the most physical, fiercest and competitive.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Basketball in the world. Miami's Michael Beasley and Lance Stevenson must win over Houston to make the playoffs, reeling from last week's savage beating at the hands of Chicago's possessed Montrez Harrell. Last time these teams met, Miami beat Houston, but they are a dangerous team having their manhood at stake. Then breakout star Dwight Howard of the LA Riot will battle Gary Payton's Boston squad in a do or die match for both teams. Will LA avenge their previous shocking loss to perennial basketball Boston rivals to survive, six teams are allowed for four spots and all must win. Don't miss the Big Three, the three on three basketball league everyone is talking about. There's no crying in the big three and the no hold spot action starts Saturday at 4pm Eastern 1pm Pacific followed by two games on Vice starting at 6:30 Eastern.

[Sarah Spain]

Presented by iHeart.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Hey guys, it's Az Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA National Champion and recent Most Outstanding player. You may even know me as a people's princess. But now you're also going to know me as your favorite host every week on my new podcast, Fut around and Find Out. I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all from my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the natty with my UConn Huskies, to just trying to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the Fudd family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on tv, you may think you know me, but this show is the only place where you can really futt around and find out. Listen to FUT around and find out. A production of iHeart Women's Sports in partnership with Unanimous Media on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II when they pulled off what was either a bold literary hoax or a grand poetic experiment, publishing over a dozen intentionally bad but highly acclaimed works of expressionist poetry under the name Ern Malley. In an incident that caused a media firestorm and even a criminal trial, the Ern Malley episode made fools of believers and critics alike and still fascinates poetry lovers to this day. We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on Hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, Hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history, from forged artworks to the original fake news. To try and answer why we believe, listen to Hoax on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Danielle Kurd. I'm a writer, analyst and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an Associate professor of Political Science and a senior non resident Fellow at the Arab center of Washington. Today we'll be speaking with Ushra Khalidi, the policy lead for Oxfam. Our discussion will cover Oxfam's work in the occupied Palestinian territories and the current crisis in aid distribution. We are recording end of July, July 27, 2025 NPR reported in May of this year that Gaza has already reached Phase four of the Integrated Food Security Phase classification, the ipc, which is coordinated out of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and an organization called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. So what does this all mean? Phase four means emergency. As NPR writes in their May report, hardships deepen, food gaps widen, and people resort to really extreme forms of coping. So the Famine Early Warning Systems Network does not have a presence in Gaza at the moment. This is their best guess. Phase five is when they declare a famine. We're seeing very terrible images in the media and on our phone screens about the level of deprivation in Gaza at the moment because aid has been blocked off by the Israeli government. Writing for Al Jazeera just a few days ago, former UN official Mohsad Khaneh accuses the UN of not declaring famine despite overwhelming evidence because he says officials are worried about their careers and possibly worried about antagonizing the U.S. but regardless of whether it's phase four or phase five, the situation in Gaza is dire in July 27th. Today, when we're recording, there's reporting that there might be airdrops, that the trucks on the Egyptian border are moving towards Gaza after the Israeli government has received a lot of pressure over the ongoing aid crisis. But of course, that may be too late for many Gazans, as I said. We're speaking with Bushra Khalidi today, who will talk to us about her work from the vantage point of Oxfam. Bushra, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So let's begin with first describing Oxfam's work in the occupied Palestinian territories. Yeah, sure. We've been here since 1956. We have offices in Ramallah and Jerusalem and in Gaza. And OXFSAM was originally set up as an organization to fight famine, you know, the first kind of famines that we've seen globally. That's, that's originally why Oxfam was set up. And then so a lot of its programming is around water and sanitation, food security, livelihoods, working farmers. A big part of our program is water and sanitation, helping, for example, farming communities, providing them with irrigation pipelines. You know, it could be agricultural inputs needed for growing their crops. It could be technical support to farmers to support them in growing, for example, vegetables. How do you grow crops of vegetables? Around date trees, you know, so it's kind of that kind of work in terms of the food security component that we have. A big part of our work is with women's organizations, women's cooperatives, women's farming cooperatives as well, especially in the West Bank. And then a lot of work with kind of the relevant ministries and relevant trade unions on, for example, agricultural insurance. So getting, you know, trying to get insurance for farmers in case their crops are ruined or sabotaged or damaged, for example, by settler violence, et cetera. So there is kind of like a piloting kind of program where we're looking at the potential of providing insurance to the farming sector here in Palestine. Other things could look like small grants to start a small kind of business. Women, for example, ceramics, women's cooperatives and farming. So a lot of it worked like this. And most of our operations are actually run through partners. So we have about 90 partners kind of across the occupied Palestinian territory. And about 80, 90 of our operations are actually completely implemented through partners. But of course, after the 7th of October, our programming really drastically kind of shifted to fully humanitarian, where we are now basically providing hygiene kits, food parcels, some agricultural inputs as well, where we could, you know, in Gaza it looks like setting up latrines, hand washing, state like mobile stations. It can be like water trucking. I mean, it's changed, you know, depending on the access that we've had. So for example, since March this year, we've not been able to enter anything because of Israel's full total siege on Gaza. So nothing kind of entered. So our operations looked like psychosocial support to women, young girls in shelters, trucking water from one area to another, where we felt like these communities potentially needed water or had little access to water. It looked like a cash for work. We do a big, big, big, big part of our, both now in the west bank and in Gaza is providing cash for work. So for example, we have daily workers that will remove solid waste with their bare hands, unfortunately, because there's no materials to remove waste in Gaza. But then they would receive kind of daily rates in order to get paid. And then there's like cash vouchers for the most vulnerable, where they can have a voucher in a store and they can purchase items that we've agreed, for example, with the store owner that people can purchase with our kind of cards. So it's very versatile. Versatile. And especially in last year's, had to adapt and change very quickly and flexibly depending on the situation, what's available in the markets. But that's kind of like what our programming looks like across the territory. Yeah, thank you for explaining that. And it brings me to, I mean, you touched on it a little bit. But it brings me to a second question that I think is important for listeners to understand is how has the war and post October 7th really impacted the restrictions that the Israeli government is imposing. So we know there's a siege in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Absolutely. There is so much happening. How has that impacted Oxfam's work? It's completely restricted us. And not just us, it's all of the international kind of sector, including UN agencies. I mean, we know what they did with Irwa. Maybe explain that. Yeah, I mean, Israel, the government of Israel's kind of attacks, or let's say attacks on humanitarian and civic space. It's been a long standing policy of theirs and started well before 7th of October. It's gotten just, you know, much tighter, much more restrictive sense. But, you know, this goes back decades. I would say kind of the most notorious development in shrinking space, we call it shrinking space is 2021, when they declared six organizations. Palestinian civil society organizations mostly are human rights organizations. Some of the most notorious and well known human rights organization where they're designated as terrorist organizations. So that was kind of the first big development where many of those partners, those six partners, were actually partners of international organizations. So we found ourselves kind of advocating for continuing our support to these six, despite the designation by Israel. And there was never, of course, evidence provided by the Israeli government as to what evidence they had. Why would they deem these organizations terrorist organizations? But they continue to operate under very, very difficult circumstances. Their offices were raided, their assets were confiscated, but they're still operational and we're still certainly supporting them. And of course, shrinking space or the restrictions on humanitarian civic space, it translates into so many different restrictions. It could be, you know, restrictions on permits, restrictions on what crossings you're able to use as a humanitarian, you know, whether you can go through that crossing or another, it can be visa restrictions. And we started seeing the visa restrictions even before the war. And after the war, of course, everything kind of changed. And now we're facing, and I'm talking more about like legal restrictions in terms of our work. And then I can talk more about like the siege and the actual blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is the, you know, effectively completely restricted our operations and has dismantled really the humanitarian sector in its entirety and has reverberating impacts to the rest of the territory. But for us, I think the first kind of sign of turmoil was when there was already a decision, but nothing had been kind of formally communicated, of a new registration process for international organizations that started already in 2024, where the civil administration announced to our respective organizations that there will be a new registration procedure. The Israeli civil administration. Israeli civil administration, it was only 10 months later that the criteria was presented to us and only a year later that the criteria actually came into effect. But in that time where they were announcing these new measures, there were lots of visa denials. Permits of course were completely non existent for humanitarians. For example, I had a permit to Gaza for six months that of course stopped. All of our staff in the west bank had permits to travel both to Gaza and in Israel. Those stopped on the 7th of October and same vice versa. Our colleagues in Gaza who had permits to come to Israel to travel through the Allenby Bridge because of course, you know, Palestinians don't have an airport, so they have to travel through Allenby to travel through Amman. Those also stopped. So that's one other kind of like, you know, measure that was taken against international organizations. And then when the, when the new registration rules were made public and the criteria was made public, there was a new, there's a new ministry set up called the Ministry of Diaspora and something Affairs. I know Diaspora Affairs, I forget the full name of the ministry, but it's an inter ministerial committee that is made of basically thugs. If you look at the background of some of these people that are in the committee and they are now deciding the registration of international organizations and the criteria is onerous, it's political, it's big. And you know, even, even it crosses some of our red lines in terms of organization. I mean one of, one of the, I think the most contentious criteria is submitting staff lists and all of the information of our staff to the Israeli authorities, which is something we never had to do before. It's not something that is actually in any other context not abnormal for an authority or a country or state to ask, you know, who is your staff working for this organization you're seeking registration from? But obviously because of the unprecedented number of humanitarian workers that have been targeted and indiscriminately targeted as well, in Gaza we've got more than 400 humanitarian workers killed. At this point. We are unable to submit our staff list because we have no guarantees of protection, even though we have guarantees under protection international law. This is not applied when it comes to Gaza and in Israel's conduct in the hostilities against humanitarian workers in humanitarian space. So that's one of the criteria. But there's also other criteria where for example, we would be revoked our registration or not be registered if we are seen to support some of the designated organizations that were designated early on, which most of our organizations do. So many of us are facing about to face basically being deregistered in Israel and losing our presence in Jerusalem, which is, you know, has such big implications, not because, you know, we're so desperate to have presence in Jerusalem, but because it says a lot about what the future of East Jerusalem means.

[Sarah Spain]

Right?

[Noah de Barrasso]

Because you're removing UNRWA, you're removing the INGOs, and you're moving all the program and the support that goes to organizations that are operating in Jerusalem, providing legal services to people that are losing their homes, that are getting their homes demolished on a daily basis, legal services for settler attacks that happen also in East Jerusalem, and school, provision of school services, educational items, educational activities, summer camps, you know, I mean, et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on. That will be removed. And that's kind of, you know, it's working now in parallel with the annexation kind of plan that Israel has been threatening and implementing at the same time. So, you know, everything is moving towards this annexation. It also has vast implications because many of our organizations operate in Area C because the most vulnerable communities are in Area C. And so we always, as part of our programming, is obviously reaching the most vulnerable Palestinians and those that need to help and support the most. And so annexing area C&DE registering at the same time, deregistering us from Israel means that we will also have a lot of difficulty accessing these communities and accessing Area C. As we mentioned, organizations we've not had visas for international staff for since the beginning of the war. And then when you look at Gaza, so this is kind of like looking at the west bank and how it's evolving in the West Bank. But then the fact that we would be deregistered would effectively mean that we cannot operate in Gaza anymore, because you have to have an Israeli registration in order to be able to bring goods inside Gaza. And so if you're deregistered, you can't bring in goods into Gaza. The strangulation of the humanitarian and civic spaces is all encompassing in Gaza. Of course, it looks like our materials have been systematically and deliberately denied, rejected, delayed over the course of the last 20 months. But of course, at its worst since March 2, when Israel imposed its total siege on Gaza and basically has completely sidelined the UN INGOs and Palestinian civil society. And since then, we've not been able to enter anything in Gaza. And I doubt that we will be able to enter anything moving forward, especially that the registration kind of window ends in September, beginning of September, that's when we'll finally know who is going to be registered, who's not. But I expect for an organization like Oxfam as part of the registration process. It's very vague, so we don't know how they will apply it. But there's something about basically calling again, you know, calling out or speaking out or calling for accountability of individual soldiers and members of the idf. So what that means I don't know. But we call for accountability every day because it's part of our mandate. We're not just an operational organization, we're a rights based organization. And so we have a mandate to also, you know, where we witness violations of human rights or of international law. It is our mandate to speak out on it. And so there's no operations without that. So that's where we're at right now. It's an incredibly difficult space. It is of course, deliberate. This is a deliberate policy of Israel that is carried out against the kind of humanitarian civic space for years. There's another law, there's a law that's against Israeli human rights organization where it will start taxing Israeli human rights organization that are receiving foreign funding by 50 to 80% or something like that. So it's just, it's deliberate, it's thematic. We have been the only ones in Gaza that have been able to actually report independently on what's happening in Gaza. Like the humanitarians happen, not even the journalists, because of course I can argue that yes, Palestinian journalists are independent, but most of the world would probably disagree with that. So really, I mean, the independent kind of eyes and the neutral eyes, or let's say the impartial eyes, I won't say neutral happen. The humanitarians and UN agencies sidelining us means that we'll also see a reduction of quality reporting on what's actually happening in Gaza. So it's terrifying. It's an attack on our ability to even understand the level of the problem. Absolutely. That is being left in the wake of this war, which of course is ongoing. But also, I think it's really important, I mean, the things you just described, I think it's really important for listeners to understand this, the aid question, the question of these humanitarian organizations and what's happening to them, whether it's the registration through the Ministry of Diaspora affairs and I think Combating Anti Semitism is is its full name. That's it. I'm sorry, should have remembered. So, yeah, I mean, there's so many problems with, with this ministry and, and it has been even internally criticized by, by Tel Aviv University, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even actually members of the government itself, by the way. I think there was a. Yeah. There was something about somebody in the Israeli government not attending the inter Ministerial committee meeting, you know, because it was wanting to be associated to it. So yeah, there's okay, it problematic committee but I mean if this kind of committee is responsible for registering international organizations and humanitarian organizations, then there's all the blockade of aid. All of these are parts of the same ethnic cleansing strategy that what we're seeing in Gaza. Whether you want to call it ethnic cleansing or genocide, people are being eradicated. We're seeing large scale displacements in the west bank. And as you mentioned, if these organizations also stop existing in Jerusalem, we'll see Jerusalem next. Not piecemeal the way that we've been seeing it. Possible, you know, more aggressive way. And so I, I really think it's important to kind of underscore for listeners that this is part and parcel of an annexation and ethnic cleansing plan that people from the Religious Zionist party have been saying since the early 2010s. Bezalel Smotrich, Finance Minister today had the decisive plan that said you either surrender or transfer. And we're at that level. They are transferring, they are making sure that that happens. And they are in the west bank as well. I mean it's quiet and all eyes are on Gaza. But I mean we've seen displacement of entire communities in the last few weeks only let alone the largest numbers of forcibly Displaced Palestinians since 1967 in the west bank this year. And in the refugee camps that have been attacked. Exactly. So, you know, and again, I mean, you know, you can look at the history of smear campaigns against UNRWA by the Israeli authorities. I mean that's just in itself, you know, the services that unaware provide, you know, we have to re emphasize like education, health services, I mean, you know, shelter. Onrwa provides key services that the Palestinian Authority has no ability to respond to. What is going to happen to all of these people when you know, and already so listeners electricity cut off in Ramallah. This is our life. Yeah. So we might have to restart some of that. Answer. That's fine. Yeah. So did you want to pick up where you left off? I was, yeah. I mean the point is, is that this is, you know, a long standing policy by Israel. It's just like very much accelerated like every other policy of theirs when it comes to, you know, forcible displacement, collective punishment, you know, detentions. I mean everything is at a record high and accelerating so quickly with this, you know, right wing, far right wing government that's, you know, has zero checks and balances, zero. Nobody holds them accountable to anything. And so, you know, they're able to get away with all of this. So I mean, my sense is that, you know, very soon you will no longer see kind of the longstanding organizations that have been here for decades that have very much understood the context very well and have understood that it's impossible to do the work that we do without also bearing witness and speaking out on what we're witnessing. And I think the UN in that way, even the United nations, where in Palestine, has made sure that it stays committed to that mandate because of how important it is to speak out on what you're seeing around you. I think like that's purely, I think like, you know, we are the only ones that are able to witness and record independently what we're seeing on a day to day basis. And I think the UN has been incredible in keeping a record of that. I mean, I think they started recording in 2008. So it's like 18 years now almost of monitoring violations all across the territory. And if it wasn't for the work that the UN has done in that, we wouldn't be able to say that there is a genocide being carried out in Gaza or that the risk of ethnic cleansing has risen exponentially in the West Bank. The reason why we're able to say this is because we're able to see the patterns and the data. And you can contest the data, but you know, even you were talking about the ipc. The IPC is not even reflective of what's really happening. And they say it themselves. But you know, of course the media, the way the media kind of focuses on what the results, because you know, you only have time for sound bites. But if we read the IPC alerts, it's clear that one, they're always delayed, so they're always talking about a time that's already passed and we are way beyond that. And two, it says that it doesn't have access to Gaza. But look at the testimonies. You know, just like just reading the testimonies that some of our organization have recorded in the last week, just talking about our own colleagues and how they are facing starvation themselves. I mean, I think the testimony speaks to themselves on what is happening in Gaza. And I don't need the IPC to tell me that there's classification four or five. It's never going to declare famine when it's not there. Like there's never going to be a time where the ipc, because that's not even the role of the ip. The role of The IPC is not to declare a famine. The role of the IPC is just to collect the data and publish the data, and then it's the role of the UN or another international body to do so. So we're not going to see a famine declaration because we don't have access. And so, you know, we're not going to be able to say that with confidence because the IPC is never going to be able to publish that data. But I don't think it matters. I think what matters is what we're seeing on the ground, what's being reported. And, you know, I mean, it's, it's undeniable really, by the pictures themselves. I mean, the videos and the pictures that are coming out of Gaza just speak for themselves, really. So it's definitely unprecedented times for us. And it's going to be a very, very interesting and frightening, terrifying year, to be frank. Yeah, no, I mean, as I, as I said at the beginning, there are, of course, critiques also of the limitations of the un. But this idea that they are wanting organizations as a condition of registering them to somehow not bear witness to what is happening and not to write reports about what's happening, it's a way of hobbling the ability of actually creating policies like, if you want to talk about famine or if you want to talk about poverty, as Oxfam does, how could you solve it without talking about the root cause? In every way, in every direction, the Israeli government is attempting to hobble the ability of international organizations, of the Palestinians themselves, to be able to solve the root causes of these problems. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it will have to be. Find creative ways, just like our Palestinian civil society partners that have been also designated have had to find ways to continue doing their work. But, but I mean, even them, they've lost funding, they've had to reduce their operations, they've had to reduce their field officers that go to the field and do this work. So, I mean, it's so uncertain, but I think the fact that many of these organizations have been here for so long understand so deeply the context. I think organizations will also do whatever they can in order to ensure that they continue the important work here and find ways to continue to work. I don't know how. It's really a new time for us, like we've never been there before, so we don't know what it looks like, how we're going to be able to continue our work, but we're committed to that, so we will find whatever. I don't want to say Loophole, because there are none. But we'll find whatever way to continue kind of being here and being present and remaining present, because I think it's. It's also part of our commitment to the work that we've been doing in opt for decades. So. Yeah, yeah. I think maybe we should end on a discussion about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. I mean, I've already mentioned it in a previous episode, so I encourage listeners to look into that. But I think it's important we discuss what is this foundation and what is the impact it has had on people in Gaza and on international organizations that are already doing this work. Yeah. Okay. The GHF or Gaza Humanitarian foundation. Ghf. I don't like talking about it as such because the issue, of course, is that's one of the issues. But GHF is part of many actors, and it's not ghf. GHF is a facade for many actors that the US And Israelis. It's an Israeli plan, and I don't think we need to. We cannot. You know, I know there's US military actors in GHF at the border and shooting at people, but this is an Israeli plan, and we have to dub it as such. This plan actually came into. We started hearing about this plan a year and a half ago. It was maybe May last year. We saw the General Islands plan on what they wanted to do in the north when they started the ethnic cleansing campaign in the north of Gaza, where they besieged the north and tried to force everybody south. The idea then was already. They had already. We were already hearing about something called humanitarian bubbles. And the bubbles are the sites of what. It's. What's. What's become the sites. Right. But this idea has been floating around for more than 18 months. It's just that nothing kind of transpired until May. I guess that's when May the operation started. So Israelis launched this as an authorization mechanism. This is how it was originally kind of. And that would expand basically Israeli military control over how aid enters, moves within and is distributed inside Gaza. And of course, I mean that. And on its own is a clear attempt to instrumentalize humanitarian aid. So, you know, and I think it's very important to clarify, you know, our organizations, we operate under certain extremely rigorous standards and mechanisms where we ensure that aid is not diverted. And I think aid diversion, you know, it's been talked about like Hamas, aids, diversity, aid diversion exists everywhere. It exists in every crisis we work in. Like, it's something that is part of, you know, crisis mode. Like, this is where when there's a crisis, when there's chaos, that's where there's space for informal actors to start popping up. So it's a symptom of every crisis around the world. And so it's not just a Gaza thing. So we have protocols on how we can ensure that aid diversion doesn't happen in operations. And of course, as humanitarians, we would never accept military or profit driven intermediaries overriding what we call principled aid delivery, because it basically means that you're expanding military control over aid operations by an actual party to the conflic, which of course risks that aid will never reach the most vulnerable, of course, at a time when it was most needed. So from our perspective, there is no scenario where we would accept any attempts to militarize or privatize humanitarian aid, whether it's in Gaza or anywhere else, because such actions actually violate international humanitarian law. But also they undermine the core principles of humanitarian law, which are impartiality, independence and humanity. These are principles that guide all of our work. And of course, what is the most dangerous about this model is not only the massacres that have occurred near daily at these food distribution sites run by the GHF and other actors, it's that it sets such a dangerous precedent where occupying powers around the world will now be able to dictate the terms of aid based on their political agendas and their military goals. That is, what's effectively now happened is that if it's happened in Gaza, why can it not happen in Uganda, in DRC and Sudan? And I want to also take it a little back back. Let's talk about the pier. The pier last year is exactly the same. It's the same thing. It's an international company called Fogbo, run by former US military veterans and soldiers and others, other actors that spent $320 million on a floating pier that brought virtually nothing in and in fact was used for one rescue mission, rescue operation by special Forces where they entered, I think it was Zawaida Camp, the refugee camp at the time, and were able to obviously rescue hostages, but kill, I mean, you know, dozens in that operation using the pier. And hence why we're like we do not. We would distance ourselves and from the beginning distance ourselves from the pier. There's no difference with the distribution sites. It's the same kind of idea that with logistics we can address a political issue. The issue of Gaza is not an issue of logistics. Don't think the UN or INGOs don't know how to do the work. Palestinians, Palestinian Civil society has been responding to the civilian needs in Gaza from before the war. 80% of the Gaza population was dependent on humanitarian assistance before the war. So, I mean, it's not that we didn't know how to do it, it's that we were prevented from doing it. We were deliberately prevented from doing it. So it's a political decision, it's not a logistical decision that prevents us from doing our work in Gaza. And so branching Israel control over who receives the aid, where they receive the aid, and from who has basically turned what is relief, what should be relief to the civilian population into actually a tool of coercion. Because what we saw is massacres, people being shot indiscriminately at. We heard Dr. Nick Maynard yesterday. Yesterday he came back from Gaza a week ago, where we heard of children being shot in the testicles at these distribution sites. And not one he mentioned on the same day he saw a half a dozen boys with the same injury, sniper shots, sniper shots in the testicles at food distribution sites. So what's happened now is that what Israel has done is that it blurred the line between what humanitarian assistance is, what a military objective is, and of course, putting the civilian, Palestinian civilians and aid workers as well, because aid workers we know of, some of our colleagues in different organizations that even themselves have had to go to these food distribution sites because there's nothing and we're unable to even support our own staff at risk. And of course, I mean, this entire system has eroded any protections that are guaranteed to aid workers and humanitarian responses under international law and under the Geneva Convention. So it's not only that it killed people and that it's harmed Palestinians, but it actually, it's also a complete disregard for international law, complete disregard of international law. And at the same time, I think what people fail to remember is that at the same time as this plan of the distribution sites was being set up in the south, at the same time Israel every two days was evacuating, forcibly displacing basically the population towards the south, right? And in less than two months, we've got almost a thousand Palestinians that were killed, but also an immense movement of the population towards the south because that's the only place that they had food, right? So, you know, this is not protection. This is complete coercion. You know, when you move aid and defense supervised spaces under military, Israeli military control, frankly. And what we saw from the pictures recall some of the darkest chapters of humanitarian failure of our history. It's not protection, it's coercion. And no Countries nobody should ever support a model that is basically treating civilians as prisoners. And that's not what humanitarian aid is about. Humanitarian responses have to be guided by international law. It has to remain voluntary. It has to be grounded in the dignity of the people. And it has to be delivered impartially, not shaped by Israel's occupation or Israel's siege or Israel's military control. So not only has this scheme reinforced military control over the Gaza Strip, it has completely dehumanized Palestinians by design. Like Palestinians are only worth a box of food. That's what basically, essentially what has happened is that we have reduced a humanitarian response that addresses hospitals, medical care, water, sanitation, wastewater, shelter. It goes right to dignity, to a box of flour. You know, that you can get killed getting or you get killed. And not only that, it's a first come, first serve. You know, it's whoever's the strongest. It's the survival of the fittest. That's not what humanitarian aid is about. We're supposed to meet the most vulnerable. We need to reach the pregnant moms, the people with disabilities, the record number of amputees in Gaza, the record number of disabled people in Gaza right now. Children. Half of Gaza are children. They are part of some of the most vulnerable sections of society. AIDS should be going to them. They shouldn't have to come to us, walk for, I mean, some people have said 20km. They've had to walk to go to these distribution sites in the middle of the night in sand dunes. They have to duck because otherwise they might get shot by sniper shot. And then when they gates of hell open of these, you know, fence zones, whatever you want to call them. I don't even like calling them distribution sites because they're not distribution sites. It implies that there's some sort of, like, system to it. There's no system. It's literally the gates to hell. And then everybody flows into the, you know, floods. And we've heard of people carrying knives to protect themselves because they're getting looted. Because not enough, of course, right. Food. And then there are gangs that are being weaponized by, you know, so. And, and actually what I, what I was saying to people is that actually what GHF has created, it has created the perfect. It's the perfect recipe for armed gangs and a diversion to occur. Like, it's actually like providing the perfect environment for these informal actors, gangs, criminals to prosper to. You know, this is, this is. You're creating that kind of environment because. Let's just be very direct. This is not about Aid? No, of course not. No, it's not coercion. It's about coercion. I mean, as you mentioned, from the very beginning, it was about sequestering Palestinians. And they said it, actually. And by the way, they said it. The Israeli War Cabinet has said that, you know, and it's like we have to take things at face value sometimes. They said it. They've been saying it for the last year. We just waited until it happened on the ground to be able to now say it and confirm it. But this was their plan from the beginning. And there was nothing implied. It was very explicit. Right. No, I mean, very, very clear. And it really frustrates me personally because, yeah, you know, Arab media, Palestinian journalists, Palestinians on the ground testimonies would would say, we're being arrested at these sites. They're using facial recognition. They're very much politicizing aid. And it took forever for us to even be able to say it, to even be able to report on it, until Western media sources confirmed yesterday a number of children were released. I saw that from being arrested at these aid sites. And I couldn't mention that in things that I wrote because they didn't believe Palestinian testing. I mean, the GHF contractor themselves, themselves have admitted to what is happening and everything that we've been seeing and saying and warning. I mean, I'd like to say as well, I mean, I want to underscore, actually humanitarians have been underlining this very, very explicitly to everybody since before they were even set. So I can sleep with a clear conscience, that we did what we needed, what we could do, and we did warn that this would happen and this would be the result. And now here we are. Right? No, I mean, it's absolutely important, appalling. So I want to mention to listeners that I will put in the show notes a lot of these citations. The UN reporting that close to a thousand people have died at these sites. The Dr. Nick Maynard speaking to Channel 4 News in Britain about what he saw. I also want to point listeners to a volume that was released called Suppressing Dissent, edited by Zaha Hassan and HA Hellyer, because, full disclosure, I do have a chapter in that book, but it's about the shrinking civic space prior to October 7th and the dynamics that we have seen basically playing out at this point. Thank you so much, Bushra, for coming and speaking with us under such severe circumstances and explaining, I think, really succinctly the dangers of this moment. Because what is happening in Gaza will change the world, it will change every war, and it already is. I think I would tell listeners, go look at AP's article on fogbo in Uganda and Sudan. We're already seeing it. It's not even that it will change the world. We're already seeing the precedent that Gaza has set for others humanitarian crises and for these military actors and private contractors to profit from misery. That's essentially what is happening. It's happening. So I would also direct you to that article from AP that came out a couple weeks ago about the same companies operating in Gaza and being complicit in the atrocities that we're seeing unfold in Gaza now operating in other contexts and crises. Humanitarian crises. Really terrible breaking world. Yeah, I know.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Noah de Barrasso]

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[Noah de Barrasso]

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[James]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Bryce from no More Deaths. And what we're going to talk about today is this really excellent piece of, like, data visualization and research that depicts a very sad topic, which is the deaths of migrants entering the United States. And Bryce, I know, has done a lot of work on this, so welcome to the show, Bryce.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you.

[James]

Yeah, you're welcome. I guess maybe we can start off. I'm looking at this data visualization on a map right now, and we'll have links in the show, notes for other people who want to look at it. Can you explain what this data set is?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So we collected through a bunch of different sources, medical examiners, justices of the Peace, sheriff's apartment, CBP's own data, just a bunch of data on individual migrant deaths along the US Mexico border. And so this is different data through each source, but generally we tried to get a lot of demographic data, location data, cause of death, and at least some form of the incident narrative to kind of get a little bit of the context of how each of these people died.

[James]

Yeah. If people are looking at the map, they can see various colored dots. Right. And they can click on that dot and that will give them the fiscal year, the border patrol sector. In some cases, you'll see, like, the type of death, maybe a gender and age, things like that. I don't know, looking at it, like, it's one of those things that maybe is more emotionally difficult to view if you're more familiar. Like, I can look at these dots and I can think of. Of places I've been. I can even think of the day I was there. And it's quite. I don't know, it's impactful to see that all these people have died in places I know so well. Perhaps we can explain, like, the scale of this is huge. Right. Do you know exactly how many data points there are on here?

[Mia Wong]

I think there's something like 12 or 13,000.

[James]

Yeah, it's vast.

[Mia Wong]

Which overall is like, not a great sort of, like, indicator of how many people have actually died or even of how many people could be reported to have died, just because the Texas data was so wonky.

[James]

But, yeah, let's get into that then. Let's talk about maybe the sources for this data and then maybe perhaps how your estimates are much higher even with some of the emissions. Like, the data that you have tends to show underreporting. So, like, can you explain first, like, where does this data come from and how did. How did you get it? You were saying the Texas Numbers are lower. But can you explain how, like, there are these multiple jurisdictions and how you can't just, like, ask someone for this information?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, there's a few people we were able to just ask for it. Well, generally it all comes from formal public records requests from medical examiners, when we're lucky, because medical examiners usually have really good, reasonably searchable data. So that's what you did for San Diego County.

[James]

Yep, they're very good.

[Mia Wong]

Pima county, the state of New Mexico, El Paso. Other places have a coroner that are associated with. For sheriff's department, and that's usually a little dicier. They're a little more reluctant to give up records. That would be like Imperial county or Yuma county and then Texas. It's just like a medical legal nightmare. So there's. If smaller counties don't have medical examiners, they just add justices of abuse, which are part of, like, the courts, and they'll go out and investigate deaths. And if an autopsy is needed, they'll send it off to another county to get an autopsy. There's a huge amount of counties in Texas like this. So that data all came from this researcher, Stephanie Leuter from the University of Texas, Austin, who is working on a different project, but was gracious enough to share everything that she had collected. But that was like just a huge amount of legwork of physically going to each of these counties, looking at paper records from justices of the peace, writing down all that data. There's some that comes from, like, sheriff's department, some that comes from various other sources. So the Texas data, I mean, some of it, for example, Webb county medical examiner, they don't give up their data to anybody. And there's a lot of issues with than potentially like, not having actually performed autopsy on a lot autopsies on a lot of migrants. And there's some potential cases about that going on. Yeah. So Texas is really messy. And a lot of it you'll notice, like Texas has a lot of the purple dots. Yeah, the purple dots are location data from border patrol's database.

[James]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

And so that ends in 2018. So we have data past 2018, Border Patrol, not location data. And so a lot of Texas ends up being this just the border patrol data, unless we had specific access to that place's justice of the peace data. So the Texas data is pretty limited for that reason.

[James]

Yeah, you can see this sort of very few red dots, which are your other data sources, like in Texas, aside from it looks like maybe Brooks county, you were able to get justice to the peace data. There. Because the density is profound.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It's just the Brooks County Sheriff's Department that actually puts together that data. They're really keen on the whole thing.

[James]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

And partially it's because the data exists, but partially it really was just because it's huge cluster deaths in that area because of a checkpoint south of there where people will get dropped off south of the checkpoint, hike around, and it creates this massive. From massive open graveyard in Brooks County.

[James]

Geez. Yeah. I don't think I've spent much time in that part of Texas. But certainly, like some of these other ones, I'm much more familiar with. Let's talk about the CBP data. Right. You mentioned it there. One of the things that you found was that CBP has a systemic issue with undercounting deaths. Right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James]

So where does that come from?

[Mia Wong]

So I've heard from, I guess, for years. Humane Borders and Pima County Medical examiner have been documenting this since at least 2014. The major undercount on Border Patrol's data. But something I hear a lot is just that it's cases where Border Patrol wasn't personally involved in the search and that they had, like, changed their counting system to only be counting cases where they were involved. And I think that may account for some of it. But in order to compare these deaths, Border Patrol's data is just really gnarly and messy and bad. There's typos, there's misspelling. States are wrong, ages are wrong, genders are wrong. So you really. In order to compare them, you really have to go person by person, go down the list, find the deaths. Border Patrol database, look at the medical examiner data, time to matches person by person. So because we have so much of the incident narratives from the medical examiners, we can actually tell when Border Patrol was involved. And so we marked when Border Patrol is involved, when they're not involved, and then when that case doesn't actually get counted by Border Patrol.

[James]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

And it doesn't actually really line up. There's not a huge correlation there. I mean, there is some correlation, like older skeletal remains, things like that often won't get counted. But generally there are a lot of cases where they're directly involved, where even they were the first responders on the scene to a distress call or any number of things where that person won't end up in Border Patrol's database. And then other cases where it seems like they had no involvement, that person ends up in Border Patrol's database. So, I mean, they've been in trouble with the GAO multiple times for undercounting or improperly counting or reporting these deaths. And so they have access to medical examiner data, Medical examiner send them the data, they just don't use it. We often also noticed that the causes of death really don't match up in a lot of like, really specific cases. Like for Wall Falls, for instance, was the most notable one. There will be a huge amount of cases that the medical examiner will say one force trauma and then border patrol's data will say medical examiner on determinant or exposure or any number of other things which like for the most part, causes the death scene to line up. So the fact that these wallfold deaths, it happens to not line up is like, you know, I don't want to assume they have bad intent, although obviously boredom trial has bad intent. But it seems like it happens regularly enough that it's hard to feel like it's not at least somewhat intentional that the cases that they're kind of choosing to change the causes of death for.

[James]

Right. So like it obfuscates the lethality of the border war rating. It's the amount of people who it kills.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I mean, to a huge degree too. I mean the fact that border souls data is kind of our only source of data for migrant deaths and then specifically for deaths caused by border patrol or like wallfall deaths, means that the amount of deaths that we, the public has access to, like wallfall deaths for instance, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what's actually happening. So all of the research and reporting and all the stuff that happens around these CBT related deaths is drawing offload, just like, like truly false numbers.

[James]

Yeah, yeah. And that leads to people drawing bad conclusions. Right. The other thing that you found is that like there seems to be an under reporting of in custody deaths. Right. Or an undercounting of people who died in custody. So can you explain how you were able to ascertain that difference between the in custody death recorded by the Office of Professional Responsibility versus the ones that you found?

[Mia Wong]

Right, right. So the Office of Professional Responsibility is part of CBP and they're supposed to be recording all of CBP related deaths, including according to the Deaths in Custody Reporting act of like 2013 or whatever it was, army deaths in custody. There's a very specific definition of what in custody means. And so we tried to follow pretty strictly what that definition was to kind of make our own assessments using the incident narratives.

[James]

Yeah. I'm curious what it, what does it mean? Like, I'm thinking about door detention. Right. Like, does that count as in custody?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So any only time, if a person is in the process of being apprehended, if a person has been apprehended, if a person has been detained, if the person is physically in custody, Border patrol in a border patrol vehicle in CBG facility, all those things would count as in custody.

[James]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Which is important because in at least one of the cases, the Border Patrol agent involved said the person wasn't in custody, he was just detained, which for the purposes of reporting, there's actually no difference.

[James]

Right. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But he said that clearly to not have it be labeled as an in custody death.

[James]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And what it seems like that ended up not being labeled as an in custody death. So it's definitely. I think they're aware of the fact that these are being reported and kind of trial not to have that be.

[James]

The case, not to have too many of them, like, up here. Another interesting data. Interesting is the wrong word. But another data point here was the amount of deaths caused by pursuit. Right. Or in pursuit. I guess maybe you should just explain what pursuit is to people if they're not aware.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So there's two kinds of pursuit. We list them as the same here, but on their database you can see the difference of. There's chases on a motor vehicle and there's chases on foot. So for example, a person's getting chased through the desert and collapses and dies. That'll be considered a death. Either pursuit. Or if a person is like in El Paso or San Diego or Imperial County, Moore is chased and ends up falling in a canal or jumping into a canal to escape and drowns. The idea. Or chase on foot. And then motor vehicle pursuits are. Yes. If a person is being chased by Border Patrol and the group crashes and people are killed. Use of force cases also includes some of these cases through OPR standards and CBP standards. If spike strips are deployed or if a vehicle is ran by a Border patrol vehicle, that's considered use of force. So deaths where a person died due to that, we would call that a use of force death. Yeah. So I guess those are the two to three different kinds of receipt. That's the grade view.

[James]

And so like, yeah, those are, as you say, they're broken down in the database. Right. But in the spreadsheet, they are combined. What does this data show us about, like, I guess if we look at the last half decade or so. Let's go Back to like 2016. Right. Border policy. Like. Like, what does it show us about, like, Title 8, Title 42. We're like, a little too, too close to the Biden asylum ban to have, I guess, like, good data on that yet. But do you see a clear pattern in, like, the border rhetoric and border quote unquote enforcement and the amount of deaths or the type of deaths?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, definitely, yeah. It's. I think it's immediately clear. I mean, even Biden's asylum ban, I think there is an immediate effect. I mean, even just with, as a no more deaths volunteer, we started seeing people crossing the border, crossing the desert that just never would have made the attempt previously, and then started to see those people reporting the death data, too. So I think all of that is pretty clear. So with Trump's restrictions on asylum, I think that the biggest thing, honestly, was all the metering policies, rather than just Title 42 or Nike protection protocols or any of that. It was just the fact that people weren't allowed to access the port of entry.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Ended up kind of like, going around to enter, like, other places in the desert, board of hotel to pick them up. Then all this started happening.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And so it's kind of like a trickle in 2019, 2020, a little bit more in 2021. And then 2022, you suddenly see just huge amounts of people from countries other than Mexico, Central America, starting to show up in the data. And then also, like, people who clearly were trying to seek asylum showing up in this deck data all the way up until it slowed down after the end of 2023, but definitely continued through 2024.

[James]

Yeah, definitely. Like, speaking from my own experience on the border here, we saw the same thing, right? Like, people crossing who you wouldn't have seen making that crossing in places and times that they wouldn't have crossed, you know, before the Biden asylum ban. And, like, that definitely resulted in. I mean, there was a weekend in September where I think five people died. September 2024, we had a heat wave and, like, yeah, it immediately resulted in multiple fatalities that, like, wouldn't have been the case previously. I wonder, like, what is this data set in terms of, like, recommendations? Right. In terms of, like, how we can use this data set? Obviously, we're at a time when I. Well, I guess the Trump administration, like, had its complete asylum ban stayed, but we're back at, like, people can't in good faith, like, turn up to a port of entry anymore and just be like, hey, I'd like to claim asylum and really, really hope for the best. What does this dataset tell us in terms of what policies kill more people and I guess what recommendations Arise from the data in terms. Obviously, I guess the recommendation is to have laws that allow people to fucking enter this country and claim asylum without walking across the desert, but that seems like it's too much to ask. So what do we learn in terms of specific policies that are particularly fatal and the ways that. That that could be mitigated if it's not already by water drops and such?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that's a hard question. Just because talking to the older people at no More Deaths who've been around since the early years of prevention through deterrence, they talked about sort of feeling like when they were first out there being like, man, this is really unsustainable. You can't be out here all the time like this. Maybe like a few more years we could probably handle. And then hopefully this prevention through deterrence thing will have, like, kind of stopped. They'll see, like, this is unsustainable. And then here we are all these years later, and it's worse than it's ever been.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And the original prevention through deterrence policy is like this strategy of essentially killing people in the hopes, you know, people will stop trying to cross the border or something and kind of just is the original sin that it's really hard to get away from. And yeah, the fact that we're now applying the same. The same strategy of death and suffering to asylum seekers is really horrifying. So I think, yeah, number one, open up ports eventually to allow asylum seeker to seek asylum. Bring back, like, even the sort of minimum asylum projections that we had back then. Other things like how people are dying really matters.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So, for example, in the El Paso sector, there was very, very few deaths in 2014. The last couple of years, it's been the deadliest single small area in the entire border. And a lot of that was just because the border has just become so militarized that even this, like, urban area where, you know, people are dying a mile from town, people are dying in town.

[Noah de Barrasso]

We.

[Mia Wong]

I was part of a recovery where we. This person was on a row, had been there for about three days dead. It was about 40ft from Tabazius. The busiest road in the entire town.

[James]

Jesus.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, and that's just not something that really fits in with the ordinary narrative of, like, prevention through deterrence, people getting pushed out to these more remote areas. And I think just the level of militarization is just up to the level that it really is just deadly kind of. I mean, even. Yeah. All these deaths in San Diego, as you know.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Also the. So, like, all these Waltol deaths are pretty much all since, like, 2017 or even more recently. So the construction of all this new border wall, you can point very directly to a huge amount of depths just caused by Wall Falls. There's the canals in Imperial county and El Paso that kill a huge amount of people. There's El Paso right now is in the process of revamping their whole canal system. It'd be a great opportunity to have some sort of, like, safety systems in place so that people don't die.

[James]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

There is all the pursuit deaths, which now are not just being caused by Border Patrol, but also like the Texas Department of Public Safety now that Operation Lone Star has popped up. There's all these things where the kinds of deaths and the kinds of people dying and all that stuff has changed and increased really drastically in the last few years. And you can kind of point to a lot of them. But also it's like, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to really have any smart thoughts on it. Besides, just like, Border patrol is unperformable and just needs to be disbanded entirely.

[James]

Yeah. And like this whole border regime. Right. The whole idea of, like, an iron border that we enforce in a physical space. The point of it is to kill people. The point of it is to deter people by having perfectly innocent people who you'd be happy to have as your neighbor die in the desert. Like, that's. That is. That is the policy goal. Like, I'm just looking at, like, I'm looking at Pinto Canyon, which San Diego people will know is like. Like, it's pretty. Like, don't. If you're listening to this, don't go to Pinto Canyon. You might die. It's not a place to just go looking around if you're not experienced traveling out in the desert. But, like, even Pinto Canyon is gnarly. But looking along the wall, the wall kills way more people than this rugged and difficult piece of terrain in the middle of nowhere. Like, it's. It's things that we have paid a lot of money for that kill the most people. Like, and that's pretty brutal to confront. One of the other things that. That you guys were able to determine was that, like, a number of United States residents had died right in this data set.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James]

Can you explain that for people?

[Mia Wong]

Totally. So, yeah, like you said, there's people you'd love to have as your neighbor dying in all these places. And not just that, but your actual neighbor. The amount of people whose main residents listed was just in San Diego county, in Oceanside, in Bakersfield and Indianapolis, places that we've all been to. We were able to record for San Diego county and a few other counties, a lot of where people actually lived and some of the circumstances for why they were crossing through the desert in the first place. A lot of it is people who are very recently deported or who just traveled to Mexico because they had to get some paperwork done or wanted to visit family or things like this. Just had entire lives in the United States and then. And then passed away on the way back into the country.

[James]

Yeah, yeah. Including.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, it's really heartbreaking to even see.

[Sarah Spain]

There's.

[Mia Wong]

There's a lot of cases where the person who actually finds the body or recovers the body is that person's family members or their spouse or their children even, which only happens because, you know, Border Patrol is generally not that interested in recovering bodies or in looking for people who are lost. So often. Yeah, often it'll be, yeah, somebody's. Somebody's spouse who comes when is actually the first person on the scene.

[James]

Yeah, it's very common, Right, for volunteers to be alerted via, like, you know, I know some of the search and rescue groups are alerted by, like, Instagram, for instance, that, like, someone is missing. Right. It's not like there is, like, despite this being massively overfunded, you can't just call and they won't just send out an ambulance. Like, a lot. A lot of. A lot of times it is either the family members or, like, a bunch of volunteers just driving out there in their trucks. Their last night. Like, I can remember in running into some migrants in, like, 2023, and then being like, hey, there are some other people down there. And I was like, where? How do you know? And they'd found them on a Snapchat map.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, wow.

[James]

And like that. That was, you know, the only thing that. That maybe saved those people's lives. And, yeah, it's pretty brutal to think that, like, that there's still really. There's no one. Well, there are people you can call, come help you, but it's not the people who are getting billions of dollars. Let's talk very briefly before we finish up, about deaths outside of the United States. I see you have some data. Like, obviously my familiarity is with the Daddy and Gap, which good luck getting. I don't think that data exists. But, like, I see you have a number of data points within Mexico. Can you explain how you came across those and to what extent that data is, if at all, like, representative or complete?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, so it's not at all Representative or complete. It all comes from the National Institute of Immigration, the inmost in. In Mexico.

[James]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Who I guess if you do waterwork, you know, people's data are. They're like the sort of like quote unquote humanitarian aid route for migrants instituted by the government of Mexico in Mexico. And so we, through the Mexican, we were able to get data from the Green plus Beta, which throughout the years there's been kind of like changing locations of offices. So the data we have is just from where their offices are. So it's usually just sort of like a number of deaths for that particular office for that particular year. It's very, very limited. And there's many, many, many deaths that we then have other data to show that doesn't exist here. So it's really just kind of like. Yeah. Shouldn't be taken as any kind of like representative sample. It's purely just the one piece of Mexican data that we were able to quickly put on the map. Yeah, we did get other data from like specific states in Mexico, but we through, because of time and capacity and just the data itself, we were unable to turn that into a map just yet.

[James]

Yeah. And I think it still remains true that the single deadliest mile of this journey is the United States border. At least from this data that you're seeing. Would you say this data still supports that?

[Mia Wong]

Probably. I don't know. Yeah, probably. I just don't want to say because the data is just so bad in so many places, especially in Mexico.

[James]

But yeah, I'm thinking of like the daddy end. Right. Like it's. It's very deadly. I've seen people die there. It's obviously a very, very difficult and rugged place. But I think comparatively, probably more people die at the US border just because a. There were more of them and because people come, people are not everyone has to cross Hydarian people can fly to Mexico or somewhere further south and then come up that way. Where if people want to find this data or perhaps as someone who's a ninja with data and data visualization, they want to offer to help. Where can people find this and how can they reach out to no more desk if they'd like to help in some way.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So just on the Nomore Desk website you can see the report and the map and all that stuff. And in there there's a link to the media Outreach email, which in the next couple months is my email. And just feel free to send. Send an email there and yeah, happy to give greater access. Right now the data is pretty. Anonymized for privacy and safety. And there's a lot of the fields that we've kind of talked about that don't appear in the public database. So happy to share that with researchers, activists, advocacy people, journalists, things like that. And also we desperately would have thought to help. So yeah. Interested in looking at some spreadsheets? Yeah, just. Yeah.

[James]

Cool. Great. Thank you so much for your time and for all the work on this. I know this was a lot of work getting those records and I think it, I don't know, it gives us something to point to to show how many people this this board of is killing.

[Noah de Barrasso]

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[Sarah Spain]

Presented by iHeart.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Hey guys, it's Az Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champ, champion and recent most outstanding player. You may even know me as the People's Princess. But now you're also going to know me as your favorite host. Every week on my new podcast, Fut around and Find Out, I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all, from my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the natty with my UConn Huskies, to just trying to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the Fudd family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on tv, you may think you know me, but this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out. Listen to FUD around and find out. A production of iHeart Women's Sports in partnership with Unanimous Media on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 1920, a magazine article announced something incredible. Two young girls had photographed real fairies. But even more extraordinary than the magazine article's claim was the identity of the man who wrote the article. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The man who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Yes, the man who invented literature. Most brilliant detective was fooled by two girls into thinking fairies were real. How did they do it? And why does it seem like so many smart people keep falling for outlandish tricks? These are the questions we explore in Hoax, a new podcast from me, Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood, and me, Lizzy Logan. Every episode we'll explore one of the most audacious and ambitious tricks in history, from the fake Shakespeares to balloon boys, and try to answer the question of why we believe what we believe. Listen to Hoax on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sarah Spain]

This is It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode I'm joined to by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news.

[G]

Oh no.

[Sarah Spain]

I which is frankly one of the best ways to start this episode and one of the best ways to start the show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called let's see Ill Hitler and I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist. Oh wow. I have decoded some of At Hell Hitler's communiques and I have uncovered a secret. A secret Nazi code.

[James]

Wow.

[G]

This is, this is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hail Hitler.

[Sarah Spain]

He has posted some pictures in like what I would assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like, I don't know, it's some kind of like, like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there's some runes on this uniform.

[James]

Oh wow.

[Sarah Spain]

That look very similar to the Odell rune. So I'm thinking because of the rune, this guy might be a Nazi.

[G]

Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have determined this.

[Sarah Spain]

That's right. I. You can find me at OSINT Defender online.

[G]

Oh no, don't send people to OSINT Defender.

[Sarah Spain]

No, that does it for us today and it could happen here now. So this episode we're going to talk about something that's been slowly frustrating me the past few weeks and that is the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the DHS Gov online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X, the Everything app. But this, this extends outside of. Of X the Everything app. This extends outside of Blue sky, the Internet in general. This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti fascist like education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So bear with me. This is going to be kind of a, an odd episode, but I think, I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same traps that, that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's, let's, let's start by talking about some communications posted on the Internet by HSgov. A picture of a painting titled American Progress by John Gast, captioned a heritage to be proud of, comma, a homeland worth defending. So on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak bringing forth the, the tide of quote unquote, progress as indigenous people are, are forced to, to flee from the edge of the painting, it's.

[G]

It's fun because this is a painting we literally, when they had to explain manifest destiny. Like colonialism, good. This is the painting that was in my textbook in. In high school history class. Like it is like the. The Ur. Colonialism. Good. Genocide.

[James]

Good.

[G]

Painting.

[Sarah Spain]

Genocide. Good. That's what the painting is. But what I have found through some hashtag research, there might be a hidden code in this communication from the dhs. Already an agency that only has the best interests and of really all people who strive for human rights, the dhs. So if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet. Mia.

[G]

15.

[Sarah Spain]

No. So close. So close. 14. 14 words in this tweet which might remind you of the 14 words. The. The. The Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on. On fascist rhetoric. But the 14 words, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past, I would say 10, 15 years, usually by implanting 14s and usually 1488s, with 88 meaning Heil Hitler. Because H is the eighth letter of the Alphabet, this became a common Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti. You see this embedded into posts. See this in, like, Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet, this is actually a 1488, because two of the H's in this. In this post are capitalized unusually, and that means Hal Hitler.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Wow.

[Sarah Spain]

Because H is the eighth letter. Oh, but wait. Actually, looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized. But don't worry. Don't worry. This is still a dog whistle because those other words that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers, are 1 in 4. So it's actually another 14.

[James]

Oh, wow.

[G]

We're doing. We're doing numerology. We're doing gematria. We've become qanon.

[Sarah Spain]

We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my. My. My thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing? What are we doing here? We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters. To get a 1488. It's literally gematria. And then also counting the total words in the whole. So we met while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for another 14. What are we doing? How is this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump administration and finally proves that they're fascist? You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking, hahahaha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with a HHD one. 88 14. Nice try, Groipers. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post, you can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide, of Manifest Destiny. While the administration, the dhs, is currently furthering ethno nationalist policies, they are doing this.

[G]

This is Homeland Security. Right. I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland Security.

[Sarah Spain]

But like, this is the agency that.

[G]

Is literally rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have camps in multiple countries now. When I say they're being round up and sent to camps, it's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.

[Sarah Spain]

See? Caught in El Salvador.

[G]

Yeah. I mean, I think people have now escaped. So I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp, but like, again, they're sending people to South Sudan. They're like, they're just doing this.

[Sarah Spain]

Like, what are we doing here? So this episode, I want to focus on how people are misusing antifascist education. Or I would argue they're misusing anti fascist education and kind of missing the forest for a cardboard cutout of trees. Yeah, not even trees. Kind of something that could be a tree if you look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a real tree. And you don't need to sound like a Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious. Like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and furthermore doing it, doing things. What purpose does a dog whistle have?

[James]

What are we doing here?

[Sarah Spain]

And this is something that we're gonna to discuss. I'm not just saying this and closing the episode. We are, we're going to get into these. Yeah. And I think part of what's happening here, everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that were Missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has a total victory. QAnon does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018. That the QAnon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more. But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on maga. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which. Which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet. And this is what, what, like everything is. And like the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 election in like a, a massive fracture from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading up to that, which, which contributed to this.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump with people creating whole new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because that door was opened now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blue and on conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across. And I'm going to do a whole piece on blue and on very soon. I've been collecting blue and on conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do something specifically about this 1488 and like, secret codes thing because it's, it's so evocative of like, you know, Q drops. And it's, it's evocative of, you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing for generations. And we're going to talk about that more and read a little bit of, of an essay on that topic after this ad break and I will let you know. There's going to be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode. So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the code. Okay, we are back. Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I want to quote a few sections to kind of, of frame what I'm talking about here. This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard.

[G]

Hofstadter.

[Sarah Spain]

Hofstadter. Richard Hofstadter. One of the first, like, modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna. I have three paragraphs here that I, That I selected as, as being relevant to the current, the current topic at hand, quote. There is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content, unquote. And I like that section specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle. We can, we can see this used. There's aspects of people who are, who are trying to search for this and trying to search for, for patterns in the communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I, I find, like, sympathetic. Like I can understand, I can understand because, yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenarianists. He expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days. And he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as of yet unaroused public. The paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals. And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Hofstadter is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before, how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information. Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything. And having that informational exclusivity in a world of information, saturation of a vortex of meaningless noise. It's such a romantic idea that I alone have the info or the clue to piece this together and it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very romantic notion.

[G]

And it's also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just a moment where everything that is happening is just.

[Sarah Spain]

It's so clear, stunningly literal. Like it's all out in the open.

[G]

Like what is happening with the Trump administration. Okay, in 2020, there is a massive uprising to attempt to attempt to fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States, to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right? And they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward. Like if this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because it's just, just there. There's no subtlety to it. They're just saying it. They just want to do it and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy in it. It's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, you can argue that we have a groiper occupied government not because of counting words in posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS as of today, which I'm recording this on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night, are copying like Patriot front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U Haul style rentable trucks to, to hunt down people to assault and kidnap. Like they're, they're just copying the Patriot front playbook here. The ICE director said that he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote Amazon Prime. But with human beings they're saying this, you can, you can sing it, listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the paranoid style of American politics essay. Quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world. But he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it, unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this, this Nazi code hunting. It's actually a form of like self Coping. Looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating. And this is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Bluesky that I was talking to about this was like arguing like, like, ICE doesn't need to dog whistle. They have no reason to. Like, dog whistling is for trying to like, sneakily get racists or fascists into power while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are like one of them. Right. But these guys are already in power and the base already knows that they're in power. There's no point in dog whistling. They're just using ICE to establish an ethnostate. They're using explicit ethnostate rhetoric in a. In a post from this morning which has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 words, not 14, 10 words.

[James]

Wow.

[Sarah Spain]

DHS said, quote, serve your country, defend your culture. No undergraduate degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants. It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. It's. They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest.

[Noah de Barrasso]

No.

[G]

And I want to return to something else that the Hofstadter said in that. In that second paragraph that you read about how like, one of the central conceits is that, like, you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American public doesn't know anything about it. And like, yeah, you can. You know, it is distressing to a large extent the extent to which people just don't know what the government is doing. But also, like, if you look at any polling at all about anything these people are doing, everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that all these people are Nazis, because, like, that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already. Like, trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, hi, I'm your neighbor. You also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking, like, do the shit people are doing in LA and like follow these fucking ICE fans around. Right? That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like, accumulate hordes of secret knowledge. So people do it less, even though it's less effective.

[Sarah Spain]

In my discussion of this, like online on various cursed social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics and what I What I see as a sort of like, abuse of, of anti fascist education. Right. Because people like, you know, Robert Evans myself, you know, Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually, you know, educate people about like, Nazi rhetoric, like in like Nazi signals and dog whistles. Right. And as an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention.

[James]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

Of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things that we've, you know, argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense. That it's, it's, it's kind of like trying to tame a mo. Tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was, was lightly arguing about this online was, was saying like, this is not numerology and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like, codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes. And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric. What they're actually like saying which, which has like proto fascist or fascistic aspects. That is the rhetoric. And they're, they're doing it. Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalized letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message? Is, is there one person. No. Who's going to become convinced of this? No. That's not the purpose. So trying to conceptualize this as like, we have to, we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about?

[Noah de Barrasso]

Yeah.

[G]

And also, like, I think, you know, like, I, I, I, I think we've sort of, kind of just to some extent, we've just failed on, on the normalization front because again, like, it's the President of the United States.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[G]

This is, this is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security. It has already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize is it is not actually to do media critique. It's to like, actually oppose them.

[Sarah Spain]

But that's scary.

[G]

That's scary, right?

[Sarah Spain]

But it's like, scary. Mia, do you know what's easy? Posting on X, the Everything app.

[G]

Yeah. This is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state. Because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[G]

This is why it can stage things. This is why it can rig elections. This is why it can light like, I don't know, like it can just like magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone. It can stage any protest movement it wants to. Right. And you, I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where like I see people who are like genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, you're falling victim to the panopticon. Yeah, yeah.

[G]

But it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right. And can hurt you, it's very, very easy to, you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day. Right. Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like, like fucking U hauls to jump out and grab people. It's because when they tried to fucking mass, we stomped them. Right?

[Sarah Spain]

And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window, everyone follows them. People can follow them around and alert their community members on where ICE is.

[G]

Like again, motherfuckers and fucking Lululemon shit are like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people. Like, yeah, that that's the actual condition we're in.

[Sarah Spain]

And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self described as like anti fascists or self described as, as leftists almost falling into this trap, like more so than others. And it's, it's a little bit evident of something that like I've described as like the forever 2016, how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016, 2017, 2018 era. And we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This is a different situation. This is 2025. And one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote, Nazis love playing games like this so it's important that we call it out. And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote. And like, first of all, this is not a game. This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And I think that view of like, anti fascist, like education risks repeating like the okay symbol debacle, right? Where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter egg. Anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barbra Streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing which Nazis always have, have that like, like frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think, as Ratlimit put it, one of one of my favorite posters and like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap the okay symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and had then having the media try to convince regular people that anyone who uses like the okay hand symbol is secretly a fascist. And this scheme worked and eventually the OK symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was like, invented as like a joke online. And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the 14 words dog whistle. With an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far right accounts specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS Gov account and their heritage, to be proud of homeland worth defending American progress like ethno nationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside. I can't. I can't tell you that. And the point I'm trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want. But you know what I do want.

[G]

Right now is it the products and services that support this podcast.

[Sarah Spain]

Another ad break. That's right. Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.

[G]

All right, we are back to briefly take a second. I think there is something very important about like the fact that we're all stuck in 2016, which was sort of like the peak of irony. Right. As a social affect has left us really unprepared for now where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're just doing it and saying it, right?

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[G]

And it's not this sort of like irony pill, deniability shit. They just do it and people are just not prepared for that.

[Sarah Spain]

They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts. And I think they are still pushing this. I'm a quote from from a friend of the pod rat limit, one of my favorite mutes quote prediction the Nazi salute will become common within two years. Right wingers will half ass it for plausible deniability meme ify the backlash and then start fully doing it, quote unquote as a joke to quote unquote troll the libs for being hysterical enough to think that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact its cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what Rhett Limit predicted. There's this current trend on X the Everything app where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying to memify the backlash with several posts going going viral of these, of these like, like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having your arm in a Elon Musk. My heart goes out to you. Nazi salute style fashion.

[James]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

And I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense. Right? He is like an actual person affiliated with the government but making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls. Maybe not so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value. If a random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their insta pot.

[G]

I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Nazi salute and about the ways that everyone, you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is that everyone has been trained to experience the world and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things.

[Sarah Spain]

That's what I want to talk about. Next. Yeah, yeah, let's do this.

[G]

Let's do this. Yeah, go for it, Go for it.

[Sarah Spain]

Think part of this focus on, on, on, like, these hidden codes and even just like these, like, messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself.

[G]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

It's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with, like, neoliberal governing. And that's, I think, what a, a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film, like, gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes. Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important. And they're, they're bad. Right? It's, I'm not saying these things are good. Yeah, those things are still bad.

[G]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this, like, capitalist realism. Being trapped in this, like, like this neoliberal.

[G]

Yeah, the society, the spectacle.

[Sarah Spain]

Exactly right. Let's, like, in June, ICE arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations. In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations. Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations a month. The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013 under Obama, averaging 36,000amonth. The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000 when the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice. That triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US Military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Colombia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later caved as tried. Trump threatened punitive tariffs. And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this, like, image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher, and that's kind of all I have left.

[G]

Yeah, I mean, it is very fitting of our styles of politics that you're going to Fisher here and I'm going to Benjamin.

[Sarah Spain]

Benjamin is, is quoted in these sections that Fisher is, is pulling from as well.

[G]

Yep, yep. I, I, I'm, I'm going to the source. I'm not, I'm not going through the fucking CRU bullshit like pop Marxist bourgeois running dog Fisher. But no, but like, you know what? Like, one of the things that, that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read, he's one of the great original theorists of fascism. And he fucking died trying to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics, that aesthetics would allow you to feel representation instead of do the action. And this is an analysis that has been sort of folded through a whole bunch of different analyses of how capitalism functions, right? This is one of the three lines of the society, a spectacle. And it's this real issue that we're dealing with now because again, again, kind of in a sense, what has happened to everything, right? And you can argue to some extent that like our channel being called Cool Zone Media is sort of. This is that all politics from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows, like. Allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of. Through this sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[G]

And it also is doing the same thing to us. But the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't, right? And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic, of sort of like, of fucking living in images, right? And, you know, go do the actual shit that the board is talking about in the society of spectacle, where you and all your friends form workers councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of the people who've been taking it from you, you're just gonna live in the fascist nightmare forever.

[Sarah Spain]

I mean, you could look at the union resistance to ICE deportations, specifically in LA with restaurant workers. That's literally doing that. And like, I would argue, like, now it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics, but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you can even see that insofar as its focuses on, you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving out the indigenous people with those of Aryan white lady, carrying the torch of progress. It is an aestheticized politics on like a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, quote Mark Fisher in capitalism, quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible. Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberal. The capitalist realists par excellence have celebrated the destruction of public space. But contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions, unquote. This is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected, in terms of the state becoming more removed, but hostile.

[G]

Yeah. Although. Although, I see. Again, I disagree with Fischer here because the neoliberals understood what they were doing to begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away. That was just the lies that they told the fucking Basses, Like.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Sure.

[Sarah Spain]

I mean, that's what. Contrary to their official.

[G]

Yeah, yeah, that's like, you know.

[Sarah Spain]

Quote. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless. Only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts, the helpless proliferate, unquote. This is part of what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting is almost a form of this hopeless superstition. To continue, quote. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows? Its cause lies long in the past, past so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being, a negative miracle, a melidation which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism, unquote. And, yeah, that's what MI is talking about with Guy Debord and society of the spectacle. That's the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still doesn't mean it's like, good, right? That's not. That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alain Badou, quote. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal, like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of aids, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lomosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated.

[G]

Oh, yeah, because we're doing this now. Like.

[Sarah Spain]

But this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions of people die. Right. One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through aesthetics of racist, nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure, actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane that we should not allow at all.

[G]

Yeah, I see the logic of this all the fucking time, talking to people where, like, we'll be like, okay, like, no deportations. And then you get a whole bunch of people being like, well, but what about criminals?

[Sarah Spain]

It's like, some. Some deportations. What do you.

[G]

This is the structural logic of the original, like, deportation blitz from Trump, creating.

[Sarah Spain]

A class of undesirables that you can then always add to and press the border on, like, what Carl Schmidt talks about.

[G]

This is the structural logic of fascism.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, but.

[G]

But everyone. Everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But you know, until people actually break through the sort of pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start, you know, having. Having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here.

[Sarah Spain]

And this is, I think, one of the limits of using antifascism as this, like, aesthetic code hunting is because a few days ago, THS posted a Woody Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with DHS posting, the promise of America is worth protecting. The future of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this video is all white people, which this sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words, except it has 15 words. So therefore, not a Nazi dog whistle. Yeah, we're safe, guys. We're good. I counted the words. There's 15 of them. So you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is like the prime. The prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the. The aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you have any. Any final, wise. Wise notes?

[G]

The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed. It is now time to end the episode right here.

[Sarah Spain]

That's right, it is. We're late for a meeting. Oh, and if you were able to decode the hidden message in the ad break, send the contents of the message via email to your local congressman to redeem your prize. Bye Bye.

[Noah de Barrasso]

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[Sarah Spain]

Presented by iHeart.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Hey guys, it's Az Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion and recent Most outstanding player. You may even know me as the people's Princess. But now you're also gonna know me as your favorite host. Every week on my new podcast, Fut around and Find Out. I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all, from my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the natty with my UConn Huskies, to just trying to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the Fudd family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on tv, you may think you know me, but this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out. Listen to Futaround and find out. A production of iHeart Women's Sports in partnership with Unanimous Media on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II when they pulled off what was either a bold literary hoax or a grand poetic experiment, publishing over a dozen intentionally bad but highly acclaimed works of expressionist poetry under the name Ern Malley. In an incident that caused a media firestorm and even a criminal trial, the Ern Malley episode made fools of believers and critics alike and still fascinates poetry lovers to this day. We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on Hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, Hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history, from forged artworks to the original fake news. To try and answer why we believe, listen to Hoax on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sarah Spain]

This is it could happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by mia Wong, James to, and Robert Evans. We're covering the week of July 30th to August 7th. Robert, what is Texas?

[Robert Evans]

So the original root word of the state's name is Tejas, which means friendship, a thing that no one in Texas has ever known because it's the angriest, meanest state in the country. That's Texas, Garrison.

[Sarah Spain]

Up for some stiff competition these days?

[Robert Evans]

Up for some stiff competition.

[Sarah Spain]

But it's still holding out, isn't it?

[James]

Everything's bigger in Texas. Garrison.

[Robert Evans]

It's famed as being the second or third worst state that borders New Mexico. So, you know, rarefied company, really. It can compete with all of the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado. But the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado are Oklahoma and Arizona and Texas. So not high bars.

[James]

Texas has some of the finest airbed and breakfasts that I've ever stayed in.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[James]

Including one with a deeply disturbing basement.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Just because they had one torture basement. James. So we're talking about Texas right now because a bunch of the Democratic state legislators just fled the state for Illinois, I believe is how the name of the state is pronounced.

[James]

Yep.

[Sarah Spain]

It's French.

[Robert Evans]

It's French. It's French.

[G]

Fact check for a real Illinoisan.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Wrong.

[James]

This post fact checked by real Illinois.

[Robert Evans]

So when you've got a legislature of pretty much any type, at least in the U.S. i'm sure there's other countries that don't do it this way, but you need what's called a quorum in order to actually do anything, which means of the total number of elected members of the legislature, you need a certain number of them. Otherwise you can't, like, do anything because there's not enough people there in order to actually have it be a valid vote. And I probably don't have to explain the reasonings why. There's some pretty obvious reasons why you'd want it to work this way, but there are, however, some. Some downsides to it. You know, potentially, you.

[Sarah Spain]

You can be.

[Robert Evans]

Depending on whether or not your side is doing it, it's a downside or an upside.

[Sarah Spain]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Which is that if you have a side that is the minority in the government and they don't want a vote to go through, they can just bounce. And if they bounce at the right time, before the legislature has been called and, like, no one's there, then you can't get a quorum and nothing can get done. And this is big news right now because in order to stop a redistricting vote, a bunch of Democratic legislators have fled. But this is a thing that has been going on for well over a century, and it is a thing that both sides of the aisle have engaged in with substantial regularity. I'm not an expert on any of this. The earliest example I can find of anyone doing this is in Texas. I'm not saying that means it's the earliest example of anyone in the US Doing this, but the earliest example I found in my research was from 1870. So there's an article on this by the Texas State Historical association called Understanding the Rump senate of the 12th Texas legislature. And the rump Senate is a term applied to the 15 Radical Republican members of the 12th Texas Legislature who fled in 1870 to stop a vote on a militia bill. And this bill gave the governor power to declare martial law. It gave him the power to establish a state police force. It increased the appointive power of the governor. A bunch of stuff that's not all that interesting to us today because governors, like every state does this today, right? Like, there's state police everywhere. Every state governor has the power to call a militia or, you know, a national guard or whatever. Like, this is not controversial today, but it was back then. And it's important that I note that While it was 15 radical Republicans who fled in 1870, those were conservatives, right? Like the radical Republicans were conservatives in 1870.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So this is. This is kind of a reverse. If you're just sort of looking at things from a liberal or conservative point of view, this is kind of a reversal of what's happening right now in Texas, although it's happened a lot of other times since. Right. So this is 1870, and I should note, it didn't succeed. Right. This is, however, one of the fairly rare times when this kind of thing happens. If it goes on long enough, every time, the governor basically will declare an arrest warrant for the legislators who have left. And as a general rule, this does nothing. Right. Like, the governor has the ability to fine them a certain amount per day, and it has the ability to call out an arrest warrant, but it's not like a real arrest warrant. Like, if you murder a guy and then flee to another state, an arrest warrant will be issued that law enforcement in that state has to abide by. Right. Because you murdered somebody, this is not a real crime. Basically, if you flee back, if you wind up back in the state that you left, you can be taken into custody by law enforcement in the state, but they can't leave the state to get you. And almost, I would say, like, 90% of the time when something like this happens, nobody actually gets arrested. However, in 1870, several Conservative members were held under arrest for, like, three weeks until the Senate could pass the legislation. So as is usually the case whenever stuff like this happens, it only succeeded in kind of delaying the inevitable. It didn't succeed in actually stopping things. And this has happened a number of times in Texas. Most recently, Texas Democratic lawmakers broke quorum in 2021. And I want to Quote here from an article in ABC News, quote. Texas state lawmakers left brook quorum in 2021 when Democratic House representatives fled Texas to prevent measures restricting voting options. The measures eventually passed after internal Democratic fissures led to enough representatives returning to form a quorum. And this is the kind of thing where Governor Abbott allowed the sergeant of arms, or command of the sergeant of arms to arrest the members within Texas. Weirdly enough, a couple of them did return. The first was Philip Cortez, who, like briefly, he came back to Austin to handle personal business and there was a civil arrest warrant signed. But then he fled the state again before he could be arrested. There were warrants signed for the 52 remaining absent legislators. But law enforcement didn't arrest or detain anybody. Eventually, enough Democratic legislators came back into the state for like personal reasons. Some of them had like shit to handle like in their own life. Some of them had other things they wanted to push through in terms of like legislature. And so they were like, I guess I'll come back back and let this happen. And eventually the house reached quorum and this past Democrats did not face the 500 a day fine that they'd been threatened by the governor and nobody was arrested. Now we've been, I've been talking about Texas here, but this happens all over the place. In fact, when this story first broke, the immediate thing I thought back on was what happened very recently in the state of Oregon and has happened a couple of times in the state of Oregon.

[G]

You know, it was mine too. They do this all the time.

[Robert Evans]

They do this. Yes, this is, this is a common thing in Oregon. It has started and this is, both parties have done this, I should note, right. Both Democrats and Republicans in Oregon, as in Texas, have done walkouts.

[Sarah Spain]

They don't even have to leave the state.

[Robert Evans]

They don't even have to leave the state, although they have recently. This seems to have started in Oregon, I think in the, in the 1970s. There's actually a really good article that's a like an overview of a bunch of different states state's history of doing this in Oregon. Central Oregon Daily News, although it's an AP press article, so I guess Central Oregon Daily just is licensing this thing. But anyway, in Oregon, the most recent case of this happening was in 2023 after Republicans staged a six week boycott, which is the longest so far in Oregon Legislature history over a rule a law the Democratic Party was pushing to protect abortion rights and gender, the right to gender affirming care for transgender people. This again did not succeed. This was passed in the legislature and there were actually some consequences, although it hasn't been enough time to see how serious there will be because there was a different GOP walkout over climate change legislation, which also failed in 2022. And as a result of that 2022 walkout, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution in Oregon, which barred lawmakers from getting reelected if they had more than 10 unexcused absences in a single annual legislative session. And as a result of the walkout the next year over abortion rights and gender affirming care, 10 Oregon Republican lawmakers were barred from seeking reelection. Again, as I stated, this is something that very rarely actually does anything. There's a 2021 case in New Hampshire where Democrats walked out in protest of an anti abortion bill. The Republican House speaker locked the doors to maintain a quorum. I'm going to quote from that Central Oregon Daily article. I'm locking the doors right now so that everybody in the chat chamber will stay in the chamber. Shouted House Speaker Sherman Packard, who later refused to let Democrats back in to vote on the bill.

[James]

It's just fucking like representative politics is just not school children shouting at each other.

[Robert Evans]

I want them to fight with canes. They should be fighting with canes.

[James]

Agreed. Give them nerfs. Give them, give them all a nerf. Let them fight it out.

[Robert Evans]

I would say 90% of the time, nothing is. At least from the reading I've done, nothing is achieved except step forward delay. Which is not to say that that's nothing. And also I do believe, like in the case of the Democratic Party, I don't think what the Texas Democrats are doing will stop the redistricting. Like the Republicans are going to win this fight. It's worth fighting. Yeah, I'm glad they're fighting it. However, very rarely is the actual law stopped or is anything but a delay achieved. One of the rare cases in which something more was achieved is in 2011 in Wisconsin. Democratic state, State senators fled to Illinois as a protest against Governor Scott Walker. He was attempting to strip public workers of their union rights. Yeah, and this, you know, this walkout was staged at the same time as a mass pro union demonstration at the Capitol. And after several weeks, they won a partial victory. Republicans weakened the legislation, which is like significant. Right? Like the fact that they actually got concessions over this. And sometimes the delay can be significant. The same year that that all went down in Wisconsin, Indiana, Democrats also left for. For whatever reason. Illinois is where you go if you're doing this.

[James]

No one wants to come get you. No one wants to go to Illinois.

[Robert Evans]

No one's going to Illinois.

[James]

Fuck that. It's just not worth it.

[Robert Evans]

I've been to fuck Illinois.

[James]

Sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Illinois is the hero of this story. We love you, Illinois.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, Chicago's fine.

[Robert Evans]

Chicago's fine. For whatever reason, this is the state you go to if you're a Democrat doing this in the modern era.

[James]

If you're in Wisconsin, it's not that far away, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Well, this is Indiana, too.

[Sarah Spain]

Not very far away.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's also not far.

[James]

Yeah, they couldn't make it to California.

[Robert Evans]

You know, it's further now that Texans are doing it.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But Indiana. Democrats left in 2011 to prevent Republican law that would have stopped unions from levying mandatory fees on union members, which would kind of make. Could potentially make it impossible to do a union, because nobody wants to pay for a union, but everyone wants one, right?

[James]

Yeah, every worker does.

[Robert Evans]

You want the union protecting you. You don't want to have to give up your money. So it's the kind of thing you could. I think the. The Republican plan was use the natural greed that people have in order to hamstring unionizing efforts.

[Sarah Spain]

Many such cases.

[Robert Evans]

And the Democrats left, which left the House short of its quorum and threatened to stay in the other states until they were promised that the bills would not be called. Republicans successfully passed the bill, but they had to wait until the next year. So. So again, every now and then, you eke a win out here, or the side doing this ekes out a win, and everyone does it, and everyone has been doing it for more than 150 years. Nothing about this is new, with the exception of the fact that they actually look to be pushing some serious legal consequences. The most I've been able to find in the history of this is what happened in 1870, where a number of people were arrested and held in custody for a few weeks. Usually no one is arrested, and usually the fines aren't even actually levied. Right now, this does cost money. The last Texas walkout, Texas Democrats are spending, like 10 grand a day on, you know, food and board, you know, paying for their hotels or whatever, which was. I think Beto o' Rourke raised most of the money through his pac, which is what covered it.

[Sarah Spain]

A few hundred grand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, like $600,000. So, you know, this does cost money.

[James]

To do, because you've got to put.

[Robert Evans]

These people up, but generally, you're not really hiding them. And generally the legal consequences are more of a threat than a reality.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Right.

[Sarah Spain]

And that might not be True. In this most recent case, yes.

[Robert Evans]

And we're gonna throw to you, Garrison. But first, you know who does force serious life changing legal consequences on people?

[James]

Is it Jay Pritzker?

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And the products and services that support this podcast, which are entirely, we're actually backed entirely by JB Pritzke.

[Sarah Spain]

From your mouth to God's ears, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Not like knowingly. I stole his debit card. And boy, that guy has a high daily spending limit, let me tell you.

[James]

Yeah, well, he has a lot of shadow companies.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, thanks, jb. Please don't change your password to your online bank. Garrison.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Hi.

[Sarah Spain]

Hi. We're back. So, as Roberts said, Republicans in the Texas legislature are trying to gerrymander Texas to increase their total power over the state, proposing a redistricting map that would add five more Republican seats. And in an effort to prevent or delay this, this past Sunday, 62 Texas Democrats fled to Illinois to deny quorum in the Texas house and only 12 need to return in order for the redistricting to go through. With the main goal right now being trying to stay out of the state until November. In terms of consequences, new House rules adopted back in 2023 after the 2021 quorum can impose a $500 fine per day for missing lawmakers, not just from the governor. Now, on Monday, the Texas House Republicans voted to issue civil arrest warrants for the lawmakers, empowering the sergeant of arms and the Texas Texas State Troopers to locate, apprehend and transport the rogue legislators back to the Capitol. Governor Greg Abbott announced he had mobilized the Texas Department of Public Safety to return the Democrats to the chamber. Now, these warrants really only apply within state lines. These are, these are civil warrants. They're not facing criminal charges, though. Back in 2003, during a similar quorum break due to gerrymandering efforts, federal resources were used to track planes with suspected rogue Democrat lawmakers. And Abbott has already proposed trying to declare their House seats vacant if they do not return. Yeah, a tactic which would probably prompt some lengthy legal battles and require new special elections to take place to fill the seats. So that still would like delay this process. That's not a quick solution, but there has been some breaking news as of this morning recording Thursday. On Thursday morning, Texas Senator John Corbett announced that the FBI would now be investigating and working to locate the Texas House Democrats, saying in a press release, quote, I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable for fleeing Texas. We cannot allow these rogue Legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities, unquote. So the extent of the FBI's involvement in tracking down, locating, or apprehending the Democrats is currently unknown. The FBI has declined to comment. But this is something that's going to develop in the next week, which they.

[Robert Evans]

Always do on ongoing cases. Like, yeah, sure, if you email or whatever the FBI about any ongoing case, this is what they do, period. It's been their policy for forever.

[James]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it doesn't tell you anything.

[Sarah Spain]

Just saying that in. In terms of, like, we do not know what the extent of their involvement is going to be at this point.

[James]

Right. Yeah. Right.

[Sarah Spain]

And they might not even know either.

[G]

Yeah. This could just be a Cash Patel TikTok.

[James]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

There's a good chance they're internally scrambling to, like, what are we gonna do?

[Sarah Spain]

This would be unprecedented. Sending a federal, like, law enforcement arm to. To. To physically apprehend and return lawmakers. That is certainly an escalation from using, like, federal resources to track planes like they did in 2003. This would be a whole new ballgame.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. As I noted, it's uncommon for them to be arrested inside the state by the sergeant at arms.

[James]

Yeah, sure.

[Sarah Spain]

I mean, like, arrest just means, you know, you, like, like accompany them back to the capital or force them to return to the capital.

[Robert Evans]

You're staying here. You're not going to leave to the state.

[James]

Yeah. And you've got a guy called Sergeant Arms involved.

[Robert Evans]

It's not serious, but even that's pretty uncommon.

[James]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

No, I mean, like, most quorum breaks fail because legislators just choose to return, whether to do personal business, whether to do political business. It takes a lot of discipline to not return to your home for a period of like, three to six months.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You got stuff to do. Most people, A lot of people have what are called families. Families, something like that.

[James]

Familiars.

[Sarah Spain]

I don't know what that is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think it's a new concept. Yeah. We're still working at Cool Zone to get a handle on it. We'll have a report on whatever that is soon, don't worry.

[James]

Yeah, they got to get back to the polycule or whatever. But they haven't violated a federal law, right? Like, no sort of federal law.

[Sarah Spain]

They even violated a Texas law.

[James]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's not a law violation. It is literally the governor saying, I'm sending guys for you.

[James]

Yeah. This is some old timey parliamentarian shit.

[G]

Yeah. And like, you know, as I was saying, it's like, again, it is on. This could just be a Cash Patel TikTok. Op. But also.

[Robert Evans]

God, I hate the way that sounds.

[James]

What a fucking way to describe our federal law enforcement.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Oh, it's on huge.

[G]

This is genuinely. Okay, I'm going to take a very, very slight detour, which I've said this before, but also, like, the thing that gives me most hope about all of this is that, like, look, they found the right winger to put in charge of the American secret police, and he doesn't want to do his job because he just wants to be a podcaster.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, understand, look, you make me director the FBI and I promise to be more or less the same.

[G]

Yeah, but, you know, but if this is actually a thing, right? And federal agents are suddenly grabbing lawmakers out of Illinois, that is.

[Robert Evans]

That's a big deal. Yeah, that's a massive escalation.

[Sarah Spain]

And that's why, as people fully supported by Pritzker's private militia, we will be on the front lines defending the Texas lawmakers.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[James]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

Saluting the Chicago flag.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. As Governor Pritzker recently stated, blood for the blood God. Skulls for the skull throne. Classic Pritzker.

[G]

Do you need to do some Pritzker? Not even slander here. So just fuck you. Tiny bit of you Pritzker news, which I was gonna talk about a little bit anyways later, but Pritzker has basically allowed a bunch of hospitals in Chicago to stop covering gender affirming care for minors, even though it's like illegal under Illinois state law. So him for that.

[Sarah Spain]

Eat.

[G]

Yeah, we, we, we, we, we will unfortunately oppose the Khanate of the Great Plains.

[Robert Evans]

And what's the reason? Has he given any.

[G]

He was just like, oh, well, they're gonna lose funding.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, no, it is over. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's over.

[G]

Yeah, so it is over.

[Robert Evans]

The threats, but like, yeah, a number of states have been, have been. Something similar is brewing in Oregon right now.

[G]

Yeah, yeah, we've, we've. Yeah, this has been happening in Oregon. We. We just had an episode about people resisting this in Pennsylvania. This will be a continuing ongoing struggle. But I. Fuck you, Pritzker.

[Sarah Spain]

Eat shit. Like, I do have two science stories for this middle segment here. First one, I'm gonna call on everyone's, I don't know, probably my least favorite Kennedy RF. RFK Jr. Wow. Controversial.

[G]

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of bad Kennedys.

[Robert Evans]

After reviewing the science and consulting top.

[James]

Experts at NIH and fda, HHS has determined that MRNA technology poses more risk and benefits for these respiratory viruses. That's why, after extensive review, Barda has begun the process of terminating these 22 contracts totaling just under $500 million to replace the troubled MRNA programs. We're prioritizing the development of a safer, broader vaccine strategy.

[Sarah Spain]

Sure, sure thing. Sure thing, Mr. Kennedy.

[G]

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that sounds true. And not like we're throwing away a holy grail of medical miracles.

[G]

Literally won the Nobel prize.

[James]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

So this is, this is some devastating news where he is removing 22 contracts, researchers and universities that are developing new MRNA vaccine technology. And earlier in that video, which I'm not going to play because it's just him basically lying, but he was lying about how MRNA technology has been ineffective against upper respiratory infections because it only targets a single protein which not only becomes obsolete due to mutations, but actually accelerates the mutation process and prolongs pandemics. This is not true. You can.

[G]

No, no, it's not true.

[Sarah Spain]

This is not true. And one of the most unique aspects of MRNA technology is that the vaccines can be developed at a much faster pace to be deployed against mutations. And even if a vaccine is not, does not 100% prevent an infection, that doesn't mean they still won't like decrease the severity of symptoms. He is trying to coat his decades, decades long anti vaccine advocacy in this scientific language while actually just stripping away all of the funding and removing access to vaccines. Vaccines. And this is stuff that he promised not to do. In his confirmation hearings. He said that he would not take away vaccines and he would not change who's on the vaccine advisory panels. He has done both of those things so far. Two months ago he fired all 17 members of the advisory panel. I talked with Kaveh about this and he replaced them with eight anti vaxxers. And not only did he remove a multi million dollar contract from Moderna to continue MRNA vaccine research, he now canceled these 22 other contracts totaling $500 million of technology. People are die and get sick because of these changes.

[G]

Yes.

[James]

Yeah.

[Sarah Spain]

Which doesn't just affect like Covid and the flu. It also affects all of the other ways that MRNA technology can be utilized. A lot of these research projects are about expanding the possible use of this technology beyond upper respiratory infections. So this sucks.

[James]

Yeah, this is real bad. It's gv.

[Sarah Spain]

I am very nervous about the development of the HIV vaccine and cancer vaccine scenes. Things that we were getting so close to now being put into jeopardy because this fucking clown is in charge of health and human services.

[James]

Ton of this work done at the Salk Institute in San Diego.

[Sarah Spain]

Actually it was reported earlier this week that some Republicans and Trump himself might actually not be happy about this. And Trump has a meeting scheduled with RFK Jr today to discuss these cancellations. So we'll see where that goes in. In some other science news, Sean Duffy, interim NASA administrator who also is the Secretary of Transportation, who directed his employees to prioritize funding and grants towards. Towards demographics with high marriage rates. He announced that he was expediating plans to launch and operate a 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor for the moon.

[Robert Evans]

Great. Look, there's a lot of people living on the moon and power outages have been a constant problem there. Garrison, if this science fiction novel from the 1960s is accurate, I talk with.

[Sarah Spain]

A friend of mine who is an anonymous NASA contractor. She gave a quote, I need a cigarette, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Great, because he just got fucked.

[G]

It's also worth noting that all of this is coming in the context of. Of the largest, really, like the largest cuts in the history of American science across the board to anything that's actually.

[Sarah Spain]

Like, I'm gonna get into this even.

[G]

Remotely doing science, like, yeah, sorry, I just wanna go on it.

[Sarah Spain]

Especially space science. Like, Duffy is trying to manufacture this new space race and prioritize, like, manned moon missions, all while cutting at least 50% all NASA science missions and just like absolutely crippling NASA's capacity to actually develop technology. Now, Duffy said at a press conference announcing this new directive on Tuesday, quote, we are in a race to the moon, a race with China to the moon. And to have a base on the moon, we need energy, unquote. Is that fucking 1950? What are you. What are you talking about?

[James]

That is the time when the greatness happened, Garrison. They want to go back to that.

[Sarah Spain]

The NASA contractor I spoke with said, quote, NASA is already down at least 20% of its workforce and behind on its previously announced lunar mission missions and objectives. See the Lunar Gateway and Artemis 3. I just don't immediately see a world where NASA does this successfully, even if they go the route of contracting it out. If the success, specifically the lack thereof, of the commercial Lunar Payload Services program and the commercial LEO Destinations program has any indication for how this will go, it will be mirrored in failure and many years behind schedule at best. On, quote, this new NASA directive from Shandhafi calls for a fission surface power program executive to be named by the end of August who will then implement.

[James]

Yes, yes.

[Sarah Spain]

Who will then implement and oversee the project while reporting directly to the NASA administrator. The directive reads, quote, Since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place A reactor on the moon by the mid-2330s, the first country to do so could potentially declare a keep out zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence, if not there first, unquote. And this is, I think, a big part of why Duffy is wanting to do this. And the contractor I spoke to said, quote, if they're able to extend some, quote, unquote, exclusion zone around a reactor on the surface where other countries, Countries aren't allowed to land, it's not difficult to imagine that they may try to use this to de facto claim areas of the moon for the United States, unquote.

[James]

Hell, yeah, we have colonized the Moon.

[Sarah Spain]

And there is even more troubling use cases. Part of the directive reads that this would, quote, encourage dual use civil and defense operational architectures.

[James]

Yes.

[Sarah Spain]

For deploying fission surface power systems in coordination with interagency partners.

[James]

Moon base, unquote, Space Force finally getting its moment in the sun on the moon.

[G]

I guess this really is just like the pure, unspeakable tragedy is unspeakable farce version of colonialism. Because it's like the moon is the one place that is actually terra nullis, and there's nothing there and there's nothing to gain from. From being there. There's just nothing. But, you know, we gotta colonize it.

[James]

Yeah, but the sun never sets on the American empire if you got the moon on it as well. So you got that going for you.

[G]

It's just a pure drive of colonialism detached from its actual, like, material motives.

[James]

Having failed to gain Greenland, we will pivot and take the moon instead.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, you know, the moon and Greenland are both similarly habitable territories.

[James]

So it's true. But you can't do backflips in Greenland.

[G]

So this is the plot of Despicable Me. Like, that's what we're doing here. We're doing the plot of Despicable Me.

[James]

Yeah. Many science fiction movies have predicted this. Please send them all to us.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, as was noted by Robert Heinlein, the moon is indeed a harsh mystery. Wait, what is that I hear? Is that the tariff song?

[James]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

Every time. Every time. It's good.

[G]

Let's talk turf tariffs. There's so many of them. The tariffs have gone into effect. So, all right, we're going to do a full episode about this on Monday because there is so much tariff bullshit that it, quite frankly, needs its own actual episode in which we're going to be talking about shit like, for example, the US has maybe on accident, maybe on Purpose recognized. The junta. Myanmar is a legitimate government to tariff stuff. We're talking about that on Monday because we don't have time for that shit.

[James]

Yeah.

[G]

What we instead have time for is, is the just massive array of tariffs on a list of countries so long that we just genuinely can't read them all. Okay. This is a very, very confusing raft of tariffs. In a lot of ways it's simpler than the other ones. But. Okay, so. So, Percy, and if the US runs a trade deficit with you and you're not also in one of the other special categories where we have imposed a really high tariff on you, it's like 15%. If we have a trade surplus with the country, we imposed a 10% tariff. This doesn't make any sense.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Sure.

[G]

Okay, so it's like in terms of the stated motives of the tariffs, it doesn't make any sense except in terms of like raising money, which these raised very little actual money relative to like the amount of money the US spends.

[Sarah Spain]

I mean, right wing commentators have, have stated that the end goal of this massive tariff program is to abolish income tax because we can fund the government through tariffs, actually. Great.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Yeah.

[G]

And just know that. No, you can't. Like. No, this is just.

[James]

Yeah. At the same time as they're driving the deficit into the fucking sky.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[G]

And we've talked about the sort of rifts that this has caused with like the sort of true believer deficit hawks versus these just completely unhinged fund the government with tariff weirdos. But, comma, there had been a huge number of countries that now we have 15% tariffs on. On. We've also gotten a formal like announcement of the 100% tariffs on semiconductors unless you invest. Do some kind of significant investment in the U.S. it's deeply unclear what the fuck that means. Apple has pledged to invest $100 billion in the U.S. there's this very, very weird thing on the right where like they just, they think that you can make iPhones here. You can't.

[Noah de Barrasso]

You can.

[G]

You just simply cannot. We do not have the labor force. We do not have the technology.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, but Tim Cook did just bribe Trump with a nice plate, a golden iPhone, a big orb ingot of gold.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I thought it was a gold iPhone.

[James]

There was some glass involved as well.

[Sarah Spain]

No, it was a plate that was on like a gold, like brick base.

[James]

I love that. Yeah, that's the way we do it now, really subtly. We slide it under the radar.

[Sarah Spain]

You have to bribe the Supreme Ruler by giving gifts of gold to grant good favor.

[James]

Oh, God, it. It's like Smorg. Whatever. Like, if he has this pile of gold that he's going to be sitting on, oh, man, it's going to be Scrooge McDucking in that by the end of four years.

[Sarah Spain]

Oh, don't. Don't get us started on ducktails.

[G]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[Sarah Spain]

All right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that'll really inflate the length of this episode.

[James]

That's what they call a length up in Sports Ball.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah. What's the terrorists up to?

[G]

They're calling me the fucking wembanyama of fucking inflation shot blocking. Fuck this. We're talking about. We're talking about chip infrastructure. People have been trying to develop, like, the infrastructure. Develop chips for a long time now. The Biden administration did this. The Chinese government isn't pouring a bunch of money into it. And it's basically impossible to actually develop domestic chip infrastructure other than the kinds of infrastructure the US Already has. Because the really short version of it is that it's not just a technological problem, and it is. It's really hard to actually develop this technology. This is why almost all of the, like, direct production stuff they're trying to replicate basically just happens in Taiwan. It's not just a problem of the technology is really hard. It's a problem of the machines to make. The machines that you need to make these things exist in, like, one place in the world, in Switzerland, right? So in order to actually scale up production of this, which is. Which is in theory what these 100% imported semiconductor tariffs are supposed to do, right, you have to go up three layers of the supply chain. You have to make the machines to make the machines that make the machines that make the semiconductors, right? That's like the simplest way to explain it.

[James]

We don't know.

[G]

We can't fucking do that. Like, Apple could throw fucking hundred billion dollars at that won't do shit, right? So they're chasing just a ghost. But, you know, our entire sort of like, trade policy is just being run by the just weird, fascist miasmic phantoms of. Of all of these trade policy people. Now, it's also worth noting that there's been, you know, another, I guess, kind of tariff that's been enacted, other than hilariously, the countries that tried to negotiate with Trump got worse rates than the ones who just waited until he imposed 15% rate rate. Generally.

[James]

That's kind of funny.

[G]

But also. So Trump has been threatening anyone who buys oil from Russia and also, I think Venezuela, although it's been less press that with 50% tariffs. Right now he's threatening India with 50% tariffs because India has been buying oil from Russia, that India's tariffs are currently at 25%. He has also just straight up imposed a 50% tariff on Brazil for refusing to release Bolsonaro. There's been some updates on that front where Lula is just straight up refusing to do direct talks with the U.S. lula had an exclusive interview with Reuters where he said, quote, we had already pardoned the US interventions in the 1964 coup, said Lula, who got his political. Listen, listen to the Lula episodes.

[James]

We did.

[G]

They're very good. More Lula, quote. But this is now not a small intervention. It's the President of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil. Still, it's unacceptable. It's worth noting that this is actually a pretty massive change for like, Lula's specifically relations with the U.S. lula actually had very good relations with George Bush, but he is riding a massive tide of Brazilian anti, like anti American nationalism. And he's attempting to spread this tide elsewhere. Right. He's been specifically saying that he's calling on organized resistance from particularly India and China, but the rest of brics, which is a. Well, okay, BRICS was originally a category of assets that's now kind of a vaguely a political alliance whose main members are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It's unclear if this will happen. I kind of, I don't know. But Lula's the first person really, really seriously trying to organize resistance to this outside of the EU. The EU is also under threat of 30% tariffs if they don't just sort of like see the Trump's demands. But like, like, you know, again, India also negotiated a deal with the US and then immediately got their tariffs. Like, is now being threatened with 50% tariffs. So you can't negotiate with him to escape this. So I don't know, Lula, maybe this is the beginning of sort of organized like large scale organized tariff resistance to the US Being framed in this sort of like collective struggle versus the US thing. That's an interesting political trend that we'll be following as all of this continues. Okay. And the rest of the, of the unhinged amount of tariff news we're going to be covering Monday, I will make a brief note that the, the Yale budget lab is estimating like, like a $2,400 increase for the average family just in terms of like inflation prices for this, especially on things like clothing. They were specifically, I think There's a CNN article that they're specifically talking about running shorts and shoes and anything, any goods from South Asia massively increasing in price. They're talking 30% increases very quickly.

[Sarah Spain]

So.

[James]

Yeah.

[G]

Now obviously all of this news is, I don't know, the, the stock market has kind of like, accustomed itself to tariff news.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah.

[G]

But, comma. We got a really, really bad jobs report last month. And.

[Sarah Spain]

Well, actually, well, well, I don't know if that's true. I think the jobs report could be completely faked.

[James]

Yeah. Who can say? Jesus.

[Sarah Spain]

If the President says it, it has to be true.

[James]

True. It was a Biden. Did you know a Biden appointee.

[Sarah Spain]

Oh, that's crazy.

[James]

Crazy.

[Sarah Spain]

The auto pen is issued this jobs report.

[G]

So, yeah, Trump. Trump has fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing this report. We are just, we are just truly fully into the deep end of shit now.

[Sarah Spain]

The report just showed that we didn't have. Have very positive job growth. And like, like anyone who's trying to get a job right now can confirm that. It's like a nightmare.

[G]

Yeah. And we're, we're just like, we're just like, fully going to be in, like, you know, it's unclear exactly how fast American data collection capacity is going to degrade. It is worth noting, this is the thing that kind of happens at the end of dictatorships when they really start going to shit, is that they lose the ability to trust their own statistical apparatus.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah. I mean, like, anything that happens that Trump just doesn't like, you can claim it's fake and rich, whether that's losing an election, whether that's his. His good. His good, close personal friend Jeffrey Epstein, or if that's a Bureau of Labor Statistics job report, it's all rigged. It's all, it's all a hoax.

[James]

Yeah.

[G]

Yeah. But to tie this back to Lula for a second, I think it's actually really a really interesting historical parallel that's worth noting that Lula's rise to political prominence came off of a series of strikes that was held because. Because a bunch of economists that were working with the inside, the Brazilian labor unions figured out the military dictatorship of Brazil had been f their inflation numbers. And like, this is one of the things that caused the end of the dictatorship. So, you know, you can only lie about the inflation rate for so long before. Like, someone goes like, hey, you've been lying about this the whole time. And I don't know, this, this has, this has brought down military before.

[Sarah Spain]

And that's why we have to hold archive of our own accountable for faking those inflation numbers.

[Robert Evans]

I agree with you entirely, Garrison.

[G]

I don't get paid enough for this.

[James]

You've lost me. I'm not following.

[G]

And yeah, that has been tariff talk.

[James]

You know what will continue to be available to our listeners at an excellent price despite tariffs?

[Sarah Spain]

The products and services that support this podcast.

[James]

That's absolutely correct, Garrison. Well done.

[Sarah Spain]

All right, we're back.

[James]

So back and also back is the United Kingdom where a poll shows that more than half of Britons think there are more migrants in the UK illegally than legally. This isn't true.

[Sarah Spain]

No, but feelings matter way more than facts, James.

[James]

Feelings matter. They. Yes, they do. The actual data, even at the highest estimate of undocumented people, shows that it's around 10 times more foreign people who are in the UK. UK with documents. This is indicative of a broader issue, Right. That the discussions that we're having around immigration are nearly all based on massive amounts of misinformation. Misinformation by omission was extremely common in legacy media until very recently. Right. Like there were simply not people covering immigration in a serious fashion. Even in the. In the Biden administration, the reporting that was done was atrocious. This comes as the Labour government's disapproval rating in the UK hit 67% in a YouGov poll, which I think is very indicative. What Labour did was try to adopt right wing culture war positions to get people to vote for them. It does not work and it is not working for them. You can look at their policies towards trans people. They're atrocious and it's not buying them the favor that they want it to. Moving back to the United States. Yeon Soo Go, she's called sue by her friends, has been released by ICE after being detained at a routine hearing. The 20 year old young woman is a Korean national. South Korean, evidently.

[Sarah Spain]

Right.

[James]

And the daughter of a priest. So she's here on the. On a visa as a dependent of a religious worker. There are religious worker visas and she's here as a dependent. Dependent. She is, I believe, in the process of transitioning to a student visa. She had another. At the hearing, her case wasn't like dismissed or revoked. She had another hearing set for October. ICE claim that she overstayed her visa. Her lawyer says that claim is not true. I'm particularly interested in this case because of the intervention of the diocese, the Episcopalian Diocese of New York. And so it was the Episcopalian Diocese of New York's legal team who fought for her release. She was Very quickly moved to Louisiana. We know that ICE likes to do this right. It likes to move people to places where it feels like it has a favorable circuit court. The diocese legal team was able to secure her release, but they are still working on the wreaths of a 59 year old Peruvian asylum seeker who has been detained after having her court date moved up. So in her case, they said, hey, we've got a hearing that's opened up. Why don't you come in on Thursday? And then detained, which is just reprehensible. It is really good. I think that these big religious organizations are getting involved directly in these cases, that they are taking on responsibility. They're using their pulpits as a place to oppose this. I think that's good. I think regardless of your stance on organized religion, you should be happy about that. These are institutions that have power in this country. Talking of institutions that have power, detainees in Florida's Alligator Alcatraz are being denied their right to file court documents because federal courts are claiming they're not under federal jurisdiction. State courts are claiming they're not under state jurisdiction, which is fairly reasonable given that they have not been charged with or accused of in many cases, any crimes in the state of Florida. Right. They're not being held. They were not detained by, or sometimes they were detained by Florida law enforcement, I guess. But only in their capacity to enforce federal immigration law.

[Sarah Spain]

Yes. With a special like deputized status.

[James]

Yes. Yeah, it's deputized, which we're about to talk about. There have been some very funny outcomes of that. This isn't it. Like I've seen it reported, a loophole. It's not a loophole. It's extremely fucking clear that they were detained by the federal government for immigration reasons and they have every right to representation in immigration court.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James]

This is not a loophole. They're just denying people their rights. And I think reporting it as a loophole is entirely ridiculous. A judge has ordered the document showing who is contracted by whom the facility be produced as part of a civil rights lawsuit. So what that will do will obviously document that the federal government is paying for some of this. I know Rick DeSantis had wanted to use FEMA money for some of this breaking news. So federal judge Kathleen Williams has ordered that construction, new construction, whole. They won't be allowed to do any new filling, paving or infrastructure building for the next 14 days. Temporary pause. They can still continue to hold people. Right. Like this is not going to stop those people being denied their rights, which is what's at stake here. So we talked a little bit about those Florida deputies, right, who have been I guess seconded to ICE or they've been crossworn to do ICE work. ICE is recruiting very heavily right now. It's offering $50,000 sign on bonus. It has reduced the minimum age and it seems to have no maximum age cap. From what I can tell, Border Patrol has been issuing all kinds of waivers for years for all kinds of things that it's supposed to have as standard for its recruiting. So this isn't particularly new. ICE has been known for a while. If you want to be a fed and go around and carry a gun and you can't get hired to do gun stuff for the feds or other agencies, ICE is probably the place you're going to end up. Their standards are lower than, than other.

[Sarah Spain]

Agencies and now they're like specifically selecting for the most like online unhinged right wing freaks to join their agency as like a national police force.

[James]

Yes.

[Sarah Spain]

And that's like what they're doing in their messaging online. And also some news this week. Dean Cain has, has joined. It's most likely in like a promotional capacity but still worth noting.

[James]

Yeah, you might get chased by a middle aged Superman. So let's talk about what ICE is doing to recruit. First of all, it is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on big trucks. We know Donald Trump himself is a fan of big trucks. Many pictures of him enjoying big trucks. Over the years ICE has spent $196,000 on Ford Raptors for recruiting purposes. The Raptor, for those of you not familiar, is a tricked out F150. They were issuing Raptors to field agents for a while. They're not the best vehicles. Like I've heard plenty of agents complain about the Raptors.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're not good.

[James]

Yeah, yeah they're not. And BP had a special like lowest possible trim of the Raptor that like they're popular now because people will buy them used as government surplus and make them good. But they, yeah, the Raptors they had didn't work too well. They also bought a GMC Yukon for $101,000 which is a very expensive GMC Yukon. I have also noted that ICE is recruiting from the police who have been cross sworn into doing ICE enforcement. This has resulted in some very funny beefs between agencies including. Can I share this video? Can I screen share? Yeah, yeah, let's watch the video.

[Noah de Barrasso]

And then what has happened is ICE.

[James]

Has sent emails to I don't know how many agencies but I know several agencies.

[Mia Wong]

I've talked to several sheriffs, sheriffs that.

[James]

Their deputies have received these, this request.

[Sarah Spain]

And basically it's a recruiting tactic.

[G]

It's hey, we got your email.

[James]

Now you got certified.

[G]

And it's something like, dear colleague, you've.

[James]

Shown an interest in this and that.

[G]

We will let you know that we.

[James]

Are offering a $50,000 bonus paid $10,000 at a time. And it's for five years, obviously.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Man, is that not, you know, biting the hand that feeds you? We went through all of that took.

[James]

Took our time, utilizing our local resort, not ours yet, but local resources. And then they try to recruit you right out from under you using the.

[G]

Very emails that we give you.

[Sarah Spain]

Finally, they found something bad ICE has done. This is a new low even for ice.

[James]

Yeah, Sheriff Chip Simmons. They're calling ICE out for their poor form.

[Sarah Spain]

Sheriff Chip finally found something and that shows the true depravity, a compromised heart of ice.

[James]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where will they stop? Well, let's talk about where they will stop or at least start spending. ICE has been spending some money this week. Some of this I think, like some of the sort of reporting on it I've seen isn't hugely responsible. So like ICE signed a sole source contract with Bi2 Technologies, for example, for quote, licenses for the inmate identification or recognition system and the Mobile Offender Recognition Ignition Information System. They call these IRIS and Morris based on their initials. Right. These are for Eros. So that's their Enforcement and Removal Operations Branch. VO two pitches. IRIS is being able to identify people with no physical contact based on the tears in their iris. This technology has been used by police for a while, so you'll notice it was called the Inmate identification. So the way they would obtain these Irish scans would be scanning people who were detained. Right. CBP will also have IRIS scans. So will uscis. Right. This is one of the pieces of biometric data that's sometimes collected from migrants as part of their process of moving into the United States and getting their documents, et cetera. What Morris will do is allow them to search a registry of previous offenders. In 2024, Niagara County Sheriff's Office were the first sheriff's office to add IRIS to their vehicle. But Athena reported as this is as CBP office or ICE officers are going to be scanning people's irises with their phones. I don't see any evidence of that technology existing either in the contract that the government has or on the website for the company that makes it. I'm guessing what this will do is if they have somebody who for instance, has previously been detained somebody who has done time and come out, then they would use this as a way of identifying them after they've detained them, before they take them to wherever. The big issue here is that BI2 owns this database of scans. So this database includes Morris, which is people who have previous offenders. They have a sex offender registry within it. They also have databases of seniors who are at risk for going missing. So I think that's people with dementia that people can voluntarily sign up to. And they have a database of missing children as well. Ba2 Interesting company. They also, they offer a bunch of services for detention companies. They previously partnered with the support our Sheriffs foundation to provide lower cost prescriptions to sheriffs and deputies. And they're pretty embedded in this law enforcement world. Other contracts they saw for ice, Newtek Solutions for fingerprint scanners. Again, fingerprint information is routinely taken from migrants.

[Sarah Spain]

People getting green cards, people getting visas, people getting citizenship.

[James]

Yes, yeah. Anyone who has in any capacity and really engaged with uscis like all those categories you mentioned, Garrison will have already done this. They did also purchase Gray Key, which.

[Sarah Spain]

Is more concerning, which is for breaking into cell phones. Locked cell phones.

[James]

Yes, it's. It's for trying to get around the lock on your cell phone. I've written about Grakey before for Input magazine. Generally the way they do this is that they, they copy of the cell phone and work on the copy so you don't get locked out of your cell phone. But Gray Key is an extremely nefarious piece of technology for breaking into people's phones which you otherwise wouldn't be able to access. So yeah, that is what I have for ICE's spending spree this week.

[Sarah Spain]

For our last story, I would like to also talk about technology, but technology in the news. Some AI incidents that have broken into people's news news gathering process. Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has shared a fake AI video of AOC giving a speech in Congress calling out the Sydney Sweetie American Eagle ad as racist.

[James]

God damn it, I gotta see this.

[Robert Evans]

Why does it have to all be so stupid?

[James]

I was tweeting today and saw a clip of AOC saying that Sydney Sweeney ad was racist. And so I replied to it and.

[Noah de Barrasso]

I said, why do you care about.

[Sarah Spain]

This and ignore what matters most?

[Noah de Barrasso]

Why in all the times that you've.

[James]

Called on Israel to stop, why have you never told Hamas to stop, told Hamas to surrender?

[Noah de Barrasso]

Why would you ignore the St. Louis attack on that Jewish guy who had his car bombed?

[Sarah Spain]

AOC tweeted back and said, dude, that's.

[Noah de Barrasso]

A deep fake that Sydney Sweeney had. You suck in so many words.

[Sarah Spain]

And she was right.

[Noah de Barrasso]

They got me.

[James]

She was right.

[Robert Evans]

I suck.

[James]

He has been owned.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, that's not bad. That's pretty good. That's funny.

[Sarah Spain]

Yeah, I chose to cut off the.

[Robert Evans]

Clip there because I think it gets the point across. Yeah, yeah, that's the right place for it to go.

[James]

Beautiful, Beautiful.

[Sarah Spain]

On this AI video of aoc, it is clearly, like, embossed into the video itself. This is an AI video from.

[James]

From.

[Sarah Spain]

From ChatGPT, memes +AI art on Instagram.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Oh, what a fucking girl this is.

[James]

This guy is being elevated as a fucking journalist. Jesus wept.

[Sarah Spain]

He later said on. On NewsNation on his show, they got me AI. It was really good. And it did seem like something she would say. I'm gonna now play. Yeah, I got AI video in question to see if you think this is something that AOC would say.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Sydney Sweeney looks like an Aryan goddess, and the American Eagle jeans campaign is blatant Nazi propaganda. I mean, watching that sultry little temptress squeeze into a Canadian tuxedo three sizes with her bouncy little fun bags on the screen staring at you.

[Sarah Spain]

Okay, that's enough.

[G]

That's not.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[G]

No, no, no. No more.

[James]

No more. End the episode.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man, what a. One of our greatest journalists. You know, AI really has to be. You know, we've hit AGI. If it can crack a mind as keen as Chris Cuomo, it was really good at it.

[Sarah Spain]

It did seem like something she would say.

[G]

Oh, God.

[James]

It'S not even how her voice sounds.

[Sarah Spain]

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. One of the most unhinged things I've ever seen.

[James]

To watch that and then wonder why she hasn't commented on her mass in the same breath is truly an indication of where her country's at.

[Sarah Spain]

That AI video is 80 seconds long. It gets so much crazier. But we don't need to say anymore. The other incident of AI in the news, former CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta interviewed an AI avatar impersonating a school shooting victim. Oh, no.

[James]

Is this one of those things that, like, every town or someone was doing?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Yes. I caught this when it happened.

[Sarah Spain]

Here's a video.

[Noah de Barrasso]

I would like to know what your.

[Sarah Spain]

Solution would be for gun violence.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Great question.

[G]

I believe in a mix of stronger.

[Mia Wong]

Gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think about that?

[James]

I think that's a great idea, Joaquin.

[Robert Evans]

That's not even an answer. That's not an answer.

[Sarah Spain]

This is one of the grossest things I've ever seen.

[Robert Evans]

Create a culture of kindness and understanding. Yeah, that'll fit. Fix it. Thanks.

[G]

Incredible human evil.

[Robert Evans]

Not a person.

[James]

That's someone's child.

[Sarah Spain]

That's not someone's child. All right. Jim Acosta wrote, it's just a generic. Well, no, like, it's, It's. It's not a person. This isn't a human being.

[James]

Yeah, but they've attempted to reanimate through cringe. AI someone's kid. And they look like a character. And it's a small world.

[Sarah Spain]

Yes, the parents are involved in this process. Jim Acosta wrote on blue sky at 4pm I'll have a one of a kind interview with Hakeem Oliver. He died in the Parkland school shooting, but his parents have created an AI version of their son for a powerful message on gun violence, unquote. You did not interview Joaquim Oliver. That's. That's not. That's not him. You did not interview that person.

[Robert Evans]

No, you did not. You didn't interview anybody.

[Sarah Spain]

You have helped to. To spread a fake puppet of someone without their knowledge and consent. Just as. Just as Gross is doing it for, like, movie actors. Right.

[James]

Who have.

[Sarah Spain]

Who have died. This is. And, you know, more. More gross. Actually. Actually, like, significantly more gross.

[James]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It didn't even suggest, like, it. It wasn't even willing to be, like, ban AR15s or whatever. Like, there was no. Nothing suggested here. Like, I can't believe how milquetoast for a dead person who was killed by an AR15. It wasn't even willing to. It was just like, vaguely new gun control and also a culture of kindness, but, like, can't even be specific. This ghoul that you've made, you're putting.

[Sarah Spain]

Fake words in someone else's, like, death mask mouth.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Sarah Spain]

It's so unethical. Like, I don't even know what to say. He doesn't work at CNN anymore, but my God, like, this is not journalism in any way, shape or form.

[James]

No, I don't want to, like, punch down on the. I don't understand, Like, I know parents who have lost children right through my work. I've told. Talk to lots of them, more than I'd like to. And I understand the desire to get your kid back in some form. And if whoever the fuck came to them and said, we're going to make an AI of your child. So it can argue with journalists about gun control is a fucking ghoul pure evil.

[Sarah Spain]

No, the default here is on the people promoting technology. And in effect, that's what Jim Acosta is doing here as well.

[James]

Yeah, totally. No, because the journalist is totally irresponsible.

[Sarah Spain]

And profiting off of it. It's so gross. So anyway, that was our AI news to close the episode. Sorry we couldn't end on the AOC ad. Instead had to end on a bit of a more. More sour note.

[James]

Yeah, I genuinely wanted to know where that AOC ad goes. I'm gonna watch it.

[Sarah Spain]

Oh, I'll send it to you, James.

[James]

Yeah, okay.

[Sarah Spain]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I guess.

[Mia Wong]

We reported.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

[Noah de Barrasso]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio 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. Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer. This Saturday, 4:00pm Eastern on CBS.

[Sarah Spain]

With playoff elimination on the line.

[Noah de Barrasso]

The most physical, fiercest and competitive basketball in the world. Miami's Michael Beasley and Lance Stevenson must.

[James]

Win to make the playoffs.

[Noah de Barrasso]

And breakout star Dwight Howard of the LA Riot will battle Gary Payton's Boston squad in a do a die match for both teams. Six teams are allowed for four spots and all must.

[James]

There's no crying in the big three.

[Noah de Barrasso]

And the no holds barred action starts Saturday at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, presented by iHeart. I'm Noah and I'm 13.

[Sarah Spain]

And I started this podcast because honestly.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Adults don't ask the right questions.

[Sarah Spain]

Now, you know, with Noah de Barrasso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Of you, it's not the news.

[Sarah Spain]

It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Politics is wild. And I'm definitely not here to you.

[Sarah Spain]

Tell payment, but I'm here to make sense of it. Listen to now youw Know with Noah.

[Noah de Barrasso]

De arrasto on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'. All. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapinoe, to the show and we had a blast.

[Robert Evans]

Take a listen.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Sue and I were like riding the line bikes the other day and we're like, wee people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. Summer's here, and with the kids home and off to camp, it's easy for moms to get lost in the shuffle on Good Mom's Bad Choice Choices. We're making space to center ourselves with joy, rest and pleasure. Take the kids to camp.

[James]

You know what?

[Noah de Barrasso]

It was expensive, but I was also.

[James]

Thinking, you have my kid.

[Noah de Barrasso]

This is kind of priceless. Take her.

[James]

Feed her.

[Noah de Barrasso]

Make core memories. I don't have to do anything. Main thing, I don't have to do anything to hear this and more. Listen to Good Mom's Bad Choices from Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I heart podcast.