Francis (1:23)

Hosted by co editor in Chief Cynthia Littleton.

James Stout (1:27)

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James Stout (2:04)

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Robert Evans (2:08)

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

James Stout (2:34)

Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today and I'm very fortunate to be joined by Francis, whose husband Amos is facing a date in immigration court this week. We wanted to bring you a firsthand perspective of what it's like going through immigration court right now. So, Francis, thank you for, for joining us.

Francis (2:53)

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

James Stout (2:56)

Yeah, of course. We're very glad you're here. So to start with, like, would you like to explain your family's. I know this is a lengthy topic, your family's immigration story.

Francis (3:08)

Yes, I met my husband Amos in Hollywood. We were both living in Hollywood and we dated a couple years there and then ended up moving to his home country of Tunisia because he had a big family there and I don't have much family here and we wanted to have children. It's much better cost of living there. And at the time, the government there was doing pretty well. There had been an Arab Spring, which meant my husband was very much involved with, on this over here in the States, like helping with that. And so he's an activist and at the time, the government there was pretty good. So we lived there for eight years, had our children there, and a new presidency came in. While we were living there, the current president, Kayas Saeed, and things started to change. So my husband was doing a lot of organizing grassroots movement through local farmers unions and monitoring elections and doing pro democracy activities for anti corruption. And he's really an activist for free speech and things like that. So he started getting harassed, he was arrested, he was beaten up by the police and things like that. So it started getting very uncomfortable. Also, I was getting harassed. I would get pulled over a lot by the police. They would impound our car, they would take us out. Yeah, the police there carry big guns, you know, as in most Arab countries. And so it was very frightening for me. Yeah, they carry big guns. They're either on their backs or even in their hands. And they would have me and the kids get out of the car and it was very frightening. So, yeah, the children and I, well, we were all planning on coming back to the States. I hadn't been home in a while. And so the children and I went ahead and came assuming that my husband would be able to get a, at least a visa to, you know, see us. And while once we were here, he was not able to get a visa, he tried and tried and tried and I was begging the embassy to allow him to see us here and they just would not. So we were separated for nine months. So him being away from our children, they were about 4 and 6 at the time, or maybe 5 and 7 it was devastating for all of us. So he ended up taking a very treacherous journey across South America and made his way through many countries and presented himself for asylum at the border because, again, we did not feel safe living in Tunisia anymore. So he presented himself for asylum at the border, and they allowed him into this country with a court date. And at the time, Biden was president. So things are, you know, have changed a lot since then.

James Stout (5:58)

Yeah.

Francis (5:59)

You know, the immigration system is broken. Everybody knows that. It takes years and years and years and tons and tons of money for an immigrant to, you know, go through the process. You know, people who say, oh, just do it the right way. It's not that simple. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time, and it's very complicated. And when you're fleeing a country or a situation where you're in danger, there is no other option. You know, there's nowhere to go back.

James Stout (6:29)

Right.

Francis (6:29)

So that's what we're kind of facing now. So he had a court date. We've had five master hearings, and we've gone through a few different lawyers because we have found, for one thing, it's extremely difficult to find a lawyer these days because they're very overbooked. Most of them are not taking new cases. People tell us, oh, just get a pro bono lawyer. It is almost impossible to get a pro bono lawyer anymore. And, you know, who has thousands and thousands of extra dollars to pay for leg help with the situation. We do have a lawyer now, thanks to some fundraising that we've done. So since he's been here, we've had to check in at the ICE office. Like it was on sort of a. A basis of after you have a court hearing the next day or within a couple days, you must go check in at ice. And it's been very fine. Like the. There's a very nice officer there who knows us and tries to help answer our questions. So it was. It was pretty calm when Biden was president.

James Stout (7:31)

Yeah.

Francis (7:32)

And then now that Trump's administration has taken over, we knew that there would be a lot of changes, and we were very frightened.

James Stout (7:38)

Yeah.

Francis (7:39)

So we went for a hearing earlier this year. You know, we're just a lot more nervous, and the hearing went fine, just kind of as normal. We went to the ICE check in. I think our guard was kind of down because we thought, since the hearing went fine, this will go fine.

James Stout (7:55)

Yeah.

Francis (7:56)

And the nice officer told us, you know, well, this is going to sound a little scary, but we need you to go check in at a different place this time. And so they sent us to a company called isap. They own, I think, migrant detention centers. So we went to this place and he was there the whole day. They were interviewing him. They, they put an app in his phone so that now he has to do these weekly check ins where his phone makes this loud alarm sound. He must stop everything and take a picture of himself. There's a monthly home visit where they come to our house and take his picture and ask him questions. There's. We have to go check in at their office. And also he does virtual check ins. So it's just a lot more.

Robert Evans (8:39)

Yeah.

Francis (8:40)

And everything was kind of going as planned. We, our last hearing in July, that was really stressful because we didn't have a lawyer leading up to it. And at the last second we were able to, to get a lawyer. And the reason it's so important to have a lawyer is because if you don't, you must appear in person. And that's very stressful and frightening. Again, we have small children, we don't even do babysitters. Like we're always just together. We're a very tight family unit.

James Stout (9:07)

Yeah.

Francis (9:08)

And so we go to these things together and we really wanted this last one in July to be virtual because if it's virtual, you know, it just feels a lot safer. We're in the comfort of our own home and we've been hearing in the news, you know how they're picking up people outside of their court hearings. So we got the attorney, we got a virtual hearing. It was a very short hearing. It was great because she just gave us the next hearing date was September of 2028. And the judge said, okay, see you in 2028. And we breathed a sigh of relief, crossed our fingers, did our necessary check ins and we were just, you know, hoping that everything would be fine.

James Stout (9:49)

Yeah.

Francis (9:49)

Well, just here at the end of August, beginning of September, we get out of the blue a new notice. It was very interesting too because this is our company calls us and says, good news, we're going to lessen the amount of check ins you have to do. It's going to be a lot less now. So, you know, it was interesting because she's like, this is great news for you. It's like once a month, you'll still do the weekly ones and then that's just going to be once a month.

James Stout (10:13)

Okay.

Francis (10:14)

But then she says, and then we'll see you after your hearing in September, meaning this September. And we, we thought it was a mistake because we Knew we had one in 2028?

James Stout (10:24)

Yeah.

Francis (10:24)

Like, no, no, you got a new hearing notice. So that's how we found out. They didn't send it to us. Even our lawyer didn't know. So we find out that we have a new hearing out of the blue. There was a mix up about the dates. But anyway, we, we. It was September 11th or 15th, and then our attorney asked for an extension.

James Stout (10:43)

Right.

Francis (10:43)

And the most they could give us was nine days. So now our hearing is this coming Wednesday, September 24th. And on. This has never happened before. But when, again, when you have an attorney, you can appear virtually, right? And on this hearing notice, it said that the attorney can appear virtually, but the respondent must appear in person. And that is highly unusual. It's in bold at the top. So our attorney agrees with us that it's pretty clear the plan is, what they've been doing now is when you go to court, they, they drop your case. So now it's dismissed. And therefore you are just here without due process. Like now you're, you don't have a right to due process. It's done. So you're just here illegally. And then they are sometimes waiting for you in the hallway or outside the building to take you to ICE detention.

James Stout (11:34)

Right.

Francis (11:34)

So obviously since we found this out, I mean, we've just been sleepless nights, full panic mode of figuring out, like, what to do. And then our attorney doesn't even have answers for us. She does not know what to do. She says every. This is all new to her. It's new to all the lawyers. She doesn't even know what to do or who to ask. Yeah, and that's frightening because that's why we have an attorney. You know, it's. We're hoping for some support or someone who's knowledgeable about the law and, and what are our options? And it feels like we don't have any. We feel extremely helpless. And I've never thought I would see this in my country, my quote, unquote free country that I have lived in most of my life and grew up in. Also, about two weeks ago, they changed the law where now we are not entitled to a bond hearing. So if he is taken into detention, we can't even get him out because that was the first thing we thought was, well, let's just try to get some money together and we'll bail him out. Yeah, that's not even an option anymore. So again, more fear. So we're dealing with all of this and wondering what to do. As far as, you know, again, we have small children. They're now seven and nine years old. We're extremely happy where we're living. We live in a small community that does lean on the conservative side. So we do feel a little uncomfortable with some of our neighbors and their flags and everything. They're very bold. So, you know. And you can't hide being brown, so it's awkward. And our children, because of the way that we left before, when we left Tunisia, it was pretty sudden. We kind of took them out of school and just came to America and left their dad behind, so.

James Stout (13:21)

Right.

Francis (13:21)

They've been in therapy ever since. They. They each have a weekly therapist just to help with if they're, you know, if they're going to have any symptoms of trauma coming up for them. And. And they're doing great, actually. They're thriving here. They are so happy. They are in the best school. I actually work at their school and my husband volunteers, and he's been their soccer coach for both of their teams, which is a lot to take on. He also volunteers in our community at a ranch helping with horses and at a facility for senior citizens. And he does have a work permit. They granted him a work permit, which took a long time to get.

James Stout (14:01)

That's good because that can take a long time.

Francis (14:03)

It took a long time. Over a year. But he does have it now. So we. So we got excited because you. He only got the work permit a couple months ago, so we're very excited. You know, he can work and. And now it's just out of the blue, our world is turned upside down where there is a strong potential that he will be taken into ICE custody. And. Listen, I. I understand if that's how they want to do things now, but if it was like a safer situation where maybe they. They just. I don't know. It's just there's so many unknowns about where are they taking him. Our lawyer does not think we will be informed about where they take him. That's one thing. Which means we probably won't be able to communicate with him. We don't know how long he'll be there. They could keep him there the entire three years until 2028. They might just want to keep him in detention and wait, you know, for his next year. It doesn't make any sense to me because that costs money and he's a taxpayer. Wouldn't it pay more if he's home working, by the way? Yes. He has no criminal record whatsoever. He has not broken any immigration laws. At least when he came over the Border. It was legal to present yourself for asylum when you are coming from a country. Like, he was. Where he was, you know, being harassed, detained.

James Stout (15:30)

Right.

Francis (15:31)

And his entire family, like, we were being threatened and feeling very unsafe there.

James Stout (15:35)

So, yeah, it's a textbook asylum case. Right.

Francis (15:38)

Like, yeah, we have a valid asylum claim. We've submitted hundreds of documents of evidence to the court. You know, the judge actually complimented us on how well we did, because at the time, we didn't have an attorney. We were just trying to do it on our own because we couldn't afford an attorney. We were both college graduates. So we. We put together a really organized, you know, case. And so I have filed to sponsor him as well, you know, as my husband.

James Stout (16:06)

Yeah.

Francis (16:07)

We've been together 12 years, married 10, two kids. And they don't care about that. It does not matter if he has an American family. It does not matter. They are taking anybody.

James Stout (16:17)

Yeah.

Francis (16:17)

And that also is very, very frustrating. And that's the reason that we should have due process. They should be looking at every single case individually and may have a judge make a decision. That's the whole point of it. Obviously, if we had hindsight, if we had known that this, you know, could have happened, we had no idea that this.

James Stout (16:49)

Yeah.

Francis (16:49)

Could have happened in our country, we would have started this sponsorship process a long time ago. The reason we didn't is because he was married before, and he went through this process with USCIS to try to get sponsorship with his first wife. And it was extremely complicated and frustrating and cost a lot of money. And he went through a bunch of lawyers, and he was so traumatized by the experience that literally we had big legal files in our house that I had to hide because he couldn't even see them or he would get triggered. So he didn't want to put me through that. And we were living in Tunisia anyway, and so we just figured we were just kind of kicking the can down the road thinking, oh, we'll deal with it at some point. Unfortunately, we waited way too long and, you know, didn't start dealing with it until he got here. And so uscis, which is where we, you know, file for the sponsorship.

James Stout (17:39)

Yeah. U.S. customs, Immigration Service people are not familiar.

Francis (17:42)

Yes. Thank you. After we filed it, they gave us a time period on when we would get the decision. It was 15 months that we would have to wait. And we've been checking the site. Checking the site, checking the site. It's been counting down, counting down. And about a month ago, we were down to a week.

James Stout (17:57)

Oh, wow. Okay.

Francis (17:58)

That we would be getting a decision. And after the week passed, it changed. The message on the app now or the website now says indefinitely. You'll have to wait indefinitely for this decision. So we've been trying to ask our lawyer, please push for this, because if that gets, you know, an answer, that would be great. But the answer could be no on that as well. They could just say, no, come on in, and they can take them straight from there as well. So the whole thing is so incredibly stressful and frightening. The fact that my government, I'm in America, I'm an American citizen with two American kids, and my government is threatening to tear our family apart and take my husband away, the father of my children, and traumatize my children again. To have, you know, their dad not with us, and Lord knows where they're going to send him. It is absolutely infuriating. And it feels like agony, too, because, like, every day I wake up and I'm counting down the days to this hearing, and we have no idea what's going to happen.

James Stout (19:04)

Right.

Francis (19:04)

It feels very, very threatening to our safety and our livelihood. And that it's coming from our government does not make me feel like this is a great country to live in and I do not feel safe living here.

James Stout (19:20)

Yeah. Thanks for sharing all that. That's a lot to.

Francis (19:23)

Yeah.

James Stout (19:23)

To have to. To put out there. So thank you for sharing it. I guess we should just explain for people, like, there's a lot of stuff that maybe people who haven't been through the system might not. Not grasp within that. Right. So what the government has. If I just break down, like the dismissal of cases, as I understand it, what the government has been doing has been dismissing people's asylum case. Right. Which they got under when they entered and under the Biden administration and then placing them in expedited removal proceedings.

Francis (19:53)

Yes.

James Stout (19:54)

Which is a mandatory detention, as you said. Right. It's not a. Not a bailout situation. And then, as you say, forcing them to fight from detention. Right. Which in this case would obviously stop your husband from working, stop your husband from paying taxes, and instead make him a burden on the American taxpayer while he's detained in conditions which can often be very poor in that situation. Your only sort of claim is a credible fear of torture. Right. Which is something that in. In your case, it sounds like would be very real.

Francis (20:23)

Yeah.

James Stout (20:24)

But nonetheless, that is a very high bar. And we've seen the United States do all kinds of things to get around that. Like, we were put on that all the time. So I can understand that fear and where it comes from, I think people will be shocked, but they perhaps shouldn't be to hear that, like, yes, you can be a US Citizen married to a non U. S. Citizen. This can still happen.

Francis (20:43)

Yep.

James Stout (20:43)

To you. It can happen to anyone who is not a citizen in this country right now. I wonder, like, it must have been pretty heartbreaking to see the election, to see the rhetoric, like, how does that line up with your lives in your community? Because I see this often even from really conservative people. Right. Like, I know people who voted for Trump who have also shown up to, like, cook for asylum seekers in the desert or to help refugees living in our community. Like, it's very strange thing. Have you felt alienated from your community since the beginning of this year? Like, has it. I'm interested in, like, how your lives have changed because of that change in rhetoric.

Francis (21:32)

Yes. Like I said, we have neighbors on our street, so there was a block party for 4th of July, which I didn't even feel like celebrating, but we had just moved into this house, so we've felt, you know, like we should go at least meet the neighbors. And there's a lot of Trump flags on our street. And it was very awkward, but my husband is very charming and charismatic and outgoing, and he just goes right up and introduces himself. And there was one gentleman wearing a T shirt that said, they hate us because they ain't us. And it's got a big old, you know, Trump face on it. And it was just so, so awkward. So, yeah, we feel uncomfortable also, like I said, it's a. It leans conservative in this community. And our school, even, like, as we're doing this fundraiser, we were very careful not to share it with anyone that we live near, just in case, you know, because we have been hearing reports of people, like, neighbors calling ice on their neighbors to, you know, report them and, you know, go pick up this person. You know, he looks brown, or. I don't know what they're. What they're doing or their logic, but, you know. Yeah, it feels very threatening and even. Oh, my. My daughter even said, can't Dada just cover. Cover up his skin? You know, like, she was just thinking, like, yeah. Was he gonna wear a burka?

James Stout (22:49)

Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Francis (22:50)

I mean, you can't really hide who you are, and you shouldn't have to.

James Stout (22:55)

Right. And it's very hard for the kids to be saying that.

Francis (22:59)

Yeah.

James Stout (22:59)

That dad should be hiding.

Francis (23:01)

Yeah. And they've asked me, how can we make Trump just forget about data? You know? And I said, well, he doesn't really know. They don't, you know, he doesn't know exactly, your dad. It's just they're doing this to a lot of people, you know.

James Stout (23:13)

Right.

Francis (23:14)

We just happen to be in that group. But I will say we have some, some close friends that we really adore, and they are Trumpers. You know, we see it on their Facebook page, but then when we're in their presence, they don't bring it up, and it's just kind of an elephant in the room. And honestly, as our data is getting closer, we plan on, on having them over to talk about it because it feels very aw. And I just think they're, they're just the kindest people. They're extremely religious, which, which we are not. We're more on the spiritual side. But, you know, I think they're just, they're just on a team. They've chosen a team, and I don't think they're necessarily paying a lot of attention to what's actually happening to people. So we're hoping that just a conversation will just let them know we, we want to be honest with the people that are close to us and that mean a lot to us, you know, because we don't know what's about to happen. And even there's members of my family that I feel very aw. Talking to as well, where I, I kind of distanced myself because people who are still supporting this regime at this point, to me, are too far gone to even kind of get them to come around. I, I, I guess, I mean, I just don't understand. I, I, I can't understand support of, of Trump from the first place. So again, if people are still on that boat, I really, like, don't relate to them. And it's very awkward, especially, yeah, people in my family who supposedly love me and my children, you know, are still supporting that regime. And despite seeing all the things, maybe they don't see it. I mean, I know they, if they are exclusively watching Fox News, then they are only receiving that information, which is not telling the whole story.

James Stout (25:02)

Right.

Francis (25:02)

And it's definitely completely skewed to make them look like the good guys. And anyone on that's liberal is a bad guy. And they're very much targeting, you know, Democrats now as the enemy, the enemy of the state. They have even said so. It's, I mean, it's, so now I'm starting to feel even unsafe for myself because I am, I'm not super active on, on Facebook, but I, I am outspoken because I can't Resist. I mean, I, it's. There is freedom of speech in this country, or at least there, there should be. And it's hard to be quiet at this time. And I, we would be a lot more outspoken if we weren't feeling unsafe.

James Stout (25:43)

Yeah. But you have that fear.

Francis (25:44)

Yes.

James Stout (25:44)

Yeah.

Francis (25:45)

Yes. Especially my husband, because he's always been an activist and a, and a, you know, fighter for free speech and, and equal rights. And so it's, that's one of the things that's really crushing him and his soul and his spirit through all this is that he cannot even speak out.

James Stout (26:02)

Yeah.

Francis (26:03)

So, you know, for people like him, it's not even himself, but just for people like him, I know he wants to help, you know, and it's really challenging.

James Stout (26:12)

I know it's so sad to see the whole point of the asylum system and, and like, at least the sort of stated purpose of American foreign policy is to, like, spread democracy throughout the world and allow people who have stood up for democracy and been persecuted to come here and be safe. And evidently the United States doesn't even believe in saying that anymore in, in so much as it said it, but didn't always do it in the past. Yeah. It is really sad to think that even that is gone.

Robert Evans (26:39)

Yeah.

James Stout (26:40)

For so many people. I think the idea of migrants is like an abstract one. Right. For your Fox News viewer, migrants are just like an abstract brown skinned bad person. And I often think that if those people had known migrants in their community, they would either not vote that way or they would at least not like that policy. Even if there were other things they liked about Trump, which I gave. That's not something I can find much understanding of. And those people do exist, but it's just so sad to see people turned against anyone who wasn't born in this country simply because. Not because of any other character trait.

Francis (27:17)

They have, particularly the brown skin, though. Because you have to admit, the Canadians, I mean, even though there's been a little tension with the Canadians at first in this regime, they're, they're pretty much under the radar. And anyone from Europe or anyone, he's even said, like, send the Nordic people, that's fine, you know, I mean, he's very clear.

James Stout (27:36)

Right.

Francis (27:36)

Yeah. The South African refugees are welcome. Come on.

James Stout (27:40)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Francis (27:41)

Just so blatant, you know, and, and I remember when I was growing up, my mom in particular would, would complain when, when we started to have to press one for English, I remember my mom complaining about that or thinking, you know, you know, if you're here you should learn the language. Well, I gotta say, I lived in Tunisia for eight years, and I did not learn the language. I. I tried to teach myself. It's a dialect that, you know, at the time, they didn't have lessons that you could get on. On YouTube or Duolingo or anything. You know, if I learned French and Arabic, maybe I could piece something together. But I. You know, it's not as easy as. As people say, and.

James Stout (28:20)

And, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not.

Francis (28:22)

And then just to speak of my mother, I guess she prides herself on making friends with people at the grocery store who are of another ethnicity or, like, really, you know, getting to know a doctor, or she has a housekeeper who's been working for her for, like, 30 years. And so I know she doesn't think of that person as being someone that shouldn't be here.

James Stout (28:47)

Right.

Francis (28:48)

So I think even if you do know a family or two who's an immigrant, you might think, oh, well, not them. I don't mean them. I mean all the other ones. I mean, all the bad guys.

James Stout (28:59)

Yeah, the bad ones.

Francis (29:00)

Yeah. And. And if. If Trump was serious about getting the bad ones go to the gang neighborhoods. Like, we do know where the dangerous gang neighborhoods are, but they're not sending the tanks there. They're sending them to MacArthur park, you know.

James Stout (29:15)

Yeah.

Francis (29:15)

Home Depot. It's like, if you want to get the gangs, get the gangs. But I think they're too scared of that, because these are really just regular people that they're hiring to do this work for them, to pick up people. And that's why they're hiding their faces, because they are regular people who would like to probably have a normal life outside of this new job that they've been so well paid for.

James Stout (29:38)

Right? Yeah. And certainly they're. They're recruiting a lot more people to do that right now, which is gonna only see a step up in enforcement.

Francis (29:46)

Yeah.

James Stout (29:57)

I wonder, like, in so much as anything has helped, because people will want to help, right? Like, I think people will listen. They will understand your situation. They will see the possibility of your family being torn apart and want to help. But it's hard to help right now, Right. Unless you're an immigration lawyer, and every pro bono immigration lawyer I know. Is mental health damaging levels of overworked and stressed and traumatized?

Francis (30:20)

I think.

James Stout (30:20)

So what can people do, either for you or in their communities to, like, show up for people who are in your situation?

Francis (30:29)

I would say donate. You could donate to the aclu, donate to individual families like ours. I'm Sure. I think there's a lot of gofundmes out there that people are trying to raise money for. That's the way, you know, everything is kind of done these days when people are desperate and speak out. And I think the most important thing is have conversations and get to know people. And even, like, sometimes I. I see, you know, a Hispanic person in a grocery store. I just wanted to tell them, thank you for being here. I'm. I'm glad you're here, because I think they must be feeling so scared right now and so unwanted and so unappreciated when they are doing some of the hardest jobs that nobody else wants to do for very little money. Yeah. These are essential workers. They should be paid the most. Everything is backwards. You know, the people who are doing the hardest, you know, cleaning the toilets and picking the fields, they should be paid the most. It doesn't make any sense. Regardless of where they're from, they're willing to do the work. And Lord knows their background of where they came from and how. What the struggles that they've been through to leave their home country. Nobody wants to leave their home country. You do that because it's so bad that you. You must, you know, especially if you have children. You're trying to make a better life for yourself. And we've been sold on this American Dre. Same prospect, you know, that we've heard our whole lives and the whole world has heard about.

James Stout (31:55)

Yeah.

Francis (31:55)

So they come, and now we're just punishing them brutally. It's not even like, oh, no, sorry, we're full. You know, we're gonna have to send you back. It's like, no, we're gonna punish you. We're gonna treat you like dogs, call you animals and vermin and call you horrible things.

James Stout (32:09)

Yeah.

Francis (32:09)

Send you to places where you're unsafe and untaken care of. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get sent back to your home country. Country. Or you'll get sent to a random country or even a. A prison, like a horrible prison in another country where who knows what's good? It's just. This is what frightens me.

James Stout (32:28)

Yeah.

Francis (32:29)

You know, again, if he was sent to somewhere, to a place where I could, you know, we could have visits or calls or, you know, and he waits it out. I guess that would be more tolerable than the unknown of his. His safety. He's not going to be well taken care of. That's a fact. They don't care about these people. And my husband, unfortunately, he's always been extremely strong, extremely brave, a fighter. And I feel like his fight is gone. He's physically and mentally at the end of his rope. And I'm extremely frightened. I mean, he just feels like he's tired of fighting. He's just exhausted from this, you know, again, I mean, we've been together 12 years and again he was going through this process with his first one wife who he was with for eight years, and he never got an answer. He was never denied, but he just never got an answer. And that was enough for them for our case. Just to, you know, it's going to be really, really difficult for, to get a yes from, from. For a green card.

James Stout (33:30)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it still happens. I've heard of it happening even in the last few months, but it is increasingly harder and less common. And that is brutal.

Francis (33:41)

Yeah.

James Stout (33:41)

Like, it's horrible. And the way, of course, as you're saying, the system is designed to make you feel hopeless and just to, as they call it, self deport.

Francis (33:50)

Yes. And even our, our lawyer doesn't know what to do. And I feel the judge seems like a nice person. And I would imagine it must be very frustrating too, to be a judge at this time where they have to be the ones that are just kind of, their hands are tied. They will lose their job if they don't do what the regime wants them to do. So, you know, this is what happens in third world countries. This is why America has been great. Because we weren't like this before with this, you know, cutting out free speech and things like that. It's. It's changing rapidly. And, and if, if people don't stand up more. And I'm sorry, but it's going to have to take more than these peaceful protests, unfortunately, because they're not doing anything. We are being laughed at, had by the MAGA Republicans. They do not care about our peaceful protests. They're just like, okay, there's a protest on this day, next day, they're just going to keep doing it harder, you know.

James Stout (34:48)

Yeah.

Francis (34:48)

It's not changing anything. So something has to change. I'm hoping more celebrities come out and start speaking up. I think that would help because people tend to back the celebrities that they love. And I'm kind of alarmed that more people, like, especially the most powerful celebrities, like Oprah, for example, people. Why aren't they out there every day?

James Stout (35:09)

Yeah.

Francis (35:09)

You know, saying, this is what I support and this is what I don't support. I think they're scared, I'm assuming.

James Stout (35:15)

I would imagine so. Yeah, like, that's quite a sad thought.

Francis (35:19)

I do think that the MAGA Republicans are outnumbered, and I think that they're continuously going to be outnumbered as things get more and more, you know, shocking as we're seeing our freedoms being stripped, the constitutional freedoms that we've always known being stripped.

James Stout (35:35)

Stripped.

Francis (35:36)

I think it's going to get worse and I don't know how bad it has to get before change happens.

James Stout (35:41)

Yeah, I don't think any of us do. I do think you're right that more and more people are not happy with how this is happening. But there's. There doesn't even seem to be a will among Democrats to oppose this in a meaningful way.

Francis (35:54)

Yeah.

James Stout (35:54)

Which is very sad. And like.

Francis (35:56)

Yeah, even the Democrats in power don't know what to do. I mean.

James Stout (35:59)

Yeah. And they seem to think that it's electoral suicide to just to be basically decent and say we need to be decent people and kind to people who come here asking us to help them. And this seems to be something that is just inadmissible in electoral politics, which is really sad right now.

Francis (36:15)

Yeah.

James Stout (36:16)

So you guys have your court date. We will obviously continue covering this.

Francis (36:21)

Thank you so much.

James Stout (36:22)

Yeah, we're going to continue updating people. We will continue talking about this and covering this. And. Yeah, we'll try and get an update out. This is coming out. You'll be hearing this on Monday. We will try and get an update out within a week or so just to let everyone know how things have gone and what they can do to help. Is there anything else you'd like to say to people before we go?

Francis (36:44)

Yeah. So as we found out, you know, that there's a good possibility that he will be taken into ICE detention on Wednesday. We asked our lawyer. Okay, so what are the next steps if that happens? What, you know, he has a constitutional right to due process of law. Habeas Corp therapist, and she doesn't know what to do. She's never done it before. So therefore, we need to find a different lawyer that can help us with that. It's not in immigration court, it's federal court. So, yeah, we have inquiries. We actually have a consult today with someone who maybe help us with that. We sent emails out last night kind of telling our story to another lawyer, hoping that we can get some support. And on that front, because basically that's your next. Your next step. Once you're in detention, you raise your constitutional rights of due process of law, you know, but then again, it's another fight. And again, it could be from Detention, which is. Yeah. More money. I'm, I'm gonna be at that point a single mother, you know, trying to.

James Stout (37:44)

Right.

Francis (37:44)

Support bills here in California, which is already, you know, difficult and you know, on my own and also paying lawyers and trying to fight to either find my husband or get him out of there. You know, we, we don't want to leave the country if we, if we don't have to. We, we love it here. I don't know where else to go. We can't go to Tunisia. I'm American. Where are we supposed to go?

James Stout (38:12)

Yeah.

Francis (38:12)

And that's what people don't understand too, with immigrants, you know, if they can't return to their home country because of safety reasons, which is most of the cases, that's why we have asylum cases, then what are they supposed to do, you know?

James Stout (38:27)

Yeah. And I don't think a lot of people seem to care.

Robert Evans (38:29)

Right.

James Stout (38:30)

They think people just want people to go away somewhere.

Francis (38:32)

Yeah. Go figure it out. Yeah. It's not our problem. Yeah.

James Stout (38:35)

Yeah. Which like in this case, it very much is in every case. Like, and like it is our problem that like, we should take responsibility for one another's well being. Right.

Francis (38:45)

Yes.

James Stout (38:45)

As humans, we should care about each other. Yeah.

Francis (38:48)

Like have empathy at least. Least. That's the least we could do.

James Stout (38:52)

Yeah. I know a society that says it's not my problem. It's not one that any of us should want to live in.

Francis (38:57)

Yeah. Yeah. And. And in our case, my husband's particularly worried because if he does get sent back to Tunisia, most definitely he would be in jail there as well, which is also not a pleasant experience.

James Stout (39:08)

Yeah. To put it mildly.

Francis (39:09)

And it would be. Yeah. Where they torture people in jail. So. Yeah. Again, we don't really know what to do or where to go, but that these are the thoughts that we're having.

James Stout (39:20)

Yeah. They're not unreasonable.

Francis (39:22)

Yeah. If we do self deport, when do we. Like we're trying to push it as long as we can stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, you know, and then when do we let them know. Okay, okay, I guess we'll self deport, like at the last second before they take them into detention. Like, you know, I don't know the safe way to do that.

James Stout (39:40)

Right.

Francis (39:40)

And then if we do, can they give us time to get our affairs in order? Like leaving the country is no small task and we don't even have money to do that. That. So, you know, these are our options. These are literally our options. And again, small children, second grade, fourth grade, you know, and they're thriving here, like, they don't deserve this. And my husband even said, you know, he said this the other day, like, our children don't deserve this. And I said, no, children deserve the horrors of this planet. You know, that, that. I mean, we're. We're actually a lot luckier than a lot of other children, so. But at the same time, there are children, and this is a problem that we're dealing with, and unfortunately, they have to deal with it, too. You know, that's just what a family is.

James Stout (40:25)

Yeah.

Francis (40:25)

Our goal is to stay together no matter what. We want to keep my husband safe, and we want to keep us together. That's our number one goal. So, unfortunately, that may mean that we need to leave. And I will be very, very sad if that's the case because. Because I have always loved this country. It's always stood for greatness. And ironically, the group that thinks they're going to make America great again is. Is failing miserably.

James Stout (40:53)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredibly sad. And like you say, you've already upped and left with your children once.

Francis (40:59)

Yes.

James Stout (40:59)

To come to a safe place, to be safe, and then to have to do it again from that safe place, I'm sure will be. And the older they get, the more than they realize what's happening.

Francis (41:07)

Yeah. It's only two years later. You know, the poor kids.

James Stout (41:11)

Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm so sorry you're going through this.

Francis (41:15)

Yeah. Thank you.

James Stout (41:16)

This sucks. We'll all be thinking of you.

Francis (41:19)

Thank you very much.

James Stout (41:20)

And yeah, if you're. If you're listening, I will. I will try and keep you updated over the next few weeks.

Francis (41:25)

Thank you so much, James.

James Stout (41:26)

All right. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it.

Francis (41:29)

Yeah. Thank you.

James Stout (41:46)

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James Stout (43:53)

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Robert Evans (43:57)

Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I just got vaccinated. And boy howdy, the shit this year hits like a fucking train.

James Stout (44:06)

It does. I. I got vaccinated. It's, it's, it's a rough one this year. Oh, man. Yeah.

Robert Evans (44:12)

Oh, fucking RFK Jr. Was right.

James Stout (44:16)

Broadcasting through the vaccine injury today.

Robert Evans (44:19)

Yeah, that's right. I've received my vaccine injury. I'm complaining to the board. Oh, man, I'm gonna nap after this. But first, how about we talk about fucking Trin d', Aragua, the fucking narco criminal group that President Trump is currently justifying blowing up boats in the middle of international waters as a result of, of.

James Stout (44:40)

Yeah, it's great. It's a good thing that we are now killing civilians in countries where we are not at war with. It's great.

Robert Evans (44:51)

Yeah. This has been something Stephen Miller had been talking about since the first Trump administration, you know, and had talked with like, back when the military was willing to push back against Trump, more people would be like, what do you. What the are you talking about? We can't launch strikes at just like random boats. Yeah. And Steve Miller be like, why not? And now they're doing it.

James Stout (45:07)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (45:08)

And this group, this criminal cartel out Of Venezuela is. Has been the current justification, as we'll talk about, most of what is said about this trend by the administration about, you know, their role in smuggling drugs in the United States is either just completely invented or massively exaggerated. Yeah, it is a really interesting group. They have a fascinating, like, history. The literal meaning is train of Aragua.

James Stout (45:34)

Yeah, Aragua. Sorry.

Robert Evans (45:36)

And it started out with, like, labor unions that were working on a railway project.

James Stout (45:40)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (45:40)

That was going to be connecting central and western Venezuela together. And as has happened in history, what started as, like, labor union organizing wound up kind of morphing into direct criminal activity.

James Stout (45:53)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (45:54)

The guy who's generally credited as the founder, although that's kind of flattening things a little bit, is Hector Guerrero Flores, known as nino Guerrero. And he got put in for 17 years for murder and drug trafficking at this prison called tokoron. Am I. Am I saying that right, James? How do we. How do we.

James Stout (46:11)

Yeah, Tokoron. Is there an accent?

Robert Evans (46:13)

Yeah, there's a little accent over the second o.

James Stout (46:15)

Does it go up or down? Up to.

Robert Evans (46:20)

Thank you, James. Yeah. And so this. One of the things that's fun about this is that this prison where they start loading these guys up becomes so heavily organized, and it eventually turns from being like a prison in the traditional sense to more being like. Like a tiny, independent city that the gang is based out of. It acted as their fortress. They established, like, nightclubs in it and, you know, luxury facilities. And, like, leaders of the gang more or less came and went as they pleased, went back to their families, and it was not really what you'd think of as a prison in the traditional sense for a lot of these guys. For a while, a payment system was created in order to, like, basically, you would. Inmates would pay for protection or for access to the nicer aspects of. Of the prison called the cause. And if you didn't pay, you know, they had various ways of physically abusing you. There's a good article in small war's journal that talks about the origins and the impact of this group. And it. It quotes someone from inside the prison as saying, the first time you don't pay, they shoot your wrist. The second time, your ankle, the third time, and you face the death penalty.

James Stout (47:24)

Jesus.

Robert Evans (47:24)

So, like, you're talking, like, pretty traditional criminal gang stuff, right?

James Stout (47:28)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (47:29)

So the journey of this group from gang that's major in Venezuela to gang that's kind of operating in larger and larger chunks of South America followed a pretty natural path where they got involved in more kinds of smuggling in More kinds of trafficking over the years, started setting up operations in other parts of South America. But one of the things that the gang has sort of done is you've got this kind of process by which they have these local affiliates who are not directly associated with the gang in, like, the strict hierarchical sense, in that it's not literally the gang sending an official into another state. It's more like franchising is kind of the way things work. And you have different local groups, some of whom are not even connected in any way to the original organization, claiming a line of dissent in order to basically draft off of that clout, you know?

James Stout (48:25)

Yeah, yeah.

Robert Evans (48:25)

Which is kind of what you've seen increasingly. And this has led to a situation where there's enough claims of Trin being involved in the United States and other countries that it looks a lot like a larger and more centralized criminal organization than it actually is in reality.

James Stout (48:42)

Yeah. I think the state understands these things, like many states. Right. Like who. Like with a. With a leader and a distinct authority structure and like a direct command chain. That is not. Not how my understanding is that they operate.

Robert Evans (48:55)

Right.

James Stout (48:55)

Because they are not mini states. They are a different entity to that.

Robert Evans (48:59)

Yeah. Because you've actually spent time reporting and in Venezuela, when did you first become aware of Trenton?

James Stout (49:07)

I mean, I became aware of the fact that there were armed gangs and criminal. I mean, I was robbed at gunpoint when I was in Venezuela. Right. So that made me aware that there were people who did crime with weapons sense. But I wasn't aware really of Trend Aragua until like, maybe the 2020. I mean, I am. I don't report on organized crime, nor do I particularly follow it. Right. But I take an interest in Venezuelan affairs. And as much as I've spent time there, and I have, like, an affinity with the people, and I understand that things are getting going from bad to worse for them under the government, so. So I. I took an interest. I guess it was like. Are you familiar with the Narco Sobrino's affairs? No. Okay. Narco Sobrino is like Narco nephews. I think they're actually step nephews of Maduro, if I recall correctly. It doesn't hugely matter. They're like part of his family in a mini. And I believe they lived in his compound. And they used, like. I don't want to make statements that are incorrect. I believe they use a presidential hangar or Runway to fly a plane to Haiti, which the USDA alleges. And it is most likely true that. That that plane was stuffed full of Cocaine. Sure, sure.

Robert Evans (50:17)

Many such cases.

James Stout (50:18)

Yeah, many such cases. They believe they have diplomatic immunity, which they did not, which I believe came as a surprise to them at the moment of their detention. And so at that point, I was like, shit, we can get onto this. How? The Trump administration has, like, basically alleged that Venezuela is a narco dictatorship. Certainly there is overlap between organized crime and the state. Right. It's because the state is so poor and so corrupt that inevitably you will see, like, overlap between organized crime and the state. So I guess.

Robert Evans (50:47)

Right.

James Stout (50:48)

Whenever the narcos sobrinos affair was, I was like, okay, I need to sort of be aware of this. And of course, in my, like, coverage of immigration, you hear of people, mostly their talk is just not of that their life has been made hard by organized crime, if I'm honest, so much as their life has been made hard by the government completely failing to provide services and the complete collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Me, you know, I'm not going to ask about it explicitly, but if someone mentions it, I sort of take note of it as one of the reasons why people are leaving.

Robert Evans (51:20)

What you bring up is a really good point, which is that 2014 is kind of when the most recent Venezuelan economic crisis really kicked off. And 2014-2018 was a major period of growth for tren. And then 2018 to 2022 is when they really started pushing up into and involving themselves increasingly in Colombia and the United States as a result of, like, the increased, increased flow of Venezuelans out of Venezuela and into other countries and eventually up to the US and to. To some extent, and it's been since 2022 that the gang has really been pruned back, you know, both as a result of the Venezuelan government taking control of the prison again and, like, basically invading it with the military in order to deny them access to what had been, like, their primary centralized, like, hub of control. And also due to the fact that like, like, after expansion into Colombia and Chile, both criminal organizations and the governments of those countries increasingly pushed back against the organization.

James Stout (52:18)

Right, yeah.

Robert Evans (52:19)

One of the reasons why they're being targeted, but also one of the things that's, like, fundamentally bullshit about the administration's description of what's happening is that we're very much talking about a cartel that's on its back feet and been on its back feet for the last several years as the result of significant reversals in their business and in their political situation.

James Stout (52:37)

Yeah, I mean, Colombia. Right. Has been, you know, the Colombian civil war is one of the longest running conflicts in the world. But things have changed there substantially, Right. In the last five or seven years. You know, you have people from, from the FARC disarming. You have the fracture of, of what was previously their territory and some of who were previously their militants into other groups. Right. And so that has allowed the state there to continue its conflict against what remains of that and also to clamp down on other groups. Right. And evidently the flow of drugs to the United States relies on the complicity or inability to stop it of many states. And yeah, we've seen a concerted effort and also the attempts of the United States to stop smuggling. Right. So I guess if people aren't familiar, we should just explain. I mean, the U.S. dHS, of which the United States Coast Guard is part, I think a lot of people aren't aware that Coast Guard is part of DHS claims, a universal jurisdiction or jurisdiction, at least in, in areas where drugs are being smuggled to the United States. Right. So the US Coast Guard has had. Had a role to play in this, in the, I guess interdiction is the word they would use of drugs coming to the United States. I probably haven't got data on this in the last year or so, but it certainly was the case that most drugs entering the US Entered through ports of entry, as opposed to between ports of entry, Right. Through the desert, through the mountains. And so these boats, I guess, are not, just to be clear, they're not necessarily going to the United States in most cases. They're not going to United States in most cases going to Mexico and then moving to the United States through other methods. But as the governments both south of the United States and in the United States have adapted, it's become harder and harder for those people. And so it's become harder and harder for these criminal organizations to make, make money off these drugs.

Robert Evans (54:31)

And that's led to, I mean, a situation that one of the things that they've been accused of being by the Trump administration and internationally is essentially an agent of the Maduro regime. Right. And this is something that certainly the Venezuelan government denies. This is not a thing where I can, you know, entirely give you. This is exactly what's happening. But it seems accurate to say that as an organization, as their, their actual, like, control and power have, have been eroded, they have been utilized increasingly as a way to, for example, deal with, like, dissidents who are hostile to the Mauro regime. Right. As a, as a deniable asset. In particular, there's been cases that are reasonably well documented of dissidents against the Venezuelan regime in Chile and Trinity Aragua being used as like, assassins to. To take out dissidents in foreign countries in a deniable manner. Right. Yeah. And I mean, it looks to me like this has kind of increased as their actual ability to directly control things and directly contest the regime as a power center has been eroded.

James Stout (55:32)

Yeah, it's kind of a classic. Like, I wouldn't say they're like, ideologically aligned. Right. But sometimes their interests align. Yeah. To be clear, like, Trend Aragua are one of the sort of armed organized crime institutions in Venezuela, but by far the only one. Right. You have Trendigliano, for example. You have these other groups who have also been active in anti government protests, especially since the. But I'm going to use that quote, unquote election here in July of last year. Right. Like, where electoral fraud is widely alleged. And I documented that in my Dadian series, if people want to listen to that. But it's not like these two are a lot in lockstep. But yeah, we can understand that sometimes that their interests might align and in those areas, it may be beneficial for the regime to, like you say, to use them as a deniable asset.

Robert Evans (56:23)

Right. Which does not. But, like, one of the things that's kind of most frustrating is hearing them described as central to the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States, which, like, even in kind of the most elaborate version of this group being utilized by the Venezuelan government is fanciful. Right. Like, because Venezuela just doesn't have that much to do with the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States.

James Stout (56:48)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (56:48)

Like Venezuela and Venezuelan criminal organizations just aren't that involved in that process. That's not where it's coming from.

James Stout (56:55)

From.

Robert Evans (56:55)

Right.

James Stout (56:56)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (56:56)

And we'll talk some more about fentanyl. But first, you know what's kind of like fentanyl advertising. We're back and we're talking about fentanyl. Well, we're talking about, like, these clothes claims because that's the justification for why we need to airstrike these boats, the most recent of which we know was boarded by another government and had drugs on board it removed before it was struck.

James Stout (57:32)

Oh, wow.

Robert Evans (57:33)

Yeah. And we simply have no idea, no way to verify. I have no way to verify what the administration is claiming about these boats. We're just seeing boats get blown up. But yeah.

James Stout (57:42)

And everybody who was on that boat is now dead. So there's not many, many people to contradict that story. Should we explain, like, the usual Coast Guard process for interdiction?

Robert Evans (57:50)

Yeah, I think that's probably a good idea.

James Stout (57:52)

So generally, right, what the US Coast Guard is going to do is they will have these large vessels from which they will launch smaller vessels and helicopters to intercept craft. Right. Like the most kind of, I guess, like famous, charismatic, whatever other, like Colombian, like they call them narco subs. There's a semi submarines, actually that they're not like fully submersed, but they. But much of the vessel is submerged. What the Coast Guard would normally do. Do to my understanding, is to send a vessel to intercept them, be it a helicopter or a boat or probably both in most cases, I would imagine. Tell them to stop.

Robert Evans (58:28)

Right.

James Stout (58:28)

If they don't stop, the Coast Guard will have like a sniper who will shoot out the engine of the craft. They will then board, they will then detain the people. They will obviously confiscate any drugs that they find and then they will take those people back to their vessel where they're detained and then they'll be tried in the U.S. right, right. And then they would normally it's. They can't kind of scoop up all these ships that they've intercepted or semi subs or whatever, so they will normally destroy those and scuttle them so they sink to the bottom of the ocean. I don't know how many cases they've done this in, but that would be the normal procedure for coast guard, I guess, pre2025.

Robert Evans (59:06)

It's got to be fun being a fish near one of those vessels.

James Stout (59:10)

Yeah, yeah. Getting high. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what they do with all the. And sometimes they bring all the cocaine back for a photo op. You see that sometimes?

Robert Evans (59:19)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it looks good.

James Stout (59:20)

Yeah, yeah. If it's nicely packaged says cocaine or fentanyl on the side or whatever. That is my understanding of what was done previously. The strikes in the last month have been extremely different. Right. Yeah.

Robert Evans (59:35)

And we're looking at, I think, 14 people killed so far that we've had confirmed. Although those numbers are certainly higher than the. When you're hearing them. Right. Because we've just had another strike in the last day or so that I don't think we have exact numbers on how many people were involved.

James Stout (59:50)

Yeah. They used, from what I understand, drones from Special Operations Command to do these strikes. Right. Which in itself is quite unusual. And then the strikes themselves consisted of. Did they say what. I guess it looks like a hellfire missile, but I don't know if they've said that.

Robert Evans (60:06)

It looked like hellfires to me on the videos I've seen.

James Stout (60:08)

Yeah. There, it's not exactly like high def video, but you see them striking. It looks kind of like a speedboat, right? Like it's a surface vessel. It's not a semi sub or a submarine. It's unclear what has happened before, at least I haven't seen any reporting on what happened before, whether they got an order to stop. I think in one case they had turned around, right. Having noticed the drone and begun returning towards the coast, towards Venezuela, I guess, and, and they were still struck. And it appears that in at least one case the drone struck them again. Like it hit them once and then returned for a second run to hit, I guess, the survivors.

Robert Evans (60:51)

Yeah. And you know, there's a couple of facts that go alongside what we actually know and versus what the administration's claiming. About 80% of people involved in the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States are US citizens. And then of the remaining 20ish percent, a chunk of those are resident legal aliens and the chunk are a mix of undocumented people, non citizens who's, or people whose status is unknown, or extradited aliens. Right. Like this is based on the United States Sentencing Commission's data from 2024. And about 85% of drugs that are brought into the United States are smuggled in at ports of entry. And this makes complete sense if you think about it, in part because it's pretty easy to track when you've just got like a boat trying to smuggle stuff into the country illicitly and the people who are on that boat, if they aren't citizens, have no right to enter the country inherently, as opposed to citizens who do have a right to enter and ports of entry where there's a shitload of. You want to hide in plain sight with this stuff. Right? Like it just makes sense. Like would you rather, if you were smuggling a huge amount of illegal shit, would you rather be on your own with a van or a vehicle full of, of very illegal drugs, or would you rather be like hiding amongst the billions of tons of shit that gets taken to this country every single year? Right, yeah. Which is why just the reality of the data is, is so completely different than the administration makes it out to be. And obviously foreign criminal organizations are heavily involved in the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl in the United States. But we're talking primarily about like the Sinaloa cartel and then different criminal organizations involved in the smuggling of fentanyl out of China. Right. Which is where a lot of fentanyl comes from, as opposed to again, Venezuela, the government Here is going for low hanging fruit, I think is the conclusion I'm driven to just every time I read about this is that like there doesn't seem to be a better reason for focusing on this organization which really is just not that involved in crime in the United States nearly to the extent that groups like the Sinaloa cartel are.

James Stout (62:54)

Yeah. I mean, it offers a chance to demonize Venezuelan people. Right. And Venezuelan people made up a large number of the people who came to the United States to seek asylum under Biden. Because like if we do believe that these like the word in Spanish would be like a mega bandas, like mega gangs are a serious threat to the well being of people in the United States, imagine how much more of a threat they are to the well being of people in Venezuela.

Robert Evans (63:19)

Right, right.

James Stout (63:20)

And that combined with a government which objectively sucks and which also uses extrajudicial violence. Right. Including in its battle against these gangs, leads people to want to leave. And when they come here. The United States, especially the Trump regime, has been engaged in this demonization of migrants. Right. This offers a very convenient narrative for that to say that these people are bringing crime here. Here. The vast majority of them are doing the exact opposite. They are coming here because the state in Venezuela has extorted them and slash or non state actors in Venezuela have extorted them. The vast bulk of the complaints I hear from migrants from Venezuela about the state, they have no interest other than working hard and receiving a decent living wage for that. Every Venezuelan person I spoke to, almost by none when I ask what their American dream is, tell you that their American dream is to have a job that pays them enough to feed their family.

Robert Evans (64:23)

Right.

James Stout (64:24)

We have next to no evidence of organized crime coming into the United States through the asylum system. There are sure. There will be like I would imagine a fraction of a single percent of cases. Sure. In which that is the case. But it's being used against all these Venezuelan people. Right. As we've seen. And I guess I should just clarify that like one thing about these megabandas are that they're not like maras. Right. Like so like ms.13 being a Mara. Right. Like a gang in which members are identified by certain tattoos.

Robert Evans (64:59)

Oh my God. Yes. This is tattoos and emojis.

James Stout (65:02)

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Again, like, like I understand that that is a thing that happens in some cases, but that is not a thing that is common to these gangs.

Robert Evans (65:11)

No, it's certainly not common to trend. Right. Is like the use of tattoos. There's not even widespread agreement among experts as to whether or not there's any sort of centralized US based hierarchy for the group. Right, right.

James Stout (65:25)

Yeah, yeah. For tattooing is just as it is in the United States and lots of other places around the world. A very common practice in Venezuela that people do for as many reasons as there are people right to include, because they love their mum, because they love their kids, because they're like a football team, because they are religious, et cetera, et cetera, Etc, that is why people get tattoos. It is not to indicate membership in any organization.

Robert Evans (65:49)

No. And this is something that's verified. Again, like, one of the leading experts on trend is Rana Risquez, who wrote a book, the Trend Aragua, the gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America. She specifically told Noticias Telemundo during an interview. Venezuelan gangs are not identified by tattoos. To be a member of one of these Venezuelan organizations, you don't need a tattoo. You can have no tattoos and still be part of it. You can also have a tattoo that matches other members of the organization. So like, again, there's groups and different sort of. Because this is a very bottom up sort of organization, which is often the case with criminal groups where like they will, you know, there will be money being passed in one direction or another, but there's not tight control being exercised in a top down manner. You can find groups that have tattoos in common, but it's not a centralized thing that the organization does.

James Stout (66:38)

Yeah. And like the Venezuelan state, to be clear, is extremely violent. They have like a special armed police which deals with gangs and organized crime that kills hundreds of people. It would be unwise to be going about in the streets with a like, I am a member of a certain gang.

Robert Evans (66:53)

Right.

James Stout (66:54)

Tattoo. Right. And so unless you plan to live in some area where you feel completely safe from the state, that would be a very unwise thing to do. Yeah.

Robert Evans (67:02)

And we'll talk some more about things that are unwise. But first, it would be wise for you to buy these products. We're back. And I want to quote from a recent piece in the Guardian on the US law enforcement claiming that emojis signal membership in this organization. This is by Sam Levin and Manvi Singh from September, a couple of days ago.

James Stout (67:31)

Ago. Yeah.

Robert Evans (67:32)

The first reference to emojis in the records comes from a July 2024 situational awareness alert from the NYPD which was distributed to law enforcement across the country and warned of trend threats in New York City. NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau has observed members of TDA in New York City using social media messaging platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to depict allegiance to the gang. Neilurg said TDA members often utilize emojis such as trains, ninjas, slot machines, double swords, shields, ogre face mask and crowns. Members also use South American slang and Arabic language terms to mask their identities on social media. They've cited the NYPD tattoos featuring Michael Jordan fucking ninja emojis. You're telling me that that's a TDA symbol? That's not just something people use?

James Stout (68:15)

Yeah, man. This is like, obviously there's a large Arab or population of Arab descent in Venezuela. That's where these slangs come from. People use emojis, particularly in this context because their education has not been the best. Right. Like their TO literacy is less than it would be in other contexts. So, like, sometimes they use emojis, sometimes they just use them because it's funny. But like, the notion of like. And yeah, people will use slang. People will spell shit the way they say it. Sometimes when I'm talking to Venezuelan people, you know, if I'm. If I'm talking to a source and they. Sometimes I have to read it aloud to help me understand what they're saying. Yes, that is very common to people in Venezuela. There's nothing to do with being a member of a gang whatsoever.

Robert Evans (68:57)

Yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of that in terms of like the, the fact that the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan are popular among immigrants. Right. Like that. That's particularly Venezuelan immigrants. And a lot of it comes from like. Well, a lot of Venezuelan immigrants tend to like these things in media, tend to like these musicians and get tattoos that reference these things in popular culture or these things, you know, that, that different Venezuelan artists. Artists have put out. And that's. I mean, it's certainly not a sign that like, oh, these things signal membership in this criminal organization and more they're just targeting Venezuelans. And these things are more common among Venezuelans, but not, certainly not exclusive to that group. When you're saying that like a Michael Jordan shirt or tattoo is a symbol of membership in a criminal organization. Well, I guess like a third of my high school were criminals. I mean, they were, but not in this way.

James Stout (69:51)

Yeah, like, these are very common. Like the Jordan logo. I don't know what it's called at the Jumping Jordan logo. Not a big sports wear fan myself, but like, yeah, it's very common. It's because people buy fake designer apparel all the time. Like, you will also see people, tons of people with Louis Vuitton Items, they're not real. It does not indicate membership in any gang. It's just kind of an aspirational thing that you can buy any almost anywhere in Venezuela because no one's going down there to enforce copyright laws. Like it's not, it's, it doesn't indicate any affiliation. Sometimes it indicates like a, an interest with the United States, right. Like, like that. These are where these things come from and this is a place where these people would like to go. I also saw a guy across Darien Glap in Nike Alpha Flies. Like the, the super fast marathon running shoes with a giant carbon plated spring. Like this is not like indication of anything other than that. Like this person thought those were cool and they purchased. Yeah. Are you familiar with this Cartel de los Soles thing?

Robert Evans (70:53)

No.

James Stout (70:54)

Okay, so the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Sun. Of the Sun, I guess it's another organization which the US is alleging that Maduro is head of, right. It's a vertically organized organization and that Maduro is literally the chief of it. And I guess I just want to say the same shit applies. There are gangs all over Caracas as well whose names we haven't mentioned. What you've got here is state failure, right? Like in Venezuela, the state has failed to provide people with services and it does not always enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. You also have massive corruption. So it is absolutely the case that people smuggling drugs through Venezuela will be able to buy off certain officials, right? Particularly like military commanders, people who have control over transit and border areas. It doesn't imply like a vertical structure per se, to be clear. Like I don't think Maduro should be in charge of Venezuela. I think the Maduro regime is bad for Venezuela and bad for the world. But like, it's very oversimplified to see it like straight up as like a narco regime, right? Like there is more to it than that. This is the country that sits on masses of oil. This is a country that has been incredibly corrupt from an incredibly long time now. And you're always going to see these organizations creeping into the government, right? When the government can't even pay its own people or guarantee them a decent and dignified quality of life. That doesn't mean that it is okay to just kill first and foremost. I would imagine that, that if we go with the government story that the boats that they struck were carrying drugs, right? It is unlikely that the people who were carrying those drugs were anything other than poor, desperate young men who wanted a chance at A better life and. Or were intimidated into doing this.

Robert Evans (72:59)

Right.

James Stout (72:59)

And maybe some of them chose to do this because they thought this was the way they could get money and progress in a place that doesn't offer them many opportunities. These are not the people who are in any way, like, making the calls, making the decisions. Right. And so killing them isn't going to do very much because there is a massive supply of poor, desperate young men in Venezuela and it's not going to change anything to, to kill 14, 15 of them other than it will, obviously. It's a tragedy for those families. Right. There's people who lose their children or whatever. Yeah. And so, like, I don't know, until we solve the situation, that life is untenable for people in Venezuela. Yes, there will be crime there and yes, people from there will want to come to the United States. Both of those things make sense. That does not mean that people coming to the United States are coming to the United States to do bad things. The vast majority of them are coming to the United States to escape bad things. We've had so much discourse about Venezuelan people and crime, even in the, you know, this has begun, I think, in Chicago in the Biden administration. I have not seen journalists of whatever political stripe talk to Venezuelan people about this.

Robert Evans (74:14)

Right.

James Stout (74:14)

Like, with very few exceptions, it's very easy to find Venezuelan people, especially if you work at the border and you do border reporting. But even still, lots of these Venezuelan people went to Denver. Some of them went to Chicago, some of them went to the Springs in Colorado. Many of them went to Texas. They went to all kinds of places when they came to the United States. Right. If you speak Spanish, it's not hard to find these people and ask them, what's it like in Venezuela? Why did you come here? And then perhaps you can, you know, establish a picture of. Yeah, it's pretty shit, right? People work hard every day and don't make enough to feed their family if their kid is sick, if their elderly parents can't work and need support, it's really hard to do that. That is why they want to come to the U.S. that is why often young men want to come to the U.S. right? Because the world as it is, gives them the highest level of economic opportun opportunity. And so the family will send them to the US Such that they can earn enough money and they hope one day to bring their families here. Sometimes you also see people bringing their very young children because they realize there's no future for their children in Venezuela. So they make the choice to try and come to somewhere which once promised a future for hard working people and doesn't really anymore. But it pains me so much to see this discussion of Venezuela without Venezuelan people, most of whom I found to be wonderful. Like I spent a good amount of time in Venezuela and even longer with Venezuelan people and I have a great affection for them. Like they've been nothing but kind to me. Even now, like a year after I was in the Darien gap. I get texts all the time from Venezuelan people. The majority of them not asking for help, just asking how. I am asking, do I know what happened to the Bolivian gap? Do I know what happened to Zimbabwean women? Like genuinely concerned even amidst a really shit situation for them, concerned for the well being of other people. And I just wish instead of talking about, yeah, the hundreds, maybe thousands of Venezuelan people who are involved in moving drugs to the United States, we could talk about the millions of people who just want to work hard and have a decent life and who are being denied a chance due to that home and are now being denied a chance to do that here as well.

Robert Evans (76:33)

Yeah, well, I think that's about it for our episode today. Till next time folks. I don't know. Best of luck out there.

James Stout (76:43)

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Mia Wong (79:10)

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where your host wakes up every morning and rolls rolls a D6 to determine whether the government wants to exterminate her for being trans, autistic or Chinese. This week I am your host, Mia Wong. We have rolled the dice. This week is Autism Week. And by Autism Week, I mean Anti Autism Week. The Trump administration, or specifically RFK Jr. Promised at the beginning, it was like April roughly, that they were going to find the cause of autism by the end of the summer. And they are claiming that the cause of automatic autism is taking Tylenol when you're pregnant. And that's not true. And to talk about how unbelievably vile and unhinged this is is Crystal, who's a unionized abortion care worker who is also Clozilla on Blue sky and friend of the show. Done many things. Welcome to the show.

Crystal (80:04)

Yeah, thank you so much, Mia. It's always so wonderful to come and talk about horrifying things with you and be filled with existential dread together.

Mia Wong (80:13)

It's good. And by good, I mean the worst thing I've ever seen.

Crystal (80:17)

I'm like, this is such a great time to be a trans non binary abortion care worker. I just love, I love like being hated in so many different ways. You just got like a rich tapestry of hatred towards you. It's really great.

Mia Wong (80:30)

So good. So okay, that's actually kind of where I want to start about this, is that most of the media coverage of this has been purely focusing on the Tylenol causing autism, or specifically that's causing autism. And I want to point out because most of the news articles that cover this simply do not mention this. They are also claiming that taking Tylenol if you're pregnant causes adhd, a thing which you think would be noteworthy to point out, but has just not.

Garrison Davis (80:57)

Yeah, I don't know.

Mia Wong (80:59)

I don't know why people aren't reading the transcripts. I don't know why, but they're not.

Crystal (81:03)

Yeah, I actually hadn't seen that part. Like, I was literally just reading and observing like just the pregnancy and what that means for, you know, pregnant people.

Francis (81:11)

People.

Crystal (81:12)

And I like didn't see any of the ADHD stuff, so that was new when you brought that up to me.

Mia Wong (81:17)

Yeah, it's. It's just not being reported on. It's really baffling. So I want to, before we sort of really get into the. Wait, hold on. Why the fuck are they doing this? What is happening here? Because, and as Crystal is going to say, actually, Tylenol is safe for people who are pregnant. It's fine. But I want to go over a bit of like, what's actually in this because it's a really, really weird. We're going to be getting more into the sort of like into the autism angle in another episode next week. But I want to talk a little bit about just like the actual stuff that was in this announcement where Trump is saying that a, you shouldn't give Tylenol to pregnant people and also saying like, you shouldn't give it to like young children and is like, you know, he's like ranting about like mercury and aluminum in vaccines, which, like, this shit isn't real. Like there hasn't even been anything that's even remotely related mercury and vaccines for ages. It also never did anything. But this is all weird Andrew Wakefield special shit. He also has this, this thing where he's talking about like how you should separate the MMR vaccines, which is a thing that if you have seen the H bomber guy video you will know. The reason that that was an anti vax talking point was because Wakefield was selling separate vaccines. And so he was trying to convince parents that having all three of the vaccines at once would give their kids autism. But if you did it separately, it wouldn't through scientific things that don't make any sense, even according to his own incredibly made up bullshit. Wakefield, by the way, is the guy who sort of kicked off the modern anti vaccine movements by abusing a bunch of children and publishing an incredibly fake study and then getting it retracted and then getting his medical license retracted because it was incredibly fake and abused children. So Trump is sort of just repeating the stuff that he's like, vaguely remembers. There's a whole bunch of this, right, of like, stuff he vaguely remembers. Like he's he's, he goes on a random rant about like how Cuba doesn't have Tylenol so they don't have autism. And that Amish people. And this is the one that it goes around a lot like Amish people don't have autism because they don't take drugs. And it's like, oh my God. I also just, I want to read a quote from RFK Jr about this, which again, and I want to point this out, the actual point of this thing is announcing that the FDA is not going to recommend that you take acetaminophen or Tylenol if you're pregnant. I'm just going to read this and I'm going to ask if you can figure out what the link between this and Tylenol is. This is from RFK Jr. Quote, President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalizing them. Marginalizing them like prior administrations. Some of our friends like to say we should believe all women. Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades because research on the potential link between autism and vaccines has been suppressed in the past.

Crystal (84:08)

So is this basically talking about kind of like the celebrity anti vaxx people and like the grifters and.

Mia Wong (84:15)

Yeah, yeah. It's like, I, I can't believe that. Well, I mean I can believe but like a. The fact that RFK Jr noted repeatedly accused of sexual assault and whose response when asked to about it was, quote, I have a lot of skeletons in my closet is doing believe all women but a. About vaccines causing autism.

Crystal (84:36)

Yeah, I mean it's only just like a talking point that they can use in their favor. It's never actually about, you know, I hate it. Yeah.

Mia Wong (84:45)

Oh God. And like, like this is just like the average thing in this speech that isn't barely even getting news coverage.

Crystal (84:53)

I mean, there's also what Trump said as well, which. Oh yeah, because I've seen a lot of that too. And it's like between what Trump said said and what RFK Jr said, it's like what, where do you even, like, where does the media focus? Like, how do you explain this to the American audience?

Mia Wong (85:07)

Yeah, it's, it's ridiculous. And then they also brought in Marty McElray who's the commissioner of the FDA, who has a giant rant about how like I learned in medical school, just treat fevers, low grade fevers with acetaminophen.

Garrison Davis (85:21)

Why?

Mia Wong (85:22)

What are we doing? A study out of Hopkins actually showed treating a Fever can prolong the duration of illness in all young children. Child. Maybe that's because fever is a body's natural way of ridding an infection.

Crystal (85:32)

Yeah, well, that's absolutely not true. I mean there's like, we, we know that like fevers are dangerous for young children and pregnant people. It's, Yeah. I, I don't, I don't know. It's just, it's just total made up bullshit.

Mia Wong (85:46)

Like, it's just eugenics.

Francis (85:48)

Right.

Mia Wong (85:48)

Like they, like, they're, they're like, oh no, you shouldn't actually do anything to treat the illnesses because if the child is strong then like they'll go through it naturally and they'll become stronger. And it's like, no, that's eugenics.

James Stout (86:00)

Yeah.

Crystal (86:00)

This goes for the pregnancy of it all too because it's about being able to suffer and enduring and it's, it's the same case, the same kind of like puritanical survival of the fittest eugenics shit. Whether you're talking about pregnancy or you're talking about like literally young children who have fevers. Same, same like approach.

Francis (86:21)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (86:21)

This also links directly back to what they're trying to do here. Right. Because the thing that they're trying to do is get rid of autistic people.

Crystal (86:31)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (86:32)

Like they don't want there to be children born with autism.

Crystal (86:36)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (86:37)

And in order to do this, they are willing to not take vaccines. They are willing to. Well, I mean I, I guess I get, I guess I should say that not letting pregnant people take Tylenol is really truly the most. Some of you must die. But that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make thing that I've ever seen. But it's, you know, it's absolutely hideous. It's like, yeah, these people, they don't want autistic kids to be born, you know, and that's also just straight up part of the eugenics thing that the project that they're doing. Right. There's on the one hand the sort of pure survival of the fittest. Fuck them kids, let them just die of fevers. And then on the other hand there's the just active like, oh, we're just going to do all this stuff that we think will just make there not be autistic kids.

James Stout (87:27)

Yeah.

Crystal (87:27)

And they definitely care more about there being less autistic children than there are about actually like, you know, addressing infant mortality.

James Stout (87:34)

Yeah.

Crystal (87:35)

And it's definitely, it's treating autism as in something that can be prevented by the choice of the parents as opposed to it just Being something that some people are born that way also, you know, same with being queer and trans and all these things. It's this idea that you can, like, choose it, that you can, can, like, if the parents are strong enough and they can endure enough pain and they can suffer enough, and if they, you know, make the right choices, then they can avoid having a child with autism. And it's not really that dissimilar than, like, oh, what to do if you, like, have a queer child, a trans child. It's this idea that, like, that is something that can be controlled and eliminated, which is eugenics, which is, you know, as you've been saying so definitely.

Mia Wong (88:17)

Do you know what isn't eugenics products.

Crystal (88:20)

The products and services? I would really hope so.

Francis (88:22)

I hope.

Mia Wong (88:23)

I really hope. I don't know. I cannot. I don't know what these ads are going to be. If they are eugenics, let us know at. I write okay on Twitter in Blue sky. Actually, I don't know if he's still on Twitter. I have no idea. I've been on there in ages.

Francis (88:38)

Woo.

Mia Wong (88:38)

These ads.

James Stout (88:45)

Foreign.

Mia Wong (88:51)

We are back. So let's talk about specifically the don't use Tylenol of it all. Can you talk a bit about just, like, the importance of Tylenol and pain management for pregnant people?

Crystal (89:04)

Yeah, and I bet, like, there's definitely, probably people out there who are like, why Tylenol? Why did they choose this? Like, where did this come from? Is it because Trump can't say acetaminophen? You know, a lot of people have, have been, you know, speculating. And first off, I, I do want to say that autism predates Tylenol. Like, oh, like Tylenol, like, came to be in, like, the 1950s. And, you know, autism existed before that and has probably already always been around to some degree, which we don't know. I don't know. It's. It's a very complex and we're still, you know, it. There's been so much stigma around it for so long that it's difficult to talk about, about. But Tylenol is basically one of the only pain medications that pregnant people can take, and that's why it's Tylenol. I think that that is the way of looking at this where it's like, why did they single out this medication? And it's because it's the only pain medication that a pregnant person can take. Because as we know, there's other pain medications like the NSAIDs, like ibuprofen and naproxen and Then of course, there's opioids, which is obviously not good during pregnancy. They'll course talk to your doctor, because I'm not a doctor. And you should always get this from doctors. Talk to your OB GYN. But NSAIDs are typically not recommended in the last three months of pregnancy because they can cause issues with amniotic fluid and baby's kidneys and things like that. So it is typically recommended that you avoid ibuprofen and other things like that. And you take Tylenol to reduce fevers, to reduce pain. Obviously, there is a lot to be sick with when you're pregnant. There's a lot of sources of pain. You know, fever and headaches are definitely something that pregnant people experience. But pretty much like, because it is the only pain medication that pregnant people can take, then it's really easy to be like, oh, well, what are they taking? This is what they're taking. And then you can go from there. And this is very much coming from. It feels so weird saying this coming from like, a biblical sense of like, Eve ate the apple. Eve is the original sinner, I think. I don't know, like, you know, Eve did the bad thing. So Eve needs to suffer during pregnancy. All women need to suffer during pregnancy. That is a very much like a very biblical take on this. And I think that is kind of why. Why Tylenol? Because it's what pregnant people are taking to reduce pain and to address fevers.

Francis (91:27)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (91:28)

And I, I want to read a quote from the commissioner of the FDA that he gave while he was speaking about this where he says, quote, when my wife was pregnant and delivered our son a few months ago, they pushed her to take acetaminophen for a low grade fever. She said no. And then they looked at me and I said, absolutely no. I'm also here to announce good news. Today the FDA is filing a federal registered notice to change the label on an exciting treatment called prescription Lecovirin so it can be available to children with autism. Autism. So you could see, like, how casually he's doing this. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Like, I'm really proud of my wife for saying no to taking Tylenol for a fever. And like, they also, like, look at this. And it's like the, like, oh, they pushed her to take acetaminophen for a low grade fever. It's like, that's an extremely normal thing for a doctor to say to you. Like, take Tylenol for your fever is like the least, like, medically invasive thing. A possibly Recommend, like, what are we doing here?

Crystal (92:32)

Yeah, it's really basic medicine. And also, like, there's like, there's ways to profit off of this too, because if you can't take any pain medication when you're pregnant, but you can take. I think they were recommending something like, I don't even know. It was like something folic acid thingy. They were recommending that you take something which obviously now can be like, profit off of and sold. This is a very capitalist, very grifter approach, approach to medicine and healthcare because obviously always talk to your doctor and your obgyn about taking any medication when you're pregnant. Like, talk to your doctor. They're going to be the best source of information.

Mia Wong (93:06)

So the, the folic acid thing is a licovorin, which is a medicine for anemia and counteracting the effects of chemotherapy meds.

Crystal (93:16)

Yeah, I wouldn't.

Mia Wong (93:17)

And then they're specifically like, oh, this will stop your children from having autism.

Crystal (93:23)

Okay.

Robert Evans (93:23)

No, it won't.

Crystal (93:24)

No, no, no, no. I mean, like, there are, there are respected organizations speaking up right now kind of like about, like, the facts about the studies about what's real. So there's like Physicians for Reproductive Health are, you know, saying, like, there's decades of study of studies of Tylenol being safe to take during pregnancy. There's acog, which is a big professional membership organization of like tens of thousands of OB GYNs saying, like, hey, Tylenol is safe during pregnancy. So there's been decades of studies on Tylenol use in pregnancy. Some of the studies published in the Journal of the American Medical association that says how safe it is. So, like, it is, it is, it is safe. It is absolutely 100 safe to take to treat pain and fever during pregnancy. So, like, you know, in terms of, like, who can you look to, like, definitely look to the OBGYNs right now and what they're saying and the physician and these respected organizations because they're going to tell you the truth. But the problem is that this information is not reaching the public.

Francis (94:25)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (94:26)

And instead, yeah, they're just getting the President of the United States and all of these just weird conspiracy people that they've installed as the people running the US Medical establishment being like, oh, no, actually this is really bad for you for reasons.

Crystal (94:43)

Yeah, it's all very vague. It's not really backed by my, like, decades of medical research. And like, also too, there's so many people who have not taken any medication during pregnancy and they still have children who are autistic.

Mia Wong (94:59)

Yeah, it's, It's. It's just like. It's just absolutely ridiculous. And like, any way you look at the numbers, like, in terms of, you know, if you look at, like, the increasing rates of Tylenol usage by pregnant people versus, like, autistic kids, it's not like the Tylenol usage goes up way higher, higher. And then the autistic numbers don't change that much relative to it.

Garrison Davis (95:19)

It's just like.

Mia Wong (95:20)

It's all just, like, nonsense.

Crystal (95:23)

Well, so there is the eugenics of it all. And there's also the aspect that we've been dealing with, with the rampant abortion bans and the criminalization of pregnancy that we've been seeing over, honestly, over the decades. It's about controlling bodies. And like, this is also with trans healthcare too. Like, it's, it's about. It's about eugenics, about kind of this necro politics of choosing who lives and dies eyes and being able to choose everything about a person's body, even how they're gestated. You know, like, oh, the. The parents shouldn't take this and they shouldn't do this. And then it opens up when it comes to control and surveillance and criminalization of a pregnant person, that can go in so many different directions because, you know, they're telling you not to take Tylenol. If they just randomly chose Tylenol, they can randomly choose anything. They could talk about epidurals because there is, like, this idea that you suffer and that you shouldn't treat the fever and that you should experience pain during pregnancy, just like that one quote that you shared about his wife. So they're gonna, like, start targeting other things. And also there's already so much criticism and control and judgment and stigma over things like if you're working while you're pregnant, if you're drinking coffee while you're pregnant, if you're eating certain things. There's already so much, like, policing over pregnant bodies, bodies without even touching on abortion. But, like, they're also trying to control how you even dispose of pregnancies. Like, if you're looking at the states that are requiring you to call the police if you have a miscarriage. So it's like they want to control how you miscarry, how you have an abortion.

Francis (96:59)

Yeah.

Crystal (96:59)

Worth noting, too, because this is absolutely connected to abortion and abortion pills. If the government is coming out and saying that Tylenol is. Causes autism and it's not safe to take while you're pregnant or to use to treat a fever in young children, children, then they can also say things like the abortion pill is not safe because they've been trying to get the FDA to take away the approval of mifepristone, saying that it's dangerous. And you know, if they're going to say that Tylenol is dangerous and causes autism, then it's like it's going to be so easy for them to say that the abortion pill is deadly as well.

Mia Wong (97:33)

And they've already been doing this with vaccines in terms of like, like they've been restricting access to vaccines that people without pre existing conditions, which admittedly is a lot of people. Like the list of pre existing conditions is really long and you should just try to get them anyways. But like, yeah, like this isn't a hypothetical. They are already doing this with vaccines. A thing that we do all need in order to not get horribly sick and die from plagues. A thing which there are many of right now.

Crystal (97:59)

Yeah. And I think that this definitely goes to show how topics like abortion and, and early pregnancy loss and miscarriage and abortions later in pregnancy, like the way they've been talking about this has spread to all aspects of pregnancy and it's spreading to other areas too. Like, so when we haven't addressed the bans and the stigma and the criminalization, it's, it's been spreading, it's spread to vaccines, it's spreading to trans health care. It's just, it's just, I feel like I've been watching this black hole just grow and grow and grow over the years and, and just take away our access to these, to these really basic medical things and yeah, like, I just see like we let it happen with abortion and then now all of a sudden, now we can't take Tylenol during pregnancy because it causes autism.

Mia Wong (98:48)

Yep.

Crystal (98:59)

There's so much to say about the eugenics and autism aspect of this. So much to say more than like we can say right now.

Mia Wong (99:07)

Don't worry, there will be another episode of this show about that with some doctors next week.

Crystal (99:14)

Probably just like focusing right now on like pregnancy and in policing pregnant bodies and, and Tylenol and pain management and what's real, the fact that Tylenol is, is safe to take while pregnant and doesn't cause autism. You know, it's really dwelling on that. But like, there is a lot to say. There's a lot to say about the implications of this where, like where this came from in our society and where it's going. And it's all really horrifying.

Mia Wong (99:42)

Yeah, it's It's. It's exceptionally bleak. But I do think, and this is, I think, a theme we're going to be returning to a lot in the coming days and weeks. But, like. Like, the only silver lining for this is that this shit is not popular. It's just not. People hate it. People hate the administration. They have been hating the administration. Every day it goes by, they hate it more. You know, and this. This is part of the control strategy.

James Stout (100:09)

Right.

Mia Wong (100:09)

Part of the reason why they're making these incredibly draconian moves into, like, authoritarian moves into the domestic sphere is because it's a way of suppressing dissent. And they have to do that, that they have to suppress dissents and they have to take things from us, and they have to continue to try to just beat everyone into submission because they can't do it through actual persuasion. What they have is the violence of the state, and they're going to try to keep doing that. But the violence of the state only functions insofar as people allow it to function. And this has always been sort of the secret of the United States, which is that a bunch of the things that they're doing or their crackdowns that they're attempting to do are. Are effectively unenforceable because people simply refuse to cooperate with them. And, you know, this is a field. Well, I mean, I don't know. Until they just straight up ban Tylenol. This is a thing where, I guess we're mostly just trying to spread information. But, like, the things that they do can be opposed. And when people oppose them en masse, they lose. And, I don't know, I want to give people a little tiny bit of hope.

Crystal (101:15)

You want to be positive?

Francis (101:16)

Yeah. Yeah.

Crystal (101:17)

So the deterioration of public health in the United States is absolutely state violence.

Mia Wong (101:23)

Yeah.

Crystal (101:24)

Focusing on Tylenol and stigmatizing autism and people with autism is, like, distracting from so many things that are actual public health emergencies. So when they're talking about pregnancy and they're talking about Tylenol and autism, there are so much more severe things going on in the United States right now when it comes to both the health of pregnant people and infants. So there's the. The black maternal mortality crisis, which is so severe in so many states that it's just constantly like, abortion bans have made that even worse. There's terrible infant mortality rates rising in states. So, for example, Mississippi declared infant deaths an emergency because they halted that CDC information data collection program. So Mississippi declared a public health emergency from rising infant mortality. And there's also. I mean, I believe that the abortion bans are a medical crisis as well.

Mia Wong (102:23)

Yeah.

Crystal (102:23)

And there's also huge OBGYN deserts in this country. Like we're seeing like the loss of obgyn health providers where people can't access a OBGYN for, for miles and miles and miles. And there's just entire, entirely a lack of providers. These are all very, very serious public health emergencies. And yet they're talking about autism.

Mia Wong (102:47)

Yeah, well, and also as much as they're talking about is they're making all of these crises worse.

Garrison Davis (102:51)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (102:52)

Like specifically the opgy crisis.

Robert Evans (102:54)

It's like.

Mia Wong (102:54)

Yeah, I don't know, they, they've been kicking a bunch of people off of their access to, off their access to government insurance. And like what does that do? Oh wait, hold on. It just absolutely annihilates the income and revenue base of a bunch of hospitals that already like weren't making much money in rural areas. And so more of them close because they lose their revenue sources and suddenly all of these crises just continue to get worse.

Crystal (103:15)

Yeah. So we have like this stigmatization of autism. Parents of autistic children, trans people, trans children. When like they're focusing on this and they're vilifying and dogpiling and stigmatizing and, and, and all of these things, these groups, while there is this snowballing of crises, the damage already just from Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022, like it's like been three years and there's just been this like cascading, just ever increasing public health disasters from it. And, and yet we're, we're stigmatizing vulnerable people.

Francis (103:56)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (103:57)

In the ways that we've been talking about. Right. Their ideology is about inflicting suffering on vulnerable people because they think that it's good. And that's a thing that's, you know, I mean, just obviously incompatible with public health as, as a concept. Which is, you know, part of why they're sort of dismantling it. Part of it is that these people are all like selling their own weird anti vaccine grift stuff that they've been selling for years and years and years and years years. And all of this has just sort of come together into just this sort of abyss where every, all, everything that was the public health infrastructure in this country which was insufficient to begin with, has just been disappearing more and more into.

Crystal (104:40)

Yeah. The erosion of our public health. You know, this isn't like new this, decades of, you know, this coming into being where we are right now. But it's been really horrible to watch As a healthcare worker, as somebody who cares about just like everyone being able to get like evidence based care, have access to medical providers and then also the ability to do whatever kind of healthcare they need to be able to do on their own as well, to just have this solid medical information. And then also like there's the public education of it all too, because already like, there's this attack on public education which autistic children need a lot of support in order to thrive and schools are, you know, they could be equipped to do that. Where I've seen wonderful programs and wonderful education services that really set people up for success. And this goes for like everyone. Obviously, like any child is going to benefit from this, but it just, it makes everything so much worse. Like parents and families and just autistic people just don't get enough support, period.

James Stout (105:45)

Yeah.

Crystal (105:45)

Just like trans people as well. And then we're all just being thrown under the bus for the capitalist class and the elites so they can continue to like, you know, hide their, their pedophilia rings and like the whole, just the fact that they're all like, because like what you said earlier about rfk. Yeah. These are all a bunch of child molesters telling us that we're not strong or brave enough to endure pain that we can easily treat with the, the medical technology that we have.

Robert Evans (106:16)

Yep.

Crystal (106:17)

And I feel like I normally, I feel like I used to not talk, talk like this. I used to not be like child molesters in the government. Like, I kind of feel like, but I'm like, this is literally where we are right now somehow. So here I am like, you know, talking about Tylenol being safe for pregnant people, Tylenol not causing autism, and then talking about the fact that our government is run, run by a bunch of pedophiles. Not quite where I expected to be if you had talked to me like eight years ago maybe.

Mia Wong (106:45)

It's really something, something.

Crystal (106:47)

It's, it's really wild to be talking about this right now. And like we knew this was coming too. Like, I, I, there's been months of whispers where it's like, oh yeah, they're going to say Tylenol causes autism. So like this, I knew this was coming somehow. I don't even know how. It's just, I feel, Yeah, I feel like it's all very transparent and like there's leaks and there's whatever. But I, like, I knew this was coming for months. And yet here we are. Here we are.

Mia Wong (107:11)

Yeah. And, and I don't know, I think that's as good of a place to end unless you have anything else you want to make sure you get in.

Crystal (107:17)

I just want to say again that it's safe to take Tylenol during pregnancy and it doesn't cause autism.

Mia Wong (107:22)

Yeah, absolutely.

Crystal (107:24)

And tell everyone you know that and share good resources like acog, acog Physicians for Reproductive Health PRH I believe is their initials acronym.

Mia Wong (107:38)

We will put links to stuff in the description of this.

Crystal (107:41)

Yeah and also ask your doctor about medication that you should take whether you're pregnant or not. You know it's cool to ask your doctor stuff like just ask them questions.

Mia Wong (107:53)

Yeah, yeah that is what they are there for.

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Andrew Sage (110:24)

Good day, Good day and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew sage andrewism on YouTube and.

James Stout (110:31)

I'm here with James Stout. For those of you wondering what my last name is.

Andrew Sage (110:35)

Hello. Hello. And for those who couldn't tell by my accent or maybe don't recognize it, I'm from Trinidad, but born and based. And you may or may not have seen Trinidad's name being called up in JD Vance and Marco Rubio's mouths lately, particularly with the moves that the US has been making in the Caribbean Sea as of late. So to provide a little context on the inciting incident of this episode, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamala Passad possessor, expressed very passionate support for the U.S. s recent move on an alleged Venezuela based drug vessel. I say alleged because no proof has been provided that it was a drug vessel or anything of that nature that the United States struck. The Prime Minister said, and I quote, that she has no sympathy for traffickers and that the US should kill them all violently.

James Stout (111:34)

Jesus Christ.

Andrew Sage (111:36)

For those. I mean, most people not know much about Trinidadian politics. I don't expect them to. Our current prime minister, she won this year actually, and she kind of carried on that trend of incumbents losing their elections that took place, you know, post COVID lockdown 2020 era.

James Stout (111:55)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (111:56)

So the previous prime minister was Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley. He was Prime Minister for like 10 years. He became prime minister after she lost her last stint as prime minister because she's kind of a mess in a couple different ways. I mean, both parties are pretty corrupt, but they're corrupt and incompetent in some very critical ways. Corrupt and racist and a couple other issues. That trend continues with her new candidacy. You know, she is not only failing the country in some crucial ways. You know, she canceled our Independence Day celebrations. She fired like thousands of workers from a local agency that's responsible for landscaping around the country, basically cutting grass and clearing drains, that sort of thing. Fired like thousands of them. Right. So now the entire country is overgrown. And all those people have like right before their children have to go to school, you know, they had no income to support them. So it's like a lot of cruelty, a lot of corruption, a lot of incompetence and, and in this particular case, diplomatic carelessness, recklessness because she goes, and she says this despite the fact that not only did the US violate a law, international law, but also we are small. You may not be able to see Trinidad on a lot of maps because we are small. You know, we may be one of the more populated Caribbean countries, but we are still small. Venezuela is our closest neighborhood neighbor. And she has been exceedingly irresponsible in the ways that she's approached Venezuela because the previous administration actually had an agreement with Venezuela regarding the extraction of their fossil fuels in the waters that are between Trinidad and Venezuela. We had to get permission from the United States to get into that agreement with Venezuela because Venezuela is currently under sanctions. And for the longest time, Trinidad has had to walk this sort of tightrope of playing nice with both the US and Venezuela. She's basically coming, guns blazing, to make statements that appear to be openly aggressive towards Venezuela, towards Venezuelan sovereignty, and so on. Now, her reasoning is that Trinidad has been ravaged by a lot of violence and addiction that has been caused by these drug cartels coming from South America, including Venezuela. This is a very real issue. The illegal gun and drug and human trafficking that takes place between South America and Trinidad. We are transshipment point for that sort of activity. And that kind of thing brings violence. The issue is that while she may be able to say things like, may God bless and protect the members of the U.S. military, the U.S. and the U.S. military are in part responsible for the violence that has ravaged Latin America, but is also not even particularly interested, regardless of what their words may say, they're not particularly interested in dealing with the drug issue. At the end of the day, it really comes down to regime change and a desire to control Venezuela's resources. But let me take it back for a moment and, and provide a longer history of what's going on.

James Stout (115:17)

Right.

Andrew Sage (115:17)

The United States became independent in 1776. Trinidad became a colony of the UK in 1797, not long after that. Because prior to being under the uk, Trinidad was under the Spanish. And while being under the Spanish was settled by French settlers. So it was like Spanish law, French settlers, and then later on, UK governance. And so the War of 1812, which is, you know, the war took place between the US and the uk, led to some African Americans siding with the UK in exchange for emancipation and in exchange for their services in that war, that group of people which became known as the Americans, were resetting, settled in South Trinidad. And I'm actually descendant from some of them, allegedly. So there is this history of exchange taking place between us and Trinidad. You Know, During World War II, America had military bases established in Trinidad. We had Waller Field, which was commissioned in 1941, and the Chagramas Naval Base, which was fully operational in 1943. And that provided strategic naval and air facilities in the Caribbean, thanks to the Destroyers for Bases agreement with the British. The British got destroyers and the US got bases in the British colonies.

James Stout (116:45)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (116:46)

Now, thankfully, the base was scaled back and eventually decommissioned and returned to Trinidad. Was controlled by 1963. But that took a lot of protest and marching to accomplish. It was a whole thing of trying to get Yankees Yankee out of Trinidad. Yankee did provide some benefits to Trinidad in terms of establishing infrastructure for highways and that sort of thing. But there was also a not so positive social impact of the American presence. You know, one Calypsonian known as the Mighty Sparrow sang in a song called Jean and Dinah, that's basically the American presence funded a lot of households due to prostitution.

James Stout (117:30)

Oh, wow.

Andrew Sage (117:31)

And the song was basically about how Gene and Dinah had to go and find other work now that the Americans were leaving. So after the failure of the West Indies Federation and the independence of countries like Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago from the uk, the location of the former military base Chagramas also ended up becoming the temporary location of the capital of the short lived West Indies Federation. After the West Indies Federation broke apart, Chagramos became the place where the Treaty of Chagramos was signed between the newly independent countries of Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica and so forth, which established Caricom, the Caribbean Community and Common Market in 1973. Caricom will come up later. CARICOM is kind of like, like if the EU was like entirely toothless and didn't really do much of anything. It's a nice idea of trying to get a bit of regional collaboration and inspiration and trade and movement, but it's still more expensive to go between islands than it is to go from an island to the us. So Caricom hasn't exactly succeeded in facilitating island movement that thus far, but CARICOM will come up later on.

Robert Evans (118:51)

Right.

Andrew Sage (119:01)

Santa got its independence in 1962. We became a republic in 1976. And we were under the prime ministership of Dr. Eric Williams from 1962 to 1981. Now, now Dr. Eric Williams was our first Prime Minister and so he's respected in that regard. He also wrote Capitalism and Slavery, which was a really impactful piece of literature on the role of capitalism in the abolition of slavery, or rather the economic motivations for the abolition of slavery as opposed to the claimed moral virtue of the British Empire in abolishing slavery when it did.

James Stout (119:40)

Right, right.

Andrew Sage (119:41)

So he did some good academic work and he was instrumental in the establishment of Trinidad and Tobag independent country. But he also suppressed the black power movements that took place a little while after we became independent because of his failures. He also banned the Trinidadian born American immigrant Kwame Ture, otherwise known as Tohlee Carmichael, which is like a world renowned socialist and Pan Africanist.

James Stout (120:04)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (120:05)

Right. So through the 70s we had an oil boom and we became really, really industrialized. We had another boom in 2000, so. And unlike other Caribbean countries, we didn't have to be dependent on tourism. And so we ended up going in a different developmental direction. The thing about the oil booms is that really had more to do with certain happenings in the Middle east than really anything that we did. You know, the oil boom just kind of fell in our laps in that way.

James Stout (120:31)

Right.

Andrew Sage (120:32)

1983, there was an invasion of Grenada by the United States after Maurice Bishop's coup. And the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, Dominica, Barbados and Jamaica called for the US to come and assist in dealing with this Marxist Leninist gaining power in Grenada, while Trinidad and Tobago, the UK and Canada criticized the invasion. It was a violation of international law according to the UN General Assembly. But as usual, the law doesn't really apply to the US So nothing really came out out of that. Otherwise the relation between the US and Trinidad and Tobago has been, you know, we have a lot of trade, you know, we have a large diaspora in the us. There's a lot of travel between the countries. Most of our tourism comes from the us we have a lot of American based oil and gas companies established in Trinidad. And our whole consumerist culture is basically a copy in many ways of what the US does. When they sneeze, we catch a cold, as the saying goes. Yeah, I know I'm establishing a lot of context, but it's to give an idea of how we are where we are right now. Right, yeah. So next door to Trinidad we have Venezuela and we really had this sort of diplomatic relationship going on with Maduro and the USA at the same time time under the former Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, who was of the same party as our First Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams. Right. With the issues taking place in Venezuela right now, there's been a large influx of migrants from Venezuela living in Trinidad and Tobago right now. Well, mainly Trinidad, yeah. Right. I have a lot of Venezuelans now living in Trinidad, some of them legally, some of them illegally. Prior to that recent wave, and by recent, I'm talking, talking like 2016, 2017, prior to that wave, we had Venezuelans in Trinidad and we had Trinidadians in Venezuela because we're neighbors.

James Stout (122:36)

Right. It's close.

Andrew Sage (122:37)

So you had Trinidadians involved in the mining sector in Venezuela. You had Venezuelans involved in the cocoa plantations in Trinidad. So we've always been a very mixed up group. And this idea of strict border control between the countries is a very recent, politically motivated situation. Now with everything going on in Latin America thanks to US Intervention, and the US Is constantly feeling war on drugs, we have a lot of violence passing between our territories. You know, guns, drugs, human trafficking, as I mentioned.

James Stout (123:16)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (123:17)

And then Venezuela now is. I mean, their hands are not clean. I'm not saying any country's hands are clean in this. I'm not trying to pee into good guy or bad guy dichotomy. You know, Venezuela is still holding strong to this claim that they have from since before their independence that like more than half of Guyana actually belongs to them. Guyana, by the way, is an English speaking Caribbean culture country bordering Venezuela, Suriname and Brazil. Yeah, so Guyana recently explored and discovered a bunch of, of offshore reserves which, you know, they're really excited to capitalize upon. And, you know, they have a lot of deals and agreements taking place where that is concerned. All of a sudden, Venezuela's like, you know, that piece of land that we've long been saying is ours. Yeah, that, that really is ours. And they started, you know, they're putting out maps claiming that, yeah, most of Guyana is actually Venezuela and all these different things. So it's a very, is a very threatening situation because Venezuela is a military power in its own right.

James Stout (124:25)

Yeah, right.

Andrew Sage (124:26)

Guyana, Trinidad, we don't have much military prowess. So in a sense, I understand why both Trinidad and Guyana are cozying up with the US Right now. But at the same time, this recent administration's cozying up has not been the most tactful because we do house a diplomatic approach that has worked well for us for a very long time. Now the argument could be made that maybe that diplomatic response, that diplomatic balance cannot be maintained forever. Our neutrality cannot persist as things are heating up in the region. But we had an opportunity to respond carefully, to respond in a measured fashion to the U.S. s recent move with bombing the alleged drug boat, and we did not do that.

James Stout (125:18)

Yeah, that's a pretty squandered chance to just like say, you know, we should respect international law here. And, you know, like, the easiest thing to say would be, like, there's a set of procedures for doing this. We could follow them. Yeah. It's not hard to say that that.

Andrew Sage (125:35)

Deal we had with Venezuela, that was a deal that we were able to negotiate under Biden. That was the deal that when Trump came into power, he just took back. He was like, nah, y' all can't do that anymore. So with Trump going in this either you're with us or against us kind of direction that calls for extra, you know, care, and, you know, you're kind of dealing with a bomb that you're trying to work around. Right?

James Stout (126:00)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (126:01)

But in the same year that Trump got elected, Kamala Passad, possessor, our current prime minister, got elected, elected. You know, she's known for being reckless. She's known for being a bit of a drunkard. She's passionately pro Trump. She was a Covid conspiracist. In the vein of one of her famous quotes is sunlight will kill Covid. She's passionately pro us, passionately anti Maduro, passionately racist, and very much anti Caricom.

James Stout (126:33)

Okay.

Andrew Sage (126:33)

Right now, there's a bit of a history there because Trinidad and Guyana are two Caribbean countries with very large East Indian populations. As in Indians from India.

James Stout (126:45)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (126:46)

When the West Indies Federation was getting its start, both Guyana and Trinidad's Indian populations had the concern that considering the rest of the Caribbean as black majority, that they would not be adequately represented in a West Indies Federation. And so that sort of opposition to that level of regional unity seems to have persisted within some circles of East Indian or Indo Caribbean politics.

James Stout (127:15)

Okay, interesting.

Andrew Sage (127:16)

Not. All right. But some seem to have an opposition to too much Caricom involvement because they feel that their voices will be drowned out by. By black people. And, I mean, there's a lot of anti blackness in that community, but that is not the subject of this particular episode. So that sort of opposition to the West Indies Federation seems to have carried over into opposition towards Caricom. And when there was low turnout among PNM supporters, which is the party of Dr. Rowley and Dr. Williams, as well as some third party momentum taking place.

James Stout (127:52)

Place.

Andrew Sage (127:52)

Kamala ended up coming into power.

Robert Evans (127:54)

Right.

Andrew Sage (127:55)

And when she came into power, she's making these moves, making these statements and disregarding Caricom and disregarding caricom's opinion, disregarding Caricom involvement in Trinidad's moves and decisions. As a small country, Caricom is supposed to be our way of beefing up our voice on the international stage. And she's basically saying, bun, that, you know, we will do our own Thing, Right, yeah. Oh, I forgot to mention another thing about Kamala, just for a bit of context, Cambridge Analytica came into Trinidad and basically ran an experiment using our elections to test out some new strategies they ended up taking into the us Right. They practiced their electoral manipulation in Trinidad, which is how Kamala won in the first. The first time she was elected back in 2010, 2015, it was through collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. So, again, yet another connection between the US and Trinidad, for better and for worse.

James Stout (129:02)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (129:13)

So what's up happening now is that, you know, on the 2nd of September, the US bombed a pirogue and claimed to kill 11 people and claimed that it was a drug boat, despite the fact that they haven't provided any proof that the footage was extremely grainy. And even if they did have proof that it was a drug boat, summary execution on the high seas is not exactly in line with international law.

James Stout (129:37)

Right, right.

Andrew Sage (129:38)

If these are, quote, unquote, violent drug traffickers who are killing people and doing all these ridiculous things, you're supposed to bring them in, you're supposed to interrogate them, you're supposed to go through a certain procedure, right?

James Stout (129:52)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (129:53)

All the smoke and mirrors about drugs and fighting drugs and all these different things, it really is that smoke and mirrors, because if it was about that, they would be trying to get information to target the heart of the operation. What the US Is doing right now is flexing, right?

James Stout (130:09)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (130:10)

It's flexing their muscles in the region to show what it is willing to do. It's trying to poke and prod Venezuela to respond in kind so that it has the excuse it needs or the further excuse to intervene. There was another strike, another boat bombing on 15 September, and there was another strike on 19 September against another boat. And. And it's a very, very worrying place to be and time to be alive.

James Stout (130:43)

Right.

Andrew Sage (130:43)

I would say, you know, we have Guyana as a player. You know, they're still working with US oil companies, they're collaborating with us. They have this territorial anxiety with regard to Venezuela, and they are part of caricom, Guyana's part of caricom, trying to, you know, work it out through that channel and through other channels out. Venezuela, in response to Kama's energy, has basically put out statements talking about a. This karma lady kind of crazy or. Sure about that. Because if any US missile comes out of Trinidad, we are responding to Trinidad.

James Stout (131:17)

Right. And Trinidad is like not the same as the U.S. right? Like. Like that. It's not like a mutually assured destruction.

Andrew Sage (131:24)

Exactly. So she is, you know, speaking very reckless. And in the meantime, the Venezuela is saying response, you know, if any sort of US incursion is launched out of Trinidad, which she invited, by the way, she said, hey, the US could base whatever they want in here if they want. We are standing ready. We. Right. I don't know where she got this we from. Right. But she's saying, oh, yeah, they could come and they could launch stuff from here. And Venezuela, like, y' all are talking kind of crazy right now. You should care about your citizens because we know your citizens don't like what you're doing, so why are you doing this kind of thing? Yeah, and it's bigger than just Venezuela, the US And Trinidad, because Venezuela is also aligned with Russia. Right. It's, I believe, Russia's only ally in the Western hemisphere.

James Stout (132:15)

Yeah, right.

Andrew Sage (132:16)

And while the drug issue and the crime issue is a significant concern, most of the drugs are coming from colonial in the first place, which the US Is not currently targeting. Right. And at the end of the day, as I mentioned earlier, it seems to be coming down to regime change and resources and the control of Venezuela's resources. You know, we are now in a situation where our fishermen are having to stay home out of fear.

James Stout (132:44)

Oh, geez.

Andrew Sage (132:45)

That their fishing boats could be struck out of the water. You know, we are in a situation where Kama's fan base is just as Trumpian and cultish as the marker base seemingly seems to be perfectly fine with what's going on. Although in some ways I think that that might even be astroturfed or inflated artificially, because there was recently an expose that determined a lot of the pro unc, which is Communist Party. The pro unc, pro Communist Party. Similar buzz that occurs on social media. It's bot driven. Like, you go onto these profiles and they're bots, just, you know, fake names, fake profile pictures, AI posts.

James Stout (133:29)

Oh, geez. Yeah, yeah. It's just entirely fabricated.

Andrew Sage (133:33)

This is also at a time when the US is building a massive embassy in our country, when camels seemingly opening the floodgates to military collaboration with the US where we are dealing with our own economic woes and crime woes and so on. And we also have the largest Chinese embassy in the region. We have a lot of collab with China. We recently made moves to recognize Palestine with a Palestinian diplomat now residing in the country. It feels like we are putting ourselves in a very, very risky position. And whether or not we could have done more or less to get out of this position, considering the US has its backyard Policy with regard to the rest of the Americas, with regard to the fact that Trump has created this Department of War, that the US Seems to be flailing around as a dying empire. Does the fact that the Caribbean has been called out so frequently with violence in an effort to manufacture consumption consent for what seems to be coming next with the fact that there was a field intervention to overthrow Maduro in the past, known as Operation Gideon.

James Stout (134:47)

Right.

Andrew Sage (134:47)

Back in 2020. All this has me a bit stressed.

Robert Evans (134:52)

Yeah.

James Stout (134:53)

I mean, there was a particularly insane attempt to overthrow Maduro in 2020. Right. The silver core thing.

Andrew Sage (135:00)

Yeah. Yeah. They had this, this American security firm and. And some Venezuelan dissidents just. They tried to infiltrate Venezuela by sea and basically as soon as they landed, they got arrested.

James Stout (135:13)

Yeah. Yeah. I think some of them got detained, like, by Venezuelan fishermen who realized they only had BB guns. It sucks that, like, having spent time in Venezuela and with Venezuelan people a lot, you know, for years now, it's Venezuelan people who are going to pay the price for all of this. Right. Like, it's not. And potentially, potentially people in Trinidad and Tobago as well. Like, they very clearly do not want Maduro to be running their country. Right. Like, it's. Yeah, saw that in the election. We saw that in the protests after election. They have every reason to. To want to leave their country and go somewhere safe, but that's not possible for many of them. Yeah.

Andrew Sage (135:54)

I mean, like I said, there's a lot of Venezuelans in Trinidad right now.

James Stout (135:57)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (135:58)

So any moves that Venezuela is making, they're obviously going to make with consideration to the fact they have their own people in Trinidad. That as well.

James Stout (136:05)

Yeah, exactly. And like, they're being demonized even though they've done everything they can to separate themselves from Maduro. And, like, they are being.

Andrew Sage (136:14)

Yeah, there's unfortunately a lot of xenophobia in Trinidad.

James Stout (136:17)

Yeah. It's really sad. Like, and we see it here too, right, this allegation that they're all gang members, which is, like, if we think that gang violence is bad in Venezuela and in parts of Venezuela it is bad, then surely it would make sense to people who don't want any part in that might leave and go somewhere else else.

Andrew Sage (136:34)

Yeah.

James Stout (136:34)

And rather than supporting them, we're just killing, like, the, The. The lowest tier people. Right. Like, even if we entertain the idea that the boat could have been carrying drugs and we put aside the fact that that hasn't been proven, or the boats, plural, the people driving the boats are not the people, like, making the calls here. But, yeah, they're the people being killed.

Andrew Sage (136:58)

Exactly, exactly. It's the same principle with all the, these, these, these drug busts and, and, and, and gang busts to take place in Trinidad. You know, they go and they, they roll in and they, they arrest these small fries. But the, the big boss is calling the shots unharmed.

James Stout (137:14)

Yeah.

Andrew Sage (137:15)

You know, the multinational criminal empires that are moving the people, moving the drugs, moving the guns in the region, they're untouched.

James Stout (137:24)

Yeah. And like even the Maduro's two nephews, like they were released after they were detained for trying to run drugs for Haiti. Right. Like, like you say the people making the real decisions are largely insulated from all this. It's, it's working people in Venezuela who like, they don't have other opportunities. Right. Like I have heard the most disheartening stories, especially from Venezuelan fishermen. Right. Like, like their economy is so bad that they are not able to put fuel in their boats. It wouldn't be economical to put fuel in their fishing boats. Boats. Even if they caught a full load of fish, they wouldn't be able. No one has any money to buy the fish at a high price, so they can't pay for the fuel. This is a country which sits on a massive oil reserve. Yeah. But yet people can't afford to put fuel in their fishing boats. Like, you know, these people are victims of a system that has left them with very few opportunities. And the way we're responding is by killing them and by destabilizing a whole part of the world that no one asked for this there, you know, apart from apparently your prime minister.

Andrew Sage (138:33)

Yeah. So, I mean, this was a very rambly episode. More rambly than my usual. But I just wanted to get the word out on what's going on in my corner of the globe, to let the Americans in the audience know to, you know, please do what you can to stand to speak out again against this American intervention, to educate yourself on what's going on. For the Trinis who may be in the audience, you know, probably hunker down and have a crisis bag or emergency bag set up if worse comes to worse and everyone else really just get the knowledge and do what you can in your area to disrupt this machine. Yeah, yeah. That's it for from me. All power to all the people. Peace.

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Garrison Davis (141:48)

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder Our weekly newscast cover what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans.

James Stout (141:59)

That's right.

Garrison Davis (142:00)

This week we're covering the week of September 18th to September 24th.

James Stout (142:05)

Luckily, nothing that remarkable has happened, so this will be a short one.

Garrison Davis (142:09)

Another famously slow news week in the United States of America and abroad. Only the most stable out of all democratic countries.

James Stout (142:17)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (142:18)

Oh yeah. I mean, of the democracies, we're easily the most, most democratic.

James Stout (142:24)

Shining city on a hill.

Robert Evans (142:26)

On a hill. That's right. That's right.

James Stout (142:28)

Elevated.

Robert Evans (142:29)

Yeah.

James Stout (142:30)

So let's talk about this guy who opened fire at An ICE detention facility to start off with then.

Robert Evans (142:35)

Sure. That's the big news story today, is that there's been a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas. This is not the first shooting at a North Texas ICE facility this year. Two detainees were killed and one injured. Last I saw. They were in an ICE van, it looks like, like. And the shooter killed themselves pretty quickly. It seems like, yeah, like fired a few rounds and then killed themselves.

James Stout (142:58)

Yeah. Kash Patel, who's the director of the FBI, shared pretty quickly after shooting on X.com, the everything website, a photo of a stripper clip of what looks a lot like 8 millimeter Mauser ammunition. One round had the word anti ICE written on it in blue pen in block capital. Let's.

Robert Evans (143:17)

Yeah, lazy. We can agree on that. Like, especially compared to etching them onto a bullet. This has been, I think, immediately adopted by God. I mean, it seems like I haven't done a deep survey, but most of the liberals and leftists that I follow on both Twitter and Blue sky and on just looking at friends on Facebook have pretty immediate, immediately gone after this as a false flag or something.

Garrison Davis (143:48)

Liberals and leftists casting doubt on the authenticity of this.

Robert Evans (143:53)

I'm seeing both people be like, well, the shooter must have been a right winger who lazily put anti ice on the bullet. Or this is some sort of federal conspiracy. But a lot of conspiracies here.

James Stout (144:02)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (144:03)

We simply don't know very much about the shooting at this point. It's unclear who the shooter was aiming for. If they were just aiming at ICE property, like unknowing, knowingly shooting, like migrant detainees inside.

Robert Evans (144:16)

Did they think whoever was in that van was a cop?

James Stout (144:19)

Yeah, yeah. Most of this lines up with the person being the sort of person who ends up being a high profile shooter. Right. Like they're not so much an ideologically motivated person as someone who, like you say, pretty, pretty low effort, wrote anti ice on their bullets at the last minute. Or not on the bullet, but on the casing that holds. Holds the fucking powder that the bullet goes in. I understand how that works.

Robert Evans (144:43)

And this just fits. And this is something I try to talk about pretty regularly. Shootings in the United States are heavily driven by memetic spread. Right. This has been happening since Columbine. There have been more than 100 copycat shootings of Columbine. And you do have shooters who are, let's say, original. Right. Like the Christchurch shooter, where they have new ideas for things to do in mass shootings. And then in the wake of those, because Whenever someone does something really new, it gets a lot of attention. Right. Like if there's a mass shooting that like gets a lot more media coverage than other ones, there will be people who copy it and who copy specific aspects of that shooting. And what I'm seeing with this guy that kind of just fits into that pattern is you had a really high profile North Texas shooting at a nice facility. Facility. Then you had a really high profile shooting where somebody with a hunting rifle shot at targets from the top of a roof. Right. And I'm seeing both of those things in this shooting. And I guess it's just like. Yeah, that, that kind of scans to me, you know?

James Stout (145:49)

Yeah. I guess another thing that has been fueling this conspiracism is that the guy used a Mauser rifle. Different type of Mauser rifle to the last one. It looks to me like a Ka98.

Robert Evans (146:02)

Yeah. The previous one was a very old Mauser that had been re barreled. The.30 06, which is a very common American round. This one looks to have been an original KAR98K that was still an 8mm Mauser, which was the gun the Nazis that was the standard battle rifle of the Wehrmacht during World War II.

James Stout (146:18)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (146:18)

It's not weird he would have access to that. He probably didn't have to buy it or pass a background check to get it. Looking at Garrison found his mother's face. Facebook, they'll talk some more about that. But one of the things that was on there is her talking about how she recently had to clean out like a barn and a farm that her grandfather and dad had owned and get rid of a lot of their stuff. It kind of makes sense to me. One of them very likely was a veteran. Could have brought back a car. 98K, as hundreds of thousands of GIs did.

James Stout (146:45)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (146:45)

From the war. And it would have just gotten passed down under the family. Right. Not weird.

James Stout (146:49)

Yeah. No way at all. Like you say, there are probably hundreds of thousands of these in the United States. States.

Robert Evans (146:54)

It was very common. And again, that's more or less probably what happened with the Charlie Kirk shooter. Why they had a Mauser. Right. Because it was their grandpa's rifle. Probably had it re barreled or whatever.

James Stout (147:07)

Yeah. Not uncommon at all for someone especially somewhere like Texas where those rifles, even if you didn't bring them back from World War I, could have been obtained by private party transfer any time in the last 75 years. So he'd been placed on probation for a 2016 marijuana offense for which he pled guilty and received deferred adjudication. I guess in Texas it's considered dealing marijuana, but it just seems to be that he was in possession of an amount greater than a quarter ounce, but less than £5. Maybe that's. I'm not that familiar with Texas law in that regard, but that is a thing that we found out about him. I'll just add that I don't know if that affects his ability to obtain a new firearm by doing a4473.

Robert Evans (147:53)

It's unclear, but it wouldn't have mattered in Texas because again, you can just meet a guy in a parking lot and buy a gun.

James Stout (148:00)

Exactly. Yeah.

Robert Evans (148:01)

It's not relevant, as I did when I lived in Texas almost every month.

James Stout (148:09)

What the great state of Texas.

Robert Evans (148:10)

Yeah.

James Stout (148:11)

It's easy to get a gun in Texas.

Robert Evans (148:13)

How did he get the gun? He could have gotten it by accident. He could have traded grocery groceries for it.

James Stout (148:18)

Like, we just don't know. But there's.

Robert Evans (148:20)

There's no barriers to him owning this.

Garrison Davis (148:22)

Yeah, we still don't know very much about this guy outside of his, like, public arrest record. I have like a LinkedIn that hasn't been updated in a few years. Yeah, he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary. We know that from Texas voting records. His mom's Facebook has a few political sentiments, but not expressed very commonly. She's posted a few times about Greg Abbott's pro gun stances.

Robert Evans (148:46)

Yeah, she was definitely like anti nra.

Garrison Davis (148:49)

Anti Abbott, anti nra. Upset about Abbott and Senator Corin and Cruz not taking action for gun control.

James Stout (149:00)

Damn. Yeah. This isn't the sort of gun that would ever be impacted by proposed gun control legislation. Right. Like, this is kind of central to the gun that people generally feel is reasonable to people to own.

Robert Evans (149:16)

Yes. Assuming that it was something that he inherited from a grandfather or great grandfather. Even like gun control bills that are looking at stopping face to face sales wouldn't stop this because the Dims always tend to include an exception for like, yeah, inheriting your dad's hunting rifle or something like that. Right, right.

James Stout (149:32)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (149:33)

On an old Google plus profile that's cached deep dive. His profile picture is like a Soviet communist caricature. But again, that is no indication of a recent political alignment. We still don't have a detailed look at this guy's politics, but people have been quick to call this a false flag when I think this appears more like a manifestation of this reality brain rottenness that we've talked about vis a vis the years of lead paint. Yeah, like brain rot. Inspires like ill thought or illogical actions that maybe appear akin to a half baked false flag, but this is like just a result of this weaponized unreality. Fiction inspires reality and then reality is seen through the lens of fiction. So people project onto the state this like 1950s CIA staging world events thing. Like everything's become so like Eddington pilled.

Mia Wong (150:29)

Yeah, I remember there. There was, there was a really big example of this someone. I forget exactly what it was like someone like graffitied like Chuck Schumer's garage or something. And everyone that I knew was convinced it was a false flag. Like it was all over Twitter, it was all over blue sky. Everyone thought it was a false flag. And it's just like all of that has just accelerated alongside this process that Garrison, you're describing, where you have the unreality tunnel of all this is a false flag. Then you have the other unreality tunnels that are like generating these people and they're just sort of like flowing parallel.

Garrison Davis (151:01)

To each other, mashing into each other.

Mia Wong (151:02)

Yeah, yeah.

Garrison Davis (151:04)

No, like people are so quick just to point the Black's rule image to discount every single thing that might confuse you at first glance. Like if you cannot understand that someone who is suicidal would do a crazy thing like this, inspired by recent events and scribble something onto a bullet, trying to shoot at ICE equipment or ICE agents, ICE property inadvertently hit, killing actual ICE detainees. If you have no way to understand that as a premise and the only way that you can see something like this happening is like a beat cop walking up to the crime scene realizing he has to alter it to fit an agenda like that is a way more disjointed and like broken reality to like force yourself to believe than just take the facts as they come and evaluate them slowly without jumping to a very quick assumption that satisfies your like, emotional reaction to a tragic event like this where multiple people have died.

James Stout (151:57)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (151:58)

With Trump in power again, I think it's entirely possible that oppositional political violence will take a form that resembles, quote, unquote, left wing attacks increasingly through the next few years. It's not 2018 anymore, and calling this guy a leftist right now doesn't make any sense. We don't have a clear look at his politics or if he really even had serious politics. But there are a lot of like, seemingly normal people who are depressed, demoralized, and are angry and might not write a stupid Twitter brained manifesto. And scribbling anti ICE gets a point across. Whether that's sincere or some Kind of ironic shitpost. If anti ICE sounds weird in comparison to fuck ICE or abolish ICE again, not everyone is part of of like the leftist Twitter brained terminology circle. It seems like he wasn't really thinking things through intently anyway as is common with these like quick copycat style attacks. And attacks like this are also sometimes just partially driven by suicide. Wanting to like do something as a part of the suicidal act. And like who knows what this shooter was aiming for or what they thought they were aiming for. We do not have enough information yet.

Robert Evans (153:18)

And it's worth noting NBC has interviewed his brother. Kind of sounds like from the text of the NBC article like they broke the news to him which is oof, that's fucked up. Not great.

James Stout (153:30)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (153:31)

But he said the last time he'd seen his brother was two weeks ago. He was not particularly political. He had never mentioned anything about ice. As far as his brother knew, he had no hatred or particular feelings about ice. Either way, he was registered as political independent. His brother said that his parents had a rifle and that he knew that his brother knew how to shoot it, but that he didn't think he knew how to make a shot like that. I don't think he knew anything about the quality of shot and it doesn't sound like he did anything but shoot into a van and then kill himself. So. He was recently unemployed and was looking to move to his parents land in Oklahoma. But he was raised in Allen. The whole unemployed didn't sound like he felt like he had a of lot of maybe opportunity going forward. His life was not going great. Like I, I don't know, like I, I'm not having trouble seeing this all add up.

Garrison Davis (154:20)

No, I mean the people who do some crazy shit like this often have a suicidal impulse running through an action like this and sometimes it manifests through something akin to like, you know, this is like a bad term but like suicide by cop. Right.

James Stout (154:34)

Mm.

Garrison Davis (154:34)

And like similar to what Robert said about like memetic and like copycat shootings. You can see some of what's on display here in the lineage of Luigi Mangione allegedly writing, denying to pose on bullets, then the Charlie Kirk shooting with stuff written on bullets. Yeah, but this is something that's now like in our zeitgeist. It doesn't require you to be like an online communist to do something like this. Nor is it relegated to a cop trying to manufacture a fake narrative to cover up a murder of immigrants to frame it in this left wing violence spike that the right is cursed currently really running With.

Robert Evans (155:11)

Yeah, look folks, if you are convinced that this is a conspiracy, I really doubt much that we say is going to convince you otherwise. Yeah, it's, it's kind of a, I don't want to go on too bleak of a rant here, but like, I almost feel like there's not really a point in trying to stand up for basic reality anymore because number one, people are increasingly going to dig into the reality tunnel that's most comforting to them and that's going to be the one where like they don't have to deal with the complexities of the world that like some people who on paper have espoused beliefs that are similar to you will also do fucked up shit. Right? Like that. That's just America that's living in a country with 400 million guns. That's living in a country where mass shootings go viral and where people act based off the virality of shootings that they watch or see or hear about.

Garrison Davis (156:03)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (156:03)

And honestly like, there's a part of me that feels like caring about the reality of the situation is almost a vanity project that like, it doesn't win you anything. It doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't, it doesn't help you make the world better. Maybe just embracing a fall like the right has gotten very far in embracing completely fraudulent realities, so why do I even care?

Garrison Davis (156:25)

I mean this is something I've talked about with like the flattening of tactics with the right adopting state sponsored cancel culture and the left getting more conspiratorial in, in like replies to, to tweets and blue sky posts, talking about how you know, the bullet markings have to be a false flag. I'm seeing people share memes like Pepe, like psyop memes, but like, like leftists and like, like oh wow, yeah, liberals. Sharing, sharing these memes that you used to just see under like unhinged right wing accounts to talk about how big world events are all staged or the feds are faking everything and it's, it's just this complete like swap, more accurately, a flattening of tactics and, and yeah, like, sucks to be in a position where I'm trying to be like slow and methodical in how I evaluate things and not just jump to posting funny reaction images about how everything is a psyop and how everything is a false flag.

Robert Evans (157:15)

Lmao, obvious psyop work done.

Garrison Davis (157:18)

Because that seems so much more emotionally compelling and instead I'm just tired.

Robert Evans (157:23)

Yeah, just tired all the time. Anyway, go on and believe whatever you Want. Let's continue the episode.

James Stout (157:29)

All right.

Robert Evans (157:30)

Let's talk about Antifa when we come back.

James Stout (157:32)

It comes from our mind control partners.

Garrison Davis (157:48)

Speaking of false flags. Antifa.

Robert Evans (157:51)

Antifa. I hardly. No, that doesn't. Garrison, just continue.

Garrison Davis (157:57)

I don't have anything to say about that.

Robert Evans (157:59)

All right, listen, folks, we're going to be doing, well, James is going to be doing with our collective lawyer, Moira Meltzer Cohen, an episode on what this actually means legally. And we will be doing that with a lawyer who is competent to speak on that more than we are. Yeah, I guess kind of what we want to do briefly in this episode is try and pull people back from a ledge if you're feeling like you're on one right now. Because it's bad. The current situation is bad. The administration is absolutely going after people on the left. They absolutely will be increasingly applying terrorism enhancements to charges for anything that can be deemed as politically motivated by the left. But this declaration, as people have pointed out, it's not like a thing, the president declaring something a domestic terrorist group. Like, it's not like none of this is anything that, like, has a legal force behind it, which doesn't mean, again, that they're not going to continue to go after people. But this is stuff that started under the Biden administration, applying RICO charges and whatnot.

Garrison Davis (158:54)

This is stuff that goes back to the 90s, like to the fucking green scare, right?

James Stout (159:00)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (159:00)

With. With environmental organizations. There is no real domestic terrorism designation. That's why they're trying to go after, like, funders and trying to find ties to, like, international groups, to. To have that terrorism like label make more legal sense. But Trump did actually sign an executive order to, quote, unquote, designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Quote, all relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist acts, actions conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions, against those who fund such operations, unquote.

James Stout (159:49)

I mean, like anything in the United States, if you're going to be prosecuted for a federal crime, the U.S. attorney has to bring a case against you, and there has to be to be a crime that you have committed.

Robert Evans (160:02)

Right.

James Stout (160:03)

The executive branch does not make law.

Garrison Davis (160:06)

But they're sure trying.

James Stout (160:07)

Legislative branch makes law.

Robert Evans (160:08)

They are trying.

James Stout (160:09)

They tried a lot last time as well. They did. I do want to remind Everyone that right now we still have courts. And as we're seeing in Los Angeles and in other places, grand juries are not returning indictments. When the AUSA brings a shoddy case or tries to prosecute someone for something that isn't a crime, that right now is the case. I'm not saying it will be forever. I'm saying that that's where we're at. And we can take a step back from the ledge if we know that. I hope for people who are understandably very afraid. Yes.

Robert Evans (160:43)

And I'm not saying don't be afraid because these are scary times. I'm just saying, like, don't assume that there's no point to fighting back or there's no way to do so that you'll just, like, wind up in a fucking camp. Because people are going to court right now and winning.

James Stout (161:00)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (161:01)

And those. Those court cases have not been invalidated by the administration. They're not just taking people into custody anyway. Like, people have repeatedly gotten off for charges of assaulting ICE officers because they were bullshit charges. Right?

James Stout (161:15)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (161:16)

So that's all I'm trying to say right now.

Mia Wong (161:19)

Yeah. You know, in terms of what these people are actually worried about, I think if you read the executive order, you can see. See what they're scared of. Right. You know, to do the mildly cringe and or quote, authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Garrison Davis (161:32)

You jd.

Mia Wong (161:36)

God, Blade stole. Is stealing. My.

Garrison Davis (161:41)

You and Prickster holding hands. Meme.

James Stout (161:43)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (161:44)

Voting andor apparently he's a big Star wars guy.

Mia Wong (161:46)

But if you, if. If you look at like, what's actually in there, right? Like, okay, I mean, some of his. That's like, obviously 2020 stuff. But then they're talking about, like, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officials and routine doxing and other threats against public figures and activists. Like, they are very worried about the fact that everywhere ICE appears, a whole bunch of people, most of whom are just like, random people in sweatpants. I have seen so many pictures from every single city that there's like, large scale ICE deployments are. There's just like, people in sweatpants who just, like, walk out of their houses and start taking pictures of ICE agents. They are very much concerned about this.

Robert Evans (162:22)

Right.

Mia Wong (162:22)

This is why they're trying to do this crackdown, because the resistance to this stuff is actually working well enough. You know, it's not that they, like, haven't been able to do ICE raids, but it has degraded their capacity to do it significantly. And that's why they're rolling this out so that they can, you know, as, as, as an attempt to intimidate people and as attempt to like get people to stop doing the stuff that they've been doing, which has been, been effective enough to really shift the way ICE has been forced to do these things.

James Stout (162:54)

Yeah, yeah. If you go back to one of the first incidents of people opposing an ICE raid, it was in south park in San Diego. Right. These people are not organized members of Antifa. South park is a pretty bougie place. It's like a vegan small plates restaurant and cocktail place.

Robert Evans (163:12)

There are people are pissed that their neighbors are getting abducted.

James Stout (163:14)

Yeah. 100%. They're just people who were there and were like, no, you, this seems wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Mia Wong (163:20)

And again, like we talked about this last week, like there, this is happening in Wheaton. Like people in evangelical college towns are seeing, are seeing ICE trucks roll up and like just walking over to them and yelling at them and filming them. And that sometimes is enough to make them just run away. And that's what this is. You know, they're terrified of the fact that they live in an entire country of people who don't like that you're dragging their neighbors away at gunpoint and that's a sign to do more and not, you know, sort of give in to fear. Every time there's some executive order bullshit that happens.

Robert Evans (163:56)

Yep.

James Stout (163:57)

Talking about things where the regime has not been as successful as it wanted to. Right. Let's talk about the case of the Guatemalan children. We spoke about this on Ed, I think last week, potentially the week before. Right. These were the kids who were grabbed from their beds over Labor Day weekend. And in that time, Judge Sparkle Soup Nanan issued an emergency protective order. But we've now seen a class action which would bring a more permanent protective order for these children. Judge Timothy Kelly, I'm going to quote him here. He was talking about the government's case and he said it had, quote, crumbled like a house of cars, guards. This is in part because a whistleblower's account contradicted the government's claim. And this claim was made by Acting Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Angie Salazar. Salazar said under oath that the children had been screened to ensure they would not be subject to abuse or neglect. The whistleblowers claimed that at least 30 of these children had been deemed ineligible for return because they have indicators of being victimized by child abusers. But before so returning them would obviously return them to that situation of abuse or potentially do so Right. The whistleblowers further stated that this was in an ORR database, Office of Refugee Resettlement Database and such that the acting director would have access to that information. Right. The print had a lot of other evidence to Judge Kelly, who granted protection to the children in the case, and to quote, all unaccompanied Guatemalan children who have received neither a final removal order nor permission from the Attorney General to voluntarily depart the United States. So if you remember, the government had previously said that, like, they were resettling these children and that the DHS had nothing to do with it, that it was an Office of Refugee Resettlement operation.

Robert Evans (165:44)

Right.

James Stout (165:45)

And that their families wanted them home and the families didn't want them home. Right. They dropped that claim later. So this is a win.

Robert Evans (165:52)

Right.

James Stout (165:52)

They couldn't take these little children away in the night and spirit them off to somewhere where they would be in danger. Let's move on to executive order number two for this week's episode. This is one that you probably heard less about than the antifa one, but this is the quote, unquote, gold card executive order.

Mia Wong (166:11)

Oh, God.

James Stout (166:13)

Yeah, it's a gold card. Trump has been truthing about this, right? He trust about it in June. Also in June, Howard Lutnick announced that there were already 70,000 people waiting for these gold cards. Applications could be made@trumpcard.com the original stated price was 5 million. The executive order signed this week slashed the cost to just US$1 million.

Garrison Davis (166:39)

One million.

James Stout (166:40)

One million American dollars. And as our, as our currency continues to crush it, that will only get more affordable for folks elsewhere in the world. So that's great. It's good. This is Trump's promised plan to, to sell permanent residency. Right. When he first announced this, we kind of wondered, how's he going to do this statutorily? Right. How's he going to do it legally? Well, it turns out his plan is to consider the donation as evidence that the person is, quote, of exceptional business ability and that makes him eligible for an EB2 visa.

Mia Wong (167:14)

Oh, my God.

James Stout (167:15)

Yeah. So like, you could, you could have never engaged in business in your life. Right. You could receive a small loan of $1 million from your parents. Sure. And that would allow you to get one of these. Now, people will go through all the usual background checks. Right. Which, according to the eo, will be expedited. Right. You can't be like, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi is dead now, but you couldn't be him with a million dollars and do this.

Robert Evans (167:39)

For example, I like the idea that Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi would try to move to the US but would put his real name and his application for a visa.

James Stout (167:48)

He'll never see it coming. No one's gonna check for this, but everyone's like, oh, damn it. Unfortunate, man. He shares that name with a bad.

Robert Evans (167:56)

And there's like a 50% chance that it would have gotten approved. That just like no one would have liked. Would have had his name on a list.

James Stout (168:02)

Yeah, it's checked out. Well, look, guys, the caliph of ISIS.

Robert Evans (168:07)

Is like, fucking living in Brooklyn.

James Stout (168:09)

Yeah. He's going to all those founders meetings, you know, with other CEOs to discuss managing a large organization.

Robert Evans (168:15)

I'm excited for his TED Talk.

James Stout (168:19)

He's put his address as a tunnel in a HCS controlled area.

Mia Wong (168:23)

Syria.

James Stout (168:24)

No. Okay, so Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, to be clear, is dead. It was killed in the first Trump administration.

Robert Evans (168:30)

Yes.

James Stout (168:30)

A corporation donating for an individual would pay 2 million. Right. So it's more expensive if a corp's doing it on your behalf. And the cards will supposedly be gold and have Donald Trump's face on them, which is nice. At the same time, the Trump administration added $100,000 bill, bill to the H1B visa application. So it's the visa application fee. The H1B, if you're not familiar, is an immigration scheme for skilled non immigrant labor. I'm particularly interested in this because this was one of the moments that the Trump coalition began to fracture in the early days of the Trump administration. Like, we saw the kind of tech right, as exemplified by Elon Musk, risk going like, no, H1B is a good. They allow them to bring people to this country and pay them not very much and take advantage of their skilled labor is what they allow the tech industry to do. Right? Sure. And then we saw the more straight up white nationalist right being like, but those people aren't white. We don't want them here. And it seems like it is that cadre of the Trump coalition, that part of his ideological sort of support base which has won out in this instance. Right. Because companies cannot save money paying someone 20 grand less if they have to pay 100 GS to get them into the country. Right. Like, individuals could make that donation, I guess, and get the visa that way. Like if they came from a wealthy family and in another country and wanted, just desperately wanted to work in the US but generally H1BS are used because employees, they can't leave. Right. Your visa is tied to your employer, so the employment can be much less favorable, especially in the Tech industry where people are always shopping and changing jobs to try and get a better wage, better benefits, etc. They can't do that. And so that will be coming to an end. Finally, I want to talk about immigration judges. And the Trump administration has fired even more of them. According to NPR, when Trump came into office, there are about 735 of these judges. There are now fewer than 580. What? Oh, my God. Yeah, it's quite a remarkable, remarkable cut. Right. Not all of them were fired. Some of them took advantage of the quote, unquote, fork in the road offer. If we remember, like early. Right, early, early Trump 2.0 doge stuff. Immigration judges, just so people understand, like, people are like, what, they fired a judge? How can they do that? Immigration judges are not part of the independent judiciary. They are. A better way of seeing them would be as civil servants. Nonetheless, they have, in many cases, I guess, worked to break, bring the trappings and the procedures of due process to the immigration world. Right. Like in many cases, they, they have, you know, they're not just rubber stamping deportation orders. Right. People do have a chance to make their case in front of immigration judges. And Even in Trump 2.0, people are still getting asylum in the United States. The courts right now are extremely backed up.

Robert Evans (171:31)

Right.

James Stout (171:32)

People are getting hearing decks in 2028, as we heard earlier this week. Week. Some courts, I read that one court is now running at 25% of its capacity. Like it's supposed to have 21 judges and it has five.

Robert Evans (171:43)

Yep.

James Stout (171:44)

So this means that people will be in detention for longer.

Garrison Davis (171:49)

I mean, that's like kind of intentional, right?

James Stout (171:51)

Like, yeah, well, one could make that case very. Yeah. The DOJ has reduced requirements for staffing these positions. And the Trump administration. Administration has authorized about 600 JAGs to military lawyers to take on the role. I don't think they're going to get the rubber stamp on deportations from those people that they expect to get. It depends on if they sort of hand pick those Jags or they just got a bunch of people from the National Guard. But I don't think that that's going to be the just like straight up deportation factory that some people might assume it to be. But nonetheless, right now, what we have is 582 judges, tens of thousands of people in detention and detention numbers and detention overcrowding growing every single day. So that is not good. Detention facilities are terrible at the best of times and conditions are pretty awful. From everything I've heard right now, talking of things that are Pretty awful. Here are some products and services.

Robert Evans (173:05)

We're. We're back. And next, I think we're talking about tariffs. Wait a second. Do y' all hear that music?

James Stout (173:29)

Oh, wow. We haven't had the song for a while. That was nice, wasn't it?

Robert Evans (173:31)

Yeah, that was good. That was good.

Garrison Davis (173:33)

Just like old times Bring it back.

Robert Evans (173:34)

Just like old times Several months ago.

Francis (173:37)

Yeah.

James Stout (173:37)

Garrison has their alarm clock.

Robert Evans (173:39)

Do you, Garrison?

Garrison Davis (173:40)

No.

Robert Evans (173:41)

Okay. Okay, good. I picked you. That would be. That would be too much.

James Stout (173:45)

Got him.

Robert Evans (173:45)

That would be too much. Too much. We would need to intervene.

James Stout (173:50)

Listen, if you're listening and you do stop.

Robert Evans (173:52)

All right, Mia, how are tariffs B do.

Mia Wong (173:55)

So we have some tariff news. One is that we have a Supreme Court date for the case over whether a whole bunch of the tariffs are going to be allowed to continue or not. That is going to be on November 5th. We also have something a no movement, which I think is pretty interesting. Interesting. So when last we spoke of tariffs, we mentioned that there were two countries that had gotten political tariffs on them. Brazil for arresting Bolsonaro and prosecuting him, and India for buying oil from Russia. And there was a lot of speculation that these would be fairly quickly resolved. They have not been. They are both still into effect. This is having massive consequences on. On a whole bunch of stuff. And the place that I want to focus on with this is US Agriculture, because we have been seeing some extremely alarming things out of the American agricultural sector that has really not broken out of, like, Midwest agriculture circles very much. So one of the major consequences of. Of in some sense, also the tariffs on Brazil. But one of the major consequences of the US tariffs on China is that like China did in 2018, China has simply refused to buy any American soybeans. The US grows for export 52 million tons of soy every year, and more than half of that is sold to China.

Robert Evans (175:24)

And again, if you're conspiratorial and believe that, like, you know, the soy is ruining people, you should support this.

Mia Wong (175:34)

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Francis (175:35)

You should. You should.

Mia Wong (175:35)

You should be opposed to this because you should be wanting to export soy to China so that you can make. You can make the Chinese woken soy.

Robert Evans (175:43)

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

Mia Wong (175:45)

Oh, yeah, yeah, there we go. Yeah, yeah.

Robert Evans (175:47)

You should support the export of soy to China. We're getting it out of the US and to our greatest geopolitical enemies.

Mia Wong (175:54)

The other people who support the export of soy to China are American farmers. So as God, I guess this is like. This is like the farming Thing that I say on this show, I did, technically, there was technically a farm behind my house growing up. This is something that's very common in Midwestern agriculture, is a soybean corn rotation. Doing a soybean corn rotation is good for the soil. So it's very, very common in American agriculture.

James Stout (176:16)

Sure. You can fix nitrogen in soil with legumes.

Mia Wong (176:20)

Yeah. But in order to do this, you have to be able to sell the soybeans. And when this happened in 2018, this was kind of. Kind of behind the scenes, so that there. There was a whole big trade standoff in 28, in 2018. And one of the things that played a big role in ending it was the fact that China just didn't buy soybeans from the US For a year. And it really, really, really messed with the American agricultural market. I'm going to read an account from the Progressive farmer. This is a quote from a guy. For most soybean farmers in North Dakota, you're looking at about 100 to $150 loss per acre on every acre of soybeans per planted. Grackle said on his own farm, he expects losses could top $400,000 this year. Grackle said the losses are not just tied to individual farmers. It's the small businesses, local grocery stores, hardware stores, or local schools or financial institutions. They are all feeling the hurt from this.

James Stout (177:15)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (177:16)

So what is happening right now is that there is a bunch of soybeans that are being. That are just sitting there.

James Stout (177:20)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (177:21)

You know, no one wants to buy things.

James Stout (177:22)

Them.

Mia Wong (177:23)

And I've seen a few things talking about, like, okay, they're, you know, there's processing plants opening up. We can turn them into, like, soybean oil and use like, in the US and do that. But, like, this is becoming a really serious logistical problem because the thing about corn and soybeans is that it's not like you store them in different things. Right. Because if you're a farmer, you're growing both of them.

James Stout (177:46)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (177:47)

The sort of storage hubs that they use are the same ones. And the problem is that there are basically stockpiles building up of these soybeans that can't be sold. And this is becoming an increasing problem because there's the corn harvest and you have to put the corn somewhere. It's a good example of the kind of little miniature logistical nightmares that are cropping up all up and down the supply chain as. As these tariffs sort of continue to roll in and as the instability of them continues to roll in that you and I aren't seeing yet, or we haven't seen much of the effect of other than some small price increases. But down the supply chain, there are increasing parts of the population who are just dealing with these just horrific logistical nightmares. This is going to be, we're going to see the acceleration of this with the de minimis exemption being eliminated. And in the meantime, China is just basically going to the country that the U.S. slapped 50% tariffs on. They're going to Brazil and attempting to basically supply their entire soybean demand, largely from Brazil, which is like the other major soybean exporter. So this is also very important politically because the American farming sector is very, very powerful. There have been some bailouts already, but they're not going to be able to sustain the American farming sector, especially if this goes on for more than one year. It only. There was only one year in 2018 when they didn't buy it and it was a fiasco. If this goes on for an extended period of time, it is going to cause significantly larger problems. Also, the economy was doing a lot better in 2018 than it to is going right now. I mean, it was still kind of a mess, but. Yeah, so this, this is going to turn into an increasing sort of political thorn for Trump among a bunch of people who are supposed to be his base because people are very, very frustrated about this and it is getting very little press attention. This is, this has been the American farming tariff update question mark.

Garrison Davis (179:39)

No, I mean, why would we want to hear about farming tariff news when instead we can just keep the culture war machine going to have everyone just gobsmacked over that instead? Like, that's the whole point of their political machine. It's not that everything is a distraction from something else.

Robert Evans (179:54)

Right.

Garrison Davis (179:54)

It's that if you keep everyone engaged with this with like culture war nonsense, left wing terrorism, Charlie Kirk, whatever, like all of this stuff, no one's going to care about farming tariff news, even.

James Stout (180:08)

If you're a big liberal outlet, Right? You put this out there and like half your fucking audience is going to be like Lola Mao. They voted for Trump. Sucks for them.

Francis (180:16)

Like.

Garrison Davis (180:16)

Yeah, yeah.

Mia Wong (180:18)

And, and the, the question effectively is, are the people who previously had been kept in line by woke bathroom anti dei like trans women in sports stuff going to be able to be kept in line when the soybeans are rotting in the field? And we will.

Garrison Davis (180:35)

We will see.

Mia Wong (180:36)

We shall see.

James Stout (180:37)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (180:38)

Speaking of some Charlie Kirk culture war, the Department of Education has partnered with the America First Policy Institute and turning point us a new civics program. This is called the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. They'll work with over 40 national and state organizations to, quote, spearhead nationwide initiatives to engage students, educators, and communities in conversations about liberty, citizenship, and America's enduring values, unquote. Other organizations a part of this coalition include PragerU, Moms for Liberty Alliance, Defending Freedom, Heritage foundation foundation, and the three explicitly Christian lobbying groups. Now, all of these groups are basically Christian lobbying groups, but three with, like, Christian or religious like names in the title of the organizations now partnering directly with the state for this educational coalition. Let's play a video from the new website explaining the initiative.

Andrew Sage (181:40)

American education was once a shining light.

James Stout (181:43)

Guiding generations built on faith, heritage, patriotism.

Andrew Sage (181:50)

But over the past 60 to 70 years, that brilliance has been dimmed. A great institution has been crumbled from within.

Garrison Davis (181:58)

Playing footage of the civil rights era.

Andrew Sage (182:02)

False revisionist history and division from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

James Stout (182:08)

That's a triggering phrase for me.

Garrison Davis (182:09)

Critical race theory, gender queer, drag queens.

Andrew Sage (182:12)

Now on the 250th, Linda McMahon emerges nation.

James Stout (182:15)

The Department of Education, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, and partners across America.

Andrew Sage (182:22)

Are reigniting that light, restoring understanding and returning education to the States where it belongs.

James Stout (182:31)

For this was life that inspired the world. And under the leadership of President trump and Secretary McMahon. That's Linda McMahon.

Robert Evans (182:41)

Oh, my God.

James Stout (182:43)

Oh, my God. Our students and our nation.

Francis (182:46)

Oh, my God.

James Stout (182:48)

Are you kidding me? AI generated lighthouse.

Robert Evans (182:52)

Oh, my God.

James Stout (182:53)

Stand in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours.

Robert Evans (182:58)

Oh, my God.

Garrison Davis (182:59)

It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

Robert Evans (183:03)

Oh, my God.

Garrison Davis (183:06)

So the framing of the video is that this lighthouse has gone out and Linda McMahon emerges, polishes and fixes the lighthouse which now shines across the nation, igniting our patriotic education.

James Stout (183:19)

They couldn't find a lighthouse in America, so they.

Robert Evans (183:22)

They aied one with audio from WWE Secretary McMahon.

Garrison Davis (183:27)

It's like the most hyperreactive reality American brainwash.

Robert Evans (183:30)

What do you even say to that?

Garrison Davis (183:32)

This is, this is like the. Here's the lead paint thing that we're talking about. Like, yeah, talking about how American education's been, like, totally destroyed. And they're playing footage of, like, civil rights era, like, protests and, like, leaders. You can't parody this.

James Stout (183:44)

Nah, no.

Robert Evans (183:45)

And it's all set to the, to the soundtrack and edited in the manner of, like, a big budget Hollywood Summer blockbuster from 15 years ago.

James Stout (183:55)

Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah.

Robert Evans (183:57)

Which I guess, you know, fucking conservative Christians are always about 50 years behind.

James Stout (184:00)

Yeah. And they're culture shit.

Robert Evans (184:02)

Like, so that scans. But yeah, like, this is like. It sounds like a fucking. Who's the guy who did Independence Day? God damn it. You know what I'm saying?

James Stout (184:10)

I don't know shit about popular culture, but, yeah, we should just note that 70 years ago, education was segregated in this country.

Garrison Davis (184:16)

Well, yeah, that's.

James Stout (184:17)

By race, which is. Yeah. Yes. I just want to. I just want to just sort of drop that nugget.

Garrison Davis (184:22)

And I've listened in person to Charlie Kirk. I argue that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. Like that's what these people want.

James Stout (184:29)

Yeah, Yeah. I just want to join the dots for folks who haven't. And history is inherently revisionist. That's what we do. We. We don't just like, go like, oh, we've done it all now. We've worked it all out. No need for any more historians. That's. That. That's not how history works.

Garrison Davis (184:41)

The chief education officer of Turning Point Education, this is his real name, Dr. Hutz H. Herzberg. Triple H, said that quote, turn.

James Stout (184:51)

That was also wwe character. Is it the same guy? I.

Garrison Davis (184:55)

No, this is a. This is a Christian educator.

James Stout (184:58)

Oh, okay.

Garrison Davis (184:59)

He says, quote, turning Point USA is more resolved than ever to advance God centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation. With that in mind, we are honored to partner with the distinguished organizations that comprise the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to restore, revive and reclaim robust American civics education for all students throughout our country, unquote. Earlier. Today is Wednesday. The state of Oklahoma has announced that they will be establishing TP USA chapters in every high school across the state.

Mia Wong (185:34)

Oh, great.

Garrison Davis (185:35)

Here's the superintendent, Orion Waters of Oklahoma.

James Stout (185:40)

I'm excited to announce today that every Oklahoma high school will have a Turning Point USA chapter. We have seen the outpouring from parents, teachers and students, students that want to.

Mia Wong (185:51)

Be engaged in the meaningful work going.

James Stout (185:53)

On at Turning Point. They want their young people to be engaged in a process that understands free speech, open engagement, dialogue about American greatness, a dialogue around American values. We're so excited to partner with Turning.

Mia Wong (186:08)

Point USA with this initiative.

James Stout (186:11)

For far too long, we have seen radical leftists with the teachers you union dominate classrooms and push woke indoctrination on our kids. They fight parents rights, they push parents.

Robert Evans (186:23)

Out of the classroom and they lie.

Mia Wong (186:25)

To our kids about American history. What we're going to continue to do is make sure that our kids understand American greatness, engage in civic dialogue and.

James Stout (186:35)

Have that open discussion. We will continue to do all that we can to make sure Oklahoma students have the best education.

Garrison Davis (186:43)

Part of this announcement, he's written on Twitter, quote, radical leftist teachers unions have dominated classrooms for far too long, and we are taking them back. I think. Robert, we talked with this guy last year at the rnc.

Robert Evans (186:56)

Yep. Yeah, we sure did.

Garrison Davis (186:57)

We might do something with that interview at some point.

Robert Evans (187:00)

I wish he'd got. He'd been out of a job by now, but life. Life, huh?

Garrison Davis (187:06)

The last thing I want to discuss today is quote, unquote, transgender terrorism, something I've seen many friends and hosters across the Internet be really, really concerned about for, you know, a lot of good reasons. Ken Klippenstein has released a few articles the past few days. The first one from last week, quote, the FBI readies a new war on trans people. The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as violent extremists in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. That is how Ken framed that on the headline and for his tweet alongside the article. Other outlets like them.us has spread this reporting even further. Quote, FBI to categorize trans people as nihilistic violent extremist threat group. Report says the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as violent extremist extremists. This framing is incorrect, and I will explain why in. In. In great detail shortly. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not getting ready to categorize transgender people as like, a category, as like. As like a class of people as violent extremists. There is no evidence that this is currently what they're doing. There's no internal communications arguing this. Even the Heritage Foundation's proposal to create a new category of trans terrorism is not arguing this. As I will quote from here shortly. Let's get into what. What the. The first article from Klippenstein actually wrote based on a source inside the government. Quote, the senior official explains that there is no process per se, for dealing with trans people as a, quote, unquote, threat group, but feels that trans individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of violent extremism. Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender subjects as a subset of the Bureau's new threat capture category, nihilistic violent extremists, unquote. We've talked about nihilistic violent extremists on this show before, back in spring, and we all know that the Trump administration has been targeting trans people. Like, this is something that everyone who listens to this show is aware of. This is. This is a real thing. But there is not actually any new verifiable information in this report. There's rhetoric from people like Donald Trump Jr. And, and, and right wing influencers talking about transgender terrorists and this trend of transgender terrorists as they have been for the past two years. Me and Mia did that piece about fake trans terrorists like almost two years ago.

Mia Wong (189:37)

That was two years ago.

Crystal (189:38)

Now.

Garrison Davis (189:38)

We've been, we've been tracking this rhetoric for a long time. So stuff like that fills up a lot of the space in articles like this. But new verifiable information is actually quite short. In, in this article, Ken has a single unnamed official who, quote, unquote female, feels like trans people could be labeled nihilistic violent extremists. Now in, in Ken's previous reporting about this label, he misunderstood the NV E label. This label exists just essentially for 764, the childish exploitation group that operates around like Discord and Telegram and Branch off groups from that. We've talked about them on the show here before as well. And the nihilist violent extremism term predates the Trump administration. This, this isn't a Cash Patel thing. This, this predates the Trump admin. This was active last year year. And it primarily is to categorize and map these child sexploitation rings and some overlapping communities like the school shooter fandom. But in Ken's article here, there's no like leaked documents in this report showing like current memos or communications on this topic. Ken's great for leaks, but there's, there's not leaked documents in this report. Now.

James Stout (190:44)

Right.

Garrison Davis (190:44)

As we all know and we've reported, the right wing hate campaign against trans, trans people is a real thing. It's, it's real coming from the Trump administration, from state level government as well as the entire conservative media apparatus. But I think right now especially it's really important to read reports like this very carefully. Yeah, trans fear mongering massively boosts social media engagement which then can encourage people to use framing like this. That might actually kind of be irresponsible. Now, a few hours before Philippine published this first article, the Heritage foundation and their oversight project released a petition to have the FBI designate a new category of violent extremism, which they call trans ideology inspired violent extremism, or tiv. Quote, TIV is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. Ideology. It has led to an increasing trend of TIV domestic terrorist events across the country in recent years. TIV has played a role in the majority of mass Shootings at schools. That is the Heritage Foundation's claim. The petition includes a list of quote, unquote, TIV motivated attacks, including multiple attackers who either were not trans or were clearly not motivated by trans ideology, as reporting at the time and government documents have shown, including acts from the past, like six or seven years. But Heritage writes that, quote, experts estimate no citation that 50% of non gang related school shootings since 2015 have, quote, involved or likely involve trans ideology. Unquote. 50% have involved or likely involved. Yet in this list, they can only only list three school shootings. They can only list three. Even their own list, which they say 50% likely involve trans ideology. There's been more than three school shootings this year.

James Stout (192:44)

This month.

Garrison Davis (192:45)

There's been more. Three school shootings not involving trans people this year. This. This is a wild, wildly atrocious stat.

James Stout (192:52)

Yeah, it's just fabricated, right?

Robert Evans (192:55)

Like, and again, like, reality doesn't matter. Like, that's, that's, that's the point.

Garrison Davis (192:59)

Like, no, this is the Heritage Foundation. Like, come on.

James Stout (193:01)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garrison Davis (193:03)

But importantly, like, a violent extremism designation would not mean that all trans people as a class are deemed violent extremists. What it would do is it would create a category to use for investigations into violent acts. Graph patterns of violence argue in court documents and possibly include some preemptive surveillance on people or groups that are deemed deemed as threats as a part of this threat group. But in the petition, Heritage says that no, not all transgender individuals or their allies are domestic terrorists. Quote, they are even free to engage in offensive and hateful speech under the First Amendment so long as they do not stray into unlawful incitement, defamation, true threat, obscenity, or some other category of non protected speech. The domestic terror designation becomes relevant only when individuals or groups will one, are motivated by an ideology that encourages, promotes or condones violence, and two, take or incite unlawful violent action or threats based on that ideology. Both criteria must be met, unquote. That's from Heritage's own petition. It's not. There's nothing in Heritage's own petition or Ken's article that says that trans people entirely are going to be deemed terrorists or. Or a domestic, like, extremist threat group. That's not what either Heritage Heritage or what the actual details of articles like Ken's is saying. And for to further kind of show this divide, the Heritage petition also addresses the nihilist violent extremism label as a completely separate thing, unrelated trans people that they do not want combined into one single category. I don't know why Ken keeps pushing on this. This label so much. It's really important to understand how trans people are actually under threat right now, because they are. Right. The biggest threats of trans people right now are accessible healthcare, specifically for people who are under the age of 18, and things like bathroom bans and trying to restrict transgender people from public life. But the other, you know, biggest threat to trans people right now is, like, ourselves. And we don't need to do the government's work for them to keep us so demoralized. Spreading misinformation or unverified reports like this that just makes everyone panicked and freak out, actually harms us and our community. The Transpanic industrial complex is dangerous, and people need to be very careful about this because it's an extremely, like, dangerous time. And having an accurate assessment over what's going on is going to be crucial to survive the next few months to years.

Robert Evans (195:31)

No. And again, we've seen this on the right in, in. And this has played a role in radicalizing a lot of people on the right and getting them to do up shit is years of like, they're coming for you. They're coming for you. They're going to be coming for you tonight. Right. Like, you're already dead. You know, there's money in pushing and there's clout in pushing hopelessness.

James Stout (195:53)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (195:54)

And I. I don't want to be telling people everything's good, because it's not. Things are very dangerous for trans people right now in a way they have not been at any point previously in. In very recent history. Things are much worse. Right. Nobody's denying that. But you. You have to look. Look at, like, the facts of how they're worse, as opposed to not reading an article or analyzing what the article actually says or analyzing what the Heritage foundation says and saying they. They're declaring all of us terrorists. Right. Because that's not going to end well.

Francis (196:28)

No.

James Stout (196:28)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (196:29)

Don't panic, organize. That's the actual solution to this. I also want to briefly note on. I've seen a lot of comparisons of this to the black identity extreme extremism designation. And I want to bring this back to something that Garrison mentioned earlier about the way that the nihilist extremism category was, like, specifically designed to target, like, a specific sort of complex network of.

Garrison Davis (196:54)

Yeah. Pedophile discord servers.

Mia Wong (196:56)

Yeah. This is the same methodology that was used for black identity extremism. Black identity extremism wasn't a category they conjured out of nowhere to go. After all, black People. It was a category that was specifically designed to go after specific activists in the wake of Occupy and the wake of Ferguson.

James Stout (197:14)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (197:14)

And this is completely just not the process that is happening for this. Right. Like, we're not. We're not dealing with. Okay. There is a specific group of trans activists that the government wants to target, so they're creating a. A label for it.

James Stout (197:30)

Right.

Mia Wong (197:30)

We don't have any evidence of that at all. What we have is anonymous sources saying they feel like something might happen, that.

Garrison Davis (197:39)

Trans people could be targeted. And you're like, yeah, trans people have been targeted. Like, that's. That's. That's what's happening.

Francis (197:44)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (197:44)

Are they going to be labeled denialist violent extremists at this point? Unlikely. Could the FBI consider adopting something like the Heritage proposal for. For tiv? Yeah, possibly. Yeah. That is. That is absolutely a possibility. Would that come into reality the same way that people are talking about it online or the way that headlines are framing it? No, it's not about designating all trans people as terrorists as a class.

Mia Wong (198:08)

It's not about that. And it also wouldn't function like the black identity extremist thing, because, again, that was a. Like, they already had people they were going after, and they wanted a legal category that they could deploy in order to go after them. That's not what's happening here. They don't have, like, a list of, like, trans discord servers that they're about to round up for, like, doing a protest. Like, that's not what's happening. Happening here.

Garrison Davis (198:31)

No, but they could go after people who make threats online. And that's something that I'm sure Cash Patel's FBI.

Mia Wong (198:37)

Yeah.

Garrison Davis (198:38)

Would love to do. And if they can sort those people into a category like TIV to argue in a prosecution or to. Or to make like a flowchart to direct investigations, then that's the realm they're gonna use.

Mia Wong (198:51)

Yeah, but. But even that we are so far away from them, even, like, starting that process.

Robert Evans (198:56)

Process.

Mia Wong (198:57)

That you should be concerned about the actual threats from, like, I don't know. I mean, just like, literally there.

Garrison Davis (199:05)

There. There's.

Francis (199:06)

There's.

Mia Wong (199:06)

There's been a series of attacks on trans people, just like, in neighborhoods in Seattle by just, like, gangs of dudes.

Robert Evans (199:10)

Right.

Mia Wong (199:11)

That's like an actual substantive thing that is happening. That is not this. That is not just sort of nebulous. Like, we are relying on opinions of unnamed officials we can look at and evaluate and figure out what we're going to do about it in some. Instead of Just giving into the panic industrial complex and panicking about it.

Garrison Davis (199:29)

Yeah, things that are framed bombastically like this go super viral and they spread a lot. And that's what the algorithms are encouraging. I mean, same thing with the algorithmic boosting of, you know, false flag conspiracy theories, because those are so much more satisfying. They, they spread like wildfire across blue sky and Twitter and like, even things like Instagram stories. And just be very careful about anything that goes on viral because that claim is trying to influence your brain. It's trying to worm its way into your brain to take the form as a thought that you had yourself. And be super careful because this type of weaponized unreality has been used so successfully the past 10 years against the right. This is how the whole, like, you know, migrant panic wave started. Lies about immigration, this, like, panicked framing, these things spread like wildfire online. And now you have large swaths of the country, country believing in this genuine, like, like, you know, migrant crisis. And this is how social media functions to influence how your brain thinks and how your brain processes fact from fiction and forms, like a collective sense of reality. And you are also being targeted by this same process in different ways than the right is, but this process is still targeting you as well. And it's like, super important to, like, read things critically and take time before jumping to conclusions, because I don't think we need more quick, emotionally satisfying conspiracy theories in our life.

Robert Evans (200:50)

Yeah. Anyway, that's the news this week.

Garrison Davis (200:54)

We sure did report it.

Robert Evans (200:55)

Yeah, it's the news this week.

James Stout (200:57)

We reported the hell out of it.

Robert Evans (200:58)

Yeah, go away.

Crystal (201:01)

We reported the news.

Robert Evans (201:08)

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

Crystal (201:14)

It Could Happen.

Francis (201:14)

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 app, Apple Podcasts.

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