It Could Happen Here Weekly 237

Summary

Behind the Bastards Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here Weekly 237 (June 20, 2026)

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Main Theme

This episode of “It Could Happen Here Weekly” from Behind the Bastards explores the dark legacies of state violence, settler colonialism, border and immigration enforcement, and tech-driven global transformation, focusing particularly on the U.S.’s influence in shaping oppressive systems abroad and at home. Key topics include the history and present of immigration enforcement in the Dominican Republic, a comparative study of settler colonialism in Liberia and Israel/Palestine, crackdown and indictments on U.S. protest movements, the explosive rise of the anti-data center movement, and current events reflecting American political, economic, and social turmoil.

The tone is urgent, critical, deeply personal at times, and richly analytic.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The U.S. as Global Border-Maker: The Dominican Republic & Haitian Migration (03:02–57:03)

Ezra Francis Hullett’s Death and Systemic Abuse in the Dominican Republic (03:15–10:00)

• Carlos Perrios Polanco shares the underreported story of Hullett, a trans American immigrant who died in a Dominican detention center after gross medical neglect.
• Quote: “Their death was significantly undercovered by English language media and ... they died as a direct result of an immigration system that systematically abuses Haitian immigrants.” (07:26, Carlos)
• Conditions: Haina detention center: overcrowded, unsanitary, with food/water shortages and medical neglect.
• Haitian immigrants (and Black Dominicans) are targeted, extorted, beaten, and systematically terrorized.

History of U.S. Influence on Dominican Immigration Policy (10:00–19:54)

• The DR-Haiti border was ambiguous until the U.S. imposed formal guard/controls in the early 20th century—part of Monroe Doctrine and American imperial interests.
• U.S. occupations installed and trained militarized Dominican forces that laid groundwork for later ethnic cleansing.

Entrenchment of Anti-Haitianism under Trujillo (16:49–22:06)

• Dictator Rafael Trujillo, U.S. trained, solidified anti-Haitianism with brutal policies, most horrifically the 1937 Parsley Massacre (20,000+ Haitians killed).
• Creation of the DGM, forced labor in sugar plantations, and ethnic/racial exclusion as part of Dominican identity.

Modern-Day Enforcement: Mass Denationalization & Deportations (24:56–34:54)

• 2013 DR constitutional court ruling stripped citizenship from up to 245,000 Dominicans, mostly of Haitian descent—even applied retroactively to 1929.
• Current government aims for 10,000 deportations per week (May 2026: 35,305 in one month alone).

U.S. “Border Externalization” and Global Enforcement Model (37:50–49:44)

• U.S. collaborates, trains, and funds Dominican border forces, pushes “border externalization”—moving U.S. border enforcement further south.
• Border patrol “set theory”—borders and migration hurdles are multi-layered, designed to block people far from the U.S.—“we already have open borders, just only for some people.” (45:26, James Stone)
• Capital moves freely across borders; people, especially Black and poor, face ever higher, deadlier walls.

The New Border Wall & Everyday Violence (49:44–57:10)

• The DR is constructing the hemisphere’s second-longest border wall with U.S.-inspired surveillance and technology.
• Everyday life: midnight raids, family separation, deportees forced into debt bondage, continual cycles of return due to lack of opportunity in Haiti—“borders are more porous than the state wants them to be.” (54:04, Carlos)

U.S. Policy Feedback Loop (55:28–65:57)

• The U.S. now accepts deportees sent to the DR as part of Trump’s latest campaign, further entangling both states’ systems of exclusion.
• “What I thought was only a thing of the Dominican Republic, this paramilitary-style immigration force ... has now become a common reality for millions ... in the U.S.” (56:41, Carlos)

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2. Case Study: Settler Colonialism—Liberia & Israel, with Patrick Wolf’s Framework (68:45–95:01)

Concept Overview (69:36–73:01)

• Andrew Sage unpacks settler colonialism as an ongoing structure where outsiders eliminate and replace indigenous societies, not merely exploit resources.
• Not inherently genocidal, but always eliminatory—dissolving indigeneity through policy, coercion, violence, or assimilation.

Liberia: Black American Settler Colonialism (73:01–83:35)

• Liberia founded in the 1800s by the American Colonization Society as a “return” for formerly enslaved people.
• Americo-Liberians imposed their culture, saw themselves as superior, excluded locals, recreated hierarchies of race and exploitation, propped up by U.S. and European powers.
• Ended with coup (1980), civil war, persistent inequalities.

Israel: Political Zionism as Settler Colonialism (83:35–92:00)

• Zionist movement: European Jews migrate to Palestine, justified as “return”; marginalize/exclude indigenous Arab Palestinians.
• Nakba of 1948: 700,000 expelled; subsequent laws formalize Jewish supremacy, ongoing settlement, militarization, and apartheid.
• Demographic engineering prioritized: displacement, fragmented communities, expanding settlements.

Comparison: Parallels & Divergences (92:00–94:38)

• Settler projects differ in relations to indigenous demographics and labor needs—Liberia resembled South Africa/Algeria’s ruling minority model; Israel, like the U.S., aimed to create a settler majority.
• Indigenous resistance is ongoing (Intifadas, struggle against domination).
• Wolf’s conclusion: “Elimination operates through a logic that is adaptable.”

On Nationalism, State-Building, and Their Dead Ends (76:11–82:46)

• Panelists discuss how post-colonial states often reproduce oppression; nationalism is “counter-revolutionary...a dead end.” (76:11, Jacob Goldstein)

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3. Crackdown on Protest: Minnesota Indictments & State Criminalization of Dissent (97:44–135:55)

The Fort Snelling/Whipple ICE Protest Indictments (97:44–135:55)

• Fifteen Minnesota activists indicted on federal conspiracy charges for protest tactics (shields, barricades, “soft” and “hard” blockades) against ICE at the Whipple federal building.
• Mo Meltzer Cohen and Olive give legal analysis: Most of what’s criminalized is “garden variety lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior.”
  • “A conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal ... a group agrees to do something illegal and then takes overt acts in service of it. Prosecutors criminalize even constitutional speech, association, or organizing.” (110:14, Mo)
• The indictment leans heavily on organizational security, being part of “bad protest,” and anarchist identity.
• Authorities attempt to “divide and conquer” movements by labeling “good” vs “bad” protesters but cast a wide net for surveillance and prosecution—including DSA and unions.
• Community solidarity and robust legal support in the Twin Cities are a source of optimism; few actual “violent” acts are alleged.

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4. “War on Data Centers”: Anti-AI Infrastructure as the New Mass Movement (135:35–163:43)

Rise of Anti-Data Center Activism (138:35–164:21)

• Robert Evans presents the rapid national explosion of grassroots opposition to new data centers, particularly those serving AI, describing it as the most hopeful mass movement in years.
• In Q1 of 2026 alone, 75 projects worth $130 billion were blocked/delayed in the U.S., often over water use, energy, and local environmental impacts.
• This movement has cross-political appeal (urban/suburban/rural), may become a “fundamentalist” voting issue, and has politicians and Silicon Valley terrified.
  • “None of these people ... cared about the data centers going up 5 or 10 years ago, but fighting gives them a taste of political power.” (138:35, Robert)
• Tech companies’ PR campaigns pit data center opponents against almond farmers (“What about almonds using water?”) — “Put them out of business, too! Fuck ‘em.” (138:35, Robert)
• Structural critique: data centers bring few jobs, strain water/electricity, and lock communities into dependency.

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5. Weekly News, U.S. Political Crisis, and Bizarre National Moments (166:17–230:05)

Trillionaires, Political Corruption, and Trump-Era Executive Orders (166:40–168:52)

• Elon Musk on paper becomes the world’s first trillionaire from inflated valuations after SpaceX goes public.
• Trump revokes conservation orders; Senator Mike Lee attempts public land selloff.
• Federal authorities accused of using FBI “slush funds” to pay out loyalist agents.

Police Violence, Anti-Immigrant Crackdown, and American Protest (173:43–181:04)

• Mississippi police kill a 1-year-old child during a reckless shooting in a Walmart parking lot, justified by “shoplifting panic” and use-of-vehicle-as-weapon excuse.
• "Cops are trained to believe their lives mean more than the lives of infants. That's what this is." (176:38, Robert)
• Indictments in Minnesota tie back to prior coverage.

Trump-Iran “Peace” Deal and Its Repercussions (182:53–194:11)

• Trump signs a secretive MoU with Iran, granting $300 billion in reconstruction funds, sanctions relief, freeing frozen assets, and new passage arrangements at the Strait of Hormuz. Israel public officials outright refuse to comply.
• Panel discusses historic, strategic, and economic implications.

Culture and the Surreal: UFC “Freedom 250” at the White House (193:14–213:36)

• Trump hosts a pay-per-view UFC event on the White House lawn, attended by billionaires, Red, White & Blue Monster Energy logos, military flyovers, and AI-generated “Americana” videos.
• Fighter Josh Hokit gives Trump a chain, then says: “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right America?” (203:47, Josh Hokit), prompting controversy and selective censorship by UFC/YouTube.
• “This is the most ‘Idiocracy’ things have been.” (200:16, Robert)

The Alleged “UFC Freedom 250” Terror Plot (205:00–217:45)

• FBI thwarts a supposed mass-casualty attack—actually a larping group of poorly organized, heavily surveilled, radicalized young men organizing via TikTok and Signal, with delusions of being “tier one operators” but no means to execute their plans.
• Fox News and VP J.D. Vance mischaracterize the incident as a “far left” plot, blaming Democrats and open borders, but the evidence overwhelmingly points to right-wing extremism, anti-Semitic, Christian accelerationism. (211:03, Margaret)
• “A group of men larped themselves into federal custody.” (208:15, Margaret)

Elite Networks: Peter Thiel’s Dialogue (Social Network/Retreat) (218:55–230:08)

• A major data leak exposes Dialogue, Peter Thiel’s secretive social club/retreat/network, featuring Silicon Valley C-suites, Christian tech entrepreneurs, oddball self-help authors, and at least one Jeff Epstein (not that one).
• Workshops include “Build a cult” and “How’s your sex life?”
• “Steve Gatina ... has the dead empty eyes of the shark from Jaws.” (223:39, Robert)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We already have open borders. We already have no borders. Just only for some people.” – James Stone (45:26)
• “Many civil society and human rights organizations have documented how the DGM uses racial profiling as a justification to detain pretty much whoever they want.” – Carlos Perrios Polanco (35:41)
• “Aggressive use of shields” illustration of state misunderstanding/anarchist demonization. (128:07, Mo Meltzer Cohen)
• “None of these data center projects are sold ... based on real, accurate information about how they will impact the environment and the local community.” – Robert Evans (146:00)
• “A group of men larped themselves into federal custody.” – Margaret (208:15)
• “This is the most ‘Idiocracy’ things have been. ... Not even a comparison anymore.” – Robert Evans (200:16)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Dominican Republic, US Border, Ezra Hullett – 03:02–65:57
• Settler Colonialism: Liberia & Israel – 68:45–95:01
• Minnesota Protest Indictments – 97:44–135:55
• Anti-Data Center Movement – 135:35–163:43
• Weekly News & Surreal America – 166:17–230:08

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Conclusion: Call to Solidarity and Vigilance

The episode concludes with a call to continued solidarity, legal support, and mutual aid—rejecting attempts to divide/prosecute on the state’s terms, and to hold onto hope amid mounting repression and dystopian absurdity.

Final Message:
“Hold each other close, try not to let them get us down—more than they have to.” (135:43, Mo Meltzer Cohen)

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For Listeners

This episode is packed with history, analysis, urgent reporting, and dark humor, well-suited for those seeking to understand the intersecting crises of borders, capitalism, surveillance, and the ongoing fight for justice and life.

Transcript

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[Robert Evans]

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

[Vaquero2XL]

Hello dear listener. My name is Carlos Perrios Polanco and I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico.

[James Stone]

I'm here with it's me, James Stone. I am a journalist who lives in San Diego.

[Vaquero2XL]

Thank you for being here, James. Today I'm here to talk to you about the Dominican Republic's immigration system and how it has been shaped by the US's immigration system to kind of function as a part of the US border outside of what we would normally consider the US's border. And instead of diving in immediately to that, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about the tragic death of Ezra Francis Hullett, a trans person from the United States in immigration detention in the Dominican Republic. I should mention that they use both they them and he him pronouns. However, I'm going to be using they them going forward because that's what the friends and family of Hollett put as their pronouns in the GoFundMe. They were found dead in the Haina Immigration Detention center, the biggest immigration detention center in the Dominican Republic, on June 23, 2025. The GoFundMe set up by their family to bring their body back to the States describes them as a compassionate and sensitive person who lived with mental health issues and the after effects of childhood trauma. They were 24 and a really good artist from looking at their Instagram. Per the Dominican news show El Informe con Alicia Ortega, who interviewed Hullet's mom. Hullet traveled to Puerto Rico without their family's knowledge and seemed to be in contact with a social worker here. I found a local Telemundo affiliate here in Puerto Rico that reported that they went missing on September 3rd of 2024. However, the GoFundMe says that they were missing in PR since March of 2025 and Hollett's mom told El Informe that that's when they last spoke. Around that same time, Hullett flew to the Dominican Republic. According to Ellen Forme, shortly after that they were detained inside a construction site where it appears that they were squatting alongside a Dominican man. After being detained by the tourism police, they were passed on to the Direction General Emigration, or dgm, which does immigration enforcement and manages detention centers. Per El Informe, this was about 37 days after they entered the doctor. I want to preface this next section by saying that the doctor isn't particularly kind to trans folks, which I'm sure affected Hollitt's experience during immigration detention. Hollett was initially sent to the mail wing of Hyena not because the doctor is particularly woke and sends people to detention based on their gender identity, but because they were male presenting and didn't have any ID on them. However, once the DGM was was able to identify Hullet, they were transferred to the female wing of Haina. To be honest, quite a bit of the reporting around Hullet in the Doctor and here in Puerto Rico is quite transphobic. And the way that these immigration officials talk about Hullet in this kind of mini documentary by Ellen Forme is also quite transphobic. Videos published by Ellen Forme appear to show Hullet curled up on the floor next to dozens of other people who were sleeping in two small rooms in inside of immigration detention. Some of the notes and videos uncovered by Ellen Forme appear to show that Hollett was suffering from a mental health crisis throughout the more than two months they were in immigration detention. Hollet's mom told Ellen Forme that Hollett suffered from schizophrenia. They also wrote about having asthma and being allergic to milk. Per Elinforme, Holit's mom confirmed to them that they needed an inhaler and an EpiPen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Oh.

[Vaquero2XL]

Although news reports say that DGM provided Hullet with some medicine for the apparent mental health crisis they were going through, I can't find any reporting that says that they ever got an inhaler or an EpiPen that they needed. A coroner's report found that they died from a heart attack. According to Noticia Sin, a national news website. There, her information obtained by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights, quote, at least four facilities are being used as immigration detention centers present overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, deficient food and lack of access to health care. The same report states that a newborn died in Haina on November 14th of last year.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Damn.

[Vaquero2XL]

People I've spoken to who've been detained in Haina over the years have described the conditions there as horrific, particularly as the Dominican government has ramped up deportation efforts massively against the country's Haitian population. Detention centers are routinely overcrowded and people have very little access to food or water for days. From what they tell me. Per the people I've spoken to, detainees are sometimes beaten or extorted by guards to be able to call their families to get their documents or for food. And I talk a little bit more about this later on in the episode. But the reason that I started with Hallett's story is twofold. First, because they're deaf, was significantly undercovered by English language media, and second, because they died as a direct result of an immigration system that systematically abuses Haitian immigrants and has been historically shaped by the US Military and the American border apparatus. While they're organized in different ways within the law enforcement structures of their respective countries, there are a lot of similarities between the DGM and ICE in the United States, particularly, particularly in their tactics and how they've terrorized immigrant communities. However, before diving into the current immigration situation in the Dominican Republic and how a lot of it has come as a result of collaboration with American immigration enforcement, I want to give some historical context about how, in a very real way, the United States created the Dominican Haiti border. The Dominican Republic was originally a Spanish colony. Haiti was originally a French colony. Haiti became independent, then invaded the Dominican Republic, then they fought them back to become independent themselves. But throughout all of that time, the Dominican Haiti border was in amorphous space, not the kind of quote unquote hard border that it is today. There had been agreements on where the border was supposed to be. People roughly knew where that border was supposed to be on a map and on the Earth if they lived near that area. However, it was just kind of essentially an imaginary line that ran along the 240 miles of land that make up the border between the two countries. However, in 1905, the US established a Customs receivership over the Dominican Republic to force the Caribbean nation to pay its foreign debts and ostensibly protect it from a possible European invasion, which is a classic Monroe Doctrine move, of course.

[James Stone]

Yeah, many such cases.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

This agreement was officially ratified for a 1907 convention and created the Dominican Border Guard to police the frontier between the two countries and make sure that all duties were collected from commerce and people crossing the border. According to a journal article titled Haitians Magic and Money Raza and Society in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands by Lauren Derby. While these weren't the first border guards, they were essential to turning the borderlands into the border as it exists today. One of the most highly regulated and police borders in the Western Hemisphere. And I should also say that at some points throughout Dominican history, the military patrolled the border. Per a document from the Marines titled Marines in the Dominican Republic 1916-1924, North Americans were part of the Dominican Frontier Guard that regulated this border. Some would later go on to become part of the Guardian Nacional Dominicana, which was created by the American military government that controlled the Dr. Between 1916 and 1924. In 1921, the GND turned into the Policia Nacional Dominicana, which also stationed people at the border at that time. For more context, the American government was occupying Haiti at more or less the same time from 1915 to 1934. This period of American occupation of La Espanola greatly defined the relationship that both countries would have with each other going forward, as well as both countries military and law enforcement. The military occupation of the Dominican Republic also led to laws that prevented the entry of workers who weren't white unless they came through official border crossings and paid for temporary residence permits. This is according to the book More than a Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands by Sabine Cadeau. While there had always been racial prejudice on Hispaniola, this brought even more, leading to Dominican security forces to arrest people on suspicion that they'd broken this law even if they hadn't. And it was later used to strip Dominicans of their citizenship. It also strengthened the idea of, quote, unquote, Dominicanidad as something closer to being white and European, a sentiment that continues to this day and in some ways is even stronger now than it was then.

[James Stone]

What's entering my mind is, I think it was a tweet that said they're coming out with a new version of white that doesn't include you. Like, whiteness as a liminal concept is something that can be hard for people from the US to understand. But, yeah, I've heard this directly elucidated to me many times that Dominicanness and blackness are distinct.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely.

[James Stone]

Or the Haitian people are black, which obviously, as someone who's. Who's lived in the UK and the United States, is difficult for me to understand. But like, I. All of these things are socially constructed. It doesn't mean they're not real. It just means that people made them, people can move them.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. I have also had people to my face say that the Dominican identity is completely separate from blackness. You know, and as someone who has lived in Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States, are owned by it, that also to me was very, very strange. And I say this as someone who. Whose mother is Dominican. Right. So I was just kind of like stunned when the first time that I heard it. And sometimes it's called eventidadquiskeya is how it's being marketed by some people in the current day. Although I will say, if you've seen the. The Video of the comedian I think saying I know black, I Dominican. That's if I have pretty much witnessed something exactly like that said completely seriously several times throughout my life.

[James Stone]

Yeah. It doesn't mean that like Dominican people coming to the US will not encounter anti blackness because they will.

[Vaquero2XL]

Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

[James Stone]

It's just that, that it also doesn't mean that on returning to Dominican Republic they cannot slot into a different structure which puts them above Haitian people.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very, it's a very interesting topic how those kind of identities are presented in separate ways depending on, on where you live for. Because for me, for example, if I went to the U.S. most people would say that I'm brown, but here in Puerto Rico I'm kind of very explicitly a white person here, you know?

[James Stone]

Yeah, it's, it's so it's such a short flight as well. Like that flight from Miami to Dominican where if you go Punta Cana or whatever the airport there, that's like out of Santo Domingo and so much changes. Right. Like you can, you can literally get on that plane as someone who isn't considered to be black and then get off that and be treated by American law enforcement like you are. Yeah, within like a one hour flight. And yeah, it's just this is, this is like the nature of creating hierarchies. Right. They can shift to include people and shift to exclude people too.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely, absolutely. So I know I'm speaking to the choir about this, but this kind of definition of borders and national identity are an essential part of the nation state and immigration enforcement. Because if you don't have an established border, it's very hard to define the in group that belongs inside of the nation and that group that doesn't who can then be detained, penalized and deported for crossing that imaginary line in the earth. These kinds of steps by the US military government were essential to creating this idea that Dominicans and Haitians are two completely different people. However, to be clear, it's not that this sentiment didn't exist beforehand. In particular, the Dominican elite hated Haitians a lot for the invasion of Dr. By Haiti. That sentiment existed in, in the borderlands. But a lot of those people were bilingual, which is very different from kind of people inside of the metropole who saw themselves as kind of the, this one identity versus along the borderlines, which is usually what happens. Right. There is a kind of melding identities in ways that isn't seen anywhere else.

[James Stone]

Yeah, this is the same where I live. Right. Like San Diego, Tijuana is Effectively, like, it's not one large city. There are important and very, very, very real differences. But like, in many ways, one community. Right. Like so many of our community members. Like, I have students at the community college who cross every day. I've had students when I've taught high school classes who crossed every day. Like, I've got friends who couldn't make rent work in California. And so they, they go to Tijuana and like, obviously, yeah, those people speak two languages or like both languages at the same time. I think that's just the nature of living in the, in the borderlands.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. So following the US's exit from the Dominican Republic, dictator Rafael Trujillo came to power in 1930. He was trained by the US military and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General of the pnd. The then militarized it, and as the word dictator implies, he was not a good guy. Under him, the already burgeoning and existent anti Haitian sentiment essentially exploded. He introduced the cedula, a national identification document for all adult men. So Haitians had to pay for the cedar and a foreign residency permit, essentially ending the binational lifestyle of communities on the border. According to more than a massacre. If the US started the border, then Trujillo marked it as a sign of utter violence by ordering his troops to ethnically cleanse the Dominican border of Haitians in October of 1947. This was known as the Parsley Massacre. And estimates of people killed vary, but the most common number I've seen used is roughly 20,000 Haitians killed over the course of about a week to two weeks. And this massacre, of course, came about as a way for him to define the, the border by stripping Haitians of, of that land because they were. It was mostly done inside of the Dominican side of the Dr. Haiti border. Yeah, it's called the Parsley Massacre because soldiers reportedly recognize Haitians by their inability to pronounce parsley in Spanish, Perejo. However, experts think that this was just a myth, another way to separate Haitians from Dominicans according to more than a massacre. Also, as a not so fun fact, a lot of the violence took place along the Massacre river, which a lot of people think is called that because of the 1947 massacre. But from the various Spanish language sources I've read, they all essentially say that this isn't true, that it was. It's called the Massacre river because of the frequent violence that took place there between Spanish colonizers and French buccaneers in the 18th century. And this is according to an article by Simon Rodriguez in NACLA titled Dominican Republic and Haiti at the crossroads of the Massacre River. The Dominican immigration agency, the dgm, was also established by Trujillo just two years after the Parsley Massacre. Not only were they essential to deporting Haitians during Trujillo's reign, but they also forced the Haitian population into the sugar producing regions of the country. And because he couldn't deploy overt state violence there in the same way that he did along the border, they came up with a new plan. Any Haitian immigrant detained in the area would just be brought back to whatever sugar plantation would pay their immigration taxes, essentially creating these zones, which still very much exist to this day, of Haitians living in and around these sugar plantations that they also work at. I should say that this wasn't a codified policy, but that it coexisted with other tactics throughout the years.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

The Trujillo government also instituted a policy that made all Haitians who owned land or businesses to not be able to work outside of the sugar producing regions. According to a journal article titled A Veil of Legality by Amelia Hinson, I visited some of these sugar plantations in 2023, and many of the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent who live there are descendants of the ones Trujillo pushed into the region. While anti Haitianism already existed before Trujillo, he cemented it into the political structures of the Dominican Republic to the point that it still continues incredibly strong into the modern day. About 51% of Dominicans believe that immigration harms the country. Per a 2024 poll by the polling firm Latino Barometro, many Haitians come to the Dominican Republic seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Much like immigrants in the US and similarly to the us Getting a visa or becoming a citizen for them is extremely difficult. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. And I should also say that they are by far the largest immigrant group in the country, which makes sense because they're next door neighbors. Yeah, the construction and the sugar cutting industry are completely dependent on cheap Haitian labor. The sugar cutting industry is heavily reliant on this labor, a lot of which is done by undocumented immigrants. Many people over the years have called it a quote, unquote modern form of slavery. I've been to these camps and what they endure for extremely little pay is horrific. I went there at the tail end of 2023, and while there are some places set up by by the companies that own those sugar producing regions that Are. They're like. They're called bate inside of the sugar cane mazes. Some of the bateas have, like, houses made out of cement with electricity, and some are completely degraded, made from wood that's rotting. And they have no access to running water.

[James Stone]

Jesus.

[Vaquero2XL]

Or electricity. There have been, over the years, attempts by both human rights groups and the companies that own those regions. It wasn't benevolently, is my opinion on it, but more because of the pressure that they've received over the years to move these people into somewhat better conditions.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

In think fleets. For some of them, they have. For others, they have not. A lot of the Haitian migration in the last decades has come after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Javanel Moise. The two events, as well as other crises, have caused people in Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti, to experience significant violence and hunger crises. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced out of their homes and left the country over the last decade. Per the Migration Policy Institute. For many, the natural path of migration out of Port au Prince is towards the border and towards the Dominican Republic. And as we've seen, a lot of those Haitian migrants have also tried to go into the US Through Latin America. And I mean, not to say that they exclusively go there, of course, but they try to go wherever they're able to go.

[James Stone]

Yeah. I wrote a piece for NBC. God, when you could still write things critical of the Biden administration at NBC. And like, in 2021, right, when the United States Embassy in Haiti had a picture of Biden, it was translated into Creole.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

But it was like, essentially, do not come that. We'll turn you around and send you back like this. This is the guy who'd run, you know, like, months before on a kindness where Trump had done cruelty. I remember, like, right around that time, 2021. So there was a large number of migrants, of course, who have been stuck in Tijuana because of Title 42. They tried to cross and they kept getting bounced back, Right. And so I would cross to. To talk to them. They moved to, like, right by where the Ped west pedestrian crossing is now. And they were just camping there in the square. Like, literally, you go over the border bridge that goes over the road, you pop out your first step on, like, on the ground. The bridge is probably in Mexico at some point, but they're right there. I remember speaking to Haitian folks there about, like, they had genuinely hoped for a little bit better from the Biden administration, which, of course, they didn't get very common pathway is to Brazil to do underpaid construction work for the Rio Olympics and then finding yourself without work, without much of a chance at citizenship or permanency, deciding to come north. That was a very common pathway at the time too.

[Vaquero2XL]

So about 200,000 displaced Haitians are believed to have moved to the doctor in the months after the earthquakes, according to the International Organization for Migration. And after that flow of migrants to the doctor and the rising tide of anti Haitianism, which had been building for a very long time. In 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic ruled that people born in the Dominican Republic to immigrant parents without a regularized migration status had never been entitled to Dominican citizenship. This ruling is called la the Judgment. What this essentially did was that if you do not have at least one parent who is a Dominican citizen, then you do not have Dominican citizenship. In the US we have birthright citizenship or jusoli, which means that if you're born on this land or inside the US you are an American citizen. This of course applies almost everywhere except certain colonies like American Samoa. So essentially in the Dominican Republic, if one of your parents was not Dominican, you did not have citizenship. The thing about judicial decisions is that they typically only go forward in time. But what was particularly evil about La Sentencia was that it applied retroactively to 1929. And I want listeners to sit with that for a second. Even if it applied just going forward, it would be a horrible thing. But going back nearly a hundred years is just horrendous because what the ruling caused was a chain reaction that stripped entire families of their citizenship. Because if your grandparents weren't citizens, then neither was your dad. If your mom wasn't a citizen, then, then neither are you. Of course, this ruling also affected anyone who did legally still have citizenship but didn't have the documentation going back that far to prove it if the government came knocking. So yeah, essentially imagine if you had to prove that your great grandparents were citizens in 1929. I. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I personally would have that documentation for

[James Stone]

my great grandparents, especially living like in the lower 48 in the US it's just more likely that one might have documentation of one's great grandparents and living in parts of the doctor but yeah,

[Vaquero2XL]

essentially for me it would be incredibly hard to have that documentation for my great grandparents. I couldn't imagine someone who has moved throughout their their lives inside of the Dominican Republic to also have that documentation. And then there's also the fact that because of of the anti Haitianism that was there. A lot of people who did or were supposed to legally still have citizenship were rolled up in the people whose citizenship this law took away. In total, the decision impacted about 245,000 Dominicans, of which 211,000 were Dominicans of Haitian descent, according to the center for Migration Studies. I, of course, say Dominicans because they were, legally speaking, Dominicans at the time that the Sentencia took place, but now they have been stripped of that citizenship. The Dominican government tried to backtrack this decision just a year later after a lot of international criticism, and provide a path to the stateless, but the damage was done. In 2023, it's estimated that as many as 130,000 people remain stateless per CMS. There is no law that provides a path to citizenship for the children of the stateless. So Even after this 2014 law that tried to make people back into citizens or provide a pathway to citizenship, if you have a child, that child was not going to have citizenship.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Because so many people were affected by it. And a lot of the slowness of the government, the ways that government doesn't work, you have this wave of denationalizations. And because of a lot of the problems of the government, some people who should have had that pathway to citizenship provided to them still don't have it.

[James Stone]

Right. It's going to be so much harder to get those people back. And like, understandably, it's going to be very hard to get those people to engage with the state in any way.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely.

[James Stone]

Because why the fuck would you like it just told you that you don't belong. This state is a danger to those people.

[Vaquero2XL]

And of course, not to mention that the anti Haitian sentiment that the government has, maybe the government at the top decided to go back, but that anti Haitian sentiment is still there from the top down, of course.

[James Stone]

So, yeah, yeah, it takes a long time to get over something like what happened under Trujillo. Right. Like the massacre and the ongoing, like the state being used as a weapon against you. Like, yeah. People aren't gonna just be like, okay, well, this is a benevolent entity now. Let me go, let me go chat with them, tell them where I live and make sure they got all my information up to date. Like, it's just. It takes a long time to rebuild that trust.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely. So at the same time that this was happening, the Dominican government created a sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus that has systemically punished Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent that they made stateless. These numbers are honestly quite, quite horrifying. In 2025, the DGM registered 379,553 deportations, according to their self published numbers. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean 379,553 people were removed from the country because of possible double or triple counting. If a person crossed the border more than once and were detained, then deported. But even if you cut that figure in half or in freeze, that still is a staggering amount of people's lives who have been touched and affected by this deportation apparatus. To give some more recent numbers, In May of 2026, the DGM said that they deported 35,305 migrants according to their own numbers. And the thing about the Dominican Republic is that essentially every law enforcement agency does immigration enforcement. The great majority of those migrants deported in May were detained by the DGM, the Direction General Deracion. About 5800 were detained by the Dominican army and about 2300 by this specialized Land Border Security Corps, which is known as CES Fronte. They essentially patrol the national border with Haiti. And about 1300 of those people were detained by the National Police. These numbers are so staggering because all of these law enforcement agencies are trying to meet a 10,000 a week quota that President Luis Avenader set for the Dominican government in 2024 and continues to follow. This number to me, is really, really staggering. And it's kind of horrific because you read it on paper and it's hard to really understand the immensity of this mechanism to forcefully move people out of the country. And as well as all of the law enforcement work and immigration enforcement work that goes into detaining those people in the first place, then sending them to immigration centers and then deporting them outside of the Dominican Republic. And the way that that usually happens is that they are loaded into these trucks, which are converted horse trucks. Sometimes they're like the little short ones and sometimes the very long ones that you see to move pallets of stuff that have this cage built onto the back and people are just stuffed to the brim inside of there. It's really incredibly inhumane.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Damn, that's rough.

[Vaquero2XL]

So migrants are routinely extorted while in immigration detention, per an anonymous source that spoke with Listindiario, a national paper in the Dr. That detainees are routinely hit up for bribes during immigration raids and during their detention. Per the article, guards in Haina, the largest immigration detention center in the Dr. Were charging about 200 and $270 to be freed, which might not seem like an insurmountable amount. Of money in the US but it's about half of the average monthly salary in the doctor and these migrants are making much, much less than that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

The same report says that guards sometimes charge migrants families so detainees can get food while detained. So much of the rhetoric that Abinade and other Dominican officials use to justify their actions, especially in recent years, is that immigration contributes to the destabilization of their society. Meanwhile, the. The vast majority of Haitian immigrants are just trying to live in peace and escape the violence or crisis that they're facing in their home country. And like I said earlier, a lot of industries in the Dr. Rely on cheap Haitian labor. And I would be remiss to mention that a lot of the people that the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement are deporting are people that the Dominican Republic made stateless in the first place. So they essentially created this gigantic group of people that they are now deporting. Right. It's. It's the way that, yeah, the, the nation state operates to kind of push people, to push people that it considers undesirable out of that nation's borders.

[James Stone]

Yeah. This is like Ben Anderson, right, when he's writing about nations, says no nation can be coterminous with all of humanity. And then when we combine the nation with the state, that's when we get if no nation can be coterbnous with all humanity and the state is policing who and is, and it's not part of the nation, and expelling those are not. That's when we get what we see here. Right. And what we see here in the US

[Vaquero2XL]

we talked about this a little bit earlier, but whenever I talk to Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent about immigration enforcement in their country, they pretty much tell me the same thing to the Dominican government, everyone black is Haitian. And we talked about this and how the conception of Dominicanidad has become separate from the way that they view Haitians as black.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Many civil society and human rights organizations have documented how the DGM uses racial profiling as a justification to detain pretty much whoever they want. This got so bad that in 2022, the American state Department issued a travel warning for, quote, unquote, darker skinned Americans about the risks of being swept up in the country's immigration crackdown. And to me at the time, having written about that, it's kind of incredible to see an American agency be like, hey, the racism in this country is so bad you should be on the lookout.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah. Like you might not want to go.

[Vaquero2XL]

Exactly.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

That's wild.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. So the DGM routinely performs midnight immigration raids on Haitian communities. Break down their doors and drag people kicking and screaming from their beds, then load them up on the repurposed cattle trucks and horse trucks that I was talking about earlier. There are usually about 30 or so people in those immigration trucks, the small ones pushed up against the metal bars. And I've seen this personally at the Dr. Haiti border where they're. They're taken from immigration detention centers and then dropped off and essentially forced to walk into Haiti. When I was at the border in 2023, the ones I saw and was able to speak to had grabbed everything that they could as they were getting detained because they knew that it was possible they could never make it back. Some of these people included mothers carrying small children and babies. One worker who I spoke with worked in construction, and he claimed that he was being deported because his boss had called immigration enforcement on them because they were talking about getting paid more.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Taylor sold his time with undocumented labor, sadly.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely. And this is big in the sugar cane cutting regions as well, or at least it used to be.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

And it's a kind of a recurring system because, you know, they get deported, but there's not really any. Any work or safety in some cases in Haiti, so they're forced to come back over the border to do the same job.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Many Haitians live in fear, hiding from immigration authorities as much as they can while trying to work to feed their families. It's especially bad for pregnant mothers who can't go to hospitals for fear of being swept up by immigration raids. There have been several women who were deported very quickly after being discharged, according to a report by the Guardian. And I've personally seen a pregnant mother with a small child forced across the Dr. Haiti border after being dumped there by DGM, similar to how the American government essentially created the Dominican Haiti border and shaped its border guard in the early 1900s. They also routinely provide training for several law enforcement agencies who enforce the Dominican immigration laws. For example, agencies from the Dominican Republic routinely receive training from International Law Enforcement Academies, which are international police academies administered by the U.S. state Department, where U.S. law enforcement trained police and other law enforcement agencies from other countries. A training schedule from 2024 I found showed that the Dominican Republic participated in nine sessions throughout the years with agencies like ICE and CBP. However, when it comes to being trained by the US no one beats the Cuerpo Especializado de Seguridad from Teresa Terrestre, known as Cess Front, or the Specialized Land Border Security Corps. They are in charge of securing and quote, unquote, protecting the Dominican border with Haiti. They are an arm of the military and were created in 2006. That same year, unidentified quote, unquote, U.S. experts reported that there were a, quote, series of weaknesses that will lead to all kinds of illicit activities along the border, According to a 2006 article from Dominican Today. Per the same article, the military patrolled the area beforehand. But the study revealed the lack of in bad shape of the Dominican Army's facilities, the lack of training, logistics, weapons, vehicles, garments, as well as low wages and bad nutrition for these, these soldiers. And I should say that's a quote from the Dominican Today's article. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the border before I explain it later on in more detail. But a lot of the border that I've been to between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is along the Massacre river where part of the Parsley Massacre happened. And you essentially have this very big cement and iron and steel border wall going up that has completely separated this contiguous piece of land where people were once upon a time over a hundred years ago, able to more or less walk between and walk over without much restriction at all. And you know, the place where they've built the barrier. This was not like what, you know, whenever someone from Puerto Rico, whenever someone talks to me about the US Border, I'm imagining the big iron wall throughout the desert. This was not that. This was kind of very lush, green mangroves. There used to be one big forest, but now they created a bay strip of land that's now separates that forest that once was one and then put the border wall there. So a lot of this modern history of collaboration between the US and the doctor Immigration enforcement is recorded in Todd Miller's Border Patrol Nation and Empire of Borders, both of which I recommend everyone go read. Yeah, Miller is great.

[James Stone]

Yeah, Miller's books are fantastic. I know we both really enjoy them, but. Yeah, yeah, a real resource for anyone looking to understand the border and its history and like how we got to the situation. Wasn't hard to see it coming, actually.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. And a lot of Border Patrol Nation is from the early 2000 and tens too. So it was really kind of prescient in many ways.

[James Stone]

Yeah, very much so. Like, I remember, I remember reading that book and then like thinking about it a lot as I was in the Dominican Republic and even when I was in Panama last year, like the Biden administration, right, was was financing deportations from Panama of people who had just crossed the Darien Gap, like, chiefly to Colombia, almost entirely Colombian young men. I literally watched these guys get, like. I watched a family who I'd known from the jungle, right?

[Vaquero2XL]

And then I.

[James Stone]

And then we reconnected in Las Blancas, which is a reception center. Reception center's a pretty euphemistic term there. It's not a great place to be. I think it's closed now, actually. But they would come and call out names and was like, huh, what's going on? Like, maybe we're getting taken somewhere. Like, maybe this is. They want to check our passports, and they just start loading into same thing. Got, like, a flatbed truck. And I remember one guy, like, having to give his baby to his wife. And I was there, and he was like, hey, what are they doing? And I was like, I don't know, man. Like, I. I don't know. And some guy was like, this is how they deport people. It was a very.

[Vaquero2XL]

Wow.

[James Stone]

Yeah, it's horrible. And then his wife was just, like, standing there next to me, and, like, I was horrible. Like, I put my arm around her, and she was just sobbing. And of course, like. Like, separated from her partner and the father of her child. But, yeah, it's rough to think that then I went home and did my work and paid my taxes and paid my little share of that family getting torn apart. But, yeah, that was blue team. That wasn't a Trump thing. The US has been trying to move that traumatic violence further and further from its population for a long time. That's what strong borders are. Strong borders of violence. Strong borders are tearing families apart. Strong borders are people dying. And there is an understanding shared by both parties that Americans don't like seeing dead people. They don't like seeing families torn apart, as we've seen in the last few years. Couple years. And so they have sought to move that violence further away from the Metropole rather than stopping doing the violence.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. And Miller talks a lot about this in his book. Right. We're part of the US's internal migration policy as it relates to foreign policy is that if you can stop migrants from coming into the US at another border, that means that they won't be able to reach their border. Right, yeah. An academic who described it to Todd Miller as kind of border sets in ways that the borders go there.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Like clusters or something, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Essence.

[James Stone]

Oh, it's a dude who. He's like, a veteran, and he was, like, in Afghanistan and saw Border patrol out there. Like, what the fuck?

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So the way that that veteran, that person explains it is that these borders are created in such a way to keep people from flowing into the United States, but able for people inside of the United States to more very easily leave them and pass through them. Right. So for example, let's say a migrant from Haiti wanted to go into the US they would be faced with an incredibly uphill battle of passing several borders. It might be the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic, then into Puerto Rico, or it might be Haiti to some Latin American countries, then several Central American countries, and then onto the U.S. southern border. Right, yeah. But versus, let's say if I wanted to go to Haiti, it would be pretty incredibly easy for me to go there. Right. And this is, you know, what we see.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

The way that these, this mechanism is constructed for the in group to be able to move freely around the world and the out group to have an incredibly hard time actually coming into the

[James Stone]

US as my friend Erica from Al Ollado likes to say, we already have open borders. We already have no borders. Just only for some people.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, exactly. And of course, I'd be remiss not to mention that capital flows very easily through borders as if they do not exist.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

Because they don't for money.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. As Miller lays out in Empire of Borders, post 9 11, the US adopted a very strong policy of considering terrorism against American interest, quote, over there, needing to be regarded in the same way as terrorism over here. Right. And of course, terrorism, the way that the US government sees it is probably extremely different from the way that you and I see it, James.

[James Stone]

Yes.

[Vaquero2XL]

So this ideology essentially pushed the American border everywhere because everything that the US didn't agree with was a threat to its interest. This is essentially kind of the same reasoning as the Monroe Doctrine and the American empire just massaged it for the modern world. In some ways, this is why international collaboration between American immigration enforcement and border security agencies has skyrocketed since. Since the dawn of the millennium, to the point that CBP agents have traveled around the world to show countries how to enforce their country's borders so that people inside of those countries wanting to leave and reach the United States borders are never able to do so. We talked a little bit about this. I can't remember if it was on air or off air about how Pavino did that in Honduras.

[James Stone]

Yeah, that's right. That was something I found recently. I was reading some document about this Board of Externalization and he's one of the people interviewed. Yeah, it's like when he was in Bortac Right. Bavino was a member of Bortech and they were going out on patrol with, I guess, I don't know, Honduras has border patrol or I don't quite know what the structure they're under is, but they were going on patrol with him. And then like the Borch guys are armed and running around, but not technically. Not the ones making arrests. Yeah, like, like you can read this in the Miller books, but this is a, a thing that the US does all over the world.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. And Miller traveled to a lot of countries where people were agents of their country's border security apparatus or Lawrence or an agency were like, yeah, I've been trained by the U.S. of course.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Like talking about the, like the Kybilis. Right, like in. Yeah, like. Anyway, everyone should read the book. I'm not gonna recount the book. It's a good book.

[Vaquero2XL]

So if you look at the border enforcement or immigration agencies around the world, you'll find that they may look like the United States because they are modeling themselves off of the trainers that train them or help shape their creation. CES Front takes after its border patrol big brother in many ways, but one of the most salient is in the wall that they patrol. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, in 2022, the Dominican Republic started construction of a Mexico US style border wall that if it's finished, would span almost half of the border with Haiti. When the project is completed, it will be the second longest border wall in the Americas, the first being the Mexico US wall. It is supposed to be high tech, containing a series of cameras, radars and drones that are supposed to run the length of the wall. This wall, like many other border walls, has done intense environmental damage along the course of the border, particularly to the mangroves that run along the border where the wall is being built. In 2023, I visited Dahabong, a town in the northern section of Dr. Haiti border, to report on the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement apparatus for myself. Dajabong is where the SESFRONT has a very important base. And as I mentioned earlier, it's a place where a lot of the violence of the Parsley massacre took place. SES Front's base in the Habong is painted in a beige brown camouflage pattern that makes it stick out like a sore thumb against the green forest background where it's station. However, it does blend in to that strip of land where they've cut out to make the border wall, you know.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

In many ways the government tries to reshape the land in Nature to fit its image.

[James Stone]

Yeah, it's kind of the same here. Like, I was in a desert this weekend, and I was like, climbing up into mountains there, and you can look down at the border wall, and it's like a. It's like a scar across the landscape. You can for miles. As far as you can see. It just looks like somebody sliced through this. In this case, this pristine desert landscape. Right. And yeah, I can see it being the only worse in these areas where, like, it's so lush and green.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. From aerial drone images that I've seen of the border, it definitely looks like a kind of sand colored scar, Especially in the Dahabong area, where you have green on both sides and then that sand color line running through it.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

So the Dahabon border crossing is extremely close to SESFRONT's base there. When I was there, the border between the two countries was officially closed because of a dispute over the canalization of the Massacre River. Haitians needed the water for agriculture along the border, but Dominican officials said that the canalization would take water away from their own purposes. A couple weeks after I was there, they opened up the border again, which was extremely necessary because border towns like Dajabong and Guanamint, which is the town on the Haitian side, rely on each other a lot for trade. And this has been that way since time immemorial in that region. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

The binational market in Dahabong is pretty much the only place where Haitians are legally allowed to enter, but they have to leave the same day they came in. It's essentially this giant market. And there is a steel wall that runs along the outer perimeter of it, which is where you have SES front border guards. So if you pass through the border crossing, you do the whole immigration check, you're able to go into the market, and you could essentially do a circle around it. So you're able to go into the market and then you leave the back way, which connects to another border crossing.

[James Stone]

Oh, just so you're like you're in a bubble.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, essentially.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Okay.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, essentially.

[James Stone]

That's crazy. They're like going that hard to be like, we want your money. We just don't want you.

[Vaquero2XL]

Exactly, Exactly.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

And it's really the. It really shows the hypocrisy of these. These border systems, because, you know, they're.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

These two towns are extremely reliant on one another, but the countries that represent both towns are like, no, we need to enforce this. This border. Right.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

So, yeah, this, this market in the Habong is where a lot of people on the Haiti side of the border are able to buy and sell a lot of stuff they wouldn't otherwise have access to.

[James Stone]

Sure.

[Vaquero2XL]

So the bridge that runs over the Massacre river that connects the Habong to Unamint is within feet of the national market. And like I mentioned, all encircled by suspense guards. Any Haitian who would try to pass that fence without going past the official checkpoint would likely be detained and deported immediately if they're caught by the border guards. And as we know, even if a border presents itself as extremely rigid, a lot of it is for show, at least in my experience with the Dr. Haiti border. Right. A lot of it is theater security theater. Yeah, yeah. So when I was there, I spent the better part of my time there just watching DGM trucks bring dozens of people to the border, then watched as CIS front guards herded them out of the Dominican Republic.

[James Stone]

Jesus.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, it was incredibly inhumane and heartbreaking. I. Yeah. Remember taking this picture of a little girl with a suitcase who was just. And this wasn't a person being deported by the trucks, but this was a Haitian person who was leaving of a little girl just waiting for her dad with a suitcase.

[James Stone]

Jesus.

[Vaquero2XL]

I don't know. That image really sticks in my mind.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. So the thing about the border, as I mentioned earlier, even if it seems to be incredibly hard, it's still porous in several places. When I was in the Bateyas, in the sugar producing regions, which are the little towns that they have or little settlements that they have inside of the sugarcane maze, I spoke to someone who had been detained outside of the sugarcane areas without their work permit and then deported. His family had to pay a Buskong, essentially what the US would call a coyote, to bring them back across the border. However, this forced him into what's essentially debt bondage to the Buskong because the worker couldn't really pay because of the sugar plantations pay a pittance. So they were essentially in a recursive cycle of some part of my money has to go to the Buskong and then whatever's left has to go to paying for my family and my needs. And it was never enough, sadly.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

So one of the news videos that I watched as part of research for this was at pbs, like a seven minute clip where they talked to a Haitian man as they were being deported along the border. And when they went to talk to the guy's family the next day, the guy who had been deported was there because he crossed the border through the river overnight. And you can hear the astonishment in the narrator's voice, even though that script reading was probably weeks later. And it's just an example.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

Of how these borders are more porous than the state wants them to be and wants them to appear to be. So I wanted to start finishing off by mentioning that the Dominican government is now actively collaborating with the Trump administration's deportation campaign by agreeing to accept third country deportees from the US under the initiative.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

This agreement, as I hope I've shown throughout the course of this episode, is another action in a long line of collaboration between the Doctor and the US when it comes to immigration enforcement. Noticeably, the agreement leaves out Haitian nationals, and the US is supposed to provide funding to ensure that these deportees have a, quote, unquote, adequate conditions for the global Detention project. Which really remains to be seen if that's the case. But if the conditions in the current immigration detention centers are anything to go by, I'm really not holding out hope that they're adequate conditions. So before I finish the episode, I want to return to Holitz. Death in Haina, a facility systematically created with a deep racism towards the Haitian migrants who make up the vast majority of the people detained there. Hullett was killed by a system that the United States helped create and then shaped. The probability that the DGM agents who were at Haina at the time that Hullett died, the probability that they were trained by US officials, is not zero. And right now we're seeing the immigration systems that the US helped train outside of the country boomerang back towards us. What I thought was only a thing of the Dominican Republic, where you have a kind of paramilitary style immigration force raiding everyone in sight and, you know, kind of systematically terrorizing a population, has now become a common reality for millions of people inside of the U.S. yeah. I hope that we live long enough to see these border walls become ruins.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Yeah, me too. I often thought, like, it would be a good book project, just go look at border walls.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[James Stone]

I just don't particularly want to do it because it would fucking suck. That's a human experience. But, yeah, like, if you've lived in the U.S. in the last 20 years, you've paid for border walls and border violence all over the world and in Europe, to be fair. Like, the. The EU does this too.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Right.

[James Stone]

If you've lived in the Global north, you probably have a hand in the death of migrants just through paying your taxes. And that fucking sucks. It shouldn't be that way.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely.

[James Stone]

Yeah. It's tragic. I want to thank the person who reached out to us to share this story with us as well, because, like, I wouldn't have been aware of it otherwise. There's so much horrible shit happening in the immigration system that, you know, we miss things.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

So thank you for doing that.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely. Thank you.

[James Stone]

Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us. It's. It's a long time. I used to, used to ride my bicycle around the Dominican Republic a lot

[Margaret]

when I was there.

[James Stone]

And it was always nice to go out to those areas, like get it, get out of the Santo Domingo and like, see how folks live in these rural areas. But then also to be reminded of how two tiered rural existence was, especially for people. Like you say cocaine, like it's, it's a brutal way to make a living too. Like hard back breaking work under the hot sun. Like a machete, like swinging a machete all day. Like you can yourself up pretty easily.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. They'll do this for like between 10 to 14 hours a day, day after day. You know, it's just them and sometimes a big hat and some clothes to protect them from the sun and a little bit of water. But yeah, it's like backbreaking labor that they're, they're working on. And you know, historically there was a movement of Haitian laborers from the Haiti to the doctor who would come for the safra, which is the sugarcane cutting season.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

And then they would leave after about six months. But as the border hardened, those people had to make a decision whether they stayed in Haiti or stayed in a place where they could get work. And a lot of them decided that they had to stay in the places where they could get work.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Much the same as it is in the United States. Right. Like a lot of seasonal agricultural laborers would have did the same, of course. Yeah. But reminded me kind of that guy you're saying who popped back the next day over the river reminded me of that Woody Guthrie song where he's talking about the, the Los Gatos Canyon plane crash and how all those people had. Many of those people had traveled multiple times from their homes in Mexico to the US Whenever there was an expense so they couldn't cover with whatever they could sell from their estancia. Right. They would come across and labor, or young people come across and labor in order to establish themselves in life and then go back. And then if they had an expense, their children, they would come back and labor some more. Or some people would just come back and labor for a year. And then one time on the Way back, their plane crashed and they all died. Yeah. There's so much needless suffering that happens because of borders. It's rough to think about people in those detention centers. Like, that always kind of makes me sad, having spent a lot of time around them. It's pretty fucking miserable in there.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. Yeah. Especially, like, for me, you know, I became a Dominican citizen in 2024 after I had been there. And I always think about, you know, I was seeing these people, some of which they had spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing else outside of it, but they were stateless because of this. This 2013 decision. Right. And I was thinking, you know, they've spent their whole lives here, and I have more of a right to citizenship than them. Just because my. My mom was born there and then left when she was a small child. Like, to me, I don't know, it was an extremely bleak, bleak thing to realize just how. How the state prefers some people under it and then others not. You know, it was.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

I always think, like, you know, this is. This is a person who is a Dominican. Like, this is so. So, like, culturally more Dominican than I could ever be, but I'm the one who. Who legally is entitled to citizenship.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

Yeah. I used to think about that a lot when, like, I would go there and, like, we try and have Haitian folks come over to join us. The time I was helping with some diabetes education, nonprofit diabetes education for folks there in. How much harder it was for the Haitian folks, even if they, in some cases, like, they had family who were there, they had spent most of their lives there. Like. Like, for them, it was so much harder than it was for me who, like, you know, I'm just a guy from Britain. Like. Like, I have no stake in this at all, but I could. You know, no one batted an eyelid. When you fly into that airport there and come on through, you don't even need a visa.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, Yeah. I also think, like. And this might be getting too. Too into the weeds, but my great, great grandparents had to leave Spain because of the monarchy, and they were part of the people who were. Or we. Or my family falls into part of the people who get citizenship through the Ley de Memoria Historica.

[James Stone]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

I've seen videos of so many videos and read so much about migrants trying desperately to reach Europe, and that, to me is like, you know, I get to legally become a citizen because some guy that I've never met had to leave Spain, and I'm just like, this is crazy. Like, I wish I could just pass it on to somebody else because I. You know, they need it. And, you know, some people who've lived there their entire lives deserve it, like, much more than I ever could.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Right. It's such a strange lottery that gives you the right to go there, reside there, work there, whatever. And someone who deeply wants you and whose life will be in danger if they weren't able to, who might die trying to, can't have it, and they're very determined to keep it from them. Like, it's such a stupid hierarchy or however you want to put it, like, system. But, yeah, unfortunately, it happens all over the world and it's only getting worse. Right. Like, as we're recording this, people in Belfast are fucking attacking people. Who specifically? I guess I spoke to some people in Belfast today and they were like, yeah, it's not all of us. It's a small group of loyalists who are very, very racist and have been for a very long time. But nonetheless. Right. Like, I know there's a crime think sticker that I think of a lot that says, the border doesn't protect you. It controls you. And, like, maybe Americans are realizing that now that Border patrol are murdering U.S. citizens in U.S. cities. You know, I said this the other day, and we're talking about Gregory Pavino. Like, there is no reforming this shit. Like, the nature of what we have done for decades with borders is that it kills people who did nothing wrong. And if we want to get away from the place we're at now, when this shit needs to be torn down, all of it, the way the building border wall now, it's very clearly with the understanding that they just need to build as much as possible because no administration will ever tear it down.

[Vaquero2XL]

Absolutely.

[James Stone]

And that's what they did in the first Trump administration, too. They literally skipped the hard parts. I remember being out there in late 2020, even after August, September, October, November, December, and they're, like, skipping the difficult heli bits just. Just to put more miles of wall in. And, like, they're building now, they're kind of filling some of those gaps and just building wall in places where we never thought they would because they have unlimited money. And, like, they're doing it because they were right in 2020. Right. Biden didn't tear it down. In fact, he. He repaired and maintained and continued to build it. Like, we need to really think about rolling this shit back if we ever want to make sure that this can't happen again.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, absolutely. The depths of the mechanism have to be destroyed. Because like you said, there's, there's no reforming it. And I specifically use like, kind of mechanism or machine to describe it. Right. Because even if you think that the only thing it applies to is, you know, immigration enforcement in the US and seeing ICE and cbp, you know, terrorizing the streets, like, I hope I've evidenced the episode. This is, this is a global project.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Vaquero2XL]

They're not only doing immigration enforcement in the U.S. they're helping and sometimes doing immigration enforcement outside in, you know, if they could, they would probably go to every country on earth and be like, hey, this is how you harden your borders and do immigration enforcement.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah. I was just saying it's a part of colonialism and spreading our violence around the world. Well, thank you for sharing that story with us. Where can people find you if they want to read more of your work? Follow you online.

[Vaquero2XL]

I'm Vaquero2XL V A Q U E R O2XL on all social media. And I'm also actually working on a series of mini documentaries about immigrant communities in Puerto Rico for a local website here called Noemi Yones. And I am an editor at the Latino Newsletter where I have been reporting a lot on immigration enforcement here in Puerto Rico. Yeah, thank you, James.

[James Stone]

Thank you for sharing that with us. We'll look forward to hearing from you again soon.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

with scenes of the genocide in Palestine plastering our screens over the past few years and increasing analysis of the settler colonial and supremacist root of Israel's violence, it had me thinking more about the concept of settler colonialism. Many people know now about Israel's settler colonial past and its parallels with the us, Australia, South Africa and Canada. Those are common comparisons, but few know much about the settler colonial origins of Liberia, which has gained a little attention as people have begun learning more about the concept. So I'd like to take a look at Liberia, Israel and the parallels of settler colonialism. This is it could happen here. I'm Andrew sage andrism on YouTube and I'm joined once again by It's James again.

[James Stone]

I'm excited to learn about this.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, I'm mainly looking at the parallels through the lens of analysis provided by historian Patrick Wolf in his famous article Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, with other historical resources and articles linked in the show notes. First off, before we start making comparisons, I'll need to introduce the concept. For those unfamiliar settler colonialism is, in one sentence, an ongoing structural process where outsiders permanently occupy indigenous lands to build new societies. Woolf notes that invasion is a structure, not an event. He calls settler colonialism inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal, and calls elimination an organising principle of settler colonial society rather than a one off occurrence. Unlike the kind of exploitation colonialism which seeks to extract resources and leave, settlers come to stay to claim land. As Wolf quotes, Deborah Bird rose to get in the way of settler colonisation, all the native has to do is stay at home. Settlers tell various stories to justify their eliminatory ambition, race, religion, ethnicity, civilisation, status, but it really comes down to territory. Settlers want to establish lasting autonomous communities by eliminating the existing indigenous way of life and replacing it with the coloniser's culture, economy and political order. Woolf says that settler colonialism destroys to replace, pointing to the quite visceral example of Israeli settlers uprooting ancient olive trees and replacing them with foreign fruit trees, or, as Israel often euphemises it, making the desert bloom. Elimination doesn't have to mean the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people, though frontier homicide tends to be a trend. But elimination seeks to dissolve indigenous people and their way of life through various means. Expulsion encouraged, population mixing and forced assimilation, enclosure, child abduction, missions and boarding schools, religious conversion, marginalization, labour exploitation, and more often several at once. Settler colonialism tends to remain deeply embedded in the laws and institutions of the countries founded that way. But Wolf points to a curious side effect of settler colonialism, which is the way that settler society subsequently attempts to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its independence from the mother country. He references Australia's incorporation of indigenous symbolism for one example. Australia, Canada, the us, New Zealand, South Africa, French, Algeria, Rhodesia, Liberia and Israel are all examples of contemporary or historical settler colonial societies. But I'm focused on the parallels between just two of them, Liberia and Israel. In 1818, the American colonization Society scouted what was then known as the Grain coast and deemed it a suitable location for their planned African colony, meant to be a home for formerly enslaved people in the us Foreign emancipation as well as free black people that already existed in the territory. The first successful settlement was established in 1822, after an agreement with the local chiefs signed in 1821 granted the society possession of Cape Mesurado. Now, some free black Americans had advocated return to Africa projects long before the ACS was even founded. So we shouldn't erase the agency in this. But the ACS was led by a mix of white abolitionists and white enslavers who mostly just wanted to rid themselves of the free black population in the us. Most free black Americans opposed the project, either initially or in time. Those black Americans that did participate came to be known as Americo Liberians. They carried on the American Colonization Society's narrative that the establishment of Liberia was a return to the promised Land, an exodus of formerly enslaved people returning to their ancestral homeland to establish an independent land of freedom. And as a minority in that land, the Americo Liberians would establish a government and various settlements they ruled that would attempt to expand Liberia's initial territory and bring civilization and Christianity to the natives. Those that went were clearly heavily influenced by Their American background, viewing themselves culturally, socially and educationally superior to the native African ethnic groups they encountered. After a few decades of support from the American Colonization Society, independence was declared in 1847, but only recognized by the US in 1862. They also very quickly fell into a deteriorating economic situation marked by heavy foreign debt obligations, culminating in multinational intervention and oversight in the early 1900s, as well as the establishment of a million acre rubber plantation for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which would exploit the indigenous people in Liberia for decades to come.

[James Stone]

Anytime you're setting up a rubber plantation, I feel like that should be a massive red flag that you're one of the bad guys.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[James Stone]

People who have been subject to settler colonial violence and to like racially motivated. Sound like a cop when I say racially motivated violence. Like the violence that is inherent in racism and capitalism. The idea that the way to kind of right those wrongs is to become the one doing the violence, not the one subject to the violence. It's it in Myanmar.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

Like a country that was brutally colonized by the country that I was born in, but in which essentially today the state of Myanmar is itself a colonial entity. Right. We have a number of different ethnic groups, dozens of ethnic groups within Myanmar. And we have one ethnic group which has dominated governance and which has dominated the military and which has used the tool of the state to extract resources, labor, human bodies from the other ethnic groups. Right. Like they've gone from being colonized to effectively being like a contiguous empire and they've adopted the logic of the colonizer in doing so.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a very common phenomenon. You know, this is why I tend to view nationalism, even so called third world nationalisms, as dead ends, as explicitly counter revolutionary, as against the liberation of all people.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Because that construction of the nation state, or really of states in general, tends to come with the establishment of certain superiors and inferiors, you know, subordinates and rulers.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And the privileging of certain religions, ethnic groups, skin tones, whatever the case may be. Even within so called ethnically homogenous societies.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

You can even look at Japan.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Right.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Which is touted by, you know, supremacists of all flavors as an ethnically homogeneous society. Even within that society, there's, you know, colorism.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And there's also the exploitation and marginalization of certain groups within that territory, such as the Ainu.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

I think a lot about like nationalism now. There was a time when there was a movement to try and use nationalism as a positive thing, like the idea of A Brotherhood of nations, Right. It existed within Catalan anti fascism in the 1930s. Like we are a nation which has been suppressed by the state, so we will build a nationalism that doesn't suppress people.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

We saw the same thing with Kurdish people, right. With the Kurdish freedom movement. Their understanding, I would say, was more advanced than the Catalans. And that like their. Their analysis was we are a nation that has been suppressed by multiple states and therefore we will build society without the state in order to link. Create a world where there is no boot so we can't tread on people.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

I still believe that that is possible, but like in the last six months, you know, I've seen people back away from that within Kurdistan. Right. And start talking again about the brotherhood of peoples was a mistake. They feel betrayed. I don't think those people consider themselves to be superior, but they feel that their project didn't work. That really makes me sad. Ultimately, the Brotherhood of Nations didn't succeed in Syria.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

And we've seen it effectively. Syria is still called the Syrian Arab Republic after hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives for it to be a place where everyone could be free. And yeah, it really saddens me to see that, that like. Like I really hoped for something better. This idea of like, brotherhood of nations, which acknowledges people's differences but doesn't create a hierarchy. But we're not. We haven't made it quite work yet, I guess. And I guess we live in a world, right, where the. Where the appeal to nationalism and bigotry and the idea like, specifically in Syria, I think, that like Arabs should not be equal to Kurds was appealing. Through making that appeal, this project was able to be sabotaged, I guess.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, I think that while we're still forging different approaches to liberation, trying to figure out what that looks like. We've seen the track record of nationalism is my point.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah, No, I think it's fair. Like it's. It's been used much more as a force for dividing us and making us hate each other than it has been for creating a world where we can all live together alongside each other.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, this is a digression, but in my experience in Trinidad, what I've noticed is that there are efforts to kind of construct, and they have been since the establishment of Trinidad as an independent country, Transbago as an independent country in 1962, first led by Dr. Eric Williams, there were efforts to kind of build this kind of cross racial, like, overarching, like Trinidadian Trinbagonian identity, which, I mean, I use that term Trinbago.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

In some of my work. But Tobago was kind of attached to Trinidad against their will. And even now there are people who try to push that Trinbago unity. But there are also people who will assert, particularly people from Tobago who will assert that, yeah, no, we want greater autonomy. We want even independence from Trinidad. And so for maybe certain people unifying purposes, I would use the term, but I try not to give off that impression that I'm using it for a kind of unifying nationalism. Because I think with the nationalism of such a young quote, unquote nation, a nation of nations of various people from all over the world, mostly brought here against their will.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

There are these competitions, I think, over the proportionality of the representation of different racial ethnic groups, the competitions over who gets to define what this Trinidadian nation is, what it means to be a Trinidian, and efforts to kind of balance or imbalance the proportion of representation depending on which government is in power. You know, our current government is very much oriented toward a kind of Indo trinity and Indian focus and have in many ways marginalized all other groups, maligned all other groups, disrespected all other groups within the country to kind of elevate the sense of or get back for the Indian people in Trinidad. And I don't want to go too much down that road talking about that, but it's just another example to me of the frustration and misdirection that comes with investment in nationalism, which currently holds a monopoly both here and in much of the world on narratives of liberation and anti colonial resistance. It's almost treated as if anti colonial resistance is synonymous with nationalism.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

As though the two cannot be distinguished.

[James Stone]

It should be a relic of the 20th century. Right. Like it was heavily tied to state socialism. Right. The idea of the way that we fight the wrongs of colonialism is through creating post colonial nation states and ignoring the fact that many of those states, many of the boundaries they find themselves within, include a diverse range of identities, like you said, of many people, including those brought against their will to those places. And that many of those identities don't line up with the national identities. And it almost always results in a change of the oppressor rather than the absence of oppression.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. I mean, you could literally just look at the entire history of independent Nigeria.

[James Stone]

Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

For one very clear example of that.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

But getting back to the comparisons. Right. I don't see an explicitly titled ideology behind the founding of Liberia beyond settler colonialism, I suppose. But the implicit ideology was the Supremacy of the elite Americo Liberian way of life and the right to that territory and the label and the resources of its people. While the elite would themselves be subordinate to the global capitalist order dictated particularly by America and Europe, so the supremacy of the American Liberian elite did not place them in a position of supremacy on the global stage. They were still in a subordinate position in some ways. Turning now to Israel, the political Zionist movement emerged into late 19th century Europe amid pogroms and the failure to achieve equality for Jews in many countries. Its most influential early theorist, Theodor Herzl, argued that Jews constituted a nation and that antisemitism could not ultimately be solved through integration into European societies. Instead, they required a state of their own, and Palestine was not initially the only territory under consideration. Various proposals included Argentina, Uganda and other locations before Palestine became firmly established as the movement's focus. Not all Jews agreed with this political Zionist cause that many Jewish socialists, particularly those associated with the general Jewish labour bond, rejected Zionism altogether. They argued that Jews should fight for liberation where they lived rather than establishing a separate nation state. Nevertheless, Zionist colonial settlement efforts began and expanded in Palestine through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, aided by wealthy benefactors, land purchases from absentee landlords and growing immigration. The movement received a major boost in 1917 when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration expressing support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, despite the fact that Palestine's Arab population constituted the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants at the time. As settlement expanded, Zionist narratives increasingly emphasized the idea of return. The Jews were not colonizing a foreign land, but returning to an ancestral homeland from which they had been dispersed centuries before. And the State of Israel was officially established in 1948, accompanied by the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes across Palestine. Like Liberia before it, Israel emerged as a state founded by a population claiming a historic connection to the territory. And like Liberia, its legitimacy would be built upon narratives of return, civilization and nationhood, while the indigenous inhabitants found themselves excluded from the political order being constructed on top of their home. Now, already these situations aren't exactly one to one, but they don't need to be. To apply a settler colonial analysis, the key questions for ascertaining settler colonialism are if the settlers established permanent residence, if they claimed political sovereignty, if they dominated indigenous populations, if they created institutions that privileged settlers, basically what was the political and social order that emerged after they arrived and who was elevated and degraded by it. For Liberia, the answer becomes pretty clear Once we look at how the new state was organised over the course of the 19th century, Americo Liberian settlements expanded their territory through a mixture of purchases, treaties, coercion, military expeditions and outright warfare with indigenous peoples who made up the overwhelming majority of the population but were largely excluded from political life for generations. They lacked meaningful representation in government and were treated as subjects to be administered. The settler elite monopolized state institutions and eventually established what was effectively a one party state under the True Whig Party which ruled Liberia for over a century. The Liberian state extracted taxes and tribute from indigenous communities that relied on indigenous labour. And by the early 20th century, international investigations were uncovering systems of forced labour and human trafficking so severe that they generated an international scandal. While the settlers themselves had once been victims of slavery and racial oppression, they recreated similar class and ethnic hierarchies in their state. Liberia, of course, differs from many other settler colonies, but they retained the basic framework of a settler population claiming sovereignty over territory inhabited by indigenous peoples and concentrating political and economic power in its own hands. Now compare this to Israel. From the late 19th century onward, Zionist organisations acquired land through purchases and violence. Following the Nakba, which created one of the largest refugee populations in the modern world. The Palestinians which remained within Israel were subjected to military administration for years, while Palestinians in the occupied territories continued to live under a different legal regime than Israeli settlers. The 1952 citizenship law and the 2018 nation state law cemented the Jewish supremacist heart of the Zionist project. And since 1967, settlement expansion in the west bank had steadily increased, accompanied by land seizures, home demolitions, restrictions on movement and the fragmentation of Palestinian communities. And Gaza has been an open air prison where settlers occasionally mow the lawn, aka slaughter its population since 2007. It's worth noting a major difference between the two cases, which is the demographic element. America Liberians remained a small minority ruling a much larger indigenous population for the entire history of of Americo Liberian ruled Liberia. Those kind of demographics are more akin to settler societies like South Africa, Rhodesia and French Algeria, which leaned heavily into the exploitation aspect of colonialism. Israel developed differently intentionally to ensure that Jewish people became the demographic majority within its territory. So it's more comparable to settler societies like the us, Canada and Australia. Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in how indigenous peoples were managed between projects. Liberia's system depended upon indigenous labor, while Israel's project has generally prioritized securing land while minimizing dependence on Palestinian labor. In many periods of Zionist history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in favour of exclusively Jewish labour. But again, settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that might often be expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement, and whatever else. Again, the settlers want the land, the native becomes an obstacle. And different settler societies develop different methods for dealing with that obstacle. The US had its ethnic cleansings, removals, reservation system and boarding schools. Australia had frontier wars, stolen generations and land dispossessions. Canada had assimilation policies like reservation schools. South Africa under white rule couldn't expel the black majority, so they maintained apartheid, controlled reservations and extracted labour. But again, what matters for defining settler colonialism is that indigenous sovereignty is displaced and settler control over the land is secured. Of course, indigenous people in all cases do not take this abuse lying down. From the very beginning of Liberian settlement, indigenous peoples resisted. The kru, Grebo Vai and numerous other ethnic groups fought against territorial expansion, taxation, forced labour, and attempts by the Liberian state to extend its authority into the interior. And despite generations of Americo Liberian dominance, indigenous resistance never entirely disappeared. Eventually, the political order that had governed Liberia for over a century began to crack. Economic crisis, corruption, and growing resentment towards settler domination culminated in a military coup in 1980 led by Samuel Doe, overthrowing the government of President William Talbot and ending more than a century of uninterrupted Americo Liberian political dominance. Now, that coup clearly did not create a free or egalitarian society. Liberia would soon face dictatorship, civil war, and immense suffering. But it did mark the collapse of the old settler elite's monopoly on state power, and efforts at recovery in the country are ongoing. Palestinian resistance, on the other hand, faced a very different trajectory. From the beginning of Zionist settlement, Palestinians resisted displacement and land loss through protests, strikes, political organizing, and armed revolt. The Great Arab revolt of 1936-1939 saw Palestinians launch a massive strike and uprising against both British colonial rule and Zionist settlement. Decades later came the first and second intifadas, mass movements that combined protest, civil disobedience, community organizing and armed resistance. Palestinians have built a number of institutions alongside international solidarity movements in an effort to sustain their efforts under occupation, siege, exile and apartheid. Even today, amid the destruction and genocide of Gaza, Palestinian resistance continues. Liberia and Israel are both settled colonial projects, but they are different enough in scale and goals and methods and historical development that obviously treating them as equivalent would be misleading. The point of the comparison is to identify what these societies have in common. Since the coup in Liberia, the old Americo Liberian elite has lost its monopoly and power. But in Israel, the settler colonial project is alive and well with ever expanding settlements, occupation, displacement and brutality. Whether settler dominance in Israel remains or falls is yet to be seen. In Liberia, the end of settler rule did not automatically bring justice, equality or freedom. Their liberation through state power has not brought their relief, especially in the context of a global capitalist order. The replacement of one ruling class for another has not ended the struggle, but maybe put a semicolon on that struggle. I believe the aim of decolonisation is must be not merely the fight against the people at the helm of the system, but the very helm of the system itself, dismantling the structures that make domination possible in the first place. For Palestine and for all peoples struggling against oppression, ending settler colonialism is only the beginning in the pursuit of liberation. That's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace. This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem?

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[James Stone]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, Today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined by three other people to discuss this indictment in Minnesota. I'm gonna ask them all to introduce themselves. So if we start off with you, Mo, that would be wonderful.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Sure. Good afternoon. I'm Maura Meltzer Cohen. I'm an attorney, abolitionist and educator. I primarily represent people arrested in the course of justice struggles and I do a lot of popular legal education. I also teach at CUNY School of Law.

[James Stone]

Wonderful. Thank you, Olive. If you'd like to go next. Hi, I'm Olive. I'm a legal worker, a movement legal

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

worker based in Minneapolis. And I also make outlaw. So you might have heard my voice on here before.

[James Stone]

Thank you, Magpie.

[Margaret]

Hi, I'm Margaret. I am sometimes on this show, you probably hear me on Sundays with coolso Media Book Club. And like you all, I woke up to a lot of messages this morning being like, oh, fuck, Things are happening in Minneapolis. People are being raided. As always, we started off with some false information or some, like, early rumors. But right away people were like, there's a bunch of people who are getting arrested. And people started sharing that we were about to see a press conference by the federal government and they were going to be like, we've caught this terrible antifa terrorists. And I thought that's the kind of thing I like paying attention to. So I woke up. Well, I'd been awake for a minute and then I watched a press conference and then I read a very long indictment. And I think I'm not the one who's supposed to do the very short version of it all, but that's how I. That's my narrative version of what happened.

[James Stone]

I think that's a good narrative. We are going to get on to talking about the indictment, talking about what it does and doesn't do and what it means and doesn't mean. But, Mo, I know you wanted to begin with some really important context about it. The physical locations where the alleged actions took place.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah. I wanted to ground this whole discussion in the historical reality of the United States federal government's violent colonial history in this specific place. So one of the places that is mentioned a number of times in the indictment is Fort Snelling. And Fort Snelling is a US Military installation that was built on a sacred site at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. I think it's really critical that we understand that not only is the United States federal government continuing to perpetuate its violent occupation in the same places that it has historically done so in ways that are intended to either include or exclude certain groups of people, depending on what's expedient for the federal government, but that they're doing it in the exact same place as, I think, the largest mass execution in US History, which was a mass execution of Dakota people, that after it was carried out, was determined to have been totally unlawful and to have involved totally insufficient legal process on the part of the United States government and to have involved actions that far exceeded the lawful legitimate authority of the US Government. And of course, that's exactly what we're seeing here, again, is the United States federal government taking actions that far exceed its lawful authority and punishing people who resist those excesses.

[James Stone]

Yeah, I think that's really important.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

One thing I just want to add, I'm not sure if you said this clearly, but Fort Snelling is also the area that. Where Whipple is located.

[Robert Evans]

So you're going to probably hear us

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

talk about the Whipple Building, and that is the ICE headquarters for the Midwest. It's where people detained by ICE in all of Minnesota are processed through and protesters arrested by ICE as well.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Thank you, Olive. I don't think I did make that clear.

[James Stone]

Yeah. It's a very important context. If people are looking for a little bit more context on Whipple Building. Olive made a wonderful podcast for us that they can listen to about that. And Margaret and I did some reporting when we were in the Twin Cities as well. We will link to all of those in the show notes subsequently to this. Like Margaret.

[Vaquero2XL]

Right.

[James Stone]

I began to receive messages that we would be seeing people have been detained, we'd be seeing oppressor and an indictment. So I watched the presser and then they actually released the indictment like 15 minutes before the presser, I believe. Yeah.

[Margaret]

And they were like mad at people for having not already read a like 94 page indictment.

[James Stone]

Yeah. They kept saying, read. Well, this is a thing. Right. They can. That. That allows them, when they're answering Questions to say, well, read the indictment. Yeah. But then for people not to ask questions about things that are covered or not covered in the indictment.

[Margaret]

Yeah, it was a shit show.

[James Stone]

They told people to read the indictment.

[Margaret]

The indictment did not say what they claimed to said.

[James Stone]

Yeah. It was a press conference. It was exactly squarely what I would expect from a press conference in that people asked questions which are good and they got answers which were useless.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

I was impressed with how quick the press was to point out, to identify, even without having read the indictment, to identify the gaping holes in the government's claims.

[James Stone]

Yeah. And there's been a lot of really excellent local reporting in the Twin Turties for a long time. Actually, it's one of the places where like local journalism has not been gutted just yet, which is a good thing. The indictment that I have in front of me here indicts, I believe, 15 individuals. From what we know, one of those people was already detained. Another 12 have been detained and I believe two are yet to be detained.

[Margaret]

As of recording, I think we're down

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

to one is yet to be detained.

[James Stone]

Okay, we're down to one. Yeah. And that they suggested in the, in the presser that those people are maybe negotiating surrender. Yeah. And at the time we are recording, there is a big gathering outside of federal court which is being attacked by feds of some description, I'm not quite sure, maybe FPS pepper spraying people. We saw them throwing some kind of less lethal grenades, but like something that people who live in the Twin Cities will have become very familiar with at this point.

[Vaquero2XL]

Right.

[James Stone]

Which is this kind of state violence. Yes. As Mo has pointed out in the chat, these people are being pepper sprayed for attending court proceedings which are public. In the indictment, the District attorney I guess, outlines that these people were members of a group called DAM Direct Action Minnesota, previously known as Twin Cities Direct Action. There are a number of other groups and acronyms here that I don't think is hugely important. That they are alleging that they were part of a group that conspired to, among other things, disrupt and obstruct federal agents to. I'm going to quote here, the purpose of the conspiracy include the Preventing the enforcement of federal immigration law by force, intimidation and threats. Opposing the authority of the United States government. Preventing, hindering or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the identification, detention and removal of non citizens to include the Immigration and Nationality act and preventing, impeding and interfering federal law enforcement from discharging their duties, including enforcement of federal immigration law by force, intimidation and threats. They then go on to detail a great number of messages from a number of signal chats. They specifically identify them as signal chats. And a large number of the messages pertain to a protest held at the Whipple Federal Building on the 23rd of January. That's a Protestant Margaret and I covered. And you will have heard our coverage of it before, or you can go back and listen to it. The specific allegations here that the accused people conspired to create a soft quote unquote and hard quote, unquote barricade. The soft barricade took the form of a shield wall that Margaret and I reported on the time. The hard barricade they're alleging was a number of trailers that they're alleging the accused people attempted to flip over in order to prevent feds accessing Whipple.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

From my skim read of the indictment

[Margaret]

so far, it looks like the actual

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

actions that the conspiracy charge focuses on, largely about the planning and carrying out of two blockade actions at the Whipple

[James Stone]

Building on January 23 and March 1,

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

and then the participation in the coordination of commuting or ice watching by car and general ice watch activities after the occupation drawdown from March to June.

[Robert Evans]

And the conspiracy charge and the evidence

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

that goes to those two things takes up most of the 94 page indictment.

[James Stone]

Yeah. And then as we get to the very, very end, somebody is accused of kicking a government vehicle and somebody else is accused of getting in a road traffic accident with a government vehicle, which, Margaret, I know you'd read that before, but it's being alleged that they were deliberately using their vehicle as a weapon. Right?

[Margaret]

Yeah. The, the indictment doesn't say that it was a car accident. The indictment implies that it caused physical contact. And we don't know whether that was physical contact with a vehicle or the officer themselves.

[James Stone]

Got it.

[Margaret]

In the entire indictment, there are very few things that the average person reading this indictment would be like, oh, that sounds like a crime. And one of those is kicking a police car. And one of those is the. This using a vehicle as a dangerous weapon to make, quote, physical contact and inflict bodily injury. And that is number 276 out of 276 not counts, but like claims made in this document. So they are clearly spending the overwhelming majority talking about other things.

[James Stone]

Get your claims. Mo. Is that a reasonable way to refer to them?

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

They said allegations.

[James Stone]

Allegations. There you go.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, yes.

[Margaret]

So there's 276 allegations, and the vast majority are the kind of things that the average person reading a thing would say. That sounds like the Most free speech thing I've ever read, not just one of the allegations, is that one defendant made a video calling for people to come armed during the press conference. They actually did a good job, though. The reporters were like, cool. Is there any evidence that that person or anyone who that they spoke to actually came armed? And they were like, we are not answering that.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Which is more or less what they said to everything. But overall, we are talking about a document that describes how to organize any protest. Yeah, how to organize any protest. It talks about how do we organize our signal groups so that we can communicate more clearly with each other and how do we know that the people in our group are who they say they are. And it's. It's the kind of thing that protest organizers have been doing in this country for at least several decades. It's just what I can speak to personally. And it is being framed not in a different way. They've done this kind of thing before, but it is in this current real bad context where everything gets real intense.

[James Stone]

The point you're making, Margaret, is very important because a lot of people will look at this and be like, this is standard First Amendment shit. And I don't want people to think that standard First Amendment shit is illegal now, because that is what these prosecutions do. They have a chilling effect on protective First Amendment activity. So, Mo, I know you enjoy the First Amendment. Would you like to explain to us exactly what conspiracy is and, and what's going on here with this charges of conspiracy?

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

I do. I am a First Amendment enjoyer. So if you look through this indictment, almost all of the allegations that are made about the, quote, overt acts, the actions that were taken in support of the conspiracy, are, as you said, really First Amendment protected conduct. So in order to understand how First Amendment protected conduct can be evidence of criminality, we have to look at what is a conspiracy. And a conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal because what it is is a claim that a group of people made an agreement to do something illegal and then took steps, overt acts engaged in these, quote, overt acts in the service of carrying out their illegal agreement or their agreement to do something unlawful. Right. So all of these things, you know, there's so many things in here that are clearly constitutionally protected. They're. They're very preoccupied with people being members of different groups identifying themselves as anarchists, wearing T shirts or sweatshirts that are. At one point, I think they say they're antifa branded. I didn't know we had a brand.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Margaret]

I Could send you some merch. Sorry, I don't know if I should make that joke. That's a joke.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

You know, there are all these things, you know, people having conversations, people using rhetoric, and all of these things are clearly First Amendment protected. And then there are people talking about the Second Amendment, which of course, is also a constitutional amendment, and, you know, all kinds of, you know, interesting evidence where they. They talk about people following or identifying ICE agents or. Or vehicles driven by ICE agents. Well, we have a First Amendment right to observe law enforcement in the public discharge of their duties. Looking at an ICE agent or taking notes on what they're doing is actually. It's not only not unlawful, it's clearly First Amendment protected conduct. Right. These people are doing legal observation. And so what is the thing that's allegedly removing the First Amendment protection from these behaviors is this claim that all of these things are being done in the service of this large, larger agreement to do something illegal. What is the illegal thing? Interfering with the discharge of ice. You know, I guess I'll say duties. For a given value of duties.

[Margaret]

There's a lot of air quotes happening for people who can't see.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Sorry, I remember that. This is not actually a visual medium.

[James Stone]

Yeah, thank God.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

I will verbalize this for the record. So the thing about conspiracy that makes it so attractive is that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize garden variety, lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior and whole communities of people who are engaged in those behaviors by making the claim that all of those things and all of those associations and all of those beliefs and all of those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a larger agreement to do something illegal. Now, of course, they're not addressing the fact that people are organizing themselves to prevent ICE from doing things that we know are very much not lawful. Right. Like detaining people who are citizens. Detaining, among others, indigenous people.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Punching through people's windshields and pulling them out of vehicles, like, I don't know, murdering two people. And that's not being dealt with in this at all. Right. The idea that Minneapolis is organizing itself to prevent this massive, you know, unlawful occupation that, true to form, it exceeds the lawful authority of these agencies.

[James Stone]

To your point on Minneapolis organizing itself, it's worth noting that every single one of these indicted people is from the Twin Cities. And they repeatedly said in the press conference and the indictment that these people tried to hijack peaceful or First Amendment protests. But as they admitted in the press that every single one of these people was from that community I would actually

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

like to point something out about that. Specifically. One of the things that's happening in this indictment is that the prosecutors have framed it as these bad protesters are trying to use as cover the actions of legitimate peaceful protesters. So what they're doing is they're setting up this idea that there are good protesters and bad protesters, which first of all is a way to divide and conquer social movements. But the other thing that they're doing, and I really want people to, to be alert to this, is that they are making it possible by associating the two. They're making it possible to later come back and go after even those people that they are currently defining as good protesters. So there's a point in this indictment where they make a, that an organization. I think it's the, it might have been the 50501 organization. We need to check that.

[Margaret]

But they are mentioned in the indictment.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

They are mentioned as a dsa and the DSA is. And a union is. There's a point at which an organization asks Twin Cities DA for assistance with a rally. And even though in this situation I believe the prosecutors are setting it up like, oh, well, this legitimate group is working with this, the bad guy group, what they've done is created a discourse that will allow them, if they want to, that will allow the government to come back and say, look at this group purporting to be a union and doing legitimate peaceful protests, but they're actually enlisting the assistance of, you know, the direct action group. So on the one hand, you know, I think the indictment is, is playing right into this good protester, bad protester narrative, which, to be clear, it doesn't matter if you are protesting in the air quotes right way, you will still be subject to police violence. Right. The function of this sort of non violent protest is that it exposes how unwarranted police violence is, not that police are not violent toward you if you are protesting the quote, right way.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Margaret and I were there very clearly identified as Press on the 23rd of January at the Whipple Building. And that did not stop us being exposed to police violence. We saw people approaching the cops to ask what they were supposed to do and get arrested. Yeah, yeah. We saw a cameraman from Italy get pepper sprayed in the face.

[Margaret]

Yeah, that was what I was thinking of. Yeah. And actually, Mo, I really like this point because I actually don't think that the good protest or bad protester split is going to work in the popular conversation in this particular case as effectively as it usually does. And that's part of why ICE is so scared, as relates to Minneapolis, is because there is such a. I mean, obviously, I'm sure there's divisions.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Right.

[Margaret]

But overall, there's such a unity around, like, the thing that is happening is far more important than our differences that, like, I think they're not going to successfully split people in the general discourse.

[Robert Evans]

They'll do it a little bit.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Right.

[Margaret]

But they're not gonna have nearly the traction they usually do. So I actually think that this point that you bring up is so vital, except, of course, for the fact that there's no time in history when anyone has ever come for one person in the morning and then a different person at night. I can't think of any examples of that.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Right.

[Margaret]

That's sarcasm for.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah, that's my concern. And that's really the thing I want to highlight here is that even though they're sort of claiming, oh, this group is legitimate, this group is not legitimate, they've done this in a manner that's certainly setting them up to come for DSA later to come for the, you know, the extreme liberal groups and behave as though those liberal groups who are, of course, protesting in the, quote, right way, are actually engaged in violent, militant, revolutionary action.

[Margaret]

Right.

[James Stone]

I think the veil on this has

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

already kind of dropped here in the Twin Cities. Just how people have been charged with the church protesters facing these face act charges, super serious federal charges, and so many people facing federal 18 USC 111 charges, most of which have already been dropped or those cases closed.

[Robert Evans]

And the way that we've seen people

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

show up in solidarity has been so cool.

[Margaret]

Just like your average liberal mom is like, drop all the charges.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

There does feel like this sense of solidarity among people for being brave and trying to get out there and support their neighbors. That feels unique and makes it feel

[James Stone]

like it would be pretty hard for them to be really successful in pushing this narrative here. I don't think you get to do like, anarchists brought the violence to this otherwise peaceful protest when you murdered a mother in the street and then you murdered someone else a few days later.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

And I think this is part of the thing that I'm finding interesting about this indictment is on the one hand, they're making these factual allegations where they're saying things like paragraph 70 says that ice was totally boxed in for half an hour and inconvenienced all morning. It's like, okay. But then on the following page, it's very clear. They're talking about, you know, how violent ICE is being. And it's very clear that the stakes are actually life or death. And that all of the people who are in the streets inconveniencing ICE are doing so in defense of others. Like, and when I say defense of others, I mean in a legal sense. Right. A self defense or defense of others. And they're not coming there and shooting ICE agents, they are inconveniencing them. And so even the indictment itself, even from the government's own narration, you can see that what is at stake for the community in Minneapolis is true life or death stakes. And what is at stake for the ICE agents is that they are inconvenienced all morning.

[James Stone]

Yeah. One of the things that they spend a great deal of time talking about it's indictment is OPSEC operational security for those who are not familiar and how that is evidence that they were bad people conspiring to do bad things. And very obviously this group's operational security has some kind of breach. And we should talk about the time and place to discuss that breach. So if anyone would like to take a swing at either of those things, that'd be lovely.

[Margaret]

I mean, I would say that obviously if you're reading someone's signal messages in an indictment, clearly the security did not fully succeed. But I would just say that actually a lot of the indictment seems to be people being frustrated at the success of the operational security. A lot of the indictment is like, and then they kept vetting and therefore the implication is like, and therefore we didn't get to the next stage with our attempts.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

I do think it's important to understand that operational security is not evidence of guilt. And playing who's the cop in the group chat is a game that everybody loses. And also, not everything needs to be said on the Internet. I'm going to say it again,

[James Stone]

if

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

you missed it the first time I said it. Not everything needs to be said on the Internet.

[Margaret]

But what if I want to just explain to everyone that I'm really cool and radical? Isn't the best way to do it to just say that on the Internet?

[James Stone]

If you have an Instagram account.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Hey, remember that Tracy Chapman song where she says talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper, but also had a really fast car? Yeah, great.

[James Stone]

Sorry, I just really like Tracy Chapman.

[Margaret]

Yeah, no, no, that, that's a.

[James Stone]

That is a good point.

[Margaret]

And standing in the welfare line might be a better place to do it than online, maybe.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

And we also are just seeing that the bulk of the evidence is extensive records of some supposedly vetted signal chat messages and Highly detailed reports from supposedly vetted in person meetings, both gathered over the course of nearly half a year since January.

[Margaret]

And there's a lot of ways they

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

could have gotten this information. Some of these events were public events. There's transcripts of a tour that some people did a speaking tour about resistance in Minneapolis. Those are open events to the public. Of course there's going to be feds there.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

But as wiser people than me have

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

always said, your signal messages, if you can see them on your phone and someone else gets your phone, they can also see them on your phone. So a lot of people were arrested here and had their phone seized as evidence. There's lots of ways that these messages could have been obtained. And what Mo is saying, I just

[James Stone]

think it's worth elaborating on that. It won't help anyone. What did you say about cop Looking

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

for the cop in the chat will never. Don't play. Who's the cop in the group chat?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret]

Everybody loses is a good way to describe that.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

And just to make it explicit, I think it's because you could read this and be like, oh my God, somebody snitched or there's an infiltrator. And I just think that's not clear. Yeah, we don't know yet. We just don't know. And I. And I think the other thing that I would like to say is I'm looking at a lot of these text messages and they're not particularly evidence of unlawful conduct.

[Margaret]

No, no, they're really not.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Right. And so I, I don't think the solution to that is to never talk to your friends or to never organize. I do think that it's important to remember that basically anything you say can and will be used against you. When I say to my clients, look, even when you're saying you're protesting your innocence, you know, and you're telling people publicly, I didn't do anything that can be used against you. You don't know what police and prosecutors are going to understand as evidence or what they're going to understand it as evidence of. That doesn't mean we don't talk to each other. It doesn't mean we self censor. It means we have the courage of our convictions and it means that we're thoughtful and circumspect about what we say.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

I think that's just like the most

[James Stone]

important point to all of this.

[Margaret]

We have the courage of our convictions

[James Stone]

and that doesn't mean we should be fools. Right.

[Margaret]

Like the indictment is much more concerned with that they built shields than it is about their conspiracy to kick police cars or whatever it is that they're accused of their overt acts.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

You know, and a lot of it is around the ideology of these people. And interestingly, it mentions anarchism or anarchists substantially more than it mentions antifa, with emphasis on the wrong syllable of course. And that's actually not new, that's actually really old in American history. But like, yeah, it's, it's interesting to me that one of the cases that it looks like they're trying to build with these allegations is that all of these people identify as anarchists and that they're obviously not being accused of being an anarchist because that's not a crime. But it certainly seems like they're attempting to say like this person identifies an anarchist, therefore they are more likely to have committed these other crimes or whatever. And I just think that that's worth pointing out that that is a thing that the state is heavily focused on. But for me, as an anarchist, this is about the kind of thing where you're like, well, the courage of my convictions. It's not a crime to believe that we should organize society in a bottom up horizontal structure.

[James Stone]

And to add to that, the reason they're doing that is that they're relying on a popular misunderstanding of anarchism to mean a predilection for chaos and violence.

[Robert Evans]

Right, totally.

[James Stone]

And the more that we can explain that anarchists mostly just want to make tea for you and be nice to you, then the, the further we can go to dispelling.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

That like I like to define anarchism as building ways to take care of people that don't reinforce ways to control people.

[Margaret]

Which includes guarding kindergartens. Right.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah. There, there are many ways that we can do that, but the fewer people who, who have that misunderstanding that the harder it becomes to make that argument. Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

I think the point in this indictment that perfectly illustrates the fundamental misapprehension that the government has about what an anarchist is. And what we're up to is the phrase the aggressive use of shields.

[James Stone]

Yeah, I heard that was what I was going to clip out as.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Well, because as you say, we're not food and bombs. Right. It's food, not bombs. We're feeding each other, we're protecting kindergartens where, you know, we're providing security for meetings. We're mostly frankly feeding each other.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Not always very well. Right, Yeah.

[Margaret]

A little over emphasis on badly cooked eggplant.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Too many human beings possibly, but you know, but we're doing our best out here. And maybe. I actually think that the idea that anarchists are people who engage in the aggressive use of shields is actually, in some respects, really precise.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If these people all walk, it would be a great album title for someone. There has been a lot of reaction to several federal cases in the last 12 months. Right. Maybe 16, 18. God knows how long we've been to this. But this is not that. This is not Prairie Land. As we spoke about before, more than half the 18 USC cases in Minnesota have already been dropped. Can you maybe help situate this in a place that helps people who are struggling with the sky is falling feeling right now?

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Well, I think one really nice thing is the arraignments are, I believe, still

[James Stone]

ongoing, as we are speaking of the

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

people who were raided and arrested this morning. And last I heard, all five whose

[Margaret]

cases had been called were ordered released

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

with conditions of not talking to each

[James Stone]

other, with one exception for people who are roommates.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

But that's interesting and probably a whole other conversation, but that's a big deal that people were facing conspiracy charges, which are very serious federal charges, and were released today at their arraignments. I think it shows. It's an indication of where the courts are at. And also just these cases are taking place in this. In these cities where the whole world watched the federal government do absolute terror and people do beautiful, human loving each

[Margaret]

other in all the ways that they

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

could to try and keep people alive

[Margaret]

while federal agents killed people.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

So it's just the context that it

[Margaret]

is in, it's super different than rural

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Texas, you know, and even the facts

[James Stone]

that we are dealing with in this

[Margaret]

are just less hard.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

You know, there's not allegations that someone

[Margaret]

shot a cop, which is a harder

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

narrative to overcome in public. The court of public opinion and the allegations generally also seem even less serious than the recent indictment that came out in Michigan for the Palestine protesters. So I just think that's an interesting grounding thing. And on the other hand, we did

[Margaret]

recently see that with the Spokane three

[James Stone]

people convicted of conspiracy, which was.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

That's the second one after Prairieland.

[Margaret]

So while a lot of these cases

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

around the country have been dropped, not

[Margaret]

all of them have, but it's hard

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

to imagine this being super successful given where it's taking place.

[Margaret]

And I think that when we look at Minneapolis and we're like, okay, Minneapolis was the. Or the Twin cities.

[James Stone]

I'm sorry.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

St. Paul.

[Margaret]

I'm so sorry. I keep accidentally doing that. St. Paul, you're also wonderful and people have done so much work and they have been this, like, guiding light for a huge chunk of people living in the United States of America in this past year. Right. Like, looking how people have come together to defend their neighbors and themselves. And like, I think that it's important that we say that unity has to continue. And so it's like, the reason that I am optimistic is because of the actions that I saw in, in Minneapolis. Sorry, I didn't go to St. Paul, but, you know, the actions I saw in Minnesota. But that has to continue, like during court support during, you know, so it's not like just a, oh, we've got this. Right. But instead by continuing to say we, we are looking, this does matter to us. This matters to everybody.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

I'm hoping that that kind of continues to influence things.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

And I think we saw that today, the arraignments. The courtroom was packed, it was overflowing. So people were outside chanting. And that's when tear gas was deployed. And there was unprecedented. I mean, it just was unprecedented here at the federal courthouse to see that

[Robert Evans]

kind of force used.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

But there's tons of people outside. You know, this happened this morning and

[Margaret]

the community is not having it. So, yeah, even though they're car kicking

[James Stone]

anarchists, cars are living in fear.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

We need to remember to that. No action is over until the last person accused is home and free. Yeah, we have to keep doing court support. We have to do prisoner support. I am so relieved, I guess, to know that Minneapolis and St. Paul have such well developed legal infrastructure, including not only lawyers who have, you know, decades of experience fighting against the politically motivated abuse of state power against people on the basis of their First Amendment protected beliefs, but also legal workers and jail support. And people who have really learned over the course of not just this last winter, but through the course of many decades of movement struggles, how to deal with this kind of stuff. And I know that these people particular, this particular group is in really good hands. It's not that this isn't a terrible situation, and it's not that it isn't going to be potentially devastating for the individuals who've been indicted, but the kind of solidarity that we have seen and that we saw this morning at the courthouse is really heartening to me.

[James Stone]

Yeah, I guess I'll just say, like, I had the misfortune of having to listen to Gregory Bevino's interviews at the Re Migration Conference in Portugal as part of my job. And one of the things he said was that they surrendered to Minneapolis and St. Paul.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stone]

And they felt like they were defeated there. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening right after they got their funding bill passed. Right. But very clearly the people of the Twin Cities stood up to ICE and CBP and WON and ICE and CBP know that they are very upset about it, but that means you can do it again. And like this takes a different form when it comes in the form of court support. Right. It's different kind of struggle, but the way we confront it is the same, which is to say together. We saw people holding each other so close in the Twin Cities, and it was really beautiful amidst horrible, horrible shit. And I think that people can continue to do that and continue to, like, be this light the rest of the

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

country to accept you as a wise mentor. Mo has said many times before, the punishment is the process. For anyone going through this, I hope you don't feel that however hard this is, is being undermined.

[Robert Evans]

It's incredibly difficult to go through this process.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

But staying grounded in the reality of where you are, the cases that have been dropped and the fact that there is not yet a conviction to minimize fear is a way of taking back power from the state, which they get

[Margaret]

to wield over us by doing things

[Robert Evans]

like this to freak us out and

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

make us really scared.

[Robert Evans]

And we don't know if this will

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

hold up in court yet. So let's keep our feet on the ground and hold each other close and try not to let them get us down more than more than they have to.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Margaret]

It's a single company that sells a

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Evans]

What do you believe? What do you want, and what would

[Jacob Goldstein]

you risk to get it? Find out Snap Judgment new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

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required intro rate first 3 months only,

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra fee full [e-mail] with my mom and dad living in Orange county, when we bring my five and seven year old to visit, we are sometimes in for a two hour drive that could feel like 10.

[Vaquero2XL]

Oh, as an avid camper, I know all about this.

[Robert Evans]

We'll pack up the RV and know

[Vaquero2XL]

this is either going to be the

[James Stone]

trip of a lifetime or a complete disaster.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Which is why we load up the iPads with Lingokids before we even pull out of the driveway.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

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[Vaquero2XL]

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[Robert Evans]

Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Robert Evans. Now a few days ago I had the experience of listening to somebody that I've known for a while and known as a fairly mainstream liberal, someone who does not in general support the personal ownership of firearms. Certainly not weapons like AR15s react to the recent race riots, Bagrams, you know, whatever term I guess is most appropriate in Belfast, where racist mobs ran through the streets attacking people in their homes, pulling them out of their homes, lighting their homes on fire, targeting these people because they were not white. And this person who I've known for a while reacted to watching footage of this and reading headlines and their general shock and horror by saying something along the lines of, I guess if this kind of stuff is on the table, I understand why people need AR15s now. Nothing had actually changed about the way the world works to alter this person's opinion of guns or of reality. They were simply forced to confront an aspect of reality that had previously been obscured to them because in earlier days they had assumed that in any civilized nation and they considered Northern Ireland to be part of a civilized nation, police would stop this kind of behavior. And if you feel like the rule of law is something you can trust on pretty immutably, then someone else saying, no, I would rather have a gun of my own than trust a cop might sound like a maniac. Today's episode is not about guns or gun rights. It is in the most direct sense about data centers and the current people's war on building more of them. I see the current vast groundswell of support for this kind of activism and this fight in general as the most hopeful change in domestic politics in quite some time. And I think this movement could become a weapon that drives a stake into the hearts of the silicon oligarchy that currently rule quite a lot of our world. The problem is, any mass movement like this, especially one built on what is essentially also like the biggest name in the news right now, AI is going to involve a lot of misinformation and even disinformation. People don't just hate data centers for good reasons, they hate them for bad ones too. Or at least it would probably be more accurate for me to say a lot of people hate them for reasons that don't reflect something data centers actually do or make worse. The broader reason that I've seen some people have issues with this fight, with this mass movement against the construction of new data centers is that data centers are utterly necessary modern infrastructure and in incredibly crucial to the maintenance of what we would consider basic daily life. This is something that's true even without AI, and this is something that was true prior to the introduction of what Silicon Valley likes to call AI into all of our lives. Data centers are what make the age of cloud computing possible. And Starting in the 2010s we decided that the cloud was where everything compute wise was increasingly going to happen in the future. There were pragmatic reasons for this. Having Word save your document to a cloud file that makes it instantly accessible from any machine with Internet access should you desire. That's a big leap forward in capability, at least in one direction. Likewise, having like a watch on your body that can not just take down your biometric data during a workout, but can store it and analyze it over long periods of time that offers people real utility. There's a reason products like this are very popular. You can't however, have the entire world mapped out and accessible for turn by turn navigation without needing a shitload of data centers somewhere and in fact in quite a few somewheres to make that possible. Now of course there are also privacy trade offs for all of these kinds of products. That's been the entire logic of the Internet of Things era. You hand over your data and we deliver. Utility privacy advocates have had issues with this from the jump, but most people didn't because the benefits were obvious and most people don't like to read or think very hard if we can avoid it. For almost 20 years, consumers largely ignored the rollout of data centers around the world, even sometimes into our backyards, because big tech had reasonably good PR and most people were pretty happy with their gizmos. All in all, you get a hint of how uncontroversial this used to be In a 2022 article I found published on Microsoft's Source EMEA website, written by Bill Briggs, the title was critical to our modern How Data Centers Power Everyday Necessities now, there was a little bit about AI in there, but this is 2022 and the hype cycle hadn't nearly hit its peak at that point. The article spent much more time emphasizing how integral data centers are in things that people like. Quote Simply put, they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing. And across Europe, Microsoft data centers are operating around the clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services, from the life saving work of doctors and first responders to essential services like groceries and online banking. At the same time, data centers also empower everyday necessities like food deliveries, remote work, and video calls to family. The article goes on to include a quote from Raheel Nasir, an associate research director at a market research firm, who called data centers the invisible infrastructure, which I find interesting because absolutely no one would call it that today, right? People only saw them as invisible back then because there hadn't been much public discussion about these things, and there weren't nearly as many of them. To be fair, in 2022, the Del Oro Group estimated global data center CAPEX to have been about $241 billion. McKinsey is currently predicting global spending on data centers will reach $7 trillion by 2030. The number of data center projects in development or under contract exploded pretty much right after Microsoft put out the article I quoted from earlier, and this put millions of people face to face with the reality of data center construction projects. Many of them revolted. Q1 of 2026 saw a record 75 data center projects blocked or delayed nationwide, which made it, in NBC's words, the most blocked and delayed quarter for data center projects on record. Researchers at Data World Watch told journalists they did not consider this a cyclical spike, calling it instead a structural shift caused as Quote, communities internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states. Now, the rapid and obviously organic nature of this growth has alarmed certain Democratic and Republican politicians, largely the ones who have taken money from the tech industry. Some of these folks have panicked and insisted that Chinese government propaganda is behind the growth in opposition to data centers. The New York Times published a piece by sociologist Tracy McMillan Cottam, who argued that Democrats need to make the issue of data centers their issue because she believes that these protests could have a significant impact on the midterms. And in 2028, in her column, she states that she wasn't initially sold on the value of data center protests, but time around activists convinced her that she'd been wrong, in part because this was not an issue that inherently drew urban or suburban or rural voters together. But all of them, like it didn't inherently pull at Republican or Democratic voters. And thus it was a way to bring people together and get them working together in common cause, which is a really beneficial thing to do if you're trying to pull people closer into like a broader political alignment with you. And I would add to that point, just based on my own research and what I've seen, I feel like the fight against data centers is something that has what I like to call a high likelihood of fundamentalism in it, or hlf. And an HLF issue is a, is a kind of political fight that if you get drawn into it, you're really likely to become some kind of fundamentalist on the matter. And abortion would be a good example of this sort of issue. Right. That's why Back in the 1970s, the Republican Party adopted abortion as a central concern. Because if you get someone to become an anti abortion activist, they'll vote just based on that. Right. And if one party is against abortion and one party's for it, they'll never consider the party that is even open minded to it being legal in some limited sense. Right. They become an absolutist on the matter. These are great issues to pull people into, like a voting block with, because if you can get them to associate that issue with your party, you can kind of immunize that chunk of your voter base from economic concerns or other points of attack, at least in theory. Now, different issues tend to create fundamentalists for different reasons. People who are organizing against data centers aren't doing it usually because they think the idea of a data center is wrong. But many of them do believe that AI is evil and immoral, and AI is the reason that so many new data centers are going up. Many more people oppose new data centers for the specific reason they see them as a threat to their own personal environment and to their own power bills and to the cleanliness of their own water and air. It may seem as if this is the kind of support that would tend to breed shallow activists. If you just don't want a data center in your hometown, that doesn't mean you give a fuck about one going up in Mississippi or wherever you don't live. After all, none of these people presumably cared about the data centers that had been going up five years ago, 10 years ago, before the issue became salient to them. But as Tressie Cottam wrote, the realities of doing this kind of organism on the ground have a tendency to transcend the reasons individuals start getting into the fight Quote I have been watching this new groundswell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions, and civic trainings. Here in North Carolina, the resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements, and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less consider joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they're committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them, and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering, a taste of political power. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads. And we're back. I think it's really important to emphasize something that Cottam said at the end of that last quote, which is that part of why the anti data center movement is potent and why it tends to draw people in much deeper than maybe the initial shallowness of why they got in would suggest is that it offers them a sense of political power and of agency. In an age in which people are being trained more and more to feel as if they have no agency, you can't stop this, you can't fight this. Or alternatively, this guy will do the fighting for you, right? People are getting it from all sides, wherever they actually land in the political aisle. And that's, quite frankly, not very much fun. It's really fun to feel like you're a part of a movement like this that's kicking ass and taking names. Now, I don't share the long term goals that led Cottam to write that article. At least not all of them. I get the sense that she wants to give the Democratic Party a powerful new long term voting bloc. I don't care so much about that now. I do of course want to see the Republican Party beaten electorally and more Democratic votes is the only current way to do that. But the Democratic Party is not morally or logistically capable of doing anything but betraying these people in the long run. I really do believe that the reason why is the reason why the party has been incredibly slow to embrace these activists in any cohesive fashion. This movement is death for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley has a lot of fucking money. And when I say death, don't think I'm exaggerating. Data Center Watch has calculated that the total value of data centers blocked in early 2026. This is just the first three months of this year was around $130 billion, compared to a total of $156 billion in projects blocked in all of 2025. Now, a huge month last year for data construction expenses in the US was last July, which was actually a historic month, and that represented about $14 billion in expenses. So the value of the projects that have been stopped are significant, even in tech industry terms. More to the point, nearly all the money that underlies and underwrites these corporations and their owners is fake. Elon Musk could not produce a trillion dollars of real liquid US dollars if he wanted to, because that simply is not how assets work. Most of his wealth is in stock valuation, and those stocks are worth what they're worth because of consumer sentiment as much as anything objectively real. The entire AI bubble is being underwritten by the belief that this will be worth it. There are trillions in value here, and we just need to spend a few trillion more to unlock them. None of that value can be unlocked without data centers, and if you throw a wrench in their plans to build more, you can hobble the whole effort. Any delay or serious setback creates the risk of a panic, and panic is their greatest enemy. All it takes is one sufficiently disastrous crash to kill many of these big overvalued companies. SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta can't all survive a market collapse, just as they won't. Sadly, all die. Nor can their billionaire bosses. All remain masters of the universe. If they fall off their perch in a ray that shatters the global economy, we won't even have to bring all of these guys to court. Some of them will get done in by their former friends overseas. There's a reason why some VC types have already started trying to describe anti data center activism as terroristic. They are in fact, terrified of it. This segment from an Ars Technica article by Ashley Bellinger should give you an idea of what I'm discussing. Quote the researchers suggested that the back half of 2025 marked a turning point as data center opposition emerged as a national level narrative that showed the AI industry can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes. It is now reshaping elections, regulation and site viability nationwide, Data Center Watch reported last year. Where before officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they're encountering backlash before any deal is in the books, Data Center Watch found. In some cases, researchers reported, opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance. Now folks, when you hit this level of cultural inflection with a movement, you are in an extremely powerful but also very dangerous position. There's a reason that Steve Bannon's also made waves recently by encouraging his side to start reaching out to the anti data center people. He knows this energy can be co opted, or at least he believes it can. For my part, I want to see this energy harnessed. I want to see it burn brightly like the working flame of an oxyacetylene torch, because I want to see it used to cut directly into the belly of the industry that I hate. The best way for us to do this right now is to create as many moments as possible where projects to construct new data centers clash with protesters. Each of these conflicts has the potential to spark a panic in the market, and every piece of bad press contributes to the overall weight of public opinion and expectation against AI and against big tech. We never know which piece will be the one that breaks this current incarnation of the industry. The name of the game for us then is to create as many moments as we can that endanger the future of this market and the industry behind it. And we can do that entirely legally by forcing them to confront reality. None of these data center projects are sold to towns and cities based on real, accurate information about how they will impact the environment and the local community. One good example of this recently from the United States is a story earlier this year about a data center project in Box Elder County, Utah. The proposed buildings together would have been three times the size of Manhattan and stretched across multiple sites. The project was championed by celebrity billionaire Kevin o' Leary who was also the VC behind it, per a separate article in Ars Technica. Residents top concern was the Stratos data center project draining local waters, and they were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a $15 fee to register Comets to block the transfer of 1,900 acre feet of water from a ranch to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and potential risks to air quality, local wildlife and land. Venture capitalist Kevin o', Leary, chair of o' Leary Digital and shark tank investor, is behind the construction of the project. He told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working with state officials to be more transparent about the project. From the beginning, we really screwed it up, o' Leary said. While confirming he was not expecting this intense kind of blowback from the public. He claimed that he and state officials anticipated that people would be excited about the major local investment and made huge mistakes by not involving the public more in discussions. Based on that assumption, we pissed off a lot of people and that's not the way I do business, o' Leary said. That's not now, given that he undeniably did business this way, I disagree, but that's beside the point. The resistance was successful. Now, the project wasn't killed entirely, but it has been massively scaled back and may yet die on the vine. The fact that resistance to this huge project, and many like it, has caused so much damage to the industry has prompted a scale response. In late May and early June of 2026, I noticed a drip and then a flood of new articles and viral content critical of the anti data center protests. One good example of this would be a June 10th article on the website Bar Chart by Nash Riggins. It was titled Data Centers get a bad rap for using too much Water and Energy. It turns out Almonds suck up even more. Now in this incredibly snotty little shit of an article, Nash is reporting on the fact that a bunch of pro AI influencers had, with shocking coordination, started posting online responding to complaints about data center water usage by pointing out how wasteful it really is to grow almonds. You know the almond industry uses even more water than AI does. And you know, if you want a good response to that, just say, sure, put them out of business. Fuck em. Another popular article in this genre was a blog post by Andy Masley. He critiqued the argument that AI was particularly wasteful by making arguments like this, per an interview with him on azfamily.com, almost all of that 1.7 trillion gallons of water per year is specifically water that is withdrawn and then returned to the source, Masley told me, referring to a widely cited estimate from Karen Howe's Empire of AI. The book claimed surging AI demand could use up to 1.7 trillion gallons of fresh water globally by 2027, or half the water annually withdrawn in the UK. Masley says the word use in that sentence is misleading. Data centers do evaporate most of the water they use on site for cooling, but on site use represents only about 20% of their total water footprint. The other 80% comes from power plants that heat water to spin turbines. That water is then returned, mostly unchanged, to its source. Masley's viral post got him interviewed by the New York Times and earned a correction from the author of the book. But his critiques about specific claims made there shouldn't be seen as having any overall legitimacy to the broader argument about data center water use. For one thing, he acts as if all data centers function the same way, basically, both in terms of how they're powered and in terms of how they do cooling. And thus you can make the kind of assumptions about water use that is making, and you just fucking can't. Now the Environmental and Energy Study Institute has published an expansive analysis of data centers and water consumption. They point out that this is all much more complex than Masley's quote might lead you to believe, and I'm going to read from that article in the context of data centers. Water consumption refers to the amount of water withdrawn from blue or gray sources minus the water discharged by the centers, primarily warm water left over from cooling. The it racks. The consumed water is generally the water that evaporates or is otherwise taken out of immediate human usage. Withdrawal of fresh water from local streams or underground aquifers may lead to aquifer exhaustion, particularly in water stressed areas. Approximately 80% of the water, typically fresh water withdrawn by data centers evaporates with the remaining water discharged into municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume of wastewater from data centers may overwhelm existing local facilities, which were not designed to handle such a high volume. And again, one of the things that Masley tends to ignore is that even when you're putting this water back into the system, quote unquote, that doesn't mean it's going back into the aquifers that it was pulled out of. It doesn't mean that it's going back into the same way, which can still cause massive issues. Now, how water efficient a data center is is going to vary depending on the climate of its location, but because these tend to require a lot of space, many are built in places where land is cheap. Those places are often hot and dry, like Utah and Wyoming. Data centers in hotter climates use more water Data centers specifically built for the AI industry also have higher chip density, which requires more cooling, which uses more water. As time goes on, these increased demands lead to more and more being demanded of the local areas that agree to host data centers. Since data centers don't lend themselves to any other industries or create very many jobs, this often leaves local communities dependent upon them, which means they have no choice but to say yes to ever harsher environmental demands. I'm not creating a hypothetical here. This has happened over and over again, and I'm going to read again from that article by eesi.org Northern Virginia is considered the world capital for data centers, with over 300 operational data centers spread across four counties. Collectively, all data centers in Northern Virginia consumed close to 2 billion gallons of water in 2023, a 63% increase from 2019. Luton county, with approximately 200 operational data centers, used about 900 million gallons of water in 2023. This has led Luton Water, the county's Fresh Water Authority, to rely heavily on potable water for data centers rather than reclaimed water. Now, activists looking for cautionary tales about what data center addiction could do to an area should look no further than Northern Virginia. The region started saying yes to such development decades ago, when the industry was very much different. Back then, AOL was based there, and their data center was part of an overall campus that employed more than 5,000 people, per an article by the Lincoln Institute. The campus has since been demolished, and three large data center facilities are being built on the site. There's a big fence around it for security purposes, so it's totally isolated from the community now, and it's only going to employ about 100 to 150 people on the same piece of land. That's the difference. That's a quote from a local resident, and we'll hear from some other local residents. But first, here's ads. And we're back. Now, I've mostly discussed the fight against data centers thus far as an American thing, and it isn't. I think it is particularly relevant to our upcoming elections in a way that deserves particular attention. But this is a global fight, and it is a global fight not just because people hate AI, but because data centers and the AI they enable have come to symbolize the tech elite who have bought our world and who are in the process of burning it to the ground. Hatred of these people should know no geographical boundary, and this presents the possibility of international outreach as well as collaboration and strategizing. As an example, I'll discuss a small community in Romania, Mishli, which is located in one of the poorest sections of the country. In 2020, they said hello to a team from Cluster Power who wanted to construct a data center in the area. The mayor gave a welcoming speech that should sound familiar to many of you. We are incredibly proud to have an investor on board and to see people talking about the data center in Mishli. The company contributes to the local economy by paying taxes here and has chosen this area as its headquarters. So that all sounds great, but I found an article for Algorithm Watch that notes no documentation was provided to verify the tax revenue actually generated for the commune. By June of 2024, only 10 jobs had been created, compared to at least 300 that had been promised. Now you can find stories that are almost identical to this all over the United States, but also elsewhere in Europe, like the Netherlands and Germany, and in many other places besides. Everywhere these companies do business, they leave behind broken promises and lies, like a trail of gasoline reeking behind them as they go. Why shouldn't we drop a match and watch the fire catch them? There are dangers to embracing a movement based around opposing the construction of infrastructure that is necessary for a lot of modern life. But I might argue those dangers look a lot less scary if we recognize that necessary for modern current life and necessary for life itself aren't necessarily the same thing. In much the same way as I would give up my ability to buy pistachios and almonds year round to avoid California not having water, I'm willing to reconsider what miracles of daily life are really worth the cost. If it turns out the cost is that high and the scariest thing in the world to the people who currently run it is, perhaps one day soon everyone will start to feel this way.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem?

[Robert Evans]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Margaret]

at no additional charge.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other.

[Robert Evans]

Check out odoo@o d o o.com that's

[Jacob Goldstein]

o d o o dot com. I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment,

[Robert Evans]

the award winning storytelling podcast from kqed.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Every week Snap deals a new card. Like the girl whose sister was a monkey, the man who lived in the woods for 30 years. Or the woman who snuck her lover out of prison in a dog crate. Pick a card, any card. Snap Judgment from kqed. New episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, world stop. With Mint. You can get premium wireless for just 15amonth. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying.

[Jacob Goldstein]

No judgments.

[Robert Evans]

But that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required. Intro rate first 3 months only, then

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

[James Stone]

See full [e-mail] mom, can I have Lingokids?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Dad?

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Lingokids, please. When did we become the Lingokids house? No idea.

[Robert Evans]

Last week it was dinosaurs.

[James Stone]

This week it's Lingokids. Why Lingokids? Because it's the best thing ever. You can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes.

[Margaret]

With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows, LingoKids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

So no dinosaurs and dinosaurs.

[Robert Evans]

Lingokids.

[James Stone]

Everything kids love.

[Robert Evans]

Download it for free.

[James Stone]

There you go. The passion Fucking fixed it.

[Robert Evans]

That's what I've always been. Well, I've never said that.

[James Stone]

There's one thing that SD cards know. It's passion.

[Robert Evans]

Passion is negotiable. Deadlines are not welcome to. Go ahead, Garrett.

[Margaret]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week of June 10 to June 17. Some small news items to start. Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire.

[James Stone]

Oh, good.

[Margaret]

At least on paper.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What other. There's no other kind of trillionaire. It's all on paper. There's no other kind of billionaire.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

This is following SpaceX going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. $866 billion of Musk's wealth is now in SpaceX stock. And SpaceX itself is currently valued at over 2 trillion on the market. Not good.

[James Stone]

Yeah, great.

[Margaret]

DHS has announced it will not comply with Virginia's new law prohibiting federal officers from wearing masks. And on June 11, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Virginia, quote, challenging their unconstitutional attempts to regulate federal law enforcement. The French government suspects the Israeli, quote unquote elite influence cyber and technology firm Black Core of interfering in elections in France, Scotland and the New York City mayoral race by orchestrating online smear and disinformation campaigns against left wing pro Palestine politicians.

[James Stone]

They didn't fucking work in New York, did they?

[Robert Evans]

And I wanted to include this because it literally just broke as we are recording. But Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland put out a letter today that states, quote, we have been receiving troubling reports that you and this is too Cash Patel, that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful bonus payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct. And I'm going to quote here from an article on Ms. Now by Kendallanian quote committee Democrats have information that Patel has issued more than $1 million in awards. The letter says. The letter says that the money went to special agents serving on his director's advisory team, which Raskins later describes as a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful and partisan orders. There's very little else known other than that allegedly some of these payments were made so rapidly that they bounced back like he was sending money. That's what they are alleging. I'm going to assume Cash is going to deny this and so will the FBI. I don't think they've even had time to make a response yet. The FBI has not responded for comment by Ms. Now at least according to their article. This just dropped. So that's fun for us all to know.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool.

[Robert Evans]

So I just felt like that was

[Jacob Goldstein]

worth including

[Robert Evans]

great least corrupt administration in history.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[James Stone]

Let's talk about a bunch of other stuff that isn't also great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

Donald Trump issued a broad executive order on Friday which rescinded previous orders by the Carter and Nixon administrations limiting off road vehicle access to public lands. Although it doesn't immediately change the rules, this has the potential to do massive and irreparable damage to public lands, potentially taking away the the pillars really on which they've built regulation and motor vehicle use of public land studio public land thing. Now friend of the show Mike Lee is back again trying to up Your public lands. Again, Mike Lee, Utah Senator, if you're not familiar. So there was a bipartisan Wildfire prevention act. This 2025 wildfire prevention act that was going along smoothly in its little Senate journey until Mike Lee decided to put in a spoiler that would rescind the roadless rule. We've spoken about the 2001 roadless rule before, so I'm not going to go into very great detail. I've spoken about Lee ad nauseam. Lee used his position of chair of this committee to insert this right. And in doing so, not only is Lee trying for a third time since 2025 to sell off public lands, he's also probably ruining the future of the Wildfire Prevention Act. The funding that this will have, the effect that this will have, it's now unlikely to pass because Mike Lee has spoiled it with his public land sell off. Shit. Again, people might recall Lee tried to sell our public lands with parts of the better. The Better Business Bureau. No, the Big Beautiful Bill. The other bbb. And again, when he attempted to justify motor vehicle use in wilderness. Garrison and I made an episode about that where he was talking about how you need roads in wilderness areas to allow border patrol to do border patrol stuff. The Forest Service had previously talked about rescinding the roadless rule through, like, administrative rule change. That seems to have been an extremely unpopular choice, but that process is still ongoing. But what Lee's trying to do here is lock it into legislation as opposed to something that another administration could change back. Finally, guess it's all kind of public lands and related stuff for me. This week, Fish and Wildlife Service agents served a warrant on a property in New Mexico after two collared Mexican gray wolves, which are covered by the Endangered Species act, were killed. According to an affidavit file in New Mexico, both wolves were killed after being caught in leg hole traps. One was left to die, the other was shot and then beaten in the head. I read this warrant today. It's kind of interesting. I saw some like, very, very brief reporting on it, and Molly helped me find the warrant. The people on who the warrant was served on were horse breakers, but I think they worked on a family cattle ranch. It seems that the Fish and Wildlife Service agents set up cameras after the collars of the wolves told them that the wolves had died. And then they realized that they had remained in one area. It suggested that they had remained in one area for some time, then died. That is, they'd been trapped. Trapped. They were able to set up cameras and film these guys recovering the traps, according to the affidavit. And so they are now going to begin their prosecution, I guess. One more from me. 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on criminal conspiracy charges for events and protests around the Whipple Federal Building and Fort Snelling. Yeah, we covered this in great detail on a show that broadcast on Wednesday, 17 June. So if you'd like to know more about that, we got some comment from a couple of lawyers and Margaret and I were present at one of the events that this indictment centers on. So we gave some more insight there

[Margaret]

for some election news. We still don't have ranked choice vote tallies in Maine for the governor's race there. I will keep an eye on that. But in Washington, D.C. democratic socialist Janice Lewis George won the Democratic primary in the Washington, D.C. mayoral race with 52.8% of the vote. And a DSA cadre member named Aparna Raj is in the lead for the Ward 1 City Council seat with about 47% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Both candidates are now expected to face substantial opposition in the upcoming general election. So it looks like big wins for the DDSA in Washington, D.C. last Tuesday. Robert California, Yes.

[James Stone]

What's going on with it, Robert? Why is it the way it is?

[Robert Evans]

In short, James the sun so California US House District 14 is currently undergoing a special nonpartisan primary because Eric Swalwell, friend of the pod in the, you know, joking sense, not literal sense because we don't like him.

[Margaret]

Definitely, definitely an enemy of the enemy

[Robert Evans]

of the pod, disgraced enemy of the pod, no longer can do his job.

[James Stone]

Our avowed nemesis.

[Robert Evans]

Now the fun thing about that is that Eric Swalwell is genocide denier and he is currently the number one person. And you know, this is just like the first round of voting is Aisha Wahab, who's at about 42.6% of the vote based on the most recent numbers I have. Melissa Hernandez is number two at about 16.8% of the vote. So Aisha's got a sizable lead here and her politics are significantly better in some important ways than Eric's wawa's, including the fact that she is not a genocide denier. So that's kind of bracing. That's nice to see. Anyway, that's really all I've got to say.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So in much bleaker news, on Sunday, June 14, police in Senatobia, Mississippi shot and killed a one year old child named Cohen Wiley as they opened fire on a car in the parking lot of a Walmart. An adult who was in the car, who is a friend of the child's mother, is described as, quote, critically injured after also being shot. I think it's important to hear what happened first directly from Valencia Wylie, the mother of Conan Wylie.

[James Stone]

It was me, my son and another

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

friend of mine was at Walmart.

[Robert Evans]

As we was leaving out the Walmart,

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

they tried to stop her, but I

[James Stone]

kept walking because it had nothing to do with me.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

By the time me and my baby got in the car, she came. And then they.

[James Stone]

When we was backing up, they was

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

running out the cone.

[Robert Evans]

I raised my baby up because they.

[James Stone]

They would drive their gun.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

She has no tent.

[Robert Evans]

I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car. So she was backing up, and she

[James Stone]

hit a car as I was opening the door.

[Robert Evans]

So the door flew back in.

[James Stone]

By the time I sat my baby down, it was like three to four shots.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

One of the shots hit him in his rib cage, and the other shots

[James Stone]

hit her in her arm and her thigh.

[Robert Evans]

And we left and went to Senatopia

[James Stone]

Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

[Robert Evans]

My God.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

That is fucking heartbreaking.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's just a nightmare. It's horrible.

[James Stone]

Yeah. It looks like Benjamin Crumps representing her, which is like. That guy's a powerhouse.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like any time you're trying to train people how to use firearms responsibly, one thing you have to drive home repeatedly is that like. Like, bullets don't stop if you miss, and they don't necessarily stop just because you've hit the target.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And so you always need to be not just aware of, but paranoid about what's around you and around where you're shooting, if you're going to shoot. And police are trained to do the opposite of that. You know, they're trained that their lives mean more than the lives of infants. That's what this is.

[James Stone]

Yeah. God.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That video, by the way, per Wreg. So, as was mentioned in the video, the cops were nominally responding to a claim of shoplifting. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations, per the Mississippi Free Press, claims that the car was driving towards the officers. This is eerily similar to claims made by federal agents after the murder of Ray Goode. Police have yet to release body cam footage. The footage we do have, it's not very good. Cell phone camera. It doesn't show the shooting itself, but shows the car driving away from officers. We also had some of the witnesses basically describe the car, like, driving away from the officers, the officer shooting.

[Margaret]

But you're right, this is definitely following the trend that we've seen a lot with federal law enforcement, but not just them.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is just local.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Of this idea of like vehicle weaponization and that they have the ability to respond to quote, unquote, vehicle weaponization with lethal force, which is something we've seen claim a number of lives just this year.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And this is combining. And we'll talk about this a bit more in a second, but this is combining with sort of the shoplifting panic to create this nightmare of a situation.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Police in Senatopia have a history of police violence. Here's from WRG again, quote, last year at the same Walmart, the department came under fire after a woman had a Taser pulled on her and was tackled to the ground after the department claimed she illegally parked in a handicapped spot lot. The woman claimed she had just dropped her grandmother off at the store. In 2023, the case of a 10 year old boy made national news after he was detained for urinating in public in an attorney's office private parking lot. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is Mississippi. This is a place where things like this have happened before. The fact that there was a woman like again last year who was tackled like in this same parking lot by the police says a lot.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And continuing in the trend of police violence.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

The police tear gas protesters on Tuesday, like in the parking lot. In like the same parking lot where protests were going on. All of this comes in the sort of context of the deployment of a nationwide panic about shoplifting deployed by the right as part of their strategy to bolster support from the police and roll back the gains of the 2020 George Floyd uprising, which and everything about police killings has just continued to get worse since the Trump administration took power. We've had it now from federal agents, we've had it from the police in general. And as Garrett was talking about earlier.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is kind of this intersection of this panic about shoplifting combining with this panic about sort of vehicle weaponization and turning into the cops murdering a 1 year old. I think it's also worth noting in the context of this allegedly being about shoplifting, that nobody involved, like no one who was in the car, which is the mother of the baby and also the woman driving the car who the police had initially confronted. In the story we heard earlier, neither of them have been arrested. So.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

This is one of the worst stories of a police shooting I've ever encountered. And yeah, protests presumably are going to continue tonight. This is again being recorded on Wednesday, June 17. They may have escalated by the time you're hearing this. Yeah.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

The cops in LA also killed a fucking. A golden St. Bernard doodle.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man.

[James Stone]

This week.

[Robert Evans]

Not to equivocate these fucking cases. I guess this is just in the news. Yes.

[James Stone]

Absolutely not. No, no. This is just another incident of police shooting when they absolutely had no need to. Right. In this case, the lady had been watching the Knicks game. Somebody called to report screaming, which resulted in the cops coming and killing this person's dog. It's nowhere near the same as someone killing someone's child. I'm not suggesting that. It's just yet another example that cops can just shoot first and ask questions later in this country. Yeah. Six years after George Floyd was murdered.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I think to close one of the things I always remember about the protest is every single city had their own list of names.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Like, we, like, we had our own in Chicago and. Yeah. I mean, I'm immediately sort of like just thinking about the killing of Tamara Rice and.

[Vaquero2XL]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

How we just continue to live in this country where the cops just murder black people constantly.

[James Stone]

And

[Robert Evans]

the only thing that's changed since then is the police have more money.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And they're working to be able to murder other groups of people more often, too. You know, that's true. The feds are expanding out into shooting

[Vaquero2XL]

white people in cold blood.

[Robert Evans]

Eventually the racism will be less noticeable.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

If the violence just becomes more all encompassing.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's the promise of the future.

[James Stone]

It won't.

[Robert Evans]

It'll still be as noticeable, guys.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

They're not going to come through on that promise either.

[James Stone]

Yeah. I was going to say, like this country, like after. After Elijah McClain. I feel like anyone who could watch that and be like, yeah, shit's going fine. We just. At some point, cops just decide we're never going to change.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it's. I'm going to guess the number of people who stumble onto our shows and don't already think like, yeah, the cops kill a lot of people they don't need to be killing. That's pretty low. So I feel like we.

[James Stone]

Preaching to the choir. We don't done. We.

[Robert Evans]

We've. We've done what we need to here. Like.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Not. Not that it's not important.

[James Stone]

Nope. Just sad.

[Margaret]

We'll go on a break now and come back to talk about Iran and sports.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yep.

[James Stone]

We are back. And we are back to report peace in our time.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. Donald Trump did it. Somehow. Somehow he finally brought an end to a Long, lingering conflict that he started a couple of weeks ago.

[James Stone]

God, yeah. Calling him the peacemaker.

[Robert Evans]

This is like three or four days after, like, a really long bender when, like, I. I'm like, wow, I actually haven't gotten fucked up at all. And it's been like 96 hours. You know, I think I've learned a couple of things about sobriety. I've reached, like, a new level of wisdom that's allowed me to transcend. Like, that's, that's, that's how I would I compare to Donald Trump right now.

[James Stone]

Yep, he is. He announced that, quote, oil will flow on both ends again for the region and the world. So we initially learned about this deal via Truth Social. Right. And I initially wrote this based on what we didn't know. Then this morning, after a lot of people complained that nobody knew the details of the deal, State Department spokesperson read the text of the deal, allowed to report us on a conference call. So this is a memorandum of understanding, right? The MOU is titled, quote, islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran. It'll be signed on Friday, so that'll be the day. If you hear this today, it comes out, that will be that day. It's already been electronically signed, apparently. It's still unclear if it's Trump or Vance. She's got to sign it on behalf of the U.S. i love the idea

[Robert Evans]

that they've got a docusign that's like banging back and forth. Some fucking Daron is like, waiting, like, I refreshed my phone, man. I. Like, I'm still not seeing it. I'm still not seeing it.

[Margaret]

Did you.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, how did you spell my email address when you.

[James Stone]

Yeah, let me check the spam, dude.

[Robert Evans]

Trying to get the Trump administration to spell your name right in an email as any Iranian politician. My God.

[Margaret]

Yeah, quick update here. Turns out Trump signed the memorandum of understanding right after we recorded on Wednesday in Versailles. So it is an MOU of Versailles. Back to James.

[James Stone]

Once they sign it, they're going to do a 60 day intensive negotiation period, which will certainly focus on the nuclear issue and get in a bit. The MoU begins, quote, the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MoU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or military operation against each other and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including a Netherlands. We're going to get on to that, don't worry. Probably the headliner, right is the nuclear stuff. This is point eight, quote, the Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. There's still negotiation on enriched uranium, but CNN had a leaked version of a previous version of this draft and it didn't have the following. So this has been added at a relatively late stage. And it seems that there is a quote, unquote, minimum methodology for degrading their enriched uranium, which is to downblend it under IAEA supervision that seems to have been added very late. So that's kind of their lowest threshold that the US is willing to accept, I guess, which would be not transferring that uranium but down, blending it. The United States has committed to withdraw down its blockade and its force posture within 30 days. Today we saw Iranian tankers across the USA's blockade without any issue. Claims about the Strait of Hormuz on Trump's true social account and those that we see on Iranian state media in the document diverge. Trump has claimed unequivocally that strait is open without tolls. This is not something we see in Pakistani PM Shabbat Sharif's statement or in Iran's Fars News Agency. FAST News Agency seems to say that the straight will be administered by Oman in Iran. And I'll just read from the, from the MoU here. The Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa, the traffic of commercial vessels would immediately start and considering the need for removing the technical military obstacles and de mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to determine the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz. Not entirely clear there, but it does seem to perhaps leave open some kind of Iranian Amman toll agreement.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're definitely going to start charging a service fee. Man, they're going to make a shitload of money off this.

[James Stone]

Yep, let's talk about a shitload of money because that's only, unfortunately some of the shitload of money ye they're gonna make of this. So the document includes $300 billion in reconstruction funds, total sanctions relief.

[Margaret]

Part of the deal.

[James Stone]

Yep. That's why they call him Deal man.

[Margaret]

I mean, this is tough because we have destroyed massive parts of their infrastructure and we should pay for that. But also, dude, you started this war, spent billions of dollars, and now are gonna give them 300 billion more dollars. Them 300? What is wrong with you?

[Robert Evans]

Fucking 10 years ago, he was like, you know, the only thing that stopped Iran from falling off the brink was that Obama's. That deal gave him $150 billion.

[Margaret]

All this circle back to another version of some kind of Iran nuclear agreement.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

All we've gotten is they say they won't, but now.

[Margaret]

But now they get to rebuild all their infrastructure using our money because we used our money to destroy their infrastructure.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, yeah, there's supposed to be like an international monitor battering thing, but, like, fuck, yeah, that's not new. And I think more importantly for, like, America too, strategically, it's like Trump has managed to end the American protectorate of open trade lanes, a thing that has been the core of American power since,

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

like, World War II, and that no

[Robert Evans]

one was even thinking about taking away Iran. And no part of Iran's strategy was to do this. This was not in the. Like, this was a move they made because they were at a tight spot and they had to fucking pivot.

[James Stone]

This was always in there. If shit hits a fan, we will do this. And now we've normalized it.

[Robert Evans]

This has always been an option for them. And they were put in a bad enough position that they had to do that. Right. This was their helm. Steep thing, you know, is like, well, we can strangle global trade, you know.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This wasn't even like a thing in,

[Vaquero2XL]

like, the, like the.

[Margaret]

I mean, I guess it kind of was.

[James Stone]

They have done it previously in, like,

[Robert Evans]

the worst nightmares of, like, Israeli Fezmagoria about Iran getting a nuke. Like, this wasn't even a thing that was like, oh, they could.

[Vaquero2XL]

Iran could do this.

[Robert Evans]

Like, it's. It's astonishing what, what they've. What they've managed to do. I feel like it's a good time and everything's very fine.

[James Stone]

So let's talk about it. 300 billion. Just because I'm interested in the preconditions for fascism. And of course, paying reparations for a war that you started was one of them. First time around in Germany, it does, if you do the math, calculate to a lot less in the reparations that Germany had to pay after World War I.

[Robert Evans]

Of course, yeah.

[James Stone]

The document labels the 300 billion as reconstruction funds, but does not give a source other than, quote, the United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A separate line item details, the United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Republic of Iran upon implementation as mou. So they also get sanctions relief, right?

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

So they are getting all of the funds that the US has had frozen. They're getting sanctions relief. And it seems like it's conceivable with these two sentences that they're trying to include the unfrozen funds, but also highly conceivable that they're not. They don't seem to have restricted ballistic missiles. They don't seem to have mandated anything about changing in the. In the regime of Iran. Human rights, women's rights, rights for minority ethnic groups in Iran. Iran. Since this. Since we first Learned at this MoU, Iran has continued drone strikes against Kurdish groups in southern Kurdistan. Iranian Kurdish groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stone]

And then, like, it's not over yet because. Let's talk about what Israel has to say.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Oh, boy.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Israel seems to be showing no signs of feeling itself to be in any way restrained by this. Many Israeli politicians are publicly broken with the US on this. Israel's National Security Minister, Ben Vere, famous for many terrible things, took to Twitter to announce that he had other plans, saying, quote, trump's agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subject to the United States. We are an independent and sovereign nation. Exclamation mark. Our duty is to the citizens of Israel, to the soldiers of the idf and to the Jewish people, and our historical duty to the persecuted and murdered Jews over thousands of years of exiles to provide security to Jews in the land of Israel. Every time we succumb to international pressure at the expense of Israel's security, we played a blood place with interest. So I don't think Ben Gavir feels bound by this to stop aggression in Lebanon, which will make the implementation of the whole thing very difficult. We've seen Trump really break with Bibi in a. In a way that, like, we. We'd heard before, but there have now been several more reports of Trump being very annoyed at Netanyahu continuing to effectively sabotage these negotiations. Right. So, yeah, great times. Very successful war, Huge dub.

[Margaret]

Speaking of dubs, let's talk about sports.

[James Stone]

Oh, yeah.

[Margaret]

This past weekend, there were three sporting events that I think each reflect a unique facet of current American politics. This is the NBA Finals, the World cup, and of course, the Formula One Grand Prix in Barcelona. No, this is, of course, the UFC fight in the White House.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Before we talk about the ufc, which we. We will, because there's a lot, a lot to do there. On Saturday night, the New York Knickerbockers overcame the curse of James Dolan and beat the San Antonio spurs five games to one, becoming NBA champions for the first time in 53 years. After the Knicks drought ending victory, the city lit up in celebration, literally, in the case of a school bus in Times Square.

[James Stone]

More than one.

[Margaret]

But thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers celebrated in a largely peaceful yet energized fashion all throughout the streets, buses and trains, until the early hours of the morning.

[Robert Evans]

I love celebrating in a largely peaceful fashion.

[Margaret]

Five police cars did not survive the

[James Stone]

night

[Robert Evans]

ripping pepperoni, as the youth used to say.

[Margaret]

But come morning, everything was all cleaned up and the city was sparkling ahead of the Puerto Rico day parade. On June 11, the World cup kicked off with matches being hosted in the U.S. mexico and Canada. I think, as everyone knows, FIFA has tried to cozy up to Trump the past few years, notably awarding the president with the first ever FIFA World Peace Prize. A few months prior to Trump starting

[James Stone]

a war, well, he'd already started a couple. He invaded Venezuela.

[Margaret]

That was. That was a small skirmish compared to,

[James Stone]

I think, yeah, the bigger war.

[Margaret]

The scale of our. Of our $300 billion restitution being paid to Iran.

[James Stone]

Fair.

[Margaret]

But the Trump administration's foreign policy and immigration restrictions have still caused disruptions to the World Cup. World cup referee Omar Abdul Kadir Artan was denied entry to the US By CPB at the Miami International Airport due to, quote, unquote, vetting concerns after being detained and questioned for 11 hours. Artan is from Somalia, which is currently on Trump's travel ban list. But Artan had actually already been vetted by the State Department and was issued a valid visa to referee at the World Cup.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Cup.

[Margaret]

The executive director of the White House's World cup task force, Andrew Giuliani, son of friend of the pod and America's mayor Rudy Giuliani.

[James Stone]

Oh, boy.

[Margaret]

Said that Artan was, quote, talking to some very bad people right as he was coming to the United States. There's some classified information we can't discuss now at some point that may be released, unquote. Just last year, the Confederation of African Football named Artan as referee of the Year. The Trump administration currently has travel bans against four of the qualifying countries participating in the World Cup. That's Haiti, Iran, Ivory coast and Sengal, with exemptions for athletes and team officials participating at certain sporting events like the World Cup. For football fans wanting to attend the World cup, there are visa bond waivers for Ivory coast and Seagal, but not Haiti and Iran, with the admin citing a high visa overstay rate among Haitians and national security concerns related to the war in Iran. The Iranian travel ban also does have an exemption for certain religious minorities. Fans from the Ivory coast and Sengal still have to deal with restrictions as fans from those countries have reported getting their visas denied. It appears that in order to attend the World cup they needed to apply for their visas prior to the presidential proclamation on December 16. Very few fans from those countries are in and yeah, many have reported getting visas denied.

[Robert Evans]

Bummer.

[Margaret]

The visa bond waiver just applies to the fee. The, the visa fee that the Trump administration has. Has introduced. And they announced there was a waiver for the fee for World cup countries.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

So if they did get the visa, they don't need to pay this extra fee, but they can only get the visa prior to the travel ban going into effect in December.

[James Stone]

Yeah. Indonesia was removed as a host for the 2023 Under 20 World Cup. They don't have diplomatic ties with Israel and they had had opposed Israel's participation in the tournament and obviously weren't going to like, I believe they weren't going to allow them visas but I'd have to check that last part. But at that point FIFA acted very swiftly. Right. They're not going to do that here, here.

[Margaret]

And despite the athlete exemption, the Iranian team has ran into issues. Their training base camp had to be relocated from Arizona to Mexico and the Trump administration has been making the team enter an exit through U.S. customs on the same day as their matches.

[Vaquero2XL]

Jesus.

[James Stone]

Yeah, they're right there in, in Tijuana actually. So like they're as close as they can be. Right. Whilst not being. Except playing the games up in la. I think I played in Inglewood, but still, I'm guessing they are transiting to sand. They're probably crossing, having to go to San Diego and then fly north it seems they said they flew so maybe they fly directly to Tijuana, I don't know.

[Margaret]

Despite the travel ban exemption, also technically applying to coaches and non player members of the athletic team, Iranian football officials

[Robert Evans]

have had their visas denied.

[Margaret]

Star Iraqi player Amen Hussain and the Iraq team photographer were detained for in the player's case, seven hours. The photographer's case, 12 hours. At the Chicago airport while going through customs. Hussain was ultimately allowed entry, but the team photographer was not. Finally, New York City is hosting eight games for the World cup, including the final. And in the lead up to the World Cup, Tom Homan threatened to send, quote, more ice agents than you've ever seen, unquote, to New York City following legislation signed by Kathy Hochul limiting cooperation between ice and local law enforcement. Following Homan's threat, Mehrmani said, quote, the World cup is supposed to be a celebration of the world as a whole, and some of the decisions that we've seen being taken by the federal administration is anathema to what this tournament is supposed to be about, unquote. Let's talk about one more sporting event, and of course, that is the UFC Freedom 250, streaming on Paramount plus, which happened this Sunday at the White House South Lawn, which was turned into a UFC stadium arena. Trump and Dana White walked together from the Oval Office all the way to

[Robert Evans]

the Octagon, and like, yeah, it's. This is the most idiocracy things have been. Yeah, it's not like a.

[Margaret]

Like a.

[Robert Evans]

Even a comparison you can make anymore. It's just. We're just doing the exact thing. So cool. Welcome to UFC Freedom250. Here is the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.

[Margaret]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That movie's aged better than I would have thought, unfortunately.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

The cold open for the event was narrated by Ron Perlman, which is kind of the saddest part of this whole ordeal for me.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, that's upsetting. That's upsetting. Wait, what?

[Vaquero2XL]

Really?

[Margaret]

Yeah. I'm sorry.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm sure UFC offered him a dump truck full of money.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Ron Perlman's well known to do things for dump trucks full of money. I don't know that.

[Margaret]

In between the fights, they played a series of largely AI generated videos covering American history and showing how the UFC embodies the country's fighting spirit. The videos are not good. You can find them on the UFC YouTube channel. They're titled Americana. There's a series of three. UFC veteran announcer Bruce Buffer kicked things off in a way that really encapsulated this entire event. And I do want to play this clip here.

[Robert Evans]

Ladies and gentlemen, we are

[James Stone]

live

[Robert Evans]

from the South Lawn of the White house in Washington, D.C. for USC Freedom 250, presented by Ram Trucks. Nothing stops Ram. And by crypto.com, the world's leading cryptocurrency Platform. Man, this is the most cardi as

[Margaret]

bullshit I've ever seen. Crypto.com.

[Jacob Goldstein]

yep.

[Margaret]

Well, it wasn't just crypto.com that had a presence at Freedom 250. The Octagon stage itself was covered in logos for Red, white and blue. Monster Energy, Bud Light, Rumble, Meta Steak, Gambling, and Polymarket.

[Robert Evans]

Christ, such a good country, man. I'm just. I love this place.

[Margaret]

I.

[Jacob Goldstein]

We're.

[Robert Evans]

We're nailing it.

[Margaret]

The 4,000 seat South Lawn arena was mostly filled by members of the military, Trump's cabinets, and politicians and billionaires like David Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.

[Robert Evans]

Man, the.

[Margaret]

The.

[Robert Evans]

The incredible ratio of billionaires to guys with 31% APR loans on a Ford F150. I don't know if it's ever existed before in like this small a space

[Margaret]

that normal people had to watch from Ellipse park near the Washington Monument. This was a $60 million production. You know, there was a military flyover, the. The U.S. marine band played songs like the Boys Are Back in Town and of course, Trump's favorite ymca. But the thing that caused the most headlines after the event relates to UFC heavyweight Josh Hokutt, who acts as a sort of heel for the ufc. While making statements that pander to a mega fan base. After winning his match, he gave Trump a chain and necklace and said, hey, shout out to Trump for having the balls to put on some shit like this, unquote. Trump's balls received multiple shout outs on stage, but following that comment, Josh Hokutt said this.

[Robert Evans]

Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?

[Margaret]

Joe Rogan is on stage at the same time holding the microphone for Hokit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he sure is.

[Margaret]

Rogan never addressed the comment for the rest of the night, and the UFC cut out this comment from their own YouTube upload and has issued takedown request requests for this clip across social media. Dana White told Time magazine, quote, I understand that the Obamas are public figures, but I'm completely against saying nasty and false things about people's families. Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense. Unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you make that bed, you gotta lie in it.

[Margaret]

So that was Freedom250. I did. I watched about an hour's worth of the Paramount plus broadcast. And the fights, I did not watch the full thing. Most of the actual fighting was just like a regular UFC fight. Right? The Hokit comment was the main thing that was like, politically motivated actually on stage. You know, besides the fact that, you know, Trump's sitting right there and you're fighting at the White House. But according to the FBI, this event could have gone very different. Here's Fox News reporting.

[Robert Evans]

Good morning everyone. Breaking news out of Washington D.C. on a potential tragedy that's been average the FBI revealing earlier today it foiled an alleged terror plot that was set to target Sunday night's UFC Freedom event at the White House.

[Margaret]

That's right. On Tuesday morning Fox reported there was a sophisticated multi step plan involving explosives, drones and snipers targeting the Freedom250 event. Vice President J.D. vance addressed the alleged terror plot on Fox and Friends saying quote, so much of the far left rhetoric is driving itself towards violence and also said this. Unfortunately I think a lot of my

[Robert Evans]

Democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum?

[James Stone]

Maybe they can do something different.

[Margaret]

So according to Vance, this alleged terror plot was coming from the Democrat side of politics, a result of turning up the political rhetoric. Fox reported that the thwarted attack was targeting capitalism, billionaires and AIPAC with upwards of 23 people involved in the plot, five of whom are in custody. With the details of the plan being uncovered on the encrypted messaging app Signal, a Fox contributor said that terrorist organizations and countries use Biden's open border to bring people inside the United States. Advance pointed to the administration's efforts to go after left wing terrorist funding networks. Almost all of that is not true.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's just lies. It's just lies. Complete nonsense.

[Margaret]

Yeah, almost all of that is at the very least stretching what actually happened to a near unrecognizable status or is completely lying about the context and background of this attack. We will get into what actually happened regarding this alleged planned attack. Back after this at break. Okay, we are back. On Tuesday morning the FBI and DOJ announced law enforcement had thwarted a mass casualty attack attempting to kill government officials with a arrests happening over the weekend in Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska and California. But rather than being the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess, law enforcement only learn about this potential attack because the mother of one of the members of this group that's planning the attack called the police concerned about her son's recent firearm purchases and contact with individuals online. By the time the FBI got to this person, 19 year old Tyson proper, he was already in a mental hospital.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, literally could not have done this. And just to be clear, the scale of the plan that they're describing I would think would be difficult for like a nation state actor to carry off successfully in D.C. yeah, absolutely.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

These guys were LARPing. These guys were LARPing on a signal group and there was definitely some mental illness involved in that too.

[Margaret]

A group of. A group of men larped themselves into federal custody.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Margaret]

Now, after police were called to Tyson Proper's home where he lived with his parents, he was transported to the Dublin Springs Mental Health center for homicidal ideations. Tyson Proper himself told police and FBI that he and others online had planned to use drones to detonate explosives on the north side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to evacuate south where other co conspirators would be set up with sniper rifles to fire on the fleeing crowd, targeting politicians and other quote, unquote high value targets. At the Freedom 250 event, Proper and four others are charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A family member told officers that Proper talked about meeting up with people he had met online to conduct quote, unquote missions and quote unquote recons and that he allegedly spent about $3,000 of his graduation money to buy, quote, camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition, extra magazines and plate carriers, unquote. After searching his phone, investigators found signal chats detailing a planned attack with maps highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. The day after local police first visited Proper's home, the Sheriff's office contacted the FBI. The FBI then searched Proper's home and found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a list of approximately 46 names including celebrities and politicians, as well as pages quote, in which Proper wrote that the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children and others to a demonic figure, unquote. Family told FBI that Proper had, quote, recently began interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who represented themselves as ex military and that may share some Christian based ideology, unquote. Family members said that these individuals were using religion to manipulate Proper and that they, quote, quote expressed ultra religious and anti government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers, taking up all the water in communities and other government actions. The Ohio criminal complaint says that Proper's family members also highlighted concerning statements that he had made in recent months, quote, such as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti Semitic comments on Facebook, unquote.

[James Stone]

When will the left stop its violence?

[Margaret]

Yeah, basic, basic antifa. Left wing plot against capitalists here.

[James Stone]

Yep, standard leftist Hitler.

[Margaret]

Appreciate sacrificing children to demonic figures.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if you know Garrison, but they're actually Called the National Socialist Party.

[Robert Evans]

No, these, these people were like Christian extremists with, I'm sure some very weird views that will all get elucidated. I look forward to reading through the signal chat. This is not really a thing. This is people who are mentally ill. And certainly, I mean it sounds like if you have a signal chat where you're passing around a map of targets, crossed a line where I'm not surprised. One of them was already in a mental hospital. But there was no danger to the event.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

To be clear, he was placed in the mental hospital after first being interviewed by police. But I think it's noteworthy that police did not take him into custody. They sent him to a mental health facility after first contacting him.

[Robert Evans]

Cause he clearly had no ability to do this. Yeah.

[James Stone]

Did he get like an involuntary mental health hold?

[Margaret]

There was an emergency request to put him in this mental hospital based on the homicidal ideation. The application detailed that he had also sought to join police or military specifically just to kill human beings.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And like this kid sounds like he very easily could have become a mass shooter.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like I'm sure there's a number of those like that. It does sound like that's something that was going on here. Ideation is certainly present. So this is very concerning. But yeah, what Vance's description of what happened is so.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So far afield as to effectively be a lie.

[Margaret]

Oh yeah. As for the sort of group formation here proper allegedly told police that members of the group that was planning this attack were primarily recruited through TikTok.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

And then once they had been vetted on TikTok, they were allowed in a signal check chat. The largest signal chat investigators found contained 19 members. There's also some smaller spin off signal chats.

[Robert Evans]

Even among terrorists, the danger of the spin off group chat is impossible to avoid.

[Margaret]

One of the chats was called quote, unquote hunters.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God.

[Margaret]

And the complaint says it contained detailed instructions for carrying out the attack, including plans to escape.

[James Stone]

They're completely delusional. They think they're escaping from doing something like that.

[Robert Evans]

That.

[Margaret]

Next week I'm going to do a full episode about. About the criminal complaint here and we'll get into more details about the attack and their planning. And yes, this, there's. There was no way this attack as planned was going to happen. They did not have the material, the personnel or the logistical capacity to pull this off.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Margaret]

Now they weren't just communicating on signal though. They also were using another encrypted messaging App called Simplex.

[James Stone]

Yeah, Simplex messenger, where they had one

[Margaret]

chat called the Vanguard of the Old Republic.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God. Oh dear. This has shades of that fucking dude in Texas who got killed by a security guard trying to attack the courthouse with a gladius on his belt in addition to his AR15.

[James Stone]

I didn't see that. Yeah, he had like a post of

[Robert Evans]

himself, like a modern gladius to defend a modern republic. It was one of the, one of the lamer attempts at a mash.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

You.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

One of the co conspirators who was arrested in California wrote on Simplex, quote, to be clear, I intend to escalate this group. I don't want to take six business years to do it, unquote.

[James Stone]

Business years?

[Robert Evans]

The fuck, man? Sorry.

[James Stone]

Yeah, that's a fascinating term. I guess they're just saying a long time, right? They're trying to say a long time.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry, Garrison, please continue.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Also writing that everyone in the group should, quote, consider yourselves an enemy of the state. In this group chat, they also discussed imagining executions. Another, another co conspirator, also from California, read about the need for quote, unquote, guerrilla style warfare and quote unquote raid attacks with quote, skilled operators to work like ghosts to conduct quote, infiltration missions. Completely delusional stuff. Yeah, the Call of Duty shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's the same as them being like, what if we were really good at being terrorists? Would that work? Like, like that's what's going on here.

[Margaret]

Tyson proper showed the FBI the TikTok profiles of other members of the group. And based on those accounts and chat logs, investigators were able to identify other co conspirators across multiple states. Part of the plan for the Freedom250 attack was for co conspirators to meet in Fredericksburg, Virginia a day or two before the event. This obviously never happened because it appears the group never actually acquired the explosives or the drones needed for their plans.

[Robert Evans]

Too expensive.

[Margaret]

And we're still trying to figure out how to get enough money to purchase materials needed for the attack.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, that's important. Having the ability to do it is important.

[Margaret]

One of the members allegedly wrote that the attack would require, quote, five teams of three, each team consisting of one sniper, one tier, one operator as support slash lookout, and one drone operator.

[James Stone]

Unquote. Yeah, what tier? Sure, yeah, tier one of the signals

[Robert Evans]

you got lying around. Christ, how many ex delta guys you

[Margaret]

got hanging out in the extended plan? They had like written out like four different tiers of operators and like what each tier is supposed to do and how and how, and how if the tier ones get arrested, we have to, we have to try to break the tier ones out of jail, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because they're so important. There's. They're super important. We got to get the tier ones out.

[Margaret]

One of the members from California did try to drive to dc.

[James Stone]

Exactly. Okay.

[Margaret]

But his vehicle had issues and needed to turn back.

[James Stone]

Oh dear.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's. You know, honestly, the, the Iranian hostage crisis. Delta Force got stopped from doing a rescue. Something similar happened.

[Margaret]

This guy did admit this to the FBI, but he claimed that he was only going there to protest the UFC Freedom250 and that he was not involved in any conspiracy.

[Robert Evans]

That's tier one.

[Margaret]

But inside his vehicle, agents found firearms, tactical belt, radios and other supplies. Inside the residence of the other California co conspirator, agents found firearms, 30 round extended magazines and approximately 180 rounds of ammunition.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

One of the members of the group in West Virginia who was interviewed by FBI confirmed that the members communicated online about attacking UFC Freedom 250, but claimed the attack plan was canceled on June 12th.

[James Stone]

That's fine then.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is the kind of thing again, there's no way this attack ever would have happened the way the government's presenting this as nonsense. This community, little community. Absolutely could have spawned one or more mass shooters. Yeah.

[Margaret]

Yeah, totally.

[Robert Evans]

Super glad that it didn't.

[Margaret]

I find the sort of organizational structure of this really interesting.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

They also discuss doing like attacks. Only power goes grids. So you, you have certain, certain aspects of like accelerationist terrorism here, but not organized on like you know, telegram. Not, not ex. Still anti Semitic, but not necessarily like explicitly the sort of like neo Nazi like terrorist model. These people are on TikTok. They're obsessed with like, like military tactics. They're very, they're very larpy. They wanted to do something like they, they discussed assassinations, they discussed various types of attacks. Attacks, but that they were interested in in. In attacks like for these like general anti government reasons rather than a specific sort of like niche political ideology.

[James Stone]

Right.

[Margaret]

Or ties to neo Nazi accelerationist groups. Like I said, we will go into more detail next week. Tuesday night, Vance did comment again admitting that the attack plan was quote, unquote, not that advanced and that the suspects quote, weren't in town. They had not really done that much planning.

[James Stone]

Great.

[Margaret]

Cool dude.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

So yeah, Vance kind of changed his tune later on in the evening.

[Robert Evans]

That's good. I'm glad he eventually said something that was not complete bullshit. Speaking of places where everything is complete bullshit, did you guys know Peter Thiel has a new social network. Actually it's 20 years old, it's not new at all. But he does kind of have a social network. It's a private invite only organization called Dialogue. Have y' all caught this story that's been dribbling out?

[James Stone]

No.

[Robert Evans]

So this first got onto most people's radar in like 2022 when Andrew Gelman, who's a statistician, posted on his blog that he had gotten an invite to this like dialogue 2022, which was like that year's event. It was described as an off the record retreat for global leaders and there was a list of confirmed participants. Like this was part of the like some of the names of people who've been in this organization we're talking about was going to be referred to as like a hack. Revealed some data that had not been like effectively redacted on the website to this organization that revealed a bunch of the members. But we already had like a list of like several dozen of the people in this group and it included folks like Peter Brown, who's the CEO of Renaissance Technologies, Kelly Bayer Rosemaryn, who's the CEO of Optus, like you know, a lot of CEOs, but also folks like Susan Athy, professor of economics at Stanford. Grover Norquist was on that initial revealed list. He's an anti tax activist, I guess would be like the most basic way of saying what he is.

[James Stone]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

In the email to invite to Andrew said, quote, there are no speeches or panels, only moderated breakout discussions for eight to 12 participants. Everything is 100% off the record. The agenda is curated based on your interests and we optimize for introverts. No small talk. So yeah, there have been, I think a couple of other previous cases where like invites to this have leaked out to different people. Like several folks who have gotten invited have like posted about it. This is not a totally weird thing for billionaires to do. Jeff Bezos has a similar kind of thing where every year or so he'll have a group of people he finds interesting that he takes to a resort or to a nice property or something that he owns somewhere and they'll all hang out and they'll have like discussions. Sometimes people put on presentations for like three or four days and we've gotten a couple of people who have been to these have like written about, about the experience in some cases. Critically.

[James Stone]

Yeah, there's that big one at Sun Valley, right? That might be the one people are most familiar with.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's one of the big ones. So this is not a super weird thing, but the fact that Peter Thiel is who he is and the fact that he's only gotten more influential now that Trump is president again makes this organization a lot more relevant. Which is why it's particularly interesting that very recently there was apparently a directory in the website's code. And Swiss hacktivist Maya Arsen Crimey, who is also a friend of the POD in the actual sense, was tipped off about a directory in the code for the website for Dialogue that basically was not. They hadn't done the things that you would want to do to protect the data of their members. Right? That's, that's the basics of this, right? So something was left undone that should have been handled and a bunch of information was revealed. And Wired got, as a result of this, the names of 222 people and records. And these are a mix of folks who were like members of this organization. And dialogue over the years has turned into more than just every year people meet. There's also apparently like a dating app component of it where they're advertising, like, if you let us know who you're looking for, we've got this network of influential people, people will hook you up with another, you know, the, you know, only special and important people. You know that. That's a lot of the appeal, right? These are a lot of star fuckery that goes on in the Silicon Valley set. But because of all of this stuff, there's also information on a retreat, the upcoming retreat, this year's event, which is apparently August 12th to 16th. God, I'd love to get a seat at a venue near Dublin, Ireland. That's part of why. And to quote from that, that Wired article, and this is talking about like the program for this upcoming event. Quote, there's a series of off the record discussions including money does buy happiness, bring back nuclear navigating, World War 3 battlefield technologies, and how's your sex life? Other talks include Build a cult moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com and build a Party run by a former White House national security official. Now, I haven't looked into Build a party yet.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yet.

[Robert Evans]

That's. Boy howdy. But I did look into prey.com and as soon as I went to the prey.com website, it informed me that the founder and CEO is one Steve Gatina, who has the dead empty eyes of the shark from Jaws. Are you guys looking at this? Steve, now in the research doc, is

[Margaret]

this the guy with the prey shirt?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's wearing the Prey shirt.

[James Stone]

That's who that is.

[Robert Evans]

He's got like the same phenotype as

[James Stone]

Peter T. It's uncanny.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he weirdly looks a little like Peter Teal. Yeah, he looks like his grin is about to start spreading wider and there's going to be an alien face transformation.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah. There's a lizard purse in case to be made here.

[Robert Evans]

So I was upset hearing that there's a Build a Cult workshop at Peter Thiel's private club invite. So I wanted to look into this guy a little bit and I read up on him. Gatina was, before becoming an entrepreneur, an NCAA champion. So he used, he's used to having people take advantage of him. He played college football for the University of Southern California and won a Rose bowl championship. In 2009. He started his first company, rep interactive at the age of 22. I run into a lot of these LinkedIn founder guys and often it's hard to tell what their many different companies do because they all have like 30 of them.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret]

Or if they're like real companies.

[James Stone]

Yeah, if they're, if they're real. Like if they're not. Just bullshitting.

[Robert Evans]

This seemed. It's real. It's, it's a video agency. It's like a marketing agency that helps do video marketing. It's one of the best workplaces in America according to Inc. Magazine. I don't know if you pay to be in Inc. Magazine or not, so I don't know how impressive that is, but it seems to be a company that makes money. It's a social media like marketing company. He also has a stock footage company that does like drone stock footage. And after, after that he started a business called prey.com in honor of his mentor and business partner who had just died. And when I started looking into this guy, I realized I've been following him before because I periodically on Reddit will go to the LinkedIn Maniacs subreddit.

[James Stone]

Oh, it's gotta be good. That's gotta be good, man.

[Robert Evans]

Steve Gatina is all over this shit because he's the CEO of pre.com and I'm going to read you one of his fucking posts.

[James Stone]

I love people who post on LinkedIn.

[Robert Evans]

Yesterday I swung by a 24 hour diner after my late shift at work. I saw a waitress in her 50s sitting in a booth with a teenage boy. He had a notebook open and she was helping him tackle some algebra problems. When she got up to refill my coffee, I asked tutoring after hours. She smiled, looking a bit tired. That's my son. I can't afford a tutor, so we study here between my shifts. The boy looked up and said, she's the smartest mom in the world. It turns out she juggles two jobs, but always makes time to sit with him every night and help him with his homework. He's going to college, she said with determination. Whatever it takes. It's amazing what love can do, even when life gets tough. And to prove that this is a true story, he shows a picture of some lady and a kid sitting in a booth looking at a notebook.

[James Stone]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

I love these guys. And they're inspirational. Definitely didn't happen posts. Definitely not a thing that happened to you.

[James Stone]

Man, such a genre.

[Margaret]

He credits the photo to somebody else.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Yeah, he sure does.

[Robert Evans]

Where did you get it? Steve? Yeah, there's a lot of great people who are going to be at these events. Which, boy howdy, it sure would be fun to be a fly on the wall at.

[James Stone]

It's also watermarked. Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret]

For illustrative purposes only, just in case

[Robert Evans]

you're stuck on him. Okay.

[James Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So to go back into the people who help make Dialogue the great organization it is, the executive director of Dialogue is apparently Raffle Grinberg. And he is also the author of a self help book titled how to be a Grown Up. He did not respond to Wired's request for a comment, but I looked into Raffi a little bit and his website. When you go to like, Raffi Grinberg's website, he immediately tries to sell you his book directly above a YouTube video titled Do Princeton Grads Know Anything? And it's like a YouTube prank video where he runs to Prince, he's wearing like a green tight skin tight bodysuit. And he runs up to Princeton grads like after, right after graduation and asks like, do you know how to pay your taxes? And it's also he can like give out a bunch of copies of his shitty book about like life skills. And like, I'm sure the book sells to like parents who give them to their kids, but no one reads this, man. When kids need to learn how to pay their taxes, if they don't have parents who know how to teach them, they like Google it or like desperately go to H and R Block or they just don't pay their taxes, but they don't read a book like how to be a Grown up. And I'm sorry about that, Raffy.

[Margaret]

Yeah, no, that's like homeschooling parent target audience.

[James Stone]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, I don't know there's, like, a lot more to say about this. I think I'm gonna do, like, an actual dedicated episode about dialogue in the not too distant future.

[James Stone]

This is fascinating.

[Robert Evans]

It does sound really interesting. And I want to know more about this fun club. But, yeah, you should check out the Wired article. It's really interesting you should mention Jeffrey Epstein.

[James Stone]

I was gonna ask if there was an Epstein.

[Robert Evans]

You're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. I tried to blow through Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in this. Now, Jeffrey Epstein is tied to this, but not in a bad way. Well, mostly not in a bad way. There's one email from him where, like, someone who is a friend of Jeffrey Epstein got invited to one of these events and, like, forwarded it to him and was like, hey, should I do this thing? Basically, I don't think we know what Jeff responded, but, you know, that caused. Because there's that, like, there's an invite to their 2014 retreat in the Epstein files. There was a lot of confusion where people were like, oh, Jeffrey Epstein was a member of dialogue. And this was furthered by the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a member of dialogue, but not that Jeffrey Epstein, the former CFO of Oracle. Oracle was also. So the fact that, number one, in the Epstein file, someone forwarded an invite to the Jeff Epstein, who's a pedophile, and number two, there is an actual member of the group named Jeffrey Epstein, just a different one caused people to believe that he was a part of this, but he does not appear to have been, in a way that anyone has proven.

[Margaret]

The former CFO of Oracle should absolutely change his name.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I gotta say, very rarely do I extend this to especially a member of the Oracle C suite. But no one will blame you. We won't even joke about it. Like, honestly, dude, like, Jeffrey, it's not a weird name. You had no reason to expect that somebody like this would wind up with your name. You don't deserve to bear this cross, I hope. Unless you do. I don't know you, actually. Anyway, I think that's enough.

[James Stone]

Oh, man. Okay, if you want to email us Cool zonetips Proton me. Keep it to story tips.

[Robert Evans]

Put a trans girl on your couch.

[Margaret]

We reported the news.

[Vaquero2XL]

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. It could happen.

[James Stone]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions.

[Maura Meltzer Cohen]

Thanks for listening.

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