It Could Happen Here Weekly 217

Summary

Behind the Bastards: It Could Happen Here Weekly 217 (January 31, 2026)

Overview

This dense, multi-segment episode intertwines global authoritarian trends, on-the-ground reporting from Minneapolis’ anti-ICE organizing, reflections on resistance tactics, and a discussion of doxxing Nazis. The central focus is how authoritarian “conflict management” and ethnic cleansing are becoming normalized around the globe—with Gaza and Minneapolis as case studies—and how grassroots solidarity and community defense offer both hope and resolve. The episode features in-depth interviews, discussion among the hosts, and timely analysis of recent state violence.

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1. The Gaza “Peace” Blueprint and Authoritarian Doctrine

Featuring Dana Al Kurd (01:32–16:30)

Main Points

• Recent Developments in Gaza:

  • After the latest Israeli assault and a partial ceasefire, Israeli military control and ethnic cleansing in Gaza continue.
  • 449 Palestinians killed since the ceasefire; humanitarian access sharply restricted; land grabbed behind the newly enforced “yellow line.”
  • Aid is insufficient; basic safety and movement remain denied to Palestinians.

• US/Trump Administration’s “Board of Peace”:

  • Phase Two of the US-sponsored ceasefire deal launched: a Board of Peace for Gaza run by a technocratic “transitional” Palestinian administration.
  • Trump declared himself chair, with Tony Blair, Marco Rubio, Kushner, and international oligarchs invited, all required to pay $1 billion each.
  • Critics call it a "Trump United Nations" with no mention of Gaza in its founding charter, aiming for neocolonial oversight to enforce compliance, demilitarization, and enable business-led “reconstruction.”

• Global Trends & Doctrine:

  • This is seen as a prototype for managing global conflict: might-makes-right, legitimized ethnic cleansing, and using war as a business opportunity.
  • “Reconstruction as a business opportunity. To review, might is right, ethnic cleansing is A-OK, and war is a prime real estate development opportunity.” (Dana Al Kurd, 08:55)
  • Parallel drawn to “Don Roe Doctrine”—each state claims a sphere of influence; conquest and territorial aggression now openly condoned.

• Palestinian & Local Responses:

  • Palestinian bureaucrats express commitment to peace, democracy, and justice, but little changes on the ground.
  • Gaza journalist Hind Khoudari: “There is no change. … Palestinians are frustrated. They’re very disappointed. They thought phase two would give them freedom of movement, reconstruction of Gaza … But on the ground, nothing happened, nothing changed.” (14:44)

“Gaza is only the test case. In this new form of authoritarian conflict management, the world will operate without any pretensions under the premise of might is right.” (Dana Al Kurd, 09:03)

Timestamps:

• 01:32 – 16:30: Dana Al Kurd’s Gaza analysis

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2. Minneapolis: Mutual Aid, Rapid Response, and General Strike

With Margaret Killjoy, James Stout, Robert Evans & guests (17:05–134:55)

On-the-Ground Narrative

The Situation

• ICE and Border Patrol are conducting quasi-military immigration raids.
• Locals have launched decentralized mutual aid and rapid response networks to protect neighbors and push back.
• The city unites in strikes and direct action, culminating in a general strike and mass protest—even as temperatures dip below -30°F.

Core Insights

1. Community Defense/Mutual Aid:

   • Hyper-local Signal groups organize street-by-street rapid response.
   • Grocery co-ops, daycares, and businesses publicly join the strike in support of migrants.
   • All informal, anarchic networks—no one group controlling, just neighbors helping neighbors.
   • Volunteers provide food, childcare, rides, school runs, and support blocked businesses.

   “The thing that people are building here are really incredible. And people know that they’re holding down ICE here in a way no one would have expected.” (Margaret Killjoy, 21:14)

2. Rapid Response in Practice:

   • ICE moves evolve: from big raids to quick, surgical abductions within 2–3 minutes.
   • City residents respond with whistles, honks, and outdoor presence at a moment’s notice—rushing out, even in pajamas, to stop abductions.

   “The only time we have seen here, the only person who has expressed any negativity about what is happening is a person in a truck today who was honking at a large protest…” (James Stout, 52:01)

3. Unity, Scale, and Impact:

   • Striking is neighborhood-wide and politically mixed: “That Republican business is closed. My neighbor, very conservative, is pissed as hell...” (Margaret, 61:36)
   • Even “What Would Ronald Reagan Do?” sign holders join, because the government crossed a line.
   • Every block has a watcher; whistles are the “sword” of defense—simple, but collectively powerful.

   “You hand someone a whistle, you’re handing them responsibility. You are now a defender.” (Margaret Killjoy, 57:12)

4. Reflections on Trauma and Beauty:

   • Despite daily violence (people pulled from cars, children targeted at schools), the shared struggle creates deep community.
   • “People step up.” (67:40)
   • Minneapolis “passing the open-note test of history”—refusing to be quiet in the face of fascism.

“Minneapolis isn't failing the open-note test ... When it comes down to it, we do what's right.” (Margaret Killjoy, 64:51)

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “If people could see the cruelty, they would care and they would do something. And this confirms that for me.” (James Stout, 69:25)
• “Solidarity gets so much further than 'what took you so long.'” (Margaret Killjoy, 62:31)
• “I've never seen unity like this.” (Margaret, 37:02)
• “This is more evidence ... in hard times, we can build beautiful things.” (Robert Evans, 22:50)

Key Segments

• 17:05–41:42: Arrival in Minneapolis; scale & spread of ICE; witness rapid response first-hand
• 42:01–70:22: Digging into mutual aid and neighborhood networks; “tanking” ICE via unity
• 70:23–134:55: General strike, mass protest, officials' violence; lessons for organizing elsewhere

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3. General Strike & Direct Action: Living Resistance

Margaret, James, Robert in Minneapolis (76:02–134:55)

Highlights

• General strike brings out 10,000 people in -30°F weather; businesses close or shift to offering free resources to protesters and migrants.
• Action at Whipple federal building: protesters kettled and arrested; police employ strong-arm tactics; some pressed with cold more threatening than tear gas.
• Coffee shops and mutual aid groups act as organizing hubs, continuously supporting those on the streets.

Takeaways

• Diverse tactics (rowdy shield walls to peaceful clergy) exist in harmony—“There isn't time for that [infighting], we've got shit to be doing.” (87:34)
• Everyone can contribute, even if only by sharing resources or comfort.
• The ability to sustain this for months depends on ongoing solidarity, shared leadership, and building systems of care—starting by simply knowing your neighbors.
• Lessons from Minneapolis can be applied anywhere: “You just show up. Spread a culture of neighborliness. Solidarity is not charity—it’s in your own self-interest.” (126:08)

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4. Anti-Fascist Intel & Doxxing Nazis

Interview: Molly Conger & Christopher Mathias (136:38–190:35)

Main Points

• "To Catch a Nazi": Chris Mathias’s new book explored, detailing how anti-fascist activists doxx and infiltrate white supremacist groups, leveraging community defense over state surveillance.
• Key Tactics:
  • Doxxing as the digital equivalent of unmasking Klansmen—enforcing social consequences for public fascism.
  • Antifa’s unpaid, risk-heavy research is more effective at destabilizing Nazi groups than media, academia, or law enforcement.
  • Modern “outside agitator” narratives are recycled tools to delegitimize grassroots resistance.

"These organizations can't survive sunshine. And they're so aware of that that ... people have been killed for this." (Molly Conger, 153:30)

Notable Quotes

• “I will always trust an anti fascist infiltrator over an FBI agent.” (Molly Conger, 158:50)
• “You create a social cost for being a fascist. … Your girlfriend’s going to dump you, your family might not talk to you. … They were creating a social cost for being a fascist.” (Christopher Mathias, 147:36)

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5. Executive Disorder: Updates on State Violence, Media, & Resistance

Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans, et al. (191:19–245:56)

Key Segments

• ICE/CBP Killings in Minneapolis (192:56–203:22)

  • Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse, is killed by CBP agents while filming an ICE raid. Video contradicts official account; officers lied, executed him after disarming.
  • Nationwide outrage erupts, with broad swaths of the public—including NFL stars and fans—condemning the killing and administration's lies.
  • DHS, Fox News, and administration initially falsely label Preddy a terrorist; narrative crumbles as footage spreads.

  “For years, they've skirted by in situations where ... depending on what you bring into it ideologically, that can look like two different things. That's not the case … It's very clear what's happening.” (Mia Wong, 214:10)

• Public Uprising, Political Fallout (210:48–218:02)

  • NFL games, other public events echo with chants of “Fuck ICE;” even Patriots’ jet used for deportation is called out.
  • The mass outrage prompts the administration to backtrack, fire/transfer officials, and announce token reviews while deportations and raids continue.

• Surveillance, Intimidation, & Movement’s Response (231:24–236:45)

  • Reports surface of ICE constructing databases of protesters (“You're now considered a domestic terrorist”).
  • Organizers emphasize these tactics aim to intimidate & chill dissent—don’t spread panic, keep organizing.

• Ilhan Omar Attacked (237:57–240:58)

  • MN Rep. Ilhan Omar is physically assaulted at a town hall; attack condemned broadly, including by Republicans.

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “You don't have to help them [spread fear]. … The government, generally, courts have found, should not do things that have a chilling effect on First Amendment speech. Don't help them.” (James Stout, 236:28)
• “They tried to deploy a narrative which after, after enough circulated documented footage contradicted … public opinion formed in strong opposition to administration claims.” (Garrison Davis, 208:47)

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6. Practical Lessons & Closing Recommendations

• Start building trust and networks with your neighbors now—don’t wait for a crisis.
• Ensure every network is decentralized and gives autonomy to local participants.
• Solidarity is both morally necessary and practical self-interest—no one is truly free until everyone is defended.
• Everyone can play a part—organizing, provisioning, documenting, showing up, or just offering a warm drink.
• Use Minneapolis (and Gaza) both as a warning of creeping authoritarian doctrine and as a model for how radical, inclusive solidarity can save lives and transform communities, even in dark times.

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Episode Takeaway

The episode is a primer in both resisting authoritarian repression and building lasting grassroots solidarity. The guests and hosts demonstrate that even in extreme adversity—facing government violence, ethnic cleansing, and mass abductions—cooperative defense, mutual aid, and diverse tactics can genuinely protect, inspire, and sustain communities. Their stories are both a warning and an invitation: the tactics of the state are both ancient and newly bold, but so too are the capacities for resistance and community-driven hope.

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Notable Quotes, Moments, & Timestamps

| # | Timestamp | Speaker | Quote or Event | |---|-----------|---------|---------------| | 1 | 08:55 | Dana Al Kurd | "Reconstruction is a business opportunity. Might is right, ethnic cleansing is A-OK, and war is a prime real estate development opportunity." | | 2 | 14:44 | Hind Khoudari | “There is no change. … Palestinians are frustrated. … On the ground, nothing happened, nothing changed.” | | 3 | 21:14 | Margaret Killjoy | “People know that they’re holding down ICE here in a way no one would have expected.” | | 4 | 31:06 | James Stout | “...Everyone is carrying whistles around their necks. ...It makes you a defender.” | | 5 | 57:12 | Margaret Killjoy | “You hand someone a whistle, you’re handing them responsibility. ...You are now a defender.” | | 6 | 69:25 | James Stout | “If people could see the cruelty, they would care and they would do something. And this confirms that for me.” | | 7 | 61:36 | Margaret Killjoy | “That Republican business is closed. My neighbor ... very conservative, is pissed as hell.” | | 8 | 64:51 | Margaret Killjoy | "Minneapolis isn't failing the open-note test... When it comes down to it, we do what's right." | | 9 | 87:34 | Margaret Killjoy | “There isn't time for that [infighting], we've got shit to be doing.” | | 10 | 147:36 | Christopher Mathias | “You create a social cost for being a fascist. … Your girlfriend’s going to dump you, your family might not talk to you.” | | 11 | 153:30 | Molly Conger | “These organizations can't survive sunshine. And they're so aware of that that ... people have been killed for this.” | | 12 | 208:47 | Garrison Davis | “They tried to deploy a narrative, which after, after enough circulated documented footage contradicted, ... public opinion formed in strong opposition to administration claims.” | | 13 | 236:28 | James Stout | “You don't have to help them [spread fear]. ... Don't help them.” |

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For those seeking actionable models for resisting state repression and building resilient communities, this episode offers both moving testimonies and concrete lessons.

Transcript

[Margaret Killjoy]

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human.

[Molly Conger]

Friday. Kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy, featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold.

[James Stout]

Lipsy for sensational.

[Molly Conger]

The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Ilia Malady redefining the sport Friday at 8 Eastern, 7pm Central on NBC. And Peacock.

[James Stout]

Hey, Sal.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hank.

[Robert Evans]

What's going on?

[James Stout]

We haven't worked a case in years. I just bought my car at Carvana and it was so easy.

[Mia Wong]

Too easy.

[James Stout]

Think something's up? You tell me. They got thousands of options, found a.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Great car at a great price, and.

[Mia Wong]

It got delivered the next day.

[James Stout]

It sounds like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, you're right.

[James Stout]

Case closed.

[Molly Conger]

Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Hello everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al Kurd. I'm a professor of political science and a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. Since I last recorded an episode, those in power have been very busy. The world looks different a month ago, what with the assault on Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, the as of this recording, possible invasion of Greenland. It's been hard for even the best of us to keep up. As Nemec from the series Andor would say, the pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. I will never not squeeze in an Andor reference when I can, given that this is the state of the world. What's happening in Palestine has largely slipped out of most people's feeds and certainly the media headlines. But lots is happening. Lots of dangerous things are happening. And I'm going to take this episode to give an update about what's been going on since the ceasefire was announced three months ago. 449 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks and another 1,246 have been injured. Over 100 of those killed were children. According to UNICEF, the Gaza Strip has been reduced even further with a new yellow line demarcating where Israeli troops will remain and where Palestinians are not allowed to go. They literally placed concrete yellow blocks on the ground in Gaza. And as the BBC notes from a report January 16th of this year, Israel continues to push the yellow line further and further into what remains of Gaza. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs notes, quote, the Israeli military remains deployed in over 50% of the Gaza Strip beyond the yellow line, where access to humanitarian facilities and assets, public infrastructure and agricultural land are either restricted or prohibited. In this context, and despite this context, the Trump administration has declared that phase one of the ceasefire agreement is now over and that phase two will commence.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The US has announced the launch of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. Special envoy Steve Witkoff shared the news in a social media post, writing that phase two establishes a transitional, technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. He also wrote that it begins the full demilitarisation and reconstruction of Gaza, primarily the disarmament of all unauthorised personnel. Witkoff says the US Expects Hamas to comply fully with its obligations, including the immediate return of the final deceased hostage, and warns that the failure to do so will bring serious consequences.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Now this is the declaration, even though really, aside from the return of Israeli hostages, no part of the 20 point plan that the Trump administration put forward as the peace plan was realized on the ground. Aid is being let in, but not at the levels that it's needed. Attacks against Palestinians haven't stopped. Nonetheless, phase two is apparently starting with the naming of members of the Board of Peace. Now, if listeners will recall from a previous episode, Trump declared himself the chair of this Board of Peace that's supposed to bring peace to the Middle east. And Tony Blair was tapped to run it, much to the outrage of anyone who witnessed Blair's cooperation in the destruction of Iraq. Now this Board of Peace is going to run the Gaza Strip and its quote, unquote technocratic government, and it's going to make sure Hamas demilitarizes and that Palestinians don't step out of line. The Board of Peace is one aspect of the great plan, great standing for Gaza, Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and transformation plan, a plan that apparently will turn Gaza into the, quote, riviera of the Middle East. The Huffington Post reported Jan. 17 that Trump is setting a billion dollar price tag for any country that wants to participate on this. Board members so far include Tony Blair, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, son in law Jared Kushner, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, Mark Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, Israeli billionaire Yakir Gabay, and a number of others along the same vein. Among those Trump has invited include Vladimir Putin, famously very interested in peace and not at all in eradicating Ukrainian existence. Trump also sent a letter to Viktor Orban, far right wing president of Hungary, to join the Board of Peace. Orban has apparently accepted this invitation to remind listeners Orban is one of Trump's models for authoritarian takeover of democratic institutions. Orban has also very close ties with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, despite his anti Semitic politics. Now, I thought the letter he sent to Orban and to every other right wing politician he's been inviting was quite telling. In the letter, Trump invites Orban to join, presumably with the billion dollar pay to play, and calls the Board of Peace a quote, bold new approach to resolving global conflict. Reuters, reporting on this issue, quoted an anonymous diplomat saying, it's a Trump United nations that ignores the fundamentals of the UN Charter. In fact, the charter of the Board of Peace doesn't even mention Gaza. So what is this bold new approach to resolving global conflict? It's apparently a resolution to conflict that includes a neocolonial oversight board run by white men to make sure the natives don't get too excited. Now, this oversight board is intended to manage conflict because let's be clear, this isn't about solving conflict at the expense of the people who have been facing the brunt of this conflict. So we should take them at their word that this is going to be the way that global conflict is going to be resolved. From now on. This is the blueprint. Gaza is only the test case. And in this new form of authoritarian conflict management, the world will operate without any pretensions under the premise of might is right. And if the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and transformation plan is any indication, this plan is predicated on encouraging Palestinians to ultimately leave Gaza, at least some significant segment of them. So not only might is right, but ethnic cleansing is a more than fine way to resolve a dispute. And finally, the plan is predicated on the idea that reconstruction is a business opportunity. So to review, might is right. Ethnic cleansing is a okay, and war is a prime real estate development opportunity. Now, things get even worse when we bring in the guy who's been tapped to be the Director General of this board. Nikolay Mladinov is a Bulgarian politician, an ex UN envoy who has been tasked with, quote, disarming Gaza. According to a report by Al Jazeera published January 15, he's the guy who's going to oversee the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic government which is run by Palestinian bureaucrats, and make sure that they stay in line during the reconstruction phase. Somehow these bureaucrats are supposed to reconstruct Gaza while not being able to operate in most of it anyway. Mladinov this guy is really something. He's a Bulgarian diplomat that worked as a minister for one of the most corrupt governments in Bulgaria, a government that faced mass protest pretty persistently. He is part of a right wing populist party in Bulgaria. His father was also involved in politics, specifically in the Bulgarian version of the KGB before the transition from the communist regime. Since 2021, he's been working in an Emirati institution, the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where he came out as a vocal proponent of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states. Now, it all checks out, honestly, that this is the guy who's going to be the Director General. The fact that this person is the one being chosen for phase two of the ceasefire and the fact that he has this kind of political background should make clear that the plan for Gaza isn't just a blueprint for the world new levels of authoritarian conflict management with no pretense, but also part and parcel of the US Israeli Emirati vision for the region. Now, this vision is one where Arab authoritarian regimes and Israel, with the US supporting, remake the Middle east into a, quote, modern, developed, tolerant Middle east, essentially by pouring concrete over graves and building megacities on top of rubble. Their vision of the Middle east is one that is authoritarian and contained, where citizens are subjects. These subjects can have some social freedoms and maybe some economic opportunities, but should never think that they can have an opinion on anything that happens to them. This is a vision where states like the uae, the United Arab Emirates can arm militias to conduct ethnic cleansing in Sudan and Israel can get away with ethnic cleansing in Palestine, because ethnic cleansing and genocide are apparently a perfectly reasonable way of getting rid of undesirables. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't how these states operated even before the genocide in Gaza, and I'm not saying it wasn't how the US allowed certain allies to operate even before Trump. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when Palestinians were indefinitely occupied and no one cared, or when Artsakh was ethnically cleansed and Azerbaijan got away with it. President Biden gave his blessing to the destruction of Gaza after October 7, after all. But there used to be a pretense, a pretense of international law and a liberal international order. There also used to be variation on these issues. This type of authoritarian conflict management wasn't always tolerated. In fact, Arab liberals who advocated for democracy would often say that the US Is different from China or Russia in that at least it was committed to democracy and international law and human rights. Rhetorically, even if there was hypocrisy, they thought that that space between reality and rhetoric could be leveraged and exploited. But now there's nothing to be leveraged. Authoritarian conflict management is the modus operandi of powerful states. And according to Donald Trump's new doctrine, the Don Roe doctrine, each powerful state gets to do what it wants in its own sphere of influence. In fact, not only is territorial aggression valid, it's actually the way the world should work. According to all of Trump's spokespeople and parts of his administration, conquest is totally fine. Here's Stephen Miller on Greenland, for example.

[James Stout]

Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years, to control a territory, you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests.

[Dana Al Kurd]

So Gaza is indeed the blueprint for what happens to weaker states in war, or what happens in this case to stateless people deemed undesirable and expendable. Now, what are the Palestinians saying about all this? The technocratic government made up of Palestinian bureaucrats is saying it's committed to a reconstruction of Gaza that is rooted in, quote, peace, democracy and justice. The Palestinian Authority, the largely illegitimate and undemocratic governance body that apparently governs the west bank somehow and represents Palestinians. They're putting out statements welcoming the Board of Peace and Trump's vision, maybe because they think this will earn them a seat at the table, or maybe it's a way to sideline their main opposition, Hamas, in whatever crumbs of Palestine they're allowed to control in the future. Hamas has said in a statement that they also welcome the formation of the Administrative Committee for the Gaza Strip to, quote, achieve calm in Gaza, while noting that they are working with mediators to get to the next stage of the ceasefire. And they accuse Israel of trying to break the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli government ironically rejects any Palestinian involvement, even at the technocratic level, and have vowed to take it up with their friend Trump and the Palestinian people. Well, here is Gazan journalist Hind Khoudari of Al Jazeera.

[Margaret Killjoy]

English Hind, what has been the reaction in Gaza to that announcement of a move to Phase two?

[James Stout]

Well, just like you said it, an.

[Molly Conger]

Announcement A symbolic announcement to phase two. Palestinians do not see anything on the ground. There is no change.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And despite all of that, we're still hearing drones, as you can hear in the background. We also heard a couple of explosions since the early hours of the morning, where demolishings are still going on across.

[Molly Conger]

The Gaza Strip, especially after the yellow line. But Palestinians are frustrated. They're very disappointed. They thought that phase two would give.

[James Stout]

Them the freedom of movement, that would.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Give them reconstruction of Gaza, would also.

[Molly Conger]

Give them a little bit of what they lost. But on the ground, nothing happened, nothing changed.

[Margaret Killjoy]

What we know so far is there.

[Molly Conger]

Are 15 members that have been approved on to be ruling Gaza. But there are a lot of questions and concerns. How is this going to happen? What is going to happen to the people here?

[Margaret Killjoy]

The reconstruction, the Rafah crossing, thousands who.

[Molly Conger]

Need to get education and also people who need to travel abroad to either.

[James Stout]

Get their treatment, to get to reunite with their families.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So there's a lot of questions, but.

[James Stout]

Mainly there is a lot of frustration because there's nothing changing on the ground.

[Dana Al Kurd]

People in Gaza are beyond exhaustion. Everyone wants some path forward out of this nightmare. But I really don't think, for all the reasons I described here today, that this is it. And we shouldn't let them, the Trumps and Orbans and billionaires of the world, get away with the narrative that they're peacemakers and that apparently this is all in the name of tolerance and peace. That's it for me today. Thank you for listening and hope you're all staying safe.

[Molly Conger]

Friday, kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Ilia Malin, redefining the Sport. Friday at 8 Eastern, 7 Central on NBC. And Peacock.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hello. Welcome to Cool People. Did cool stuff slash it could happen here. Episode eight. And this is a little pickup we inserted because James and I. Hi, James. Hi, Margaret and Margaret. That's James. Yeah, we're on each other's shows this week. Yeah, we just spent three days in Minneapolis culminating in the general strike last Friday. And we were there to cover the rapid response networks and the mutual aid networks that people have been building. And that's what we're gonna be talking about in these two episodes. But the reason that we're recording this little pickup right here to listen to at the front of it, is that nine hours after we finished recording these episodes, shortly after both of us had left the city. A man named Alex Preddy was killed by federal agents in what is obviously a something that you all are familiar with. And we just kind of want to mark that because I think the tone and what we're talking about right now is we're so excited about these networks that people have been building, but obviously the tone would have changed a little bit had we recorded it only nine hours later, and we would have been talking about something slightly different. And that's just the breaks of podcasting.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The fundamental message, I guess, wouldn't change. But we all know that doing what these people do can have terrible costs. And we were reminded of that again Saturday morning. And I guess we should just say that, like, we grieve his passing and we're sending our thoughts to his family and the people who loved him. Yeah, it's gonna be a really hard time for them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Absolutely. Hello and welcome to Cool People Could Happen Here. I'm one of your hosts, Margaret Killjoy. And with me today as my other host is James.

[James Stout]

Hi, Margaret.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We are doing a special crossover episode of It Could Happen Here. And cool people who did cool stuff. And we're doing it because James and I are in sunny Minneapolis, which is true.

[James Stout]

The sun was out. Yeah, I saw the sun.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I saw it through a cloud of cold.

[Robert Evans]

Cold.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The vapor of our own breath freezing. I have seen more people today with frozen eyelashes than any other point in my life put together.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I breathed into my goggles briefly and that froze. Yeah, I took them off and my eyes froze. Yeah, yeah. It was minus 30 Fahrenheit feel, I guess, with wind chill.

[Margaret Killjoy]

With wind chill. What is that in. What is that in Celsius?

[Robert Evans]

They come together at minus 40. So it's going to be like minus 35, I think. Something like that. Yeah, it was. It was. For those who are not familiar, cold. Very cold.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so the two of us came up to Minneapolis a few days ago, and we have spent the past three days here talking to everyone we can about the rapid response networks that people have built to try to keep themselves and their neighbors safe from ice and federal repression and the sort of federal occupation of the city. And so what we thought we would do. This is kind of neither of us have written scripts yet. We are still here. We just had a fun, slightly hectic day where we spent only about 20 minutes reasonably sure we were getting arrested. But we didn't get arrested. No.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you, comrade Train.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, we got on a light rail and were able to leave a kettle by a Light rail, which is a new experience for me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was very European.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And yeah, we came up here to talk to people and that's been the, like, the story that I'm most interested in. Right. Is that we have all of these stories that are absolutely true. The stakes are really high here. But the things that people are building here are really incredible. And people know that they're holding down ice here in a way that no one would have expected, I think. I don't know. So. Yeah. Should we just talk about kind of our days since we've been here?

[James Stout]

I think I just want to ground.

[Robert Evans]

People before we do that, in that so much as if reporting on Minneapolis has focused on trauma and so much reporting on migrants focuses on trauma.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And I think people who have listened to our podcast know that that's not really our game. And so I understand when they hear that we've been in Minneapolis, I think we're going to talk about horrific things that we've seen. I want to talk more about the beautiful things that we've seen because I think those get missed and they're super important, especially if you're listening in another city in the US which will face some degree of this or is facing some degree of this. Right. So I want to ground this in saying that rather than talking about the trauma people experiencing, which I'm sure will be incidental, I want to talk about how closely people are holding each other here and how special that is and. And what we can take from it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And like, without. Obviously we're like, we're not trying to paint a rosy picture of what's happening here, because what's happening here is like, I'm a cold hearted journalist, historian person, and I was crying multiple times in the past couple days as people told me about some of the stuff they've experienced. But some of it has been, you know, we've asked people, we've said, like, hey, what do you want people to take away from this? And one of the main things is that kind of a, like, hey, you can do it too, kind of thing. And the other thing that people have talked about is like, it would be really nice for people to see that what we're doing is amazing here, even if it's like coming out of such horrendous adversity.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. One of the things that I've taken throughout my career is that in hard times we can build beautiful things. That's what I wrote my book about. Really. And what I've tried to report on all over the world. I think this is more evidence of that. And so you're going to hear things which were amazing, and the people who have done them are wonderful, but they're not uniquely special. You can do all these things, too.

[James Stout]

And I want you to see that.

[Robert Evans]

It is possible where you live.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So one of the first things that we did when we got here, we talked about to put ourselves in the story. I drove a long way and James flew a long way, and I picked up James at the airport, and we came to where we're staying, and we were talking about, like. And it was late at night, and we're like, all right, what are we trying to do tomorrow? And what are we trying to see and what are we trying to learn? And one of the main things, one of the first questions we had was, like, what's the scale of what's happening here?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, what were your impressions of the scale of what was happening? Hmm. We should talk about what's happening here. Just, like, really quickly. I bet you all know about it in the news. Why do I have a different tone of voice when I'm talking into a microphone in this way instead of. Usually I'm in a zoom call, but instead we're both sitting in a bedroom on opposite ends of the bedroom, talking into microphones, and I somehow have a different cadence, and I don't know how I feel about it. Also, I've had to drink caffeine, which I don't do, because we've had to do an awful lot. And anyway, what was I about to ask you?

[Robert Evans]

How widespread stuff is?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, yeah. Like, what was your. Okay, we were gonna talk about what's happening here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So if people aren't familiar. Right. Ice, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they're the agency charged with removing people from the United States who are non citizens. Right. Who are considered deportable. Specifically, the branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that we are seeing here is Enforcement Removal Operations, AKA Erosion. We're also seeing Border Patrol. Right. In the last year, actually more than a year now. Right. This began under the Biden administration with Operation Return to Sender in the Central Valley of California. We are seeing Border Patrol agents used to do internal enforcement. Right. Of people who are generally documented, sometimes undocumented, but always non citizens. They are detaining them in the street, they are detaining them outside schools. They're detaining them at the bus stop, they're detaining them at places to work. And when I say detaining, that's kidnapping. People. Yeah. They're grabbing people out of cars. They're snatching children and using them to bait out their parents. They're smashing people's car windows and pulling them out. They're barging into businesses. In one case, they ate at a Mexican restaurant and then arrested the workers there later that day. I've visited a lot of places where terrible things happen. Right. The shit that is happening here, it's the shit that people come to America to get away from.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It is men in masks with guns pulling people who have done nothing wrong, who are here not harming anyone. People who do not have criminal records. Just for the. I don't feel like I need to say it on this show, but I need to say that every time I talk about this. Right. Like the vast majority, something like 80, last time I looked at the stats of these people have no criminal records. And a criminal record could be something like parking in the wrong place.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I've been arrested.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I don't care. I don't give a shit.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You've done a lot of crime. Everyone listening to this has done a lot of crime. Whether or not you've been caught.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

You probably. Yeah. You went a little bit too late. Through a red light, whatever. Like, I don't think that matters.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Exactly.

[James Stout]

Even if you're a lib, even if you believe that our justice system is fair, it should be fair for everyone. There shouldn't be different consequences for different people. Move past that. Right, so how widespread is this? Margaret and I got in late. We sat up even later, talking. We all got a shitty vegan pizza. We ate it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We. It kind of was shitty. I was a little sad about it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I've had better. I won't. Name drop. We woke up the next morning and within five minutes of our waking up, we heard like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep coming down the street.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Both Margaret and I ran to the front door, spent a while trying to put on snow boots, and watched an ICE agent rolling down the street in what they normally drive in. Right. Which are rental SUVs with the Windows blacked out.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And people following them alerting the block that ICE was here. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we're not downtown. We like picked an area that's like.

[James Stout]

Slightly single out of the house.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Slightly out of it. But we got warned that nowhere is goon free.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they were right. Nowhere is goon free. Right. I mean, we have probably been within a 30 minute radius of the spot we're staying at for three or four days. Right. We've seen ice pile their car into a telephone pole. We've seen spent munitions on the floor. Ice, tear gas.

[Robert Evans]

Some people a few blocks from us.

[James Stout]

But they were gone by the time we got there. Yeah, the. And I want to get this out, like, front and center. At the start, it was not ICE who kettle protesters today. It was Hennepin County Sheriff's office.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It was not ICE who arrested people who approached them with their hands in the air, trying to work out what was going on. That was Hennepin County Sheriff's office. I've seen press conferences with Minneapolis police. I don't know what their deal is. I'll tell you, the Hennepin County Sheriff's office are actively participating in this. Right.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm not buying this. Local cops, good. This will shock listeners. Yeah. I'm not buying the local cops. Good federal cops, bad narrative. Yeah. When cops get our squat side, they're on there on the side of the other cops.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Well, it's interesting because the thing that you have is that you have, you know, there's the great classic, like, if those are neutral in times of oppression or siding with the oppressors. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because the overall situation here, it seems to be, is that you do have much more. The oppressive force here is an outside force as compared to any other protest movement I've seen in the United States. People are very aware that it is outsiders who have come to their city to steal their neighbors.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so because of that, the federal forces are the forces everyone's mad at. Whereas a lot of the people who are standing up to federal forces are neutral or fine with police. And even, like the concept of other federal agencies, they just don't want people snatching neighbors. Now, that's not universal, but that's like some of the people we've talked to.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But what state level law enforcement has decided is, is that they are committed to keeping the peace, and they can't keep the peace against ice, which they probably, on some level, morally know that they need to, but they don't. And instead they're like, all right, well, we can mess up with the, you know, the protesters.

[James Stout]

There won't be protesters. There ain't protestors.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. But yeah, like when we saw people drive down honking, the very first thing that we experienced in this town, and we weren't sure what it was, we were like, is that people following ICE and honking. And I had done a fair amount of research before I came, and I kind of knew about the WHISTLES But I didn't really know about this incredible network that people have built that what we saw was not in any way exceptional.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

That was just a standard street on a Wednesday morning.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so we get into my vehicle and we start driving. We have some places we think we're going to go check out. We have some friends who are local who are going to talk to us. And we get like two blocks, three blocks before we find people protecting Somali daycare.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

Well, before that.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

We went to the food co op to get food.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And we went into the food co op and we got our food. And on the way out we see this big old sign on the door which is like, we're closed. On the 23rd, I sat in Minnesota. Yeah. I sat in Minneapolis, whatever it is. And it's in English, in Spanish, and it's like in solidarity with our migrant neighbors. We're not opening. Yeah. And like, obviously it's a food co op.

[Mia Wong]

Right, Right.

[James Stout]

It's not a reactionary space that sort of planted a seed for me, like, ha. Like this is a big ass business, you know, like, it's not a business that necessarily relies on migrant labor. But I can see it being a space where people are in solidarity. I wonder how wide that is.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And they. Even in the time we have been here, I've seen businesses put those up. That didn't happen when we were going out today. Right. Like, people being like, nah, this isn't right. But yeah, to go back, what happened was that Margaret was driving. I was riding next to Margaret. I saw a group of people. One guy had kind of tan trousers on. And I was like, stop, Margaret. Margaret slowed down, signaled and turned into the parking lot these folks were at. And they immediately had seen us ham on the brakes and turn up in a vehicle without estate plates. Then we. Then we better go speak to these people. We've probably scared them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

What's funny is we thought we scared them. No, they're not scared of us. No, they're looking to see if they're on to us. And it's such a huge difference.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because when people are scoping us out, they're not like, oh, that might be ice. They're like, is that ice? Let's fucking get them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Like, if that's ice, we need to roll. We need to let people know. We need to start honking, we need to start whistling. So we get out, walk over and we start talking to these people. And like the person who was most forthright, most forthcoming Was an older lady. I mean, she shared her age of death. I think it's fine to see.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think it was 76.

[James Stout]

76, yeah. It's probably around zero Fahrenheit like that. Warmer than that. Right? So like, you know, minus 10 Celsius something there. Yeah. Blade's not wearing a hat. Doesn't give a fuck.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I'm chilly in my brand new winter clothes that I wear. And I live outside in the mountain. I don't live outside anymore, but I.

[James Stout]

Live in the mountains.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I'm wearing all my nice technical gear. This lady's got her poncho on a Parker and. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And she's just like, so zealous.

[James Stout]

Is like, she's so happy to be doing what she's doing and so proud of herself for being the person who did it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And she writes in an earnest way.

[James Stout]

Like in a way in a self congratulatory way. Just in a. Like, I am 100% convinced I'm in the right. And I will talk to you. Yeah. And I will say it with my whole chest.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like, do you want to share some of the stuff she said? I thought it was really one of.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The things that she said that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, I mean, you know, she, I. I didn't get the impression she was like a wild political radical or something. Right. And she's just like, you know, my father fought fascists in France and Italy and like, he would be proud of me. And like.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I'm sure he would.

[Margaret Killjoy]

He would be.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I'm sure it also be disgusted at what's fucking happening.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And, you know, and while we're talking, the Somali family, whose daycare it is, comes out and gives us sambosas. And we're like, no, no, no, no. We're journalists. You don't have to give us anything. We're like, not even helping. We're like, they're like, you're here, you're with us, you are taking food.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The guy was like, no, we're Somalis. We feed people like, what's your deal? Are you vegetarian? And we're like, well, we're vegan. So he comes out, goes back, comes out with the vegan ones. They were delicious.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, there was some best food I've ever eaten. As we're standing there, more people come and go. So you're like, okay, this is happening here, right? No pun intended. And as we leave, we talk to a few more people. We leave. And some of the other people we talk to are like. And they're people from different scenes. It's not.

[James Stout]

It's not just the old lady scene. Right. It's a diverse crowd.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. And we talked to a father who I tangentially know through the metal scene, who is like, yeah, my kid goes to school here. No one is taking kids while I can stand here. And he was like, I have work to be doing. He's like, we're supposed to be recording this band today or whatever. And he's like, no, I'm here. I'm doing this. There's no sadness. No.

[James Stout]

He's like, this is what I have to be doing. It's the most important thing to do.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Every two blocks, there are people on the corner, Usually two people, sometimes alone. And those what we later learned because we were like, holy shit, there's Ice Watchers everywhere. Those are just the marked people we see. That's the minority. There are people driving constantly in very organized but entirely decentralized networks of rapid response where they have come together in these hyper local signal loops. Signal is an encrypted messaging app that you can use on any device, Android or iPhone. The government can't break its encryption. However, there's no truly safe system.

[James Stout]

It's the safest one we have. And it automatically deletes messages after a period of time.

[Margaret Killjoy]

If you set it up, too.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Which you should. And so people are using this system, and a ton of these people had never heard of Signal before in their life, and now they're using this system. And also we talked to folks, and people felt that a certain level of transparency about the networks they're building is very useful.

[James Stout]

Yeah. We should probably address this head on, just to be super clear.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Everything we are sharing is because people have implored us to share it. Right. We did not sneak in and find its information. People openly gave it to us because they wanted you to hear it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. Because they understand that this is the kind of system that is currently proving effective. And they want people to learn from what they're doing. And so they've created hyperlocal systems, like block by block, you have groups where neighbors are able to check in on neighbors, and people are able to say, hey, I saw this thing. Right. And so there is constant presence all over town. And when I say town, we spent our time in Minneapolis, but we have talked to a lot of people who say that St. Paul is doing a similar thing. The suburbs are doing a similar thing. Even some small towns elsewhere in Minnesota are starting to do this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I don't quite know where the town is. But if people are local. Like a few years ago, I went to a massive ren fair here and I really outed myself.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's okay. I brought a cloak I must wear.

[Robert Evans]

And folks. Folks all the way out there are doing it too, which is. That was. That place had a rural Midwest vibe, let me tell you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so people are doing this all over. I have never seen unity like this.

[Robert Evans]

No. Like, the only time I've seen a.

[James Stout]

City this much in lockstep is when I was in Kamishlo in 2023. And where is that? Kamishlo is the capital of what is generally referred to as Rojava, the autonomous administration of north and East Syria. And at that time, we were being bombed by Turkey. Turkey takes offense at Kurdish people having any autonomy. And this is what that felt like. Because there is someone invading your town and taking your friends.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And everyone. I remember there were funerals, right? Cause one bomb killed 34 acai shot at the internal security forces. And I remember everyone rolled out for the funeral. It was like a general strike. And that's what it feels like here. You could walk through town the day that happened and see people were sad, but they were sharing their sadness. And here people are mad and they're sharing their anger, but also their love for one another.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Even when someone was killed by ice, this did not stop people from doing this work. It brought more people out to do this work because people were like, no, this work needs to be done. And on some level, the scale is that right? Because if someone is seeking asylum, no one runs unless they have a reason. And so sending people back to the places that they've sought asylum from often just means killing people.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I mean, let's look at the things.

[Robert Evans]

That have happened in the last month, right?

[James Stout]

Gay men being sent back to Iran, where the punishment for that is death. People from this community, Koran people. Right. Being sent back to Myanmar, where we know that they are directly delivered to a military prison. They are sending people back to Mauritania, where, again, you can be punished for being queer by death.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

What is happening here is that people's lives are at stake. I think sometimes people think, oh, it's inconvenient. You go out to a place where life is less, you know, you don't have a target. No, that's not the deal.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We're sending people back to Venezuela.

[James Stout]

Right. We're sending people from the US To Venezuela. The US notably just kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Those people aren't going to have a nice time yeah. Right. And if you were a US Intelligence agency and you wanted to insert people into Venezuela, that's how you would do it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And Venezuela knows that.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They're not that dumb. And they are very paranoid and they are a state which has a great deal of ability to do violence based on that paranoia.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so people are aware of the stakes and they're doing something about it. And what's cool. It's so interesting because at the same time, there's a little bit of like, yeah, we're built different and certainly around the cold. That is absolutely true. And there is all of this stuff in the history of at least Minneapolis that people have built resistance out of. Right. You know, all of this very active multiculturalism going back decades. We've talked to organizers who grew up and, you know, we talked to an organizer who grew up in the American Indian movement and was talking about, like, black and indigenous solidarity going back to the 60s and 70s. Right. And you know, and was saying, like, there's all of this multicultural and solidarity. There's also all of these, like, cultural events. Right. They have this huge May Day parade. Right. Or festival every year. It's funny, I've spent a lot of time in Minneapolis, but I've never actually been here for this. But everyone's always talking about it where basically people go to this park and build puppets and build giant puppets together. But it's decentralized. And so there's all of this history of decentralized organizing. And in 2020, of course, the uprising kind of began here. And people are very aware of that. And so they have all of these networks that have been built for years, and they weren't necessarily crazy active in the intervening years, but people know each other on some level. And that's the thing, though, because we expected kind of. I expected people being like, ah, yes, they had all of these deep interconnections. And most people were talking to are like, no, I know my neighbors now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we did six months ago.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We have these small seeds, right. And so people here are and aren't special about that. But do you know what is special, James?

[James Stout]

I shudder to think, Margaret.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think what's special is the fact that you and I run anti capitalist podcasts. Special has a lot of meetings that are interrupted by advertisements.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It is different.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It is a thing. And here they are.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you.

[James Stout]

Please insert name of advertiser here for buying us a low grade vegan pizza which still cost us more than $50.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we're back.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I wanted to talk A little bit about like the structures that exist. Right. And I think probably the way to do that is to break this down into two distinct, I guess, categories. And I think these are distinct in terms of organizing for the most part. Right. One is mutual aid and one is rapid response. And I just want to break down why people are doing mutual aid first. First of all, we're doing mutual aid because it is the way that we build a better world by taking care of one another without trying to extract profit from one another. Why they're doing it is because people right now who are at risk of deportation are afraid to leave their homes. They are living like a lot of Jewish people lived in Nazi. This is a comparison to somebody whose grandparents fled the Holocaust made for us today like Jewish people did in Nazi Germany.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[James Stout]

The difference is this time they know their neighbors have their back.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And so they're afraid to go out. Right. Schools are offering remote education because kids are afraid to go to school, because ICE has been hitting school bus stops.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

People can't go out and get groceries and they can't go to their jobs, so they can't pay their bills. And so that requires, if we want to take care of people, we have to feed them, we have to help them pay their bills, meet their material needs, get their kids educated. Rent, that is a heavy lift. Capitalism extracts a pretty heavy fee for paying rent. Right. We give most of our lives. Yeah. To capital so that we can get food and pay rent and clothes and shit. We have to do that without that here. Right. And people are doing it. So they are organizing food drop off, they're organizing diaper banks, they're organizing to give people rides who might not feel safe driving by themselves.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They are taking people's kids some often.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

A scenario that I'm very familiar with is citizen children born to non citizen parents. So those kids, no one is safe. When you have this many people running around with weapons. Right. And very poor training and then don't know how to drive. A lot of anger and yeah. Not very good at driving in the snow. But their kids are still able to go out and go to school, but it's about a different parent to take them. Right. So you're seeing people organizing school runs, getting food for people. Then you've got businesses that are owned by migrants. Right. Or businesses that are largely staffed by migrants. So it's trying to keep those places afloat so that community can continue to care for itself. But when its workers can't come in, or what if the Majority of the clientele of the business are migrants. Well, maybe people volunteer to do delivery. Right. So that that business can stay afloat and those migrants can still get the foods that make them feel safe at a time when they don't feel safe, whatever it is. Right. People are meeting each other's needs without trying to extract like financial compensation from each other.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And to talk about the decentralized nature of this again. And it's like hyperlocal, like no org, many orgs, but no one org stepped in and was like, this is the way to do it. Here is a top down flowchart. Instead. All of these groups started in different ways. Like, we've talked to people from different neighborhoods. We're like, ah, it all started like this. And then they paint a completely different picture from people from three blocks over.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

Hey.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And like, you know, someone was like the mutual aid here started with one mom who was like, well, I'm making food.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And in her own kitchen made food.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And then it was like, I will carry the entire weight of the world as necessary upon my shoulders.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And then other people were like, okay, I'll help you lift this. I think of the. Have you seen the meme about like, I can't lift weights with my anarchist friends? No, I can't lift weights with my anarchist friends because every time I pick up the barbell, like 30 of my friends come over and help me lift the barbell while singing John Henry.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's perfect.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And that's like, what's happening here? And so one person starts doing this thing and people say, oh, that's a good idea. And there are these other networks that can then tie that in. And people will be heavily involved in one network and have a little bit of an understanding of what's happening in the other networks. But enough people are talking to each other that they're learning best practices, they're learning what does and doesn't work. And they're also changing to get to meet threat. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I think the other thing is here that no one's coming in with like tax deductible funding.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right. This is just people taking care of people.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That has been sustainable for some time. Right. Like since mid December. We're now in late January.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That is a thing that, like, there is a need for money.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

To keep making that happen. And that is an area where people outside of Minneapolis can help if they want to. So I just want to flag that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And we will drop some resources at the end of these Two episodes, and we'll drop at the end of the first episode. And hopefully you'll. If you feel so inclined, you'll be able to help financially. But, yeah, let's talk about rapid response.

[Margaret Killjoy]

ICE is not as large of an agency as they wish it was. You know, there's so much news about how hard of a time they're having hiring people to the point where they, like, hired the, like, leftist journalist who was, like, applied as a joke, you know? You know, and so they've. They've had this surge here. The flood, they called it, I believe, of agents here. And, you know, there's about 3,000, I think, ICE agents in the city.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think it was Metro surge here. Midway flood was shoot Chicago.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Ah, okay. And they can't do that everywhere at once.

[James Stout]

No.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So if you play video games, Minneapolis is tanking. Do you know the concept of tanking?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You don't have to be a video game. You can do it in Dungeons and Dragons.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I know, I know they do. Yeah, you can tank in Dungeons and Dragons. But the actual. Weirdly, I think the concept of tanking comes not from Dungeons and Dragons. Later editions of. This is a nerd tangent.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, James and Margaret talk about Dungeons and Dragons etymology.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The concept is that one person stands there and takes the damage while other people heal that person and do damage to the people attacking that person or prepare themselves. Yeah. Well, in the video game version is you. One person takes all the damage while everyone else is also helping do the damage back. That's literally just the World of Warcraft version. But Minneapolis is tanking, the Twin Cities in Minnesota are tanking, and all of the ICE agents that are here aren't somewhere else. And one of the ways that they're making that possible is through rapid response. And rapid response. That's what the name says. It is a way to respond rapidly, which is. Okay, this is the other question I had coming in. Why does this work? This was my thought. I was like, why does blowing whistles at ICE agents make them not able to kidnap people? So I was like, does this work? That was one of the main questions we asked people. The answer is yes. It doesn't work all the time. This is still a tragic situation.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Everyone involved is kind of traumatized to medium to greater degrees. I don't want to say to lesser degrees, but what happens is that if the ICE agents are outnumbered, they usually don't successfully abduct anyone.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Even though they're the only harmed people in the situation. Even though they Theoretically, the Way that police would act, being outnumbered, it helps, but it's not as much of a game changer.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

With ICE being wildly unpopular, occupying force so far at least currently outnumbering them, seems to often stop abductions at first, I believe December ish. The way that ICE was handling things was these big, spectacular raids that we've seen a lot of places. 30 agents are showing up and raiding this place. Right. And so if you get a call about that, a rapid response can be 20 minutes, can be 30 minutes, you can show up and you're still part of fighting against this happening. And this is what's happening all over the country, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So ICE here adapted and started moving faster and faster.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so now often these abductions take two or three minutes. So they were like, how do we get a crowd in two minutes? And when an organizer first. Which everyone here is an organizer. When a person who does this first suggested that to me, my thought was like, well, you don't.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's impossible. It's not.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They do it.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they do it because everyone here in Minneapolis. Not everyone. Everyone. But I haven't run across too many counterexamples, is themselves willing to respond.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so when you hear people honking and whistles outside, you go outside.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I mean, we heard someone was mentioning that they had seen. And to be clear this morning, again, the real feel was in the minus 30s Celsius and Fahrenheit, which is last.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Friday, if you're bliss.

[James Stout]

But they had said they were on a block, they heard some honking, they come outside, Their neighbors were outside in cut off pajama pants and Crocs, screaming and blowing whistles. Yeah, right. Like, and you. We saw it even when someone mistook us for ICE agents. Right. And within a couple of minutes, a couple of people have come and we were like, yo, we're doing this. Like, yeah, long hair, you know, like septum ring. Yeah, exactly. Like crusty. Like you can. You can see us coming.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But out of state plates.

[James Stout]

Yeah. A city is made of people. Yeah, right. Like the people that. The blood pumping through the veins of a city, it's not made of buildings.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And there are people everywhere. And when all of them are willing to show up. Yeah, right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Or half of them.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Well, in the entire time we have seen here, the only person who has expressed any negativity about what is happening is a person in a truck today who was honking at a large protest that we were part of in a way that was clearly adversarial.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Literally one person.

[Margaret Killjoy]

He was also stuck.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he was also stuck and had been stuck for some time. And he appeared to be struggling with a merge situation that happened when.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We actually don't know his political opinions. We just know he was unhappy.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he was just. That's the only person I've seen express any upset.

[Robert Evans]

Like every.

[James Stout]

The person checking us out at the supermarket, the people who we have run into at coffee shops. Right. Like randos outside the Dollar General Store. People we see in the street, but people we see in the street standing, it's cold as fuck. No one's just like vibing on a park bench currently, but everyone is 100% in it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

On the Fuck these guys page.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, we. Today we heard about an ice vehicle that crashed into a pole. And this is actually fairly common, I believe, because one, they don't know how to drive in ice. And Minneapolis's Iec. And they were driving like a. I don't know whether the vehicle was all wheel drive or not.

[James Stout]

It was a Ford Escape.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But was some. Not all terrain tires.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, those were pretty. Those were some California ass tires. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it just crashed into a pole in a, like, pretty impressive way. Like, they had to be going at a decent speed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They both airbags had deployed. The radiator was done. The engine block was, you know, like they'd crumple the front of the car. It's because they drive erratically when people are driving behind them to try and get rid of them. And they are driving ill equipped, both skill wise and vehicle wise.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And so we showed up an hour and a half after the crash. They just abandoned the vehicle. They came and got some of their stuff out of the car.

[James Stout]

Tossed some tear gas.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Tossed some sear gas. We saw the canister on the ground of CS gas and they just left it there. And they were not gonna clean it up. I don't believe they will ever clean it up. That'll be on the local police or whoever, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah. City.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we're standing there and a guy drives by and he's just a normal man. No distinguishing features.

[James Stout]

Man in van.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. No belief to be subcultural or lefty or. Someone drives by and is like, oh, shit, is everyone okay? And I was like, oh, that's a nice vehicle. And he just starts laughing. He parks his car. He gets out.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And this happens over. And this must have been happening over and over for an hour and a half.

[James Stout]

Yeah. What else I noticed then was like. So we were walking Up.

[Robert Evans]

And this.

[James Stout]

This. This person popped out of their house and was like, hey, what's happening? We're like, oh, I spiffed it into this pole.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And they were like, okay, if you.

[Robert Evans]

Guys need anything, like, I'm here. I'm taking care of some kids, or.

[James Stout]

An elder, I can't remember. But they were like, you need to come in the house.

[Robert Evans]

It's cold. Just come.

[James Stout]

Come knock on the door. Like, you need a hot drink. You know, like.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we're more press. We're not like, hello. We are the activists, you know? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, you know, I'm.

[James Stout]

To be clear, I'm wearing a helmet. We're both wearing helmets with. With big blue press patches on.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So one of the things I noticed is, like, it's been repeated a bit and then reported on a little bit. Like these 3D printed whistles, right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

One of the ways that people identify someone, saying that they'll let people know you're cool. It's like people are all carrying whistles around their necks. I was just keeping an eye on this as we met people throughout the last few days, everybody had a carabiner with their keys and a whistle on it, or a whistle around their neck, or there was a whistle on a lanyard on their wrist. It's like a little marker.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And what's interesting is we've talked to people about how at the beginning, a lot of people are like, this seems kind of silly, right? You're like, oh, they're the federal. I mean, they're the Gestapo, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we have whistles. And so it seems so absurd.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But there's so many parts of it they hate. They want to operate in secrecy. We see watchers on every corner. We don't see ice. Like, this is a city under occupation, but it's, like, visibly under occupation by its own defenders.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It is, like, infiltrated by federal agents. Not like you don't. You know, I've been in places where you have, like, the. The police rolling around in their tank. Things with tires. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Bear cats.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And like, this isn't that. Because they can't actually express much force.

[James Stout]

They can't even be seen as they go.

[Robert Evans]

They're trying their very hardest to hide.

[James Stout]

Right. They have tinted vehicles. They cover their faces. They keep getting different rentals so people can't recognize it. They are trying their best to blend in and failing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And everyone having a whistle. So not only is it effective because it draws attention to them. It makes you a defender. It's A very cheap and easy way. You hand someone a whistle and you're handling them responsibility. You're saying, like, you are now. It's like he's handing some of their goddamn sword, you know, in a, like, knight fantasy land way.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, you're one of us when we take care of each other.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And you are going to defend people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And you're going to defend people by casting these people. Like, it's so interesting because I'm so used to thinking, like, power doesn't need to hide. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, and when journalists are like, oh, well, what they really fear is the truth. And, you know, I'm like, well, how.

[James Stout]

It doesn't need to hide. But the power is not with the folks driving around in occupying the city right now. The more relevant power is with the folks standing on street corners who don't feel the need to hide, who aren't afraid. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And, like, this is part of why I. I hate saying things like this. I think we're gonna win. Like, and I haven't felt that way in years. And like, yeah, I. I think that this spirit, the spirit that is animating this city is the thing that will get us through it. And when I say win, win, conditions are all weird and hard and we're going to lose a lot of people. We're going to lose a lot of.

[James Stout]

Grabbing people off the street here every day, despite all of this.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because when I'm like, oh, people are stopping so many abductions. They're also, everyone we've talked to has stopped abductions and failed to stop abductions. Yeah.

[James Stout]

And that haunts a lot of them, I think.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think so, too. Yeah. People are really torn between those two things.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I'll just say that as someone who's been in it for a minute when it comes to advocacy for migrants. Right. Yeah. If I go back three years ago to 2023, it was hundred Krusties and anarchists and Quakers and Sikhs who were feeding thousands of people in the desert.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And in a big city, a Metro area of 3 million people, 45 minutes away, people didn't believe me when I told them it was happening because nobody gave a shit to include the local media. Then I was in la, right, in summer this year, and there were young folks there who were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And did really inspiring stuff.

[James Stout]

Did really inspiring stuff and very brave stuff. And so many of them were those kids who were in that situation where they are citizens and their parents are not. Yeah. And they believe in the right to freedom of expression of speech, and they came to use it.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

But I could walk five blocks from there and it could have been any other day in la, right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I went to a fancy coffee shop. I overpaid for coffee because the way.

[Margaret Killjoy]

People didn't give a shit, you mean?

[James Stout]

Or didn't for the most part.

[Robert Evans]

No, you're right.

[James Stout]

But they cared. I think they cared. A lot of people say, oh, it's terrible what's happening.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But, you know, some people spoke to me about the film script. It's la, right? That's a given. But it did not feel like the city was locked in. This feels different to that. It feels more locked in than it even felt in 2020. Because everybody sees this as an external thing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. But do you know what doesn't like doing ad transitions Right now, it's me. I don't actually like doing it, but that is my job. And here's some ads. And we're back. The external threat part is really fascinating and is, like a key to a lot of this, I believe. You know, the difference between the tone of 2020, where it was this nationwide internal threat. This is still absolutely present.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Is absolutely. All of the problems from 2020 are.

[Robert Evans]

Still here pointed 40 millimeters at a hospital.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Earlier today. And we watch them arrest a lawyer.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we'll get to that. But the thing I've been thinking about is that in protest movements, you often say things like, oh, it radicalized you, or, I got radicalized by this. Yeah, this isn't radical.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Even though it's higher stakes, more risk, like, yeah, it's not radical to say, man, I don't think you should kidnap literal children, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think it's normal, which is why very normal people are very pissed off.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And like. And one of the things that's come up from multiple people, you know, and. And the Internet commenters will say, well, then why'd they vote this way? And that's just a. That doesn't get us anywhere.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, what the fuck are you doing?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, we have talked to a bunch of people who are like, oh, yeah, that Republican business is closed for the general strike. Or my neighbor, who is very conservative, is pissed as hell.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I saw a sign today and we'll get to the big protest. I saw a.

[James Stout]

What would Ronald Reagan do?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the person.

[James Stout]

Right. So this person has not just thought that, yeah, they have got out their pens and paper and their crafting supplies. They've made that Sign. They've got their ass down to the middle of town and it is minus 10, minus 15. And they are out and about with their what would Ronald Reagan sign? Because they are that pissed off and.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No one's mad at them.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because at a certain point it doesn't matter.

[James Stout]

Yeah, like I'd rather they were here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, like, exactly. And like, the thing I've been thinking about a lot is that glad you're here gets so much further than what took you so long.

[James Stout]

Yeah, 100%.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And there just is a line. The federal government has crossed it. And the more people who are aware of that, the better.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think it's really important that part of the organizing here has been so wide and so inclusive and so broad and yet so focused. Right? Yeah, it's so focused on keeping their neighbors safe and thus it can be so broad because most people think that's the right thing to do. That is what is allowing them to do this right now. And it doesn't matter where someone was yesterday or in November of 2024 if they're on a street corner today looking out for their neighbors.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I'll say that I'm not going to name them, but to shout out, part of the reason I'm here is that, like, someone I know who, I don't know if they have a political ideology to their name, just, you know, a young queer person I know was talking to them a couple weeks ago and they were telling me about how, you know, I didn't understand the scope of the rapid response networks. It's hard to see from outside.

[James Stout]

Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah. And unnecess, it's something that people don't always talk about to everyone.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right, right, totally. And so talking to this person and they're like, oh, earlier today I went and stood in front of an apartment building because of ice. And I was like, your apartment building? And they're like, no, about a block away. And I'm like, okay. And they're like, yeah, I just wanted to go stand out front to make sure ICE didn't get in. And I'm like, okay, I don't quite understand. And then they're like, oh, yeah. And I, you know, I go to the hotels where ICE are at and me and my friend sit there and write down license plates and I'm just like. And I'm imagining this is just like an activity they're doing. Yeah, I don't quite understand, you know, but I'm like, why are you doing it? Right. Not that it's a. It's an obvious answer on some level, but they're like, because I told myself I was someone who would do what's right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I think that in all of our hearts, we tell ourselves that when it comes down to it, we do what's right. And people are talking about comparisons between now and Nazi Germany and the rise of fascism. And they're like, there's the meme about how you all ended up fascist. You're failing an open note test. But Minneapolis isn't failing the opennote test.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They are passing with flying colors, Right? I mean, yeah. I think you and I are both history appreciators, and history has taught us a lot, right, that big coalitions do better than small one or ones that fracture into a million pieces. That leadership isn't what we need. Participation is what we need. And, yeah, you see a lot of it in action here. And all of us, right, anyone who's spent any time reading, writing, learning, listening to history, whatever, has thought, what would I do? What we're finding out is that, yeah, we're not alone in having thought, what would I do? And most people have said, well, I wouldn't be one of the ones who did something. And so they're doing something.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And I think about maybe my last thought for today is that when ICE abducts people, which they do every day, do they just disappear? People, right. They just show up, they pull someone over, literally, just for being brown. To be really, really transparent. Like, the police have come out and been like, could you please stop pulling over all of the brown cops?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, and when they pull someone over, they just take them and they leave the car. Sometimes running, sometimes in drive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And just drive away. And I was like, are we walking into a ghost town?

[James Stout]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Are we gonna see this everywhere? I'm like, in my three days here, I haven't seen the abandoned vehicle except the ICE abandoned vehicle that had crashed. But it is happening every day. And we have talked to people who see it every day. And a very common activity is the ghastly approaching. An abandoned vehicle abandons the. A vehicle that has been.

[Robert Evans]

The person has been stolen.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And trying to figure out who the fuck it was. And going through and finding the information to contact people's loved ones and say, like, hey, your. Your wife has been stolen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, and like. And that. And we were talking to, you know, a decent number of the people that we talked to about this were Jewish. And they're, you know, talking about, like, this is what my Family told me about.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, and like, that was one of the first things that someone told me that really made me cry. This whole thing has been like, really challenging. All my cynicism and detachedness from hard things. But hearing those stories and then just seeing the people who do that, which could be anybody.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because people step up.

[Mia Wong]

It.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's.

[James Stout]

God.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I just. I say I can only imagine it, you know, but it. Like that's a. That is a daily reality here, is someone was just stolen.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Person was just stolen. And I have to go through their effects to figure out who they were.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I guess when we were speaking about that, I was thinking about experiences I've had in the desert, right. Where you find someone's bag as they're walking through and it's got too hot, they've taken off their bag. And you go through all the little ephemera, the little things that people thought were worth carrying across the world. And you try to piece together their life and work out who they are. And you look at pictures of their children and you look at pictures of their spouse and their home and. And you hope that they're okay. Right. And in this instance, they're not okay. Right. And it's not the abstract violence of the structures of borders and walls and surveillance that have killed them or taken them in this instance. Right. It's five people in masks in a car over there. And it's happening in the middle of cities where people can see it. Right. Part of the function of the border is to take the violence away from where people can see it. And they got away with that for so long that they figured they could just bring it into cities. And it makes my heart so proud that when people could see it, they said, fuck no, you're not doing this in my town.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Because for so long I've believed that if people could. Like. The reason I'm a journalist, right. The reason that I have spent the better part of 10 years like receiving trauma is because I really believe in my heart that people could. If people could see the cruelty, they would care and they would do something.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And like this confirms that for me. Right. People can see it and they have cared and they have done something amazing.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And that makes me so proud of them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. The paradise built in hell, as Solnit put it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, people are finding community and a really active way and learning what people can do for each other. And the levels in which people are plugging in. There's the whole long standing cliche that for every frontline activist, there's 10 support people. And you're like, well, here those lines aren't so clearly delineated.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because on some level, we've talked to people who have been like, oh, my neighbor who has so many mobility issues that they can't leave their house. They're just hanging out on the front porch.

[James Stout]

Yeah. On the front line.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, exactly.

[James Stout]

Because the front line comes to you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Like we talked to someone earlier who was pepper sprayed this morning while walking their dog.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, because while walking their dog, they witnessed masked agents stealing a person.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Well, about do it for part one of it could cool people here. And we'll be back on Wednesday or whenever it. We actually don't know what the scheduling is going to be of this particular episode.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We'll be back in the subsequent episode of the podcast feed you're listening to.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That's right. That's right. And yeah, you're going to final.

[Robert Evans]

Let me say this right.

[James Stout]

I was really sad when I came here because my friends were dying in Rojava.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And I wish I was with them in a strange way, because I know the sense of togetherness they feel. And I felt that here. And that was really special for me because I would struggle to be dealing with this alone.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And we're going to talk a bit more about rapid response stuff. And there's also, just to point some articles people's way, there's a series of articles that came out from crimethink, which is crimethink.com, that have talked about some of the structures of rapid response networks. And people here are putting together a lot of resources about what they have and haven't learned. And we're going to be talking about some of those things that people have learned and things like that, but it's really worth understanding wherever you are, because you're also that person who can hang out on your front porch. I mean, not necessarily literally you hang out on your front porch, but it's like the idea is when the entire city mobilizes, it works. And I think that when we realize that we can mobilize the entire country, it works. That's my theory.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

See you all soon.

[James Stout]

Hi, friends. It's me, James. I'm back. And I'm back because we asked some people on the ground if they could provide us with some links to places where people could donate that have been vetted that they knew would be going to people helping people on the ground. And they provided us with a lot of different links. So I'm going to tell you what each of these links are. And if you'd like to donate, you can just scroll on down whichever app you're using to the podcast show notes and you can click one of the one of the links below. So there's Rent support for neighbors in Philips, Rent support for neighbors in Central, Rent support for neighbors in Powderhorn, supplies for political art making, protective gear for legal observers, diapers and menstrual supplies. There are Abolish Ice T shirts that you can purchase. There is a fundraiser for Northstar, Frontline, Street Medics and the Twin Cities Swallow Terrier Bail Fund. There are links for both a Venmo and Cashapp donation there.

[Molly Conger]

Friday, kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy, featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. Let's see for sensational the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, Ilia Malady, redefining the Sport, Friday at 8 Eastern, 7 Central on NBC. And Peacock.

[James Stout]

Hi, friends, it's me, James. And I just wanted to explain as you're listening to this, that we recorded this around midnight on Friday after having spent, I think, three days, four nights in Minneapolis. And the tone of what we recorded here is hopeful. I remain hopeful and inspired by the people we met in Minneapolis, and I remained so proud of everything they've done. But about nine hours after we sent this off to our editors, Alex Pretty was killed by two Border Patrol agents. And the tone of this would have been different if we had recorded after that. And that's, that's just the nature of the work we do. But we don't want anything in the, the hopeful tone here to suggest that we don't grieve his passing, that we aren't thinking of the people who loved him right now because we understand that they're going through a very difficult time. But we still want you to learn from what's happening in Minneapolis and from what people are doing there. And we hope that you remember that as you go through this episode.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I think that honestly, those two things that we have to balance just as we deal with the state of the world is just, you know, everyone we talk to this is so present on their minds is both an awareness of the beauty of the things that they are building and also an awareness of the darkness that has caused them to need to build these things. But anyway, we hope you enjoy these episodes and are following more closely with more current news about what's happening and are talking to the people around you wherever you are about how you will keep yourself and your neighbors safe and yeah.

[James Stout]

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Cool People could happen Here it podcast, which is what happens when two podcasts love each other.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And go to Minneapolis.

[James Stout]

Go on a trip to Minneapolis in the winter where it is cold. I am one of your hosts today. My name is James Stout and I am very lucky to be joined by my friend Margaret Killjoy.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hello, welcome to the thing that we're doing. Should we talk about today? We talked last time about some rapid response and mutual aid and there's more to be said about that.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Today is the 23rd.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. It's the past for you all, but.

[James Stout]

It'S present for us. It's amazing how podcasting works like that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Today was the second real general strike I've been to in my life.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

First one was in Oakland during Occupy.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They pulled off a pretty serious general strike. Thousands of us shut down the ports. It was really beautiful.

[James Stout]

Oh but yeah, that was possible today. No one had to shut shit down really. With the exception of the federal building which we will discuss.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's been remarkable.

[James Stout]

We've been here since Tuesday.

[Mia Wong]

It's Friday.

[James Stout]

How just the momentum has grown. Like seeing we went past some place, I think it was like a place that repaired like, like electronics of some description. They just had a little thing being like attention. We're not opening on Friday.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like yeah, it's these businesses which have no reason, you know, like these outward facing reasons to. You know, it's not even businesses which rely on the community for business enough to signal to the community that they're with them.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

It's just people who are being like yeah, nah, no, you know, like that.

[Garrison Davis]

Seems give it a shot.

[James Stout]

Yeah, let's. We gotta true something. Yeah. Let's all close down and go protest. One thing that I was sent in share this with you, Margaret. Some unkind was a list of businesses that were like yo, we will not be participating in like profit making today. But if you need X, that's what we do. Come by.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like if you know, if you're hungry, if you're cold, if you need a cup of coffee, what if you need a bicycle fix whatever it is. Like if you want to screen print abolish ice on a shirt.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Swing by like we'll be just be open up for the community. Come say hi.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like we don't want your money, we just want your solidarity. Like I thought that was cool.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And on Some level. It's been happening for a while to like talk about how yesterday we went to Powwow Grounds.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. There is a indigenous owned coffee shop called Powwow Grounds. They're actually worth donating directly to because they're mutual aid projects. They'll probably be in the list of things that we include. And you go in and the coffee is free now. And you know, we were like, well, we want to pay you for tea. And they were like, you can pay us for tea.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And we, we were able to like put some money behind in case someone else came in and needed some.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But the entire space has been taken over by a mutual aid organization and it's, you know, indigenous run. We talked to someone from aim. American Indian Movement.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

About the work they've been doing there and you know, which is that they've been, you know, basically just turning it into like making sure everyone has everything they need.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

By creating these places that are good to hang out in, you make really good rapid response places. Yeah. This is the first person we heard from about just like, I was like, how does this work? How does rapid response work? I was like, well, there's more of us than there are them. We can keep showing up.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So people are hanging out there and so. And it's right in a place where ICE likes to fuck with people. People.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Well, it's like for people who aren't familiar with that block. Right. Like, I've read a lot about aim. It's a topic I'm interested in. Like that Franklin Avenue, I believe is where AIM began.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That's understanding with Community watch, which is what's happening now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. Was doing patrols to keep their community safe.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's a cool little full circle movement from that. So this is a space which is obviously designed to like center and protect indigenous folks. Yeah. But they were just like, yeah. Anyone who's out there doing the work, please come by. We got snack packs for you. We got this earmuffs we made. We've got four different soups. Got a vegan soup, got a gluten free soup. Like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like they were more than happy for folks to come by, get fed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Get warm. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

A big thing here. People, you know, sort of make light of, you know, there's the whole quip that really works on me, which is the like ICE made the classic Nazi mistake. They invaded a winter people in winter. And that's true. But it is exceptionally cold right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like we last night, I think due to an error on my part were locked out of the place we are staying. Yeah. I think it's fairly clear that I fucked up there.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yes, that's fine.

[James Stout]

It becomes a risk to your well being pretty quickly. Yeah. To put it another way, how cold it is today. I took the battery out of Margot's vehicle and blew hot air from a hair dryer on it for some time so we could try and start it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So a jump would work. Because a jump wouldn't work without also heating up the battery.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The battery didn't have enough coal cranking happens to get.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Despite being a brand new battery.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

You need different tires for your truck. You need different oil for your vehicle. You need your battery to be warm.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. People have engine block heaters for gas engines. I don't even have a diesel. Okay. So this morning we knew as the general strike we went and got enough supplies to have enough food without having to go shopping today. And you know, we get up and we knew that there was going to be a direct action this morning at the Whipple building. And the Whipple building is. Oh I wish once, once this whole thing is scripted you'll understand all this better. But there is a building that used to be a fort and it was a fort in ye olde even more murder of indigenous people times. And it was the fort from which they would go out and capture people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And that is what it is again. It is the center of the ice operations here. It is where everyone has taken both citizen and non citizen for processing. And there's like one way in and one way out. And there have been people I keep talking about, we were talking about this hyper local rapid response. There's been people at the Whipple Building at this trap of a place with one way in and one way out.

[Robert Evans]

This place is a fortress ass building. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Where it's real easy to kidnap people because the kidnap place is right there.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

There have been people there basically every day. And just blatantly being like we are here to track you all anti ice people have been there every day.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So there was a call to go to it this morning and so we did and as press and we did not get there on time because my aforementioned absolutely not start. But multiple people came to rescue us.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like multiple people showed up to help out of towners who aren't even core of. We weren't there to get stuff done. We're just here to talk about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Like someone came to our office to jump. Someone else was like hey, did you get A job?

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Someone was like, do you want to ride?

[James Stout]

Do you need to borrow my vehicle?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And these weren't people we known very long.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The longest we'd known these people was since Tuesday. It's Friday.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so people come up, get the vehicle working, we drive there. And the whole time, both of us are moderately outdoorsy people. Right. To put it mildly in your case, and to be accurate, in my case. And we spent the whole time being like, do we have enough gear? Do we have enough winter gear? We both have these new insulated boots we got for this trip. And I live in the mountains. You are a literal sports person.

[Robert Evans]

I enjoy to be in the mountains. When I have time, I will go into the mountains and sleep outside.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, it was cold.

[Robert Evans]

It is like, it was cold. You know, there's a cold when your nose hairs freeze when you breathe in, and then. Yeah, then there's a cold when you're like, my eyes are, like, actually icing over. This is alarmingly cold.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It is the coldest day here since 2018 or 2019 is what we learned.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And, you know, when I talked to my friend before I came, I was like, it's going to be horrendously cold. Are people still going to show up? And, you know, my friend who lives here was like, well, we will. Ice will be miserable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we saw probably 10,000 people outside today between the two protests. Mostly the larger one.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, so we roll up, Right. And there is a small shield wall barricading one of the ways that ice gets into the Whipple Building to incarcerate the people who they have snatched. Yeah. There are probably half a dozen shields and then two big corrugated steel, which.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Is the level of bravery of that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That is audacious. Yeah. Because there were maybe a hundred people in that whole formation. Right. And the shield was facing two ways. We check it out as we arrive. We see what we later learn was an Italian camera operator that had been maced in the face. I just want to break down again. We've made light of the cold. And it's funny that it's cold. You get maced. Right. Generally, you want to pour water on your face.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

The clock is ticking pretty quickly. Once you start pouring liquid on exposed skin in these temperatures, the clock is.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Ticking on exposing skin in these temperatures. Any exposed skin is danger. I have this basically balaclava that I like. I don't wear to protest. That's sketchy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And then I'm like, everyone knows I'm going to die. If I don't wear this thing that covers every inch of my face.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I have a helmet with goggles and I wasn't wearing the goggles for particularly, like, I didn't think I was going to get a pepper ball in the eye. I needed the air not to touch my eyes. So, like, this masing is serious, right? And I saw that and I saw them pouring water and I was like, oh, shit. Actually, that's quite grave.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they actually did have a staged water truck to spray people. They didn't spray people with water.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, that's what we heard right there. There was a water truck staged in the, in the parking lot.

[James Stout]

To be clear.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that could have killed someone really easily.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So then that was one entrance. We were like, let's go scope out the other entrance, see what the whole scene is here. As we're walking, first of all, we come past someone with one of those trolleys that people pull. They have the better part of like a thousand hand and foot toe warmers. And they are stoked to be giving them out. Right. So we put hand warmers inside our gloves. Then we see someone who's pulled up in a minivan. That is the warming car. So people do get cold. They get in there and they warm them up. We come around, someone has snacks, someone's playing public enemy. As we come around further, we see this is the place that ice are coming in with people. Right. And so there are people who were there shouting at them. I saw a couple of snowballs thrown. And yeah, there were people who were throwing snowballs. Right. But there were also folks who just turned out to be like, yo, I'm more of a. That's not my vibe. But if you would like a snack while you're throwing them, I'm here for you. No one was like, hey, don't do that. Everyone was showing up in their own way.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that was really cool.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And that's like one of the things that we, you know, I asked at one point, I was like, what's the like discourse like about? You know, the usual thing that divides people about like, I'm going to use air quotes here, you can't see, but violence and nonviolence, which are like complicated.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, and, you know, and there's obviously people like, we've met people who've been like. And we're non violent and they're like really excited and that's an important part.

[Robert Evans]

Who had yellow vests on, being like peaceful observer. Don't shoot.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. And then there's also people who are like, we didn't see any of it, but there's graffiti all over town.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Like, fuck peace. Justice doesn't bring him back.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And I was like, what's the discourse like between these groups? And everyone we've talked to is like, there isn't time for that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We got shit to be doing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And like, you know, even when people are discussing things, they'll try to start having a discussion and someone's like, hey, ice is on that corner.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And not that these discussions aren't worth. Well, I famously my pins post on blue skies discourse as the mind killer. But like. And you can see it just like right here.

[Molly Conger]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because there's people who are like, when you show up with shields at a shield wall at blocking federal agents from being somewhere, you're clearly being mildly antagonistic. Right. It is a. Is a rowdy thing to do. And you know, and at the same time. Right. Like, we didn't make it to this because they were happening at the same time, more or less, but not very far away at the airport. We're not the news in this particular case. It could happen. Here is a news show, but this is still not the news we're reporting right now. Like 150 clergy people were arrested in civil disobedience because the airport's being used to transport people away. Did real quick tangent about that. I think it's really beautiful because there's so much. The national press is of course, like, these anti Christian people attack church. And you're like, no, the churches are on our side. Except like one or two of them.

[Robert Evans]

We were staying next to a church. Yeah. And like we get up in the morning that first day, we heard the honking and we see like, yeah, the church has got a sign being like, yeah, I know this ice shit seems bad.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think it's what Jesus would have done.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So at the thing and you know, we're like, okay, this is happening. And we start seeing the police getting ready to use munitions. Right.

[Robert Evans]

We come back from the first place to where the shield wall was. Right, Right. Shield wall is no longer there. We think, huh, weird. No shield wall.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And then there's a line of police. Oh, look at that.

[Robert Evans]

It's Hennepin County Sheriff's Department.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And. Yeah, go ahead.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, no, I mean, that's the thing is like you. It's always really sad when you come back and expect to see a shield wall and instead there's a line of police yeah. And they are yelling dispersal orders at the. At the shield wall, which is already banked up first.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They're like.

[Christopher Mathias]

They're. They've been.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They've been pushed away. We can't.

[Robert Evans]

Several hundred yards away.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, we. We just, like, straight up can't see them. And we are told in no uncertain terms by some other folks who are standing. This is not a large crowd. The crowd has been moved. And we're just kind of.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The cops are between us and our car.

[Robert Evans]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of us.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, there's six of us.

[Robert Evans]

I was counting people in my head. I can. I can say six.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, no, you're right. And two of the people we're standing next to are like. Yeah, if you cross this red line. They told us that if we cross this red line, the National Guard will shoot us dead.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And we did not test that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm not sure if they would, but Neil Young wrote a song about it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. And we're not in Ohio. It'll be fine.

[Robert Evans]

Minnesota National Guard.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. And so they are not letting us go.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. To be clear, the red line would have signified. We were entering into, like, a military area.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. Totally. With no, like, barricades or anything like that.

[Robert Evans]

They had barricades further along. Right. To make vehicles weave. So you can just drive straight up.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's the side of a public road. We're at the light rail station.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So there's the line of police, and they're mostly facing away from us. There's about two people facing towards us. Our cars between them. We are marked press.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm wearing a bright red helmet with press stickers on it. I was wearing a blue helmet with press stickers. Like, black. The first. The cops keep pushing the shield wall further away from us, and we hear them on the lrad. This has been declared an unlawful assembly. I did hear somebody shout by who? That is a very good question.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Honestly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Unfortunately, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department were not very interested in answering questions.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And the way that we learned this is that a couple of people. I would call them older folks just from looking at them from a distance.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They weren't the young rowdies holding shields.

[Robert Evans]

They were. Absolutely not. No. It was an older gentleman, a male presenting person in Carhartts.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Who walked up coveralls.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. With hands up. Yeah, Right. Very clearly hands up. And. And seemed to be asking or talking.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Was like, probably going up to being like, hey, what's happening?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, whatever. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Can I go over there? That person was arrested.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So was another person who was with him.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they were told they were arrested on the lrad. We could hear that.

[James Stout]

You are under arrest.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. That was very strange.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Then a bus arrived. More cops got out.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And those two people were put on the bus.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, Three people. There's three of them.

[Robert Evans]

Three of them. Three that were put on the bus. Yeah. Okay. The majority of the police then turn to face us.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. All six. By now, there's probably 12 of us.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because other people are like, hey, my car's over there, too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Because they're in between us and where we parked our cars right now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And then they turn the LRAD around. Right. And then they tell us that they have issued a dispersal order due to something about, like, illegal conduct. Yeah. Which, again, we are standing on the platform of a light rail station at this point, and I have seen no one do anything other than stand around. I've seen someone throw a snowball, but that was somewhere else. We're in a different location. And then they say we have five minutes to disperse. And they give us a cardinal direction. We have to disperse east onto a.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Road that no one with us knew what was.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're all looking, like, where the.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We're in a kind of weird maze of barricades.

[Robert Evans]

I had previously tried to walk up to this line and be like, can we go through to our car, please? Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We would like to disperse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because at this point, we're like, this is just going bad.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We're maybe under arrest now.

[Robert Evans]

Right. We're here to report. And if we get arrested, we can't report. And there's nothing to report on because the cops have kettled us with two other press.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. The rest of the Italian news crew.

[Robert Evans]

Who now don't have a camera that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Is still trying to do reporting, but brave as hell. Yeah. Because they're just still standing there and they're like. Yeah. You know, thick Italian accents, and they're just like. Our camera person got mazed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they'll be fine, but they got mazed.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And so the cops had very clearly indicated that they were not interested in that arrangement. So we went back to standing there wondering which way was east. I was trying to get under my layers. To my watch, I could pull up a compass.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I had figured out which way was east. I even had a suspicion about how to go that way. But I am willing, I believe, from talking to other people who are elsewhere there that day. That day today. This morning. It's been a long day. I don't normally drink caffeine. I am on caffeine. I believe that is where the other line of police was starting to kettle people from.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it seemed like.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So I actually believe they were not actually offering us a way out at all.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I, on the other hand, just realized I couldn't get to my watch and was. I knew it was before noon, so I was looking for where the sun was gonna do some celestial navigation.

[James Stout]

And at that point we saw. Well, actually at that point we went to the train platform and a light rail train was going not towards our car but away from it. But it didn't open the doors when it came to the platform.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We were like, we want to go though.

[James Stout]

I said, margaret, we're fucked. Margaret said, get ready to run, I guess.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And then as they were advancing towards us, comrade light rail train arrived. Everyone got on the train literally last minute. Yeah. Scootle straight past the police line and then we got off and commenced walking around to try and find a way back to our vehicle.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. So that was our morning. That was. I mean, whatever. We are the parties least affected. But to be like really just transparent about it, this is the coldest day of my life. I've experienced negative temperatures before. I haven't experienced -30 something wind chill.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like we were seeing people getting off the light rail. Everyone's eyelashes had frost in them.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Anyway, just to. Just to keep hitting that point.

[James Stout]

Well, like that was one of my concerns with detainment, Right. Was like cops legendarily don't treat people in their custody very well.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

And I was very worried about that too. They did seem to be getting the people there rested quickly on that bus.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But like that was one of my worries.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[James Stout]

You got. If you lose a glove when you're being handcuffed, that's not a. That's, you know, that's serious.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That's like. Maybe you lose your fingers now at.

[Robert Evans]

The end of that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, like it's like genuinely like a. I know we keep harping on it, but it's just, it's a. It's a massive characteristic.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

My car's a mess right now because we can't clean it because that involves standing outside like negative 18 or whatever. The fuck. All of these numbers have become meaningless to me at this point.

[James Stout]

Anyway. You know what keeps me warm, Margaret?

[Margaret Killjoy]

The hand warmers we purchase with the money that we get from advertisements.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I was going to say, thinking about how the Products and services that support the show. Love to support me in the work I do, but I don't think they actually know what I do. I think they need to look at our listener numbers, to be honest. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think they don't hear our ad transitions. Maybe be in trouble.

[James Stout]

Almost certain they don't.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And here they are. And we're back. So we, we go to this and then we go to the.

[Mia Wong]

The.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The clear highlight of the day, which is the ICE vehicle crashed into.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. That's when we decided. We got a. We. We received word that an ICE vehicle had T boned telephone. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I was doing a blue sky thread and I was like, nope, that's a shorter thread because we gotta go.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm not as good as Margaret is at skeeting while I'm at things, so I'm so used to being in places where it would be a risk to everyone involved to post that I was there. So we go, right. We park a few blocks away. Once we see flashing lights, we start boogieing up the street at fast walk pace, which is about as fast as you're going to go when it's an inch of ice on everything. And we see this car. There's traffic calming roundabout that clearly they were not expecting to be there. It looks like they've. They've been trying to go straight over to roundabout and have.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, they just like the front of their car is just trashed in a 15 mile per hour street.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like a street where like you would expect a child to be riding a bicycle in the summer. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it's like. It's one of those streets that's like cars on both sides, one lane kind of deal. One lane that two cars have to pass each other by backing up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they clearly just blew through it. They don't give a fuck. And that's like a thing we've heard over and over from the people who tail them is that they drive erratically, they drive recklessly because they think they are immune to all consequences.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they are.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They are. Until someone like the only people giving them consequences are the people of the city, not the city itself or the state.

[James Stout]

Yeah. This is the thing, actually, I'll just. I have spent more time than nearly everyone at the southern border United States in most places. Right. In California, in Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona. I've been up and down the border. There is one thing that unites the border experience. Be it on torn Autumn reservation in Arizona, be it in San Diego, be it New Mexico or in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. And it is that border patrols. Driving is a risk to everyone. And you can hear the most straight up right wing people are saying, I love what they're doing. I don't want the migrants in my country. But I wish they wouldn't drive like dicks. And they've killed people on the Oddam reservation. Right. Like this is serious. And what is happening once again is that the border is coming to a city and people are seeing it. This is not new. It is new here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The driving erratically is such a perfect though example of what power does to people. Like you have an unaccountable force. And they will do horrible things. They will do major horrible things like kidnapping people and they'll do petty. I don't care, I am just drunk on power things.

[Robert Evans]

Or they will leave the cars in drive when they pull them out.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like it doesn't take a second to pop it into park. Or like. Yeah, in this case they will case a telephone pole.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Anyway, so then we decide we're going to the big march downtown.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because the general strike has a component that is a big march downtown. And the single most important thing about that to me was again to keep harping on it, the cold. Because I know a lot of people who go to these sorts of marches. Right. And these are the sorts of marches that a lot of people go to who don't necessarily do a ton of other political activity. Although here it probably feels a little different because a lot of the people going to that march who probably are the kind of sign holding going to the big march kind of people are also quite possibly, at the very least showing up when ear whistles.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, doing the work.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

They're buying the groceries, whatever it is.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I think one thing I was struck. So we're walking towards this march and it is one of the things, you get this a lot when you're going.

[James Stout]

To a big action. Right.

[Robert Evans]

You feel like a salmon and everyone's just swimming up.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Swimming in the stream together.

[Mia Wong]

Over.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, whatever. A tuna. And you're all going towards the same space and that's cool. That's always nice to feel the size. And then we get there and it's big.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like there's a lot of people and it's cold. Like, I know we keep hopping on about the cold. It is cold. As Margaret's ear was a little bit out. We were both worried about Margaret's ear.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like it's. You want to ensure it like skin coverage in these temperatures.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We get there and like, so they're meeting in like a big square and then they're marching through the street, right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And there are also people on, like, there are internal walkways between buildings above the street and all of them around with people with signs who are cheering and stuff.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And the thing I noticed as we got there was like, immediately we set foot in that square, we are once again being offered hot cocoa hand warmers. There's a guy with like a. You know those orange insulated containers? They use it like sports.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Like a Gatorade thing, but it's not exactly a Gatorade.

[Robert Evans]

But he's got soup in it. Yeah, he's backpacking the soup.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's vegan and gluten free and he's handing out soup. There are multiple people who have just set up to care for people because it's cold and people might need caring for. Right. Like, there are all kinds of facilities there to, like, look after folks.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We received some hand warmers, I think. I think you and I both took some hand warmers and there wasn't. At least where we were like a speaker. There was some chanting. At this point, I would love to include to B roll of chanting. Unfortunately, it was so cold that both my voice recorders refused to work.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, yeah. One by one, every electronic device that James brought ate shit. And I like, you know, I'm much. Y' all listen to my shit. I'm much more of a vibes podcaster where I like just observe and then write everything down. James is a proper podcaster and journalist and like, you know, as B roll of things, not as much today.

[Robert Evans]

My voice recorder, which has been through the Darien Gap, has attended the Syrian civil war, has been to the place where the US dropped a nuclear bomb. It didn't make it out of Minneapolis. It's gone to Valhalla now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is sad. I even tried to record on my phone, but my phone just black screened on me.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It was comedy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was pretty funny. When the cell phone died, it was like previously I had been just to paint a picture for you all using my nose to unlock the phone and then, like actuate apps because I didn't want to take my glove off.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We would. We would take turns taking our hands out of gloves to touch buttons on things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Or to, like, adjust each other's clothes or like. Yeah. Someone watched me doing the phone thing and they just gave me a nod like.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Doing the nose phone.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Totally. And, like, I don't know, I just. I. I keep talking about how the sense of togetherness, it's inspiring. Like, full disclosure, I'm not a big rally person. I'm much personally more interested in mutual aid and direct action. I'm disinterested in it when it seems like a way for people to check off that they've done their resistance.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, definitely. If that feels like you're warm fuzzy and that's all you want.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But in this case, it was more. I don't know for certain. It was more of a warm fuzzy for people who are also just doing this hard thing day in and day out.

[Robert Evans]

It felt like when you and your friends, like, you know, when you're doing a hard, long mutual aid thing. Right.

[Mia Wong]

You.

[Robert Evans]

You know, like. Or let's say you're engaged in a project that feeds people every week.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And once a year, you get together and have a dinner together.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

It felt a bit like that. Or like, yeah, you know, a little bit. Like, when we were feeding people in the desert, we would sit down afterwards, and I was talking about this with someone today. We would, like, eat vegan MREs out of the packets. Like, people eat gogurts because we were too tired to warm up our food, but we were hungry. But we would just spend a little bit of time in community and celebrate what we'd done. What was cool, though, is sometimes after those big actions, you feel a little lonely. But it felt like that was just everyone going over there, but there was also everyone elsewhere as you kind of went around the city.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

It wasn't like that was the end of it. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I was worried it would draw people away from other things. But even this huge crowd was only a tiny portion of the people doing things in the city. And people were still doing things. And at one point I was like, hey, maybe it was Thursday. We were like, hey, we saw less people out today. Was that because the cold was starting to drive people inside? And we talked to someone and they're like, no, ice was less out today than it was yesterday, but if ice had come out, all of those people would have come out again. They're all staged and ready to go. And one of the things, actually, the warm fuzzy thing, that feeling, one of the things that we talk to is that people are very aware that they're organizing for the long haul. Again, I don't have the news in front of me, but the word on the ground here is people being like, we think ice might be here till June. And so People are like, how do we do that? You know? And one of the things is that, like, there are people providing things to the people doing things. You know, the people whose job is to provide things for other people are having people provide things for them.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And there's this moment I think about all the time. I'll accidentally do, like, the. You know, I was at this protest in the Netherlands, and the cops try to grab my friend.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they try to grab him because he's screaming. The Netherlands is a police state, which. They try to make their point by trying to grab him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. So everyone holds on to him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So the cops start just beating the crap out of the people holding on to him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So people start grabbing onto the people who are holding on to the person. They start trying to beat the people who are holding onto the people who are holding on to the people who are holding on to the people. By the time it gets to, like, four layers out, the cops are just.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, fuck it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Fuck this. Yeah. All right. The center person is never arrested. You know, and that's what solidarity is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But that's also a lot of the mutual aid stuff, like, you know, we're talking about to people who are like, yeah, we work day in and day out on this stuff. And other people are like massage therapists and regular therapists are talking with us, you know, and, like, people are building the infrastructure to try and make it sustainable.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And who knows? I don't know whether you can truly sustain what's happening here. Right. But, like, they're gonna fucking try.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The way I like to explain anarchism to people who. There's sometimes the confusion. Right. That people think anarchism is a predilection for chaos and violence, and that's not what it is. I like to explain that anarchism at its core is building ways of caring for one another that don't reinforce ways of controlling one another.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that's what people are doing here. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Under any name.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It doesn't matter. The rest of it is really ephemeral. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

A lot of them are anarchists, but not. Not anywhere near the majority of them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. But I think we can use what Jim Scott called the anarchist squint.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And see us people building networks here that make the state unnecessary. Yeah. Irrelevant. Right. Violence is all very much relevant. But others. Right. The feds are going to cut funding. Yeah. They can cut food stamps in Minnesota.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

People are still going to get food to their neighbors. Right. They can Cut.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Education funding. We heard that there are schools which have a very diverse background. And by diversity, I don't just mean like people of different races, but also people of different income brackets.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And the wealthier parents are like, which families aren't able to work? How do I help them make their rent? Yeah. Oh, God.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It was funny when. Yeah. People were like, oh, you know the thing where like the rich parents are like really excited to help everyone and feed everyone. I was like, no, that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You do realize that's not the stereotype.

[Ian]

Let me tell you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, it should be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it should be. Well, I think folks are really like, huh, what do the world without these people look like?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Worse. I don't want that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, what do I have that I can use to stop that? I have my time, I have my body, I have my money.

[James Stout]

Let me give them all of them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I thought that was very cool. I think the, the specific thing that has made people. I, I saw little signs.

[James Stout]

He had the name for one of.

[Robert Evans]

The guys from Liam, the young, very, very young kid. Right. The five year old kid with the Superman.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The one who was.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Grabbed Spider Man. Yeah, he was grabbed the other day. I saw a lot of people with science about that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, it made me want to cry even just seeing the signs.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Well, these little outrages continue to bring people out of their safe, warm comfort bubbles and be like, no, like I am going to do whatever it takes. My money, my time, whatever. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. You know William Von Spranssen?

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Margaret Killjoy]

For people who are listening, there was a. An IWW member named William Von Spranssen who was killed by ICE a number of years ago now because he decided that he would go and try to set some ice stuff on fire. Middle of the night.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think it was buses, Right. Unoccupied buses, to be clear. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Middle of the night, empty buses. The buses that they're using to kidnap people. And the cops showed up and killed him. And he was seen as kind of this lone wingnut. And I'm watching it and I'm like, this man is going to be written about history books. As a guy actually started doing something early about this. And in his statement that he wrote, I'm not telling people that this was a wise action for him to have taken whatever. But in a statement he wrote, he wrote a line something like, I am off to fulfill my childhood promise to myself, to be noble. And like, he knew he was going to die doing that action. Right. That certainly seems to be the tone from the letter. But that line, the idea of fulfilling your promise to yourself to be noble. And the thing that is beautiful here is that you can now do that with people and effectively. And I think that a lot of the things that stop people from taking action is a belief that it would be shot in the dark, it would be a lone thing, it wouldn't accomplish anything. Right. Because most actions you can take by yourself don't accomplish nearly as much. And to be clear, the people who built rapid response networks here, they learned from other cities, they learned from Chicago, who learned from la. Yeah, right. That is the lineage that I've heard presented.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But they have developed and expanded because this is actually a bigger thing than operation on ISIS part, than either of those. But so people can do what we've been put on this earth to do, which is be our best selves. And I think that there's. Even as hard as it is for people, I think that there's a dark beauty that they get to know who they are and they get to know that they are people who will make sandwiches, because that's the thing. And they will risk everything to make sandwiches. They will risk everything to follow ICE vehicles and honk at like, imagine following a murderer down the street going, this man's a murderer. This man right here shoots people.

[James Stout]

Well, not just that.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

This person has the power to kill me and not face consequences.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. That's what they're shouting at people and everyone is shouting it at them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it works.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's people who you wouldn't expect and people who you would expect both together alongside each other. Yeah. I think a lot about how, like, how much things have changed in this country in a year. Lots of it's bad. Right. But abolish ICE was a pretty niche position in 2020, let me tell you. You didn't really hear it right. Abolish ICE is a compromise position. Now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That is the centrist position.

[James Stout]

Abolish ice.

[Robert Evans]

That is. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Reform ICE center.

[James Stout]

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think Reform ICE is some parts of the Republican Party. Right. Abolish ICE is pretty much in between the two.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The political parties haven't caught up to this fact.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But they'd never do. Right. They always take longer than everyone else. But let me tell you, there was, you know, what would Ronald Reagan guy do?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

When you've lost the. What would Ronald Reagan guy do? You're in fucking trouble.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Totally.

[James Stout]

In this country.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I, I love how it's like we talk to a Lot of people with a lot of different political ideas. Most people didn't have a. This is my political ideology. Yeah. But like, you know, people are like, just blunt, like, well, it would be better if the politicians were doing it and they're not.

[James Stout]

Yeah. This lady who again, the lady said, oh, those are local cops. You don't have to worry about them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

A couple days later turned out, but she was like, it would be great if our politicians were with us, but they're not, so we're going to do it ourselves. That's all you need. That lady's done more anarchism than your average Internet anarchist who's out there Fed posting every day.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, totally.

[Robert Evans]

That's.

[James Stout]

That's really all you need.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Well, we're going to take one more ad break.

[James Stout]

That's all you really need is advertisements.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it goes a little something like this. And we're back. I feel warmed in my belly by those advertisements. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Hopefully you buy something that you don't need.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, hopefully you skip past them, but.

[James Stout]

You double tap the old headphone button. It normally goes 30 seconds.

[Margaret Killjoy]

See, the problem is that I don't usually. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I don't have cooler zone media because I have Android.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So I have to listen to the ads. Yeah, I know. So the ads come on.

[James Stout]

Just remember, if you tag. I writeokay if you have any issues regarding the ad.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah, that'll definitely work.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so sometimes when I'm like. Because I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm like, doing like, woodworking or, like, cleaning. Doing stuff with my hands.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so I like. I'm like, I don't want to put down the saw in order to press the button.

[James Stout]

So I do it with my. With my. With my left earlobe against my shoulder. That's how I skip them. Yeah. Because I don't have callisone media either.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, but maybe you do. In which case you only hear the.

[James Stout]

Diversion about shit that doesn't bother you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Lucky. Lucky thing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We will have a lot more reporting. This isn't the end of the episode, but we'll have a lot more reporting about Minneapolis and the structures that people are building and Minneapolis and St. Paul and the outlying areas, as someone kind of correctly checked me on the fact that I keep saying Minneapolis, it's just where I spend most of my time.

[Robert Evans]

True.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And things are different, but the things are different block by block. But a lot of that we really want to kind of do right. And we're going to write scripted, but we're just really kind of in it right now and really want to talk about this. And part of the reason we want to talk about this so soon is because things happen really fast. And just that everyone we've talked to has told us that they. They want people to know, you know, the horrors are getting out on some level, which is good. It is actually good that people are learning all these horrible things. But a lot of them, the scale of the resistance isn't getting out, and the efficacy of the resistance isn't getting out. And people want people to know because they want people to know that they can do it, too.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I saw someone had, shockingly, someone had a stupid opinion on the Internet. Someone had said that talking about this makes it dangerous for these people. No, first of all, I mean, there.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Are things that we don't know that we shouldn't. We wouldn't say, but, like.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, there were things. Yeah, yeah. There are things that we wouldn't ask about or that people wouldn't give us interviews about if they thought they were dangerous. Right. But, like, what makes it safe is that everyone is doing it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

What makes us safe is that there are more of us. And what people asked us to do was share this because they are safer if you do it, too. There are tens of millions of people who are just as outraged as that older lady that we met on the first day. And what keeps that lady safe and your neighbor safe and her neighbor safe, and people who you've never met safe and yourself. Yeah, and yourself is you doing it, too.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, if it stops here, if you can't grab migrants off the street here, then you can't grab dissidents off the street somewhere else.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. And, like, you know, we've seen all over graffiti and, you know, we saw a huge piece of graffiti at the ICE building.

[Robert Evans]

Basically, I read it into the mic. Actually, my mic was working.

[James Stout]

First it came for the undocumented, and I said nothing because I wasn't undocumented. Then they came for the Somalis, and I said nothing because I was not Somali. Then they came for the activists, and I said nothing for I was not an activist. Then they came for me.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I am so grateful that we live in a generation that has read that poem.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And seemingly taking it to heart.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And more people have than I thought. And I think all the time about solidarity. You'll be shocked to know this. Obviously, the moment that makes me cry on the most regular basis is, of course, the charge of The Rohirrim, when the riders of Rohan ride to Gondor to face the. Anyway, even though Gondor wasn't there for them, where was Gondor? But part of the reason that I love solidarity so much is because I keep joking that I'm gonna write the Misanthropic Introvert's Guide to Socialism because I. Misanthropic introvert at heart. Right. I also love people. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And I love most people over there. And I grew up not proud to say, pretty self interested. Right. And I was very lost in my own head and kind of selfish. And I very quickly upon this, meeting anarchists and meeting people who believed in responsibility and freedom was like, oh, I am safer and more free and more able to express my full self if I am part of a community of solidarity.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so even though in the immediate moment it is more dangerous, like there's the old joke about like, you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than your friend.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That is the single worst idea in the world.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Because then bears start eating people.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. So if there is a monster and you can outrun someone so you think you're safe, you now have to be the fastest person.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Right. You're safe until you're not.

[Margaret Killjoy]

To be part of a community that turns around and fights the monster might be more dangerous for yourself in the immediate sense. And being someone who stands up is that. Yeah, it is that saying, like, well, even though in the short term it is more dangerous for me to stand up by having been participate in a society where we stand up for each other, I am safer. And so even if that means my literal death, I will have been safer. Even if you get weirdly utilitarian about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. In aggregate, you are safer and so is everyone else.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And so it's not a charity, it's a solidarity.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, like solidarity is in a sense is in your own self interest. Because we want to live in a world where people take care of each other, not just in case union jobs.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Pay better, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Not just in case we need to be taken care of, but because I often think about that. I think it's John Stuart Mill.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. The bell tolls for thee. What he's saying there is not. What's that bell ringing? What he's saying is I participate in humanity. And so when humanity is devalued, in his case, talking about bell or funerary bell. Right. When humanity is Devalued. My humanity is devalued. And therefore, in this case, where the bell is ringing for me, I am a human. And when they undermine our common humanity, therefore they undermine this thing that I have. And I won't let them do that because I participate in humanity. And so, as it happens, does a person who's been subjected to inhuman violence. And so I will stand up for humanity, and in doing so, I will stand up for. For making a humanity that will stand up for me.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And like, I think about a lot because John McCain wrote it in an obituary for the last American.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Lincoln Brigade volunteer. And I don't agree with John McCain on anything, really.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Right. But I do want that.

[James Stout]

And like, I was thinking about that today when I saw what Would Ronald Reagan Do, Guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because John McCain was a man who believes something. He believes things I don't agree with.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Including a lot of racist shit.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

John McCain clearly thought that the Lincoln brigadiers were on the right side of history. Right, right. And like Winston Churchill's nephew fought in the International Brigades.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

Okay, folks with whom I share very little in terms of politics, a lot of British upper class people fought in the International Brigades.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They probably weren't anarchists, but they were anti fascists. They were better anti fascists than the people who stayed at home. And you couldn't tweet in 1936, but they would have been if they could.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Right. Because they were willing to put their bodies on the line.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And many of them died. Many of them are buried in Spain as Spanish people remember them fondly. Right. They have annual ceremonies to remember the sacrifice they made before any of the people who are attending those ceremonies are alive. And if more people had said, yeah, I'll go, right. Like the bell's ringing for me.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm not going to stand for a world where this happens. We're going to fight for one where it doesn't. Then we might not have had the Holocaust.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

We might not have had the Second World War. We might not have had Stalingrad.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And also all the people who fought in Stalingrad are the reason it didn't get worse.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

World War II could have been worse.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It would have been worse if people hadn't fought.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. Yeah. We had Stalingrad. So the Holocaust wasn't more so that Western Europe doesn't speak German. Right. Like every single one of those people who stood up to stop that probably wish that they'd stood up earlier. And every single one of Those people who stood up earlier probably wish that more people had joined them. I think about that a lot. It's not news to anyone listening to this that I wrote my PhD on the Spanish Civil War and think about it every day.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

If you wanted the non dramatic version of all this, you're listening to the Wrongdo podcast.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot about, like, what we should learn from that. Right. I translated a piece for zine, Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness. Oh, yeah, Good, Gene.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's a publishing collective that I work.

[James Stout]

With and I've translated a piece by a Belgian anarchist who's referred to as a constellation of acronyms. But Charles Riddle was his birth name. Louis Mercier Vega was his name he lived with for most of his life. And he wrote this piece called Refuting the Legend, where he talks about what he feels that he owes the people who died. And I think about that a lot. The thing that he comes up with is that he owes the people who die the truth so that we can learn from it and do better. And he shouldn't just make them into heroes, he should make them into real people with flaws so that people can understand their flaws and they can know what we can do better. I think about that a lot. Right. So many people have gone before us. So many brave people have gone before us. And we owe it to them to learn from it. Right. And I think we have. I was thinking about this when that older lady said to us, oh, my father in the Second World War. And I think about it again when I saw the poem today. We have to learn from that experience. Right. And you have to stop it now, not when it comes for you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah. And the fact that we talked to multiple people who, some of their families had survived the Holocaust.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The reason they were in America in many cases was because their grandparents had come here to flee the Holocaust who.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Were making comparisons to that. And you're like, they're not doing that lightly. And I feel like almost, you know, when we talk about this sort of grandiose things, I'm like. I almost feel like. I'm like, ah, we're talking about people with whistles. We're like, yeah, but we're not. I mean, we are. We're talking about people with whistles.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Well, let's hope it stops at whistles. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And that is what is effective right now. And it, like, is, you know, it's spreading something and it, it's going to be so interesting to see what comes of this. Everything will be changing. You know, there's no reason to specifically set up everything that you all do in whatever city or town you live in exactly the same as they do it here. But there's, like, so many things to learn from them. And more than anything else, the thing to learn from them is, like, you just show up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's not that every single person in the city has quit their job to do this full time.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Obviously, economies don't function like that, but you don't have to quit your job to walk outside your house when you hear someone yell, help. Which is what is happening with whistles and honking. Right. And just spreading a culture of we take care of each other and neighborliness.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And that is, like, weirdly, fundamentally, it is an American cultural idea. We're just bad at it. We've kind of forgotten a lot of it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, it's like, because obviously, isolation is a big part of American individualism Is a big part of it. But, like, everyone's a little bit happy when they get to, like, oh, you need a lawnmower.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. When I get to fix my neighbor's truck.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Love that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Get up and give someone a chainsaw.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And one of the things that we. To maybe kind of end on and the thing that I want to end on, you know, we were asking people, like, what they wish other people knew, what other people could know. And there's a couple things that people mentioned, and we'll write more about this and podcast more about this. But one of the things that people mentioned is they wish they had started earlier about knowing their neighbors. Obviously, it wasn't too late. It's the whole, like, with any kind of preparedness. Right.

[Robert Evans]

You're like, you wish you started.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. But, you know, now is the best. You know, yesterday is the best time, and today is the next best time. Right. And, like, just literally knowing them, not necessarily becoming their friends, like, a lot of people are like, no, I wasn't friends with them. I just sort of knew them, you know? And then also, one of the other things that people. Just as another thing people mentioned that they wanted people to know is that when you build these networks, you need to build autonomy into them at every level.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You need to build the idea that the person who is following ICE is, at the end of the day, in charge of how they do that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, even if, you know. You know, people are like, oh, ICE is over here. You can't say, everyone go do this. Someone can suggest that. But having built autonomy into these networks, Makes them so much stronger. And in an interesting way, partly because it makes them less predictable to ice.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Because you never know what someone's going to. What they're comfortable when they're not comfortable with.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. So that is basically a diversity of tactics. Makes movements strong. If they don't know how we are going to behave, they can't. And not just like, if everyone's rowdy.

[Christopher Mathias]

No.

[Margaret Killjoy]

If people are going to be rowdy. Combination. And when the rowdy and non rowdy support people, they support each other. Anyway, those are the kind of last thoughts I have before I actually sit down and look at all my notes and write something real.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I think for me, it's. Everyone here said that it was funny when people were like. We were like, how do you start organizing? They were like, you know, last July, we had a block party and a potluck.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it just seemed to be just a thing until it became the foundation of this thing that exists now. Right. If there's one thing you can do, it won't cost you any money, it will take you a little bit of time, and it will probably make your life better. It is go out on your block and meet your neighbors. And I know that can be hard for people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I know it can be scary.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But we're talking, like trans motherfuckers who are doing this too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's people who. Who have more at stake than I do. Yeah, Right. Like, I'm. I'm. I'm a cisgender white man.

[James Stout]

For people listening, the.

[Robert Evans]

The best thing you can do is start to form community. And it could be in so many ways. One thing that, like, I really like to do is, like, I have, throughout my life, developed certain skills and certain hobbies, and I love to share those with people. You know, if there is someone in my neighborhood, they got a bike outside, they're trying to fix a puncher, I'm gonna go help them because I've done that 10,000 times. Right. Whatever it is, that is your thing that you like to talk about, that you're good at, that you know about. Think of a way you can share that with people. Maybe you like to bake, maybe you like to knit. Maybe.

[James Stout]

Whatever.

[Robert Evans]

It. It doesn't matter. It doesn't.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, there's people with, like, free hats and scarves at these things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could just be the person who knits the scarves. Is that your way to contribute? That's your way to meet your neighbors. Right. Put on a knitting circle to Put on a baking thing. I like to grow plants, so I'm always growing plants. And I'm stoked when my neighbors stop by and say, hey, I really like your basil plant. And I want to make.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Which is how they pronounce it when.

[Robert Evans]

They say, yes, they do. Yeah. When they said to me, because otherwise I look at them and say, get out of my home, you know, and they want.

[James Stout]

If they want to make something, I give them some. Right. Or if they say, hey, I just need a couple of tomatoes. And I notice, of course I'm going to give them. Right. Whatever that is. Your neighbor's away for a couple of weeks. Hey, do you want me to look after the house? Your car won't start. Let me jump it, right. I have one of those little jumper packs I love to use. A little jumper pack.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, yeah. If you have a tool and someone needs the tool. Having a multi tool on you is the best way to feel good all the time. Because someone's like, like, oh, I wish I had a rent or not. You know, I wish I had a head.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And there you go, like Superman. Yeah, do those things. Now, I know we harp, Margaret and I both harp on about this, but like, this is how you build a better world. It starts on your block. It starts by building a better neighborhood, building a better street, building a better apartment complex. If an apartment complex. Right. It could be hard to see people in apartment complexes because people sort of get in the lift and put the, look at the floor, put a little sign up, just be like, hey, we're gonna have a potluck. Hey, the little bit in between the pavement and the road's kind of fucked up. Anyone else wanna help me put some plants in it this springtime, you know, whatever it is that is your thing, start using that to build community. Because it's community that's gonna get you through this. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it's like, you know, I don't always like talking to people, but I just, when I'm in a new place, I'm just like, hey, I just moved here. Nice to meet you. I'm so and so do you need my phone number? And I can do the kind of like, you know, I want you to my phone number because I want you to call me instead of the cops if I'm being too loud.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But like, you're going to make a little bit of a faux pas in certain communities by being like, hey, we should know each other. Yeah, but usually just a hey, we should know each other, isn't Actually offending as many people as you think.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, I know a lot of people don't live in cities, too. Or some people are like, I grew up very, very rural.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But actually, like, we had to know each other because, like, there wasn't really anyone else you could go to.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

In my mind, I'm like, when I live rural and I'm like, that's how you have to know people.

[James Stout]

Like. Yeah. Like, I remember someone's horse fell in. Some wealthier people had a swimming pool.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, yeah.

[James Stout]

I ain't lifting the horse out by myself.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, yeah. My neighbors keeps walking onto my property.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's not as big of a deal as the horse falling in, but just constantly, my neighbors, like, my pig got out again.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like. Like, we there. There are a million reasons why in rural areas. I'd hope you. You would know people anyway. But again, like, hey, I'm so and so. I just moved here. I just wanted to say hi. Maybe you bake something, whatever. Take something over. Most people aren't going to be mad at you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Well, that's kind of our preliminary stuff, and we're going to be doing so much more with it, but we just kind of wanted to get some ideas out while we were both in the same place in this shockingly beautiful city.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Around people who are so fucking inspiring. Like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Just everyone we talk to is so inspiring. And even if the, like, the tragedy of it, you know, I. I feel so weird being like, here's the hopeful stuff. When I'm like, we're describing a horrible land of kidnappers. Weird. Like. Like, it's just like, literally, kidnappers have descended upon the city and are like, you're just gonna kidnap people?

[Robert Evans]

When you're like, that will fund the kidnappings.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

For cool people did cool stuff. That's the core idea of the show, is that when people, you know, it's the intro. It's when people are trying to do bad things. There's people trying to do good things. And so that's why taking a break from history content, talking about something that's just happening right now, it is cool people doing cool stuff up here. Or maybe more than cool because it's freezing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Freezing people doing cool stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Feel free to workshop at home. A better way to do it. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. I'm coming back from a place more hopeful than I left. I know that's my thing that I do. But I really believe that in the darkest times, we can build beautiful things. And I Don't believe that any less after being here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, that's a great thing about being a goth beauty in the dark stuff. That's like fucking. Anyway, we will talk to you all for me next week and for James, who knows, probably freaking tomorrow. Yeah, couple of days.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Thought my job was hard. Anyway, yeah, good luck with everyone and take care of your neighbors. And fuck ice.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Thanks everyone for listening to all of this. And if at the end of this you're thinking that you would like to help some of the people who are on the ground, we asked people that we trusted on the ground to provide us with links to different fundraisers. And basically, you know, I never share a fundraiser unless I can support it with my whole heart and I would support it with my own wallet. The links themselves are going to be in the show notes, but there's a couple different ones. There's rent support for neighbors in Phillips, which is a neighborhood Rent support for neighbors in Central Rent support for neighbors in Powderhorn, supplies for political art making protective gear for legal observers, Diapers and menstrual supplies is another fundraiser. Abolish Ice shirts, including the shirt I am wearing right now as I record this North Star Frontline street medics and the Twin Cities Swoletariot bail fund. And there'll be links to both a Venmo and a cash app for that one. Anyway, thanks everyone and take care of each other.

[Molly Conger]

Friday, kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy. Featuring a special performance performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Ilya Malin, redefining the Sport. Friday at 8 Eastern, 7 Central on NBC. And Peacock. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

[Mia Wong]

Molly.

[Molly Conger]

I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger. And today we're going to be talking about something that is happening. Doxxing Nazis. Specifically, I'm talking to Chris Matthias about his new book, To Catch a the Fight to Expose the Radical Right. Chris, thanks for coming on today.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God, Molly, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[Molly Conger]

I'm so excited to talk about this book. You sent me a copy of it recently. I don't think I remembered until I was reading it. Then I talked to you while you were writing it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes. Yes, you did.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

You're one of the many, many people I talk to and you are quoted in the book. In fact, I can't remember if you told it to me or If I cite it from somewhere else. But you once compared the research that goes into doxxing unmasking Nazis to basically investigating your ex's Instagram account, which I thought was an amazing comparison. Because you're basically saying, like, this type of work is accessible if you've done that type of sleuthing, which is not.

[Molly Conger]

Something I'm admitting to doing. I'm not nosy about my exes. I'm just saying it is something many women are very good at.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Exactly.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

And they don't realize it's a transferable skill.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

But for those who don't know, Christopher Mathias has been covering the far right for more than a decade, right?

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

You were with Huffington Post for a long time and you've been independent for a couple of years.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, so I was at HuffPost for, like, almost 14 years, and about 10 of those. I know, it's wild. And 10 of those years I was covering the far right, which is how I ended up in Charlottesville in 2017 for Unite the Right rally, which is something Molly and I have talked a lot about before. And, yeah, after I got back from Charlottesville, my editor at the time was like, this is your beat now, covering the far right. So I was kind of like among this initial crew of digital media journalists who suddenly found themselves on the right wing extremism beat. And pretty quickly, I realized while I was trying to unmask people in the far right, that there were already people doing that work and they were anti fascist activists.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah. And so to prepare for today, I listened to a couple of interviews you've done about the book so far. It comes out first week of February.

[Christopher Mathias]

February 3rd. Yeah, we're close. Yeah. Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

I was listening to those interviews and I was thinking about, you know, this is a different audience. Like, you don't need to explain to people who listen to. It could happen here what antifa is or what doxing is.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

But I think the book very delicately and unapologetically explains those things to people who might be afraid of them.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. I mean, that was the entire intent of the book, and I'm so glad you picked up on that. You know, I think I kind of imagined writing this book for my parents for, like, kind of, you know, boomer liberals, if you will, or centrists and other people. Just, I think that have a lot of misapprehensions about Antifa, understandably. And, you know, the kind of the. The goal of the book was to demystify what antifa is, explain it to a wider audience and to make kind of more radical politics that Antifa represents more palatable to a wider audience. And the way I tried to do that was to make the book a bit of a thriller so that it was accessible and make it into, like, a spy narrative. And I'm hoping that the very kind of average reader will be able to dive into this and come out understanding more radical leftist politics that maybe wasn't accessible to them before.

[Molly Conger]

That's such a hard needle to thread. Because I could give this book to my dad. Right.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

But I also enjoyed reading it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yay.

[Molly Conger]

Good for the listener. You should go out and get this. It's not just for your dads. You will like it, too. The cold open. Right. Like, the introductory chapter starts sort of in media res. With your framework of the book. Right. This Vincent Washington, this infiltrator inside Patriot Front.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

And the thing is, I know about Vincent Washington.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

I read the leaks that Vincent was responsible for. I was actually the one who told Thomas Rousseau in person about the leak.

[Christopher Mathias]

What? I didn't know that.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, yes. For the listener, Vincent Washington is not a real person. He is a real person, but that's not his real name.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

Right. It was. So within Patriot Front, they all get a pseudonym and then their last name is like their state. So Vincent Washington was a man whose name is not Vincent, who might be from Washington, and he infiltrated Patriot Front and he leaked all of their rocket chats. And the day that leak was published, it was January 21, 2022.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

Was the day of the march for life.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

So Patriot Front was in Washington D.C. and I had a suspicion that Patriot Front would be there. They don't announce that kind of thing ahead of time, but I was pretty sure they were gonna be there. So I went to Washington D.C. and we were standing outside the National Archives, and Thomas Rousseau had his little bullhorn. He had, like 20 or 30 guys and a little matching fit. And they were so tickled with themselves. They were so tickled. People were just falling all over themselves because these, like, scary Nazis were on the street. And I actually. I have a video. I'll embed it in the final.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God. Molly.

[Molly Conger]

Hey, guys. Your rocket chat just got leaked on DDoS secrets. Unicorn Riot just dropped. Your rocket chat, everything, all your DMs, all your DMs, the metadata attached.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You have your shield up.

[Garrison Davis]

No one is going to hurt you.

[Dana Al Kurd]

We're just going to make fun of you.

[Molly Conger]

The videos that you send your network leaders, those all have metadata and Unicorn Riot is posting them right now.

[Christopher Mathias]

Holy shit, Molly, how did I not ask you about this for the book? I could have put this in there. Oh my God, it was incredible because.

[Molly Conger]

You know, Thomas Rousseau later was like, oh, it's like not a big deal. He looked scared.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh my God, he looked scared. Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

So like I know about Vincent, but seeing the story from his side of things was so different. Right. Like I use these leaks all the time but I, you know, never get to know about the leaker.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh my God. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. So again, this is kind of my goal for the book was that these kind of anti fascist spies, and I feel like most Americans don't know that Antifa had so many spies over the last 10 years that were infiltrating these groups. You know, they were the hidden hand behind thousands of news stories because they collected all of this invaluable intelligence, you know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of private messages that these white supremacists were sending to each other, which then were posted on a database on Unicorn Riot, which wonderful researchers like yourself and other people used to mine for clues and details that they could use to identify all of these previously pseudonymous Nazis. So for example, you know, and I wish I could have seen the look on Thomas's face. I can't wait to see that video. But yeah, I mean like they released, I believe it was like 400 gigabytes worth of Rocket Chat messages and you know, videos and photos and stuff.

[Molly Conger]

With metadata still attached to them.

[Christopher Mathias]

Exactly, with metadata still attached to them, which we'll get to in a second by the way. There's a good story about the metadata, but ultimately that data would contribute to Doxxing unmasking, I think about 80 members of Patriot Front, which is just remarkable. And I think part of the story I was trying to tell was that these anonymous antifascists who are doing this work anonymously, they're not doing it for acclaim or glory. They're doing it because they see it as a form of community self defense. And what they were doing I think outstripped the efforts of major media, news organizations, academic institutions, civil rights organizations, oh, no doubt, law enforcement, definitely. They were doing more work to destabilize and destroy far right groups than I would argue, really anyone else.

[Molly Conger]

And in the subsequent work that builds off of that by civil rights groups filing these large Clan act lawsuits. Those lawsuits don't exist without these leaks. Signs v. Kessler doesn't exist without these leaks. The three lawsuits against Patriot Front don't exist without these leaks.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

And I've been thinking a lot about this this week, right, because it was the anniversary of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face five years ago.

[Christopher Mathias]

Happy anniversary.

[Molly Conger]

Happy anniversary to those who celebrate. And that was a beautiful moment. And I think we can all agree that it's so funny to watch Richard Spencer get punched in the face. But every year you see people say, and that's what stopped him, and he was never heard from again. And he shut up forever after that.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right?

[Molly Conger]

And that's not true.

[Christopher Mathias]

That's not true at all.

[Molly Conger]

Like, I love the guy that punched him in the face, but that didn't end it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

An infiltrator did.

[Christopher Mathias]

An infiltrator did. And I think, again, you know, kind of the goal of the book is that most antifa in the public imagination is most often associated with Nazi punching. And, you know, for good reason. Like, most people learned about antifa in 2017 from videos. Like the video of Richard Spencer getting punched. It's so interesting to look back and realize that no one in America knew what the fuck Antifa was before 2017. And then by the end of that year, everyone had heard that word or knew that word.

[Molly Conger]

It was the boogeyman.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, it was the boogeyman. And it was added to the Webster Dictionary. Oxford Dictionary shortlisted it for Word of the Year. Like, it's a remarkable climb for, you know, a piece of language, a word. But the viral videos that catapulted that word into the lexicon kind of obscured the bulk of the work that antifa was doing, which was espionage and intelligence gathering and kind of the creation of this remarkable underground informal intelligence agency that just completely fucked up so many fascist groups. And, you know, at the end of 2017, Spencer famously said, antifa is winning. And he was referring not only to getting punched everywhere he went, but to these very efforts to identify all of his followers who knew that if their Nazism was public, they wouldn't be able to operate in public life, they wouldn't be able to hold down a job, and so on and so forth.

[Molly Conger]

Because I guess both the Nazi punching and the Nazi doxxing, they are different means to a similar end, which is to enact a consequence, Right? So that if you're gonna be a Nazi in public, there's gonna be a fucking consequence, whether that means you get decked in the jaw or it means all of your neighbors know what you said online, your mom knows what you said online. Like people know who you are.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. The way I Always describe it is the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman. You know, back in the 80s and 90s, anti racist activists with groups like Anti Racist Action would post flyers in neighborhoods that said, meet your local Nazi.

[Molly Conger]

Right?

[Christopher Mathias]

And what they were doing was not only warning the community that that guy down the block is liable to commit violence against people you know and love, but like you were getting at, they were creating a social cost for being a fascist. They're basically leveraging an existing societal taboo against explicit white supremacy and fascism to ensure a consequence. It basically says, it tells people, if you're going to join one of these groups, we're going to name and shame you, you're going to lose your job, your girlfriend's going to dump you, you might lose your apartment, your family, you know, might not want to talk to you anymore. Like, you're going to be a pariah. And I think it was really effective. I mean, you know, obviously the animating question of my book, of course, is what happens when that taboo starts to disappear.

[Molly Conger]

But it's not gone yet.

[Christopher Mathias]

It's not gone.

[Molly Conger]

Some of the other interviews I was looking at, people are saying, well, is there value in this anymore? Because you can work for the State Department and be a Nazi now.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

You can do the White House social media and be a Nazi now. Like, is there still any value in this? And I think the answer is obviously yes. Yeah, they wouldn't wear masks if they didn't have to wear masks.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, right.

[Molly Conger]

Like, some of them are mask off, quote unquote, but like, not all of them. Patriot Front still marches in masks. ICE agents still abduct children in masks. They're covering their faces because they know what they're doing is wrong.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And I think it's also as much of a mask off moment as we might be living in. In some ways, you know, this act of research and identifying the threat is still so important because it's, you know, preserving that societal taboo. It's still saying that that social cost is something we still want to preserve. And it is, I think, very interesting that the anti fascist work now is kind of pivoting towards identifying ICE agents and maga. And the Trump administration is horrified of this tactic of identifying ICE agents and for good reason. Because the story I try to tell in my book, this tactic played a really big part in, in destroying fascist groups. They know that it could destroy their ethnic cleansing project. And when you look at the polls since Renee Goode, the favorability for ICE has just plummeted. And the support for slogans like Abolish ICE have skyrocketed. So that societal taboo against white supremacism that's being displayed by ICE is definitely still there.

[Molly Conger]

And you ground this sort of in the history too, in the book, in the chapter about sort of the history of unmasking. Whether that's with digital doxxing or, you know, identifying members of the Klan. There was still a social cost to being identified as a klansman in the 1920s. Yeah, like there was. There was no social taboo against being racist in the 20s, but there was a social cost to being identified as a Klansman. And I think we're. We find ourselves in the same unfortunate place.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, totally. I mean, and honestly, that was one of my favorite parts about researching the book was diving into the efforts to unmask the clans. Obviously, there were efforts to unmask the first clan. But, you know, one of my favorite stories about unmasking the second clan took place in Buffalo, New York. And there was actually a very large clan chapter in Buffalo. You know, the second clan wasn't confined to the South. It was everywhere. It was in the Northeast and the Midwest.

[Molly Conger]

Right.

[Christopher Mathias]

And it was animated not only by anti black racism and anti Semitism, but also by anti Catholicism. They were really angry at this new wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

[Molly Conger]

They didn't allow Catholics in until the 70s. They had to have a big summit about it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Molly Conger]

When they decided that Catholics are white.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And this is. Man, it's just, it's so much to unpack because, like, obviously, like, my family's Catholic and I enjoy all of the privilege of being white. But like, you know, back then, like, you know, Catholics were, you know, this other.

[Molly Conger]

You had a dual loyalty to this mysterious king.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. So at any rate, the Klan in Buffalo is really big. And, you know, one night they even have this elaborate cross burning ceremony where 800 people take the oath for the clan. The mayor of Buffalo, though, is Catholic and forms a coalition with, you know, black Buffalonians and Jewish Buffalonians. And the mayor ends up enlisting a spy to go undercover into the Klan. One night, the Klan's secret headquarters in Buffalo are ransacked, broken into and ransacked. And suddenly this list of the Klan's membership ends up in the hands of the mayor. The mayor makes some, like, deft denials of any involvement, but says that he's going to post the list downtown. The list is posted downtown. So many people show up to look at the list to See who among their neighbors is in the Klan, that they end up having to move the list, I believe, to a warehouse to fit all the people so that they could form a line. And then in the ensuing weeks and months, Klan owned businesses are boycotted and vandalized. Klansmen turn up to their jobs only to learn that they've been fired.

[Molly Conger]

Good.

[Christopher Mathias]

And before long, the Klan just completely falls apart. And interestingly enough, Klan headquarters down in Georgia heard about what was happening in Buffalo and was really alarmed by it. So they send an investigator to Buffalo to figure out who the spy is. They figure out who the spy is and they get in a shootout and they both die.

[Molly Conger]

Jesus Christ.

[Christopher Mathias]

Which, like underscores, you know, the, the stakes of this work sometime.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

Which is why, you know, the Richard Spencer puncher and the infiltrators, they do their best to stay anonymous because the stakes are.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

Lethal.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right.

[Molly Conger]

Like they will, they will kill you back.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

These organizations can't survive sunshine. And they're so aware of that that. Yeah, people have been killed for this.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, absolutely. You and I have both faced our share of harassment and stuff, but there's older tales of, you know, anti racist action. Back in the 90s, two of its members, you know, anti racist skinheads, were in Nevada, lured out to the desert by Nazis under false pretenses and executed in the desert.

[Molly Conger]

It's Fourth of July weekend, right? Yes, we still honor them on the Fourth of July.

[Christopher Mathias]

Exactly. Yeah. Their names are escaping me right now.

[Molly Conger]

Spit Newborn and Daniel Shirsty.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes. And there is a fantastic Orlando weekly feature article about, I believe, Spit that I think is one of the best pieces I've read in a long time that maybe we can put in the notes I think people would really enjoy.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Christopher Mathias]

And then there's more recent examples of that too. Over the last five years, there was three members of the base, which is like a neo Nazi organization, obviously. I love that your listeners know all this, by the way.

[Molly Conger]

No, but they, they could use the recap.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, yeah, but know who these groups are at least. But they were arrested for conspiring to kidnap and murder two anti fascist activists in Georgia.

[Molly Conger]

It was a couple living in a kind of remote area and they had a very detailed plan to burn down their home and like kill. Kill them in their beds and kill their pets. And I mean, it was. If not for the FBI agent who was their friend.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Molly Conger]

That couple would have been killed.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's really wild.

[Molly Conger]

To consider the FBI Agent was friends with the Nazis. I should clarify, there is almost always an FBI agent who is friends with the Nazi.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

And I think that's. That's the important thing. Right. You know, like these anti fascists are infiltrating these groups, and so is the FBI. Right. Like a lot of these hate groups, somebody is either a paid informant, a freelance informant, or an actual undercover agent. And that's great, I guess, but a lot of times they will prioritize keeping their agent undercover over using the information to protect anyone.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

And when we do it, when anti fascists do that, we are invested in protecting our communities, not building a case.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

You don't need to take this to a grand jury. You don't need to keep a guy in there for 20 years waiting for the big fish. You're protecting a community.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes. I mean, there's an example of that in the book. There was a kind of this white whale in anti fascist circles that people were trying to identify. And he was a leader in the bull patrol, which of course is this community of Nazis that praises mass shooters and tries to encourage other Nazis to commit mass shootings. And he was eventually identified as this guy named Andrew Casseray in Sacramento, California.

[Molly Conger]

I remember Vic.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. And his pseudonym was Vic Mackie. Yeah. And anti fascist identified him. I published a story at HuffPost. It emerges later that Andrew Cassowary was already on, like, the no Fly List.

[Molly Conger]

Yes. Which means the government already knew who that fucking man was when he was. He was recording a podcast about shooting me in my womb through my vagina. And the government already knew who he was. Yes.

[Christopher Mathias]

And. Which is just insane. And, you know, and they'll claim it's like investigative secrecy, like some kind of pragmatism, but it's like, for what? Like they're posing an urgent threat.

[Molly Conger]

For one thing, I felt safer, and I was safer once I knew who he was. Once someone did the work of identifying that man, and I could say with certainty, he is in California. He is not near me. I was safer.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

And like antifascists gave me that, the government did not give me that. The government would never have given me that.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And I think it's also obviously a big tenet of militant anti fascism, is that you don't trust law enforcement or the state in this fight. And not only for the reasons we're describing now, but there's this historical irony in when the FBI, or law enforcement in general, infiltrates white supremacist groups, they end up finding a bunch of Their buddies in these white supremacist groups, they ended up identifying a lot of police officers. And I think it just goes to show the ways in which obviously law enforcement and white supremacist groups often share similar goals.

[Molly Conger]

Very much so. And sometimes once they have a guy in there, I mean, I'm sure it happens still to this day. We don't have the records of it happening now, but we have the sort of 60s and 70s era COINTELPRO records now that do show that, you know, they had tons of FBI agents infiltrating the Klan, allegedly to disrupt the Klan. But that's not what they were doing. No, they were steering the Klan into disrupting the civil rights movement.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, yes, but I mean, most famously the Greensboro Massacre, where, you know, the Klan and other white supremacists murdered some anti fascist communist activists. And then it emerged afterwards that an FBI agent was in the group but didn't report kind of their plans for.

[Molly Conger]

Violence over and over again. And those five people died for it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

Which is why I will always trust an anti fascist infiltrator over an FBI agent.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

I loved the historical parallels. Right. You know, so you take doxing all the way back to the second Klan. You know, this outside agitator narrative is not new. It's something Martin Luther King Jr. Wrote about. We're seeing that now. Right. Like, oh, you know, these people protesting, they're outside agitators. This isn't the real community. The real community wouldn't behave like this. It's the same as it ever was. Right?

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, you know, since Antifa kind of exploded into the American consciousness, MAGA and the right seized on Antifa as a boogeyman and they trusted that kind of liberals and centrists were going to throw Antifa under the bus. Right. That like, they weren't going to come to Antifa's defense necessarily or even acknowledge a lot of times that antifa existed and, you know, that allowed them to create this boogeyman of like epic proportions. So like in. In 2017, after Charlottesville, a synonymous pro Trump troll called Microchip starts a petition to declare Antifa a, quote, domestic terrorist organization. This petition goes viral, gets like 300,000 signees, and microchip ends up giving an interview to Politico where he's very upfront and frank about why he's doing this. And it's not because the White House is actually going to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oops.

[Garrison Davis]

Oops.

[Christopher Mathias]

There's no federal domestic Terror statute to even do that. Antifa is not an organization. He's very explicit to say, I'm doing this to set up Antifa as a punching bag and to deflect and distract from the far right's very real violence.

[Molly Conger]

Pretty wild that. He said it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

He just.

[Garrison Davis]

He just said it. He just said it.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. And it's like that. He admitted it.

[Robert Evans]

Meme.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, my God. He admitted it.

[Christopher Mathias]

He admitted. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, over the next few months, every time there's a mass shooting, you have folks like Jack Posobec and other kind of disinformation artists jumping in when, you know, there's not a lot of information yet to blame these mass shootings on Antifa.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, there's a weird troll who still thinks I'm responsible for January 6th.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, yes, exactly. Very impressive work, by the way. So they're using Antifa that way to distract and deflect. They're blaming Antifa for wildfires and train derailments and all this crazy shit. And then there's a little bit of a wall. And then in 2020, the George Floyd uprisings happen. And the George Floyd uprisings are one of the biggest mass uprisings in American history. It's completely grassroots and organic, and it is led by black protesters in their communities, inspired by uprisings again in Minneapolis.

[Molly Conger]

It's too soon for history to be repeating.

[Christopher Mathias]

I know, it's. It's really crazy. But Antifa, the antifa boogeyman now is repurposed as kind of this outside agitators trope on steroids. Right? So Trump and all these MAGA influencers rush to blame Antifa for fomenting these mass uprisings, which is absurd. Yeah, sure, Antifa activists were at these uprisings, but, you know, they weren't instigating them, nor would they have the organizing power to instigate such a massive uprising like that. When the right is doing this, it's an effort to make these uprisings seem artificial or kind of astroturfed, Something you can dismiss. Something you can dismiss as inorganic and artificial. And it's a way of distracting from the very real grievance at the heart of these demonstrations, which is that we want cops to stop killing black people. So throughout the summer of 2020, the antifa panic reaches absurd levels where there are rumors, viral rumors of busloads of Antifa roaming the countryside looking to burn down white businesses. Again, Antifa's blame for wildfires in the West. All of a sudden, you get these paramilitary groups, militia groups out west using these Antifa rumors as a pretext to literally occupy towns, entire towns. You know, you have 40 white dudes in full camo and vests carrying big guns, patrolling the streets on the lookout for this antifa menace. You know, there's like a story about in Sandpoint, Idaho, which is this gorgeous town in the Panhandle, and these like, group of like high school kids go on a Black Lives Matter march across a bridge and all of a sudden they're being followed by these like middle aged white dudes carrying AR15s and calling them racial slurs.

[Molly Conger]

Jesus Christ.

[Christopher Mathias]

So like basically the Antifa Boogeyman in 2020 is repackaged again, not only to sow division on the left and to create this outside agitators narrative, but to create this pretext for vigilante violence. And there was a lot of vigilante violence that occurred in 2020. Of course, you know, now we're in 2026 and we saw throughout last year as well, the antifa boogeyman again is being summoned to call whoever opposes the Trump regime's effort to ethnically cleanse the United States domestic terrorists.

[Molly Conger]

Right. The enemy is simultaneously very weak and very strong in their minds. Right. We're all a bunch of soy boys who live in our mom's basements, but we are also a massive, networked, armed organization with unlimited funding.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly, exactly. And you know, obviously Trump claimed to formally designate Antifa a domestic terror group in September.

[Molly Conger]

Doesn't mean anything. He did say it.

[Christopher Mathias]

He did say it. And then he held a antifa roundtable at the White House with a lot of our friends, Andy Ngo, Jack Posobic. But you know, as farcical as it all is, it's also deeply dangerous and alarming. In September, Trump designates antifa domestic terror group, and then last month they murder Renee Good in cold blood. And what do they do? They call her domestic terrorist after the fact.

[Molly Conger]

Exactly. It's pretext.

[Christopher Mathias]

It's all pretext.

[Molly Conger]

Because if you create this sort of shadowy network of unidentified agitators who are responsible for unspecified but very bad crimes, you can kill anyone. Say it was them.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, exactly. I wrote a piece for the Nation recently about how there's a tendency in response to this escalating MAGA hysteria about Antifa, there's a tendency among liberals and centrists to dismiss antifa as not existing, to alternately say that it's not even a thing or to say, well, antifa just means antifascist. So we're all antifa. But like to me that entirely and this is the point. Like a. Like antifa is real, and it refers to, like a very real subculture and a very real tradition, militant tradition, of antifascist organizing. And if liberals and centrists can't acknowledge that antifa is real and come to their defense, then the people doing this work might be in some danger. And I think it's important to show them some solidarity right now.

[Molly Conger]

It's such a complicated reality. Right. Because it's not a group.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but it is.

[Molly Conger]

It's also. It's a thousand different groups, groups of two or three or ten. It's not like a nationwide membership organization. You know, it is just an idea, but it's also a history, a set of tactics.

[James Stout]

Yes. It's.

[Molly Conger]

It's all of those things and it's none of those things. And it's different depending on who you ask and why you're asking.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, exactly. And like, anyone can do it, you know, like.

[Molly Conger]

Right.

[Christopher Mathias]

Like anyone can take up the mantle of like, militant antifascist work.

[Molly Conger]

A lot of people are doing it on their own.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

And I think, like, that's, that's what's been so kind of inspiring to me about Minneapolis and the uprisings. Right. Is everything that community is doing right now is a grassroots, organic response. And they're doing it because no one else is going to do it for them. There's this axiom that we talk about a lot in anti fascist spaces and anarchist spaces and black liberation movements. You know, this axiom of we protect us. And, you know, that is on very big display right now in Minneapolis, where you have people doing what anti fascist activists were doing to Nazis in 2017, which is monitoring them, following them, disrupting them. They are figuring out where they are staying, where they're eating, and pressuring those businesses and those hotels not to serve them. They are showing up outside their hotels doing noise demos. They are identifying them. Yeah, yeah.

[Molly Conger]

And I think, you know, we protect us is such a, you know, it's such a short, pithy phrase, but you don't know what it means until you feel it.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, right.

[Molly Conger]

Like, I think in. In Minneapolis, people are feeling it. They're protecting each other. Right. You know, here in Charlottesville, after Unite the Right, you know, when local authority figures were saying things about antifa, you would have, you know, white grandmas get up there and say, don't you say that about antifa. Don't you say that about antifa. You know, it was a word I didn't know a month ago, but they saved my Life.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, Right.

[Molly Conger]

That once you have experienced that kind of community solidarity, that, that we protect us ethos, once you have seen it, you know what it means.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

And nobody's going to tell you different.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. And like, you know, it's also, it's just so clear in Minneapolis that like the Democratic Party and you know, law enforcement, the local police are not doing anything. You know, like they're, they're not there.

[Molly Conger]

The people that are supposed to protect you aren't going to.

[Christopher Mathias]

Aren't going to.

[Molly Conger]

The police will watch you get beaten in the street.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

And your senator. Your senator will say nothing when the President calls you a terrorist.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes. And so, you know, I think it just kind of goes to show that this kind of militant anti fascist tradition is. It's an organic response to conditions. It is like an insurgent form of community self defense. As horrifying as the footage coming out of Minneapolis is, especially that photo this week of the five year old God being detained, which I can't get out of my head and which makes my blood boil thinking of it.

[Molly Conger]

I can't cry on the recording.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, no, it makes me want to cry too.

[Molly Conger]

Something really struck me reading the book. You know, I was saying like, you know, I read Vincent Washington's Leaks, but I didn't know anything about Vincent. You said that he told you he was moved to start taking this kind of militant action by the Portland Max train stabbing. Yeah, I mean, that stopped me in my tracks.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. You know, and I think one of the more moving parts of researching this book was realizing that all of the anti fascists doing this work had brushes with fascist violence in their communities and that's what inspired them to do it. You know, Vincent was in Portland in 20. What year was that?

[Molly Conger]

It was May 2017.

[Christopher Mathias]

May 2017. Right. And he gets on a train at Hollywood station in Portland, goes to a friend's place, has a good time, and then later reads the news and realizes that had he taken one train before his, that left about a minute before, he could have been in this car where this white supremacist named Jeremy Christian started harassing two black Muslim girls. He is haranguing them, telling them to get out of America, when three men intervene. Jeremy Christian slashes the throats of the three men and two of them die. God, we're gonna get emotional on this, but like one of the last.

[Molly Conger]

This one really, really gets to me. I've sort of brushed up against the story in a couple of things I've written. And I mean it's one of the most moving encounters of, you know, of all of these sort of moving pieces. Right. That a Nazi committing violence against a Somali immigrant. Right. That's so relevant today. Ordinary people intervening. Only one of them was sort of an active anti fascist in his community. The young man that survived, Micah Fletcher. The other two were just everyday dudes. Everyday dudes. They didn't have anti fascist politics, but they saw a Nazi threatening a little girl.

[Christopher Mathias]

They saw a Nazi threatening a little girl and they lost their lives. And as one of them, and I'm blanking on his name right now, it's Talysian. Yeah. Was lying, bleeding out. He said, tell everyone on this train I love them. So I actually flew to Portland a few days later and ended up interviewing his girlfriend.

[Molly Conger]

Oh my God.

[Christopher Mathias]

Who kept a journal of their relationship and read me passages from it and like, you know, how beautiful the relationship was. They had just moved in together, they were growing a garden together. And before he left that morning to get on that train, he said something really wonderful, just about how much he loved her. So, you know, basically his day started and ended with these expressions of love.

[Molly Conger]

That always really wrecks me.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, yeah, me too.

[Molly Conger]

But seeing that, that was sort of, you know, as someone who got into this work after seeing what happened where I live.

[James Stout]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

It was very striking to me that, you know, it was the same for Vincent. It was something that he was not involved in. He didn't, he didn't witness this stabbing, but he was so close to it. It felt so intimate to him and he felt like, well, I have to do something.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And there were so many other examples that I name in the book of these really horrendous hate crimes taking place in Portland and Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest, which, you know, historically has been a hub for white supremacist organizing. So for Vincent, the threat felt very real to people he knew and loved, which is why he decided to go undercover into Patriot Front and to fuck up Patriot Front. He had done some other anti fascist work before that, like kind of monitoring the Proud Boys. But then I think when the Proud Boys were on a bit of a decline after January 6, he started to look at groups that operated more in the dark and were more secretive. And he decided to focus on Patriot Front.

[Molly Conger]

And how prescient at that time. I mean, patriot front in 2017 didn't exist in early 2017, but sort of as they rebranded into 2018 from Vanguard America. I mean, how prescient of him to know that that would Be the place to go.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, no, totally. That's where I think the energy was and kind of the anonymous organizing was going. And what he did was really remarkable. I think a lot of anti fascist infiltrations and spy work is done online. You know, people just creating a username and an avatar and they, they can manage to do most of the espionage from behind a computer screen. You know, one of the more significant acts of espionage during this era is a guy that goes undercover into Identity Europa and again manages to get reams and reams of their private messages which end up on Unicorn Riot.

[Molly Conger]

And that destroyed them too.

[Christopher Mathias]

Destroyed them. And you know, those messages, the Panic in the Discord database ends up identifying a hundred Nazis in Identity Europa, which is just remarkable. The anti fascist spy that did this, I talked to and he just had to do an interview with an Identity Eropa leader to get into the group. And I got to listen to that recording and it's remarkable. But, you know, after that, he didn't have to do that much in person, you know, method acting to pretend to be a Nazi. Vincent, however did he, you know, for.

[Molly Conger]

Five months he was going hiking.

[Christopher Mathias]

He was going hiking, man. Like, because Patriot Front requires you to go on missions and hikes and, you know, kind of group activities. He had to do shit in person. So like this dude was acting like deserves an Oscar, you know. So he climbed Mount Rainier for two nights with 13 other Nazis.

[Molly Conger]

Oh my God.

[Christopher Mathias]

And by the way, at this point had earned the trust of his local chapter so much that he was named the official photographer and videographer for the chapter, which is just delicious.

[Molly Conger]

They're so smart. They're so smart. I mean, it's like that Simpsons bit, right? Like, videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had. Take video of everything they do.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

And then because of these leaks, we see that in several lawsuits against Patriot Front. Right? Like, they are recording video as they, you know, vandalized civil rights monuments and things like that. And then they got sued in three places.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes. And it's, it's basically the stringer bell. Like, are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy? You know me. They are and they are. So, you know, eventually all this data that Vincent collects. And by the way, so he's in the group for about five months. He's scheduled to go to their big march in D.C. but at the last minute claims he can't because the FBI knocks on his door. That's a lie. He's just doing that to scare Patriot Front. When Patriot Front gets to, gets to D.C. and goes on their march. Some anti fascists in D.C. know their plans and they know where they are parking their vehicles for this march. They know where Patriot Front is going to march. And let's just say some Nazi cars get redecorated.

[Molly Conger]

Some tires did not make it out of DC that night.

[Christopher Mathias]

Tires did not make it out of dc. Some windshields did not survive. There is some graffiti. Patriot Front gets back to their U Hauls first off, that they use to get transported into D.C. from suburban Maryland. Their U Hauls are fucked up. They get back to Maryland finally and to see all their cars fucked up. So you know, there's an act of sabotage. They realize they have an infiltrator. Before long they realize that it's the man they know as Vincent. And I think they think that that's it. There'll be a few doxes, but that's it. It didn't seem like he hacked their server. But then of course a month later, all of their messages, everything end up, end up on Unicorn Riot. You tell Thomas Rousseau the news of this.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, that was such a treat.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

I can't believe we've never talked about this. And over the course of the next few months, years, so many Patriot Front members are identified. And there's also some other delicious details. Like Vincent after his infiltration is over, he has all this Patriot Front propaganda material that he kind of took along the way. Banners, pamphlets, shields. So what he does on New Year's is he makes a pyre, towering pyre of this material and lights it on fire, makes a really beautiful video set to Auld Lang Syne and posts it online for Patriot Front to see. And I think kind of warning them that there might be some more coming, some more doxes coming, some more stuff coming. And the thing is, Vincent's story is just one story, one kind of remarkable story of anti fascist spy work over the last 10 years. There are so many other stories that I heard about that for various reasons I couldn't put in the book or there wasn't room for in the book. But it's just, yeah, I feel very privileged that I got to tell this story that not many people know.

[Molly Conger]

It was such a great framework for the book because it's not just about that particular infiltration, but it sort of provides this running framework, this sort of introduction to the concept. I thought it was very nicely done. I was excited to learn about Vincent because I have only, like I said, read his leaks and then the lawsuits that had inspired and Then the lawsuit against him.

[Christopher Mathias]

Right, yeah.

[Molly Conger]

Which was dismissed last week.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, it was.

[Molly Conger]

Congratulations, Vincent.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, it was. Yes. The book gets into this a little bit, but Patriot Front does end up ascertaining what it believes is Vincent's real identity. And they file a lawsuit in federal court in Washington. And it had been ongoing for the last year or two, but was finally dismissed in court this week. Yeah. Or last week.

[Molly Conger]

So congratulations to the person who may or may not have been Vincent.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

We'll never know.

[Christopher Mathias]

We'll never know.

[Molly Conger]

It didn't make. It didn't make it to. I don't think it ever made it to a hearing.

[Christopher Mathias]

No. Yeah, yeah.

[Molly Conger]

I know I said I wouldn't take up a ton of your time, but I can't let you go without talking about Redbeard.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God.

[Molly Conger]

This is the first concrete, confirmed, published docs of Redbeard.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God. Yeah. I can't believe it's taken us this long to talk about it. Thank you for reminding me.

[Molly Conger]

So, for the listener, you know, we talk about how this is work that is accessible to everyone, but it is not for everyone. And Redbeard is someone I have read so many incorrect doxes of. And that's why it is so important. It's so important to be sure of what you're writing. Because I have read a hundred fail doxes of this man.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

And this one's real.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. So Redbeard, to those who don't know, again, was kind of this white whale in anti fascist circles. White supremacist whale, basically, in so much as he was one of the men filmed in Charlottesville in 2017 beating DeAndre Harris. For those that don't remember, DeAndre Harris was a black counter protester resident of the Charlottesville area. He was a 19 year old teacher for special ed students. And he ends up in a scuffle with Nazis that are leaving Charlottesville, leaving the rally, and they end up in a parking garage where five of them beat him while he's on the pavement with metal poles and other weapons. And it's captured on camera. I think it's, you know, one of the more distressing things to watch from Charlottesville. I actually happened to be in the garage at the time, was running towards DeAndre when one of the Nazis pulled a gun and started waving it around. So I ducked behind a car. By the time I got up, DeAndre was stumbling away. There was a pool of blood on the pavement.

[Molly Conger]

Wait, I have to go back to the footage. Who was it that pulled the Gun?

[Christopher Mathias]

I'm not sure.

[Molly Conger]

Were you over on the police station side of the divider?

[Christopher Mathias]

I think I was running.

[Molly Conger]

I have to go back and find you. In the footage, I think the guy who pointed a gun at you is Teddy Von Newcombe.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God. Well, if we could make that I.D. that'd be because he pulled.

[Molly Conger]

Because he pulled the gun.

[Christopher Mathias]

He did.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, somebody else may have pulled a gun, but Teddy pulled a gun.

[Christopher Mathias]

Okay, I need to look at a photo of Teddy Van Newcombe. It all happens so fast. He said, oh, it's that guy.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay. All right, let's talk about this later.

[Molly Conger]

Sorry. Molly here. Recording. After the interview was over, I went back and reviewed that footage, and my memory did fail me a little bit here. I was thinking about the right moment right after the victim in that beating has sort of broken away from the main portion of the assault, and he's running away. The video taken by Unicorn Riot hands over to follow him. And as the camera sweeps across the area on the other side of the parking garage, you can see a Nazi named Teddy Von Newcombe. That's his real name. He changed it. He takes a swing at the victim with what looks like a baton. And at the same moment, somebody does pull a handgun, but it's an unidentified man standing right behind Teddy Von Newcombe. I had the image mixed up in my recollection. Sorry about that. Teddy Von Newcombe, as I said in the interview, is dead. He shot himself in the chest in 2023, the morning he was supposed to go on trial for fentanyl trafficking. I wish I could tell you who the little Nazi with the gun is, but it looks like there's no ID on him. Not yet, anyway. Sorry for the. For the listener, this is something I think Chris and I have Both spent probably 100 hours looking at frame by frame video from 17 angles of this particular assault. Yeah, for a variety of reasons. Right, right. So it was this brutal gang assault on this young black man, and four people went to prison for it. Yes, and some people didn't.

[Christopher Mathias]

Some people didn't. And one of them was a, you know, kind of a bigger white dude with a big red beard wearing a baseball cap, who from then on earned the nickname Redbeard. There are all these, like, you mentioned, kind of a million.

[Molly Conger]

Just like every fat guy with a red beard on the east coast has been identified as Redbeard.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And it was like all these, like, kind of amateur online sleuths. I think Shaun King was in the Mix for this back in the day, trying to ID this guy. No one can find him. A lot of people are falsely identified. The Charlottesville Police Department can't find him. A detective puts out a call for help, but nothing comes in. Eventually. And where my book kicks off in this story is there's a group of anti fascist researchers called Ignite, the right that is dedicated to identifying every Nazi that turned up in Charlottesville in 2017. And they create a database of all these photos and videos and a list of all the people that have been identified. And the list of names that they are identifying keeps on growing and growing and they're identifying some really crazy names. One of the stories I ended up doing was about a police officer who was working as Richard Spencer's personal John Donnelly. John Donnelly security guard in Charlottesville. So they're doing a lot of really significant doxes like that, but they still can't find Redbeard. Eventually they decide to use facial recognition, which is interesting. You know, obviously I think anti fascists out of principle are opposed to facial recognition software, but I think, you know, you kind of can't show up to a gunfight with a knife kind of situation.

[Molly Conger]

What that still I think is not enough in this case. Right. Because the commercially available facial recognition software that the average non law enforcement person would have access to really struggles with round faces like his and big beards. So he's got a big beard and a hat and his face is very round. And so it's going to pull a lot of just sort of round faced redheads.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly. And so like, you know, it's a very important and anti fascist work. A facial recognition hit is never 100%. You have to corroborate it.

[Molly Conger]

It's not enough.

[Christopher Mathias]

So they finally use facial recognition for Redbeard and they get a hit. And the hit is a baby faced, beardless, like 19 year old white dude in a army uniform at a base in Georgia. And he's about to shake the hand of President George W. Bush. And the reason he's photographed for this is because Bush is making a visit to this military base, I believe it's Fort Benning, to announce his troop surge in Iraq. So a lot of these people are about to be sent off to his war.

[Molly Conger]

And then he brought the war home.

[Christopher Mathias]

And then he brought the war. Oh man. Yeah, brought the war home. And then so the anti fascists zoom in on this photo, but the name tag is Bori. So they can't figure out who Redbeard is yet to make a Long story short, I end up filing a public information request to the George W. Bush Library in Texas.

[Molly Conger]

Right. Because they would have had to vet everyone who was there.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

If the President's gonna be there.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. And, you know, my angle on it is that I ask for higher resolution photos. We get the higher resolution photos, and zoom in, and sure enough, there is his last name. Heilman. Now all we have is the last name. So there's a lot more work to do. These anti fascists go through military yearbooks. They don't find anything. They go through so many social media accounts until eventually one day they see a Facebook account that belongs to a man named Jay Heilman.

[Molly Conger]

It's crazy. He still had Facebook all these years later.

[Christopher Mathias]

Oh, it's wild. And. And there are photos of him in the military being sent overseas somewhere. And then they take notice of this one particular detail, which is that there is this meme he posts of fucking Tom Hardy from the Dark Knight. And he's saying, the fire rises, Right? It's that meme of him saying the fire rises. Which, of course, in like, the Dark Knight is supposed to mean, like, all this death and destruction is about to commence. It's a phrase you hear in fascist circles sometimes, kind of as a half joke. But what was interesting about the meme wasn't so much the meme itself, but where and when Facebook said it was.

[Molly Conger]

Posted, he left the location data on it.

[Christopher Mathias]

He left the location on it, which was Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017. So that is how they unlock the identity of Redbeard. You know, there's a lot more to the story in the book, and I think I will be identifying Redbeard in a news story somewhere soon, so look out for that.

[Molly Conger]

I love to hear it. Make Joe Platania answer for his refusal to prosecute.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yes.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

Yay. And it's not enough to say the victim doesn't want to cooperate, because you don't need victim cooperation to prosecute malicious wounding in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Sorry, Joe, you heard it here first.

[Molly Conger]

I was hooting and hollering when I got to that part of the book. I can't believe it. Because I had heard. He had heard through the grapevine that the prosecutor was aware of his identity and had chosen not to prosecute. But I didn't know his identity, so. What a thrill.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. It was a real journey. My ex at the time joked that there was a third person in our relationship, and that person was Redbeard. Because I was so obsessed with trying to find him.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, truly, truly a white whale.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

In I guess, several senses of the word.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, exactly.

[Molly Conger]

But like I said, I promise I wouldn't take up a ton of your time. I'm just so excited about this book, about this story. It's not just for your dad who doesn't know what Antiva is.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes.

[Molly Conger]

I thought it was thrilling. I learned a lot about some guys I've been thinking about for years.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah. That means the world to me, Molly. Thank you. And you also have been such an important voice in these spaces and helping me out over the years. So I appreciate it.

[Molly Conger]

I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much for coming on. People can pre order the book To Catch a the Fight to Expose the Radical Right by Christopher Matthias. You can pre order it now from Simon and Schuster and it comes out February 3rd. Wherever you buy your books, don't buy it at Amazon. I'm going to make sure my local anarchist bookstore has put in an order for it. You should all do the same. What else do you want to plug? Where can people find you online?

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah, so I'm freelancing these days for different places. Guardian, Mississippi, now the Nation Slate, so look out for me there. But you can mostly just find me on let's Go Mathias on Bluesky. And I'm still on the Nazi site, but I don't really post there anymore at let's Go Matthias as well.

[Molly Conger]

Wonderful. And like I said, make sure you pre order that book. It is a fun read. Buy a copy for your dad who's scared of Antifa.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yes, please. Thank you so much, Molly.

[Molly Conger]

Thank you. Friday, kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, Ilia Malady, redefining Friday at 8 Eastern, 7 Central on NBC. And Peacock.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week week of January 21st to January 28th. Massive snowstorm across most of the country, at least the real parts of the country, which is the east coast in the south now. And wow, there is a lot of snow. It makes me feel kind of like a penguin just walking off into the mountains by myself. Weathering the weather. Finally I feel akin to the President who is now also a suicidal penguin.

[James Stout]

At the wrong end of the globe.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Well, you know, as soon as they start the re migration, they're going to be deporting penguins to Greenland.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It's held in a military detention camp off of Greenland. Now that we might own a tiny bit of our military base. Still very unclear what the details of that Greenland deal are.

[Mia Wong]

No, he just wanted to be able to say he made a deal and, like, I don't know if it's going to be any different than the status quo was before, but he'll claim victory and so will his supporters, and we'll.

[Garrison Davis]

All move on as we kind of already have.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

Too much other bullshit going on.

[James Stout]

That is the motto for 2026.

[Garrison Davis]

Some of that bullshit is the third immigration enforcement related shooting in Minneapolis in just three weeks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

James, do you want to start with that?

[James Stout]

So, yeah, I was in Minneapolis. I was actually just in Minneapolis airport when this happened. On Saturday of this week, Alex Pretty was shot by two CBP agents in Minneapolis while he was filming an immigration raid in which ICE agents attempted to pursue someone into a donut shop that seemed to have locked the doors. Pretty seemed to be trying to assist a woman who had been pushed to the ground by agents. When the agents grabbed him, maced him, beat him, disarmed him, and then shot him several Times. Pretty was 37. He was a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. And when this confrontation with immigration agents began, he was legally carrying a Sig P320 handgun concealed inside his waistband. I can go on and summarize the video for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's obviously quite distressing. So, you know, if you're gonna watch it, just know that you're gonna see someone die. Video shows several agents beating Pretty as one grabs a handgun from his inside waistband holster. Very quickly after this, 10 shots are fired by at least two agents. You can hear at one point an agent shouting, gun. Gun.

[Garrison Davis]

He's got a gun.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And then in the aftermath, another video shows agents asking, where is the gun? So it doesn't appear that the agent who cleared Pretty's gun informed the other agents that that had happened.

[Garrison Davis]

Though the agent that first fired at Preddy was standing right behind the agent that disarmed him and is is literally like looking down.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

At where the gun is being removed as he then seconds later starts shooting.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Pretty falls to the ground. Then more agents fire on his body as it lays flat on the ground.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The CBP Initial Use of Force Review, which was sent to Congress today suggested that on Wednesday. Yeah, this is Wednesday the 28th. That two agents fired. So we know at least two agents fired. Right. It's not entirely clear. I don't think if all of these were CBP agents, but at least one of the agents who fired shots was an 8 year CBP veteran and a range safety officer. Greg Pavino has declined to identify them because he said that would be doxxing. That's not what that word usually means.

[Ian]

No.

[James Stout]

DHS has claimed that Pretty had two extra magazines on his person, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. What they provided was a photograph of a SIG P320 with a red dot sight and the slide lock back clearly on the front seat of a vehicle with two charge cords next to it. Right. That's. That's not normally how evidence is treated in a crime. That. It's an unusual way to go about that, to put it mildly. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has told reporters that Pretty attacked and impeded law enforcement and was brandishing his weapon. Videos don't show that. The only time that you see his weapon is when it is removed by the agent who takes it out of his waistband.

[Garrison Davis]

Preddy appears to be holding his black cell phone for the entirety of this interaction.

[James Stout]

Yep. And it's very clear that it's a cell phone. Right. CBP agents are inches, obviously from the phone and his face.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

There is no reasonable claim.

[Mia Wong]

No. As a rule throughout the interaction, there was never any confusion that would have led them to believe he had a gun in his hand or to be unaware that he had been disarmed. There's no argument for that.

[James Stout]

No. You can't make a case for that. Reasonably. People will do it unreasonably. I don't care. The allegation that he attacked them was repeated by FBI Director Kash Patel in the interview he gave to Fox News. I'm going to give a little video of Nome's claim.

[Dana Al Kurd]

This individual impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

State the facts as they unfolded on the street today. We were doing a targeted operation against an illegal criminal.

[Dana Al Kurd]

And this individual came with a weapon and dozens of rounds of ammunition and attacked them. And these agents took action to defend.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Their lives and to.

[Dana Al Kurd]

To defend the lives of the people.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Around them and acted according to their training.

[James Stout]

CBP Commander at large. Potentially no longer Commander at large. Gregory Bevino claimed that Pretty had assaulted federal agents and throughout a press conference that Pavino gave referred to Pretty as a suspect. And the people who killed him as victims. Pavino also claimed that pretty planned to, quote, massacre law enforcement.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road and then assault, delay and obstruct law enforcement? Or was he there for a reason? Did he fall victim to that violent and heated rhetoric by a Mayor Fry, a Governor Waltz? Look, Dana, they're, they're, they're trying to portray border patrol agents and ICE agents as Gestapo Nazi and many other words. Did this individual fall victim, as many others have, to that type of heated rhetoric? I want to stay focused on this incident right now because what you are saying is that he went there to.

[Molly Conger]

Try to stop this law enforcement operation.

[Margaret Killjoy]

All of the video that we have seen shows him documenting it with his.

[Molly Conger]

Self phone, which is a lawful thing to do. And the only time he seemed to interact with law enforcement is when they went after him when he was trying.

[Margaret Killjoy]

To help an individual who law enforcement pushed down. So where do you have the evidence to show that he was trying to.

[Molly Conger]

Impede that law enforcement operation?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Sure, Dan, at first he was there in the scene. He was in the scene actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement to the point. But that's not illegal. He wasn't, he wasn't impeding it. He was filming it, which is a legal thing to do in the United States. Let's don't freeze frame adjudicate this. Now, he was there for a reason, and that reason was to impede law enforcement to.

[Christopher Mathias]

What evidence do you have, and here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And here's a good point, Dana, is the fact that de escalation techniques were utilized during this action. Those de escalation techniques, whether it was physically trying to remove them from that law enforcement scene, that active law enforcement scene in which law enforcement.

[James Stout]

I wanted to include a little bit more there because I feel like that's one of the few times we've seen him not just able to deliver his.

[Mia Wong]

Where someone's pushed a little.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ian]

Yeah, well. And there's a thing in the video that I think is really effective where, you know, you can hear him lying about the video and then the video is playing next to it and you can just see what is happening. And then he's just saying, yeah, it's.

[James Stout]

A good piece of television news Ghost. That's not the worst piece I've seen. Like, yeah, him saying they use de escalation techniques as you watch half a dozen guys mace him in the face and then beat him. Yeah, Is. I mean, there's this line I think a lot about in chapter seven of 1984, which was the party told you not to believe your eyes and ears. It was their final, most important command. I mean, I don't. If this ain't that, then I don't know what is.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, they don't even try to convincingly lie at this point.

[Mia Wong]

They just keep to the narrative that has been set at the top. Yeah, well, not even in this case at the top. It was kind of set at like the upper middle. Yes, the top has been backing off from this narrative at least a little bit.

[Garrison Davis]

We'll get to that kind of back and forth in a second. But I mean, it's very clear from this that they just consider blowing a whistle to be impeding. Like that. That's. That's all the justification that they need.

[James Stout]

They consider his presence there.

[Garrison Davis]

As long as you are physically presence.

[Mia Wong]

There, anything you do that they don't like is assaulting an officer at this point.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

It's kind of a minor point, but also his pronunciation of Gestapo.

[James Stout]

Stoppo. He does that every time.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like, dude, we could. We know, we know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. He's like.

[Ian]

He's wearing that coat.

[Garrison Davis]

He's wearing the outfit people are calling this guy's.

[James Stout]

Like, come on.

[Garrison Davis]

And. Yeah, no, it's. It's. It's. It's pretty insane.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I love the articles that are like, no, he's just wearing a traditional old style military coat. It's not a Gestapo coat. Guys, come on, man.

[James Stout]

I've seen a lot of border patrol agents, guys.

[Mia Wong]

No one else wears that coat. He picked that coat because of how it looks.

[James Stout]

To my knowledge, that's not a uniform piece for the Border Patrol.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No.

[Mia Wong]

And he's never been in the military.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You know what?

[James Stout]

He isn't.

[Mia Wong]

It's a secret police unit. Anyway, sorry.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, I think it's a good. It's worth beating that one. I want to talk about this ACLU lawsuit, right? So in sworn testimonies which were part of this ongoing lawsuit, multiple witnesses said pretty did not brandish or draw his handgun. Quote. I have read a statement from DHS about what happened, and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground. One sec. Another witness, a doctor, was prevented from performing cpr. Quote, none of the ICE agents who were near the victim were performing cpr. They said agents Demanded the physician's license, which evidently they did not have. Right. They just ran out of their house in their pajamas. Their testimony continues. Quote, I could tell the victim was in critical condition. I insisted the ICE agents let me assess him. That they appear to be operating under the assumption that these people were ice. Some of them were cbp. I should just say that. They also noted that agents, quote, appeared to be counting his bullet wounds. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And there is video that shows him doing bizarre things to his remains that are not within the remit of trauma care or first aid in my experience and training, which is pretty significant when it comes to, like, this exact scenario.

[Garrison Davis]

The documents that released today said that they placed chest seals on him.

[James Stout]

They were placing chest seals on him. Yeah. Yeah. That might explain it. It looks like that sort of pulling up on his shirt.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, this whole. Again, this whole instance very, very clearly documented with video, multiple angles. After the shooting, an agent is, like, on top of his body screaming for scissors to cut off his clothing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And then later they place chest seals, according to that document that was released to Congress.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Weird not to carry scissors in your first aid kit when you're at our trauma. She is better. Minor quibble, I guess.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, these guys don't know what they were doing.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the thing, right? Bevino also noted in his press conference that the agents were still at work, but they had been redeployed for their safety outside of the Twin Cities. Following the shooting, a vigil was held and there were protests, including some armed presence in the protests. Minneapolis Police Department attempted to hold the space, both to keep the vigil away and that earlier that day they had refused to leave when told to do so by federal police. Later that night, they deployed extensive, less lethal munitions to clear the vigil.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's go on ad break and then return to discuss the back and forth characterization of the shooting from Trump's Cabinet.

[Molly Conger]

Foreign.

[Garrison Davis]

We are back. The day after the shooting, Cash Patel went on Fox News to say that it is against the law to bring a firearm to a protest.

[James Stout]

Nope.

[Garrison Davis]

Here's a clip.

[Margaret Killjoy]

As Christy said, you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want.

[Mia Wong]

It's the.

[Garrison Davis]

That simple.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You don't have that right to break the law and incite violence.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's wrong.

[Garrison Davis]

In Minnesota, it is not against the law for permit holders to carry a firearm while attending a protest. And it's arguable whether what Preddy was doing is even, quote, unquote, attending a Protest?

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

These sorts of spontaneous mobilizations against ICE are not like a formalized. We are protesting in this location at this point. It's not a protest rally, it's community mobilizations. The term protest is going to be applied a little bit loosely.

[Christopher Mathias]

Now.

[Garrison Davis]

The DHS statement three hours after the shooting made this claim, quote, this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement, unquote. This is the phrase that Bevino said verbatim at the press conference on Saturday following the shooting. Miller said something similar on Twitter as he was tweeting at Democrat politicians. Quote, a would be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and a domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement, unquote. Christy Noem also had a press conference the day of the shooting where she said, quote, when you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, unquote. But by Monday, the White House began softly backtracking previous DHS claims about the shooting. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt said that she has not heard President Trump characterized Preddy as a domestic terrorist. That same day, FOX and Friends asked DOJ attorney Todd Blanche about whether Preddy committed domestic terrorism. And he replied like this.

[Ian]

With all due respect, sir, my question is more pointed. Do you believe your colleagues may have gone farther?

[Margaret Killjoy]

You are an attorney. A DOJ, 18 U.S. code 2331 has.

[Ian]

A legal definition of domestic terrorism, and it doesn't appear to most of the.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Country that have watched the available video.

[Ian]

And we'll see if there's body cam video. I'd love to know if that's going to come out, if there was such a thing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But it does not appear to have met that definition of domestic terrorism.

[Ian]

So I'm just sort of wondering how you in the DOJ are viewing whether.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Your colleagues may have gone too far.

[James Stout]

Look, I don't.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I don't think anybody thinks that they were comparing what happened on Saturday to the legal definition of domestic terrorism. What we saw was a very violent altercation. And we. I am not going to prejudge the facts. You're right. There's a bunch of video that's out there. There's a bunch of video that we haven't seen yet in the, in the minutes leading up to what happened and what happened afterwards. And you're right, to the extent there's body Cam or other videos that, that, that witnesses are still providing to us. So. So I'm not describing it as anything except for a tragedy that's pretty, pretty wild.

[Garrison Davis]

Two days after Christine tried to literally give a definition of domestic terrorism at a press conference and then DOJ attorneys just claiming no, it's, it's not the real legal definition of domestic terrorism.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like this word is just a rhetorical tool for the administration to deploy at will.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

We just were using it because we killed a guy and we wanted to shut down discussion.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

And when we didn't stick the landing because there were multiple angles on video. Now we gotta find something else. Yeah.

[Ian]

And we just did this. Like how many weeks ago was the.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, this whole incident shows how vital documenting interactions like this can be and how much public opinion is something that is not just fully, fully dictated by administration statements. Like they tried to deploy a narrative which after, after enough circulated documented footage contradicted public opinion of this incident formed in pretty strong opposition to the administration's claims.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ian]

This has penetrated into a lot of places that are under ordinary circumstances, either extremely apolitical or very conservative.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ian]

I am trying to remember honestly the last event that I saw between this and 2020 and like the, the George Floyd uprising that had this kind of penetration into mainstream non political society. I remember one of the biggest things that I saw was this moment of, oh, actually this specific shooting has gone to a point where it's reaching people who normally would never hear about this stuff was there's an NFL commentator named Kurt Warner who used to be. He was a very famous quarterback. The only thing he ever talks about is quarterback play in football. This is the only thing he ever does. I'm not 100% sure about this, but when I looked back I couldn't find him saying anything about George Floyd. And Kurt Warner came out and gave a statement about how this shooting was a horror and that the administration was lying about it. And you saw this sort of rattling through again, very, very conservative sports circles which again, this NFL circle specifically where this kind of stuff never really penetrates. This weekend, you know, as, as this sort of murder was happening, the NFC and AFC championship games were going on in the sort of immediate wake of this. And these are for people who don't.

[James Stout]

Follow football at all.

[Ian]

These are the, after the super bowl, these are. This is the semifinals. The winner of these two games goes to the Super Bowl. These are the second most important games of the entire NFL season. And fans at both of these games Booed the national anthem, a thing I have never heard of before, at a football.

[James Stout]

This is a football game?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. That's wild.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Right.

[Ian]

Like the beginning of most football games, there's a bunch of troops holding the flag and people. They didn't do this in 2020. They were booing the national anthem. So one of these games was being played in Denver, and the other one was being played in Seattle. And in the game in Seattle, the Fox broadcast kept cutting out the national anthem because people kept chanting, fuck ice. So they would just literally be cutting the audio anytime that happened. And this just kept happening through the entire course of this. I have never seen anything like this break through into sports like this. It's been breaking into. There's a whole bunch of stories about just random groups on a Reddit where it's sort of breaking through into where you're getting statements from like, oh, God, I wish I remember who on Blue Sky I saw this from. But the person who runs the subreddit, that's like playing your cat's butt. Like, bongo drums put out a statement about this.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I'm glad they finally spoke up, honestly.

[Ian]

You know, we've all been waiting.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But.

[James Stout]

Like, I saw this in spaces where like. Like climbing forums or climbing subreddits.

[Mia Wong]

Like, no, because they just shot a nurse in the head.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ian]

This is the second time they did it. And the thing to me that I think is really significant about this happening at NFL games. Right. One of the two teams that was playing in the game in Denver is the New England Patriots. Right. The New England Patriots are famously very, very close to Trump as an organization. Their owner is very close to Trump. So I had remembered a story from last year about. So the Patriots have a jet. That is the Patriots jet that they fly all their players around in. That is has giant letters, the Patriots on it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ian]

That is technically run through a charter company. But, you know, I remember last year there was a story about how their jet was doing flights to Guantanamo Bay.

[Mia Wong]

Sure. That makes sense for the Patriots jet.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[Ian]

This is the kind of organizations that we're dealing with here. Right. And while I was looking into the story about the Patriots jet being used to do things to move, apparently not detainees to Guantanamo, but apparently just military people and supplies, which they do a lot, I found a completely unrelated story about a different Patriots jet in during the Biden administration doing deportation flights to Honduras. And this isn't considered an ideological thing.

[Mia Wong]

No, that's just money.

[Ian]

Like, this is the kind of conservatism. You're dealing. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is. Technically, it's the contractors who are doing this, but. But, you know, it's the plane with the Patriots logo on it. And they were doing deportation flights under Biden, like, four years. Three or four years ago. And now people are booing the national anthem. Enchanting. Fuck. Ice. A lot of the stuff that we've. We've talked about, we're going to talk about, about the way the Trump administration has been backing off of this is because they have been forced to watch the entire country go, holy shit, you just murdered this guy and then lied about it. You just executed him in the street.

[Christopher Mathias]

Yeah.

[Ian]

And lied about it.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think the lying.

[Ian]

And you can just see them. And this is also the second time they've done this in a couple of weeks.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, the lying thing is, like. I think for a lot of people, that's the really insulting thing. It's obviously a tragedy to have someone be killed by federal law enforcement like this.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But it just. The blatantness of the lying, I think, is what really activated people here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Because this is.

[Mia Wong]

For years, they've skirted by. On situations like the Rittenhouse thing where you can kind of see what happens, but depending on what you bring into it ideologically, that can look like two different things. Right. Depending on where you. Whether you think those protesters are dangerous or not or whatever. Like, that's a video that, like, everyone saw the same video and took something different out of it.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

That's not the case with this video or really with the Renee Goode video for most people.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's really jarring for them. Most people who were not political, because that's what we're talking about is, like, the sheer number of people who do not normally wade into this stuff, who are making a comment, they would see one of these videos that is much more like, if you're just kind of coming in and watching it, it's kind of unclear what's happening. And they would go, oh, it's another big. I'm just not going to get involved with it. People are arguing about what this is. Let them argue. I'm going to go on with my life. This is very clear what's happening. Very clear that they're lying. And it's just upsetting. It's deeply upsetting to even people who don't normally think about this shit.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ian]

And I think part of that, too, is also, you know, there were a lot of people who didn't get involved with the Renee Goode shooting because, you know, even then people were still like, oh, well, maybe it's complicated. But once you've seen the second shooting in two weeks where the line from the administration is exactly the same and you have video images, again, that's how you get someone like Kurt Warner, who is a faith family football guy. He's very open about being a Christian, is very open about. He doesn't talk about politics, but he's very obviously conservative in a way that he doesn't think is political.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ian]

And he looks at this and goes, holy shit, they murdered this guy. And the government's lying about it. And that's a kind of breakthrough moment in all of this.

[James Stout]

I've seen a lot of stuff from, like, folks in the gun community, like, who you wouldn't normally expect to be critical of the Trump administration. Being critical. Yeah. Because the Trump administration has come out with just, like, insane. They're repeating, like, anti second Amendment talking points.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[James Stout]

I also saw his name's Tony Thomas, but he was previously the commander of Special Operations Command.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Has been sharing and unfortunately, AI quote unquote enhanced photo of this shooting. God. God.

[Mia Wong]

That. I need to talk a little bit about that, but please continue.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's remarkable that you've got someone whose job has been killing people for the United States government. Right. Who, like, retired to a role in investment banking, who doesn't normally make statements in public about immigration policy. But, like, again, this one is kind of broken containment. Right. Like, they saw the police shoot a man in the back multiple times in broad daylight from multiple angles. And, yeah, this one's been really hard for them to spin. Yeah.

[Ian]

One of the things that, you know, when you talk about sort of Reddit as a side of this. Right. One of the things on the front page of Reddit for a while that day was just a thing from, like, R pics where it's a picture of a frame in this shooting, and then it's a picture of a Nazi officer with a gun to the back of the head of a prisoner they're about to shoot. And it's almost identical frame for frame. And that's the kind of thing that's just going around on, like, the front page of Reddit.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Part of what I think is happening here is they got very convinced of their ability to kind of just brute force their own reality over what actually happened. And maybe they gambled too hard.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So much of this story is like the ultimate conservative nightmare of the government, like, physically disarming you, then executing you.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And that sequence of events is, I think, also in part what has created this pretty consistent turn away from the Trump administrations and the dhs. It's like initial statement on what happened here, which the administration themselves have started to roll back on after the public rejected this claim that they kept making on him being like a terrorist, him intending to massacre law enforcement. All these things that they have no way to actually prove. On Tuesday, Stephen Miller told CNN that they are, quote, evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following White House approved protocol and that the initial statement from DHS following the shooting was, quote, based on reports from CBP on the ground, unquote. On Wednesday, the DHS spokesperson, Trisha McLaughlin repeated this claim on Fox Business.

[Mia Wong]

Secretary Noem accused Alex Pretty of being a domestic terrorist.

[James Stout]

Is the administration standing by that language?

[Margaret Killjoy]

So initial statements were made after reports from CBP on the ground. That was a very chaotic scene. We know that our ICE law enforcement are facing rampant violence against the them.

[Molly Conger]

A highly coordinated campaign.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So that is why this investigation is.

[Mia Wong]

So important, so that we can get.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Accurate facts to the American people.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump has denied that Preddy was acting as an assassin and has called the shooting a, quote, unquote, very unfortunate incident. But he has continued to say that Preddy should not have been carrying a gun. Quote, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't, unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus has been pretty impressive. Yeah, I'll say that. Like, generally, like especially organized gun owner groups in the United States tend to align very heavily with conservative politics. They have been like, reinforcing that what Pretty was doing was in no way illegal and should no way lead to you being killed.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

As of Wednesday, we do know now that the Border Patrol agents involved in the killing of Alex Preddy have been placed on administrative leave. Around January 26, Trump struck some kind of deal with local officials, namely Mayor Frey and Governor Tim Walls. Local officials have said that, quote, unquote, some federal agents would begin leaving Minnesota. Bonvino is expected to return to California with the Atlantic reporting that he's been stripped of his, quote, unquote, commander at large title and has been locked out of government social media accounts. Tom Homan has arrived in Minneapolis to take over immigration enforcement operations. And local Minnesota law enforcement have ramped up their policing of protests, especially outside of hotels where ICE and Border Patrol agents have been staying.

[Ian]

And it's important to note as, as you're seeing a lot of stories about sort of ICE pulling out of Minneapolis and, you know, an administration rollback because of the sort of Bovino movement. Everyone that I have talked to in Minneapolis, and this is a fairly large number of people have all told me that everything on the ground remains the same, the raids are continuing. And they want to make sure that everyone understands that the raids are continuing and that the same kinds of things that ICE and the Border Patrol have been doing up until this point are continuing to happen under, I guess, quote, unquote, new management.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think they may have withdrawn some Border Patrol agents. Right. But the bulk of the people they deployed were actually ICE agents. They, to my knowledge, have not been withdrawn home and is not exactly like a liberal figure when it comes to deportation, to put it mildly. It might be like a change in the outward appearance, but the practice of what's going on, that has not changed.

[Garrison Davis]

Do we want to just have any kind of final discussion on that AI enhanced image that's been circulating?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So I mean, there's an AI enhanced image and this is. I've, when I posted this, I've seen people comment that like, oh, it's more disinformation from the fascists. This is the opposite of that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Someone AI enhanced a still frame from the video because there's a question as to whether or not when one of the ICE agents disarmed Preddy, did he accidentally negligently discharge his firearm into the ground and did that maybe spook them and cause the remaining chain of events? I don't think it's clear. And the video is not super clear as to whether or not the gun is firing. It's kind of grainy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we don't know that yet.

[Mia Wong]

So in like the new AI enhanced version, you literally see like a tongue of fire coming out of the barrel of the gun and then A full round of 5.56 seems to be exiting it.

[James Stout]

What, like with the casing? I just made shit up.

[Mia Wong]

It looks like it has the casing. It looks not like a firing gun looks. And the text on this is. This is from the AI info Twitter account. An enhanced video of a man who disarmed Alex Preddy shows the shows gun allegedly misfiring as ICE agent runs with it, which has also been said to have spooked other agents into firing. AI video also enhances the visuals of the bullet so it would be clearly visible to the human eye.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It was like, hey, I didn't enhance shit.

[James Stout]

You had a fight.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You had the digital equivalent of a.

[Ian]

Five year old scribbling on it.

[Mia Wong]

And you know, I don't know, I guess this could be them trying to be like, oh, it wasn't the federal agent's fault. It's those damn sig P320s that spooked everybody. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's like number one, AI can't enhance.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Things. Nothing can enhance a photo that's not a thing. That's real. You can't just like add details to a photo that weren't in. In a way that's different from just photoshopping them in. And that's what AI did. Someone said add visuals of a bullet and they did. And it's bad. It looks like a sparkler is stuck in the end of a handgun.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But yeah, it's just shit like this. That's just gonna be everything. Like every clash, every murder, every controversial thing that happens, there's immediately going to be a bunch of different AI slot videos and analysis. And what scares me most or not even scares me, what I think is the biggest problem isn't even just the straight up disinfo videos. It's the stuff where people are claiming, look, I did some research using this AI and it revealed this thing that isn't immediately visible to the naked eye, but this is clearly what really went on. And how that's going to superchar conspiracy theories about stuff and how the response when people are like, but the AI didn't enhance anything will will just be like, you're not smarter than an AI. You don't know. Like that. That's, that's the kind of thing where it's just going to be annoying. Like the truth ecosystem is already so damaged. I certainly wouldn't say that this is going to definitely make everything worse, but it's going to make everything more annoying.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't think I've seen this image that you're talking about, but I've seen a whole bunch of other like AI enhanced images of the shooting. It's specifically like the moment where, where or like around the time that the agents are firing into the back of Preddy. And it's, it's mostly like AI sharpened images, but taken to such an extreme extent that literally one of the heads of the border patrol agents is just missing.

[James Stout]

You know what?

[Mia Wong]

I wouldn't call that enhanced, but I'd say it's an improvement.

[Garrison Davis]

You have to like kind of like look for it because of the, because of how much movement is in the right.

[Mia Wong]

Of course.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But.

[Garrison Davis]

And I, but I'VE seen, I've seen this. The AI enhanced like, like still from the pink jacket lady.

[Mia Wong]

Oh God.

[Garrison Davis]

Of the shooting. I've. I've seen this image spread all around by, by people showing like how, how like brutal this looks. And it, you don't need to spread this AI sharpened version with the, with the, with the head missing. Like there is like regular stills that maybe are a little bit more fuzzy, but they actually are real. And you've seen a few other like AI altered images spreading around around this shooting. Specifically, there's been like AI altered images of Alex Preddy that like slightly changes his like facial proportions that have been used at some like memorials have been, have been spreading on the Internet. And that sort of stuff has been incredibly frustrating just to see the, the sort of proliferation of these, of these AI images into like the news cycle.

[Mia Wong]

I shared the enhanced image.

[Garrison Davis]

That looks really bad.

[Mia Wong]

It's really bad.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that's like, that's like cartoon. I've not seen that.

[Ian]

Yeah, it's like a kindergartner. It's, it's unreal.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't need to do this. Like, the people that have seen the footage knows what happened. You don't need to spread these fake images. Like public opinion is already formed on this. Yeah, we'll, we'll go on ad break again, but I think to, to close this section, I'll play this short clip from the Minnesota Timberwolves game, which is, which is a basketball game, I believe.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Which they held a moment of silence for Preddy and people chanted towards the end. I'll shorten the moment of silence for, for the audience, but you can take a listen here.

[James Stout]

By the tragic loss of Alex Pretty.

[Ian]

That occurred yesterday in Minneapolis.

[James Stout]

We extend our love, support and heartfelt.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Sympathies to Alex's family friends in our.

[James Stout]

Community during this difficult time. Please join us in honoring the life in memory of Alex Pretty with a moment of silence.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, we are back. After the shooting on Saturday, Chuck Schumer said that Senate Democrats would not be advancing a House approved appropriations bill with the currently included DHS funding. Right now the Senate is considering a six bill spending package that was narrowly approved by the House thanks to seven Democrats. And now Senate Dems are seeking to separate out the DHS bill and advance the five others. These six annual spending bills are set to expire on January 31st. If at least some Democrats don't sign on to the bills by Friday, there will be a partial government shutdown on Wednesday. Schumer reiterated, quote, until ICE is properly reined in and overhauled legislatively. The DHS funding bill doesn't have the votes to pass the Senate, unquote. Possible immigration enforcement concessions that Democrats are pushing for include, but are not limited to independent investigations into the recent shootings, mandating judicial warrants for immigration arrests, mandating body cams, requiring agent identification, no masks, no arrest quotas, no roving patrols, and restricting border patrol agents to the US Border.

[James Stout]

Yeah, so I want to address, I've actually addressed the roving patrols before and the evidence standards for the. For stops on those patrols. So I'm not going to do that. But I do want to address this last one. Right. With the quote unquote US Border. So in the statute, Border patrol is supposed to operate within a reasonable distance of the United States border, which they interpret to be a 100 mile distance. Now, when you are thinking of border, you might be thinking of land borders, but remember, this also includes ocean borders. They interpret the Great Lakes to be international waterways. And Thus it begins 100 miles from the shore of the Great Lakes. For context, that still doesn't get you into. Into Minneapolis. Right. You're looking at a bit further. 150 miles was the shortest line I could draw on a map. People seem to be operating under the misapprehension that this includes airports and it does not. And I keep seeing this repeated online and then people keep telling me the statute is actually very clear on what does and does not constitute a border. And it talks about external borders and airports are not included in this. The Border Patrol does not operate within 100 mile radius of every international airport in the United States.

[Garrison Davis]

Really unclear if Democrats will be able to get some of these things.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Obviously pushing for more training has its limits. The people involved in the shooting had.

[James Stout]

Years and years of training and gave the training.

[Mia Wong]

In some cases they were doing what they were trained to do.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, but there's, there's other stuff in here like, like mandating body cams, which. Though Border Patrol currently has body cams. ICE and Border Patrol, they have body cams. They're not required to always have them on. Yeah, this would be seeking to change that. Other things like requiring the identification of agents deployed, not wearing masks, not having arrest quotas. These would significantly change the way that ICE operates on the ground.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But possibly the most important thing that they are seeking here is the emphasis on judicial warrants as opposed to this administrative warrant.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

That ICE has been using as its primary justification the past few months.

[James Stout]

I think we should refer to those. I've been called the administrative warrants. I think a better, I guess down to use is the Form 215, because that's what it is. It's a form that they filled out. Right. Like, it is not a. It is not a warrant in any meaningful sense of the word. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm just noting that because that's a. That's a change I'm going to be trying to implement in my work going forward.

[Garrison Davis]

The last Minneapolis related story for this episode, which is mostly Minneapolis episode, I guess.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Is based on a CNN report that has claimed that federal agents encountered Alex Preddy a week prior to killing him. Pretty is said to have been driving and stopped his car when he witnessed ICE agents chasing a family on foot. Pretty began shouting and blowing a whistle before agents tackled Preddy and broke one of his ribs. Freddy was later released on the scene. DHS has told CNN that they have no record of this incident, though an anonymous source told CNN that Preddy was a known and identified protester to federal officials on the ground, quoting cnn, quote. Earlier this month, a DHS official in Minneapolis sent a memo to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations officers assigned to the state on a temporary duty asking them to use a form to input information on protesters and agitators. It is unclear whether the new intake form was used to share Preddy's information. It's also not clear whether federal agents who encountered Preddy on Saturday recognized him before they confronted him, unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's definitely HSI that has been doing the federal stuff that involves citizens, I guess. Right. Like. Like when they are investigating, detaining people. I know Pam Bondi is there today again and has posted pictures of people who are detained with HSI officers, which still not a usual thing to do. But yeah, hsi, for whatever reason they're kind of using as their, like, surrogate FBI in these instances.

[Garrison Davis]

Jameson, you can also speak on the sort of like surveillance of protesters, quote, unquote, agitators that feds have been doing on the ground, based on what you saw in Minneapolis.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's. Thank you, guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So like I was at the Whipple Building, right. The Whipple Building being the federal building in Minneapolis where they are taking people who are being detained and where ICE and cbd, CBP are deploying out of every day. Right. I was there because there was a protest on Friday as part of a general strike. And I noticed they look like CBP or ice, Right. They had like what I would describe as tactical helmets and gear on, but using DSLR cameras to take pictures of people protesting. They were in vehicles and they were shooting. I can't remember they had a door or the window to allow them to take photographs, but I noticed, like, that is an effort at surveillance. Right. It is not unreasonable. I know. Garrison, you also have this video, which happened in Maine, right, Of an agent more or less saying this, but it's not unreasonable to think that there is surveillance of people who are engaging in First Amendment protected activities.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. And there has been some desire among ICE officials, including Tom Homan, who went on Fox News earlier this month, to say that he's pushing for a database, quote, where those people that are arrested for interference impeding an assault, we're going to make them famous, unquote. So this news that Alex Preddy had been previously identified in some way by federal law enforcement follows an incident last Friday where a federal agent in Maine photographed a legal observer's car and said, quote, we have a nice little database and you're now considered a domestic terrorist. I'll play this clip here.

[Dana Al Kurd]

It's not illegal to record.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Exactly. Yeah, that's what we're doing.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

Why are you taking my information down?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Cuz we have a nice little database.

[James Stout]

Oh, good.

[Ian]

And now you're considered a domestic terrorist.

[Molly Conger]

So we're videotaping you.

[Robert Evans]

Are you crazy?

[Garrison Davis]

Georgia McLaughlin has told CNN that there is, quote, no database of, quote, unquote, domestic terrorists run by the Department of Homeland Security, unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ian]

I want to say something about this main video, which is that I've been seeing a lot of people circulating this as, oh, there's new repression tactics happening here. They're going to show up to people's houses. This has been happening. I mean, I know it was happening in Chicago, it probably was happening in la. I just don't remember off top of my head. But the stuff that's happening here, where these people take pictures of your face, is not new at all. It's not some kind of new innovation in these repression tactics. Like, obviously, be careful, but this is not a reason that everyone suddenly needs to be afraid that there's like a giant crackdown coming. They've been doing this the whole time, and so far it really hasn't happened. Like, it sucks, but it hasn't stopped Minneapolis, it hasn't stopped Chicago.

[Garrison Davis]

No, they're trying to intimidate you.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Stop doing this like that is the, the point of this agent walking by and joking about how you're now a domestic terrorist?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Because that's not actually real. That is a Way to scare you into not showing up. Based on the. Based on the idea that if you do, they'll take a picture of you and now you get added to this domestic terrorist database.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Is it.

[Mia Wong]

It.

[Garrison Davis]

Is it possible that they. They're making, like, some kind of catalog of pictures of protesters that they can maybe use for reference in the future to build a case against someone or if they arrest someone, they can look to see if they've been at previous protests. No, that's. That's not impossible. That is something that they've been doing for quite a while. It's something that anti fascists do against, like, proud boys back in the day, where you just document a lot of people at a protest and then maybe eventually the information will become useful.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

That is not, like, surprising, but, like, I've seen some pretty outrageous claims going viral that, like, after Preddy had this encounter with law enforcement previously where they broke his rib, that Freddie was then specifically targeted in the following weeks. Like, there is no information for that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

We have no evidence to prove that.

[Garrison Davis]

There's no information that this database led to him being intentionally targeted by federal agents on the ground. That is. That is just speculation at this point.

[Ian]

Yeah, there's no evidence of that, and there's no evidence that this is like. Like a new kind of campaign of repression. And I want to be very clear about this. If you are spreading this as a. You need to be afraid now because there's a new thing that's happening. You are doing their job.

[Robert Evans]

You.

[Ian]

You are spreading the fear that this is an intimidation that this is designed to do. So please stop doing this.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think, like, I understand that for a lot of people, any form of activism is very new and everything seems scary, but this is. This is one of those times when, like, you need to check what you're doing, because as Mia said. Right. This has. The legal term is a chilling effect.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, the government, generally, courts have found the government should do not. Should not do things that have a chilling effect on First Amendment protected speech. That's absolutely what the government is trying to do. You don't have to help them or not the government, but that particular agent, I should say, acting at work, saying he's building a database. Right. That is what that is trying to do is, Is to have a chilling effect.

[Ian]

Well, I mean, I. I would argue the government's also doing this. Calling every legal observer a domestic terrorist.

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Fair enough.

[Mia Wong]

So we should mention this just so we don't leave it out. Although we don't have a ton to say at the moment about this, but like the day before we recorded this on the 27th of January, I believe Ilhan Omar was doing a town hall in Minneapolis where she is a representative, and was assaulted by a man named Anthony James Kazmierzak, who was a 55 year old. He was carrying what looked like a syringe but without a needle. Just like a large syringe. Like the kind you'd use to give medicine to an animal or something.

[James Stout]

Yeah, like an irrigation syringe.

[Mia Wong]

Right. And it was filled with some kind of off brownish yellow liquid. I don't think we know what it was. It apparently was foul smelling, obviously. And he ran up screaming, you must resign. And sprayed some of it at her. I don't know how much got on her. He was tackled very quickly by a security guard. Omar seemed to be squaring up and ready to fight him, which was, you know, expected given like the kind of shit she's had to deal with. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

She's.

[Mia Wong]

She's had to be a very tough person. She doesn't seem to be injured. I don't think there's any evidence that the liquid or whatever was something that caused or is likely to cause health issues, which I mean, doesn't make it not assault. It just. I don't think she's currently in any danger, thankfully. Yeah, there's been a chorus of denunciations about the attack on her from a bunch of other elected leaders. I know people have said that like it's been ignored, but at least it hasn't been from other people in the House. Right. There's a lot of folks, including some Republicans, who have made comments on it just because none of them like the thought of having shit sprayed on them, I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway, we don't know a ton about this guy and why he did it otherwise. Other than that he presumably hated Ilhan Omar. Right. And that he wanted to get her to quit her job or otherwise harm her in some way. We don't really know much about this guy. There's some people talking about the fact that his kids seem to be on the left. Well, he's clearly not. As if that's weird. It's not. If your dad is the kind of crazy asshole who will spray poison on Ilhan Omar hit a town hall, I can see how maybe you become the opposite of him. But yeah, that's about all we know at the moment.

[Ian]

Well, I do want to mention Trump's comment on it where ABC News asked Trump if he'd seen the video. And, oh, yeah, Trump said, quote, no, I don't think about her. I think she's a fraud. I really don't think about that. She probably had sprayed herself, knowing her.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, you said that like a guy who thinks about her constantly.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ian]

Really hideous stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

Producer Sophie here with a quick pickup.

[Dana Al Kurd]

As we did not have this information at the time of recording, this is.

[Molly Conger]

As of January 20, 2026. Per AP News, quote, the Justice Department has charged a man who squirted apple.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Cider vinegar on Democratic Representative Omar at an event in Minneapolis.

[Molly Conger]

According to court papers made public Thursday.

[Dana Al Kurd]

The man arrested for Tuesday's attack, Anthony Kazmarzak, faces a charge of forcibly assaulting, opposing, impeding and intimidating Omar.

[Molly Conger]

According to a complaint filed in federal court. Authorities determined that the substance was water and apple cider vinegar.

[Dana Al Kurd]

According to an affidavit, after Karzerzak sprayed Omar with the liquid, he appeared to say, quote, she's not resigning.

[Molly Conger]

You're splitting Minnesotans apart, end quote, the affidavit says.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Authorities also say that Kasmer Zak told.

[Molly Conger]

A close associate several years ago that, quote, somebody should kill, end quote, Omar.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Court documents say Kaznerzak appeared briefly in federal court Thursday afternoon.

[Molly Conger]

His attorney told the judge her client.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Was unmedicated at the time of the.

[Molly Conger]

Incident and has not had access to medications he needs to treat Parkinson's disease.

[Dana Al Kurd]

And other serious conditions he suffers from. U.S. magistrate Judge Dulce Foster ordered that Kazerzak remain in custody and told officials.

[Molly Conger]

He needs to see a nurse when he is transferred to to the Sherburne.

[Dana Al Kurd]

County Jail, end quote.

[Molly Conger]

Again, that is via AP News.

[James Stout]

So I want to very briefly update people on Rojava. People keep asking for a whole episode. We will do one. I've been in Minneapolis.

[Mia Wong]

It's kind of a lot going on right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you may have noticed, but this is all very important, right? Like, horrible things are happening. So the stg, that's a Syrian Transitional Government, Ahmed Al Shara Jilani government and the sdf Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes YPG and ypj, it's the armed forces that defend Rojava have signed a 15 day extension to their ceasefire. Both sides are accusing the other of widespread violations of the ceasefire. Both of them are right. Like, I've seen a lot of videos of ceasefire violations. Ceasefire was internationally mediated, likely by the US and likely because of huge concerns around the escape of Islamic State prisoners. There was an attempted IS suicide bombing in Iraq yesterday. As we record this, that's the first time I can remember one of those happening in a while. The person was apprehended. But the US I know has been transferring detainees from a prisoner Hesker, and they're transferring them to US Facilities in Iraq. Right. It doesn't. The presence of the detainees is not the thing that is going to make the US Support their allies in Rojava or their former allies in the sdf. I guess I should say now the US Once again, is not going to be a good friend to the Kurdish people. Trump has also truthed that Iraq should not appoint Nouriel Maliki as its next prime minister. In his truth, he said, quote, I am hearing that the great country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouri al Maliki as prime minister. Last time Maliki was in power, the country descended into poverty and total chaos. That should not be allowed to happen again because of his insane policies and ideologies. If elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq. And if we are not there to help, Iraq has zero chance of success, prosperity or freedom. Make Iraq great again.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Jesus Christ.

[Mia Wong]

First off, I mean, Maliki does suck. Like, he's a really bad guy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This is not a, like, yay, Malik post, but this ain't the way to go about doing that.

[Mia Wong]

No. I mean, just the whole we will cut all ties and support to Iraq thing when everything happening there is still downstream of us fucking with them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we did this. We spent 20 fucking years killing people in Iraq. Like, you don't just get to be like, oh, yeah. And like the idea that we were doing regime change, but when the regime isn't the one that we like that people elect, then I was like, we're doing regime change again. Like, obviously the whole thing was a fraud and a lie. Yes. Yeah, still is. Yeah. Very concerned for my friends. All the parts of Kurdistan, actually, the peace process between the PKK and Turkey is falling apart. And state violence in Iran is still absolutely repugnant scale. Right, yeah. Yeah. Pretty tough time in that part of the world thinking of them.

[Ian]

So finally, I want to give a brief update on my story from last week about this attempt to end Fed independence and this attempt to sort of do an investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve. So earlier today, as we were recording this, we got the results of the Fed's vote about what they were going to do with interest rates. There's a whole episode about that. Go listen to that if you want to understand what this is. But the Fed, instead of cutting rates as the administration has wanted, has decided to hold interest rates at the same level, which was what was expected out of the Federal Reserve before Trump started putting even more pressure on them. However, comma we did not get any updates from anyone at the Federal Reserve about this Department of Justice investigation or any of the Trump pressure that's been being put on the Federal Reserve. So we'll keep you updated as the situation evolves, but all we got was a very normal interest rates are being held at the same level.

[James Stout]

We will include our list of mutual aid fundraisers for Minneapolis again in the show notes for this episode. Should you like to donate, put a.

[Ian]

Transfer on your couch.

[James Stout]

Yep. And if you want to email us coolzonetipson me, use the ProtonMail address to send it.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We reported the news.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Dana Al Kurd]

It Could Happen Here is a production.

[Molly Conger]

Of Cool Zone Media.

[Dana Al Kurd]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

[Molly Conger]

Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Or wherever you listen to podcasts you.

[Molly Conger]

Can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Margaret Killjoy]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.