It Could Happen Here Weekly 232

Summary

Behind the Bastards: It Could Happen Here Weekly 232

Date: May 16, 2026
Host: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Summary by Podcast Expert Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This week’s “It Could Happen Here” weekly roundup delivers a bracing examination of America’s accelerating slide towards authoritarianism and deepening crisis. The episode brings together a rotating panel of journalists, technologists, and activists—Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Cooper Quintin, Andrew Sage (and guests Colonel Panic and others)—to discuss the collapse of privacy, the U.S. government's increasingly draconian counterterrorism strategy, the Supreme Court’s attack on Black voting rights, America’s fragile systems, and the relentless drumbeat of war, surveillance, and institutional failure.

The mood is often frustrated, sometimes bleak, but balanced with incisive analysis, a focus on direct action, and wry dark humor. The primary themes include the “privacy apocalypse,” the weaponization of counterterrorism, the unraveling of American democracy, and tools for resisting the surveillance state.

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Key Segment 1: The Privacy Apocalypse & Community Counter-Surveillance

Timestamps: 03:07 – 44:55

Major Points

• Explosion of Surveillance Tech:

  • Discussion of ALPRs (“Flock” cameras), facial recognition (including ICE’s Mobile Fortify and Clearview AI), gunshot and "distressed person" detection.
  • Colonel Panic: “You may notice all these cameras popping up around your town... They’re essentially ALPRs.” [04:02]
  • False positives are rampant; detection systems can be activated by fireworks, balloons, or animal noises.

• Misuse and Risks of Facial Recognition:

  • Cooper Quintin: “Facial recognition is never 100% accurate... dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested.”
  • Social media scraping and biometric databases are fueling error-ridden identifications.

• Stingrays and IMSI Catchers:

  • Cooper describes their work detecting fake cell towers (Stingrays), often misunderstood as omnipresent at protests.
  • In practice, “these are expensive, rare, and mostly used for specific manhunts—not mass protest surveillance.”

• Penlink, Location Data, Social Media Mapping:

  • Law enforcement buying near real-time location data from ad networks with no warrants required.
  • Apps routinely snitch on users; users should disable location when possible.

• Counter-Surveillance Tools and Projects:

  • Featured: Ray Hunter (IMSI Catcher detection), “We Spy” devices (detecting Flock cameras, drones, and other surveillance tools).
  • Colonel Panic: “I came up with the idea for what people are now calling we spy... you can just tell, get alerts when specific devices are around you.” [20:32]
  • Cooper: “This gives people something to do... a tool to get off their couch and start to fight back.” [27:28]
  • Crowd-mapping surveillance infrastructure is empowering, demystifying, and helps push back against a sense of helplessness.

Notable Quotes

• “Our phones are snitches, man. Our phones are snitches.” – Cooper Quintin [19:18]
• “Fascism can really make people feel helpless, and this overarching surveillance can really make people feel helpless.” – Cooper [27:28]

Memorable Moments

• Discussion of various DIY projects, open-source counter-surveillance gadgets, and the importance of collective resistance.
• The sly, jokey camaraderie between participants about surveillance, defeatism, and finding ways to push back.

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Key Segment 2: Organizing Against State Surveillance

Timestamps: 44:55 – 52:56

Major Points

• Local communities are building alliances to fight Flock camera installations and centralized “real-time intelligence centers.”
• Example: Asheville, North Carolina—after activism and a city council meeting, mass opposition forced postponement of a major surveillance center.
• Cooper (EFF): “A ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts recently because of community pressure... Your city council doesn’t care. They want to score easy political wins... But when people show up and fight, it makes it politically poisonous.” [37:21]
• Cross-ideological coalitions are possible; even libertarians and some right-wingers oppose surveillance.

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Key Segment 3: The Trump White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy

Timestamps: 55:35 – 95:02

Major Points

• Overview:

  • The new strategy, spearheaded by Sebastian Gorka, is extraordinarily short, overtly politicized, and focuses on “narco-terrorists,” “legacy Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists” (notably anarchists, antifa, and “radically pro-transgender” activists).

• Key Pillars:

  1. Narco-Terrorism and Drug Overdoses:
     • Trump claims that overdoses are a form of terrorism and seeks to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—enabling military strikes.
  2. Legacy Islamist Threats:
     • Effort to link national security to “unfettered mass migration,” globalist policies, and the “decline of Western culture.”
  3. Left-Wing Terrorism:
     • Uses a single example (the assassination of Charlie Kirk) as justification for targeting leftist groups domestically.
     • “Our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.” [59:52]

• Comparison with Past Strategies:

  • Unlike Biden’s detailed categorization of racist and right-wing violence (2021), this document omits any reference to “racially or ethnically motivated violence.”
  • Instead, it frames all counterterrorism as apolitical—even while weaponizing it against the administration's ideological enemies.

• Partisan Weaponization & Examples:

  • Attacks on “de-radicalization” programs, FBI’s monitoring of “trad cath” extremists, federal attention to school board harassment—all reframed as government overreach.

• Lack of Actual Strategy:

  • The document provides little in the way of real counterterrorism planning, relying on generic platitudes and military solutions.

Notable Quotes

• “[They] do not have a real plan for most of what they’re doing… hacked together, cobbled together, and executed by people who don’t know what they’re doing.” – Robert Evans [87:09]

• “When you designate a group a foreign terrorist organization, that means what they are doing is terrorism. …Trump is basically using the same move against people with left-wing, anarchist or anti-fascist views.” – Garrison Davis [90:01]

Memorable Moments

• Side-by-side reading of strategy texts from the Trump and Biden eras—highlighting drastic partisan divergence in threat definition.
• The panel’s darkly comic take on the administration’s sincerity, with repeated “weapons of mass destruction” language about fentanyl.

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Key Segment 4: Systemic Parasitism and Historical Analysis

Timestamps: 98:26 – 130:41

Major Points

• Andrew Sage unpacks "Progress" (by Samuel Miller McDonald), tracing the evolution of human societies through three phases (Heaven, Human, System):
  1. Heaven: ancient religious and hierarchical societies, temples.
  2. Human: Enlightenment, colonialism, rise of nation-states, global resource flows.
  3. System: Modern era—hyper-networked extraction, corporate dominance, attention as a commodity.
• Parasitism as a core metaphor: each phase adds layers to the system by “borrowing from the future” and via new forms of extraction and control.
• There is hope in recognizing the fragility of the system, agency for resistance, and ecological models of mutualism over parasitism.

Notable Quotes

• “The system sees you. You know, it sees you as part of its functioning.” – Andrew Sage [122:39]
• “You can be and you are an agent in history… whether you serve as a cog in the machine or a wedge in the machine, that’s up to you.” – Andrew Sage [122:39]

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Key Segment 5: Supreme Court Dismantling the Voting Rights Act

Timestamps: 134:16 – 157:24

Major Points

• Louisiana v. Calais:

  • Supreme Court effectively allows racial gerrymandering unless explicit intent to discriminate can be proven (not just results).
  • This undermines the core of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which was expressly written to be a results-based test.
  • Immediate consequences for Alabama and other states, reinforcing 21st-century Jim Crow conditions—eliminating the only two majority Black districts.

• Legal Expert Reactions:

  • Legal scholar Ed Foley: “This ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act but destroys the central meaning of the section... an abomination.” [143:20]

• The Broader Pattern:

  • Court stacking the deck for Republicans and white supremacist governance; obliteration of multiracial democracy.

• Bleak Warning:

  • “If you’ve ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it’s right now... what would you be doing during Jim Crow? The answer is whatever the fuck you’re doing now.” – Mia Wong [157:12]

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Key Segment 6: Weekly News Roundup

Timestamps: 161:02 – 220:58

Grab Bag Highlights

• Global Items:

  • UK paratroops drop into Tristan da Cunha to battle Hantavirus.
  • Japanese snack giant switches to black-and-white packaging due to the Iran war disrupting ink ingredients.

• Domestic Madness:

  • CIA allegations of car bomb in Sinaloa; speculation about leaks.
  • Gas tax repeal debates—seen as bipartisan “sloppulist” populist policy that could devastate funding for roads.
  • Conspiracism around assassination attempts on Trump; wild swings in public trust in basic facts.

• Culture War & Surveillance:

  • Turning Point USA cancels anti-trans event after murder of a trans student; panic over “Antifa militia” that didn’t exist.
  • Fears over new counterterrorism powers stoking self-censorship and chilling effects—without actually expanding government powers much beyond what was already happening.

• US-China Spy “Scandal”:

  • Arrest of a local California mayor for unregistered foreign agent work—actual activities consisted largely of posting Chinese propaganda articles, not espionage or sabotage.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Exchanges

1. On Phone Surveillance: “Our phones are snitches, man.” – Cooper Quintin [19:18]

2. On Surveillance Tech Pushback:
   “This gives people something to do... Americans love buying a thing. We love a gadget. So there's a thing you can set up and start pushing back, even just a little.” – Cooper [27:28]
   “It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kid.” – Colonel Panic [23:54]

3. On the Voting Rights Act gutting:
   “If you’re not happy with the answer to the question ‘What would you be doing during Jim Crow?’ then it’s time to move.” – Mia Wong [157:12]

4. On Political Weaponization of Terror Laws:
   “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.” (White House counterterrorism doc, read by Garrison Davis) [59:52]

5. On Systemic Fragility:
   “This system is not unassailable... To borrow from [Chinese military philosophy], it’s a paper tiger.” – Andrew Sage

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Actionable Takeaways

• Counter-Surveillance:

  • Learn to build or acquire community counter-surveillance tools (Ray Hunter, We Spy).
  • Join or support local campaigns mapping, exposing, and resisting surveillance infrastructure.

• Political Engagement:

  • Organize locally to fight surveillance contracts, support multiracial democracy, and defend voting rights.
  • Pay attention to legal changes and court decisions; the landscape is shifting rapidly.

• Mental Health:

  • Recognize, as many hosts said, “it’s easy to feel overwhelmed,” but there are tangible things you can do.

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Resources, Guides, and How-Tos

• Ray Hunter counter-surveillance: https://rayhunter.eff.org
• EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense Guides: https://ssd.eff.org
• Kernel Panic’s Open-Source Surveillance Detection Projects: https://kernelpanic.tech
• Flock Camera Mapping: https://dflock.me

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Overall Tone

Candid, often bleak, but grounded in actionable knowledge and a fierce commitment to truth and mutual aid. The hosts blend dark humor, rigorous analysis, and encouragement for grassroots resistance and self-education.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode is an unfiltered, no-bullshit immersion into the machinery of state surveillance, the slow-motion destruction of participatory democracy, and the tools—both technical and political—that communities are using to push back. If you want to understand how technological and legal changes directly intersect with justice, activism, and your everyday agency, this is essential listening.

Transcript

[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Mia Wong]

Seriously, I insist.

[James Stout]

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[Mia Wong]

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[Robert Evans]

You don't be silly.

[Cooper Quintin]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Cooper Quintin]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Cooper Quintin]

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[Colonel Panic]

Visit wells fargo.comactivecash Terms apply

[Robert Evans]

call Zone 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 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.

[James Stout]

Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me today, James, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quintin, who is a senior staff technologist at the eff, and Colonel Panic, who is a hacker. And we are going to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is coming our way. I guess the end of privacy and what you can do to stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for joining me, both of you.

[Colonel Panic]

Absolutely.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. Hey, James, happy to be on the show again. Thanks for having me.

[James Stout]

Yeah, thanks for. For making the time. So I guess, like, in the case that somebody lives under a rock, we should start breaking down some of the different, like, surveillance mechanisms that the state is building. And maybe kernel Panic, you can kick us off with Flock, because that is the one that has probably got the most attention recently. And then, Cooper, we can pick up on some of the many other privacy violation tools.

[Colonel Panic]

Certainly. You may notice all these cameras popping up around your town. They're on a black pole. It's a black camera with a solar panel. And these are what we call flaw cameras. They're really easy to spot, but they're essentially ALPRs. They're automatic license plate readers. So this is like a form of dragnet surveillance where anytime you drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate. And they've expanded this to do other things like facial recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed person detection is another one, which is really dodgy.

[James Stout]

Yeah, fascinating. But it just looks for people who are acting distressed or I think it's

[Colonel Panic]

a sound thing too, right?

[James Stout]

Oh, okay.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. I think it's pretty similar to gunshot detection in that it looks for people shouting, people in the heightened state of emotion.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

I mean, this could really easily be a protest detector, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or imagine if that was a fucking peacock. Like you have when peacocks get angry. They really sound like someone's dying. Or a fox.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. I mean, false positives are already a huge issue for gunshot detections in general. Right. They can go off for a balloon popping. They can go off for fireworks.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Colonel Panic]

And then just because you're in the area, you know, you're now part of an investigation.

[James Stout]

So perhaps we should talk a little bit about some of the other ones. Cooper, maybe we start with facial recognition.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. Yeah. Facial recognition is all the rage these days. A lot of law enforcement is, unfortunately, investing in this. We've seen, of course, ICE with their Mobile Fortify tool that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this is. So this is an app that runs on Android phones that they can scan people with and, you know, apparently, according to them, get a fully 100% accurate identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial recognition will tell you that that is not true, and that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never 100% accurate. And, in fact, there have been dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned, and charged because of incorrect facial recognition results. This has also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There was a woman in Oregon who ICE scanned her face, and they scanned her twice. Both times, it came up with a different identity for this woman. And it turns out that both of those identities, neither of them, were the correct identity for this woman.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Cooper Quintin]

But ICE has been using this as. As a, you know, sort of judge, jury, and executioner to determine whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody.

[Colonel Panic]

Wow.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens is, when you come to the United States, you're a migrant, right? Is that they will collect a large amount of your biometric data. But it seems that even with all of that, the resolution that they have on their scanners is actually very poor.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. Yeah, that's. I mean, that's. That is correct. Right. So the way that this works, the databases that they have, it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's most likely checking against the, like, TSA database of biometric scans that you do every time you take a flight. Of course, all of the at the border biometric scans, the ingress and egress scans, any sort of visa information or anything like that. There's also the Clearview AI. So even if you've never done any of these, there's another app called clearview AI, which is used by law enforcement and by ice, which does a similar thing, but its backend data is all of the photos that have been posted online. So they're using data from social media, Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match and determine who you are based on that sort of publicly available data as well.

[Mia Wong]

Great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

What a reassuring thing to hear.

[Colonel Panic]

The high cost of the free service.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think those are things that people have a very reasonable fear of concern with, anger about, however you want to put it.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

There is some stuff which I think perhaps we. We just need to understand what it means, I guess, and maybe we could start there. I know, Cooper, you've done a lot with Stingrays or cell phone site sim or lots of names for them.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of years working on a project called Ray Hunter, which is a open source project to detect cell site simulators or Stingrays or MC catchers, whatever you want to call them. I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short, the way it works is it's a little piece of software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those little things that you buy to get like WI fi in various places from a cellular connection. And it looks at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that it's connected to, specifically the control traffic. Not what you're doing, but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting to the towers. It looks for a number of suspicious things, signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative of McCatcher activity. So we've been running this for a year. There's several hundred of these around the US if not a couple thousand, but we don't have exact numbers. There's a bunch of these all over the US we had a bunch in Minneapolis. People have been running them in Chicago and LA when that was going on. People have been running them all over the country.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Cooper Quintin]

And we have found some evidence of IMSI catchers, but a lot less than we expected, or a lot less than many people expected. I actually didn't expect to find many. And specifically, we have not found any evidence of IMSI catchers being used at protests. And I should stop here for a second to explain what a Stingray or mccatcher is. This is a fake cell tower, essentially, that tricks your phone into connecting to it so that your phone will identify itself to the MC catcher. These are used for. The primary reason these are used for is to track down a specific person. So, like what we see in court documents is that these are used to verify that somebody is home before a police raid happens. Right. This is what the vast majority of use for these is. That is one use. The other potential Use. And the one we're actually more concerned about is that these could be used to identify who is in a specific area. You could set one of these up outside, let's say outside of a mosque or outside of a protest. An anarchist meeting or a anti fascist meeting is regularly happening. Right. And identify the people who are in that meeting by getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone company and saying, give us the subscriber information for these people. And that is a far more concerning use. And we are not seeing it so far with 300 being used for that. What we're seeing is uses that seem to be more in line with the sort of manhunt or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation, which is also what we're seeing in court documents.

[Andrew Sage]

Interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It doesn't mean that the government cannot find out that you are at a place or at a protest. Right. It just means that they're not using this mechanism of doing that.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, that's. That's exactly right. So people have asked us what are. What our theories are for, about why we're not seeing these at protests? Because for a lot of, for a long time there were a lot of activists that were pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest. Right. Or that maybe like, you know, to use the old. There was. The old cointelpro language was like the architects of cointelpro wanted activists to feel like there was a cop behind every bush and inside every mailbox. Right. And that was really the impression that a lot of activists had about IMSI catchers. Right. That they were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that they were just constantly being used. And it seems like that's not the case. And I think there's a couple reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about a million dollars for a nimcatcher contract. So these are actually like fairly rare and they're hard to operate. They require a lot of technical knowledge. They require a lot of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually go do all this work if it's not necessary. Right. And it's a lot more expensive than using one of the many other surveillance technologies. They have Flock facial recognition, things like pen link, which we can talk about in a little bit. But other, other databases of location because our phone advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location. Right. And there's a whole surveillance industry around that, selling that data to police also. The other big issue is that there was a legal decision in 2020 2019, I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers will need to get on this in 2019 called Carpenter versus USA. And the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to access historical cell site, so this is where people were located based on what, what cell towers they're connected to that police would need a warrant for that information. And it seems like at that time a lot of law enforcement agencies decided that that also extended to stingrays. Whereas previously they had not been needing to get a warrant to use their stingrays. It seems like a lot of them thought, oh, okay, this seems like it probably also applies to stingrays and therefore any case using stingrays without a warrant will get thrown out. Therefore we're going to need to get a warrant to use this thing. And it turns out having to get a warrant was too high of a bar for most police agencies and made them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had to and thought they could get a warrant for it. But there's a lot of other things they don't have to get a warrant for. So we think. My theory is, is that they are using these other technologies that are easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get a warrant and saving the stingrays only for when they are sure they can get a warrant and when the cost and complexity is justified.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that makes sense. The 2018, June 22, 2018, that Supreme Court case.

[Cooper Quintin]

Thank you. Real time fact checking here on ichhh.

[James Stout]

Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about Penlink and like other location data. I, I did hear recently that it's possible that Iran had used commercially available location data to target some of its strikes on US troops in the Middle east, which is wild to consider.

[Cooper Quintin]

I had not heard that, but it's not surprising and it is absolutely wild. Right. So yeah, so Penlink is a company that actually previously had sold a lot of software to help out with IMSI catchers. So interestingly, they have now pivoted to different types of surveillance. So they a few years ago acquired this company, Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the software that was acquired by Penlink in this sale. There were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway, there was a report on Citizen Lab. That's excellent. I highly recommend it. But the short of it is that Penlink has acquired two of their main products, one of which is called Tangles and the Other One is called WeBlock. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links between different people, different organizations. Say like anybody who has interacted with the John Brown Gun Club or anybody who has interacted with the socialist RA or anybody who has mentioned the words antifa, right, you can go build a dossier on that person, build a dossier on who their friends are, what they're talking about, scrape specific groups, any sort of left leaning group, right, they can build a dossier on that, who all the people are, who their friends are, and then they have this tool called WeBlock. And what WeBlock does is it is a near real time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide. And so how it works is police can circle a specific area on a map and it will show information about all of the phones that they know that were in that area in some sort of timeframe. And I think that the data gets updated every 24 hours. So you're gonna have about a 24 hour delay in that data. So you circle an area just like with your finger and you're going to see who was there as of 24 hours ago and back to whatever time frame you set. You can then select any one of those phones that were in that area and see information about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information, like what sort of age bracket that person's in, what their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether they're a parent, what their personality is, etc. Etc. But you can also see a historical map of where that person or where that device, we should say has been, right? And so you can see where they're at, where they spend their days, which is probably their work or something like that, where they spend their nights, which is probably their house, where they spend sort of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house, something like that. But you can see everywhere they've gone. You can see if they were at a specific protest, you could see everybody who was at a specific protest. You could do a lot of different things with that. And we think that they get that data from advertising networks. We know they get it from apps on your phone. And basically those apps are sending information to advertising networks which is then sold or scraped by Penlink to add to their database for this app. And all of this is then sold to law enforcement. So law enforcement can get this information. And none of it requires a warrant currently, or law enforcement does not think they need a warrant. To acquire this data, and judges have upheld that so far.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Colonel Panic]

So you're saying when you download an app and you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and then sold to third party?

[Cooper Quintin]

Not every app, but yeah, a lot

[James Stout]

of apps, like most of them.

[Cooper Quintin]

We've been really strongly encouraging people to not give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason why that app should have location permissions. Right.

[Colonel Panic]

Like.

[Cooper Quintin]

Like on my phone, the only app that has location permissions is my maps app and my weather app. Right. And that's because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them. But if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid, like if I was heading into something, I mean, if I was heading to something that I didn't want people to know I was there, I would turn my phone off or at least put it on airplane mode, Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

You know, short of that, you can turn off location services entirely for your phone. Right. And give no app your location. But yeah, it's the. The. Our phones are snitches, man. Our phones are snitches.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That is the. The big take home is the big snitch you carry around in your pocket. Take everywhere with you. Talking of snitches, I can't think of a way to fucking pivot this into adverts.

[Cooper Quintin]

Damn products and services. Here's some things you can buy to snitch on you.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Hey, buy these things. They'll give away information, data, Sell it to an Israeli company who'll sell it back to the cops. All right, we are back. I hope you bought something nice. I want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting. It gives people something. They can understand a little more about the web of surveillance around them. Right. They can. They can feel a little bit more informed. So let's. Let's talk about it. Maybe Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off, you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't know how you want to put it. You're behind some of them.

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah, certainly. I came up with the idea for what people are now calling we spy. It actually was initially called Oui Spy. It was organizational unique identifier, which is the first six characters of a Mac address. But it's art. You know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it. It has dual meanings, we spy. But this, this actually kind of was born from the war driving community, which is old school, driving around trying to find devices, just seeing what's out there. And so essentially you have all these devices that are transmitting around you and it's totally fine and totally legal to just receive passively. And so things like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to just drive around and just kind of see what devices are in your area. And through this I came up with a device that was based on remote ID stuff prior to We Spy, that just detects drones and then transmits it over meshtastic or detects a device and transmits it over meshtastic. And then I was like, it'd be really cool to have a device that if you, if you have a device that you want to know when comes around you, it'll just beep. And so I just took a microcontroller and, and drew out the, the design for this thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the firmwares that do a few different things. For instance, if you, if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove by or something, you could put in the OUI for that or the Mac address for a specific device and you can just tell, get alerts when devices are around you, essentially. So that's where all that began.

[James Stout]

Yeah. To explain how like this might help someone, let's say like you just wanted to get an idea, right, of the surveillance infrastructure that, that you encountered in your daily life. You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't know all that shit is your local newspaper is dead now because everyone's local newspaper is dead now. Right. So there's no reporting on it. Like if they wanted to get one of these devices, cruise around town and work out like when they were being spied on, like what kind of abilities would it give them?

[Colonel Panic]

Certainly. So there's drone detection on this device so you can have it alert when drones are near or have to have it map via remote id. But the biggest one I think that has been the most important one is the Flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras than Flock, but this is the important one lately. So a lot of people are out on, you know, out doing war driving and doing real time research and contributing to, you know, adding to this database of Flock cam signatures essentially. And it's either WI Fi or Bluetooth and some of them are over cellular too. But essentially I made a firmware called flocku. When you drive around it just war drives Flock cams. And a good friend of mine did some recent research and found out that if you put the microcontroller into WI fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flot cams. So that firmware just came out a couple days ago, so constantly being added to. So if anyone has Mac addresses, OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kid.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It allows people to then crowdsource or do community based mapping of this stuff. Right. To give people. And I know I have friends who've reported on gunshot detection software. It won't surprise people to find out which communities are the most surveilled and which communities are the least surveilled, but it nonetheless is important. Like, that's an important function in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones. People might be thinking, why would I want to look for drones? Drones are super cool. I just fly them around to see the birds. Can you explain that drones might also play a role in surveillance?

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah, absolutely. I'm an avid drone flyer, so I developed this just for funsies and made a drone detector. And I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are the pd, unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's really interesting to see and to see that they're flying, you know, more regularly than any hobbyist.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. This has become a big part of lately. Cops used to have to send up a helicopter to look at something from above. Right. And they still do all the time. I hear that over my house every day. But they can also do it with the drone now for much less money. Cooper, do you want to explain Ray Hunter a little bit for people who are suddenly shocked by all of this and they want to turn their car into a beeping machine?

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I will do that. I want to extol the virtues of Wespy for a little bit before that though.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

I mean, this is how I linked up with Colonel Panic, because I thought this was such a really amazing project and I think that it's. It serves a couple purposes, right. I think that there's one very practical purpose of, like, this can help you map out the surveillance in your town. Right. You can export the data from this and upload it directly to lockmapper. Right. Or there's some other site that'll help you, like plot a route from point A to point B, avoiding flat cameras, which I think is really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how many flock cameras are in your town. Like, people like they, they. They are unobtrusive to a degree. Right. Like, they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah, right. But when you're like, I was surprised by how much it Went off in my town. And then I'd look up and I'm like, oh, yeah. Flat camera. Flat camera. Okay. Right. And it got me used to, like, spotting those cameras around, right. And I think that it's a really. It's a really useful piece of propaganda work, essentially, in that. In that way to get people used to spotting these, to get people thinking about, well, where are these? How many of these are there in my town, right? Like, people are like, well, you could just go look for them. Yeah, but people don't. Right.

[James Stout]

You've got other shit to do. Yeah, like.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, exactly. But if I hear that from the. From the, you know, really loud buzzer, right, I. I know that something is going on. Right. It's more of a. It's a little more jarring. It's good in that way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I see it as like a. Like a little. I don't know. Imagine a little parrot sat on your shoulder and went, you're being spied on. You're being spied on. You're being spied on just constantly. Yeah, yeah. And you realize the extent to which that is happening.

[Colonel Panic]

Surveillance. Coal mine. Canary, essentially, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Canary is better. Better analogy.

[Cooper Quintin]

Kind of like lion, cat, but surveillance cat, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

Instead of every time you're lying, it says that. It just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

The other thing that I think is cool about UI Spy and ragemilter and why I think these are good projects is it gives a lot of people something to do. Fascism can really make people feel helpless, and this overarching surveillance can really make people feel helpless. And it's really easy for people to fall into privacy nihilism and security nihilism and just be like, well, I'm going to be watched constantly. There's nothing I can do, so screw it. Why do anything? And this gives people something to do. There's a thing you can. And Americans love buying a thing. We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you can go buy or build or set up or whatever and go. Start pushing back, even just little by little, on the surveillance around you. Right. And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other things. Right. It becomes easier to go to your city council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It becomes easier to find and organize with other people in your community. Right. It becomes easier to start to think about direct action in that sense, it becomes a bit of propaganda by deed. Right. Like we're Giving people the tool to get off their couch and start to push back and start to fight back and start to become a part of a community. Right. So I think it's really important for that with Ray Hunter. So I already kind of described how it works, but we had, we had a few goals with Ray Hunter. One was to figure out, you know, how often cell site simulators were being used in the US and around the world. But, but you know, I live, I live here, so this is my main focus, but specifically how often they're being used to spy on protesters. Right. Because we were getting this idea that a lot of activists thought that they, they were everywhere.

[Inner Balance Ad Announcer]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

And I thought that other things were a much bigger threat. Right. Like I'm, there are, there are things that I'm more concerned about. But also cell site simulators, Stingrays are pretty mysterious, right. Like, we don't, we know the broad strokes of how they work, but we don't know the technical details of what exploits they are using to, you know, essentially trick people's phones into connecting to them. Right. So this was a, this was a chance to try to get some ground truth information about that as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

And we have succeeded in that. We have a bunch of recordings from around the US of things that we think are quite likely to be suicide simulators actively in use by law enforcement. And we've got some ideas about how they're working and what they're doing. And the other goal is that we wanted to try to like calm down some of the fear and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was a threat model, that they need to worry and give people more accurate threat models. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

And also give people a modicum of comfort. Right. This is not a self defense device. Right. This is actually like, at the end of the day, this is a data collect, like not data collection. We're not collecting your data, but this is a research project. We're collecting the data about how often do we think we're actually seeing these. Right. But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, Right. Because you have Rayhunter with you, right. And if it doesn't go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off, you're like, okay, you know, maybe this is not actually a threat model that I need to worry so much about. Right. And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I need to worry about? Oh, probably things like pen link. Probably things like celebrate and the cops arresting me and making a copy of all the data on my phone.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right.

[Cooper Quintin]

Probably other, you know, facial recognition and other things like that, which I think are the things that you should be thinking about and worrying about. Yeah, that's been the point of bravehunter, and I think it's been successful in that sense.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

But, yeah, we really. I mean, we want. We want more people to install this. Right. Especially the next time ICE lays siege to a city. Right. We want to have. We want to have them there. You know, late in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set up where we then had like a couple hundred of these on the ground in Minneapolis. And we didn't find. We did not find anything in Minneapolis that we felt was conclusive evidence of an MC catcher. Well, ICE was there laying siege to the city. Hopefully there is no next time they lay siege to a city.

[James Stout]

Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.

[Cooper Quintin]

But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get sort of a ground game set up very quickly to try to determine if they're using this form of surveillance or not.

[James Stout]

So, talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products and services. If you buy them, that will probably result in your data being collected, which will in turn be sold perhaps to an Israeli company who will sell it to the cops.

[Cooper Quintin]

Shamba would never sell my data.

[James Stout]

All right, we are back. I think that's a really good explanation of, like, the value of these devices. The more, you know, the more, you know, and this is a struggle that I have on a daily basis at the moment. There are so many things to be angry and scared about right now. We don't need to invent shit that we shouldn't be angry and scared about. Like, there's. We. We need to, like, focus on the things that are a real threat. And there are things in. In this landscape which are a real threat. And so I think it. It helps people to have that. Like, it's one thing to, yeah, go on Flock Mapper or whatever and be like, okay, well, they're there and there and there. It's another one to be like, well, shit. In my going out to get a pizza with my friends, I was spied upon five times. And I think that that is very valuable. At the same time, nobody tried to sell site, spoof and get my information that way. I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit about, like, how people can organize. San Diego has done a spectacular job of signing a contract that it can't stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stopped using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money to a Spying company, which is great because our city is Enron by the sea. It will continue to be a shit show forever, apparently. But like, let's assume that other people have slightly more competent local government.

[Cooper Quintin]

What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they signed that.

[James Stout]

California politics is a shit show, but San Diego is a fucking joke. Many examples of this.

[Cooper Quintin]

Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our Lord 2025, he got indicted by the FBI. So, like, how stupid do you have to be? So I have no leg to stand on. But also in California, so it all tracks.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The greatest great times on the left coast.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about how people have organized their communities against surveillance. Like just to like paint a picture for folks here, right? Like, the flock camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The flock camera doesn't know if you came from another state to obtain reproductive health care. The flock camera doesn't know if you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for your little baby. It captures all of that shit, right? Like there is a broad range of people in this country who are fucking disgusted at that. People who we might not be used to organizing with. But perhaps you guys could like explain like how or if you're aware of instances where people have organized against state surveillance. It would be cool to hear about that.

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah. I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina at a. an event called Nerd Night. And Nerd Night is essentially, it's a way to go to a bar without just a bunch of drivel. You know, you go, and then somebody does three talks, 15 minutes each. And so the host was kind enough to give me a 25 minute slot at the end to talk about flock cameras in our city here. And it just so happened to be happening before. They tried to vote on a real time intelligence center that centralized Flock, Axon and all of our drone data into one just like wall of surveillance for the city. And so I, I did this talk and a city council member showed up. Our coolest city council member, Kim Roney, she showed up. And during the, the questions at the end, I was unsure because on our portal here it said, the APD says, you know, we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim Roney came up and confirmed that something like 4,000 agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them, but they can request. And we just hand it over. So that's, that's one thing that we learned at that time. So this, this prompted a big push that was kind of happening for city council. So a lot of folks that came to that talk came to city council. And I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board. I mean, this is Appalachia here. Nobody. Nobody wants to be surveilled in these hollers, you know?

[James Stout]

Yeah, this is one of those areas where we can build really broad coalitions, like, of people who we might not agree on with on everything. Like, this is a threat to anyone who wants to do almost anything apart from, I guess, just go shopping.

[Colonel Panic]

One interesting point is that over 100 people showed up to city council. I'm, you know, this is. This is new to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit. And I ceded my time to another a speaker, but over a 100 people showed up. And then they pulled it from the. The vote. They pulled it from the agenda. So lots of folks left, but then some folks stuck around for general comment and still got it out there. But, you know, we'll. We'll see what happens down the line.

[Cooper Quintin]

They love to do that tactic. They did the same thing in Oakland when it was up for. When it was up on the agenda, they said a ton of people showed up to discuss it, and then they were like, oops, no, never mind. We're going to pull that from the agenda today.

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

It's such a shady tactic. But no, I mean, at eff, we've seen. We've seen similar things all over the country. You know, a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts recently because of community pressure, Right. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care. Right. They want to score easy political wins. Right. Flock sells them this as an easy political win. Right. They can stop carjackings. Right. They can find car thefts. They can do all these things that are popular. Nobody likes being carjacked. Nobody likes having their car stolen. Right? But when people show up to city council and push back and fight against this, it makes it not an easy political win, right? It makes it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies. And it should be. We shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen to. To be outside and like, look, I would love to not have a car, right? But this is America. Like, everybody drives all the time. That is, that is the society we live in, unfortunately.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

And you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society. And like you said, I think we can build very broad coalitions around this.

[Colonel Panic]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

And we can start to like, hey, you know, remember how, you know, how mad you were about Flock? Like, yeah, wait till you find out about these other surveillance technologies.

[Colonel Panic]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

Like now let's talk about campaign finance and how, how all these companies you don't like are financing politicians.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Cooper Quintin]

Like you can, you can pull people to the left and this is a good way to start interacting with those people.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right.

[Cooper Quintin]

Even people on the right. Even sort of our more, you know, the more libertarian folks, they hate them too. A lot of them have gone full Nazi. But the ones that haven't gone full Nazi. Right. Like, should really care about this stuff. Right. And you can, you know, this can be a way in with them as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like everyone we can bring with us, we need to. And everyone else, fuck them.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[James Stout]

But I think this is a really good area to organize because all of us stand to lose something. It's so fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which, like someone is watching or could be watching you. There's a million reasons why people could be mad at that.

[Colonel Panic]

There's plenty of room for abuse, you know, there too. And it's, it's been documented, you know, a recent video with Ben Jordan. I mean, you know.

[Cooper Quintin]

Oh, yeah.

[Colonel Panic]

If you give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to vet people on this level, you know, and if, if you give people who got, you know, godlike surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing? And there's been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveilled their ex partners and then consequently pulled that person over, which is just insane.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah. They've used this to stop people to surveil current partners, ex partners. Like, the idea that police would never abuse their power is completely absurd. And anybody who, who is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And yet like, like it is. I'm not that the Dems are like necessarily. I mean, they're not on the, on the side of goods, especially in this area. But like, it is a big blue state thing. Like, don't think because you live in California, this isn't happening. This is very much happening.

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

Right. Right. Yes. I mean, to talk about that real quick. Right. Like, we have. I am blanking on the bill number, but we have a law in California that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from flock from license plate regions in general with outside agencies and with ice. And it still happens all the time. Police just willfully ignore this law. You know, I mean, like, we see Immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't do that, we know that ice, you know, people in ICE have buddies in California law enforcement. They text them, they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement text, runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or crime or, you know, some other such nonsense.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Cooper Quintin]

And then. And then, you know, sends the information back to ice. Right. It's.

[Colonel Panic]

We call that the good old boy system down here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Up here, too. And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people from local law enforcement all across the country. And this is part of why. Right. Like it gives a workaround. SB54 is the California Values act, which.

[Colonel Panic]

Thank you.

[Andrew Sage]

Thank you.

[James Stout]

You are welcome. That is my shit. There has never been a prosecution under SB 54. As far as I'm aware. This law exists, like, largely to make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are some parts about transferring people who are in detention already. But these systems give so many workarounds. Or if the data belongs to the company and not to the city, or if it's stored on a server somewhere else, all of these things provide potential workarounds. I don't think. I guess that because your local city council member has tweeted about ICE being bad, that that means that your flock cameras are not being used for that. It's very hard to ring fence this shit.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[James Stout]

If people want to learn more about this, if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, if they want to get a WE spy, or a mesh detect. John, explain mesh detect for people really quickly. We didn't touch on that one.

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah, mesh detect is essentially. It's the first device that I made, and its primary function was to detect drone remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any drone over. I believe it's 500 grams. Has to transmit pilot location and drone location in real time, either via BLE or WI fi, which is pretty whack for, like, you know. Yeah, amateur flyers that just want to fly around. But that being said, it's a great OSINT tool, so I started with that. And essentially what this does is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over meshtastic Lora networks. So you can set up a. For instance, set up a node way out somewhere, and then you can have it send you a message down the line when a drone comes by over meshtastic. Or you can set it up somewhere and have it say okay, there's a body cam down here or whatever device, a Tesla, any, anything. You know, a lot of devices randomize their oui these days, mostly phones, but there's plenty that don't easily detectable. So send it over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection essentially.

[James Stout]

So people wanted to to get a we spy to get a mesh detect. How would they do, how they go about it? What are the ways they could get or make one?

[Colonel Panic]

Yeah, I have a website called kernelpanic Tech and it's C O L O N E L. It's a little bit of a play on words, but these devices, like if you really need one of these things, hit me up, up, we'll talk. But also it's just two wires, you know, like you can take my design and just reverse engineer it and copy it and I, I put the wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source. So if you look up kernel panic GitHub, you can take this and make it on your own. I've made home assistant integration. So like if a UI pops up around your house, you can just get an alert via your smart home. You could just go on there, you know, dev it out. If you see something that's that I screwed up, just let me know and I'll fix it or we'll collab. So it's all open source?

[James Stout]

Yeah. How about Ray Hunter?

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, so folks can go to rayhunter.eff.org and that is our Ray Hunter documentation, that's our the Ray Hunter book essentially. And there you can find links on where to buy the hardware. We do not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware on ebay or Amazon sometimes. The ORBIC is what people use in the US primarily in like South America, in Europe and parts of Africa there's a TP link device that fits the bill better for those areas. And once you buy the hardware, you can install the software on it there. The hardware unfortunately is not open source because like I said, we didn't build the hardware, we're just repurposing old hardware. Right when the project started you could buy the hardware for like 10 or 20 bucks. Now it's harder to find because people have bought out a lot of the supply and other scalpers have wised up to the fact that people are trying to buy these. So unfortunately we've created a whole mini market. I'm a market maker, goddammit. We've a hyper capitalist right here. But no, there's a whole mini market of people Selling already installed Ray Hunters on ebay and stuff. I don't recommend paying more than 40 or 60 bucks for the hardware. But then yeah, the software is free. It's free, it's open source, right. It's on GitHub. You can go edit it right now. And I know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to this show and I just want to say there's so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right? Like we keep kind of, kind of mentioning that like a lot of police hardware is made by this company, Axon, and it has a very unique Bluetooth signature that can be easily detected, right. There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do with counter surveillance. And the chip that the OUI spy runs on the ESP32 is this really powerful little chip that only costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale. And it's got WI Fi, Bluetooth and a bunch of really cool capabilities that you could use to make some really cool counter surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the tech minded folks to think about this. Come look at these projects, you know, come, you know, write your own code or make your own projects. Right? But like the quote from hackers and as your beautifully designed PC board says, Colonel, we can snoop onto them as they snoop onto us, right?

[Colonel Panic]

Exactly.

[Cooper Quintin]

We need to spy back, right. We need to raise the cost of them spying on us, right? And that's like. Sorry, that brings me to another tangent.

[James Stout]

Go off.

[Cooper Quintin]

What's really cool about these projects is like you can build Ray hunter for about $20, right? You could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled thing from kernel for, you know, a few dozen dollars. I don't know the exact price off top of my head, so I don't want to say. Or you could build one for you know, under 20 bucks, right?

[Andrew Sage]

Yep.

[Cooper Quintin]

And you are then for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks, you are making useless a surveillance tool and surveillance network which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, right. The economics here are on our side, right? Like this is just like any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right? Like it costs millions and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments of the US to set up this surveillance economy and we can defeat it for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks each, right? Like we can do this a lot longer than they can. They will go broke before we do. And I think that that's really important, right? Like the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on our side.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's Also, like, it's cool to understand and make stuff. I am very good at fixing things that work on, you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts. Right like that. That's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck. I can fix my bicycle. I can fix.

[Cooper Quintin]

Are you saying you like ice? Internal combustion engines.

[James Stout]

In many ways, both ICEs will be the end of all of us. But I enjoy to fix one. I like to look at it and go like, huh, okay. Goes bang. And then this goes up. And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to learn a new skill. Especially like once you get into your 30s. Like, it's good to learn shit.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And this is approachable. Especially like the guides for these are very approachable. Even if you're not like a tech punk, if this is your first time going on GitHub and that there are people you can reach out to, like real nice people. You won't get an AI tech support. Someone will help you understand this. And that is cool.

[Colonel Panic]

There's a platform called M5Stack that makes it really easy. So like you get, you get a Xiao ESP32, but M5 stack makes it so that like, you don't even have to do soldering. And they have drag and drop coding.

[James Stout]

Oh, cool.

[Colonel Panic]

So you can just plug in sensors and things. Like you can make a drone detector out of one of those and already has like a screen on board. And so like, it's super cheap and you can just debit out really hard and just go for it. You know, it's. It's easy for makers nowadays. Like, like in the 50s, right? You'd have to have an entire military and industry complex behind you to do this kind of stuff, right? Or a corporation. And now you can just, just make yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And like, you know, I was in Minnesota there at the time when lots of ice and CBP agents were too, when they took a lot of people and killed two people. I had like. One of the things that was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone was so locked in, like to include grandmothers, to include a dude with a sign that said, what would Ronald Reagan do? Like, no one wanted those people in their town. Right? And that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not everyone can be out on a street corner whistling a whistle or driving around. Right. Some people that have, have like a really powerful skill set. And if you are someone who can't be out, you can still help create these. You can help Code this stuff like it's beautiful when our resistance takes the best from all of us and then we are all better because of that.

[Mia Wong]

Absolutely.

[Cooper Quintin]

Beautifully said.

[James Stout]

Anything you guys would like to plug before we go? Websites, mutual aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.

[Colonel Panic]

Take a peek at dflock me if you want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet. But you know they map in the flaw cams. You can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or to find things you haven't seen. But other than that, just colonelpanic tech. And definitely check out eff. They got a lot of good stuff going on and they've been doing it since the early days.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah, I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys specifically. That'[e-mail] we got it. We're the only continuously updated and longest maintained security guides. There's also the Activist Checklist which is another really great resource. The Surveillance Self Defense Guides are almost like a textbook. Like there's a lot of info there, but if you just need the quick and dirty Cliff Notes version, Activist Checklist is really great for that. And they're doing a good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them. And then yeah, check out rayhunter.eff.org for RayHunter stuff. ColonelPanic Tech for his stuff. Since he plugged my stuff, I guess the other thing that I will plug is Open Archive, which is a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. They're making an app called Save which allows you to securely record, archive and verify videos of whatever you want, say such as human rights abuses or, you know, police atrocities or things of that nature. And so I recommend that project go check them out. They're really good folks. If you're, if you're doing a lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place to go.

[James Stout]

Fantastic. Nice. Well, thank you very much for joining us. That was great.

[Colonel Panic]

Thank you for having us.

[Cooper Quintin]

Thank you.

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[Garrison Davis]

counter terrorism. No, I prefer table terrorism Counter I

[Robert Evans]

hardly know word terrorism.

[Garrison Davis]

Hi, this is it could happen here. Yeah, I'm Garrison Davis, that's Robert Evans.

[Robert Evans]

And not a lot to be proud of with that introduction.

[Garrison Davis]

No, not much to be proud of. But there's also not much to be proud of considering the 2026 White House counterterrorism strategy.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Garrison Davis]

So I think we put equal amount of work into this as Sebastian Gorka did every year.

[Robert Evans]

The new counterterrorism list is. It's my Dune, you know, or whatever. Big movies coming out this year. I was excited.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean, I was excited until I actually read it. And that's what we'll be talking about today. And it's a short one. This is, this is very short, actually. This is just 14 pages of actual text, about half the length of previous comparable documents. Now, there's been a lot of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released, and we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's first start by talking about how the document starts with a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump, dated May 2026. Trump lists counter terrorism accomplishments from the first year of his second term, like mobilizing DHS to remove illegal alien criminals and jihadist sympathizers, to arresting the ISIS k operative who planned the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Afghanistan and rescuing over a hundred American hostages. Speaking of, Trump also says he secured the release of the remaining October 7th hostages and quote, began the process of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven for terrorism and extremism, unquote. And that's through establishing Trump's own Board of Peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt, quote, unquote, devastating blows to Iran, which Trump calls the world's number one state sponsor of terrorists. Other actions Trump Admin. Has taken include designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and quote, unquote, deadly cartels as terrorist organizations. With Trump boasting that he, quote, began using the strength and power of the US Military to stop and destroy cartel operations. The example that he includes here is when the US Armed forces captured the, quote, unquote, narco terrorist outlaw, Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. So Trump's opening forward covers the majority of what this 16 page total strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote, cartels, jihadists, or the governments who support them. And what Trump doesn't actually write about in this forward is what most reporting on. The new counterterrorism strategy has focused on, the later inclusion of left wing terrorism as one of the nation's leading terror threats. And that's what we'll be mostly talking about today, though we will cover the the other two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on. Now. This strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, a far right Hungarian commentator who briefly served in Trump's first term. This new document states, quote, a new type of domestic terrorism has emerged driven by violent extremists who have adopted Ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed. We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete. This strategy lists three main types of terror groups the US is currently facing. Narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamic terrorists and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and anti fascists. Now we'll get to the narco terrorist stuff later, but let's, let's start with that last line which is clearly, clearly pulling from Trump's antifa terrorism executive order.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

As well as the National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven which directed federal law enforcement to investigate potential crimes relating to political violence and terrorism, quote, under the umbrella of self described anti fascism. This is a pretty clear political weaponization of the intelligence community apparatus. And the new counterterrorism strategy doubles down on what MSPM7 established writing quote. In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti American, radically pro transgender and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere, unquote.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any antifa groups killing Americans?

[Garrison Davis]

They have one case. They have one case.

[Robert Evans]

Not antifa group, but yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, they don't have cases of, you know, state sponsors backing, backing Antifa, but they do have, one instance included of violent left wing extremism, which we'll get to in a sec. That's one example across this like 14 to 16 page document. Now the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations animating violent conduct included NSPM7, anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality. Now after this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote, we are taking ideology and counter ideology very seriously, unquote. Now, despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left wing extremism, something that Biden never really did with right wing extremism, at least in documents like this no.

[Robert Evans]

Shocking.

[Garrison Davis]

Despite that clear focus, this counterterrorism strategy claims that counterterrorism operations will be executed, quote, unquote, apolitically, and actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the Biden admin previously weaponized counterterrorism operations against innocent Americans. Great stuff, quote. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies, unquote. This is the only example of, quote, unquote, left wing violence included in this entire document. Just this. Just this one killing. Now, on Executive Disorder, we have reported on a few instances where the Trump administration has tried to weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as being motivated by like, anti Christian bias, even when the people committing those attacks were themselves Christian. And for all that we can tell, we're not religiously motivated against Christians. But they tried to glom onto a few of these incidents.

[Robert Evans]

Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination.

[Garrison Davis]

Exactly right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But they've tried to try to glam onto these examples to build this narrative of like, anti Christian violence which is rising in the United States. And as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack. More on that later. After this new counterterrorism strategy dropped, I did the thing that I assume anyone would do and read through the past, like three or four counterterrorism strategies.

[James Stout]

Really? Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Great, great stuff from the past 10 years.

[Robert Evans]

Good work.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump released one in 2018 and Biden's came out in 2021. Now, the first mention of any non Islamic terrorist group in Trump's 2018 counterterrorism strategy is the Nordic Resistance Movement, quote, a prominent transnational self described national Socialist organization with anti Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left wing groups and others, unquote. This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on Islamic terrorism, specifically ISIS and Al Qaeda, but also briefly mentions the neo Nazi National Action group in one paragraph and in another reads, quote, the United States has long faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism, unquote. But that's really all it has on non Islamic extremism in what is a 34 page document by the time Biden got into office, white supremacist violence had risen dramatically and the Biden Admin released a domestic terrorism specific counterterrorism strategy. This document, released in June of 2021, starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the KKK during Reconstruction to attacks on black churches and synagogues and the El Paso shooting at the Walmart. Then the document covers what it calls anti government or anti authority violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Congressional baseball game shooting and the recent January 6th attack. I'm going to read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here to compare. Quote Today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations. They also take on a variety of forms, from lone actors to small groups of informally aligned individuals, to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards specific communities, to violent self proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those who promote the superiority of the white race and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats. These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence towards the same segment or segments of the American community, whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims or other religious minorities, women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals, individuals or others. Their insistence on violence can at times be explicit. It also can at times be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted in a perception of the superiority of the white race that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent notions of racial purity or cleansing. Unquote. Now Biden's strategy does later specifically mention quote unquote anarchist violence, though within the broader context of anti government or anti authority extremism. Quote A significant component of today's threat includes self proclaimed militias and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the US Government based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization and governing institutions which they perceive as harmful to society. The document goes on to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists and other groups that resist or oppose legislative, regulatory or other actions taken by the government. And this strategy also names a few single issue ideologies which may motivate violence like abortion, animal rights, environmental issues or involuntarily celibate violent extremism. But that little section there is the closest that the Biden strategy gets to quote unquote left wing violence as Trump would call it. But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on like left, right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the exact motivating factor driving the violence. His document reads, quote, the definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no distinction based on political views right, left or center, and neither should we. Unquote. Biden's AG Merrick Garland would often say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not policing ideology. And quote, unquote, violence, not ideology was an often repeated refrain during the Biden administration. And this is something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI investigated Stop Cop City under Biden and a significant portion of the domestic terror related charges while Biden was in office were levied against Stop Cop City protesters by the state of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies, and almost all of whom were charged with terrorism were not actually charged with any specific violent crime. We'll talk more about the partisan weaponization of terrorism or counterterrorism after some ads.

[Robert Evans]

Excellent. Ah, and we're back.

[Garrison Davis]

It's such a blast from the past. Like read through all of these Biden counter terrorism manuals.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, boy, back in those days.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Makes me, makes me nostalgic.

[Garrison Davis]

It's just a totally different world.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Like it's unfathomable to like think of the federal government now using this kind of language. Talk about like ethnic cleansing being done by like white supremacist motivated terrorists. It's, it's like, it's just a totally different, totally different ball game. Now in Trump's new strategy, it states that under The Biden admin, U.S. officials, quote, used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power or to help win elections, unquote. Now under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism related prosecutions following January 6, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump himself and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop the steal efforts. In 2022, the DOJ opened a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations. And just that year, $100 million of additional resources were allocated to the DOJ, FBI and DHS for countering domestic terrorism. Now this increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks. The Government Accountability Office reported that between 2010 to 2021, domestic terrorism related investigations had grown by 356% with 231 confirmed incidents. According to the DHS, in just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations more than doubled. During this time period, the intelligence community classified Racially or ethnically motivated violence as the most common type of attack. That's 35% of domestic terrorism. And this category also contributed to the most deaths. The second most common type of attack was anti government or anti authority motivated violent extremism with 32% of attacks. And that category covered a lot of different things, including the militia stuff as well as the anarchist stuff. It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison, Trump's new counterterrorism strategy does not contain a single mention of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.

[Robert Evans]

Weird.

[Garrison Davis]

Not one.

[Andrew Sage]

Not one.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is like. Which is astounding, right? Even, like, beyond. Beyond the clear partisan weaponization. Like, just from a counterterrorism standpoint, like, this is. This is bizarre. This is. This is quite, quite a choice. The last pillar of Biden's counterterrorism strategy was, quote, confronting long term contributions to domestic terrorism like racism, bigotry, religious or ethnic hatred, unquote. Meanwhile, Trump's new strategy says that the fearsome powers of the US Government must never be abused, quote, whether under the guise of de radicalization, protecting our democracy, or any other pretext, unquote.

[James Stout]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is like, I don't. I don't even know how to respond to that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What are we. Yeah, like, what are you supposed to say? I mean, it.

[Garrison Davis]

It demonstrates they're not actually interested in combating what is the most lethal form of domestic terrorism.

[Andrew Sage]

No.

[Robert Evans]

And they never have been, even in Trump's first term.

[Garrison Davis]

At least. They moved towards that as the threat was increasing. But now they just have no interest whatsoever. And actually, like, target de radicalization as an example of the fearsome powers of the US Government.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, the thing that never works and, like, never actually did anything is the big boogeyman for you guys. Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

It's wild. The new strategy includes a few examples of US Government overreach. Quote, our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community, which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats, or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool. Whether plotting against conservative Catholics, attending traditional Mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being used politically against innocent Americans, unquote. So that's the main example of Partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start with this first one targeting Catholics attending traditional Mass. This refers to a 2023 FBI memo from the Richmond Field Office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were displaying a growing interest in Traditionalist Catholicism.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

And how trad cath extremist violence could be mitigated by building connections within the church. Now, random Latin Mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this memo was discussing the quote, unquote, growing overlap between the white nationalist movement and quote, unquote radical traditionalist Catholics and how white supremacists may use trad cath social media to promote violence and recruit. This memo also made a distinction from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer Latin Mass and the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call radical traditional Catholics. What we would just call trad cats, like colloquially. After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in Cash Patel's era.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm going to go on a little bit of like a tangent here because I wanted to get more information about this Richmond Field Office memo and investigation. So it turns out the FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest at a church and this church was not considered by the Vatican to be in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it's still Catholic affiliated. This priest refused to speak with the FBI about communications he had with a parisher who was a self described radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist. Self described. Who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a special needs school, armed resistance against the government, learning how to manufacture pipe bombs and using untraceable means to purchase supplies to manufacture 3D printed weapons. Posting about that on this Catholic account.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, nothing sketchy.

[Garrison Davis]

So this Nazi was actually previously arrested in 2019 after being overheard making comments about political violence while purchasing several AR15 style rifles, multiple high capacity magazines and large quantities of.223ammunition, as well as making online statements advocating civil war and the murder of politicians. Now, after getting out of prison, this guy started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to commit violence. He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to possessing a destructive device. So the FBI was looking into this priest because this priest was not talking to them about what the communications were with this Nazi communications that they know existed. And so they briefly looked into him. This caused a Massive backlash among the right. This is where Marjorie Taylor Greene was posting about defunding the FBI. A lot of the, a lot of the dismantle FBI stuff coming from the right was based on this incident of the FBI, you know, targeting conservative churchgoers. Little side tangent there. The other main example from the Trump counterterrorism strategy refers to parents and school boards. This is in reference to a letter from the National School Boards association requesting federal intervention into the harassment threats and attacks against school boards in 2021. And this letter read in part, quote, these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terror and hate crimes, unquote. After this letter was sent, the AG Mayor Garland announced the government was going to look into these threats. This too sparked a huge backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later, the National School Board association apologized for some of the language they included in this letter. So those are the two main examples of this, of this horrendous government overreach and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans.

[James Stout]

Yeah, of course.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it's just, it's frustrating how like reality doesn't matter at all here. But I, like, what is the point of even like going in and line by line, here's everything that's wrong with that. I don't even know anymore.

[Garrison Davis]

No, it's not a matter of convincing. It's often a matter of just holding my sanity together, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's important to like, look at it to some extent, document how bullshit it is. But it's also just like, it's incredibly frustrating to like see this fucking tradcath priest get away with shit that like people would go to prison for if the ideologies were reversed, you know?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, sure, if you, if you switch this stuff around, you can imagine how the Trump administration would be handling it. Yeah, a Unitarian pastor planning a, planning some kind of attack with like an antifa super soldier.

[Robert Evans]

Well, or, or just if you've got like a Unitarian pastor or whatever, like a, someone who is tangentially attached to someone left wing who was like posting about carrying out an attack. Like the, the level of backlash would be higher and would hurt more people.

[Garrison Davis]

No, horrendous. We've seen stuff like that happen. The sections on left wing terrorism in this new strategy actually only make up a few paragraphs of this 16 page document. So what is the rest of this counterterrorism strategy really about then? The first priority is the quote Neutralization of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations, unquote. The primary threat is the so called narco terrorists previously mentioned. And this term, narco terrorists, was invented in the 80s by the President of Peru to describe attacks on the police by drug traffickers. But since then, the term has come to mean a variety of things. In this new strategy, Trump doesn't just consider drug trafficking as a means to fund terrorist groups, but also implies that drug overdoses themselves constitute a form of terrorism.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Quote. The borderless America created by the Biden administration was so badly exploited by threat actors that during one 12 month period, more Americans died as a result of illicit drugs flooded into the country by the cartels than all the US servicemen killed in combat since 1945, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Let's look at those numbers for cigarettes. Let's just add tobacco in. Let's just throw tobacco into the mix, see how that. Oh, does it dwarf every other drug related death toll combined? Yeah, it sure does.

[Garrison Davis]

Obviously an absurd statement.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But I think it is crucial to understanding how the administration is operating by understanding that they consider drug overdoses to be terrorism. And that's, that's a big part of, like, how they're able to do what they're currently doing is by weaponizing terrorism as a category. The strategy later considers illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to be weapons of mass destruction.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the same category of weapons as nuclear bombs. That, that is how they categorize it. Technically, no. When the US Government uses the term terrorism, it's supposed to mean activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of the government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping. It's really that, that last, that last half that constitutes the terrorism part that separates terrorism from just any crime. It's the intent to intimidate or coerce civilian populations or influence the government. But the FBI defines international terrorism as, quote, violent criminal acts committed by individuals and, or groups who are inspired by or associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations, unquote. So if you designate a group a foreign terrorist organization, that means that what they are doing is terrorism. And that last bit leads us to Trump's kind of core strategy to combat drug trafficking, designating cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, which will, quote, make available additional intelligence authorities and deny and disrupt their financial streams and access to the United States, unquote. After the designation, Trump authorized, quote, dozens of strikes by the Department of War against cartel drug boats, resulting in. In a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling into the United States, unquote. Citation needed. Yeah, we will get into the second priority of the counterterrorism strategy after these ad breaks. All right, we are back for our last section here. Let's start by talking about the second priority of the counterterrorism strategy released last week. The second is the targeting and destruction of Islamist terror groups, especially Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and isis. K. Trump's new strategy blames continuing jihadist plots against Americans, quote, in part because of the failed forever war policies, the empowerment of terror supporting regimes like Iran, and a past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on, unquote. So how's that going? How's. How's that going? I haven't, I haven't checked the news in about three months. Robert, can you briefly fill me in?

[Robert Evans]

Good. No, no. No problems.

[Garrison Davis]

It's flied.

[Robert Evans]

Everything's fine.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we solved, we solved the failed forever war policies.

[Robert Evans]

We did. We did. No more forever wars.

[Garrison Davis]

We.

[Robert Evans]

We've got a short war, but it's one shortest garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

Iran is in no way empowered.

[Robert Evans]

I can't, I can't tell you how short this war is at the moment. You know, incredibly short war.

[Garrison Davis]

Iran isn't exercising economic influence over the whole world right now.

[Robert Evans]

I know you think that this has all been a disaster, but I'm going to put on a graph how long World War II lasted next to how long this little adventure in Iran has lasted, and you tell me if it's a problem. Hmm. Wow. One of those numbers is bigger than the other. Guess we're fine.

[Garrison Davis]

It's wild. It's, it's, it's absolutely batshit that they have this in here.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, yeah, it's so funny, it's insane. So the document talks about Islamist terrorism in Asia, Africa, the Middle east and Europe for over four pages. It takes up a significant chunk of the strategy. These sections of the document largely mirror Trump's national security strategy from last year and talks about how, quote, unfettered mass migration in Europe has been the transmission belt for terrorists and discusses the need for, quote, honest conversations about Islamism and how hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals. The more these alien cultures grow and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed as the birthplace of Western culture and values. Europe must act now to halt its willful decline, unquote. Share one of the more explicitly fascist sections of this strategy. Trump's new CT strategy does discuss the integration of counter cartel and counter terrorism efforts, saying it allows the U.S. to, quote, disrupt the shared network's financing and logistical routes used by both designated drug traffickers and Islamist terrorists, unquote. The main success story of this strategy is the capture of Maduro, quote, the illegitimate leader of Venezuela, a cartel boss in league with terror sponsor Iran and its terror proxy Hezbollah, unquote. We've talked about this strategy for like 35 minutes, and you may have noticed that so far we've really just talked about identifying targets with very little discussion actually on actual strategy on how to counter these threats. That's because the document has very little on actual strategy to counter these threats. It lays out three steps for countering terrorism. Identifying terror actors and plots before they happen, cutting off their arms, funding and recruiting streams, and ultimately destroy the established threat group. Methods for going about this are, quote, a series of similar high intensity but short campaigns against jihadist groups. Love to see that happen, as well as sanctions, shadow fleet, oil tanker interdiction and covert operations to disrupt funding and state sponsorship of terrorism. That's it. That, that is, that is really the bulk of, like, the actual, like, strategy of how to do this.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that's the important thing to remember for all that's scary about this and for all, like, the people freaking out and not to say there's nothing to be concerned about. This is the government saying this. They have a lot of ability to fuck with people certainly should be concerned about this. But at the same time, don't forget, they don't know what they're doing or have a real plan for most of what they're doing. No, like, this is hacked together, cobbled together and executed by people who don't know what they're doing and at least in one major case are drunk all the time.

[Garrison Davis]

No, it's pretty stunning to compare this to the 2021 Biden one, which is very, very complicated in laying out actual strategy to dismantle domestic terrorist operations. And this just, this lacks a lot of, a lot of the same, like, strategic outlook. Lastly, the strategy outlines current functional aspects of the threat environment. That's, that's, that, that's the term it uses. Functional aspects. These are like, complicating factors. I'll go through these line by line. New and evolving collaboration between nation states and threat groups, such as cartels, alliances between established terror groups, exploitation of New weapons like drones by cartels and jihadists. The remaining threat of terrorists acquiring and using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, which President Trump has rightly labeled the single greatest threat to this world, unquote. All of this stuff is like Bush era terrorism. Stuff like this is all very outdated or not necessarily outdated, but like it's not cutting edge. I guess what is would be the more correct way of putting this. Like you're just talking about drones now in 2026.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But another one of these quote unquote functional aspects is, quote, new and deepening alliances between the far left and Islamists, I. E. The red Green alliance, unquote. This really just takes up a single line. They don't expound on this. I'm pretty sure this would relate to like pro Palestine protests. Is this really people on the far left either supporting Hamas or just generally being pro Palestine or anti Israel? That's what they're calling a red green alliance.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's.

[Garrison Davis]

It's just like a throwaway line. But I thought it's worth including just because of how odd it is. Like it really stands out. It's at like the middle to end of the document. Way after they, they actually do their like three paragraphs on left wing extremism. They just kind of throw that in there as a, as a new complicating factor.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, of course.

[Garrison Davis]

So what does this all mean for the left? Almost nothing in here that pertains to left isn't already in national security Presidential memorandum number seven. This new strategy does not designate trans people as a class, as terrorists, nor does it categorize trans people as nihilistic, violent extremists, like some have previously reported.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It essentially states, like NSPM7, that being extremely pro transgender can be a motivating factor in carrying out terroristic violence. And the only example provided is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which we still don't have an illuminated motive for. Besides the suspect allegedly expressing frustration at Kirk for spreading vaguely defined hate, the strategy claims, quote, our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us. We will not permit the weaponization of America's unparalleled counterterrorism capabilities for partisan purposes, unquote, despite clear political weaponization. And Gorka specifically, specifically mentioning that we're going to be countering ideologies. Now, a way to kind of explain what's going on here. Like think about racially motivated or ethnically motivated violent extremism. Being racist isn't illegal, but if someone threatens to shoot up a black church because they are racist, then that qualifies as racially motivated violent extremism. The Trump administration is basically using the same movie against people with left wing, anarchist or anti fascist views to either stop crimes before they occur or crack down harder on people or groups who have committed crimes motivated by those ideologies. The Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already directed to investigate antifa aligned groups and individuals, quote, engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation. And that's been happening since at leave October of 2025. What's in this document is already been in effect for a while. And we've already seen some of the results of this in the Federal Prairie Land trial last February following the shooting of a cop outside an immigration detention facility in Texas last summer. The government in that case used the specter of antifa to link a group of defendants together and argue for ideological motive. And a federal jury convicted eight people of riot, conspiracy and material support to terrorists, even if each individual defendant did not commit an act of violence. Yeah, so there's cases like that and then there's also cases against the SPLC which while the government hasn't specifically said are part of their anti antifa investigations. You can see some similar through lines there.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right.

[Garrison Davis]

In a broad sense, that's how it relates to like current left wing activism. Right. The sort of threats and risk that has existed really ever since Trump took office, but especially after the antifa Terrorism Executive Order and National Security Presidential Memorandum Number seven are still in effect. That is still the same level of risk. This document doesn't introduce anything new. Now, overall, what this strategy tries to do is connect all of the ideological targets of this administration. Right. Put them onto a map, intersecting each other. That's what it's doing with this red Green alliance. So it's trying to connect all of these ideological targets while expounding on Trump's justification for mass deportations of suspected cartel members, military strikes on boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela and the ongoing war in the Middle East. That is really most of what the document is trying to do is, is actually build up the, the counterterrorism justification for all of Trump's military actions. And that's one thing that is, I guess, slightly frustrated me in people's discussion of this new strategy, that a lot of it's based on threats to left wing activists in the United States, while not really focusing on the bulk of the document which is building the justification for Trump's murderous military actions around the world. Right. Actions that are blowing up people in boats, bombing schools in Iran, things that have like a sizable death count. And the sort of logistical and theoretical framework that Trump is building through through this document does have really, really devastating, lethal consequences. And I guess that's what I wanted to focus on a little bit, a little bit more rather than just the targeting of left wing extremists.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. All right, well, fine. I guess we'll see what happens next.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean, we're going to see them continue to carry this out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Both domestically against left wing activists and overseas, including like right now. Right. This is what they're doing in Iran. They're talking about Cuba. This strategy does not grant them any new powers, but it does give us a look into how they are thinking about regime change and the don Row doctorate. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus.

[Garrison Davis]

It's all so dumb, this US Domination of the western hemisphere. And I think that's, that's really the, the core of what's driving this document is U. S. Domination of the western hemisphere rather than explicit political persecution of ideological left wing enemies, which is of course still a factor and still a thing to be concerned about and monitoring and fighting back against.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, absolutely. Well, all right guys, I think that does it for us today, huh? Yeah, let's, let's go be elsewhere.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, see you around.

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[Andrew Sage]

humanity is not a parasite. But the systems we collectively uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on us due to our interdependence as we rely on each other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are, are how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain their hold, of course, through ideology, the sets of ideas about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc. And to some extent they maintain their hold through violence. And so we can, and I believe we must break Free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating with each other, with nature. And I'll talk about those ways at the end, by the way. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew sage andrewism on YouTube and I'm joined today by.

[Mia Wong]

By Mia Wong, also here. Yeah, we're doing great intros.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yippee.

[Andrew Sage]

So I want to talk about parasitism, the development of parasitism over time, as discussed in Samuel Miller McDonald's book Progress, which I highly recommend. Quite an enjoyable read. So I actually really first heard about that book years ago, before it was even out. And I had reached out and I was like, oh, I would love to, you know, get a copy as soon as it's available and talk about it and stuff. And you know, I was at that point in my life I was really voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course we know the flaws with these grand narratives. They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these narratives in understanding aspects and angles of our history, at least when you take a critical approach to them. Because I mean, history is, as the name implies, a story. You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history. And so progress offers one framework through its three eras of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different forms can coexist, forms can come and go. It isn't this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But there are trends that we can observe. And so these three phases that McDonnell discusses identifies particular ideas of progress, forms of parasitism and agents of history. And I think it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics and ecology that intertwine to make up history. Obviously not perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist adjacent approaches to tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Peter Galileos had worship in power. James C. Scott has against the Green and in progress, although I don't think he is anarchist or anarchist adjacent in progress. McDonald's starts with the beginning of recorded civilization in 3000 BCE and looks at the way that many early states developed from a blend of religion, politics and daily life. So I mean, humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before recorded history, right? They spread across the globe. They experimented with all kinds of different social, political and economic organizations that are now lost to time and the dawn of Everything. By David Grieber and David Wengrue kinda wrestles with some of this. In the early years of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state development. From roughly 3000 BCE to 1400 CE. This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica and medieval Europe saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. MacDonald calls this phase heaven in the book, not to co sign it as an ideal, but to illustrate the prominence of religious power in this time period. And me I know you've been hosting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitance people have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially for the experience of domination in our day to day lives.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and this is something you can look at sort of in that period is the emergence of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems. Graeber talks about this, I think in debt actually, where a bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become like credit are these things that are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes. And so you have this situation where you know, the things that are going to become the building blocks of economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history are developed in order to, in order to fuel these sort of hierarchical massive complexes where like just staggering amounts of resources are like fueled into, into these sort of temple complexes. And that's a, you know, that's a thing that continues to current, present day.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed, you know, indeed we have, we have temple complexes, we have temple complexes in the sense of mega churches nowadays.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, it's like what is, what is the mega church? But like the temple complex is farce.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's the thing, right? We are seeing an echo of this historical time period even in the present. Because the idea of progress in this time and in these places was about progressing toward a higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods, you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in their proper place in that order. And so you had the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture which established this particular kind of order. And when disaster struck, whether it be floods or droughts or invasions, this was a sign, a sign of the times perhaps that the order was breaking down. And so it's really funny to me that, you know, in this progressive account of the idea of progress that McDonnell's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone away. You know, they haven't been replaced by the next era. They have just taken on subtler forms and sometimes not as subtle forms.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, there's a concept that the journal Zhuang uses where, I mean, they're specifically talking about like the ways that elements of like the Chinese and I guess you call it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing from biology called excipation, where something like evolutionarily that was used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like Finn becomes hand like that. I'm not a great biologist, but this is this kind of thing where like you have this situation where like. Yeah, elements of, like the old notion of what progress was of like this sort of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like excavated by the next thing that's going to happen and then that's taken by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing. And we still have our sort of like versions of it that have been taken through like countless numbers of world systems.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were differences in how they would have, I think, approached religion and thought of religion compared to how we do.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Andrew Sage]

Psychologically in a time like that, they didn't really have this more prominent and culturally accepted secular mindset that we have today where religion could even be seen as something separate from everything else. You know, for them, religion was how reality worked. The seasons, the harvest, illness, victory in war, all of this was interpreted through a sacred lens. People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at least thought about it in that lens, and they understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy. On a material basis though, because, I mean, we do have to think materially and not solely ideologically. These societies engaged in what MacDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labour and land. And the agents of this parasitism are city states, kingdoms and empires. On the city state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterland, and on an empire level, their conquering neighbours done for either integration and taxation or tribute or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that we do today. There were limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power or fracture. Tensions would begin to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict and contact and intellectual traditions developed over time. Governance would get more bureaucratic. Religions would face reform due to challenges from within. And by the time that we approach the late medieval period, around the 1300s and 1400s, at least from Europe focused account or Old World focused account, the world is indeed changing. Transition has begun from this heaven phase to the next phase. In McDonald's framework, As in the niche and fears from 1400 to 1900, where we move away from a world of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a world of human order. Religion persists, of course, but authority has begun to move from the heavens down to earth, an earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated and controlled by human beings. And so we see this in this time with the emergence of the sciences and the emergence of newly minted political theories. And the idea of progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increasing efficiency, mastering the environment. Hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, advances in navigation and so on, and consequently parasitism. As a process becomes more dispersed, extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by maritime trade routes, taking resources from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals and labour, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains. As wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks to the extraction of others, you know, the rich is being built up in one place because of the poverty being developed in another place. As the agents of this time are the kingdoms and empires, but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. And to be clear, I'm not trying to say that these are the sole agents of history in any of these particular periods, but just that they were significant. I don't want to deny the role of, you know, the politics from below, the rabble, as Graeber sometimes refers to them, would have also shaped the development of history.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and it's something you were talking about from the top, but as with all of these sort of like really, really broad sweep looks at history, this is capturing trends in a few places in the world as they moved. There are obviously many, many, many other things that are also coe. Existing with all of these systems at the same time. The entire world in like 2000 BC is not just like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere. Right. Like there's, yeah, a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting with each other from. I mean, I can't even. There's. There's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of, like, cultural forms, some of which are state, some of which are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macro history like this, you are looking at certain sets of them and matching patterns with them. But that also is not. We're also not saying here that that's literally everything that is happening on Earth, because it's not. Yeah, but yeah, just want to get that in for the people who are going to get very mad about this. We are aware of the presence of other narratives. We have, we have, we have, we have done our postmodernism training. We have done our historical archaeological stuff. I just put in this note in.

[Andrew Sage]

Of course, of course. And like I was saying there, they had these other agents, but for this particular narrative, we're focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters and the nation states. And, you know, nation states, we take them for granted now, but they really were not always a thing. You know, the idea of a group of people with a shared identity, language, culture and history being artificially, I would say, unified under a state. It has to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know, you didn't have this concept of France until France was built and the whole world has suffered as a result, you know. Yeah, you didn't have this concept of Italy, you didn't have this concept of Nigeria. You didn't have this concept. These nation states had to be constructed.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Even China, which is seen as like this sort of archetypical example of this. Like, we have a bunch of records of people in the 1500s, and I think even through the 1600s, like going and talking to people in China and being like, yo, you're in China. And the people are talking to are like, what the fuck is China? Like, what are you talking about? Like, we're like under this ruler who's under this ruler, who's under this ruler

[Colonel Panic]

who's like, yeah, exactly.

[Mia Wong]

You know, so, yeah, these things have to be constructed, and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think.

[Andrew Sage]

And then to actually get people to identify with them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And usually by, you know, a process in which I mean, the only way to cause people to have a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national territorial identity is to have it be posed against and other. So, yeah, one of these, One of these. Also, like the question of the national, like the 20th century national liberation movements is when you get like, for example, like Pan Arabism, it's like, okay, like, whose national liberation is this? Because it sure as it's not like the Kurds or the Yazidis. It's. Yeah, you know. Yeah, this is, this is all of which is to say what you were saying, which is this is a violent and bloody process that is a lot more recent than people understand.

[Andrew Sage]

Absolutely. This time also saw a lot of revolutions. Bloody indeed. You know, the rise and fall of old powers and new powers. And this is also a phase, I think, that could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you had this rise in tide of ideas like liberty and rights and you know, liberalism was developed in this period as was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of the sciences and scientific classifications. But you also saw how that gave way to pseudo scientific justifications for inequality. The great chain of being, the idea of the white being on top of everyone else. Yeah, we saw self determination for some and self determination not so much for others as by the time we reached the 1800s, the pace of change was exceedingly dramatic and volatile. Industrialisation, urbanization, communication and transportation converged to compress time and space. We see the birth of new ideas and reformed relationships. And by the time we reach the early 20th century, a new phase is taking shape. We are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from 1900 to the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want to call it, is this vast interconnected set of systems that organize how we live, produce, consume and even think. The system does not have, you know, a single king or figurehead that you can point to as the Big Bad, despite, I think, people's efforts to try and find a Big Bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global markets and industrial and post industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy and all these different things chugging along almost like it's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration. I like to throw in a little poetry every once in a while.

[Mia Wong]

It rocks.

[Andrew Sage]

So the idea of progress becomes very economistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency. Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's the thing that people are worrying about when they're on Fox Business or whatever, the Financial Times, whatever spaces of dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually or are people's needs being met? It's what's, what's growth looking like this quarter? How efficient are we exploiting the planet?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that. The clip on CNBC that we played in an ed a few weeks ago, whenever this is coming out where the CNBC anchor goes, trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I saw that, I saw that.

[Mia Wong]

It's horrifying, Haunting, haunting shit.

[Andrew Sage]

The way that our economy has been built around these metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea of progress in this time tends toward the economistic, you know, the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism and so on. And parasitism in this system phase is, as the name implies, systemic. To quote directly from the contiguous parasitism had captured energy from indigenous societies and native, wild and domestic species. This is the parasitism of the first phase. Disparate parasitism, meanwhile, had captured energy from indigenous societies, imperial subjects, and both exotic, wild and intensively domesticated species abroad. And that's the second phase. And so the new form, networked parasitism, captured energy from all these as well, but with the addition of ancient species of plant and animal in the form of fossils, this enabled concrete energy capture through increasing electrification and then the digitisation of extraction and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system were built in the 19th century, it was only in the 20th century that it came to dominate. End quote. So this parasitism is networked on another level. You know, it flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil, gas, power, maintains the entire economy, maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure, all of it. A whole world, as we've seen, has been built around these fossil fuels. And something as simple as blocking a fairly small strait can have a dire impact on the entire world, much of which is yet to be felt. Even as the strait has now been reopened or is.

[Mia Wong]

Well, it's not been reopened.

[Andrew Sage]

About to be seemingly AI. I mean, Israel did violate the ceasefire though, right? So it probably will not be opened again.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I mean, even before that it hadn't been reopened. I, I don't know, I, I have no idea when this episode is going to come out. So I, I am standing for the record here.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, it's very hard to comment.

[Mia Wong]

It's impossible. It's like not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out whether the straight is open on a hour to hour basis.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, like, that's fair.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know what the, the streets could have been like. I, I don't know, like maybe someone will have like filled the straight in by the time this episode comes out. Like, who knows?

[Andrew Sage]

Who knows?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just, I've Been so straight pilled.

[Andrew Sage]

That's a fair point. That's a fair point. I guess the point I'm trying to make is even in the hypothetical scenario where the straight is fully opened, we're still going to feel the impact of that brief period of closure.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

For years.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. The system phase, by the way, is not just on the whole extraction of resources, of land, of labor. You also notice that it, it extracts our attention as well through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit. And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from the future and from million year old ecosystems. Eventually that debt is going to catch up on us. In fact, it already has begun to catch up on us. We're not in the. When climate change happens in the future, it is happening right now. And the nation states are carrying on business as usual and business is booming. The agents of this parasitic phase do not care. This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these massive transnational entities. And what you'll notice about this period is that they are the agents of this time, even sometimes more than countries. Some of them, some of these corporations have more power than entire countries. And so with the advent of mass communication and globalization, we also saw ideological coalitions which could be seen as another agent in this phase. The governments, institutions, media, tech giants and movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives that determine what people, be IT workers, consumers, users or citizens, believe is normal, necessary and inevitable. As a person living in this time, it is very difficult to see it. You know, you get used to a certain system and it's, you know, it's like water to a fish. Yeah, you can feel abstract, intangible, like what are you talking about? This, there's nothing. Besides this can be the reaction you get sometimes. And it is not on any one individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system. The biggest picture, nobody, I think, sees all the machinations of the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know, it sees you as part of its functioning and to kind of bring it to a close. What I want people to take away from this is that, you know, you can be and you are an agent in history. Now whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine, or you are an agent of history that serves as a wedge in the machine, that's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth, deep inequality, technological advancement, military Might environmental strain atomization. The 2020s have been a whirlwind of a decade already, and it's not even over yet.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God. Still four more years.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This decade sucks. I want a new one.

[Colonel Panic]

It really does.

[Andrew Sage]

But this system is not unassailable. Yes, it can, and it does adapt to our ruptures, but it is a lot more fragile than it. It puts forward. You know, to borrow from. I can't remember who said it, the concept of paper tiger, it comes from Chinese mythology or Chinese military philosophy, right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Like, I know Mao talks about it a lot. I don't actually know where it's from, but.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, but I say that to say that it's a paper tiger. You know, a particularly sturdy paper tiger, but a paper tiger nonetheless.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And never have the people who are attempting to ride the paper tiger have, like, never in the entire, like, history of modern capitalism has it been written by people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick. Never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it. And they are, you know, they are already kind of tearing it apart because they don't understand it at all.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I think one of the. One of the signs of that was just the idea that you can kneecap your country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen. I mean, honestly, the US has not faced the consequences that it should for the things that it has done in this year alone. That's alone in its decades of history. Yeah, but I mean, when you saw the deconstruction of USAID, right, which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having sway in other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, and also, you know, intervening in the internal. The domestic politics of other countries to break that down like a bull in a China shop, when that was really like one of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal world order afloat. It really, I think, is an indication of the incompetence we're dealing with.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And then even on top of that, I think on. Even on an even larger scale. Right. The entire premise for, I mean, like, the entire premise of the Pax Americana. Right. The entire premise of the post World War II American order was that the US Navy would keep the world's oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing. And it worked exactly as long as the US never actually had to fight a war over, like, the sea lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And Then we fought the one war which would prove that we cannot, in fact, secure the sea lanes for global capital. Transformations are happening in, like, the very structure of global capital because these people think that, like, the idea of not using your military power and then reaping the. Reaping the world spanning, like, trillion. Trillion dollar rewards of this. Like, they thought that shit was like. Like, girl shit.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, the whole. The whole point of what? I think part of the point of investing in all this military might is so that you don't have to use it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

It's just to try and scare people into just bowing down to station your troops outside their territory. And you're like, yeah. Are you gonna really try and challenge us? Yeah. And then you went and stomped all over somebody, and obviously they had to stand up and defend themselves. And. And now everybody's seeing what it is, you know.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And it's a situation, too, where like. Yeah. Like, Iran has always technically had the military power to, like, control the Strait of Hormuz, but they never did because the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities. So the only way you could possibly lose control of the Strait of Hombus is if you bombed the cities first. So all you had to do was not do that, and it would be fine.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

But, I mean, the little girls in the school were Hamas now, so.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God. Yeah, it's just.

[Andrew Sage]

Just a tragedy.

[Mia Wong]

God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the balls because they just, like, wanted to go kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror. And also, they so clearly have no idea what the fuck they're doing, that it makes a lot of things possible.

[Andrew Sage]

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you know, what comes next? We're seeing, like, as you said, epochal transformations just in this year alone. This phase that we are in currently, as defined by McDonald, is not going to last forever. You know, unlike previous phases, however, this phase has been imposed truly globally. There is no longer a hinterland that one can escape to.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And so what comes next can be fragmentation. It can be some kind of evolution or calcification, or it can be a social revolution. And the moment, and the cogs and wedges in this moment are actively deciding that. But I think we can do without this parasitism.

[Cooper Quintin]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

As McDonald notes, there are other ways of relating with each other and with nature. He borrows from the ecological language of commensalistic and mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other. For example, we provide hives and protection while bees pollinate crops and produce honey. In commensalistic relationships, one organism captures energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other, as lots of animals and plants would make their home among trees, while neither harming nor helping the tree itself, although some of them do end up helping the tree in more indirect ways, but finally in parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world. One organism that being us, has captured the energy of another or of multiple others to those others detriment. Our system has put us in the position of essentially being mosquitoes on planet Earth are not in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem, but literally sucking more blood than the system can sustain. And so we have to. We have to shake things up. We have to embolden. I think new forms of relations and what those relations look like are up to you. As usual. All power to all the people. Peace.

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[Mia Wong]

welcome to it could Happen Here, a podcast where the thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler colony of the United States in the mass mask of humanity is being increasingly ripped away. Leaving behind I think calling it a new Jim Crow is that title's already been used for something else, but it's a return Overtly to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era. So I'm your host, Mia Wong. Let's talk about what is actually at issue here. And that is a recent Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Calais. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in its congressional map in 2024? Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation. To get to the point where there were two majority Black districts in 2024, on a macro level, what is at stake here is can a state create an electoral map where they spread all of the black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every district, thus making it impossible for black voters to select a candidate of their choosing? Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights act was passed to stop. Like this. Specifically like this. This is one of the very specific things, I cannot emphasize this enough. This specific thing, which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things it was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this. And this has led to the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own, probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short, short version of what a minority majority district is, is it's a district where the majority of voters are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a lot of these districts in the south specifically to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to elect any chose. And fundamentally what's at stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect a candidate of your choosing if you are part of a minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff was passed in the first place. Because under what we call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is other non white people too. But like this is primarily black people. It was, it was very, very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for can never be elected. This is, this is one of the bases of Jim Crow overt discrimination. The Supreme Court has decided. No, actually what they've decided is that if the Republican Party that controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about where they spread out all of the, like specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts so that black people can't elect a representative. In order to challenge this as violation of your voting rights, you have to prove, definitively prove that the intent was racism and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this is. This is the thing that's really at issue here, right? You have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisan. Lee. Which is, amazingly, a thing that's legal to do in the United States for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also, you have to be able to prove that they created this map specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group. And also, you have to create a map map that would allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want. Like, for example, again, making sure that Republicans have all the seats in a state, but also not be racist. So you have to create a map for them that would allow them to do this in order to prove that there could be another map that achieves their goals of, like, partisan gerrymandering that isn't also racist. It's completely unhinged legally. This is, this is a shambles. We have covered some downright, like, hideous nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme Court decisions, right? Like, this Supreme Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in, like, living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out with this. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because there have been so many abhorrent ones, even just from a pure legal perspective. This one is so bad, it defies belief. So, okay, one of the main issues Here is section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I'm just going to read what it says. Quote, no voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results. Keep that in mind later. Which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973, baby. So, again, I can't emphasize this enough, right? The way this is written is that it says that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting or have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens to vote in account of race. Right? It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that. Actually, you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote from a piece in SCOTUS blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the Charles B. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law is the director of Election at Law at Ohio State University. He's written a book on electoral law. He is a constitutional law professor who specifically does election law. He is like by no means a leftist. He's coming in to the right of like Justice Jackson and her dissent in this case. Right? But even he, I'm going to quote what he, what he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get from like legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this. Quote. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section 2, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982amendment to the sections test creates a quote results test for determining whether there is liability under the section replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intention quiry rather than a results analysis. So what happened here, right, to make this extremely clear is that Congress in 1982 had amended this. They amended what this thing said, right, Because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right? Which means that you have to prove that like these people were like mustache twirling, saying the N word in fucking clan robes, doing Nazi salutes. You have to like prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If the result of it is racist, then you can't do it even if, like nominally. What you're saying out loud is that you're doing this for non racist reasons. If the result is racism, then you have to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that. We're just, like, flipping it back to intent standard for no reason other than I want to be able to do racism and help the Republican Party win seats. The other thing that fully talks about is the court is arguing that, like, Congress can't draw from the 15th Amendment in order in order to, like, like, have the Voting Rights act work in the first place. I'm going to quote him again. Yeah. The court in this decision did not need to consider the question of congressional power to enforce the 15th amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the 15th Amendment, but under Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article 1, Section 4 to enact laws governing the, quote, time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory intent and not rely on the 15th amendment at all. So, okay, what does this mean?

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

What Alito is saying is that, like, oh, well, actually, Congress doesn't have the authority to, like, write the section of the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't have the authority to do it under the 15th Amendment because it, like, oversteps the rights of states to. To, you know, like, run their own elections. Right? So I'm gonna do the thing I did last time with fully's thing and just read the full Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. By the way, when something says like, Article one, Section four, you have to remember that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like the first Amendment, right, The freedom of speech, that's an amendment that's not in the original text that had to be added onto it. And obviously we have something called the Bill of Rights that like, like, you know, was like the first 10amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like, put like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. That was not in the original text of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like, fuck it. This is going to be in the original thing, right? So Article one, Section four, this is from like, the original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote, quote, the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators. So yes, obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. They literally have the ability, like it says in Section 1, Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations. By such regulations, they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right? So obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. It's, it's just, it's literally just there in the Constitution.

[Garrison Davis]

It just says that.

[Mia Wong]

It's all like this. It's gibberish. It's like, oh my God, you could just read the text of the Constitution and it says you can do this. It's like, God, holy shit. Even from the perspective of like, if you treat the law as real, this is just pure Calvin Ball shit. Like, I mean, it's just. Jesus Christ. Okay, you know what's real and not Calvin Ball? It's. It's these products and services. We are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been? It's been about two weeks since the court did this decision. The court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to gerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing this via, again, the shadow docket, which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision. An unsigned one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great. It's amazing. And by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week after the original Supreme Court decision. This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already found to be explicitly racially motivated. A thing Alito said in the decision that he wouldn't do.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Alito says in decision that he won't overturn A, cases that are like overt discrimination, and B, that he wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it anyways. Jesus Christ. I just like, oh my God. So the short version of the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slate's story on this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of like both of the congressional black congressional candidates in the states by gerrymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In 2023, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't like, violate the Voting Rights Act. So this was three years ago. This like, the Supreme Court said they had to do this. Here's some Slate quote. Alabama, however, refused to comply with that order. Again, like they got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to do it, quote. So the lower court imposed its own map featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found that in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional racial discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, in addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate states. Now racing to eliminate black republic representatives from their congressional delegations, Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift its bar, but it refused. So they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re gerrymander black communities. In light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough this vote from when they were granted this position, this vote is in like eight days, right? People, people had already started voting for candidates in primaries, right? And Supreme Court was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can, you can fucking re gerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine. Even though, again, I cannot emphasize this enough in the ruling. Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it. It's mind boggling. It used to be like it, it really truly did used to be that if you were going to do shit like this, you had to like, sort of like pretend that you were following some kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You can just fucking do Calvin Ball shit. You can just literally lie about what you're doing in your decisions and then just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as Slate points out, and this has been pointed out by a whole bunch of different outlets, the Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that would have. Were trying to like make more Democratic maps, both in the sense of like not being racist and also that would elect more Democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon. Like it's too close to the election for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these, like eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear that what's happening here is that the court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote. And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the 1965 Voting Rights act was one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement, right? It's like one of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the movement was to have elections in which black people got to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And. And that's what's being done here, right? And this has been pointed out. It was like anyone who's read any kind of analysis of racial politics in the U.S. one of the consistent themes of the sort of what you would call, I guess, like the era of black uprising, right? The sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson, although I guess you could talk about the stuff in the bay before that, roughly from Ferguson through 2020, was that the US was not a democracy before the 1965 Voting Rights act because the principle of one person, one vote was not real because you could simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group. And that was the status quo of the South. And also like a lot of other parts of the country too, was this very overt ability of these people to not only just like this is. This is one of the components of segregation, right? It's not just like imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right? It's also, you know, like preventing. It's preventing black people from voting. And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just effectively destroyed, right? It's the thing that like made it possible to even sort of like, like in the loosest sense possible, call this country a democracy. And it's gone. It's just gone. And now, you know, it's like, okay, like what, what fucking is this now? And you know, I don't know, it's like it's. It's an even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state. This is what the goal of the Republican Party has always been. Like, they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever, right? It's, you know, dating back to, if you want to look at like what Trumpism descends for. We've talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of like the school choice movement. And the thing about the school choice movement was that it was an anti integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites only schools, a bunch of these sort of right wingers were like, okay, well we'll just do private schools or we can do that. And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right? Of, you know, sort of both evangelicalism and sort of the Bush administration and Trumpism and Reagan too, is this shit. And this has been what the Republicans have done when they've been in power, right? This is a lot, a lot of the Trump administration, like what they were doing, like all the stuff about dei, all the stuff about wokeness, like, this is also a lot of what Doge is doing was trying to make it so that black people, like, couldn't work for the US government, right? It was a huge purge of black women from the US government. And, you know, now, now we're seeing this on the level of elections and on this level, what the Republicans are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps is remove non white people and especially black people from Congress so they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan, it's just partisan gerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black voters because black voters won't openly vote for the party of white supremacy. And they're also claiming that, like, not doing this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people. A thing that, like, is completely, you know, just gibberish, world turned upside down nonsense. But they can just do that now because they're in power and because the court will just let them do this shit. And so I think in a way that really has not been conveyed in the media and in the discourse, this is one of the bleakest moments of this administration. Right on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right on top of just the ethnic cleansing of non white people from the US That ICE is doing. What they're doing right now is attempting to end multiracial democracy in the US and obviously politically, I have my critiques of electoral democracy as a concept, but having it just revert back to only white people get to decide who politicians are is something even worse than what we've had so far. It's a seismic shift in just literally what this country is toward. Something that unbelievably and unfathomably bleak state of pure white rule. And the people who are talking about this think that it can be reversed just by voting more. But no, it can't. The whole point of this is to make sure that elections and whatever the will of the people is, is incapable of actually affecting the white supremacist state, because not white people just don't get votes. You can't just vote harder your way through all of this shit. You have to actually do things. And you know, if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society, we're going to have to actually take action to combat and actually resist the fact that this is like, this is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state now. Yeah. So this has been. It could happen here. I don't have a non bleak way to end this, but the common refrain is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And I think you can also add to that right? If you've ever asked yourself what would you be doing during Jim Crow, the answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now. And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's time to move.

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[Robert Evans]

Speaking of things that are on fire, America. All right, I did my job. Garrison, what are we doing? Who are we?

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen happen here. Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yep, this episode we're covering the week of May 6th through May 13th. Yep, James, some small news items to open us up.

[James Stout]

My little grab bag of news stories. Yeah, the United Kingdom Parachute Drop supplies and medical personnel into Tristan da Cunha last weekend to respond to the Hunter virus outbreak. A man had got off the cruise ship where the outbreak began in April and returned to Tristan da Cunha where he resides. I think the cruise ship stopped Tristan da Cunha this weekend. British paratroopers from the Pathfinder platoon tandem jumped a doctor and a nurse onto the island along with supplies including oxygen, which was critically low on the island. The patient had reported symptoms two weeks after disembarking the cruise ship. And they'd spent that time on the island and therefore there's a fairly high chance that they've interacted with other people. Right. The island has no airstrip. There was such a low supply of oxygen that there obviously wasn't time for a boat to get to Tristan da Cunha. So the UK conducted this like fairly, I mean, extremely unusual. This is the first time the UK has ever done it. The island has a population around 220 people and only two medical professionals who are obviously exhausted after delivering care to this person who's on oxygen for several weeks. Yeah. So they jumped a couple more in there. Yeah. Fairly audacious response to the Hantavirus. Secondly, and I think we can also agree of equal importance, Japanese snack food giant Kalbi is switching to black and white packaging for its snacks.

[Garrison Davis]

No, no.

[Robert Evans]

Garrison is loading a gun right now.

[Garrison Davis]

This is a significant portion of my daily diet.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Garrison won't be able to make it through this one. Garrison's going on hunger strike.

[Robert Evans]

They are wiring a crude detonator together.

[Garrison Davis]

It looks like I'm going to join Iran, put an end to this madness,

[James Stout]

that is. This is because ingredients used for the ink on its normal colorful packages are hard to come by thanks to the war with Iran. And yeah, so if you want, if you got one of those little stickers that says I did that and you've got a packet of black and white crisps, now you can combine the two,

[Robert Evans]

put on your black and white lame ass chips.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. The one thing that gave us joy is gone. The Nigerian military has once again carried out an airstrike on a market, killing at least 100 civilians. According to Amnesty International, the airstrike on the Tumpfur market is the second in a month to hit a market. The Nigerian military claims the area was a hideout for bandits, but it has yet to acknowledge the civilian death toll. Government in this area is more or less like only present through its ability to project force like this. And I've seen interviews with locals Suggesting the town was under the control of non state groups. Previously, people remember the Nigerian government has suggested that anyone doing business with the people it's targeting is also a legitimate target.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

Which is how it has justified dropping bombs on crowded markets like this. CNN is claiming that the CIA facilitated a car bomb in Sinaloa. The article seems to have sources in or very familiar with the operations of Ground Branch. It also alleges that the US Government employees who were killed in the car crash last month were members of Ground Branch. More than the fact of this story, it doesn't shock me that the CIA is killing people in weird ways in different countries.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[James Stout]

That it's one of the things that

[Robert Evans]

they do that's like the CIA's job.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The fact that CNN has a source that is leaking Ground Branch operations, that is not usual for someone in the CIA to be. To be talking to someone at CNN while these operations are ongoing. Right. And like, yeah, operations in Mexico are exceptionally high risk for these kinds of folks. Like in 2012, some Mexican federal cops opened for fire on US government employees, presumably not acting on behalf of the federal government. Right. Obviously it puts this mission at risk, which isn't already a high risk thing. But the fact that somebody has felt the need to leak this to CNN is pretty remarkable.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of potential CIA leaks, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent claimed on X the everything applied camp that before the president launched the war in Iran, quote, the U. S intelligent community, including CIA was in agreement that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran would target U. S bases in the region and shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel and the US Unquote. The Supreme Court extended access to remote prescription and mail to delivery of the abortion pill mithopristone until Thursday, May 14, which is the day this episode releases. The night this episode releases around Thursday, they're expected to make a shadow docket ruling on whether Louisiana's ban on mail order abortion pills can go into effect as the case continues through a lower court. A golden statue of President Trump was unveiled at a Trump resort in Miami last week. The statue was blessed by evangelical pastor Mike Burns who said, quote, let me be clear, this is not a golden calf, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

God, it's so hard. I like you. You went through everything. You just like the little parade of horrors like you do every week and then you just drop that, that there's, there's a priest blessing a golden statue. Pastor. Sorry, you're right, Pastor And I know that, like, they. That he addressed in the moment, like, the whole Golden Calf thing of it all. It's just funnier that, like, he knew I gotta say something, like, I gotta make a comment on this.

[James Stout]

That's what got me. That he felt that he needed to address the Golden Calf in the room.

[Robert Evans]

Really genuinely funny.

[Garrison Davis]

My this is not a Golden Calf shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the shirt.

[James Stout]

Oh, fuck, yeah, that's great.

[Garrison Davis]

But, yeah, grim stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

So a national survey of 1,000Americans by NewsGuard and YouGov suggests that about half of people in the United States they surveyed think each of the attempts on Donald Trump's life was staged or they're not sure if it was real. For the White House Correspondent's Dinner attempt and the Butler, Pennsylvania attempts, 24% of those surveyed thought the attempts were staged, 32% were not sure in the White House correspondence dinner attempt, and 29% for the Butler, Pennsylvania event. It's more than half if you add them up. And I'm convinced it was real.

[Robert Evans]

Super funny.

[James Stout]

I'll quote from the report here. Of the 12% of Americans who said all three attempts were staged, 55% were Democrats, 38 were independents, and 7% were Republicans, according to the report.

[Garrison Davis]

Really interested in that. 7%.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

What are they getting out of that? I just, I don't. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, in what way do they think it was just like, hell, yeah, we're

[James Stout]

owning the libs, we're staging. Look at us go.

[Robert Evans]

I think it may just be like, well, I voted for Trump because I wanted my taxes to be lower, but I know he faked that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. This is obviously worrying. And this, this trend is something we've been talking about for years at this point. Says why I've been kind of such a. Such a hard ass about the. About, like the liberal conspiracism that is growing.

[Robert Evans]

I don't even find it worrying anymore, Garrison. I find it liberating that we're finally escaped. Like, look at that.

[Garrison Davis]

We're finally free from the shackles of truth.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, everyone's. Everyone's down on the muck together. Nobody's. Nobody's standing pretty anymore. Everybody's just wallowing like a filthy pig in shit.

[James Stout]

That it's pretty much the status of the. Yeah. The US News market right now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm fine with it.

[James Stout]

God, it's fucking bleak. It's so bleak. Like, I just, I don't want to address, like, the factual elements of each thing because there's no point Right.

[Robert Evans]

No, we should all know that's useless by now. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, just.

[Robert Evans]

Have we not gotten to a place free of that yet?

[James Stout]

Yeah, I know. I. I really don't know what to say about that.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, there are like real issues here. A conspiratorial base can be more easily recruited into reactionary thought.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the idea of the cultic milieu. And like, we can see a version of this happening with certain portions of the left might engage with people like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene right now. But for me, kind of the biggest issue with this is that it's a refusal to understand or accept, accept the particular moment that you find yourself with them. Like a resistance to the self realization that you are living through history and that people are active agents in history. It's a ahistorical rejection of the fact that some people may look at some of the actions that someone like Trump is doing, whether regarding ICE or the war with Iran, and then choose to act in response, or in the case of the Butler shooting, the result of social disintegration or under regulation, manifesting as someone violent, nihilistic expression similar to the mindset of like a school shooter. My last issue relates kind of to the second issue, like the ahistorical element. How these false flag shooting conspiracy theories also prescribe Trump too much power by not just turning him into this like invincible God, but then also assuming that like the US Deep State is capable and competent enough to stage major world events like this, like brainwash and groom patsies into doing these shootings. And like, this also obviously removes the agency and the clearly defined history of the people that do these own shootings. Right. It rejects this. Like I said, this relates to the second thing. It rejects or refuses to understand the moment that you're living in and that people actually are active agents of history. And like, the people that do these shootings have their own family and their own friends, they have their own history that we can show and prove.

[Andrew Sage]

Move.

[Garrison Davis]

And assuming that all this is like fake, that like the government has like manufactured this or somehow like turned someone who was a normie kind of liberal suddenly into like doing a shooting or has like faked this backstory. Right. It gives the government so much power. Right. It assumes that the government has power like a magical wizard that totally controls reality.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Anyway, for our first main story today, let's talk about Turning Point USA. But first, on Sunday night in Seattle, a 19 year old transgender girl was murdered. She was a student at University of Washington and was found with Stab wounds in the laundry room of an off campus apartment that she lived in. No suspect has yet been identified. While horrific in and of itself, Turning Point USA was scheduled to hold an anti trans debate event just days later at the very campus this trans student attended. This event was going to be hosted by a far right anti trans lobbyist and influencer named Chloe Cole, a teen transitioner who subsequently detransitioned a few years later following an acid trip and then conversion to Christianity.

[Robert Evans]

Many such cases.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's fascinating.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Most normal Christian detransitioner.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

She made an appearance at Trump's last State of the Union address when the President talked about restricting gender affirming care to minors. After the murder in Seattle, Cole and TPUSA continued plugging their anti trans event online, prompting students to plan a protest to, quote, unquote, shut the event down, calling to bring, quote, flags, drums or anything to make noise, unquote. Then on Tuesday, the National Turning Point USA organization decided to cancel the event. According to University of Washington spokesperson Victor Balta, later that night, Tuesday night, Chloe Cole announced the event was postponed because, quote, antifa has assembled a local militia in their own words, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, that's, that's alarming. A militia.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, I was not able to find an instance of Antifa claiming to have assembled a, quote, unquote militia.

[Robert Evans]

Really? No photos of the militia, the documentation

[Garrison Davis]

of the militia, nor was this language, this, this, this claim of a militia in their own words, nor was this language included in right wing reporting of the planned protest. I cannot find a source for this. I really looked like I went through Fox articles, post millennial articles. There was nothing about Antifa using the word militia. No one, no, no counter, no protester that I could find was using the word militia. Now, Chloe Cole also claimed that there were, quote, explicit threats on my life and that the protest caused a, quote, level of attention. Our security team and the local PD are frankly unprepared for, unquote. She shared an article from the Canadian far right outlet the Post Millennial documenting threats against the TP USA event. Threats like one Twitter user in Canada saying that people should shut down the event, like Milo Yiannopoulos's Berkeley campus event in 2017, writing, quote, make them hurt for scheduling this one other Twitter post with two likes. Read, quote, luckily the bricks in Red Square are easy to grab this time of year. Okay, that's the evidence that Andy no used to claim that, quote, far left extremists are urging their comrades to carry out deadly violence on two Posts. Just those two posts that, that was. That was the post that, that Chloe Cole was sharing via this post millennial article. That that was the evidence for these deadly threats. Now, I. I do think it's worth reiterating that to these people. They also believe that just calling someone a fascist constitutes a threat of violence. Right. This is something they've been repeating a lot of since the death of Charlie Kirk. Yeah. That just calling someone a fascist constitutes a deadly threat.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

In Chloe Cole's video announcing that the TPUSA event was, in her words, postponed, she said that after Charlie's assassination, quote, speaking on a University campus in 2026 can come with deadly consequences. But towards the end of the video, she stressed that, quote, this is not a win for antifa because truth will always win. I am not afraid of Antifa2 Twitter folks. That a quote, ragtag group of wannabe revolutionaries on cross sex hormones won't scare her. The enemy is both strong and weak.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. Good for her. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Yeah, that's how these people work.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, while I was watching Chloe Cole's video, something sprang to mind.

[Cooper Quintin]

Mind.

[Garrison Davis]

Last week, the White House released a new counterterrorism strategy that named three major threat groups the country is currently facing. Narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and anti fascists. The document says that counterterrorism activities will, quote, prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti American, radically pro transgender and anarchist, unquote. I did a full episode about this with Robert earlier this week if you want to check that out.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

But the. The left wing, transgender, anarchist, antifa stuff makes up just a handful of sentences in a 16 page document which is mostly focused on Islamic terrorism, cartels and complaining about the Biden administration for a tldr. There's nothing new in this counterterrorism document pertaining to the left that wasn't already in national security. Presidential memorandum number seven. It does not grant any new powers nor designate trans people as terrorists like NSMP7. It essentially states that being, quote, unquote, extremely pro transgender can be a motivating factor in carrying out terroristic violence or threats. But since last October, Joint terrorism task forces across the country have been directed to investigate antifa aligned groups and individuals, quote, engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation. This new document is just describing things that are already happening. While building Trump's justification for military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela and the ongoing war in the Middle East. But in the wake of this new strategy being released, I wonder if TP USA's canceling of the event and Chloe Cole's language in the announcement might also be designed to coax Trump's feds into going after radical transgender antifa terrorists. Whether that may be individuals who, who possibly sent threats online that I just couldn't see or just made semi questionable posts on twitter.com or who simply spread the protest flyer online or the protest organizers themselves. Yeah, I think that is something to keep in mind. This new counterterrorism strategy, it mostly serves as a chilling effect for speech and for organizing. Like I said, it doesn't actually grant new powers, but it, it can scare people into thinking that the Trump administration is designating a whole class of people as terrorists and stuff like this, you know, protests. Right. That is one thing that they can investigate, you know, threats online, that is something that they can investigate. Right. That is, that is what they are actually looking into. They're not just investigating random trans people as terrorists. They, they will be looking into, you know, threats or questionable posts made on social media. Right. Those are the things they actually can, can look into. And I think some of Chloe Cole's language about the quote, unquote, deadly threats she received, stuff like that could be used by the Trump administration as a pretext to investigate people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Whether or not the threats even were real. Right. I did not see anything that I think constitutes a deadly threat based on the Post Millennials reporting. But her saying that might be enough for a local FBI field office to want to investigate, you know, student activists at this university.

[James Stout]

Right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

[Garrison Davis]

So that's what I wanted to talk about here.

[Robert Evans]

This is by far the thing I'm seeing people freak out about the most right now is like, overall the idea that, like, they've just declared it, you know, terrorism, a violent terrorism, to be trans or to be anarchist or to be, you know, any of the things like anti capitalist mentioned in that, in that document.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And what I'm actually seeing on the ground so far is very much the same kind of prosecutions that they've been doing and the same kinds of, like, messaging that, that they've been making. And I, I think that, like, you're right on the money. This is something to pay attention to. Like, does this get a response? Is there an actual, like, investigation? Do we wind up see some. Someone get indicted for a Twitter post or, you know, if someone made a threat that we're not privy To.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Do they get indicted for that, like. Or do we see something that does look more like a witch hunt, where they're going after, like, a protest organizer or. That'll tell us a lot about kind of what. What's coming in the immediate future. But right now, I don't see anything different than what they've been doing, which is kind of like incompetently and haphazardly flailing at everything. Sort of vaguely lefty.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And, you know, I think including this in a document like the counterterrorism strategy, you know, also serves as a chilling effect. Right. This is. This is to scare people.

[Robert Evans]

They're trying to.

[Garrison Davis]

Into not doing anything. Right. That is a part of their strategy.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

But, you know, they have investigated people for making death threats for years. Right. The Biden administration.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And.

[Robert Evans]

And their FBI to make death threats, by the way, if they're actual death threats, that is illegal. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The FBI under Biden investigated Stop Cop City. The charges against the protesters at Prairieland started. That investigation started before NSMP7 was even, you know, released. Right, right. This is not new, but it is something to. To keep an eye on.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

To see if they're. If. If their scope is. Is actually changing.

[Robert Evans]

Right. You know what else is changing in scope? Our sponsors.

[Mia Wong]

Are they.

[Robert Evans]

Not really.

[James Stout]

No. Same.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Foreign.

[James Stout]

We are back. And we are back to talking about the war in Iran. So I want to start off with President Trump's extremely vocal criticism of Kurdish groups. One can assume in Iran that that's. It doesn't necessarily seem that his criticism is limited to Kurdish groups in Iran. Let's play the clip.

[Cooper Quintin]

The level of ferocity for protests. You know, the people are watching it. They want to go out on the streets. They have no weapons. They have no guns. We thought the Kurds were going to give us weapons, but the Kurds disappointed us. The Kurds, take, take, take. They have a great reputation in Congress. Congress says, oh, they fight so hard. They fight hard when they get paid. So I'm very disappointed in the Kurds.

[James Stout]

But.

[Cooper Quintin]

But they were given. I said it wasn't going to work, by the way. I just have to say it. I disagreed with what they did. They gave it. I said, they'll never get there. And I was right. I like to be right. In this case, too bad. But we sent some guns with ammunition and they were supposed to be delivered, but they kept it. I said, they're going to keep it, but what do I know? I've only been doing this. It should be, man, what do I know. Go ahead.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Fascinating. Here's Dia Kurda asking him about this.

[Robert Evans]

Mr. President.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Mr. President.

[Garrison Davis]

Mr. President, yesterday you said you, you

[Mia Wong]

gave the Kurds arms, but they took it for themselves. A US military official says that the Kurds have not received any arms and

[Garrison Davis]

the Kurdish political parties are denying receiving any armies.

[Cooper Quintin]

President Trump, regarding the.

[Garrison Davis]

The officials. Wrong.

[James Stout]

The officials are wrong. Yes. Yeah, that's it.

[Robert Evans]

Well, there's the Kurds. Could be so many things. Like they just said that officials, I'm assuming the KDP and the PUK is who they're referring to. But that's just like the two big parties in Iraq, which isn't even all of the Kurdish parties in Iraq, like, not to mention all of the different armed groups. But I have no idea who he sent guns to and I don't know that he does.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or if he did.

[Robert Evans]

He seems pretty confident that he did.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is like the opposite of Iran Contra where the President saying like, I definitely sent them guns, I am running guns. I was running guns. And everyone else is like, we have no fucking clue what he's talking about.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So I'm guessing this refers to his previous theory that they had supplied guns to Iranian Kurdish groups in January at a time when there were large scale protests in Iran that those Iranian Kurdish groups were expected to deliver to, presumably Persian protesters, presumably in large cities such as Tehran. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump himself personally vetoed this exact plan in January after receiving pressure from Turkey to do so. There were some armed actions in January, but small arms, as we've said before, would not really have tipped the balance here. Iran's army police besiege the igc, as we've seen since February, can survive assault from the US and Israel. It's not going to be toppled by a bunch of people with AKs. They would have bombed whole cities, so they had to. We covered this at the time in our episode about it with Qur'da in. But most of the Kurdish groups I've spoken to don't have responses at this time. But the Pak, that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party, sent me this comment regarding the protests in January, quote, from the end of December 2025 through approximately January 20, 2026, the Iranian regime committed an unpreced massacre across Elam, Kaman and Lauristan. They mobilized Hasht Al Shabi militias into Persian cities and deployed a massive military presence into our territories in order to defend our citizens. We targeted the outposts and military bases where these forces were Stationed. We confirmed that, yes, we carried out these operations. So what they're confirming there is that they carried our operations, not where the weapons came from. Right, but we, we saw those operations in January. Famous, I guess, for being a founding member of the EPIGE or an SDF commander. He's also an author and politician. Did make a statement which I thought was interesting. I'm going to read it. At least a good amount of it, because I think it's worth it. Quote, the Kurds are not mercenaries. Kurdish blood is not cheap and the lives of Kurdish youth are not for sale. The Kurds are fighting for their freedom, dignity and political rights, not to serve the temporary agendas of regional or international powers without any clear outcome for the Kurdish people themselves. At the same time, the Kurds have repeatedly shown their willingness to cooperate in fighting terrorism, extremism and instability in the Middle East. Kurdish forces played a central role in the defeat of ISIS and contributed greatly to regional security. But cooperation must be based on mutual respect, clarity, and long term political understanding. I do not know the accuracy of the recent claims regarding weapons allegedly sent to protesters inside Iran. If such operations truly existed, then the American side should clearly explain which group, force or individuals receive those weapons. A nation of tens of millions of people should not be collectively accused through vague and unverified statements. Yeah, that's pretty good.

[Garrison Davis]

Sounds incredibly reasonable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, sounds like a really reasonable thing.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It does seem that Trump has some personal animus against the Kurds.

[Robert Evans]

I wonder if what he's referring to is that like a year or so ago, the last time they sent over more weapons, if he sent some message more recently being like, hey, could you send some of those guns that we already gave you over to rebels in Iran? And they were like, no, no, no. What do you mean? And he's pissed. I wonder if that's what he's pissed about.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's so hard for me to say. It's hard for me to. Is he talking about the sdf? Is he talking about groups in Southern Kurdistan that they armed? Yeah, he asked them to, like, pass them along. I have never seen large numbers of American supplied weapons among the Rogilati groups.

[Robert Evans]

No. Although they do some of their AKs come from the US if you look at like what's sent over, like a bunch of. And like body armor. A lot of like, what the sdf, like, the armor they have came from Americans.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And with like a higher speed SDF guys, you'll see like M4s, but. And even like night vision, like, yat, the anti terror forces and sdf. You'll see. But like, like on the Iranian side, I have not seen that. And he's repeated this several times over quite a long period of time. It seems to be something he genuinely believes. But I have seen no evidence aside from his claims to support. Doesn't matter. But it does matter in the sense that Trump clearly is personally mad at Kurdish groups and does not seem to be interested in supporting their aspirations for autonomy, which is disappointing. But I guess I don't know why. Maybe because he feels that he alone should take credit for the defeat of the Islamic State. Like, I can't quite work out what to cause this, other than maybe he perceives them to have slighted him by not giving weapons that we don't know anything about.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Let's talk a little bit about the broader situation in Iran. I don't want to make this like, true social review. I know. I've read Trump's truths in the past. I have reached a point where I can't do that anymore.

[Robert Evans]

That's fair.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like I can't. People are dying.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They bombed a girl's school. Like, this is serious and horrible. And it's really hard to bring the gravity that needs to be brought to this. And also read out the absolutely bonkers stuff that gets posted. Trump described a missile strike on Iran as a love tap this past week. So I'm just not going to do that this week. I am going to say that both sides have repeatedly and openly violated the ceasefire, which Trump describes to reporters and Dr. Oz as being on, quote, massive life support. Meanwhile, Iran's parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Galiba has said, quote, our armed forces are ready to deliver a well deserved response to any aggression. Mistaken strategy and mistaken decisions will always lead to mistaken results. The whole world has already figured this out. We are prepared for all options. They will be surprised. This comes as Trump calls Iran's peace demands a piece of garbage and a stupid proposal. Iranian demands allegedly included an end to Israeli aggression in Lebanon and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormone moves. Trump has also alleged that they walked back an agreement to surrender enriched uranium. We've also found that Iran has retained a large number of their missiles and their launch capacity. This week. It's also been reported by Jim laporter, who is one of the few people still doing decent reporting at cbs, that Pakistan has provided safe haven for Iranian aircraft, shielding them from US Strikes. Allegedly some civilian aircraft were also sheltered in Afghanistan, but then had to be moved when Pakistan began bombing Afghanistan in March. Iran has Friends everywhere, I guess. The United States sent a ballistic missile submarine to Gibraltar this week. These Ohio class submarines provide the survivable element of the nuclear triad, or the most survivable element of the nuclear triad.

[Robert Evans]

You can't strike a nuclear submarine before it gets a chance to strike. It's basically impossible.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That's the reason that they exist.

[Robert Evans]

Guarantees that you will get to do your thing.

[Andrew Sage]

Thing.

[James Stout]

Yeah. For mutually assured destruction reasons. It's not super normal to announce their presence in places I don't think. But the Navy did this week. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it can be. It depends on, like, the situation.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Depending on what's going on.

[Robert Evans]

This is a little weird. Yes.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. The Pentagon seems to be planning to rename the war in Iran Operation Sledgehammer. This seems to be an attempt at an end run around the 1973 War Powers Revolution. They claimed already. Right. We spoke about this last week. They're claiming Epic Fury is over now and that this is a new and distinct operation. In a congressional hearing, Hegseth denied that they needed an authorized use of military force. Let's play the clip.

[Redfin Ad Announcer]

It doesn't appear that. That hostilities have ended. And so the question to you is, is whether or not the administration has considered or had intended to seek an authorization of use of military force from the Congress.

[Cooper Quintin]

Senator, our view is that should the President make the decision to recommence that,

[James Stout]

we would have all the authorities necessary to do so.

[Redfin Ad Announcer]

Do you think that it would be helpful to the President if it was made clear that, in fact the Congress did. Did allow. Did provide an aumf?

[Cooper Quintin]

I think the President. Our view is that he has all the authorities he needs under Article 2 to execute.

[Redfin Ad Announcer]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[James Stout]

That's more or less hegtess. Saying he didn't need Congress, which is great. Yeah. Hexess faced pointy questioning from the House and Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittees. He repeatedly batted away questions about munitions depletion and suggested that, like, it wasn't appropriate to answer them in public on the record like this.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, I'm sure.

[James Stout]

Yeah. He also did not directly confront the cost of the war, which is now approaching 30 billion, instead saying, quote, what is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon? And the fact that this President has been willing to make a historic and courageous choice to confront that. It comes with cost. And we recognize that kind of an exercise in evasion on Hegseth's part there, apart from his pretty emphatic statement that he didn't think that they needed any permission from Congress to continue with this war. So we will be back next week to keep you updated on what might be Operation Sledgehammer.

[Robert Evans]

Great. Yeah, great stuff. Very exciting. So on May 12, 2026, the former mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang, pled guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and is being sentenced in the near future for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Yeah, people have taken this news, normally, the foreign government is China. I did a quick little bit of Googling before coming around here and found some, some fun headlines. One of them in the Lion, California Mayor Pleads Guilty to Serving Communist China. And that article was written by John Ransom, who's a senior contributor at the lion and also has written for the Epoch Times, which itself is like the agent of a foreign power, effectively. The WCBM had a headline. This Democrat mayor just came clean about working for Communist China.

[James Stout]

She didn't come clean.

[Robert Evans]

She didn't come clean. She pled guilty for that. And then from the House Committee on China's website, Moulinar warns of CCP influence After California Mayor Charged in Foreign Influence Plot. These charges highlight the very real threat of the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to influence our free and open society. While it denies freedom and liberty for the Chinese people, the CCP is actively working to subvert our institutions and divide us against one another. In this case, an elected mayor acted at the direction of CCP handlers, coordinated with Chinese intelligence linked individuals and used a local news platform to spread CCP propaganda. And, and so let's talk about that. How much of this is true? Right? Yeah, I mean, technically, yeah, like that's, that's kind of what happened, except for the part where they were like coordinating to drive Americans apart from each other and create unrest and whatnot. That's not what the purpose of this thing that Eileen got wrapped up in was. She and her former fiance, a fellow named sun, who got sentenced before she did. Mike sun are accused of basically having run like content farms at the behest of Chinese government officials.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Like they were putting out articles on like the alleged genocide in Xinjiang, denying like the Chinese government had done anything wrong there, there was any genocide at all in the region. And so it's kind of like propaganda stuff like that. They were serving as like a fire hose of propaganda, per the Justice Department. In June of 2021, a PRC official contacted Wang and other individuals via the WeChat encrypted messaging application with pre written news articles, including a PRC official written essay in the Los Angeles Times. That stated China's stance on the Xinjiang issue. There is no genocide in Xinjiang. There is no such thing as forced labor in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumors due to fame, China destroys Xinjiang. Safety and stability weaken local economy and suppress China's development. Development. Minutes later, Wang posted the article on her own website and responded to the PRC official with a link to the article on her website. The others in the group did the same. The PRC official responded so fast. Thank you, everyone. And this is bad. Genocide denials, bad. Spreading slop content on behalf of a foreign government is, like, bad. It is important to note that this is not like spying or sabotage in any meaningful way. She's not acting to like, like, try to damage the United States. She's acting as, like, an unregistered PR agent for the Chinese government. Or at least that's what she had done up to this point in her life. And, like, everything that she was doing was legal if she had disclosed who she was working for, which I think is also an important thing to note, because shit like this happens all the time in. In the media. Like, we all see. There's tons of content that. That is the result one way or the other of some government's influence operation. And for the majority, the majority of the time when it happens, nobody gets tripped up, you know, either because they have friends in power or because they don't quite cross a line. And Eileen and her friends were not very savvy about what they were doing, but they were also not operating on a very large level. Like, this is not a big operation. One of the notes in this charging document is that Eileen sent this Chinese government official a screenshot showing that the article had been viewed 15,000, 128 times through her site, which is, like, not. We're not talking, like, big deal influence ops here. We're not talking, like, sweeping powers over, like, public opinion. Now, perhaps that's what they hoped Eileen would kind of rise to over time. She didn't seem to be like, a kind of rising star in local government in Southern California. She got endorsed by some prominent Democratic Party officials, and she was still in touch with her Chinese government handlers at this time. This whole period in which she's, like, being charged for working as an agent of the Chinese government is like, 2020 through at least 2022. So, yeah, this is like, you know, a bad thing. And it's good that this got found out and that she's not continuing to be the mayor of Arcadia.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But also, this is not like the scary thing that the right wing press is making it out to, she was not here to like subvert the US So that it could be invaded or destroyed. She was there to try to stop people on the Internet from being mean to the Chinese government. Like, that was the primary use that they had with her. It's just not that like actually scary a story or anything. It's just the kind of thing that happens. This lady happened to become mayor of a small town, basically, which is wild. It's crazy that that happened, but shit like this is going on all the time.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think I know. Yeah. People have lost their minds about this one in a way that, like, it's

[Robert Evans]

a perfect California city. Like, it's a Southern California town and she's a Chinese government female spy. Like, of course, of course there's, there's

[Garrison Davis]

a lot of stuff. Back when Eric Swalwell was still a relevant human being, there was some attacks on him for associating with a quote unquote, Chinese female spy, like 10 years ago. And that was like one of the lines of attack against him.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Because like someone, someone he had like relations with in like 2014, what was alleged or found to be working as a spy for the Chinese government. It's interesting that they're doing this type of stuff at like the exact same time that Trump just got just like is like arriving in China.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's really great timing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Curious timing there, but I'm guessing she took the plea.

[James Stout]

This has been a period of some time.

[Cooper Quintin]

Right?

[James Stout]

Like her fiance.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because for first. First her former fiance got busted and then she was like, I didn't do anything wrong. And then it became clear that she very much had.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So there was. This was like a thing that. Yeah, this has been going on for a little while. It just sort of. Once she pled guilty, then you could do the article like, California Mayor pleads guilty to working for the Chinese government.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Just funny timing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of timing, here are some ads.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[James Stout]

Yay.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, we are back for one of our last main stories. Let's talk about Virginia and the redistricting efforts. Last week, in a 4, 3 ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court blocked the voter approved redistricting map that passed in April with almost 52% of the vote. The court found the process used to advance the referendum violated the state constitution. According to Virginia's constitution, the legislature has to vote twice to pass any proposed constitutional amendment before it gets put on the ballot for Virginia voters. But these two General assembly votes must be separated by a state general election. The first General assembly vote for this redistricting Amendment passed in October 2025, before the November general election. And the second vote to approve the referendum happened next January. So a few months ago, the Republican challengers to the new voting match argued that because early voting had already begun, the General Assembly's first vote in October did not actually occur before a general election. And that was the grounds the state Supreme Court used to block the voter approved amendment. The four judge majority ruled the intervening election requirement was violated because the general election, quote, began on September 19, 2025, and just ended on election day, November 4th.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I feel like you're kind of outside the spirit of what they were going for with that one.

[Garrison Davis]

But, no, this on the face sounds quite absurd.

[James Stout]

It's one of those things that's technically correct, but at the same time, well,

[Garrison Davis]

and there's some complicating factors because of Trump's own attempts to restrict early voting or deem early voting like, not constitutionally, like, appropriate or like it like, it defies the federal government's definition of the word election. And so now you have some groups in Virginia who are trying to pass this amendment, Democrat groups who are using kind of similar rhetoric as Trump. We'll get to that in a sec. So Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote the majority opinion saying, quote, this violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void. Early Virginia voters unknowingly forfeited their constitutionally protected opportunity to vote for or against delegates who favor or disfavor amending the Constitution by not anticipating a legislative vote on a constitutional amendment four days before the last day of voting, unquote. So the, the Court said that the reason why they have this, this two vote requirement across two different general assemblies is to give voters enough time to not just support or not support a constitutional amendment on the ballot, but then also vote for state lawmakers who will either approve or not approve the constitutional amendment in the legislature itself. Right, so that's what they're saying. It's like this, this, this, this process of having these two votes is to ensure that voters have a say both in who they put into office as well as on the ballot. And they're saying that this process was violated because early voting had already commenced by the time that the legislature actually voted on this proposed amendment. Chief Justice Cleo Powell wrote in the dissent that the majority, quote, broadened the meaning of the word election as used in the Virginia Constitution to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election. By extending elections in the Commonwealth of Virginia beyond a single day, the majority's formulation would directly conflict with the federal mandate that elections for federal officials be held on a single day, unquote. So under the Supreme Court of Virginia's new ruling, the district map drawn in 2021 must be used for the upcoming election this November. The midterms. The new map would have have won Democrats four more House seats. But considering this ruling by the state Supreme Court, Dems are now eight seats down in the national redistricting battle, which the latest gutting of the Voting Rights act will only make worse.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Over this past weekend, Virginia Democrats Hakeem Jeffries and Governor Abigail Spanberger held discussions on what to do about this ruling ruling. The New York Times reported that Virginia Democrats expressed determination to win two or three of the Republican held seats even with the current map, but also discussed a few long shot options to change the ruling or push forward the map anyway. One of the more extreme measures debated was the possibility of replacing the entire Virginia Supreme Court by lowering the mandatory retirement age age from 75 to 54 and then having a new court rehear the case.

[Robert Evans]

Sounds great.

[James Stout]

Let's do it in between now and November.

[Garrison Davis]

So it seems the Democrats decided against this path ultimately in part because the state Department of Elections deadline for congressional maps is May 12, which is a day before we are recording. They kind of ran out of time on this.

[Mia Wong]

This.

[Garrison Davis]

It's also unclear if they really would have had the the bravery to pull such a an extreme maneuver. Right. Something that may be the correct thing to do and maybe something they should just do anyway. If they have the power to fully replace their Supreme Court, why not? Because the Democrats are currently in a majority of control of the state legislature right now. Why not? Why not do this anyway? To a certain extent also, Abigail Spanberger can only serve one term term. So you know you're not going to lose much political capital by pulling a kind of insane move like this. But it's not going to happen. At least right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Nope.

[Garrison Davis]

Virginia's State Senate Majority Leader Scott Sorreville told the New Republic, quote, as a practical matter, the move would not be capable of being implemented given the time frame. Now. Despite that May 12 deadline line, on Monday, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones and Democratic state lawmakers filed an emergency appeal asking the US Supreme Court to put the state Supreme Court order on hold for the upcoming midterm election, arguing that the state court based their ruling on misreading the federal definition of election. And by adopting its own definition, the state supreme court infringed on the state legislature power to regulate federal elections, Quote. By forcing the commonwealth to conduct its congressional elections using districts different from those adopted by the general assembly pursuant to a constitutional amendment the people just ratified, the supreme court of Virginia has deprived voters, candidates and the commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts, unquote. This case will be initially decided by chief justice John Roberts courts who handles the emergency appeals from states covered by the fourth circuit court of appeals. But the u. S. Supreme court may argue that they don't have the authority to intervene because the Virginia supreme court ruling cites state law, not federal law. The new republic also reported that state senate majority leader Scott Sorrelville confirmed that even if the supreme court gives them a good ruling, that ruling could be unlikely to impact this upcoming election cycle due to this May 12th deadline.

[James Stout]

I guess it's just worth saying that like, the, the nature of this midterm will be very important for the way you get to vote in America going forward. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I mean they're, they're pulling out all the stops. Like they're throwing any kind of plausible deniability in the trash because this is the get it or lose it moment for the right. You know, like that's very much how they're looking at this.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This is a lock it in forever.

[Robert Evans]

We'll see.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A few years ago, Ohio pushed through unconstitutional maps, maps that were deemed unconstitutional by state courts. One federal court did authorize them to use these maps in like an interim period, and they're still using them. And in a piece by the nation, they mentioned this, this option, but said that they would need to have the backing of the state board of electors and Virginia might not have that. There's lots of people on the democratic side that are much more rule followy than a lot of the Republicans as, as we have seen.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, Virginia may be able to still pass this redistricting map in the future by spreading out the process over a bigger period of time to not create this confusion about the early voting period. Period. But the map would not be able to go into effect before the midterms, but it still may be able to go into effect in the future. I do think it's also worth noting that the same day that Virginia filed this appeal with the supreme court, the US supreme court also paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority black districts before the midterm elections by overturning a lower court order that blocked the use of a Republican backed map from 2023. So the Supreme Court is currently weighing in on. On not exactly the same, but, you know, similar, similar things in other states.

[James Stout]

That was because it was basically pointing to its Louisiana ruling and saying, like, we've ruled on this. Yes, this is right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, this was following the Louisiana ruling.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. You know, great. For the old democratic process Voting Rights Act. Ooh.

[Robert Evans]

So there's a, an increasing movement in the United States, both at the state and the federal level, to repeal gas taxes. So in the United States, there's federal gas taxes that, that everybody pays. The current federal gas tax rate is about 18.3 cents per gallon for gasoline. And gasahol, which is the actual official name of fuel mixed with unleaded gas, that's like unleaded and ethanol together is actually just called gasahol.

[James Stout]

Okay. Never knew that.

[Garrison Davis]

What a.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[James Stout]

What a lovely word. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

They couldn't think of anything better. And then 24.3 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. Right. And then some states have their. Their own. Like Oregon has its own, like, gas taxes.

[James Stout]

California certainly does at both levels.

[Robert Evans]

Like, the federal gas tax is there, in short, because it helps to pay for the roads. Right. Like, that's, that's why we need a federal gas tax is because it funds what's called the Highway Trust Fund or the htf, which is a big part of, like, what keeps our interstate infrastructure functional. And then state level gas taxes are often also, like, supporting, like state and local roads. Right. And so Trump has talked about temporarily repealing the gas tax for, like a couple of months. There have been Democratic proposals that are very similar. Graham Platner, who's about to be a

[James Stout]

congressman from Maine, a Democratic nominee for.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Who's currently the nominee, but is almost certainly going to win.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or the presumptive nominee, I think, has

[Robert Evans]

expressed support for ending the gas tax outright. And his basic plan was something like, you have wealthy corporations pay the money that the gas tax is currently going to, and you put that burden onto, you know, corporations instead of people. And it's not uncommon, by the way, for the gas tax to be temporarily repealed during the early months of the most recent, like, escalation of the Russian invasion into Ukraine and the Biden administration back in 2022, Biden temporarily paused the federal gas tax. Right. So this is a thing that happens. It's just always a bad idea because it's the reason why you see people on the left and right make suggestions like this repeal state or federal gas taxes is because it's really easy. It's an easy way to say like, I'm looking out for you. I'm trying to take care of ren. Regular people. Gas is too darn expensive already. We've got to do everything we can to make your life easier. The problem is the Highway Trust fund, which is absolutely critical for our roads being functional, is already always running at a deficit. In 2024, it was a deficit of about $13 billion. The main reason for this is that, like, transportation infrastructure is aging every single year and falling behind. And at the same time, that gas tax is not like pegged to inflation or anything. So it has not been keeping pace with the actual needs of the trust fund. So anyway, we're already in a really bad situation with the htf. Every time we pause these taxes, it gets much worse. And I'm worried right now that as reasonable as it may sound to say something like, well, we should just have the rich pay for that, that you're never going to have any kind of like, move that does both of those things at once. They're going to start by repealing the gas tax, and then they'll never get around to replacing it with anything. And then the roads will just be bad forever. I think this is a bad idea. And I think you should be a little wary of politicians doing this because it's an easy way to get a win. But that said, damn near everybody is.

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Is.

[Robert Evans]

So how wary can you actually be? It's just a really irresponsible bad idea that has a lot of bipartisan support.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Really. Ever since the no tax on tips thing, there's, there's been this wave of, of, you know, people have called this like, sloppulist policies or like things that are. That are.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

That are, you know, populist in framing but have certain, like, economic problems or, or get dispersed in weird ways. You know, Mia's, Mia's talked about some specifics around the no tax on tips policy. Yeah, but there's, there's been like a wave of these, you know, small targeted tax cuts on.

[Mia Wong]

On.

[Garrison Davis]

On. On various little things to kind of lift. Lift the financial burden that Americans are facing. You know, the, the better ones, you know, ones like, like, like Platinum strategy, which has a part of his plan increasing taxes on. On billionaires and oil corporations. Yeah, but these sorts of taxes are just like little bandaid solutions and that are almost like consolation prizes for not be able to Just raise the corporate tax rate or income tax brackets. Right. And it's, it's like we're adopting these consolation taxes for this presumed impossibility of just actually raising taxes to the level of, you know, if you look at the United States in like the 1950s, super, super high, super high level of taxes that actually funded social services. And you know, one, one thing that could be frustrating about these, these sorts of, more like sloppulist tax angles, you know, it, it, it undermines the vital role of taxes to actually fund social services.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, should more of those taxes be funded by corporations and billionaires? Yeah, absolutely.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But I think that should be the focus rather than these little itty bitty kind of, you know, cutting away at the corners of, of like, small, small targeted taxes that are, that are again, like, used, used as like, you know, consolation prizes rather than actually addressing the pretty significant, you know, tax reforms that need to happen in this country.

[Robert Evans]

And it's, it's just dangerous in part because it acts as if what the gas tax is there to fund, is optional, is not like, necessary. Like, well, we, we don't really need this, so we'll pause this whenever, like, things get bad because we don't need them, but we do. Like our society is reliant upon the maintenance, maintenance of that fund and we shouldn't act like it's. Yeah, I, I, this all is very frustrating to me.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You can see why the, the gas tax in particular is appealing right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, people are struggling. Like it is literally $7 a gallon in parts of California.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, it's fucking nuts.

[James Stout]

Like, people who, like a lot of people who struggle to make it are really struggling to make it. Now the way our society is set up means that it's very hard for people to exist without a car. So you, like, the populist appeal is obvious.

[Robert Evans]

And as is always the case with this sort of thing, the fact that it has an appeal is based on ignorance. Because when roads are poorly maintained, it costs regular people huge amounts of money and the damage it does to their car far more than the gas tax costs them. This has been established. This is not like a thing we have to wonder about. There have been studies into this. Like, you pay more money when the roads are bad because your car gets up.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's reasonable for people to say, well, our country has enough money. Can't we unfuck the roads and not charge me a lot of money? Unfortunately, we just spent 30 billion fucking invading Iran, so no, we can't oh

[Robert Evans]

yeah, you have to not do some of the other things that we're doing.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That is not up for grabs in the current political atmosphere. Right. Like, and even your, like, mainstream Democrats aren't going to ride for that.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean it requires pressure against Main Street Democrats and obviously the Republican establishment as well. Right. Like, you know, part of, part of Platner's plan is a 50% per barrel windfall tax on like big oil profits, which would be significant. But there will be a lot of pushback against this, including among the Democratic establishment. And that might require getting rid of a whole bunch of these Democratic establishment figures who are currently occupying seats of power.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Well, everyone think about that.

[James Stout]

On that hopeful note, on that optimistic

[Garrison Davis]

figure out how to do it note. Oh, where can, where can people send us news related tips, James?

[James Stout]

They can do that by emailing coolzonetipson Me. If you want to keep it a little bit more encrypted, you can do it from a proton email address. That doesn't bother you? Let's go ahead and send it. It. If you have a marketing email, you can not send it. Try not to be so rude to the marketing people.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I think part of, part of those anarchist left wing extremist threats might be against the marketing corporations. If James keeps threatening them. At the end of this episode.

[James Stout]

I don't want to podcast anyone to prison. I'll just block. I'm not advocating violence. I'm just going to block your email. Okay, well, I will make sure that we never hear from you again. It won't just be me blocking it. It'll be all of us here at Cool Zone Media.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

You reported the news?

[Cooper Quintin]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Mia Wong]

It could happen.

[Garrison Davis]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us

[Mia Wong]

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Cooper Quintin]

You can now find sources for.

[Mia Wong]

It could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Cooper Quintin]

Thanks for listening.

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Cooper Quintin]

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