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- [00:00]
Tenant Union Federation Director
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- [01:51]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
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Tenant Union Federation Director
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Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
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- [02:29]
Robert Evans
Media hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions.
- [02:55]
Mia Wong
Welcome to Jake It Happened Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to them back together again. And I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is one of the most acute places where everything is falling apart and one of the most acute attempts to put it back together again. We're just going to get right into it. With me to talk about a potential branch strike that there is significant organization going on for right now in Minneapolis as a reaction to the federal occupation is Tara Raghavir, the director of the Tenant Union Federation. Tara, welcome to the show.
- [03:26]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Thanks so much, Mia.
- [03:28]
Mia Wong
So, okay, let's rewind a little bit. Can you talk a bit about what the specific conditions of the occupation and also just sort of the preoccupation world for tenants got us to a point where there is potentially the largest rent strike we've seen in a century being organized right now.
- [03:47]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, thank you so much for having me. And I am boarding live from the Twin Cities where we've been in a really intense organizing drive now for many weeks. And of course, the people of the Twin Cities have very ferociously fought back against this federal occupation for nearly three months. But I appreciate your question because I think actually to take us back a little bit is critical to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in now. So the first and most basic thing to say is the rent is too damn high.
- [04:21]
Mia Wong
Yep.
- [04:22]
Tenant Union Federation Director
People cannot afford the rent in any corner of the country. You know, it's been true for me many years now that a person earning minimum wage cannot afford a two bedroom apartment in any American county, whether that's urban, suburban or rural. And as our rents go up, the conditions of our homes get worse. So what we have taken a saying these days is that we're paying higher rents than we've ever paid for the worst conditions we've ever endured. And I know you know that as a tenant and as a former tenant organizer, dear God. But so many of our people are living this reality every day. And you know, I organize. I'm based in Missouri and I help to found and organize with Casey Tenens. And increasingly we're organizing tenants in places like Raytown, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City. And the stakes are so high. And I really want to make sure listeners are aware of this, all of us are aware of it. But just to put a fine point on it, when you get priced out of a place like Chicago, you might end up in a place like Kansas City. When you get priced out of Kansas City, you might end up in a place like Raytown, Missouri. When you get priced out of Raytown, Missouri, there is no place else to go.
- [05:31]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [05:32]
Tenant Union Federation Director
And you're just stuck renting from the landlords of last resort, the people who are very keen to exactly how desperate the tenant condition is today. And then they exploit that by keeping us living in filth and hiking the rents at every turn. So that's some of the context that brings us into this moment, and that will be the context underlying every crisis following this one. And I think that's a really important thing to note, because the story I'm about to tell you about what's gone on here is then also a story of possibility about what might go on in every crisis that we encounter from this point on. So we started organizing a tenant union, a Twin Cities wide tenant union, at the end of January. And the reason for that is that the tenants of the Twin Cities had essentially been organizing unions for the two months preceding that as a way of fighting ice. Every building has a group chat. Right now. Every building has someone distributing whistles and zines so that people get information about how to spot ice, what to do if ICE is there. People are organizing mutual aid to take care of their neighbors. That is essentially the work of a tenant union.
- [06:45]
James Stout
Yep.
- [06:46]
Tenant Union Federation Director
So all we've done in the last couple of weeks is add some kind of structure and formality to the way that tenants have already gotten organized under this federal occupation.
- [06:56]
Mia Wong
Could I ask a quick question here about how. How the sort of citywide federation came together?
- [07:02]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah.
- [07:03]
Mia Wong
Because that's something I've seen attempted before, but it is pretty difficult.
- [07:08]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think this won't surprise you that in a moment of crisis.
- [07:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [07:14]
Tenant Union Federation Director
It's actually easier than in other circumstances, unfortunately, to get people organized. So a process that might have otherwise taken months to sort of align all the various entities organizing tenants in the Twin Cities took a matter of four and a half days.
- [07:32]
Mia Wong
That's astonishing.
- [07:34]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah.
- [07:35]
Mia Wong
First I've ever seen anything like this move.
- [07:38]
Carl Casarda
Right.
- [07:39]
Tenant Union Federation Director
And that's not to say it was easy.
- [07:41]
James Stout
Right.
- [07:41]
Tenant Union Federation Director
It took a lot. And you know, it took a lot from us as the tenant union federation. But more to the point, it took a lot from Tenants here who have been organizing in their own formations for many months preceding this crisis. So there's a local organization we're working with called Inquilino Sunidos. They've been organizing for 10 years, and they have a base of mostly Latino and Somali tenants all across the city. Then there's a crew that's been organizing in South Minneapolis, the South Minneapolis Tenants Union. Then there's tenants who have been organizing in St. Paul. Then there's tenants who have been organizing autonomously in their properties and forming tenant associations and marching on the landlord. So what we tried to do as quickly as possible was kind of assemble all of these forces and really focus ourselves on the project of building something that was bigger than the sum of its parts that could create the potential for enduring power out of this moment. And the thing that we said in those four and a half days of Sprint as we tried to assemble this force is the tenant union is good for protection today and power tomorrow. So this is just an experiment.
- [08:49]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [08:49]
Tenant Union Federation Director
We actually don't know what's going to come of this. But it's an experiment that I personally feel extremely invested in because I, like you, have lived through many moments of uprising and activation in the last several years. And unfortunately, more often than not, that uprising and that activation eventually evaporates. And the tenant union offers one potential vehicle to hold some of that activation into the future and to channel it into real and enduring power.
- [09:20]
Mia Wong
Yeah, there's another aspect of this before we get into what's happening right now that I was really interested in, which is how did the sort of connections and organizational bonds with labor unions start happening? Because that's another really cool feature of this that's pretty unique.
- [09:37]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah. Totally unprecedented. And even I. My mind's kind of blown. Right. A sort of contextual piece that's important is that the people of Minnesota are built different. There's longstanding alignment, partnership relationship among organized labor and between labor and community organizations here that sort of doesn't have a comparison anywhere else in the country. And I might be speaking out of turn, but I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen this depth of alignment among organized labor between labor and community. And so that context is really important to understand, because then I think in this moment of crisis, labor is much more open to a call from community groups and from tenants than they might be in other types of situations. So, you know, we really leaned on the local relationship and the depth of relationship between groups like Inquilinos Unidos and these like labor tables that have existed. And, you know, further important context is like, groups like SEIU Local 26 were leading the call for this general strike day on January 23rd. And there was this incredible table of labor leadership that came together to sort of lead that day.
- [11:04]
Mia Wong
Can you explain for our listeners, like, when you're talking about like a labor table, can you explain what that is?
- [11:09]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, I mean, essentially, as far as I understand it, there's just a really regular conversation that labor leaders are having together. And these days, I think more often than not, it's not just labor, it's labor. And then they've pulled in partners from community groups and tenant unions and some of the, like, resistance formations as well. And that also is remarkable.
- [11:30]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [11:30]
Tenant Union Federation Director
I'm saying this as though it's just kind of like, you know, fact of the matter. It's amazing that labor leadership in a context like this is in touch enough that they understand who's leading some of the decentralized autonomous resistance work and is not only aware of that, but pulling them into these kinds of war rooms that are now existing. And, you know, they're talking on an almost daily basis, as far as I understand it. So the ask moved pretty quickly. I think we. We brought a vision and a strategy to some of the closest labor partners. And their willingness to join in on the strike drive comes from an intense clarity about the stakes for their members.
- [12:14]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [12:14]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Many of these unions include membership that cannot make the rent on March 1st.
- [12:21]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [12:22]
Tenant Union Federation Director
And so they're not taking this lightly. Right. This is a big risk. They're. They're sticking their necks out for something that is a total moonshot. We don't know whether or not we're going to be able to pull it off. But what we know is we needed to try for some additional leverage that we didn't have a couple days ago.
- [12:38]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [12:49]
Mia Wong
I'm astonished by effectively every part of this because every fourth thing you say is like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. But, yeah, how fast this came together is astonishing. The willingness and speed with which labor is mobilizing is sort of. Is astonishing. And. Yeah, I don't know. This is. This is really. This is really fucking cool. Yeah. And I guess the next thing I wanted to ask about, outside of sort of the how did this organization come together is what are the specific demands being made?
- [13:25]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah. So there's three main demands related to the strike drive. One is ICE out. And a part of that that I feel like you'll be interested in is ICE is. And the federal government is pretending that the reason for the invasion is economic. They're like, this is an economic intervention. ICE is here to fix the economy by deporting a bunch of people who are taking your jobs. Part of what we are trying to do is highlight what is the reality, which is that ICE is bad for the economy. ICE has devastated the economy. We're trying to heighten that contradiction between what they say they're here to do and what is actually occurring. And so we will demonstrate, if we authorize a strike, what actual economic disruption looks like if tenants exercise their economic power. So that's one thing. ICE out. ICE fully out. There's all this talk about a drawdown now, but there's still ICE agents here kidnapping people. Yeah, on a daily basis. The second thing is a statewide eviction moratorium. And this has been a demand for the last two and a half, nearly three months. The governor has not moved on it. The state legislature has not moved on it. Eviction court is running, quote, unquote, as normal during a time where there are 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So demand number two is end evictions. No evictions under federal occupation. And frankly, not for a long time until something resembling real recovery is possible. And then demand number three is real rent relief. And the real is important here because it's not enough just to get tens of millions of dollars that we would then be expected to apply for and turn around and give to the landlord. So when we say real rent relief, we mean tens of millions of dollars that come with strings attached. If landlords benefit from what is effectively a bailout because of how bad ICE is for the economy, then they should be accountable to a higher standard of tenant protections. So, one, ICE out, two, eviction moratorium, three, rent relief.
- [15:34]
Mia Wong
These are fairly moderate demands, and they remind me a lot of a series of both demands and also just the way that policy works. During the initial parts of the pandemic where there was. There were a lot of. In a lot of cases, there actually were, like, eviction moratoriums that, you know, were never enforced as strictly as the letter of what they said, but was a thing that was implemented in conditions where suddenly people just literally couldn't work because massive external force.
- [16:05]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Totally. Yeah. A lot of what we're working with right now is groundwork that was laid during the COVID 19 eviction crisis or the early years of it. Right. The bill that we introduced in the state legislature this week is literally modeled after the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation act that we wrote back in 2020 to try to get rents and mortgages canceled when people couldn't go to work and couldn't leave the house because of the pandemic. And I think that's actually an important thing, again, to keep in mind, because crises like this will continue happening under today's conditions. Right. We are hurtling towards deep and encompassing authoritarianism. There's escalating climate catastrophe. We're going to be in this situation much more frequently and at higher degrees of stress pretty much for the rest of our lives. So it's good, actually, for us to start learning from the work that we did five years ago and applying it here to borrow and steal from our past selves, to build from something rather than start from scratch. I wish we didn't live under these types of, you know, cascading crises, but. But that's the situation we're in. And I've been feeling so often in the last month that the only touch point in my life I have to this moment is the early months of the pandemic.
- [17:27]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [17:28]
Mia Wong
And I think that gets at the depth and seriousness of the crisis in a way that I feel like is not understood.
- [17:38]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [17:39]
Mia Wong
Outside of Minneapolis, I mean, I think, you know, like, my connections. I'm from Chicago, my connections in Chicago, there was a lot of that experience. But even. Even in Chicago, it was kind of. There were places that were like that, and then you could go, like, three neighborhoods over, and everything was sort of operating normally for the most part until the next sort of raids came. And that I feel like. I don't know, it seems to me, from listening to you talk about this, that that's been the catalyzing force for all of this, is that it is just constant crisis everywhere.
- [18:12]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah. And I think you're right that people outside of the Twin Cities maybe don't understand the depths of the devastation. But just to put a fine point on it, conservative estimates show over $47 million in lost wages among people who have not been safe to go to work in the last three months. Yeah, $47 million in lost wages. I just had a conversation with a dad yesterday whose kids go to a school where there are 80 families where the parents have not been safe to go to work. They haven't been safe to take their own children to school. And so the other parents in the school have been organizing support around them for the last two months. And they just did a round of calls through all those families this week. None of them can make March rent. Right. So even. Even if we're living under a supposed drawdown. The crisis is still so alive. And I think that's also why you see organized labor lining up alongside us in this strike drive. They know, like Local 26 has 200 members that cannot make the rent on March 1st. So I think that that sort of, like, economic side of this story is not really known, felt, or understood outside of the Twin Cities right now. But everyone here knows and feels it because they've turned their lives inside out for the last three months to organize, you know, millions of dollars in mutual aid. But here's the thing is we cannot go fund me our way out of this scale of emergency.
- [19:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [19:41]
Tenant Union Federation Director
It requires state intervention, and that's what we're calling for.
- [19:45]
Mia Wong
I want to come Back to that, that 47 million number for a second, because I think when we hear numbers like that, we're used to hearing them in the context of, you know, state agencies or multibillion dollar companies. And this is not that. This is not a situation where these people have billions of dollars and you're losing some fraction of that. This is something where every single one of those dollars matters so acutely. It's not $47 million coming from Google. It's $47 million coming from people like you. And that is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis.
- [20:25]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, it's a huge crisis and one that kind of ludicrously. The leaders at the state and city level have suggested that everyday people should solve. Yeah, $47 million for everyday people is enormous. You know, through extraordinary efforts, the people of the Twin Cities have organized something in the neighborhood of $6 million in rental assistance for their own neighbors. Like mutual aid style. Yeah, $47 million or $50 million. $75 million is nothing for the state to figure out. Right. At the city level, there is, you know, something to the tune of $60 million pot that's funded through sales taxes that goes into the maintenance of the downtown infrastructure. They pulled some of that money just this past week to support small businesses. Yeah, what about the people, right. What about the people who have had to scrounge together what they can to take care of themselves, dip into their savings, put together funds to take care of their neighbors? That can't continue like that forever. And it's ludicrous that they've been asked to do that until now. So the strike drive is really about making that point in public that the state needs to intervene. We need solutions. We need some level of commitment from the state, the governor, the state legislature, and from the cities in order to protect people, to keep them in their homes for now and to make them whole in the long run.
- [22:08]
Mia Wong
I think the other element of this too, and something that I remember dealing with doing tenant organizing, is that on a very basic level, this is the most brutal possible time that you can be evicted. It is February right now. It is going to be early March, which is whether that can just kill you. And on top of that, on sort of political level, we're very used to talking about eviction as like a kind of process that we're used to happening, but it's like, no, we're sending a bunch of people out into whether that will kill them and then also just into the arms of a federal occupation. And it's the only metaphors I could think of is it's like, yeah, you're evicting people into the hands of the Gestapo, which is one of the most evil things that can even possibly be contemplated.
- [22:58]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah.
- [22:58]
Mia Wong
And yet it's just what business as usual has been.
- [23:01]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [23:01]
Tenant Union Federation Director
I mean, it's. It's hard to even find the words to describe the evil. And as you said, it's not dissimilar to the first year of the COVID 19 pandemic before there was a vaccine eviction courts in states like mine in Missouri were just open.
- [23:19]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [23:19]
Tenant Union Federation Director
You know, the courts were open in my county starting In May of 2020, a full year before we had a vaccine and people were being evicted into the streets during a time when we were told to stay home in order to protect ourselves and our neighbors from a deadly virus.
- [23:34]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [23:34]
Tenant Union Federation Director
So it's a really similar thing, you know, the quote UNQUOTE Business as U.S. of State sanctioned violence. And every eviction is an act of violence. The sort of normalcy and the mundanity of that violence is practiced every day and in front of our eyes right now. And I think that that point about mundanity is important to draw out. Right. Because I think what we've seen in the Twin Cities in the last three months is really visible in your face state violence. As the ICE agents have come and pepper sprayed and beat people up and of course shot and killed people as well. The day to day violence of eviction is actually harder to mobilize people around because it's so boring, it's so bureaucratic, it's so taken for granted that the state treats us like this. That the state exists to protect property over people and their lives and their needs. And that's an interesting thing to think about in this moment too, where there may or May not be a drawdown of the federal agents, but the long standing economic impacts of this invasion are here. And it'll be an interesting test of people's solidarity and focus and endurance to continue showing up in the months after the agents go away.
- [24:54]
Mia Wong
Assuming they do, which is also.
- [24:58]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Assuming they go away. Right. But I, you know, I have faith. I have more faith than I've ever had in my life that the people of the Twin Cities who have so righteously fought this invasion are showing up and will continue to show up even after a time when the agents are gone. Assuming that happens. And that's a critical test, that will be a turning point. Because we live in a world where this mundane violence actually does happen all the time, even outside of crisis.
- [25:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [25:27]
Mia Wong
And the ability to turn the sort of rupture in these moments of crisis into an actual change to the way that everything works, I think to some extent is the thing that we failed to do after 2020. And is the thing that sort of, you know, the foreclosing of the possibilities of the uprising and of the mutual aid from the pandemic is what allowed the sort of monsters that rule our world to today to sort of tear their way through.
- [25:57]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, exactly.
- [25:59]
Mia Wong
So I know that you have to go very soon. Is there anything else you want to make sure people know? And are there ways that people outside of the Twin Cities can support y'?
- [26:09]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
All?
- [26:09]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah, absolutely. We are running phone banks now through March 1st to increase our numbers for the strike drive. So depending on when this airs, it would be amazing for folks to join those phone banks. They can sign up@twincitiestenants.org there's a link to sign up to join the phone banks. Tenants, wherever they are, should get organized and should get trained by the tenant union federation. We've got our big union school training. It's a virtual three month training coming up this summer. There will be more information to come on our socials and our website in the next couple of weeks and months. And they should follow along. People should follow along on social media. We're learning a lot.
- [26:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [26:50]
Tenant Union Federation Director
And we're going to be sharing a lot of those lessons in public. And I think an important note to end on perhaps is that this is not a Vibes based organizing drive. This is not social media only. You know, we're believers that words mean things. And when we say we're running a strike drive, we mean that shit.
- [27:10]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [27:10]
Tenant Union Federation Director
So we're running a really intensive organizing effort that may or may not work. You know, we are trying. We're trying something big and unprecedented. And part of that attempt and part of our seriousness is also acting with extraordinary discipline. So we will not authorize strike if we are anything less than ready to be on strike. Depending on the situation with our demands and whether or not they're met, people should stay tuned. Because I think in the way that this plays out, we will also be modeling some of what we're learning in real time around what it takes to exercise both vision and strategy and discipline as a collective in this kind of new territory.
- [27:54]
Mia Wong
Yeah, and this is, quite frankly, one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to cover on this show. This fucking rocks. And yeah, I hope it goes well for you all and I hope you fucking win.
- [28:04]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Mia, of course.
- [28:08]
Mia Wong
Thank you for coming on. And yeah, to everyone else out there, I don't know, I was just some random college kid when I started doing this. So you too can do tenants organizing and you too can do incredible things when the BOMA calls for it.
- [28:30]
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Tenant Union Federation Director
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- [31:35]
Robert Evans
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where Robert Evans is slightly adjusting the levels on his microphone. Because I am in New Orleans traveling and with my friend and city resident and former guest of the pod, Carl Casarda. Carl, welcome to the show.
- [31:52]
Carl Casarda
Thank you for having me, Robert. It's great to be back. I mean, we've done a few episodes in the past on different podcasts and it's always, I don't want to say a treat, but it's good to work with you because some of the topics of course are pretty rough.
- [32:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And you and I have have talked, I think primarily in our previous episodes about both like digital security and then guns. Like we've talked about people getting into shooting. We've talked about like kind of what's responsible and irresponsible when it comes to training and firearms advice. And today we're kind of starting by talking about guns in a different context, which is the fact that specifically they are often used as an excuse by law enforcement like the fear of. The fear or the reality of someone being armed as an excuse for kill, killing them. Right. We can talk about the killing of Philando Castile in July of 2016. Was a black man who was stopped by the police and a legal license concealed carry holder and was shot during that traffic stop because the officer panicked. But the case that's right now on people's minds is the case of Alex Preddy, who was killed by Border Patrol earlier this year. Was wearing a gun during a confrontation, but he was just filming. They stripped him of his weapon and they shot and executed him. In a case that has actually drawn criticism from gun rights organizations towards the Trump administration, which doesn't happen often. But I think the kind of point you brought up when you and I started talking about this was that what happened to Preddy, you know, not only can you go back to other cases where law enforcement have shot people legally concealed carrying, as we talked about with Castile, but this is not a thing that is the result of the escalation of the Trump administration's. You support patrol and ice. This is a long standing behavior that Border Patrol agents have exercised and been exercising elsewhere for years. Like what happened to Preddy is novel because he was a white guy in the middle of Minneapolis, but it's not novel because Border Patrol shot and killed somebody and then justified it by saying he had a gun.
- [33:44]
Carl Casarda
Yeah, it's Border Patrol and really by that extension of all law enforcement in the US because there's so many examples, it's almost hard to draw out just one or two. You can go for on forever for this. But there's some real prominent ones that make a lot of sense. In fact, even here in New Orleans right after Katrina, there were a family that were crossing a bridge, trying to just recover some water and supplies. And a bunch of law enforcement officers jumped into unmarked vehicles, ran over on a bridge, jumped out, and with unauthorized guns, including AKs, unloaded on them. And it was called the Danziger Bridge Shootings. I have a video on the channel about it. And this is where this gets relevant. They not only shot them, they chased them down from a moving vehicle and killed them in their back with a shotgun while he was running away. But they use the pretense of them being armed, even though they were not, by dropping drop guns and calling them ham sandwiches. So again, the pretext of there were guns, therefore were allowed to kill them is just an example of that right there.
- [34:35]
Robert Evans
Yeah, and this is really interesting because first off, you get the gun rights people, or at least A chunk of the conservative gun rights people who will come out whenever someone actually is carrying a gun. But the fact that this happens so much more often where the police just kill someone and say, because we thought they had a gun is also. I mean, it's a human rights issue, but it is a Second Amendment issue. Right? You've got this weird dichotomy where on the right, the existence of the second. Because it's often said that, like, oh, the presence of a gun, even though you have the Second Amendment means the police can kill you. But the reality is that the existence of guns in the country means that the police have the ability to justify killing and Border Patrol has the ability to justify killing someone for no reason.
- [35:17]
Carl Casarda
Which it really brings up a really interesting question because, I mean, the Second Amendment is literally the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is a right enshrined directly in the Constitution. The first is freedom of speech, and the second one is the right to carry and bear arms. And so if that is a constitutional right, even in instances where you see, like Alex Brady, who is a legally licensed CCW holder, still can be killed with essentially no justice being delivered for their actions, raises a very interesting question about how is a right a right when they can kill you for the presence of a gun, even when it's legally possessed and not even being used in a offensive manner, like even if it's just on you or they think there's one there, suddenly they can kill you and nothing comes of it. And that's the case with so many instances. I got a few more here if you want. Like Daniel Shaver, this is one in Mesa. This is not Border Patrol, but it's still law enforcement. It has the precedent of the problem. 2016, he was a Texas exterminator. He was traveling through Arizona and he was up in his hotel room and someone on the street saw him, or thought they saw him messing with a firearm. Turned out it was like a pellet gun or something he used to shoot rats. But they rolled up, they called him out of his room, and in the very horrific video of screaming at him and giving very inconsistent commands, along with another gun that was illegally modified, at least not authorized to be modified, where the dust cover on the air 15 said, you're fucked on it. They unloaded on him while he was crawling on his hands and knees, begging for his life, literally begging for his life in the video. And again, really nothing came of it. In fact, the officer that shot him landed up getting back on the force just long Enough to give him essentially a life pension for the trauma he received for killing the man. So the presence or the perceived presence of a firearm justified them killing him while he was crawling on his hands and knees.
- [36:53]
Robert Evans
You know, we've talked about the warrior cop ethos and guys like Colonel Grossman who have helped to inculcate this idea in law enforcement that you are in, like, dire threat of immediate death every second of every day as, like, a sworn law enforcement officer. And thus you have to react like this, right? Like, you have to. You have to react immediately with lethal force the instant someone, like, reaches into a pocket or. I can't tell you how many times at protests, I can remember one really clear time from 2020, where I was with a group of people. They were promising to arrest all of us, and I was kind of talking to the police officer, basically being like, look, per the mayor's most recent orders, like, we are allowed to be out here. Yeah. Anyway, it was a whole thing. But one of the protesters who was just kind of standing behind me, very nervous, like, reached into his pocket. I don't know what it was to get a phone. And all of the officers tensed up. And I had to be like, don't fucking go. Like, keep your hands visible, man. Like, we're standing in front of a bunch of. And you shouldn't have to do that. Right. Putting your hands in your pocket shouldn't be a justification for a man pulling a gun and blowing you away with the authority of the state behind him. But the reality of the situation is that, like, whenever I am talking to police officers, I keep my hands in front of me and. Fucking visible.
- [38:03]
Carl Casarda
Yeah. It's produced a situation in which regular American citizens. Or we'll get into this. To Tohono Odom reservation members, Indian members, members of the tribe. You have to be, as a civilian, trained how to interact with these very dangerous people who have been given a ideology of, like, killology. You mentioned Lt. Col. Grossman, who actually never shot anyone himself, but was one of the seed crystals of this training mentality in which he espoused, don't be afraid to shoot. I don't think that's going to happen, is you might get sued. But don't worry about getting sued. It just gives you a little break and some time off the force until you get it cleared. He's on video saying this stuff. And that mentality so imbued into all of the law enforcement agencies now presents a problem where the legal right of having a firearm is, I'd say, very questionable. That it's a right when they have all authorization to kill you for the thought or presence of a gun. And it shouldn't be civilians, just regular people that have to be trained how to deal with these dangerous agents of the state, because they're the ones that are indoctrinated into this fear mindset when we're afraid, too, at this point, because they can kill you. And nothing seems to come of it.
- [39:06]
Robert Evans
I think the thing when we were chatting about this kind of behind the scenes that you brought up that was really interesting to me to emphasize was the degree to which this is not a training problem. Right. This is not a lack of training problem. You hear a lot on the kind of more moderate Democrat side of things about how, like, we need to be retraining these agents, and that, like the murder of Renee Good, the murder of Alex Preddy, is the result of, like, bad training on behalf of Border Patrol. And it's kind of part of this whole rogue agency thing you get with Border Patrol and ICE that, like, because of the Trump administration and how they flooded it with bad recruits and how they're. They're not getting properly trained. That's why things have been so deadly. And when you look at the history of how Border Patrol has worked on things like the Tohonomoto Reservation, what you see is a whole bunch of cases that sound a lot like what happened to Renee Good and Alex Preddy. They're just not happening to white people in Minneapolis. Right.
- [39:57]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [39:57]
Carl Casarda
I think that's something that a lot of people who haven't had the experience of living near the border, because I also spend a lot of my life in Arizona, near Tucson, and therefore the Tohono Odom Reservation's right there, and therefore have some insight into the things that go on right there near the border. And this is not new. The. The thing that's new is that it's being extended across the country and now into internal spaces. But the policies and the way the Border Patrol and ICE have acted is by. By no means a new standard. For example, not only with firearms, but there are instances, at least two instances, if not more, in which there's verified video of Border Patrol agents intentionally swerving their vehicles to hit tribal members is. It's on footage. Not only car footage, but footage of the cell phone being struck. One instance at least, they were killed. Another instance, they were hurt. And with that footage, even though it very clearly the car swerved to hit them, nothing came of it. So it's hard to not see that there's something going on here. I don't think this is a training. I don't think they're training them to run over people. But there's some cultural maliciousness that's imbued into some of this that's hard to ignore. Another example of that was in 2023. There was a ton of member Raymond Mattia. He was called for. Supposedly there was gunfire heard. And so Border patrol shows up and he's in front of his house and he reached for his cell phone in his pocket, much like you just described. Again, wow, There's a recurring theme here. And he was shot nine times, 38 rounds fired, killed. He had no gun on him. He was just a TL member. And therefore it didn't really make any press.
- [41:23]
Robert Evans
Again, you see, this is a qualified immunity problem. Right. And it does go back to that. And there's been some talk of, like, if you're going with the reforming ICE rather than the abolishing thing, which is, you know, certainly something a lot of Democrats talk about. Like, I have heard some discussion of, like, well, maybe removing qualified immunity, at least for Border patrol and ice. And it's so much bigger of a problem than that. Like, I certainly, I will, I will accept any reductions in qualified immunity for law enforcement because that's where a lot of this starts. But even without that, if these go to court, if the officer in that specific shooting had gone to court for that specific shooting, I think there's a very good, if not overwhelmingly likely chance that he would have just been able to argue I was in fear of my life. Right. Everyone knows how dangerous police officers jobs are. Of course, you know, if you reach into a bucket around them, you're signing your own death warrant. And some of my problem with this is the degree to which Americans, and maybe this is starting to shift. But things are as bad as they are because for a very long time, Americans were willing to go along with the idea that police officers lives were so dangerous and their jobs were so important that almost any violence they mete out is justified by the danger that they exist in. And I, I want to talk more about that with you. But first, here's some ads. And we're back. Carl, I'm going to hand back the mic to you and we're going to continue our discussion.
- [42:57]
Carl Casarda
Well, that's the challenge that I see with all these. And these are just, again, a handful of examples of which there are so many you can't even enumerate them all. I mentioned the Danziger Bridge shootings in which two Men were killed and there was really no justice came for that. Although there was long trials and almost, almost someone got in trouble, but not really. They all eventually got out with very little justice. Daniel Shaver was killed in Mesa. That guy got pension. Philando Castile. Nothing really came of that. Paulo Reams, the guy hit by the Border Patrol suv, nothing came of that. Another example, while this was a protester, Tortuguita in 2023 protesting Cop City, was unloaded on in his tent where they said he had a firearm. Again, another similar example 14 times and was killed in the process. Hey, everybody, Carl here. And an important update to the podcast. Once it was released, we quickly realized that there was a mistake embedded in it and it really kind of lies on me. We recorded this the day after Mardi Gras. That's no excuse. We were both a little tired, but at the same time, we had a conversation in which we discussed, should we just remove this from the podcast entirely, Just snip it out? And both of us came to the same conclusion, that it was too important to leave Tortuguita's story in the podcast, because the reality is they're not talked about as much as they should be. And what happened to Tortuguita matters very much and it should be kept in the public consciousness, especially since the body cam footage has not been released. But in this, I mistakenly used the pronoun he and him and Robert followed suit just because we were kind of recording together in that time and space. And this was recorded very, very live and raw and real. But Tortuguita, the queer indigenous activists that gave their life fighting against Cop City, went by they them. So please accept my apology and our apology for this mistake in the podcast. But again, we wanted to leave it in because it was too important and too significant to tell Tortaguita's story than it was to snip it out due to this mistake. So hopefully you'll understand and accept this disclaimer and apology for this mistake and realized that was, of course, not intentional. Thank you. There was a bunch of actual body cam footage that's never been released to the public. But at the same time, the autopsy of him showed that his hands were up in the position he was in when he got hit with those multiple 14 rounds. But we don't even get to see the body cam footage. And there was audio where the cops at least implied that one of the cops shot one of the other cops and that's what instigated the shooting.
- [45:23]
Robert Evans
It's the kind of thing that like, we don't know what happened in the shooting of Tortuguita. Right. We simply don't know, in part because they haven't released a lot of the information. And right now the burden of proof is on Tortuguita in this case or on, you know, people who think he was unjustly killed to prove that he didn't shoot the officer. As opposed to where I would argue the burden of proof should be, which is on the agents of the state who shot somebody. Right? Like if you were going to say this kid pulled a gun and fired on you, I want the proof and it's on you to give me the proof. And if you, the police, do not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were in fear for your life and being attacked when you used deadly force, my assumption is going to be that you murdered a guy. And I think that's how everyone should feel. Right? Like that should be how we treat police violence in any society, not just the United States. I mean, if you're listening to this in the UK or Germany and you're a reasonable person, I would think that your attitude should be, yes, if a bobby or whatever the Germans call their police kills somebody, he should have to prove that he or she should have to prove that they were in immediate fear of their life, which is not so different from anybody else. Right. I can think of, I can think of one police shooting that I saw a video of spreading on Twitter where like a guy was literally like sprinting around in traffic with a gun, like pointing it at people in traffic and got shot and killed by an officer. And I was like, look, if I'd had a gun and felt like I could take the shot, I might have shot that guy too, because he was carjacking people at gunpoint and pointing a firearm in there. Like, yeah, that's the case in which maybe you have to shoot a guy because he could kill someone at any second. Right? And I'm not gonna judge a police officer for shooting in that instance, but I wouldn't judge a civilian either. I don't have a different standard for them. If you are a cop or a civilian and somebody shoots at you, you have the right to defend yourself. Right? But you also should expect to prove that they were trying to hurt you.
- [47:19]
Carl Casarda
This is the challenge I have with all this is, like you said, in any instance, that's a self defense shooting. And in this and in many instances, law enforcement are put in a situation where they're not necessarily even defending themselves, but defending the community or others, and therefore they have justification. I'm not to say here to say that every law enforcement shooting is not justified. Many of them are. But in the instances where there are questionable circumstances, of which many we've just enumerated here, even instances in which they have body cams on which are supposed to be, would validate their actions, but they won't release it to the public to see it. It draws a very significant question of the validity of these events and what they're doing and why they're. I would say no better way to say than covering something up. In fact, going back to Lt. Col. Grossman, there's video of him talking about law enforcement, which, of course extends to ICE and Border Patrol as the samurai of the land. And, you know, that reference isn't really a good one, because when you know what the samurai are, that's a disturbing statement. But in his mind, he's making this point that they have these tools that are for life and death and the right to essentially kill and referring to them as samurai. And I think that mindset is sadly very much permeating the law enforcement agencies of this country.
- [48:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's the myth of the warrior cop. And I think one of my frustrations here stems from just as someone like you, I carry a firearm regularly, and I think a lot about what would happen if I had to use it. And I think about not just the practicality of, like, okay, am I trained properly to use this thing competently? You know, but what would the order of operations need to be if somebody tries to kill me and I successfully kill or injure them with a firearm? Well, I'm going to need to call the police immediately. I'm going to need to contact a lawyer immediately. I'm going to hope that there are eyewitnesses there. I'm going to hope and seek to provide as much evidence that I possibly can that I had no other choice to do what I was going to do. Right. Any civilian carrying a firearm responsibly thinks about the same things about, like, if I am in a shooting, first off, there's the question of I need to defend myself. But then there is immediately the question if I need to defend myself in court. And police don't have that second part. Not really. Not in a way that matters.
- [49:20]
Carl Casarda
And this, to me, is why the Alex Preddy situation, which was so visibly documented by multiple cameras, is such a concern. Because in this instance, we see two officers unload on the guy, one guy shoots him at least once or twice, and then Another guy unloads on him again. And we have multiple video angles, yet the narrative from them is that this guy was attacking them, which is clearly not the case on the video. I mean, you can look at it from multiple angles, whether or not you agree with his protest methods. He was not attacking anyone. He was standing between them getting pepper sprayed and being beaten with pepper spray can and then getting unloaded on. And at the same time, we now live in this situation where at least some parts of the firearms community, or gun community, which isn't a community, owning a thing isn't a community, but we use that term gun community. Like you said, some of these rights groups have said something, but the response to this is still disturbing to me because there's a lot of people saying, well, don't show up to a protest with a gun. Don't be in public with a gun. You can't bring a gun. In fact, we saw parts of the Trump administration saying, don't show up with a gun. This man had a handgun and two magazines on him looking for trouble. Well, if he was, he didn't have the gun out. And by the way, carrying a handgun with an extra magazine is by no means abnormal. In fact, that's a normal procedure for most people, that concealed carry. If you and I were hanging out on the street and we decided that we got into a fight with some guy, you know, Sheila Booth comes out of the bar and starts swinging on us, and then. And then, not only did we punch him and knock him to the ground, you shoot him. And then I shoot him nine more times. And there's video evidence of that. We're going to jail forever. But we have footage of these guys doing this, and really nothing comes of it.
- [50:50]
Robert Evans
Part of, like, what I really want to get across to people is how bog standard this behavior is. The. The agents that shot Preddy were experienced veterans. They were not newbies, they were not proud boys who just gotten inducted into the force, you know, and tasked with doing vigilante justice. They were sworn law enforcement officers with decorated careers, and they were acting the way the average cop expects people to act in a lot of situations, or at least, at least a significant chunk of. Of the law enforcement community expects police officers to be able to act. Right. Like, I don't know that. I think most police officers are going to shoot a man who has been disarmed when he's in the middle of a pile of guys who have their hands on him. But most police officers will defend their colleagues who do the same, right? That's almost more of the issue. It's not that the average police officer is looking for an excuse to shoot somebody. It's that there's enough of those guys on the force and all of their friends support them when they do it. Right. And that doesn't exist on the civilian side of things. Right. I think about, like, in Portland, we had a mass shooting that was stopped by a protester who was then, like, gave himself up to the police and was taken into custody, was initially charged with murder. And if there was the knowledge as a police officer that if I shoot someone, whether or not it's totally justified, the next few months of my life are fucked completely. I'm not getting time off to chill. I am having to defend myself and have some of the worst stress of my life. Maybe we'd have fewer police shootings, right, if they knew it was going to be a miserable situation whenever they drew their gun and fired on somebody. And I think you have to have that be the understanding. And I know, like, the. The counterpoint that at least police defenders will come up with is like, well, that might make them less likely to defend themselves. And like, well, then why are you calling them heroes if you're not expecting them to risk their lives for the good of the body politic? Right. We'll talk more about this, but first, ads.
- [53:01]
Carl Casarda
What's really interesting about this, and I would think, I mean, I'm sure you have a really large amount of cops in the audience here. But. But here's the thing, really, everyone should be concerned about this, even cops, even border patrol, even ice, law enforcement in general should be concerned about this because as this activity becomes, frankly, more common and more accepted in their ranks, that thin blue line being not one about solidarity, but one of silence and lack of justice, that puts them at danger too. Because if a person or people are so afraid of the reality of the fact that they can be just executed in the street with no repercussions of it, it sort of gives civilians, well, it takes away our trust in the system. There's no due process. You can just die for nothing for having a cell phone in your pocket. It'll make some people more reckless in their actions when dealing with law enforcement. Because they're like, what do I have to lose? I'm gonna die anyway.
- [53:50]
Robert Evans
It's the same logical problem as if you're like, well, armed robbery should have the same consequences as killing a guy. Or they should be very similar. Your life should be over either way. Well, then what's the reason not to shoot someone and kill them in a robbery, leaving them alive just increases the odds they identify you. If you're looking at the difference between 30 years in prison or 50 years in prison for robbery and murder, why not just commit the murder, right? Like it's this calculus that's being forced on people. If you know any time the police take you into custody or start to move to put hands on you, you feel like there's a very good chance they're just going to murder you, then people are going to start making very different choices when they're physically in contact with the police. And that makes life a lot more dangerous for everybody. And that's part of why this is. What we're seeing is just so fucking irresponsible.
- [54:38]
Carl Casarda
And historically, there's realities for this too. Depending on what part of the community or who you know, your demographic. If you want to go back to the past, whether or not you agree or disagree with, like the politics or actions of, for example, the Black Panthers, the reality is because black men were just shot by cops with no justice being delivered ever, they started taking on strategies and policies that reflected that fear and concern. But now that's being extended to people well beyond that. When we see middle class VA nurses with a license being killed the same way, well, this is what's been going on in those communities for decades and decades. Well before the Civil War, let's be realistic. And so I'm not saying that was right or wrong, but I'm saying it is a logical conclusion. When you fear that the agents of the state can kill you and there's no justice to ever be had. Well, what do you have to lose?
- [55:23]
Robert Evans
When we were talking about this earlier, you brought up something the Attorney General of Arizona had said recently on the subject of ICE agents who are not identifiable as law enforcement coming to your door with guns.
- [55:36]
Carl Casarda
I don't have the direct quote, but I'm paraphrasing here. But it was along the lines of if people are at your doors that are unidentified with masks, in Arizona, the Castle doctrine essentially provides you the right to use force against them. And that is a very interesting statement to be made by someone as high in power of a, of government, of a state level at that point. But I mean, there's some truth to that. And the reality is when people aren't identifiable, it is very easy to show up. And I mean, we've already seen examples of people pretending to be ICE because it's very easy to put on some body armor, some camouflage and a mask and look like these guys that are not identifiable. And therefore, when that is the case, how do you know what's there? And what you're facing is even law enforcement in the first place.
- [56:17]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. And this is, this is Chris Mays, Chris with a K, who's a Democrat, and the Arizona Attorney General. And as you said, the way that it was framed in this conversation was basically, this is a disaster. Because if you have law enforcement agents that you can't identify, people absolutely have a right to just start blasting in Arizona based on Castle doctrine. And in fact, the interviewer in that, Brom Resnick, asked, like, are you giving people permission to shoot federal agents? And Mays said, like the law does. Right. Like that's the issue. You know, how do you know if some guy's just in a mask at your door with a gun? How do you know? And the fact that you're expecting Americans, a jumpy country of paranoid conspiracy theorists with 400 million guns, to see masked men at their doors and show discretion, it seems like a bad bet to me.
- [57:09]
Carl Casarda
Yeah, this comes back to the point I was making. I don't think the attorney general was there, like, was saying, just go shoot federal agents. I don't think that was the point. The point was simply what I mentioned earlier, which is when you can't identify or you don't know what is going on, or you're in a situation in which these people are not acting in a reasonable manner, you don't know what you're dealing with. It's the same thing I mentioned earlier, in which if you're that concerned or you don't believe that due process or justice is going to be served, your decision making logic might very well change. And like you said, in a country where many people are armed, I think this is something that every side of this issue should be concerned about, including the law enforcement agents, because they are at risk too. As this continues, the risk to them increases, which will then be used to justify more force against civilians because it's a vicious circle.
- [57:53]
Robert Evans
Well, that's a fun note to end on, Carl. I want to direct people towards inrange tv. You mentioned that you have a video about one of the shootings that we talked about. So I want to let you kind of plug that at the end.
- [58:04]
Carl Casarda
Yeah, thanks, Robert. I appreciate that a lot. So Inrangetv is my video project. It's about 10 years old now. You can just find it at Inrange TV, which is my website, or you can just Google Inrangetv on YouTube and you'll find it immediately. The algorithm won't give it to you, but the search engines might. And the video that I'm referencing there, and there's a lot of them on there in regards to topics like this, historically speaking, but the specific one about Danziger Bridge is right there. So if you go to inrangetv and type in Danziger Bridge D A N Z I N G R, you will find that 2005 shooting, which is just an example of so many of these that happened. And I do have some discussions on there about recent events about Alex Brady and such as well. So Robert, thank you for having me back on the show. I always appreciate it and I appreciate our collaborations and hopefully somehow this stuff makes a difference.
- [58:46]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I hope so too. But at least I think it gives people something to like expect, right? Like to look at this is kind of the cycle we're going to continue to see unless they pull back, unless ICE and Border Patrol start using a great deal more discretion. Like I think we've given people an idea of like where the future is trending, you know, and I, yeah, unfortunately I'm not super optimistic about it right now, but you know, tomorrow's unwritten.
- [59:24]
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- [62:28]
Garrison Davis
Welcome to IT Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis joined by James Stout.
- [62:34]
James Stout
Hello. Hi Gare. What are we. What are we learning about today?
- [62:38]
Garrison Davis
We are going to be learning about a man named James Fishback.
- [62:43]
James Stout
Okay, good first name.
- [62:44]
Garrison Davis
Oh, yeah. I wanted to get someone kind of unbiased, but I now understand, unfortunately that you might be. Might be just kind of, you know, drawn. Drawn to him.
- [62:54]
James Stout
Yeah, I've come here to defend the James name.
- [62:57]
Garrison Davis
I don't think that defense will last very long. I.
- [63:00]
James Stout
Okay.
- [63:02]
Garrison Davis
James Fishback is a former hedge fund analyst who's been worming his way into the political world of the new right during the past two to three years.
- [63:13]
James Stout
Yeah, I'm giving up on that one. Already got no interest in defending this
- [63:18]
Garrison Davis
guy if you're active on, you know, any kind of political feeds, whether that's, you know, short, short form, video, blue sky, Twitter. You've probably seen a video or two of James Fishback. But this episode we're going to dive a little bit more into his background and his current political activities, which includes some things you probably haven't heard before. So James Fishback has tried to attach himself to a lot of, you know, various aspects of the new right. He attempted to attach himself to the presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy back in the oldie days.
- [63:53]
James Stout
Okay, yeah. Remember when.
- [63:56]
Garrison Davis
But he did so just by like showing up at campaign staff events. He wasn't a staffer. Like he, he just kept like appearing. He asked to like stay overnight at a hotel that the staff was all staying at for this campaign event in Florida and tried to build a personal rapport with Vivec over a few months. And eventually Fishback outstayed his welcome. He then pivoted to becoming what I would call a D tier right wing commentator and an advocate of Doge. In 2025, Fishback was a frequent guest on like news networks, CNN, Fox and others, speaking as a quote, unquote, doge advisor.
- [64:37]
Robert Evans
Huh.
- [64:37]
Garrison Davis
A role that he never officially had.
- [64:39]
Robert Evans
Great.
- [64:40]
Garrison Davis
Never actually worked with Doge. His quote unquote advising was through adding Elon Musk on Twitter with random suggestions.
- [64:48]
James Stout
Yes. Yeah, just he's literally in their comments online and. Correct. Yeah.
- [64:53]
Garrison Davis
His Doge claim to fame is that he came up with this idea of the Doge dividend, which is like a stimulus type check that the government would send to people based on the savings that they, they found or created through slashing government agencies.
- [65:09]
James Stout
Cool.
- [65:09]
Garrison Davis
So that, that was his idea that he added Elon Musk about and this idea gained some traction. And this, this kind of boosted his, his image as a quote unquote Doge advisor. And it helped him trick news agencies into boosting his public profile.
- [65:23]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [65:24]
Garrison Davis
By associating him with Doge. Eventually this led to Doge official Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, having to clarify in July of 2025 that fishback was not involved with Doge in any way. But he got a lot of traction off of this Doge Advisor thing. Right back when Ramaswamy left Doge.
- [65:47]
James Stout
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that he, he did. Wow, how time flies.
- [65:52]
Garrison Davis
Before the inauguration, because he was planning on, and is planning on running for governor of Ohio, Fishback tried to put his name in as like a, hey, I'll become the co chair of Doge Elon. Since my pal Ramaswamy is going to be busy. That also, you know, did not. Did not work, obviously.
- [66:10]
James Stout
Yeah. What a needy guy.
- [66:12]
Garrison Davis
He's just very, very needy. Very clingy.
- [66:15]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. He's very parasocial.
- [66:18]
Garrison Davis
Yes. And after Katie Miller released a statement being like, this guy's not part of Doge Fischback began lobbying Trump for the vacant seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
- [66:30]
James Stout
Pretty no shame.
- [66:31]
Garrison Davis
Based on his, you know, credentials as this like patriotic America first investor. Right. Who's worked at a hedge fund or two and tried to get his way onto this vacancy. When that didn't turn out, obviously, Fishback set his sights on his home state of Florida, launching what I would call a groiper style campaign for governor.
- [66:53]
James Stout
Cool.
- [66:54]
Garrison Davis
And this is what we're going to be discussing for the rest of this episode.
- [66:58]
James Stout
I'm not like intimately familiar with the groiper space, but this seems to be the most kind of beta behavior to constantly notice me. I forget what. There's a word that begins with S. Pick me. Yeah, it could be pick me. I guess it's like a notice me senpai or something that people say.
- [67:17]
Garrison Davis
I never expected you to say no to Sweet.
- [67:20]
James Stout
I. Yeah, I've unfortunately I've been on the Internet too. That's what he seems. Right? He seems like extremely.
- [67:28]
Garrison Davis
Yes.
- [67:29]
James Stout
Yeah. This is like I think what would be coded as like beta behavior in the.
- [67:33]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. And now he's kind of trying to do this with Fuentes and the Gripers, although at. Oh, I see to this point more successfully.
- [67:40]
James Stout
Okay.
- [67:40]
Garrison Davis
He's actually more successfully ingratiated himself with the Griper space. On Tucker Carlson Interview, he talked about how the Twitter account. Sorry, X account AF News or AF Post. It's America first post. America First News.
- [67:55]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [67:55]
Garrison Davis
Was a part of his like political radicalization towards the sort of groiper style politics. This is like a news aggregation account that promotes far right nationalist talking points through and like framing through various news stories. A lot of people used to share posts from this account, like not knowing its political orientation just because it was very active as a news aggregation source.
- [68:18]
James Stout
Yeah. There are a few of those on Twitter, like BNO News is another one that just.
- [68:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [68:22]
James Stout
Like aggregates from repost stuff and you
- [68:24]
Garrison Davis
know, Fishback has pointed to this as being a part of his like graper style red pilling is. Is the activity of this account to get a sense of his kind of very griper online background or at least like a place within the new right. I'm going to read a tweet of his from 2-8-2026 quote. As Florida Governor, I will refuse to let subhuman gestures spike our collective cortisol. Not even once. Also, no foids or E girls, unquote. How much of that do you understand, James?
- [68:57]
James Stout
I got cortisol. I'm familiar.
- [69:00]
Garrison Davis
All right.
- [69:01]
James Stout
Okay.
- [69:02]
Garrison Davis
So yeah, this is using the kind of currently trendy like looks maxing terms, the, you know, jester, which has been used a lot since Clavicular's stream with Fuentes and Sneako at that club where they played the Kanye Hal Hitler song. Spiking cortisol is a frequent way that people in the looks acting space will refer to your stress being raised. Especially like through politics. Like through politics raising your stress.
- [69:27]
James Stout
Okay?
- [69:28]
Garrison Davis
And foids and E girls is just like misogynistic ways to refer to women coming out of like the incel space. Okay, so you know, this, this post is, you know, kind of a joke, but it's also signaling to certain, a certain type of that hey, I'm your guy.
- [69:41]
James Stout
Yeah, I speak your language.
- [69:43]
Garrison Davis
And it's also just really annoying. Right? He's, he's trying to be off putting on purpose because that will drive attention to him from people who don't like him. And you know, in trying to cover him in this episode, you know, I'm trying to like ride that line of not just unnecessarily giving him publicity because he says outrageous things, but then also framing his rising profile within a certain like context, which is griper candidates popping up more and more frequently across the United States.
- [70:09]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [70:11]
Garrison Davis
So in terms of Florida, DeSantis can't run for another term. He is term limited. The clear front runner to succeed DeSantis is US representative from Florida, Byron Donalds, who has Trump's endorsement. Last month, Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins also announced a run for governor. But Fishback is not a non player in this race and his candidacy displays a tension within the Republican Party between the former like Tea Party and classical MAGA wing, which is now the effect of conservative establishment, and this new America first wing, which takes some of MAGA's originating principles to their far right nationalist conclusion. I talked about this tension last year in the episodes about Nick Fuentes's interview with Tucker Carlson and this like surge of graper adjacent Gen Z staffers filling out the ranks of the Republican machine in dc. Now Fishback is one of the first candidates to draw a lot of attention by essentially running as a griper candidate. And depending on how well he does, it could indicate how successful this politics can be when presented in front of Republican voters. The primary election isn't until August. There's nothing tons of polling yet on this race like let alone from established pollsters. But as of late January, Fishback's most favorable poll puts him 15 points behind frontrunner Byron Donalds according to quote unquote Patriot polling. Meanwhile, Donald's own sponsored poll puts him upwards of 42 points ahead of Fishback around new Year. So all this stuff is really out of date and I and Fishback certainly has risen his profile since then but we're still waiting on like reliable polls to come out. Yeah, but he's certainly getting a lot of headlines and is doing a successful job in raising his public profile. Now a part of Fishback's strategy to raise his public profile and like name recognition both in Florida and nationally seems to be just through generating controversy. Very similar to how Fuentes did this or the more recent social ascension of the looks maxing streamer clavicular. Earlier this month Fishback claimed that a fire was quote intentionally set in his side yard prompting him to do a publicity stunt where he walked out of his porch holding an AR15 style rifle above his head promising to shoot anyone who attempts to harm him and his staff. I will share a clip.
- [72:44]
James Stout
I've seen this one, I'm excited to watch it again there.
- [72:48]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
If you come back to this home
- [72:49]
Garrison Davis
and our staff, our volunteers are working hard, we're not waiting for the police,
- [72:56]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
we're gonna shoot you with an AR15 sight unseen. 556.
- [73:02]
Mia Wong
Yeah, that's what we're going to do.
- [73:04]
Garrison Davis
It's very simple.
- [73:06]
James Stout
Shall not be infringed.
- [73:09]
Mia Wong
We have a right.
- [73:09]
James Stout
It's just a bunch of words that he's saying like not in any particular order.
- [73:15]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense.
- [73:18]
James Stout
It doesn't, no, it's, it's also 5.56. I guess people do call it 556 but yeah, fascinating.
- [73:25]
Garrison Davis
2, 2, 3, 30 round.
- [73:28]
James Stout
Well he doesn't actually have a magazine in there I noticed.
- [73:31]
Garrison Davis
No, no magazine.
- [73:32]
James Stout
Backside's folded down as well. It is for those familiar with such things, a straight out the box smith and Western MP15. It looks like he may have bought it quite recently.
- [73:43]
Garrison Davis
So this is one such incident where he tried to generate some kind of publicity through this, you know, very provocative gesture. But he's also done this through the language he uses. Fishback refers to frontrunner Byron Donalds who is black as Byron, which is just not his name and has said quote, byron wants to turn Florida into a section 8 ghetto unquote he's also used Charlemagne's nickname for Hakeem Jeffries, aipac Shakur to refer to Donald's and is called Donald's a quote unquote slave to his donors.
- [74:18]
James Stout
Jesus Christ.
- [74:19]
Garrison Davis
So, yeah, a lot of stuff like that.
- [74:21]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [74:22]
Garrison Davis
Fishback has proposed a 50 income tax on OnlyFans creators, calling it a quote, unquote sin tax. And one of his very first campaign videos was titled, I'm running for Florida Governor to make the trains run on time.
- [74:39]
James Stout
Oh, cool.
- [74:41]
Garrison Davis
So I. This has not like, generated tons of controversy and headlines.
- [74:46]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [74:46]
Garrison Davis
It's, you know, caused some social media posters to be like, oh, look at this guy clearly doing a Nazi dog whistle. But then it's also signaled, you know, early, early in the campaign signaled to, you know, gripers and people in the very, very far fringes of the right has signaled to them that, hey, I'm gonna be your guy.
- [75:02]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [75:02]
Garrison Davis
Which in part he's doing so that he can count on them to kind of do free, free publicity for him. Right. Like, he wants to activate a certain type of overly online young male to be like a public spokesperson to like, to just to boost his name recognition. And even if he doesn't win in Florida in this race, it'll at least help his career, like nationally in some way. So he's, he's counting on this, like a griper block to do a lot of heavy lifting. And that's part of why he does some of these very, very, like, gross tongue in cheek stuff. Make the trains run on time. Come on, dude.
- [75:37]
James Stout
Yeah. It's like a clumsy dog whistle.
- [75:39]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [75:40]
Garrison Davis
It's embarrassing.
- [75:41]
James Stout
There's no like, sleight of hand here or whatever. You know, he's just kind of blundering his way towards being like, look at me, Nazis.
- [75:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. And like this video he just talked about trying to bring back the Amtrak to the Florida Panhandle. It's like a one minute video.
- [75:57]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [75:57]
James Stout
Cool.
- [75:58]
Garrison Davis
It had nothing to do about actually, like making trains run on time. It's about trying to return Amtrak to a certain section of Florida. Fitchback has promised to, quote, divest every penny from Israel on day one, unquote, which would include 385 million in foreign bonds invested in by the state. And he's opposed to adopting anti Semitism definitions in schools that make it, quote, unquote, against the law to criticize Israel.
- [76:27]
James Stout
Yeah, this is where the, the hard right and the soft right.
- [76:31]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
I bet.
- [76:31]
James Stout
Yeah. I'm sure it's Israel you're concerned with here, buddy.
- [76:35]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, no, I bet. I'm sure he's not doing this out of, you know, principled stances of Palestinian solidarity.
- [76:42]
James Stout
He just wants to do anti Semitism, like the old fashioned way.
- [76:45]
Garrison Davis
Yes. And this can be displayed during a campaign event at the University of Central Florida where Fishback discussed how to make lunches in high school cafeterias more healthy.
- [76:56]
James Stout
Fun topic.
- [76:57]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
What's with the pop Tarts in the Broward county public schools?
- [77:00]
Garrison Davis
In the cafeterias? I'm not saying that the test scores
- [77:04]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
are a result of the pop Tarts, but if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set up our
- [77:11]
Mia Wong
kids for failure, you would feed them
- [77:13]
Garrison Davis
the absolute goy slop in our cafeterias.
- [77:17]
Robert Evans
There we go.
- [77:23]
Garrison Davis
And that, that is on Gentile.
- [77:26]
Robert Evans
Okay.
- [77:27]
James Stout
Everyone's really excited to hear that. Hey.
- [77:30]
Garrison Davis
Yep.
- [77:31]
James Stout
Wow. Yeah. I mean, the crowd is like, they love it. Yeah. But it also looks like they just arrived from like a Southern Florida beer pong invitational tournament. Like, it's, it's a lot of like frat boy type.
- [77:44]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [77:45]
Garrison Davis
It's a lot of the people who are. Who consumed like the manosphere type content online.
- [77:50]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [77:50]
Garrison Davis
Short clips of Nick Fuentes probably aren't regularly tuning into his like three hour live stream on Rumble, but. But engage with his content through short clips online. Yeah, Same thing with like sneako Clavicular. Right. It's. It's this type of, this type of influencer which has right wing politics. But. But they aren't like super invested in politics.
- [78:08]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
It's.
- [78:08]
Garrison Davis
It's this, it's this mix of like post incel male influencers that combine right wing politics and it, it's a very common form of like, entertainment for these people that we see in the background of this video. Right. It's a lot of like college guys 18 to 22.
- [78:24]
James Stout
Yeah. It's like it's mostly white men. Yeah. From like traditional college age.
- [78:29]
Garrison Davis
Speaking of schools, in 2022, a Florida school district cut ties with Fishbacks debate organization after a female student came forward with allegations that Fishback quote, initiated a romantic relationship, unquote, with her while she was working for his student debate organization when she was 17 years old. He was 27.
- [78:53]
James Stout
Jesus.
- [78:54]
Garrison Davis
The student claimed in a protection order request that after joining the debate organization when she was 16, fishback, quote, unquote, systematically cultivated a relationship with her by increasing, quote, unquote, opportunities for personal interaction. And that Fishback later, quote, unquote, explicitly directed her to keep the relationship a secret while she was working for his school debate organization.
- [79:18]
James Stout
Jesus.
- [79:19]
Garrison Davis
After turning 18, she moved in with Fishback. The two were briefly engaged. Fishback denies the student's characterization of the relationship timeline. After the girl broke up with him, Fishback allegedly sent hundreds of unanswered texts to her over several days. This information comes out of a harassment case that was later dismissed. The case wasn't about the legality of their relationship. Importantly, it was about harassment. After the two had broken up, where these details emerged.
- [79:54]
James Stout
Yeah, his debate organization. This is some kind of like, like plastic turning point.
- [80:00]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, they kind of. It was. It was a Florida based debate organization in high schools to encourage. Encourage debate. It was active around 2022. It was bought by another company a year or two ago. But in 2022, a district ended cooperation with this organization after news came out about this relationship. Yeah, it is interesting considering the amount that Fischbach and Fuentes and these guys will talk about the Epstein files and then have this in your.
- [80:32]
James Stout
Yeah, inappropriate relationships with underage women.
- [80:35]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. That worked for you in your high school debate organization.
- [80:41]
James Stout
Yeah, that gives me the ick in a substantial way. Also kind of not that surprising from this kind of area of the. Right, but it's still gross.
- [80:55]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. It's time for an ad break, but we will return to discuss Fishback's reoccurring campaign rhetoric and his promises as governor. All right, we're back. A big part of Fitchback's campaign is targeting H1B visas. He promised on day one as governor to fire as many H1B workers as he can and to quote, unquote, incentivize companies to hire Americans. Again, here's a radio appearance where he discusses this.
- [81:37]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
On the first day in office, I would fire every single H1B who works
- [81:41]
Garrison Davis
at a state agency.
- [81:42]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Number two, if you have a state
- [81:44]
James Stout
contract with Tallahassee, I don't care if
- [81:46]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
it's serving meals or serving up IT tech support. You have 24 hours to pick. As President Reagan said, Drew, now is the time for choosing. You got to pick. Do you want your $50 million a year state contract from Tallahassee or do
- [81:58]
James Stout
you want your 50 or 100 H1BS?
- [82:01]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
You pick. You can't have both. There's no negotiating and you have 24 hours. That's how we create a culture that stands up for the dignity of American workers.
- [82:09]
James Stout
That's interesting approach. Like you can get H1B jobs. Like, not for the federal government, but for state governments. I cannot imagine that, especially in Florida, that there are very many.
- [82:22]
Garrison Davis
Well, he's not just concerned about H1BS. Fischbach has also railed against student visas as a threat to the American way of life and has falsely said that Trump plans to send 200,000 students from China to Florida's public universities, which serve only about 430,000 students.
- [82:42]
James Stout
So there'd be like 45%.
- [82:44]
Garrison Davis
It's not real. It's just not. That's just not true. Yeah, this was proposed as an idea, not Florida specifically, but this was proposed in spring of 2025 as a negotiating tactic with China over tariffs. This isn't a real thing. Since then, Fishback has promised to raise tuition on all foreign students to $1 million via executive order. The governor cannot legally raise state school tuition via executive order. These are just words that he's saying.
- [83:15]
James Stout
Also, like a lot of these state schools having a certain number of students who are paying a higher fee, be that the non US or out of state, like it's integral to their budgeting. Right. Like, yeah, they're not making it on interstate tuition.
- [83:29]
Garrison Davis
Fishback has talked about all this in an interview on Tucker Carlson's Internet show last month where he said that a child quote from Shenzhen who doesn't know what Florida orange juice tastes like can't possibly in an economic sense, but I think, I mean, not to sound gay, but in a spiritual sense does not represent our state and our heritage, unquote. Tucker replied, that's the opposite of gay, actually. Unquote.
- [84:03]
James Stout
That's a hell of a exchange of words. Again, like, I'm like a little lost here.
- [84:09]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. This is a sizable faction of the New Right of the groipers who are filling staffer positions at Heritage and in dc. This is the sort of media environment, like linguistic environment that they are coming out of. And the pearl clutchy reaction is not useful here. Right. I'm not like, who cares? Right. This is obviously embarrassing. This is like a man in his 30s trying to sound like a kind of homophobic 18 year old who's kind of only homophobic via like linguistic reflux. This is like embarrassing cosplay.
- [84:42]
James Stout
Yeah, it's very cringe.
- [84:43]
Garrison Davis
I can't even find this stuff offensive. Like, this is, this is just. It's.
- [84:47]
James Stout
No, it's sad. Like the primary sentiment I feel is like vicarious shame. Yeah. For this guy and his like desperate search for attention.
- [85:00]
Garrison Davis
Now, a core component of selling fascism to people is that they were promised a future that's now been taken away from them because of some group of people that are the enemy. Right. This is like the dream of finding a subservient wife, a cushy full time Job, buying a home, raising 2.5 kids in a safe and secure homeland. But because of quote, unquote, them, this dream is no longer possible. And through the years, we've seen different versions of this targeting Jews, feminists, Palestinians, Muslims, Mexicans, Central and South American immigrants. Now, during Fishback's Carlson interview, he elucidated on, like, an updated version of the, like, 21st century version of the American dream that was stolen from Gen Z.
- [85:47]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Gen Z was such an important part of the President's victory last year.
- [85:51]
Carl Casarda
Yes.
- [85:52]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
And they feel betrayed by a lot of these Trump advisors and what they've chosen to prioritize and not.
- [85:58]
Garrison Davis
I can see why.
- [85:59]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
And when I've met them, and I've met them where they are at their universities, whether it's UF a couple weeks ago, I'll be at FSU in just a couple weeks from now. Their number one frustration is that, look, they don't want to be lectured anymore. They got a degree, they got good grades, they got good test scores. They didn't study gender studies or black intersectionality. They did the STEM thing that Republicans told them to do.
- [86:27]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, learn to code.
- [86:28]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Learn to code. And now they say, you know What?
- [86:31]
Garrison Davis
Amazon, Google, FedEx.
- [86:32]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
No, no, those jobs aren't available for you, you pesky Americans.
- [86:35]
Garrison Davis
You want paid time off.
- [86:36]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
You want to go to church on Sunday. We're going to give those jobs to an entire new class of foreign serfs
- [86:41]
Garrison Davis
known as the Indians and the Chinese,
- [86:43]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
and we're not going to even interview you for those positions.
- [86:46]
Garrison Davis
They don't even pretend that the Chinese
- [86:47]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
or the Indians are smarter. They're not. They don't speak our language. They have no skin in their ear. They're not smarter, actually. They' not at all.
- [86:53]
Robert Evans
Oh, I know.
- [86:54]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
And so the issue then becomes, do we actually have a labor market that is utterly rigged against American citizens? The answer is yes.
- [87:03]
Garrison Davis
I think this is a really interesting exchange on a sort of slide that's happening on the right beyond talking about, like, illegal immigrants.
- [87:11]
James Stout
What's really interesting to me is that, like, the first real immigration restrictions that were passing the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act. Right.
- [87:21]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [87:21]
James Stout
And we have circled all the way back to essentially a very similar argument.
- [87:26]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. The slide from, from talking about illegal immigrants in, like, the far right space to, to really honing in on student visas, foreign workers.
- [87:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [87:36]
Garrison Davis
I think is an interesting pivot. And, and this, this new version of the American dream of, like, you know, STEM jobs, learn to code, that's now been taken away. That's no Longer accessible because so many young Americans aren't getting hired because they're adamant about going to church on Sunday. Something that's not true. That's not real.
- [87:53]
James Stout
Yeah, that's not a real thing.
- [87:55]
Garrison Davis
First of all, young Americans are not in large numbers going to church on Sunday, nor is their hiring discrimination because they don't want to work on Sundays. Right. These, these things aren't, aren't real. But, but it taps into a certain feeling that someone in college might, might have right now, especially in the wake of like, AI vibe coding of. They. They were told that there's this like, life track where you can work in tech, and now there really isn't many tech jobs open to people. And they're trying to turn this situation into. This fight against legal immigration.
- [88:24]
James Stout
Yeah. Into fascism. It's funny to see Carlson repeating that, the learn to code thing as if that was like a serious piece of career advice given to people. Like, that has been a meme for, I don't know, close to a decade.
- [88:37]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [88:38]
James Stout
Like, everybody knew that was bullshit. It's, it's literally like that. The phrase is a joke.
- [88:43]
Garrison Davis
Fitchback later says after this little rant that, quote, our North Star should not be a free market, but a free people. He's okay if the market's not free. He's okay if we're going to be restricting which types of workers are allowed as long as we have a free American people.
- [88:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [88:59]
Garrison Davis
So his strategy for winning this race appears to be through appealing to homeowners and prospective homeowners through tax cuts and down payment assistance, but then also really trying to engage Gen Z voters. Looking at the success of previous politicians, including, including Trump and how much of his victory was related to the Gen Z vote. He's, he's really, really honing in on trying to activate young voters in Florida. He's planning to visit every single state college and state university and talk about these issues. As a social media stunt, he's going on a statewide Waffle House tour, visiting all the locations in the state.
- [89:35]
James Stout
Great.
- [89:36]
Garrison Davis
And through this, he continues to talk about these beliefs on legal immigration. In an interview with a local magazine, Fishback discussed his belief in the, quote, unquote, great replacement, stating, quote, you can't make America great again with Chinese, you can't make America great again with Indians. You can't make America great again with Haitians. So when I speak about the great replacement, I speak about legal immigration programs that for far too long have been overlooked. Illegal immigration has been a primary concern for establishment Republicans, but each One of many legal immigration programs, by definition, take spots and slots, jobs away from American citizens. My campaign is the one that stands up and says America is for Americans. And so we have to stop apologizing for that.
- [90:21]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [90:22]
Garrison Davis
Little slight move there with the America is for Americans.
- [90:25]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [90:26]
Garrison Davis
In reference to German. Germany for.
- [90:28]
James Stout
Yeah, Germany.
- [90:29]
Garrison Davis
Germany for the Germans.
- [90:30]
James Stout
I'm sure he knows exactly what he's doing.
- [90:32]
Garrison Davis
Oh, most. Most certainly.
- [90:33]
James Stout
Yeah. Like, this is the obvious next place. They have made so much political headway with racism. And like, the obvious direction to keep going, therefore, is to be the one who's willing to lean a little bit further into racism. Right. See if that can get you a little bit further, a little bit. A little bit more popular. Yeah, it makes sense in that. In that way.
- [90:55]
Garrison Davis
That's why I find his candidacy really interesting. Regardless of how well he's going to end up doing in the primary, he is trying to Trojan horse something into. Not even Trojan horse, in a way. He's kind of openly trying to pull something into Republican politics. Something that's been like, festering in the sidelines for a while. You know, stuff that Nick's been advocating for a while. There was that fight around H1B visas about a year ago.
- [91:18]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [91:18]
Garrison Davis
And he's. He's really honing in on this as. As a potential future for the party. And we're gonna, we're gonna see how successful this is, like, in part. Right. There could be other factors that make his campaign not do very well beyond these sorts of politics, but this is. This is the first time we've really seen these deployed at, at this scale, I think. And he's counting on the Griper support. And this is. This is what Nick's been talking about for a while, trying to run candidates like this as much as possible in 2026. We'll talk more about Fishback's relationship with Fuentes and the groupers after this ad break. All right, we're back. In my episode last year about the right wing fallout of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson's brief friendship, I discussed how Fuentes was making threats and promises to deploy his Griper fan base to influence elections both in 2026 and then in the Republican presidential primary in 2028. And after that news cycle had peaked, Fuentes continued to really hammer down his promise and threat to various candidates that if they do not adopt sufficient America first messaging, he will deploy his fan base across many different primary states to influence the election through support and harassment. And I believe that Fishback is attempting to hold Nick to this promise. On a podcast appearance last year, Fishback said that Nick Fuentes quote unquote, broke the Internet by speaking truth to the deranged maniac Piers Morgan in an interview.
- [93:03]
James Stout
I do love how Piers Morgan is now like an avatar of woke for the like American right.
- [93:09]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
For the biggest interview of the year, Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan, where Nick made very, very clear we are done with the pearl clutching, we are done
- [93:18]
Garrison Davis
with the white guilt.
- [93:20]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
We are done with this pseudo religion that attacks us for just wanting to exist in our own country, to buy a home, to get a job and to benefit from all the things that we were promised.
- [93:32]
Garrison Davis
There he is again talking about all the things that we were promised.
- [93:34]
James Stout
Yeah, and us. Right. Like he's a 30 year old hedge fund guy. Yeah, like he got all the things. Like.
- [93:42]
Garrison Davis
No, he, he did get the, the dream that he is saying no longer exists. Like that has been his life.
- [93:48]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. And he's just trying to cash in on it now.
- [93:51]
Garrison Davis
No, and, but it's through, through this interview he just keeps talking about Fuentes and, and glowingly refers to the Griper fan base. I'll tell you the truth, I found
- [93:59]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
the audience of young men who follow
- [94:01]
Garrison Davis
and watch Nick Fuentes to be actually
- [94:03]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
incredibly informed and insightful and very patriotic young men.
- [94:08]
Garrison Davis
I'm gonna be completely honest, I probably shouldn't say this but, but I think
- [94:11]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Nick's following is actually really impressive. There's a lot of young men who are patriotic, who are well informed, who know our history, which is why they are so frightened by the current path
- [94:20]
Garrison Davis
that we are on. Having a candidate talk openly about the Gripers in this way, I think is, is super interesting. This is the one of the first cases, and I don't think it'll be the last, where Nick's fans and Nick himself are like openly referred to in a race like this.
- [94:38]
James Stout
Yeah, it's a, it's interesting. Again, not like super duper surprising to me how easily the Overton Window is moved to the right right now. And there's a whole like network of these like short form or long form video places to do that. Right. That are kind of set up to incentivize that almost. He doesn't have any particular genius that allows him to do it.
- [95:02]
Mia Wong
Right.
- [95:02]
James Stout
Like there is a system in place both with like Fuentes kind of outside of the electoral politics Overton Window and then all these places that straddle the line.
- [95:12]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [95:12]
James Stout
Like Tucker Carlson, et cetera, et cetera, where.
- [95:15]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [95:15]
James Stout
That exist to bring these further right discourses into the admissible discourse of electoral politics in this country.
- [95:24]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. And Fishback, as a largely unremarkable candidate, is counting on a group of probably hundreds to thousands of young men to do free campaign work for him. By telling them that they're good, smart little boys.
- [95:38]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [95:39]
Garrison Davis
By complimenting them. He is. Is counting on. On his success being contingent on this graper army of Gen Z Internet users.
- [95:46]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [95:47]
Garrison Davis
To him, these are like a valuable political block. And like that. That's the thing that I find interesting about this.
- [95:52]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [95:52]
Garrison Davis
Is you. They used to be like pure poison, right?
- [95:55]
James Stout
Yeah. Yeah.
- [95:55]
Garrison Davis
But now, now they're seen as like a, as like a possible asset.
- [95:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [95:59]
Garrison Davis
And Fishback knows that there could be some drawbacks by going this extreme. A few days ago, Fishback walked through Miami's nightlife on stream with manosphere influencer Sneako, who asked Nick Fuentes if he would endorse Fishback as governor. What would you say? Oh, he said yes.
- [96:19]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Nick Fuentes has endorsed James Fishback for governor of Florida. Oh, gee, that'll really help. Let's go.
- [96:26]
Garrison Davis
Wait, it won't.
- [96:26]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Never mind.
- [96:27]
Mia Wong
He's voting for Byron.
- [96:29]
Garrison Davis
No, Nick Fuentes is voting for Byron Donalds.
- [96:33]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
That's a bad name.
- [96:35]
Garrison Davis
Byron Donalds.
- [96:36]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Does that even sound like he could be a governor?
- [96:38]
Garrison Davis
So there you can see that he knows that it could have some possible negative effects, but he's, he's willing to play in this like irony, irony zone while still very clearly embracing Fuentes and, and the gripers.
- [96:50]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [96:50]
Garrison Davis
And like on this stream with Sneako is like indicative of a few things. After Fishback talked about goy slop at that school event, you know, he said afterwards, like he wasn't aware of like the offensive connotations where the else is
- [97:02]
James Stout
he getting the term from?
- [97:04]
Garrison Davis
Which is not true.
- [97:06]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [97:06]
Garrison Davis
This has been like a, a 4chan term forever to talk about how like the Jews are poisoning gentiles with food to make them like subservient. Right. That's what the term means. He knows that. That and he continued to use the goy slop term on Sneako's stream. And after jaywalking on this stream, Fishback joked, quote, the headline will read tomorrow, Florida Gubernatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer referring to Sneako.
- [97:33]
Carl Casarda
Great.
- [97:34]
Garrison Davis
And based on the most recent polling we have on this race, Fishback's youth centric strategy does seem to be getting its intended results. In a University of North Florida public opinion research lab poll from the middle of February, Byron Donald's is up 31% to James Fishback at 6%, about a 25% gap, which is kind of in between the more Fishback friendly Patriot polling numbers and Byron Donald's own internal polling. A sizable gap, to be sure, but not one that is insurmountable. What's really interesting about this poll, though, is the youth numbers for ages 18 to 34. James Fishback is at 32%, whereas Byron Donald's is at 8%. He's massively ahead among youth. Meanwhile, Byron Donald's tactics to address Fishback's connection to the gripers has been a little odd. I'm gonna read a statement from last week. Quote, dear James Fishback, I heard you crashed out when I told the truth about your stupid anti Semitic BDS plan that you stole from Kamala Harris, just like you stole your whole gimmick from Nick Fuentes and Zoran Mamdani. You're no racist, you're no groiper, you're no anti Semite. You're what people hate about politics, performative slop, unquote. So Byron Donald's approach to addressing Fischbach's ties to the groipers are not to actually attack him for these ties, but to say that he's a fake groiper, that he's not actually one of them, that he's stealing his policy ideas from Kamala Harris and stealing his gimmick from Fuentes and Zoran Mamdani, quote, unquote, you're no anti Semite, you're no racist. So basically attacking Fishback for not being a real enough racist. And Donald isn't the only one linking Fishback to Zoran Mamdani. The conservative magazine the Spectator released a positive profile on Fishback last week with the headline, is James Fishback the Right's Answer to Zoran Mamdani? The similarities seemingly being that he's behind in the polls in a race that could be very influential for the future of the Republican Party while gaining a lot of traction among youth and having a savvy online element of the campaign. And so Byron Donald's response to Fishback's popularity, online popularity among young voters is to compare him to Kamala Harris and Zoran Mamdani and claim that he's not actually a real racist, that he's not actually a real griper. I do not believe this is going to be an effective line of attack or damage his numbers among the young, especially male supporters that he has because Fishback already knows that he has the groiper base in his pocket. And that's why? He's able to make jokes with Sneako about how. No, no, no, Nick Fuentes is actually supporting the other guy. He is secure enough in his groiper support to jokingly distance himself from Fuentes as a strategic move because he knows the gripers are already going to be doing free labor for him to boost his chance of winning. He already has them.
- [101:00]
James Stout
Cool. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Like he's relying on like social media exposure from them and then he can even say other stuff to conventional media and it probably won't matter that much.
- [101:10]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, he's still getting profiled by major outlets like every, every week. And it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be a long race. He wants to eventually debate Donald's like in a televised debate. Unclear if that's gonna happen.
- [101:23]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [101:23]
Garrison Davis
But as of now, that's, that's kind of the current state of his candidacy. His, his strategy to overcome the gap in polls. And I will be keeping an eye on this race specifically because it does relate to what I was talking about last year in terms of this like, wave of griper friendly candidates expected to try to get into the Republican party in the next two to four years.
- [101:44]
James Stout
Yeah, it says the election is November of this year.
- [101:48]
Garrison Davis
November is the general, August is the primary.
- [101:50]
James Stout
Okay.
- [101:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [101:51]
James Stout
So I guess the kind of Republican primary in Georgia is the big deal. I mean, in Florida. Sorry.
- [101:59]
Garrison Davis
Yes. Yeah. The primary race in Florida is going to be the one that I'm keeping the most track of.
- [102:03]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah.
- [102:03]
Garrison Davis
And you know, don't be surprised if you start seeing fishback pop up in more stuff in the next few weeks.
- [102:08]
James Stout
Yeah, great.
- [102:10]
Garrison Davis
Well, that does it for us today at it could happen here. Now it's time to end the podcast to lower the collective cortisol.
- [102:30]
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- [105:34]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Welcome to IT Could Happen here. I just want you to know our nation is back. It is the golden Age of America and we're going to talk about this year's State of the Union by President Donald A Trump.
- [105:46]
Robert Evans
And I've been saying our nation's back since way before it left, honestly, so I'm glad to see that we've caught up.
- [105:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
But back to when, sir? You know, it's a transformation like no one has ever seen before. A turnaround for the ages.
- [106:01]
Garrison Davis
We're gonna. We're gonna do it better and better.
- [106:03]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Better and bigger and brighter and whatever B word he can decide to include.
- [106:08]
Garrison Davis
We just keep winning.
- [106:10]
Robert Evans
So you're getting some idea from this about the tenor of the president's State of the Union speech that we all just listened to.
- [106:17]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [106:18]
Robert Evans
It is, like, 8:30pm at the end of a long workday that was already long before we listened to the President.
- [106:24]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
11:30pm for. For GARE.
- [106:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah, 11:30pm for GARE. But I don't actually believe in time zones. I think that's a conspiracy, but we'll talk about that later. So, in terms of, like, first responses to the State of the Union, I think mine was Trump spent a lot more time focusing on the achievements of other people. Like, literally handing out a bunch of awards.
- [106:45]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [106:46]
Robert Evans
And time as a percentage of the speech, actually trumpeting things that he did and his own successes in a way that I found kind of telling. And I think this merges with the fact that he did not mention ICE by name during the speech. So I kind of saw this as a recognition by him and his people that, like, there's some face that needs to be saved. And we've got to try in this speech to kind of minimize our least attractive attributes and maximize the positive, you know?
- [107:15]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, yeah. My take was that he was trying to simulate empathy and try to keep hold of that Republican crowd and try to endear himself to them as much as he could, despite the state of things.
- [107:28]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah.
- [107:30]
James Stout
And trying to associate himself with a lot of acts of heroism or military valor or, you know, which is classic strongman stuff. Right. Like the. You know, we're achieving a time of national greatness. Here are some examples of masculine virtue. Blah, blah, blah. We saw the US men's ice hockey team.
- [107:49]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I really hated that.
- [107:51]
Garrison Davis
12 minutes in. 12 minutes in. Because we just keep winning. Our country's winning too much. We're winning so much that we don't know what to do.
- [108:00]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [108:01]
Garrison Davis
And here are a bunch of those winners.
- [108:04]
Robert Evans
And I did find that kind of surprising, too, like, how quickly they got brought in and how much of a. Like, a lot of the length of this was just him announcing people who had won something or were about to win something and everybody clapping.
- [108:18]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, it's the most medals that we've seen in a State of the Union address.
- [108:23]
Robert Evans
And I wonder, because I know one way in which these get, quote, unquote, raided by news agencies. Like, how much percentage of the time was it standing ovations? How much percentage of the time, how many times they have to stop for applause? Maybe he's trying to game that system.
- [108:37]
James Stout
Amazing. That's pretty funny.
- [108:39]
Garrison Davis
It was really easy to take notes because of how much applause there was in between single lines. He said.
- [108:44]
James Stout
Yeah, and not just applause. Right. There were. There were large periods of time when people were chanting usa, usa. Or Charlie Kirk's first name.
- [108:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Weird.
- [108:53]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [108:55]
Garrison Davis
I mean, it's. It started off with some. Some more like statistics of. Of dubious origin, but the economy and various other things. He claimed that fentanyl was down 56%, that the strongest border security ever. There's been no illegal aliens admitted to the United States in the past nine months. Zero.
- [109:14]
James Stout
Well, that's a tautology.
- [109:15]
Robert Evans
Right?
- [109:16]
James Stout
Like, when you are admitted, that means you have been processed and released into the United States. So by definition, yes.
- [109:22]
Robert Evans
There ever been illegal aliens admitted to the United States?
- [109:25]
James Stout
Yeah. That is not what admission is. Right. It's like saying there were.
- [109:29]
Robert Evans
It's like being like, no bank robbers legally robbed a bank.
- [109:32]
James Stout
Yeah, exactly.
- [109:33]
Robert Evans
It's like, well, no, I guess you're right.
- [109:35]
James Stout
Yeah. No fish have walked under my orders, like.
- [109:38]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And Robert, you. You mentioned you wanted to say something a little bit about the fentanyl thing he. He brought up.
- [109:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I mean, I. I love fentanyl, obviously. Big fan of this stuff. You know, I don't like to use it. Just like to read about it, study it, use it. No, that's a joke. That's a bit. Don't do fentanyl, folks, please. And actually, people aren't doing as much fentanyl, which has nothing to do with the Trump administration. So when he was like, like, there's 56% less fentanyl getting into the country, I just. I knew that was wrong because first off, I remembered reading that during the Biden administration, there had started to be, like, a significant constriction of the international fentanyl supply market. So I looked it up and I was, in fact, accurate in my recollection. I found a pretty good article hosted by the University of Maryland's medical school by Carl Hill, which notes that in 2023, the journal Science published an article by a Maryland criminologist that argued that the drop in overdose deaths that had started to be noticed in 2023 was driven by a collapse of the international fentanyl market supply chain. And you may note, 2023 is when Donald Trump was not the president.
- [110:42]
James Stout
Yep.
- [110:43]
Robert Evans
For this article, we were trying to understand why fentanyl overdose deaths, after rising rapidly for a decade in mid 2023 suddenly turned downward. Peter Reuter, professor of public policy and criminology from the University of Maryland, told the Baltimore sun, where you're reasonably sure that something has happened to the precursor chemical supply from China that was a significant cause of the downturn in fentanyl. So, again, what he's saying is the supply constriction happened in 2023, and it doesn't seem to have happened because of stateside US Policy. In other words, the contraction of the supply had nothing to do with us stopping fentanyl at the border and everything to do with an issue somewhere in China. Now, there's been a couple of theories as to this, including some international laws that have altered, like the way these kind of. Some of the chemical companies in China have to work.
- [111:25]
Carl Casarda
Work.
- [111:26]
Robert Evans
But the gist of it is that this started in the Biden administration and has nothing to do with border policy. It's purely a result of the actual physical supply of fentanyl. And that constriction began in China anyway. That's what I had to say.
- [111:37]
James Stout
Yeah. I think it's worth noting. I'm not quite sure where that. 56.
- [111:41]
Robert Evans
No idea.
- [111:42]
James Stout
It could be seizures that they. They maybe seized a lot of fentanyl. Like, I'm not quite sure where that came from. Like, there were a number of statistics which I couldn't track down.
- [111:52]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [111:52]
James Stout
The 19 billion fraud in Minnesota by Somali people.
- [111:58]
Robert Evans
There was one I loved. He made a note that 2.4 million Americans have now ascended. Wasn't the word he used, but gotten
- [112:05]
Garrison Davis
lifted off of food stamps.
- [112:06]
Robert Evans
Lifted off of food stamps.
- [112:08]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
2.4 million Americans are off of food stamps.
- [112:12]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [112:12]
Robert Evans
And he specifically lifted off, as Garrett noted, which would insinuate that, like, their circumstances improved and they no longer needed food stamps. That's not true.
- [112:20]
James Stout
Yes.
- [112:21]
Robert Evans
We simply introduced, like, work requirements and other restrictions that kicked 2.4 million Americans off of.
- [112:26]
James Stout
Of.
- [112:26]
Garrison Davis
Kicked people off of the foodstyle program. Yeah. We pushed people into starvation because we.
- [112:33]
Robert Evans
We lifted them into starvation, Garrison. We lifted them.
- [112:37]
James Stout
There you go.
- [112:39]
Garrison Davis
And this was. This was his line right before he started talking about how we're winning so much and brought the hockey team. That was the segue. Was. Was talk. It was talking about how there's millions of people who now can't get food stamps. And look, look how much we're winning. Quote, we're winning so much we don't know what to do.
- [112:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's my big problem.
- [113:00]
James Stout
I feel so encountered that what to
- [113:02]
Robert Evans
do with all the victories.
- [113:03]
Garrison Davis
But no, there's, there's a few others. I mean, he's talked about like, you know, the lowest inflation in five years, which is continuing, you know, continuing trends that have been going on for the past like three years.
- [113:13]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [113:13]
Garrison Davis
Inflation, gas prices, mortgage rates. Did this interesting line a short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest, hottest, the hottest. And then he said hottest again. And then he had a really, a really beautiful line of prose. Our new friend and partner, Venezuela has given us barrels of oil. Our new friend and partner, he called
- [113:35]
James Stout
out Delsey by name and was like, she's doing great things for Venezuela. We're going to do great things together. Like a bizarre occurrence. Like. But I think that it goes to show how he understands foreign policy, which is in a very transactional way where it is not about an ideological disagreement. This is about having some, someone who he feels is personally loyal to him and, and owes him the position that they have. And that's, I think, what he's going for in Venezuela. Right. He didn't mention the amnesty, but he at one point brought down a Venezuelan man whose niece was in the audience to reveal that her uncle had been released from prison. I will be eagerly awaiting news on that man's ongoing immigration status.
- [114:19]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So bizarre.
- [114:20]
James Stout
Yeah, there was a lot of this, like really weird political theater and so
- [114:27]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
much of it that there just wasn't seats for all of them. And so there were these like awkward open door moments that were just, just unnecessary. But that, that's what he was going for tonight. Metal, metal, metal.
- [114:41]
James Stout
A lot of medals, A lot of
- [114:42]
Garrison Davis
medals, a lot of awards.
- [114:43]
James Stout
We got the list right. The whole, the trifecta. We got the Congressional Medal of Freedom,
- [114:48]
Garrison Davis
the Medal of Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- [114:51]
James Stout
Sorry, Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- [114:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
A Purple Heart.
- [114:53]
James Stout
Yeah, and a Purple Heart.
- [114:55]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, we gave out a Purple Heart and Olympic gold.
- [114:58]
James Stout
Oh, yeah, many of those.
- [115:00]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
He like had this strange moment where he's like, I would like one of those. But apparently like it's not.
- [115:06]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [115:06]
Robert Evans
For the Medal of Honors, you could only get them in the army. Maybe they'll open it up. Maybe they'll open it up. And if they do, I'll be the first one in line.
- [115:15]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Sir.
- [115:18]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
What he, he did tout that we ended DEI in America just like one of the annoying talking points. That means nothing.
- [115:28]
James Stout
Yeah. Whilst ICE were not mentioned by name, there was a lot of border chat.
- [115:34]
Carl Casarda
Right.
- [115:35]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Especially at the. At the start and then a few times towards like the middle end.
- [115:39]
James Stout
Yeah. And one of the things he did pretty consistently was, was talk about horrific incidents, often involving the death of children, sometimes in front of their parents.
- [115:48]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [115:49]
James Stout
I just want to highlight a couple of those. The first one he talked about Delilah Coldman. Right. Who was injured in a. In a crash with a big rig. The driver as. Which was not a US citizen, but did have a work permit. A work permit issued by the federal government under Donald Trump. And this has been a claim on the. Right. This guy was undocumented for some time. Right. And that California has been giving cdls two undocumented people in this case. That. That is not the case. I'm interested in what happened to the Coldman family. I understand they've been through like a horrific thing. Right. Their daughter, it looked like she was gonna use the use of her legs. She's now relearning to use her legs and to walk, which is great. But previously they had met with the person who was driving the vehicle that caused their daughter this horrific injury, and they had explicitly declined to politicize it, saying that they weren't interested in doing that.
- [116:43]
Carl Casarda
That.
- [116:44]
James Stout
So I don't know what happened here to. Now Trump proposing a law which. Delilah's Law, he's calling it. Right. Which would. I'm trying to remember, if he said stop non citizens or undocumented people or illegal aliens, use his parlance, from getting CDLs.
- [116:59]
Garrison Davis
Obviously, I think illegal aliens.
- [117:01]
James Stout
There are states which will give you driver's license without asking for documentation for the very obvious reason that people in this country have to drive. Large parts of this country are set up around driving. You cannot not exist in some parts of America without a motor car. And it is better that people get a license and insurance than that they don't do that.
- [117:19]
Garrison Davis
He said barring any state from granting commercial driver's license to illegal aliens was his framing.
- [117:25]
James Stout
Yeah, that's his normal framing. Right. I have never had a CDL in this country and I've never gone through that application process. But I'd assume one would first need a federal work permit. Right. As one would for any employment.
- [117:39]
Robert Evans
Well, you need a driver's license.
- [117:41]
James Stout
Yes. You'd also need a driver's license.
- [117:42]
Robert Evans
Let's start there. Yeah, you gotta have a driver's license to get a cdl.
- [117:46]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a background check component it looks like to the cdl, one of the
- [117:51]
Garrison Davis
lines that he used right before this call to action was that illegal aliens cannot read road signs.
- [117:58]
James Stout
Yes.
- [117:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah. That's how we introduce the section of like. Yeah, they're all through this country driving around. They don't know what like a warning sign is or a stop sign.
- [118:06]
James Stout
Obviously, lots of people come to this country and are perfectly capable of speaking English. There are also people who are born in this country who don't speak English.
- [118:12]
Robert Evans
Well, we, we just, we don't have an official language.
- [118:15]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Just to say a lot of people can't drive very well in this country.
- [118:18]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [118:19]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
As an L, as an LA driver, a lot of you people don't know how to merge. And it has nothing to do with your, what language you speak or your citizen status.
- [118:32]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [118:32]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Like, this is a pointless remark to make is my point.
- [118:36]
Robert Evans
It's just, it's, it's a, a policy that they can make.
- [118:40]
James Stout
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Didn't he sign an executive order officially making English the official language at some point early on?
- [118:47]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes.
- [118:47]
James Stout
No, I'm just, I'm trying to remember if that was the case or not.
- [118:50]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes. Yes.
- [118:51]
James Stout
Okay. The other claim that I thought was interesting was the killer of this young woman in Charlotte. Right.
- [119:01]
Garrison Davis
Who was killed the, the train stabbing incident from last year.
- [119:05]
James Stout
Yeah. Irina Zarutska. And Trump claimed that the man who killed her had come in through an open border. I am not able to find any evidence that this person is an immigrant to the United States. I have not found that reported anywhere. Yeah, his father appears to have, have at least resided if not been born in the United States. His name is to Carlos Brown Jr. And so assuming that the Decalis Brown who is resident in the same place is his father, therefore I would assume that he was born in the United States and had citizenship through birthright citizenship. I have no idea about. His father could well be a citizen too. I'm just trying to research things in a hurry. I have not seen it reported anywhere.
- [119:47]
Garrison Davis
Zero reporting about this man being an immigrant, including from right wing outlets who used this horrific incident to stoke like racist crime panic narratives last year.
- [119:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah, and that may not have been the goal. It may have just been more traditional, like race panic.
- [120:03]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah, that was what it was. They used it for racialized crime panic. This comment by Trump inferring that he is an immigrant may have been an unscripted ad lib that he just did. But from what we could tell, this this man was, was not an immigrant.
- [120:19]
Robert Evans
Yeah, no, it's just like a guy did a bad thing.
- [120:23]
Garrison Davis
Nor was he released early from custody, by the way, which is part of the narrative that the right was using in their reporting around this was that this guy was like released early from prison and he did serve the entirety of his sentence.
- [120:34]
Robert Evans
He may not have been released early from his sentence, but you're released early from your sentence of not listening to us. Here's some ads.
- [120:42]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I hated that.
- [120:43]
Garrison Davis
One of the worst ones.
- [120:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, well, too bad. And we're back.
- [120:59]
James Stout
Hooray.
- [121:01]
Garrison Davis
So in the start to, to middle section where he was, he was still, still kind of talking about the economy before the entire pageantry performance took over. He started talking about the tax cuts and the one big beautiful bill.
- [121:16]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [121:17]
Garrison Davis
And he, he had this fun line about how all the Democrats voted against these tax cuts and this made all the Democrats stand up and applaud.
- [121:25]
James Stout
Yeah, that was kind of funny.
- [121:26]
Garrison Davis
But then he talked about this mom who is homeschooling two kids.
- [121:30]
James Stout
Oh yeah.
- [121:30]
Garrison Davis
Who also works as a waitress during the night shift on top of her husband, who also, you know, works full time and, and how these, these tax cuts have, have gotten them to take an extra $5,000 home each year. Right. This is the no tax on tips thing. And this story of this, of this mom who's homeschooling kids and working at night and a full time husband was, was like framed as this, like, as this like triumph of the American economy.
- [121:55]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [121:56]
Garrison Davis
It was hard to interpret this as like a massive economic triumph when you talking about a mother who's not only doing labor at home by schooling her children and then also working nights and a husband who's also working full time like that, that, that demonstrates how difficult it actually is to exist economically, especially if you have a family in the country right now. And his, his kind of twisting of this scenario to, to support his, his, his notion that he is, he's helping the American economy I found to be quite interesting. And yeah, that is, that's mostly what the Democratic response by Governor Spanberger was, was about is like how it's pretty clear to most Americans that it's actually been quite economically challenging based on his wildly unstable trade agreements and tariffs, which have caused a great deal of economic instability in this country.
- [122:47]
James Stout
Yeah. There was a feeling during the Biden administration, especially with like Psaki.
- [122:52]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [122:52]
James Stout
Like the Biden administration was somewhat gaslighting people as they struggled economically.
- [122:56]
Robert Evans
Sure.
- [122:57]
James Stout
But Trump has not diverged from that policy. Right? No. And obviously now the Dems are calling it out. Talking of budgetary issues, did anybody else Catch that the Democrats have frozen funding to dhs. Who would like to be out there helping people shovel their snow.
- [123:13]
Garrison Davis
I missed this. I missed this shoveling snow line.
- [123:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I didn't catch that either.
- [123:18]
James Stout
Really.
- [123:19]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I caught it. I caught.
- [123:20]
James Stout
Okay. I thought I'd hallucinated that for a minute.
- [123:22]
Mia Wong
I caught.
- [123:23]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Hallucinated.
- [123:24]
Robert Evans
Maybe that flooded the banks of like Gary and I's nonsense filters and we just shut down for a second.
- [123:28]
Carl Casarda
I don't know.
- [123:29]
James Stout
Yeah, that wonder. Like, I actually went back on the live stream and that was one of the few moments where I. Yeah. I wondered what heck he was talking about.
- [123:39]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [123:39]
Garrison Davis
I'm sure he's going to be deploying fema.
- [123:41]
James Stout
Yeah, Right.
- [123:42]
Garrison Davis
FEMA to New England to help shovel the snow.
- [123:44]
James Stout
Yeah. Great. I'm sure that will be received well. Yeah, that. That was one of the more insane ones that I. That it. I just, it really took me a. A second to work out what on earth was happening. But yeah, I believe that that was maybe a FEMA reference.
- [124:00]
Garrison Davis
No, I won't be happy until Homeland Security investigation agents are shoveling snow.
- [124:05]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [124:05]
Robert Evans
Honestly. And make them do it in every state, even the ones without snow. Just get out there and pantomime it with a shovel.
- [124:11]
James Stout
You know, we got sand in California. We'll find him some work.
- [124:15]
Robert Evans
Shovel some sand.
- [124:16]
Garrison Davis
I think the most interesting portion of the State of the Union address was when Trump talked about his tariffs specifically because just days ago, Supreme Court struck down his tariffs as not being legal. This will get discussed more in Executive Disorder tomorrow. But I found this to be quite interesting because Trump acknowledged all of this and then discussed how he is going to keep doing the tariffs anyway right in front of the justices, just, just openly talking about defying a Supreme Court order in front of them. And the camera kept going back and forth between the President and the justices as they just like sat there completely blank face as he's talking about defying their order. This is like real, real peak constitutional crisis stuff.
- [125:05]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
He kept saying, it's an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court. Mind you, there was four of them there. They all stayed stoic and some voted for him, some voted against him. So it was a mixed bag. But he was basically like, it was like, you know, when you do something wrong and the teacher lectures you in front of the class, it was very much that. They didn't really give him much of a reaction. He was talking about all countries and companies want to keep the deal, talking about tariffs and it's saving our countries. And this is such an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court, but that it doesn't matter because he's going to keep doing it.
- [125:38]
Garrison Davis
We're still doing the tariffs. Yeah, we've talked a lot about it. You know, there's going to be a certain point in this, in this administration there where it's going to come down to a Supreme Court ruling saying that something he's doing is illegal and he's going to keep. Keep doing it anyway. He's already flirted with this in. In the past year. There's a few kind of more minor moments where, if not fully breaking a ruling, was bending it to a near buckle. But like, this is. I think this is the most blatant incident so far of. Of the President just blatantly ignoring and defying a Supreme Court ruling. And then he talked about how, you know, ideally tariffs will take the place of income tax, which. Sure, man. Good luck with that.
- [126:16]
James Stout
Yeah, cool. He had a bit where he was like, we've worked out a new and totally legal way to do it.
- [126:21]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
That when he mentioned that congressional action won't be necessary for the new tariffs.
- [126:26]
James Stout
I think so, yeah. He was. There was some new and established.
- [126:30]
Garrison Davis
I mean, because that. That would be the legal way to do it. That is. That's the power that Congress has.
- [126:34]
James Stout
Yeah. We have the need to work it out. Like, we've got that one covered.
- [126:38]
Garrison Davis
Oh, my God. Do you want to talk about the Rate Player Protection Pledge?
- [126:44]
James Stout
Yes, sure.
- [126:45]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [126:46]
Garrison Davis
The idea that tech companies will have to provide their own power to the data centers popping up around the country, lowering energy costs for residents of these neighborhoods.
- [126:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And this is relevant for a couple of reasons. He's talking about allowing. Basically, the issue is that all of these data centers have increased electricity costs for a lot of Americans. And he's claiming we're going to put that on the tech companies by allowing them to make their own power plants. Like, that's probably, he says, by making them responsible for, like, funding the power that their data centers cost. But specifically, the way this is supposed to work is by letting them build power plants.
- [127:29]
Garrison Davis
Is that explicitly laid out in this plan? Because the way he said it certainly was unclear.
- [127:34]
Robert Evans
I mean, he said they're going to have power plants. The direct statement was, like, tech companies will be operating power plants that they're using to fuel these facilities. And that's, like, in line with lobbying Silicon Valley has been doing for years to make it easier for them to create small nuclear reactors. Like this has been for the last, like, several years. Silicon Valley interests, including, like, Krose Power, have been Pushing to make it a lot easier, regulation wise to operate small nuclear plants. Like, that's definitely what he was referring to.
- [128:05]
Mia Wong
Hmm.
- [128:06]
James Stout
That's great. I feel good about that.
- [128:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah. I mean, there's a, There's a good BBC article on it from like 2025 with the title why Big Tech's Nuclear Plans Could Blow up. But it features like a lot of quotes from guys great at AI companies and at Google talking about like, small nuclear reactors can provide 24. 7 Clean Energy Near Data centers, according to Haider Raza, an expert in AI and energy use at the University of Essex. Like, there's a lot of these quotes that have been going around for years. So when I heard Trump say they'll have their own power plants, that's what I read it in the context of.
- [128:39]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [128:40]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And he just, he says big tech companies. He didn't list out like, who.
- [128:44]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [128:44]
Robert Evans
He doesn't who.
- [128:45]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Who that would be because it's just like not a thought out plan. It's just something for a headline.
- [128:51]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [128:51]
Robert Evans
This is like the kind of conclusion of years of lobbying for small nuclear plants on behalf of like big tech companies. And I'm not against the idea of more nuclear power. I am against the idea of letting open AI.
- [129:02]
James Stout
Yeah. Be the ones who have operated a
- [129:05]
Robert Evans
power plant of any kind.
- [129:07]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having it in the State of the Union is something of a signal by him to them. Right. Like. Like that they are like his constituency. Yeah.
- [129:16]
Robert Evans
I think it's also, as Gare noted, it's like a nod to the affordability thing. Like he's had to deal with that a lot because people can't not notice that things are getting more expensive. So he's promising your power bill will go down because I've done this thing.
- [129:27]
James Stout
Yeah. Talking of getting more expensive, he spent a while talking about fuel prices, like how he'd gone around and he'd seen like 185 a gallon gas and blah, blah, blah. Like I thought it was interesting that clearly they understand. Right. Again, it shows that affordability is something that they know they're weak on. And he's trying to, trying to, I guess, reinforce the areas where he feels stronger within that and not talk about the ones who he doesn't. He talked about home prices, talked a lot about his Trump savings accounts.
- [129:59]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, the Trump accounts for, for kids.
- [130:01]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
There is an infomercial vibe this day.
- [130:03]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [130:04]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
He plugged a couple different Trump, Trump
- [130:06]
Garrison Davis
RX and Trump accounts.
- [130:08]
James Stout
Yeah. And he talked a lot about like, like, I think, Robert, you got the Transcripts in front of you, if I'm not mistaken. He said that with a small investment they could be worth $1,000.
- [130:18]
Garrison Davis
$100,000.
- [130:19]
James Stout
A hundred thousand dollars by the time the person is 18. Yeah.
- [130:22]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
The website describes it as rebuilding a long term financial security for millions of children by creating tax advantaged Investment accounts for US citizens under the age of 18. It asks you to fill out a form and then it says, get $1,000 for every American child born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028. The account is fully in your child's name and you are the sole custodian until they turn 18. No contributions necessary, but you can deposit up to 5,000 per year for maximum growth. That's what the website says.
- [130:54]
Robert Evans
Yeah, like, and like if this is, I guess to start off, if this was like real, if it was real, then like, I don't have a problem with the idea. Like it, it's okay, sure. But that's my immediate question, especially since, since it seems like the big thing that he was harping on is that like this was funded in large part by like a six something billion dollar donation by the, by the Dells, by like Michael Dell and his wife.
- [131:17]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [131:17]
Robert Evans
And so first off, I've used Dell computers, so I was immediately like, oh, this doesn't seem like it could be good. But yeah, I don't, like, I don't know enough about this program to really know though. It just like my, it's a Trump thing involving money, so I'm on edge. But what are we actually looking at here?
- [131:34]
James Stout
Yeah, so I'm just trying to work out the, the amount of interest it would take for that 1,000 to turn into 100,000 in 18 years. If I just plug it into the inflation calculator. Yeah. Even at 16%, that's not doing it.
- [131:53]
Garrison Davis
Well, if, if they put that 1,000 in Nvidia stock five years ago, then it's certainly possible, which I, I think, I think that's part of, part of these accounts is that it's, it's like it's tied in with stock investments. It seems, it seems like I, it doesn't sound like it's just like a high yield savings account.
- [132:11]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [132:12]
Garrison Davis
The other Trump branded service that was advertised infomercial style during the State of the Union address was Trump rx, which was essentially Trump's version of Mark Cuban's cost plus drugs website to get prescription drugs at very close to the cost of manufacturing. Something that Trump reiterated multiple times that he did not name the Trump accounts or Trump RX himself?
- [132:38]
James Stout
Oh, yeah, sure.
- [132:40]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Is this what, the part when he tried to use a woman's IVF story for propaganda? Yeah, I really disliked that.
- [132:48]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [132:49]
Garrison Davis
Yes, he did. He did one of these, like one of these people either brought in or sitting. Sitting high up in the pews. You know, he tells a lot of these little stories throughout the State of the Union. He talked about a woman who was trying to do ivf and the drugs were very expensive. And now, thanks to Trump rx, it's. It's less money.
- [133:09]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Well, it's just obnoxious because Trump said that he was, quote, unquote, the father of IVF and claimed to be able to provide resources for people that want to pursue ivf. And he has not fallen through on any of those promises.
- [133:22]
Garrison Davis
He signed some executive orders that did
- [133:25]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
all, and it's still an absolutely outrageous cost to do ivf. And he's done nothing. He's done nothing.
- [133:34]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [133:35]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So to use it as propaganda, I find it to be extremely offensive.
- [133:39]
Robert Evans
Well, yeah, sure, but that's, there's a lot that's offensive about the propaganda he does in this. Like, about the things he uses for propaganda. All the murders and like, that's 100%. That's all this is.
- [133:50]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I just didn't want to. I just didn't want to skip over that because it's not going to get as much of a headline as some of the other horrific things he did. But it sucked.
- [133:57]
James Stout
Yeah. You know what else sucks pretty hard? Robbit?
- [134:00]
Garrison Davis
Ads.
- [134:01]
Robert Evans
Not the ads for this podcast.
- [134:03]
James Stout
Oh, no, absolutely not. No. I was thinking something tightly different.
- [134:17]
Garrison Davis
All right, we are back. One thing that did get both, both chambers applauding to the surprise of Trump, because both for the Democrats applauding and a little bit of the Republicans is he talked about the Stop Insider Trading act, which would somehow. I need to look into the actual, actual bill itself, but. But restrict to Congress people from doing insider trading. And this, this did come, caused a lot of applause on the, on the Democrat side and some applause on the Republican side. And Trump remarked on both being interesting. And I made a Nancy Pelosi joke.
- [134:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
She was there. They showed her later on, she was there.
- [134:56]
Garrison Davis
In terms of disruptions from the Democratic side, Al Green did a little protest thing in the beginning, and then during the section where Trump was talking about the Democrat DHS shut down, he told, he told the room to. To stand up.
- [135:10]
Robert Evans
Up.
- [135:10]
Garrison Davis
If you believe that. That protecting American citizens is, is more important than protecting illegal immigrants or something. Something to that effect.
- [135:18]
James Stout
Yeah, The Role of the government is to protect American citizens. Right. Like.
- [135:23]
Garrison Davis
Yes.
- [135:24]
James Stout
Not illegal immigrants.
- [135:25]
Garrison Davis
And this caused a, a shouting back and forth between Alon Omar and Trump, which, which lasted for, lasted for quite a while.
- [135:33]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [135:34]
Garrison Davis
I wasn't able to hear very much on the hard to tell news feedback. Yeah, it's, it's, there's, I've not seen much reporting on it yet because we are recording this literally minutes after.
- [135:43]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [135:43]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
She shouted that he's killing Americans.
- [135:45]
Robert Evans
Okay, that makes sense.
- [135:46]
James Stout
Okay.
- [135:47]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah.
- [135:48]
Garrison Davis
Which.
- [135:48]
James Stout
Accurate.
- [135:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Which he is. I mean, that is, that is a solid, that is a solid retort. And when you're talking about the DHS shut down.
- [135:55]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [135:55]
Garrison Davis
Standing up for American citizens.
- [135:57]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes.
- [135:57]
Garrison Davis
As American citizens are being gunned down by the dhs. That is a fine retort. Retort that was mirrored in the Democratic response, which we might talk about in Executive disorder tomorrow.
- [136:07]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [136:08]
Garrison Davis
He mentioned trans people kind of one time in the speech close to the middle. He talked about how a school socially transitioned someone without telling parents. This, this kid ran away from home. And then a left wing judge refused to return the child home.
- [136:25]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [136:26]
Garrison Davis
And this, this person, who is it? Who is at the time a trans, A trans guy was sent to a, an all boys state home, but is, is now a proud young woman with a scholarship to Liberty University.
- [136:38]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [136:39]
Garrison Davis
And this woman who was part of this little performance did this like zoomer finger gesture bit.
- [136:45]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [136:45]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
The Haley Bieber hand gesture.
- [136:47]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [136:48]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I'm hip with the kids.
- [136:49]
James Stout
Yeah. I'm not. I didn't know what you're talking about.
- [136:51]
Garrison Davis
It was annoying. Like, we need more normal D transitioners. But if, if you are, you just never are never going to show up to anything like this.
- [136:58]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
No.
- [136:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [136:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [136:59]
Mia Wong
Right.
- [136:59]
James Stout
Yeah. Who wants to have the President of the United States talk about your transition?
- [137:04]
Garrison Davis
You know what? When Joe Biden gets, gets elected again, I'll show up. I'll show up at the state of the Union.
- [137:11]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Joe Biden gets elected again.
- [137:14]
Robert Evans
I think it could happen.
- [137:16]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
You know, stranger things have.
- [137:19]
Garrison Davis
But, you know, Trump's line after this was, you know, talking about how there's all these transitions happening without telling parents and then, quote, we must ban it and we must ban it immediately.
- [137:30]
Robert Evans
Whatever.
- [137:30]
Garrison Davis
And the trans stuff was, was all, was all in relation to minors transitioning without parental approval. That was Trump's framing for the entirety of the transition stuff. It wasn't expanded beyond that.
- [137:42]
James Stout
He did like go off script to be like, these people are crazy during that.
- [137:45]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. When the Democrats didn't applaud for his trans comments he did. He did start talking about how, you know, deranged the Democrats are.
- [137:52]
Robert Evans
He said, shame on you. And, like, got like a kind of a chant going almost.
- [137:57]
Garrison Davis
There was a lot of shame stuff back and forth in this section. Say same thing. The, like, the standup. If you believe that the role of the government is to protect American citizens,
- [138:06]
Robert Evans
those were the most, like, out andout fascist moments of. Of this whole thing.
- [138:10]
James Stout
Yes.
- [138:11]
Robert Evans
Like that, in my opinion. Yeah.
- [138:14]
Garrison Davis
We got a Kirk moment after this trans thing. Talked about this renewal in Christianity among young people thanks to one Charlie Kirk who was martyred for his beliefs.
- [138:22]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [138:22]
Garrison Davis
They, you know, trotted out Erica to do her, like, shtick that she's been perfecting for the past, like, six months.
- [138:29]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Surprisingly, no like fire or sparkers or like anything.
- [138:36]
Garrison Davis
It was. It was hard to recognize her without the fireworks. Then after this section, after the Charlie Kirk Christianity section, after the St. Kirk section ended, it really became a military pageant for. For the rest, it got very Metal Gear Solid.
- [138:51]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Correct.
- [138:52]
James Stout
For.
- [138:52]
Garrison Davis
For the final, final, you know, 45 minutes where. Where he brought up a whole bunch of people and gave them medals, as we've discussed. And then recounted the Maduro extraction.
- [139:04]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [139:04]
Garrison Davis
In an extremely Metal Gear Solid style. He talked about, you know, the bombing, the Iranian nuclear facilities. He talked about bombing drug smugglers and remarked that we, quote, seriously damaged their fishing industry, unquote. Which is a little joke about how the people that they blew up might have just been fishermen, not actually drug smugglers.
- [139:25]
Robert Evans
Well, and a joke about how, like, the fishing industry has collapsed because people are too scared to get murdered by the US to go fish. So they support their families. Yeah.
- [139:34]
James Stout
In addition to the fact they were already struggling to afford fuel for, like, I. I know Venezuelan fishermen. Things weren't going great for them.
- [139:42]
Garrison Davis
Talked about how Hamas had to dig through piles of hundreds of bodies to find some of the slain hostages to return them as a part of the negotiations between Trump, Hamas and Israel. And boasted that he had ended 10 wars. And Marco Rubio looked a little soulless.
- [140:01]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [140:02]
Robert Evans
Marky Mark.
- [140:03]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I took a little bit of a note on Marco Rubio because he said he will go down as the best ever Secretary of State. And it seemed like he was really throwing his Support towards Marco vs Vance tonight at the State of the Union.
- [140:17]
Garrison Davis
No, because Vance is now in charge of the war on fraud. The totally real thing. Yeah, yeah, that is happening thing which Trump announced as J.D. vance's new role is to be in charge of the war on fraud.
- [140:30]
James Stout
Great pick, J.D.
- [140:32]
Robert Evans
vance.
- [140:32]
Garrison Davis
War fraud. But do we do you want to talk a little bit more about this? Like, Metal Gear Solid Hideo Kojima, military pageant finale to this speech?
- [140:43]
James Stout
Yeah. All I know about Hideo Kojima is he tweeted in support of the FDF and then deleted it. Sad.
- [140:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, well, you live by the tweet, you die by the tweet.
- [140:53]
James Stout
A lot of this was kind of textbook fashy stuff, not to, like, you know, overly belabor the point, but the bringing out of the survivors and victims of crime, the parading of military heroes. Right. Like, you can just go to Robert Paxton's book, which I have just over there, but I'm not going to read from it right now.
- [141:14]
Garrison Davis
Anatomy of Fascism.
- [141:15]
James Stout
Yes, the Anatomy of Fascism. And you can start checking off the list. And you see so much of it here, right?
- [141:20]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. I mean, a mix of, like, you know, war veterans, World War II. Trump tied a lot of this to 1776, the fact that the 250th anniversary of the United States is coming up.
- [141:29]
James Stout
Yep. And then the national betrayal and the scapegoat group and him being the renovation,
- [141:34]
Robert Evans
like, we got it all, baby.
- [141:37]
James Stout
Yeah. His speech read like he looked at. Paxton has these motivating passions of fascism, and it looks like he kind of went down that as a checklist, as he was, as whoever wrote this was writing it. Right. Like, it has almost everything from that. The glorification of martial valor, like I said, the blaming of a scapegoat group, like, I alone can bring this nation back to greatness.
- [141:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [141:58]
James Stout
Things that not new.
- [142:00]
Garrison Davis
Fort Bragg is back, James.
- [142:03]
James Stout
Yes, actually a different.
- [142:04]
Garrison Davis
A different brag.
- [142:05]
James Stout
A different brag. Yeah. They found another guy called Bragg, which he didn't mention. They thought Bragg is back, but it's a different Bragg this time. And I'm sure it's just a coincidence. It's the same as the first.
- [142:18]
Garrison Davis
But no, Robert, I think you're totally right that, like, he started off by, you know, you have to address the economic stuff at the front because he ran on so much of it. But they want to get through that as quickly as possible. Then in order to try to coax this, like, you know, patriotic spirit, it devolves into this ceremony of, like, military greatness. Of, like, returning to military greatness. Something that, like, was lost, that now we have redone. You know, this was the most successful military operation in decades. I had foreign leaders calling me to congratulate me on it. He took down the Chinese and Russian defense systems. This guy's leg was ripped apart by bullets, but he still Landed the chopper. Like, so much of it becomes about, you know, the. The heroic moments done by other people to. To kind of pad. Pad around the actual fractured state of.
- [143:05]
James Stout
Of.
- [143:06]
Garrison Davis
Of. Of Trump's. Of Trump's America.
- [143:07]
Robert Evans
And waving the bloody shirt is a phrase you hear like. It is a phrase you hear associated with fascist movies. It's literally referring to, like, a thing that happened during the rise of the Nazis. Right. As a result of, like, the murders of some of their street fighters. But that's. I mean, like, he's doing very much a version of that here. Like, including the fact that while he was talking about this attack on Venezuela and the guy who got injured piloting the chopper, he spent, like, a lot of time talking about blood, like, sloshing around in the bottom of the. Of the. Of the flight deck.
- [143:39]
James Stout
The aisle.
- [143:39]
Robert Evans
The aisle or whatever.
- [143:41]
Garrison Davis
The Isle of the Chinook. The blood was streaming down, so all of the. All the forces in the back knew that the pilot was injured and that they were all at risk. Very bloody. Very, very bloody speech in general.
- [143:52]
James Stout
Yeah, a lot of blood mentions.
- [143:54]
Garrison Davis
There's similarly. Like, the Lake and Riley sections of his State of the Union address last year were very similar. And he. He was trying to, you know, play. Play the hits in terms of how much that stuff. That stuff played well among his base last year. He was trying to recreate that in a few moments when. When one of the instances you have is, you know, someone who is socially transitioned, who now isn't, and someone who. Who was injured in a car accident, you know, not a murder. Those are two of your instances. It's starting to get weakened a little bit. He tried to use the Kirk assassination. That's one of these instances. And then one. One instance of a stabbing. That was a murder. Those were the bloody shirts that he was waving, as well as the National Guard.
- [144:34]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And Jared Kushner.
- [144:35]
James Stout
Oh, yeah, Kushner was out there.
- [144:37]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Mention him by name, I think more than once. It's always a jump scare for me.
- [144:41]
Robert Evans
Me.
- [144:41]
James Stout
Yeah. I think he may have mentioned Kushner more than Vance.
- [144:44]
Garrison Davis
Yes, definitely.
- [144:46]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
He barely mentioned JD Vance, which is very interesting.
- [144:50]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [144:51]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Does anybody else have any thoughts?
- [144:53]
Robert Evans
Nope.
- [144:55]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
It's over. I'm glad.
- [144:56]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Let's be done with this.
- [144:58]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Let's be done with this. That I was. It was too long to begin with.
- [145:01]
Robert Evans
I wish we were finished with this State of the Union as soon as Al Green was. That's. There's a reference to him getting kicked out for the second year in a row.
- [145:09]
James Stout
Yeah. He's made a habit.
- [145:10]
Robert Evans
I wonder if he like plans dinner for halfway through. Like, don't worry, I'm not going to be there long.
- [145:14]
James Stout
Like I'm going to get out immediately.
- [145:16]
Robert Evans
Don't worry guys.
- [145:17]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Why not? And you know, if we decide there's more to talk about, we'll mention it on ed. But for now, that's all we got.
- [145:23]
Garrison Davis
The Save America act he did mention, which we need to cover in depth very soon. And we will.
- [145:28]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes, we will. But for now, bye.
- [145:42]
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- [148:48]
James Stout
This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder Our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what this means for you. I am James Stout and today I am joined by Sophie Lichterman and Mia Wong. This week we are covering the week of February 18th to February 25th.
- [149:10]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
We'll also have a segment by one Garrison Davis added on later. They were out in the field covering a story which will be an episode coming out soon.
- [149:20]
James Stout
But yeah, they were inside the Capitol. Not. Not the. Not the on January states capital. Yeah yeah. Zoran Mamdharmi, I understand is going to pardon them and it will be fine.
- [149:32]
Robert Evans
Oh my God.
- [149:32]
Mia Wong
Gosh, should be like four people who actually believe this.
- [149:36]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please don't take to the subreddit. Garrison has not been arrested. So a couple of small things I guess. Last week the Georgia State Elections Board voted to reprimand Elon Musk's America PAC for mailing absentee ballot applications pre filled out with voter information during the 2024 elections. That violates state law.
- [149:59]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, yeah.
- [150:00]
James Stout
And they didn't. They did this thing. I don't know if you remember this. They didn't indicate like it wasn't a ballot. It wasn't from the government to vote with. It was from Elon Musk.
- [150:10]
Robert Evans
What?
- [150:11]
Mia Wong
That's so unhinged.
- [150:13]
James Stout
Yeah, he was really on one back then. It'll be interesting to see how he approaches the midterms with his America party.
- [150:20]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Wow. SCOTUS did say that USPS is legally Immune for intentionally misdelivered men mail. They're basically saying, you know, and this was a 5 to 4 decision, and it happened on Tuesday, February 24th, that the US Postal Service can't be held liable for intentional failure to deliver mail.
- [150:39]
Mia Wong
Unhinged decision, by the way, that the actual. The actual story behind it is this black woman who was renting property out to people. And all the, like, the people were pissed about it because they're racists, and so they were doing shit like intentionally not delivering bills and stuff. They were, like, locking their mailboxes with, like, locks that no one had the keys to because the post office people were just putting locks on it. And it got ruled that they have immunity for this.
- [151:04]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Wow.
- [151:05]
Carl Casarda
Bizarre.
- [151:06]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, I mean, all of this just feels like it's being targeted for voter suppression, but. Yeah, that's a bigger story.
- [151:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah, but it's also another case of Supreme Court says racism.
- [151:18]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Fine.
- [151:19]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, Many such cases.
- [151:21]
James Stout
Yeah, that's the. That's the doctrine. The other thing was this. This week, as part of the DHS shutdown down, Lewandowski and Gnome decided that they were going to shut down TSA PreCheck and global Entry. So those, if people aren't familiar, are like, expedited processing. One is for getting on the plane as you go through security there, and the other one is for when you arrive in the United States and you clear customs. This lasted for like, minutes. It seems the warehouse intervened. Yeah, I think Global Entry is still paused. There are other ways in which having a Global Entry card can expedite your entry into the US Still. But the pre check thing did not last very long because that would have probably pissed off all the wrong people, right?
- [152:08]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Like, yeah. And also made lines even longer, which is. Airports are already a nightmare. Come on. Come on.
- [152:16]
Mia Wong
They would have gotten killed by their own congressional staffers.
- [152:21]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
You think Ted Cruz doesn't have TSA preachers?
- [152:23]
Robert Evans
Check, please.
- [152:25]
James Stout
The idea that, like, okay, so we're like A, they're forcing all the TSA people to work anyway.
- [152:30]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [152:31]
James Stout
Because they're essential employees. But B, like, if you can find a way to make those people work less, let's say by having a group of people who have been pre cleared so the TSA people don't have to spend quite as long checking them. That helps. Actually, like, this is not a cost saving measure. This is them clearly just trying to punish people and put it on the Dems.
- [152:48]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I simply have TSA pre check just so I don't have to take off my shoes. And because it Brings me great joy when I get to ditch people who do not have it. Love ditching Robert Evans at the airport. And every time we travel together, it's a battle of who will get through the line first. And it one time it was him and he was like, ah, you know what? I deserve that. A previous job bought me that PSA precheck back and I. And I've had it for years and wow, I love not taking my shoes off.
- [153:26]
Robert Evans
That's it.
- [153:26]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
That's the only person for me. I'm like, wow, gets to wear shoes
- [153:33]
Mia Wong
first.
- [153:33]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
World problems.
- [153:34]
James Stout
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk briefly about Mexico.
- [153:42]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes.
- [153:42]
Mia Wong
Oh, God. Dramatic tone shift.
- [153:44]
Robert Evans
Wow.
- [153:44]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you might use your pre check on a trip. Trip to Mexico.
- [153:49]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Wow. James Transition. Wow.
- [153:51]
James Stout
Yeah, that's a transition. That's what we do here.
- [153:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Spicy.
- [153:54]
James Stout
Yeah. Professional podcasting. The Mexican military killed El Mencho on Sunday. El Mencho's legal name is Nemesio Osi Juarez Avantes. He was of course, the leader of the cjng, which is, I guess the English translation would be like the Jalisco Cartel. New generation.
- [154:12]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Right.
- [154:12]
James Stout
The Spanish acronym is how. It's Germany Youth. He was also the most wanted person in Mexico. The operation was carried out by the Mexican military. I've seen some reports they didn't notify local law enforcement, so he wouldn't be tipped off. Now, Metro is reported to have died on a military flight after the raid. So have been injured in the raid and then died on the way back to Mexico City where he was obviously going to be treated and then questioned if he survived, I guess. In Response, more than 250 narco blockos. Narco blockos, if you're not familiar, are roadblocks that are generally made up of vehicles that are carjacked. They're often like buses and then they're set ablaze. They're set at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of the road. Right. So it makes a roadblock. So more than 250of these were set up around the country. This is a relatively common response. The most, I guess, like serious response we've seen to a government action before was called the Culiaca Nasso Culiacan. We've seen a lower cartel. This, this one they're calling the Menchaso. Right. Using like the same etymology, I guess. There have also been attacks on Mexican National Guard troops, killing more than two dozen in 24 hours following the raids. More than 60 civilians have now been reported to have been killed, including a pregnant woman. Yeah, this all like, it's folks in Mexico who are gonna. Gonna suffer. Right. Like, it's. It's everyday people trying to get on with their lives. Another of the things that happened is the Banco Bien Estar. So, like, well, being bank, I guess I would translate that as it's a bank that exists to bring people into the banking system who would otherwise be unbanked. It's a government initiative in Mexico. So a lot of branches of that bank have been burnt out down. This is part of a tendency on. On the part of Scheinenbaum. Right. To repudiate the previous policy of hugs, not bullets. And. And to go after organized crime in Mexico more violently, I guess. It seems like the country's security forces have been leading the charge against the Sinaloa cartel. And this maybe indicates that it's the military who are going after the Jalisco cartel. So, like, the two branches are pursuing separate. Separate missions against. Against different entities. Right. It remains to be seen if there was any U.S. involvement. I kind of take issue at the knee jerk suggestion that there has to have been U.S. involvement. Like the Mexican government is more than capable of doing state violence. It has done so for a long time.
- [156:49]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [156:49]
James Stout
You know, the Mexican government is capable of acting on its own. Not everything that happens is about America. I don't want to cover this in too great of a detail. It's not really a beat that we report on other than that this is a relatively major occurrence in Mexico.
- [157:03]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yeah.
- [157:05]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And Gare is gonna plug in now. Future Gare, tell us what you got.
- [157:11]
Garrison Davis
Hello. Garrison Davis here with Sophie Lichterman for a special segment about the super bowl commercial for Ring the Doorbell owned by Amazon on.
- [157:22]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yep.
- [157:22]
Garrison Davis
During the Super Bowl, Amazon's Ring Doorbell aired a commercial showing off a new feature called Search Party, which was advertised as a way to locate lost dogs by automatically searching through footage captured by ring cameras in the neighborhood to track a pet's movements.
- [157:39]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Ooh. Who picked the name Search Party? And who thought that wasn't creepy?
- [157:43]
Garrison Davis
Search Party is interesting because it makes you think of like a crime scene.
- [157:47]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes.
- [157:48]
Garrison Davis
That is a brain link that they may not. May not have intended it. Let's play.
- [157:52]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes, please.
- [157:53]
Garrison Davis
The audio from this commercial. Because as. As Sophie discussed before we started this segment, we're. We're unsure of the overlap of it could happen here. Listeners and super bowl watchers. So here is the Ring commercial audio. It's 30 seconds.
- [158:08]
James Stout
This is Milo.
- [158:09]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing.
- [158:14]
James Stout
And the way we look for them
- [158:15]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
hasn't changed in years until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts Outdoor cameras looking for a match Search party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search party available to everyone for free right now.
- [158:36]
Garrison Davis
Join the neighborhood@ring.com Join the neighborhood.
- [158:41]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
No. Also, when did they launch this? Do we know it's launched?
- [158:45]
Garrison Davis
I'm pretty sure search party is launched.
- [158:47]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I just don't believe that Dog a Day.
- [158:50]
Garrison Davis
It launched in late 2025.
- [158:52]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Okay.
- [158:53]
Garrison Davis
And I can speak to this a little bit more actually.
- [158:55]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Sure.
- [158:56]
Garrison Davis
Because I saw this feature early when I was in Las Vegas, actually.
- [159:01]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Right.
- [159:02]
Garrison Davis
This commercial, this intends to portray, you know, a heartwarming unification of a dog and its own owner. But in effect, the ad sparked public backlash, including from politicians like Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and privacy rights organizations and among normies, because this ad accidentally demonstrated the technological capacity to turn every neighborhood Ring camera into a web of surveillance that AI can use to locate anything based on a picture. Now, as I said, I saw this feature unveiled at CES last month. I talked about it on Better Offline at ces. The AI search functionality was described like this. The owner of a lost pet can upload a photo and post a notice in the Ring app. Then Amazon will utilize Ring cameras in the area to search for matches. And if a match is found, the owner of the camera can share the footage with the owner of the lost pet. But the public display this technology during the super bowl has stirred trouble and bad headlines for Amazon. Senator Ed Markey said that the ad, quote, exposed a scary truth. The technology in its doorbell cameras can be used to hunt down a lost pet or a person. Americans oppose this creepy surveillance state, unquote, and the privacy rights organization the Electronic Frontier foundation wrote in a statement that the ad will was, quote, unquote, disguised as heartfelt but actually quote previewed future surveillance of our streets, a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track and locate anything, human, pet or otherwise, unquote. Now, these concerns are in the wake of high profile ICE raids targeting neighborhoods and a recent announcement that Ring was going to partner with the police surveillance company Flock Flock, which operates large scale integrated camera systems that allow police to tap into a network of surveillance in urban areas through cameras and license plate readers. Now, Flock claims that they do not give federal immigration agencies direct access to footage. And that may be true.
- [161:16]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
That doesn't mean that won't change and that they don't have capability to do so well.
- [161:20]
Garrison Davis
And that doesn't mean that CBP and ICE can't acquire that footage in other ways. 100% currently right now, a 404 media report from last May showed that local police working with ICE used Flock's camera network to track immigrants as a part of ICE and Homeland Security investigations. So they are getting access to this footage even though they aren't directly tapped in to the Flock network because they can work with local agencies policies in states that do not have sanctuary city policies and in states that maybe do because police may not be always following those laws. Ring, not Flock, says that their footage can be requested by local law enforcement and users can decide whether or not to respond, though Ring is also subject to warrants, subpoenas and court orders requiring some footage be handed over to authorities. Following the backlash to the super bowl ad, Ring canceled its partnership with Flock in what the companies describe as a mutual decision. The deal would have allowed Ring owners to directly share footage with the Flock network. Now, all of this happened around the same time that the FBI was able to access recorded footage from Nancy Guthrie's Google Nest camera camera as a part of that kidnapping investigation, despite Guthrie not having an active recording subscription. So this too sparked privacy concerns. Cash Patel, FBI director, said that the footage was recovered from, quote, residual data located in back end systems, unquote. This was footage that Google records and stores for free on a temporary basis, usually for a few hours, hours before it is quote, unquote deleted. So if you have one of these Nest cameras, Google will store a few hours of footage for you to look at for free and then says that it's going to be quote, unquote deleted. And Nest owners can pay a reoccurring fee to keep that footage accessible on the Google cloud for longer. Guthrie did not have such a subscription. So this data that was recorded was marked for deletion. But data deletion is not an immediate process. It just marks a piece of data as being okay to write over with new data, which means until that happens, fragments of that data can be retrieved and pieced back together. But this can be tricky and take a lot of time. And in this case, it took Google over a week for a very high profile case.
- [163:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And they're still working behind the scenes to retrieve even more footage. Yeah, from this Nest camera.
- [164:00]
Garrison Davis
It's, it's not easy. I think this, the sort of privacy concerns for this case do not reflect largely for, I think most people's concerns Because.
- [164:09]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Right.
- [164:09]
Garrison Davis
The specific way Google stores this footage in the cloud is also unique to the Google Nest system. Ring doesn't do it in this same way.
- [164:15]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
They also ended up outsourcing this to, like, private security retrievers for data retrievers, as opposed to doing it internally either with the local sheriffs or FBI, which says a lot.
- [164:31]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, not surprising. And, yeah, there's always a concern with these sorts of, you know, doorbell cameras that the footage can be subpoenaed. Right.
- [164:39]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Sure.
- [164:40]
Garrison Davis
But that process also takes a long time. I think there is a difference between the sort of Flock style, immediate access and subpoenaing footage or having to piece together fragmented footage in the case of, like, the Nest storage system system. But this is. This is the current situation with. With the Ring and Flock deal that fell through. Ring does partner with Axon, the body cam company. Similarly, police can send requests to Ring users, and they can voluntarily send the footage if they choose not to. If police really want that footage, they can try to get a court order that may or may not succeed, depending on the details of that case.
- [165:16]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
My question is, when you were at cs, what. What were they highlighting there? Was it different from this commercial or was it a similar campaign?
- [165:28]
Garrison Davis
It was very similar to this commercial. It was. It was like a section of the large, like, Amazon room. Like Amazon has a whole suite. A suite in this hotel. But it's. It's not. It's not like a hotel room. It's on the convention floor. But they have like their whole. Whole, like, kind of ballroom section.
- [165:43]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Amazon wing.
- [165:45]
Garrison Davis
An Amazon wing of the convention.
- [165:46]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [165:46]
Garrison Davis
And this was one of the many products. They had a few other surveillance products like a. Like a security camera tower. It's powered by solar that can, like, roll around. Also was planning to integrate into these webbed surveillance networks. But since this ad and the negative backlash which led to the Flock deal coming through, there still has been reports from 404 Media about internal discussions among rich Ring to use search party for crime, to, to quote, unquote, stop crime. And there's still ongoing discussion on the various ways to apply this technology. In an internal email acquired by 404, the Ring CEO said that search party could be a tool to help, quote, zero out crime in neighborhoods. So the capabilities of using this to track humans are very known among the people at Ring.
- [166:38]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I think it's really interesting how quickly this partnership was dissolved with the backlash from that super bowl ad. It seemed to be almost instant.
- [166:44]
Garrison Davis
It's pretty quick.
- [166:45]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Which shows that when something's really bad and you Point it out. Sometimes that can work to stop said bad thing.
- [166:54]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [166:55]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
But, yeah, search party creepy, though, like that. Law enforcement still wants to use it. Potentially be helpful with certain things. Maybe, but it really just seems like they're trying to do like normal people surveillance.
- [167:09]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. And then putting it with this, you, heartwarming package of helping find lost dogs. If you want to locate a lost dog, the most efficient way to do that is by having your dog microchipped. That is still the most. Most reliable method. Using this integrated camera network as a. As a way to coax people into submitting into a system like this by waving the lost puppy banner is a little bit insidious.
- [167:33]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Leave the dogs alone. The dogs don't want to be surveilled. My dog doesn't want to be surveilled. She does. She surveils my house. Stop trying to take the dog's jobs. We're gonna go to a quick ad break, and we'll be back. And we're back. And. And I just wanted to follow up on something that was kind of overlooked from the State of the union, which was, you know, kind of a throwaway discussion about ivf. And I just wanted to give some information because I think it's worth talking about. For those of you who don't know, IVF is incredibly expensive. According to. I looked at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as an article from CNY Fertility that says the average cost of IVF is often quoted at $12,000, but that is just the price quoted by the fertility clinic for, like, their base package. And I, I have several friends who have gone through this, and the costs are outrageous. Many other necessary expenses on top of that, $12,000 is around $20,000. And for most folks, on average, IBS doesn't necessarily work the first time around. For a lot of people, you're spending somewhere between 30,000 per round to 50 to 60,000 per round. And, you know, despite infertility being a medical diagnosis and IVF being the best medical treatment for that, a 2018 analysis of the IVF insurance market by Mercer found that 74% of Americans do not have insurance coverage for IVF. And, you know, just from speaking with friends, even if they do do, it's still outrageously expensive.
- [169:21]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [169:22]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So we're looking at a cost of about somewhere between depending on insurance or without insurance. And that's not even including the medical costs. That's not including the downtime costs of not working. That's not including. If you're just doing egg retrieval and the cost of storage. But these expenses are outrageous, and it's been a heated topic for many folks on the far right. And just for an example, I would like to play a. A clip from Charlie Kirk talking to two.
- [169:52]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Sorry.
- [169:54]
Robert Evans
Sorry.
- [169:54]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
In advance. Two girl twins that. You know, I actually, when this. When this video originally dropped, I. It was a discussion with a bunch of my friends, so I kind of think it's worth sharing. Yeah, Just. Just to see, like, how heated of a topic it is, because I want to talk about how Donald Trump has addressed it and how that changed. So here is an interaction between two girls that were IVF babies talking to Charlie Kirk about ivf. And I think it's just really interesting to hear that extreme thinking from that side.
- [170:25]
Garrison Davis
Hi, Charlie.
- [170:26]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
How are you?
- [170:26]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Good.
- [170:26]
Garrison Davis
How are you?
- [170:27]
James Stout
Good.
- [170:28]
Garrison Davis
Hi.
- [170:28]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So my name is Paige, and this is my twin sister, ivf.
- [170:31]
Garrison Davis
Wow.
- [170:31]
Robert Evans
Alex.
- [170:32]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Okay.
- [170:33]
Garrison Davis
We have two older sisters that are also ivf.
- [170:35]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Okay, so this is about ivf, of course.
- [170:38]
Garrison Davis
So I'm particularly neutral on the topic.
- [170:41]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I don't want to have, like, a
- [170:42]
Garrison Davis
forced opinion because, like, my entire family's
- [170:45]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
kind of become a product of ivf.
- [170:47]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Are you guys surrogacy, too, or just ivf?
- [170:50]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Just ivf. But I watch your videos, and so
- [170:55]
Garrison Davis
I've noticed that in one of your
- [170:56]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
videos, you do mention that you are
- [170:58]
Garrison Davis
okay with ivf, but you're morally against it.
- [171:00]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Is that true?
- [171:01]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Yeah, it's a little bit deeper than that. But, Ivan, I have a lot of problems with ivf, albeit while acknowledging the fruit. I'm glad you're both alive.
- [171:10]
Robert Evans
Thank you.
- [171:10]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
And so that must be celebrated. So it's a very. I'll explain the difficulty, but please continue.
- [171:16]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Okay. My, like, part one of my question
- [171:18]
Garrison Davis
is just as someone who was conceived
- [171:20]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
through ivf, why should I also be morally against it?
- [171:24]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Good question. Okay. So as a pro lifer, first and foremost, we have to have an issue with the discard fertilized eggs that happened during ivf. That's why you guys are twins, is because during your creation process, if I can be provocatively blunt with your. You lost a lot of your siblings. Am I correct in saying that?
- [171:45]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So for our older sisters, they had six embryos in their batch.
- [171:51]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Two came out, of course, but for us, there were three, and then two came out.
- [171:54]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Yeah. And so that's my first. First problem is that it definitionally is saying, like, we're gonna discard life to get to life. Yeah, I have a problem with that.
- [172:03]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So I do agree, but in a certain way. Oh, sorry. So In a certain way, those embryos,
- [172:09]
Garrison Davis
like, say they weren't going to become
- [172:10]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
anyways, but at least we were trying because they were going to be raised
- [172:14]
Garrison Davis
in a house where we are pro life.
- [172:15]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And we really wanted to be able
- [172:17]
Garrison Davis
to have kids and cherish that. But by taking that loss, they were able to have an least us out of the three. At least they could have the one.
- [172:24]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So it's kind of. I don't know where I'm going with that.
- [172:27]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
I understand what you're saying. So there's a pro life way to do ivf, which is only implant the eggs of which the children that you actually want to raise. And so, by the way, you have a lower likelihood of working because in your case it would be maybe two or three. For example, the way that the IVF doctor will sell it is like, look, here's six embryos. You'll be lucky if one or two implant to the uterine wall. Let's see what happens now. In certain cases, 4. Implant to the uterine wall and you get quadruplets.
- [172:59]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [172:59]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Which is what happens. I find that to be a little bit creepy, to be honest, that a doctor can kind of call shots on what life is going to live and not live.
- [173:10]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I think you're a little bit creepy, John.
- [173:12]
Mia Wong
Does this guy understand what an egg is?
- [173:15]
Garrison Davis
Like, I.
- [173:15]
Mia Wong
Because, like, ideologically, obviously, no. But like, what.
- [173:20]
Garrison Davis
How does he think that?
- [173:23]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah. So that, that was like an extreme side of things.
- [173:26]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [173:26]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
That opinion of you're killing your siblings and, you know that. That sort of thing. I just find it the beginning of that video. I talked about it with a lot of my friends when I first came out. I just thought it was so interesting that where he's like, well, I'm glad you're alive. Yeah, but you're immoral. Is such a. Such. Such an unhinged stance.
- [173:48]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [173:49]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Meanwhile, during the Trump campaign. Sorry in advance. Donald Trump's voice heard Trump back to back.
- [173:59]
Garrison Davis
I should get hazard pay.
- [174:01]
James Stout
After listening to it for like two. Two hours last night of the.
- [174:05]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, yeah. Trump deeply pivoted. We're going back to, like, about a month before the election in 2024. But he deeply pivoted on IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively halted IVF treatment in the state by declaring that frozen embryos are legally considered to be children.
- [174:24]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [174:25]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
This decision led to a temporary shutdown of IVF services at major clinics due to liability risks. This is, you know, from Johns Hopkins public health website. Yeah. And so that started a big discussion and, and split lots of different people on different political sides about the topic.
- [174:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [174:44]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
But, yeah, Trump pivoted in ivf, and this is what he had to say.
- [174:47]
Tenant Union Federation Director
That's what this is about.
- [174:48]
Garrison Davis
Oh, I want to talk about ivf. I'm the father.
- [174:52]
James Stout
You don't hear that I'm the father of ivf.
- [174:55]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
So I want to hear this question.
- [174:56]
James Stout
What the fuck?
- [174:58]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah. Also during the campaign trail, in an interview with NBC News, this is the most important clip of it, he said the following.
- [175:06]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Well, as you know, I was always for IVF right from the beginning, as
- [175:10]
Mia Wong
soon as we heard about it.
- [175:11]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
It's fertilization and it's helping women and
- [175:13]
Garrison Davis
men and families, but it's helping women able to have a baby. Some have great difficulty and a lot
- [175:21]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
of them have been very happy with
- [175:23]
James Stout
the results, as you know.
- [175:24]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
And what we're doing, and we're doing this because we just think it's great and we need great children, beautiful children in our country. We actually need them. And we are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment.
- [175:38]
Garrison Davis
So we are paying for that treatment or we're going to want it all,
- [175:42]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
for all Americans that get it, all
- [175:44]
Garrison Davis
Americans that need it.
- [175:45]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
So we're going to be paying for that treatment or we're going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.
- [175:50]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
So either either the government will pay
- [175:51]
Robert Evans
for it or the insurance company under a mandate.
- [175:54]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yes, that did not happen. He campaigned on that. And just giving that false hoof to people struggling with infertility who can't afford the. Like I said, 30 to 60 to God knows how much thousands of dollars is pretty sick.
- [176:07]
James Stout
It's particularly weird when I understand this is a thing that lit his party's not united on, but, like, they've gone after not having to pay for other reproductive health care. Right. And like, specifically, I'm talking mostly about abortions here.
- [176:22]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [176:22]
James Stout
Like that insurers or employers would not have to pay for it. That that's a demand that you constantly hear on the. Right. Like, I guess this is such a strange issue for them because I guess it's one of the few areas where there's still like some division, where they haven't all just like fallen into line on it.
- [176:41]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Right. And right after he was elected, it was in the middle of February 2025, he put on an executive order that said, end quote, to support American families is the policy of my administration to ensure reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable. Okay, so he's already gone back on the Promise for Money campaign. But that didn't stop him from doing this.
- [177:08]
James Stout
We're going to have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women between the fertilization and all
- [177:15]
Garrison Davis
of the, the other things that we're talking about.
- [177:17]
Robert Evans
It's going to be, it's going to be great.
- [177:19]
James Stout
We're joined today.
- [177:21]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Horrible word for Liz Os.
- [177:27]
James Stout
I'm, I'm still very proud of it. I don't care.
- [177:32]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
I'll be known as the fertilization president. That, that's okay.
- [177:35]
Robert Evans
That's not bad.
- [177:38]
Garrison Davis
That's not bad. I've, I've been called, been called much worse.
- [177:44]
James Stout
Wow.
- [177:44]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah, you have.
- [177:46]
James Stout
That's. Yeah, I didn't expect that one today.
- [177:51]
Tenant Union Federation Director
I'm sorry.
- [177:52]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
It's so insane. And then back in last October, they put out like one of their, like White House fact sheets, you know, fact sheet. President J. Trump announces action to lower costs and expand access to in vitro fertilization, IVF and high quality fertility care. And per the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. You can read this on the White House website, but this summary pretty much covers it. It's that the Trump administration's IVF initiation contains two key components. The first is a drug pricing agreement with Pharaoh Super Co. EMD Serrano provides discounts on the list prices of select IVF medications. These medications will be offered at a lower cost to eligible users through a government operated portal. TRUMP rx.gov and preliminary federal estimates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services suggest potential savings of up to $2,200 per treatment cycle for medications alone. So TrumpRx.gov launched this month in February 2026. It's a government hosted website that serves as a facilitator and points Americans to drug makers direct to consumer websites where they can make purchases. It also provides coupons to use it Pharmacies disease and it seems basically like a government version of Goodrx and is very similar to Mark Cuban's Cost plus drugs which has a lot of the same medications with similar discounts including the same kind of medications for fertility and per asmr. Again, this move alone does not make IVF attainable for most patients. Fertility drugs represent only one portion of the overall cost of care and patients without good insurance coverage continue to face significant out of pocket expensive. Trump has repeatedly promised to make IVF universally accessible. This announcement does not fulfill that promise. Meaningful progress requires policies that ensure all Americans who need medical assistance to build Their families can access that care.
- [179:41]
Mia Wong
Also, by the way, you can't use your insurance with Trump rx.
- [179:45]
James Stout
So yeah, it's, it's an ether or.
- [179:48]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [179:49]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Great to note. He specifically brought this up in last night's State of the Union during one of his, what I call a propo, I think back to like the Hunger Games, what I call a propo, which is when they like bring people out. It like dates back to like Reagan and when they bring people out to be like. And this person here. But it just was such a bizarre thing to bring up. And you know, Trump's State of the Union was the longest of all time.
- [180:16]
James Stout
Yeah, I think so.
- [180:17]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And he spent a total of five minutes on health care alone. And this was part of, of it.
- [180:24]
Garrison Davis
And here tonight is the very first
- [180:26]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
customer ever to get that big discount. And it is big.
- [180:30]
James Stout
Katherine Rayner. For five years she and her husband
- [180:34]
Robert Evans
have struggled with infertility and they turned to IVF.
- [180:39]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
One drug has been costing Katherine $4,000 to purchase. But a few weeks ago she logged
- [180:46]
Robert Evans
onto the TrumpRx website and got that
- [180:49]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
same drug that cost $4,000.
- [180:52]
Garrison Davis
Got it for under $500. A reduction of much more actually than $3,500.
- [180:59]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Catherine, we are all praying for you
- [181:01]
James Stout
and you're going to be a great mom.
- [181:06]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Really creepy.
- [181:07]
James Stout
Imagine having the president talking about how you've been boning like, like what a fucking, how you're having trouble. Like that's a difficult thing for a lot of people to talk. Like I've had friends who have gone through IVF as well.
- [181:18]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [181:18]
James Stout
Thing that happens when you're in your 30s. But like it's a hard thing for people to talk about, let alone to have to have it talked about in front of the whole fucking country.
- [181:26]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Fertility and infertility is such a personal thing and it's really to use that woman's pain to promote your drug discount website. It's repugnant. It's repugnant.
- [181:41]
James Stout
Yeah. And she's still paying 500 bucks a month. Like, like that's a lot of money.
- [181:46]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
She's unreal 100%. While that's not as bad as 5,000, that's so much money. And it's like, while any discounted fertility related drugs is good, this is not what was promised. IVF still ridiculously unachievable for most people. He is not the father of ivf. And this is fraudulent advertising. Just a way of like trying to promote his like artificial empathy to a wider audience.
- [182:16]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [182:17]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
And it's despicable. And fertility issues do not need to be played with like that. That's what I had on that. It was like a very big throwaway comment. But I thought it was worth talking about because it's been. There's been like a linear lead up to what that was and I think it's important to talk about.
- [182:36]
James Stout
Yeah, definitely.
- [182:38]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [182:39]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Anyways, James, you have. You have more to talk about. About.
- [182:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [182:44]
James Stout
So going back to Congress before the State of the Union, Senator Blumenthal's office published a couple of documents from two anonymous whistleblowers which show changes in basic training for ero. ERO Enforcement Removal Operations. So they're one of the branches of ice. Right. You also have HSI and then like ice administrative stuff. Hsi, Homeland Security Investigations. The ERO are the people who are supposed to go out and detain and remove people. Right. That is what they do. The documents show, quote, cuts of more than a dozen significant practice examinations which potential ICR officers no longer must undergo. In fact, the cut is 16 out of a previous total of 25. So there are now just nine of these practical exams, whereas before there were 25. The exams remove include, quote, judgment, pistol shooting, shooting, determine removability encounters to detention and detention to removal, as well as criminal encounters. So these are like exams that would test the knowledge of the potential would be ICE agent on these issues. Right.
- [183:52]
Mia Wong
So you see, you just don't have to know that anymore.
- [183:54]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [183:54]
James Stout
Well, you can you do an open book test. It's open book multiple choice. Yeah, it is now. Yeah. In some cases there isn't a graded practical exam at all. It's just pass, fail an open book multiple choice. Yeah. To determine your understanding of the law. Right.
- [184:15]
Mia Wong
Or becoming a testing live judge.
- [184:17]
James Stout
Yeah, I know. I just. I guess I should caveat all of this by saying like, the people who killed Alex Pretty and Renee Goode were exceptionally well trained. They had been trained for a long time. They had been in DHS for years. It didn't stop the murdering American citizens industry. I'm not saying that.
- [184:34]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [184:35]
James Stout
Like, I'm not Joe Bidening this. But this is still still notable. There is also the wholesale removal of some classes. These classes that have been removed include the use of force simulation training. That's like a late. They watch a video and they have like a laser pistol. That's how they simulate use of force there. Well, they used to, I guess also the training on the legal structure of the United States government, ERO authority and use of force. It also shows a huge reduction in the Overall training, which we also heard from Ryan Schwank we'll get to in a minute. But he, he was a former lawyer with ICE who testified to Congress. Todd Lyons previously told Congress that the fledc, that's a federal law enforcement training center, it's in Georgia, had been moving from five 8 hour days to six 12 hour days. So although the number of training days for ICE agents have been cut, the number of training hours was the same. They were just gonna get through it with their grind set, I guess. But the, the whistleblower documents show that they're still appearing to do eight hour days. The number of days has been cut and the out. The number of hours of training in each day has remained the same. There are some longer days, but mostly those are people who have to make up the PT test or like some nights who seem to go later with practical stuff like first aid and shooting. But the bulk of the day days continued to be eight hours. There are now 42 total days versus 75 before. Some of this was already public. Actually in certain like forums and subreddits, er, officers have been posting about like the, the faster training course for a while. The documents show a target of 4,007 new offices in fiscal year 2026. They would aim to have commissioned 4,000 new ICE officers by the end of September. We also heard from Ryan Schwank who testified to Congress and they published some excerpts from his testimony which I'm just going to include here a couple of quotations. Quote, I am duty bound to tell you that the ICE Basic Immigration Enforcement training program is now deficient, defective and broken. And another quote here, without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duties and do not know the limits of their authority and do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order. Finally, ISIS lying to Congress and the American people about the steps it is taking to ensure its 10,000 new officers faithfully uphold the Constitution and perform their jobs. Schwank was hired in 2021 as a assistant chief counsel for the ICE officer's principal legal advisor. He also served as a resident attorney at Dilly, which is a detention center for families and children. And at some point in his past he was a private practice immigration attorney. Attorney.
- [187:21]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
What?
- [187:21]
Mia Wong
Good Lord.
- [187:22]
James Stout
This is not like a particularly woke guy I would say. And none of this is to suggest that it would be okay for there to be thousands more RICE officers if they were better trained. It still wouldn't. But it does show that the state is building a force of people who don't know what an unlawful order is and what their rights are and what their obligations are and what the rights of the people who they are are detaining are and talking for about the rights of people who are being detained. I want to talk about a development in the case of the unaccompanied Guatemalan children. People remember that over Labor Day the Trump administration tried to deport these children and they tried a number of like credit lawyer, like, like just, just really like silly, like I know these legal arguments which, which was kind of spurious to get away with with it. And they were prevented by a restraining order. Right. If you remember like the judge Sparkle Supner, who was the first judge who issued the restraining order, but did so in the middle of the night over Labor Day weekend and sent one of their attorneys to the airport to prevent them. Yeah, they truly like last minute stuff the class for that tro. And the injunction was, quote, children from Guatemala who are or will be in the custody of defendants. The all will be leads to the next part of our story. Right. A lawsuit is now alleging that CBP is flouting the injunction by returning children when they first enter custody before they're sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. So they kind of tried to previously make this argument that, like they were with orr, they weren't with ISO, they weren't with dhs, they were with orr. Right. So the Office of Refugee Resettlement is a distinct entity. So they'd sort of tried this like, oh, there's nothing we can do to stop the Office of Refugee Resources sudden. And that had not worked. Right. The suit also alleges that, quote, defendants are using misinformation, coercion, threats and fear to persuade children to relinquish their rights and sign paperwork purportedly accepting a form of expedited voluntary return. This is common across dhs. Right. In my reporting on Dilly, for instance, Primrose told me that the forms for voluntary repatriation are present, like all day and all night in their room, like anytime it gets too much for you, anytime they're too hungry, too tired, too stre stressed, too scared, you can sign that form, you're on a plane and it's all over for you. You're going back to wherever you fled from. Included in the case is a claim by an attorney at the National Immigrant justice center that unaccompanied children have been given a document that, quote, completely misstates or at least dramatically misrepresents the immigration laws that apply to unaccompanied immigrant children. And it conveys to vulnerable children threats that are. Are, quote, in clear contravention of the entire system implemented to protect and promote the safety and best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization act of 2008. So what this is suggesting is that these. These young people are being provided with. Like, essentially, it's not legal advice, but it's misconstruing the rights that they have to be protected. Right. And so that they are not. Not being advised properly of the protections that they have under law. I'm going to keep an eye on this one because I think. I don't love the phrase unaccompanied miners when we talk about this, because these children, often accompanied. There are people who are with them, who care for them on their journey here. Right. I've seen this firsthand. It just means that their immediate family are not with them. But like we saw in the State of the Union last night, Right. When the Trump administration talks about migrants, it wants to talk about people who kill children.
- [191:05]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [191:05]
James Stout
Like that. That. That is the. The thing that they. Or hurt children. That. It's a thing that they trusted out a couple of times last night. It is not the migrants who are hurting children in this instance. It is the government, these children who came here on their own to be safe with very few options. Right. And. And either their parents couldn't look after them or the parents aren't around anymore. There is not a more sympathetic case. Right. There's not a clearer example of people we should be looking after as a state or a community or a. And the fact that they're trying to turn these children around and boot them back to the dangerous situation they came from is really morally appalling. We'll keep reporting on it because I think it is, like, a very important thing to shed more light on.
- [191:47]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Absolutely.
- [191:48]
Mia Wong
It's horrifying.
- [191:50]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [191:51]
Mia Wong
Just on a basic moral level, like being the person whose job it is and apparently doing this job of trying to construct fake legal arguments so you can fucking deport children. Like, what the.
- [192:06]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [192:07]
Mia Wong
Just so evil.
- [192:09]
James Stout
Yeah. It's. It's horrible. Like, they. You know, I've spent a lot of time with migrants. I spent a lot of time with migrants with children. I've known plenty of children who are traveling without their parents.
- [192:21]
Carl Casarda
Yeah.
- [192:22]
James Stout
And the things that they go through just to get here are horrific. And the things that they are going away from are probably worse. And to think that those kids. Kids could be booted back to the places that they fled within 72 hours of arrival before they're transferred to Orr. Right. After months, potentially years. Is it? Yeah, it's genuinely appalling to me. Like, few of these things shock me, but they still disgust me. And I really hope that this is something that will continue to get coverage, not just here, but elsewhere, because these are the most egregious wrongs that the immigration system does.
- [193:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [193:01]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Let's take a quick break and then Mia will be back with some tariff talk.
- [193:18]
James Stout
Oh, what's that? Oh, is it. Is it the. The dulcet tones of someone who isn't? Joe Strange drummer singing the worst Clash song.
- [193:42]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I love how consistent you are with that, James.
- [193:45]
James Stout
It's the worst Clash song. It really pisses me off. Like, people, they think, oh, the Clash. And then they go to. No, the song that they played while they were fucking bombing Iraq in 1991 that made Joe Strama cry and wish he hadn't written it. Yeah. Appalled. Listen to other Clash songs, please.
- [194:01]
Mia Wong
Oh, God. Speaking of clashes, wow. We have finally learned the results of the long awaited Supreme Court case about specifically the tariffs that were implemented through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act Act. Those have been struck down. So this is the retaliatory tariffs. This is the Liberation Day stuff, the ones on Canada and Mexico. Some of the tariffs are still in effect. We will get to that in a second. Like, for example, the aluminum and steel ones, et cetera, et cetera, are still in effect. I'm going to be doing a full episode about this case and about what's going on with tariff policy now because. Because it's very convoluted and weird. But what's important for our purposes here is that in a lot of ways, this is a very narrow ruling in that it is just specifically about this one act, iepa. And what it specifically, very narrowly says is that the IEPA does not give Trump the authority to do tariffs. What it does, it doesn't say anything about is his ability to use other acts. And we're going to talk about that in a second. To do tariffs. And it also doesn't say anything. And I think this is actually very important about the completely unhinged state of emergencies that he's been declaring in order to be able to use iepa. And that's also going to be very important in a little bit because. Because there's no ruling on that, he's probably going to be able to do some of this stuff with other tariffs. So basically, immediately after this ruling, Trump imposed a 10% tariff across the board using Section 122 of the Trade act of 1974. So he implements it at 10%, and then the next day he says it's going to be 15%. The current rate as of date of recording on Wednesday, the one that's actually being assessed at customs, is 10%, because he hasn't signed an executive order to actually lift the 50%. It's all very weird. It's all very sort of extremely chaotic. So right now, the 15% hasn't gone through. But I want to talk about this section 122 thing that he's using right now, because this is a significantly less broad authority than the authority he was claiming before. So, okay, first off, it's worth noting that section 122 has literally never been used to enforce terroristry for. For reasons we'll get into in a second because it's very weird. And it's also going to be very, very difficult to do the kind of Calvin Ball tariff policy Trump has been implementing where he just sort of says a thing and a tariff appears. So the thing about 122 is that instead of the thing that Trump was doing before where he was just tweeting out a tariff rate for an individual country because he was bad at them, section 122, it only allows you to set a flat tariff rate for every country in the world, and the maximum tariff rate is capped at 15%. The other thing that's notable about this is that Section 122 tariffs also need to be approved by Congress after 150 days, at least in theory. The Cato Institute, interestingly, is arguing that Trump theoretically could just extend it for another 150 days after the first one. But this is. This would be a huge mess because there's no way he can win a tariff vote in Congress. There's just absolutely no way. Now, the. The other important aspect of this that's very weird that I, I think is going to become a very large sort of point of discussion in the coming weeks is that section 122. So I've read this section. It says specifically, quote, you. It can only be used to levy tariffs, quote, quote, whenever fundamental international payment problems require special import measures to restrict imports. One to deal with large and serious United States balance of payment deficits.
- [198:08]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Now, that's vague.
- [198:10]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [198:11]
Mia Wong
Oh, yeah. Well, but here's the thing, though. Here's. Here's the thing. So I tried to write a version of this where I tried to explain balance of payments and what a balance of Payment deficit is. I'm going to do that in the other episodes. Episode. It's too convoluted. But what's really important about this is that Trump has been complaining about trade deficits and the state of emergencies over trade deficit. A trade deficit is not a balance of payment deficit. Balance of payments is an accounting identity that has to do with like, it's literally like the sum of all exchanges between everyone in the US and everyone outside of the US So you by definition can't have a deficit in it because it's the accounting identity. It tracks both sides, right? So if someone in the US Is sending money to someone, it tracks both the fact that the U.S. person sent the money and the fact that the other person got the money. So you can't have a deficit because it's always one to one because it's, it's tracking both.
- [199:02]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Right, so you're saying the limit does not exist.
- [199:05]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's, it's unhinged. And like, you know, and specifically for
- [199:09]
Garrison Davis
the U.S. right, it is, it is
- [199:11]
Mia Wong
possible to get into trouble with balance of pay payments. If you can't just print your currency. Like if your currency is on the gold standard, you could in theory get in trouble here. Now a notable thing about the United States is that we are not on the gold standard.
- [199:26]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [199:26]
Mia Wong
So we, we literally, even if you use definitions of balance of payment where you could theoretically have one of these problems, the US Cannot have a balance of payments crisis. It cannot, it definitionally cannot have one the of these.
- [199:40]
James Stout
Right.
- [199:40]
Mia Wong
And the thing about this, right, is you're going to hear a lot of people talking about how the US Is a balance of payments crisis. If the US Was having the actual serious balance of payments deficit right now, there would be riots in the streets. And that's not an exaggeration. This is normally what happens. Normally balance of payments crises are a country owes a bunch of money and they straight up do not have enough US dollars to pay that off. And when that happens, things happen. Like Suddenly there's like 500 person lines outside of every gas station because there's not enough money to import gas.
- [200:12]
Robert Evans
Right?
- [200:12]
Mia Wong
Like you can't import food. It's like, like that is what happens when there's balance of payments crises, right? This is like Sri Lanka in 2024. And like that's the kind of thing where you get a balance of payments crisis and people burn down the presidential mansion. Like, we don't have one. This is not happening. So there's already becoming an attempt to be like, oh, The US Is a balance payments deficit. There's a crisis. No, no, no, no, no, no. Nonsense, gibberish. You're going to hear this a lot. It's complete nonsense. And it's, it's one of the things that makes me look at this and go, okay, this is the immediate one that he picks. But, like, this is not going to survive in court because the specific line here where it says fundamental international payment problems, like, we don't have fundamental international payment problems. Like, we pay. Yeah, all of this gets paid every year. It's funny, in the executive order, it says the US Sometimes has international payment problems. And. No, it doesn't. It has never had international payment problems problems, like on any kind of real scale. The closest thing you can do is look back at periods when the US Was again on the gold standard and even then we were fined. Like, it's, it's complete gibberish. I'm pissed about this. I'm annoyed that I have to go back to balance of payment stuff, but this. So this is probably not going to hold up when the inevitable next lawsuit goes under. However, comma, there are a couple of other trade authorities that he can use that they've been talking about using, and some of them have been used already. So broadly, we've been talking about, like, two kinds of tariffs on this show. We've been talking about the tariffs that are on a specific country, and those are the ones that are basically gone. We'll get to the one exception to that in a second. And then there's been the ones that are on goods. So if you remember, like, there was a, there was a tariff recently on, like, vanity cabinets,
- [201:53]
James Stout
stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that one. Yeah. Really weird niche things.
- [201:58]
Mia Wong
Oh, James, James, wait. Wait till I talk about what the legal authority of tariffs on kitchen cabinets was.
- [202:05]
James Stout
There's a special constitutional exemption for those.
- [202:09]
Mia Wong
It's so bad. Okay, so, so this, this is, this is the section 232 of the, of the Trade Act 1974. These are these specific tariffs and these ones are supposed to be tariffs on goods in response to threats to national security. So it's.
- [202:25]
James Stout
Yeah, hang on, join the dots for me.
- [202:28]
Mia Wong
The price of imported cabinets be too low.
- [202:34]
James Stout
Is a threat to national security. Threat to national security.
- [202:38]
Mia Wong
It is funny because this is the one the legal experts think actually can potentially survive challenges because it's national security. But it's like, okay, like, I get our Supreme Court. The fact that this ruling was 6 to 3 is frankly ridiculous, given that, again, Trump was pretending he had legal authority to issue tariffs in a bill that literally never says the word tariff and had never been used to raise a tariff before. Okay, so like the Supreme Court was like, okay, well, that's nonsense. And even I, who is extremely cynical about the Supreme Court, do not think that you can compellingly argue in front of a court and this probably won't even go to the Supreme Court like that. You can compellingly argue that is, it is part of the national security interest of the United States that American cabinet makers mildly out compete foreign cabinet makers.
- [203:24]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Wow.
- [203:24]
James Stout
Yeah, that's a weird one. I, I mean, yeah, national security and like terrorism are the magic words when it comes to the Constitution, but.
- [203:32]
Mia Wong
Yeah, but in this case, okay, like, I really seriously, with a straight face, gonna walk up there and go, national security threat.
- [203:44]
James Stout
Yeah. They've done some wild stuff in the course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was interesting to. What, like you say, you were saying, like, how much they'll get past the court. It was interesting to watch the Supreme Court justices in the State of the Union just like. Oh, yeah, just grimacing through it.
- [204:01]
Mia Wong
Yep, yep, yep, yep. He was so mad at them.
- [204:04]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
They're usually pretty stoic. But there was a serious grimace action going on.
- [204:08]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah.
- [204:10]
James Stout
There was no attempt to hide that particular face. Right. Yeah.
- [204:15]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
I don't know if we've ever had a, a sitting president, like, scold the Supreme Court court in a State of the Union in that way.
- [204:22]
Mia Wong
I think maybe it is possible FDR did it.
- [204:27]
James Stout
Yeah. I was going to say, I can
- [204:28]
Mia Wong
see FDR did try to pack the court at one point, but. Yeah, yeah, that was at least funnier
- [204:35]
James Stout
or at least back in the day when they used to like, fight on the floor of Congress like something back then.
- [204:41]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Those were the days.
- [204:43]
Mia Wong
So there's, there's one more trade thing I think we're talking about here, here in term in terms of, of where more tariff authority can come from. And that's section 301 of that same Tariff act. And this is the one where. So a lot of the tariffs on China are actually still in effect because a lot of those tariffs were actually from the first Trump administration and then Biden continued them because, yeah, they hate China. I quite seriously do not have a better destination than that. Yeah, but Section 301 is specifically for, quote, unfair trade practices.
- [205:22]
James Stout
Yeah. No, like, unfair is such a strange word to use in legislation. Right. Like, what do we, what do we mean by that?
- [205:31]
Mia Wong
Well, so like in the original context, it was like supposed to be an anti protectionist thing.
- [205:37]
James Stout
Okay.
- [205:38]
Mia Wong
But it's also like, yeah, people are like, oh my God, it's unfair that, like the Chinese companies get money from the governments. And I'm like, all of you, you get money from the government all the time. What are you talking like, yeah, like.
- [205:49]
James Stout
And like, are they talking about, like, is it unfair that wages are lower in certain countries? You know?
- [205:54]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [205:55]
Garrison Davis
And it's just like, like, you look
- [205:56]
Mia Wong
at this and it's like, okay, the U.S. the entire U.S. agriculture industry, like, all of the corn grown in this country is grown because they pass an ag bill every single year that does subsidies that are literally illegal for like any other country to have because they specifically got agreements carved out of the free trade statute. It's absolutely ridiculous. But, you know, this is the one that he's been able to sort of use so far. So I think this is going to be the one that's going to be leaned on once the Trump people sort of remember they have it. But the problem with using 301 is that there's actual bureaucratic steps you have to do. Like you have to like convene a bunch of trade authorities and you have to have like a specific anti competitive practice.
- [206:37]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [206:38]
Mia Wong
So this is also, I think, going to be very vulnerable to legal challenges, except probably on charter China, because you actually have to go through and designate what the legal practices are. And I mean, usually the process takes months, even when you're moving quickly. So there's also, I guess what I would call the sort of like the secret dark mode option where they just start doing the nightmare stuff. This is something that I think it was Hazlet, one of Trump's officials talked about that this last year is potentially
- [207:13]
James Stout
using the Smoot Harley Tariff act, like the 1930s, like. Yep, yeah, yeah.
- [207:20]
Mia Wong
The one, the one that is very famous for exacerbating the Great Depression.
- [207:23]
James Stout
Yeah, the one I learned about in high school. Yep. Yeah.
- [207:29]
Mia Wong
But it's also the other thing about this. Right. Is this act is not on the books anymore.
- [207:33]
James Stout
Oh, okay.
- [207:34]
Mia Wong
Because, well, so, okay, so I've seen conflicting explanation to this. Some people are just confused used. I think the explanation of it that I've seen is that it was superseded by sections of the 1974 Trade Act.
- [207:44]
James Stout
Okay.
- [207:45]
Mia Wong
So it's not even clear if this is in effect, but this is in theory like the sort of like dark maga, like we're reaching into the bag and pulling trade authority out of something button they could reach for.
- [207:57]
Robert Evans
Right, yeah.
- [207:57]
James Stout
Which they've done before with like Title 42 and stuff. Right, yeah. Title 42 is to stop people with tuberculosis crisis, like back in the day. That was the idea behind it. And they pulled it out in 2020. Right. And then Biden just like the tariffs kept it for much longer than Trump.
- [208:13]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [208:13]
Mia Wong
But I think, I think this is, and this is I think actually a very significant moment for the Supreme Court. And I think central bank independence will eventually become this if and when this gets to the, this gets to the courts. But tariffs are sort of the red line for a couple of the Supreme Court justices who normally side by side with Trump just specifically because a, I mean, it just says in the Constitution that tariffs are specifically a thing that Congress does. So you can't just be like, oh, they gave me the power to do this unless they like explicitly said it. But then B, it's, it's. This is, this is the financial red light. Right. Like, this is, this, this is the point at which you're with the money. So this is the point where the Supreme Court was like, you know, we've, we've let you just make up law. Laws in a whole bunch of other cases, but this is, this is the actual limit of it when it comes to authority that really significantly, like, destroys the American economy.
- [209:06]
James Stout
Yeah, like the, the, the economy has more rights than people do.
- [209:10]
Mia Wong
Yeah, absolutely. This is, this is the way that it's always been. I also want to mention one closing thing on the tariffs is that the Supreme Court didn't answer the question of if people are going to get their money back and how the refunds are going to work.
- [209:22]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Sure did.
- [209:23]
James Stout
Nope.
- [209:24]
Mia Wong
And I think it's because they couldn't get agreement on it because this ruling is kind of a mess in that it's like this, like, weird fractured coalition of justices or like parts of them agree on part of it and there's like, parts of the opinion that are agreed by.
- [209:38]
Tenant Union Federation Director
To.
- [209:38]
Mia Wong
By a plurality of the corp. And not a majority. It's very weird. But, yeah, they have no idea how
- [209:44]
Carl Casarda
this is going to work.
- [209:44]
Mia Wong
There's already lawsuits going on to get the money back that have been in place already. So presumably some kind of, kind of redispensation is going to happen. It's going to be unbelievably chaotic.
- [209:53]
James Stout
Okay.
- [209:54]
Mia Wong
But we will, we will keep you updated on, on how, How American trade negotiations go.
- [210:00]
James Stout
Yeah. Okay.
- [210:03]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
We reported the news.
- [210:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [210:06]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Put a trans girl on your couch.
- [210:08]
Mia Wong
Oh, actually, okay. I have one also really bleak update on put a trans girl on your couch, which is. We actually got numbers. Well, they're technically not the first numbers we've gotten, but we got actual good numbers on the number of trans people who've moved who've like, fled their state. Like just from mid 2024 to mid 2025. The statistics suggest that it's. It's 10% of all trans people, which is 400, 000 people. I think that's likely an undercount. And that's just the first half of 2025.
- [210:39]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
Yeah.
- [210:40]
Mia Wong
That is a humanitarian crisis. Like, this is an internal migration crisis.
- [210:44]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [210:45]
Mia Wong
These are internal. These have become internally displaced people.
- [210:47]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Yes.
- [210:48]
Mia Wong
And yeah, it's hideous. And the least that we can do at this moment is putting trans people on your couch because the violence that they're fleeing is intensifying.
- [211:01]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [211:01]
James Stout
A lot of people actually reached out to our email. Our email is coolzonetipson me. And that's mostly for things that, you know, that we should report on, not for just like general episode ideas. It's if you're trying to be a. Be a source for us or have some tip of something that you become aware of this and being reported. It's not for like, Robert should do this episode on Bastards. It's not. I just want to emphasize once again that it is not there.
- [211:29]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
There is a there. If you want to do that, go to the Bastards subreddit. There is a section for that. Thank you.
- [211:35]
Robert Evans
Yep.
- [211:36]
James Stout
But a lot of people had reached out to be like, I want to do this, but I don't know of anyone and obviously I don't want to be like posting online like trans folks come to my house because that seems
- [211:45]
Robert Evans
like weirdo beh behavior.
- [211:47]
James Stout
So that's something we. We will try and aggress, like in a more general, kind of mutual aid focused.
- [211:52]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [211:52]
James Stout
Series of episodes that we'll work on. But those people. It is good that you are trying to do something.
- [211:59]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [212:00]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
We reported the news.
- [212:04]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
We reported the news.
- [212:11]
Robert Evans
Hey. We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [212:17]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
It could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for. It could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [212:37]
Tenant Union Federation Director
There's a fire inside you you can't ignore, stand still, not achieve chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we're here to help you keep going further Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella Edu to learn more.
- [212:52]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
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- [213:28]
Carl Casarda
Iflag hosts premier flag football tournaments nationwide.
- [213:32]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
From boys, girls, high school girls and adults. From first time players to elite competitors, iflag delivers top level competition, unforgettable experiences and a community built around the game
- [213:44]
James Stout
ready to be part of it.
- [213:45]
Garrison Davis
Join the movement, find your tournament and
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Podcast Sponsor Announcer
learn more@iflag.org that's iflag.org There's a difference
- [213:53]
Podcast Host (It Could Happen Here)
between liking a house and actually getting it. Redfin is built to make up that difference and close the gap between finding and owning the home for you. You Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents, so when you find a home you love, you're not a step behind when it comes to making an offer. That means less watching great homes disappear and more focus on the one you'll call home. Redfin helps turn saved listings into real addresses. Get started@redfin.com own the dream this is an iheart podcast.
- [214:26]
Tenant Union Federation Director
Guaranteed human.