Executive Disorder: Green Card Application Changes, the Pope’s AI Encyclical, Federal Court Blocks GOP Map in Alabama

Summary

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It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder

May 29, 2026 | Hosts: Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mia Wong, Robert Evans

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Episode Overview

This week’s “Executive Disorder” episode of It Could Happen Here delivers an incisive, at times bleak, rundown of the week’s major political, legal, and social news—with especially deep dives into US immigration policy changes, the Pope’s surprising new AI encyclical, and the ongoing battle over Congressional redistricting in Alabama. With their signature humor and candor, the hosts dissect policy moves, media headlines, and the quietly consequential stories that shape our collapsing world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Major Immigration Policy Changes

• Refugee Admission Cap Lifted, but With a Twist

  • Trump administration raised the refugee cap by 10,000—a move framed as positive, though in reality it's designed to facilitate more white South Africans resettling in the U.S. ([03:04])
  • “This sounds like good news until you realize it is to allow more white South Africans to seek refuge…” — James Stout ([03:06])

• Dysfunctions and Cruelties in U.S. Immigration Detention

  • Continuing U.S. military actions in the Pacific result in migrant deaths and forced deportations ([03:38]).
  • Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, NJ faced a hunger strike—300 detainees protesting conditions; politicians and protesters were pepper-balled and tear-gassed ([06:35]).
  • “People in detention are entitled to religiously appropriate food, but that’s not what’s happening here.” — James Stout ([06:38])
  • Notable: Pregnant detainees denied medical care, multiple abuses documented by Senator Andy Kim.

• Temporary Protected Status & Political Posturing

  • DHS auto-extended TPS for Lebanon—not by choice, but due to missed deadlines ([04:31]).
  • Markwayne Mullin (DHS Secretary) proposes not processing international flights in “sanctuary cities”—a move seen by hosts as unworkable and designed for right-wing media ([05:00–06:35]).

• Green Card & Adjustment Changes—A Major Barrier

  • New USCIS policy: Most non-citizens must now leave the U.S. to adjust their status to permanent residence, including those with U.S. spouses and children ([14:40–16:54]).
  • “For everyone else, if you leave and…are prohibited from having an immigrant visa...then you cannot re-enter and thus you cannot get your green card. And thus this is a de facto bar…” — James Stout ([16:54])
  • Overlaps with visa bans on 75 countries and potentially impacts Cuban Adjustment Act ([15:16–17:36]).
  • “This collection of stuff is some of the worst that I’ve heard you talk about.” — Garrison Davis ([21:36])

• Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) Stripped of Deferred Enforcement

  • SIJS recipients—often youth who have suffered abuse—now lose the assurance against deportation ([17:36–20:45]).
  • Official justification: Minuscule percentage potentially associated with gang suspicion, magnified to justify broad punishment ([20:42–22:34]).
  • “It is a minuscule fraction... ludicrous to join one up with the other…” — James Stout ([21:04])
  • “There is no moral, ethical justification for this. Really. It’s really bad. It’s really horrible.” — James Stout ([22:34])

2. Digital Ephemera and Wikipedia Union-Busting

• FiveThirtyEight Archive Wiped

  • ABC News deleted years of FiveThirtyEight’s archives; concern about the fragility of internet history ([09:34–11:38]).
  • “All of the work that we produce online is significantly more ephemeral than we tend to think about.” — Robert Evans ([10:12])

• Wikimedia Foundation’s Union-Busting

  • Recent wave of firings—including CTO Brooke Viberg and the union-organizing Community Tech Team ([49:23]).
  • “You should be pissed at them and not give them more money until they make things right.” — B ([52:56])

3. Pope’s AI Encyclical: “Magnifica Humanitas”

• Pope’s Thoughtful Take on AI and Human Dignity

  • Encyclical warns against equating machine and human intelligence; notes AI imitates but does not recreate human faculties ([26:53–29:44]).
  • “We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.” — Pope Leo XIV (quoted by B, [26:54])
  • Document lauded—even by some atheists—for defending human distinctiveness in the age of LLMs ([28:34]).
  • Notable moments: references to Tolkien, math, and geometry; “The Pope has a lot more understanding of like technical stuff than I thought he was gonna have.” — B ([28:53])

• Critiques of the Vatican’s Partnership with Anthropic

  • Event co-hosted with AI company Anthropic, whose co-founder Chris Ola almost immediately disagreed with the Pope on AI’s “mysteriousness” ([29:44–32:39]).
  • Hosts skeptical of tech industry’s ethical compass and the Vatican’s ability to truly partner for the public good ([34:18–36:43]).
  • “They stole our words without our consent in order to monetize them for themselves. That’s different. That’s real different.” — B ([32:14])

4. AI, Law Enforcement, and Protest Surveillance

• Emergence of “Anti-Tech Violent Extremism”

  • New York’s anti-terror intelligence warns AI may fuel protests and unrest; law enforcement (via fusion centers) surveilling both violent and nonviolent anti-AI activism ([37:18–41:22]).
  • “...It also makes sense to be concerned that nonviolent opposition may get caught in a federal or state-level dragnet.” — Garrison Davis ([39:31])

• Fusion Centers’ Long Record of Protest Policing

  • Historically suppress protest from anti-war to Palestine solidarity to AI critics ([41:22–42:09]).

5. Crypto and Federal Financial Infrastructure

• Trump Executive Order Exploring Fedwire Access for Crypto
  • New order for Fed to consider letting non-bank, crypto companies access Fedwire, the backbone of the U.S. financial system ([42:13–46:59]).
  • “Fedwire is maybe the single most important infrastructure piece of the entire American economy… moves $1.1 quadrillion per year.” — Robert Evans ([43:31])
  • Hosts caution: integrating poorly regulated fintech/crypto outfits with core financial plumbing is profoundly risky ([46:59–47:58]).

6. Updates on International Crises

• Ongoing Iran Conflict and Stock Market Manipulation

  • Recent U.S. bombing breaks ceasefire; rumors and leaks leveraged for oil price and market maneuvers, not progress ([52:56–54:28]).
  • “It’s all just trying… It doesn’t stop people killing. It doesn’t stop people dying. It does change the oil price and it does change the stock market.” — James Stout ([54:03])

• AFRICOM Strikes in Nigeria

  • AFRICOM claims to have killed 175+ “ISIS” fighters in Nigeria, but the acronym’s meaning is misplaced; the framing ignores local realities and oversimplifies Christian-Muslim dynamics ([56:14–58:14]).
  • “He wants to make this a crusade and that’s just not how things are on the ground.” — James Stout ([59:39])

7. U.S. Electoral & Redistricting News

• Texas GOP Runs Further Right

  • Ken Paxton defeats John Cornyn for Senate nomination after Trump’s endorsement; GOP moves to label Democratic opponent “transgender” as a sign of desperation and culture-warring ([59:39–62:31]).
  • “He’s Paxton and this is Texas… This guy has been charged with crimes and the GOP tried to get rid of him. Texas refuses.” — B ([61:04])

• Federal Court Once Again Blocks Alabama’s Racist Congressional Map

  • Three-judge panel (majority Trump/Reagan appointees) finds 2023 Alabama map intentionally dilutes Black voting power—district court blocks its use after Supreme Court left ambiguous “intent” standard from Louisiana case ([62:34–71:41]).
  • “The only available intent evidence tells us that consideration of race were the key reason…” — District court order (read by Garrison Davis) ([63:25])
  • Map must be replaced with court-ordered version through 2026 elections. Ongoing appeals expected ([70:44–72:49]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is pure undiluted violence.” — James Stout on SIJS policy ([22:34])
• “If you want crazy things to stop happening to, for example, the CEO of OpenAI, maybe he should stop saying his technology might kill everyone.” — B ([36:54])
• "I just spent too long living in Texas." — B on pessimism about Democratic chances in Texas ([61:49])
• “There’s no moral, ethical justification for this. Really. It’s really bad. It’s really horrible.” — James Stout ([22:34])
• “Wikipedia: one of the last gasps of the promise of the old Internet.” — B ([49:17])
• “Things tend to sort of bounce around before they’re entirely clarified.” — James Stout, on legal interpretation of Supreme Court redistricting cases ([71:56])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Start of main show after ads and intros: [02:42]
• Immigration policy changes, Green Card shift: [14:40–22:34]
• Digital erasure & FiveThirtyEight archive: [09:34–11:38]
• Wikipedia Foundation union-busting: [49:23–52:56]
• Pope’s AI encyclical & Anthropic partnership: [26:53–36:22]
• AI protest surveillance, fusion centers: [37:18–42:09]
• Fedwire crypto integration explained: [42:13–47:58]
• Iran & Nigeria military conflict updates: [52:56–59:39]
• Texas Republican primary results: [59:39–62:31]
• Alabama Congressional map blocked again: [62:34–72:49]

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Conclusion

In classic It Could Happen Here fashion, this episode is a sobering and thorough round-up of tumultuous developments—from the grinding cruelty of America’s immigration system to the weird intersections of the Vatican, AI, and oligopoly tech firms, to the granular (but consequential) fights over voting rights. The hosts’ mix of gallows humor and deep expertise keeps things both devastating and, somehow, energizing for anyone charting the architecture of institutional collapse.

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Transcript

[Jana Kramer]

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[B]

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[Jana Kramer]

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[James]

awards sold out tours.

[Jana Kramer]

You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied?

[B]

Nope. It's podcast time.

[James]

We get to ask other people questions

[B]

because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.

[Jana Kramer]

Hey, Jonas is available now. And their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd.

[B]

You know, Steve Carell is a great singer.

[James]

Didn't he tell you not to audition

[Garrison Davis]

the office or something?

[James]

I told him, whoa.

[Robert Evans]

We were filming Anchorman.

[B]

Clearly, I was the idiot.

[Robert Evans]

Thank God he didn't listen to me, right?

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio

[B]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

This week on Crimeless, Rory and I

[Robert Evans]

welcome a very special guest.

[James]

When I did podcasts, I wore my sleep mask.

[Garrison Davis]

So I like where this is going.

[James]

So if you guys will indulge me.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right, the incredibly talented and hilarious

[James]

Will Ferrell on an episode dedicated to

[B]

crimes committed by people named Will Ferrell.

[Robert Evans]

You're good for 300 crimes. Yeah, we got two.

[B]

I'm ready to go right up to present day. Listen to crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pod, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jana Kramer]

Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.

[Garrison Davis]

He kind of shoved me out of

[James]

the way and said, move.

[B]

And he went out the front door

[Jana Kramer]

and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[B]

Media.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of May 20 to May 27. James, some small widdle itty bitty news items to start.

[James]

Yeah, let's talk about the little things and then we talk about some things in more detail. The Trump administration has lifted a cap on refugee admissions by 10,000. This sounds like good news until you realize it is to allow more white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States of America. Great stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, this country.

[James]

I found the Federal Register thing. It's still the documents still not up there, but I will link to the placeholder document will probably be.

[Garrison Davis]

The Dutch will never be forgiven.

[James]

The United States has also continued its campaign of strikes in the Pacific. Yeah, the most recent one left two survivors along with one man who was killed. So this Guardian published a piece a while ago about what happened to some survivors who were taken by a US Military boat. The US Military boarded their vessel, stole their food and beer and then transported them to El Salvador where they were questioned and then released to immigration authorities and eventually sent home, basically, I guess effectively deported for illegally entering El Salvador.

[Robert Evans]

Wait, after they were brought there by

[James]

the US by the United States. Yeah, after the US Bombed them. That's incredible. Yeah. So we don't know what happened to these two people. I guess Coast Guard activated search and rescue after the strike, so hopefully they found them. It's better than them drowning out there. The Department of Homeland Security is auto extending the temporary protected status for Lebanon not because they affirmatively chose to do so, but because they failed to renew or terminate it in time. So it auto extended. Mark Wayne Mullen, the DHS Secretary, has claimed that the Department of Homeland Security is drawing up plans to not process incoming international flights in sanctuary cities. What? Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

This is ahead of the World cup, right?

[James]

Yes. So let's, let's play a little clip.

[B]

We are currently, which we're not initiate yet, but we're currently drawing up plans to say, listen, in these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn't be processing international flights into their, into their cities either. Because they don't want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process

[James]

immigration at their facilities.

[B]

Nothing about that makes sense to me.

[James]

The line he's drawing. I guess what I want to guess is that he's claiming that in places where police won't support ice. Yeah. By removing protesters from the streets outside ICE facilities, the United States is not going to allow international travelers to enter at airports in those cities. There's a lot to break down there. Like I'm not really going to. Because suffice it to say that this would cause absolute chaos.

[Garrison Davis]

That's not going to happen because that's going to heavily disrupt capital. That's just not happening.

[James]

Yeah, it's not really possible for this to work. It's not that they can divert to non woke airports. Right. That's not how air travel works, silly. But it's interesting. Mullen has been a bit less kind of crazy in his posting as policy, but maybe he was just getting warmed up.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, yeah, he obviously does not understand who his true master is. If he actually thinks that this is something that can happen.

[James]

Yeah, I don't know if he does or he was just talking to Fox News and said what he thought Fox News wanted to hear. Marlon was talking about this in response to a large and growing protest at Delaney hall, which is a private detention facility in Newark, N.J. jersey, where 300 detainees have been on hunger strike since last Friday. Mullen has variously claimed that they chose to do this on Memorial Day. Friday, of course, not Memorial Day. And that they want their ethnic food. People in detention are entitled to religiously appropriate food, but that's not what's happening here. Right. People are on hunger strike because of the conditions in the facility. New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, who's been there for a while with protesters, he got pepper balled and tear gassed. He entered the facility to inspect it and he made a thread on X.com, the Everything website where he detailed horrible abuses inside, including a woman who had been denied ob gyncare and a pregnant woman who had miscarried inside the facility. DHS has claimed in response that quote, in fact ICE has higher detention standards than most US prisons that hold actual US citizens. That's an incredible thing to say when someone has just detailed the fact that people are having unaccompanied miscarriages in your facility and being like, well, we do worse things to Americans here. Jesus, there are Really a lot of layers there. On Monday, one of the leaders of the hunger strike was transferred out of the facility in Newark to another facility.

[B]

Right.

[James]

It's not uncommon for people to be moved around in immigration detention for various reasons. Right. To include in this case their organizing. Finally, the OPCW has published documents detailing a large haul of undeclared chemical weapons that it found in Syria.

[Garrison Davis]

What is the ocpw? For those who may not be acronym

[James]

aware, it's the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Why this is interesting, firstly, there has been open source reporting detailing the use by Assad of chemical weapons against his own population for years. And this confirms that. Secondly, there is a particularly disgusting faction of the left in the United States and elsewhere which has spent years denying that this is the case. Spent years effectively running cover for Assad murdering little children with chemical weapons. We had very good evidence that this was happening before. We now have incontrovertible proof that Assad had the ability to do this and did do this. We already know that he did it. But it should really make you question the legitimacy of any media source that continues or ever has denied that Assad used chemical weapons or indeed any politician or political actor. There's no instance in which it's okay to use chemical weapons against civilians, period. And anyone apologizing for that, in my opinion, is pretty despicable.

[Garrison Davis]

In other news, about two weeks ago, ABC News nuked the FiveThirtyEight archive, scrubbing all the articles with links, now redirecting to the ABC Politics homepage. As annoying as some of the538 type people can be, this, this is a bad removal of, of like documented informations going all the way back to 2008. It is unfortunate that ABC has done this. There still is third party archives of these articles that you can find, but it will make actually referencing information held or previously held on FiveThirtyEight much more difficult going forward.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and I also just want to say this is a continuous problem with storing information on the Internet, which is that, yeah, information on the Internet is incredibly ephemeral. It is very easy for entire people's lives work to simply be deleted because a parent company decided to make a move. And yeah, there's a bunch of people who do good work on digital preservation, but all of the work that we produce online is significantly more ephemeral than we tend to think about.

[James]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

As Jamie Loftus said in her last regular podcast that she did for us, this is a future piece of lost media. Right. Which is True of almost everything anyone puts up on the Internet. And there are groups of people who have worked over the years to try and mitigate that, including the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. And they are currently under attack, as is from within the Wikipedia foundation, as we'll talk about later. But like, yeah, it's, it's the only, the only way to make this stuff not be ephemeral and to actually, like keep a permanent archive of culture is to support the people doing that. And the people doing that are never going to be entirely cool with, for example, the people who make movies, the people who put out newspapers. And there's an extent to which they just need the backing of us and of our government to say, you can't stop them from doing that because it's in the best needs of the human race. And that's not going to happen right now anyway.

[Garrison Davis]

Last weekend, Fox News reported that socialist live streamer Hassan Piker and the leader of the activist organization Code Pink had been subpoenaed by the federal government as a part of an investigation into a humanitarian aid trip to Cuba with a bunch of left wing activists and influencers last March. Fox claimed this investigation is part of a, quote, broader dragnet involving as many as 40American citizens who joined the Marxist convoy to Havana, unquote, after returning from Cuba two months ago. Twenty U.S. citizens were briefly detained and interrogated at the border and 18 of them had their phones and other devices seized by CBP agents at the Miami International Airport.

[B]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, Fox reported that these new subpoenas show that Piker is now caught in a, quote, federal inquiry into whether activists who travel to Cuba in March violated U. S. Sanctions laws through financing, coordination or delivery of goods to Cuba, including potential contacts with Cuban government personnel or entities on the island, unquote. Also claiming that this investigation is part of a, quote, broader effort by officials at Treasury, State and Justice departments to curb malign foreign influence operations inside the United States, unquote. Now, Hassan Piker has said that he learned about the subpoena through Fox's media reporting and he has not yet been contacted by the government. Fox referred to these subpoenas as, quote, unquote, administrative subpoenas. And it turns out neither Hasan Piker nor Code Pink have actually been subpoenaed by the government. They've not actually been served by the federal government.

[B]

Oh, boy.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

On Tuesday, the leader of Codepank told Ryan Grimm that she received an email from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control requesting information about the trip to Cuba Suggesting that there is some probe here, but it's not technically a subpoena. And there's still no indication yet if Hasan Piker has received a similar request for information.

[B]

And like this is bad. It's not unusual if you go to a place like Cuba that American citizens are certainly not supposed to transit to directly to be stopped and questioned on the way into the country. And it's now not unusual for devices to be taken. None of this is good. Like the fact that they could just take your shit at the border remains bad. But yeah, as Garrison has said right now, this is not. Not what a lot of initial reporting made it look like. Quite.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, if anything, it seems Fox is trying to encourage this, this broader dragnet and manufacturer consent for there being subpoenas for people on this humanitarian age and influencer trip.

[B]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

James, speaking of Cuba.

[James]

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about people seeking to become permanent residents of the United States. And we'll get to the Cuba tie in a min here. So a USCIS policy memorandum has advised USCIS officers that most non US citizens seeking to adjust their status will now have to leave the USA to do so. What is adjusting? Adjusting is generally when somebody who is here on a non immigrant visa or here on another immigration status adjusts to become a permanent resident.

[B]

Right.

[James]

And previously they could do that inside the United States or they could go to a consulate and they could apply for a green card at a consulate outside the United States. Now they're saying that aside from cases of what they are calling extraordinary discretion, they're going to make people leave and apply from outside the United States. That is bad. What is worse is the way that this overlaps with their existing policies. Right. People already applying are facing huge delays. I've reported on that before. And now new applicants and possibly people who are halfway through their process will have to leave. That will often mean spouses leaving their spouse and their citizen children if they have them for an unknown amount of time. Right. This could take years. Very realistic to expect this to take years. This dovetails with existing visa bans on 75 countries. What that means is that people from many of these countries cannot obtain any immigrant visas. There are some very small exceptions to these visa bans. In the case of the 20 countries which run a complete ban, there are exceptions for athletes attending the World cup or the Olympics, for example.

[B]

Right.

[James]

So like Iran is one of those countries. The Iranian team can attend the World Cup. They're actually staying in Tijuana, but crossing the border to come and do their matches. For everyone else, though, if you leave and then you have to come back to collect a green card, you re enter on an immigrant visa, then you get your green card.

[B]

Right.

[James]

If you are prohibited from having an immigrant visa because you are a citizen of these countries, then you cannot re enter and thus you cannot get your green card. And thus this is a de facto bar to people from those travel ban countries getting a green card in the United States now, which is very bad. I also noticed that there is not an exemption that I can see for the Cuban Adjustment act here. The Cuban Adjustment act is a special expedited pathway for Cubans that allows them to adjust to legal permanent resident status. It used to be two years, now it's a year. This is particularly interesting given the USA is talking so much about how terrible things are in Cuba, but also saying if you've made it here and you're safe and you feel safer and you want to stay, you can't. You have to go back to Cuba and apply, I guess, to adjust. It seems very hypocritical, but that's nothing new. Yeah, so I spoke to a couple of folks who would have expertise in this and I don't have their permission to sign their name, so I won't. There isn't a consular option for Cubans seeking to adjust. They can't do it outside of the country under the Cuban Adjustment Act. They have to do it inside the country. So they think that this would entirely not include them. But like everything else, it's a little bit unclear and we will find out, I guess. Last month, USCIS also removed categorical deferred action for SIJS individuals. SIJS is Special Immigrant Juvenile status. It's granted to people in the US who are inside the United States without status, who have been subject to abuse, abandonment or neglect as found by a court. The Trump administration has already deported many of these young people. But this policy memo formally removed categorical deferred enforcement, which the Biden admin began doing in 2022. Essentially, some people will be told on receiving Sijs that they would be safe from deportation and they could receive a work permit. Deferred enforcement is the same thing that people under DACA have. Right. Commonly referred to as dreamers. That has now been removed. People with SIJs can adjust to being. The SIJS offers a pathway to permanent residency. But now these people will evidently have to live in fear right up until they are able to become citizens. If they're able to become citizens. Jesus. Yeah. These are some of the Most unfortunate people on the planet, people who get sijs use of it has increased for like unaccompanied minors. Right, but. Or children, I should say people who have come across in the last. Maybe since 2018. Ish. But still it's, it's people who have often gone through really terrible things. The justification cited, and I'm quoting from the memo here, is that quote. The Criminality Gangs and Program Integrity Concerns in Special Immigrant Juvenile Petitions report reviewed over 300,000 aliens SIJ petitions filed from the beginning of fiscal year 2013 through February 2025. Key findings included 853 known or suspected gang members who filed SIJ petitions with most receiving approval. Over 600 Ms. 13 gang members filed SIJ petitions and more than 500 were approved. Among them, at least 70 had been charged with gang related federal racketeering conspiracy offenses and many others charged with violent crimes in the United States, including murder or sex offences. Additional SIJ petition approvals included more than 100 known or suspected members of the 18th street gang, at least three trend Aragua gang members and dozens of Nortenhos gang members. If you go back and look at those numbers, 300,000 petitions, I see 70 charges.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's absurd.

[James]

That is a fraction of a single percent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

If they reviewed 300,000. Even if this like 850 number is correct. Is completely correct.

[Robert Evans]

Which is not.

[Garrison Davis]

That's like less than one third of a percent.

[James]

Yeah, exactly. It is a minuscule fraction if every single person who they suspect and given what we've seen about suspicion, that could be as much as having a tattoo, right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[James]

It's ludicrous to join one up with the other and say, therefore all of these young people, many of whom have gone through horrific things, now we'll have to live in fear again. That policy memo came out in April. I found it when I was looking through the policy memos on the USCIS website and I haven't seen any other reporting on it. Maybe I've just missed it, but it's certainly something people should be aware of. I want to do a scripted series on SIJS people. For understandable reasons, not all of them want to get up in the media right now.

[B]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In terms of all the immigration changes that have happened, this collection of stuff is some of the worst that I've heard you talk about.

[James]

Yeah, it's really bad. Like they started deporting SIJS people even, even immigration lawyers who have been like that. This second Trump administration is going to be really bad. The second Trump administration is really bad. People did not expect them to begin going after these people and they did when they, they were detaining. Another thing they've claimed is that like some of them are over 21, over 18 because they can still apply up to 21 in certain jurisdictions. Right. Again, sure. That doesn't mean that they haven't been through terrible things. Like many, many 21 year olds in America rely on their parents for things. These people often don't have their parents or have in some cases been abused by or abandoned by their parents and then sending them back to a place where they may be in danger, where they may not be safe. Right. There is no moral, ethical justification for this. Really. It's really bad. It's really horrible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's pure undiluted violence.

[James]

Yeah. And likewise, we can very clearly see if we look at the list of travel bound countries is going to be a bar on people from a large number of countries where the majority of the population is not white getting citizenship and legal permanent residence status in the United States. Right. Something that has very clearly been a motivating factor of policy for a long time. So, yeah, more shit news from me about immigration. Talking of shit news, we have to pivot to advertisements.

[B]

We?

[Jana Kramer]

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[James]

awards sold out Tours.

[Jana Kramer]

You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied?

[B]

Nope. It's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.

[Jana Kramer]

A Jonas is available now and their

[B]

first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer.

[James]

Let me tell you not to audition

[Garrison Davis]

the office or something.

[Robert Evans]

I told him, whoa, we were filming Anchorman.

[B]

Clearly I was the idiot.

[Robert Evans]

Thank God he didn't listen to me right.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio

[B]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jana Kramer]

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[B]

And we're back. Oh, boy. Well, that's all been very depressing. You know what's not depressing? Catholicism.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, and that.

[B]

That too. Two great tastes, great together.

[James]

Two things that make us all happy.

[B]

Oh, man. This week, the same week that we're recording this, Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, that warned against equating machine intelligence with human intelligence. He declared, we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. This has been seen, I think, by most critics of artificial intelligence as a pretty good encyclical. It is very long. It's well over a hundred pages. So this is not like a quick read. You should think about this as like going in and reading a book. It's a really interesting document. Among other things, The Pope quotes J.R.R. tolkien at one point, which is a nice little bit. He also makes a lot of references to mathematics and specifically like kind of comparing the way Catholicism thinks about divinity and the Holy Spirit and all that to certain kind of like geometric shapes because apparently he was a math major. I did not know this, but it comes through in the writing of this. I would say my overall impression is like, oh wow, the Pope has a lot more understanding of like technical stuff than I thought he was gonna have. This is not like a bad thing from a, like a basic understanding of how the technology works standpoint. Obviously a lot of this is based around the Pope's beliefs about the, like, what humanity is and the divinity within humanity, which is not something that everybody believes. But I also have found an awful lot of atheists and just kind of like non relig religious people who have been sharing this because while they don't agree that like, you know, human beings are sacred because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ necessarily or whatever, or that we were made by God, they agree with the fact that there's something special about humanity that is not being recreated by these LLMs. And so I've seen a lot of like praise as a result of that. However, I've also seen what I thought were pretty salient critiques. And the number one critique here is that this encyclical was released at an event that was kind of co launched with people from Anthropic and the Vatican worked with Anthropic for this release and are in general kind of partnering, maybe the wrong term, but working alongside them to try and have a dialogue about the future of AI and what it should and shouldn't do. And specifically one thing that Pope Leo talked a lot about was the need to demilitarize or disarm artificial intelligence, as in remove it from use in like defense industries and certainly make sure that it's not making the call to actually kill people.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's something that Anthropic has also took a stand on in so much as that now the US government is trying to remove any partnership it has with Anthropic.

[B]

Yes, yes, they, they at least were openly against that. Now that doesn't mean Anthropic is a company I like or a company that everybody should like. They still plagiarize huge billions of people. Basically anyone who's ever written a book, there's a lot of illegal things, objectively illegal things Anthropic did. And that's why There are numerous lawsuits against them now. And I think it is in fact a problem that one of Anthropic's co founders, Chris Ola, was invited to speak at this event in the Vatican because one of the first things he did after, you know, thanking the Vatican and the Catholic Church and the Pope for having him there is kind of disagree with what the Pope had said, that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. Because Ola said that these systems, I'm going to quote from an article in the registry here by Thomas Clabburn, quote. AI systems, he said, are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words. And as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious to those of us who trained them. This is what I have an issue with.

[James]

Yeah, no, they're not.

[B]

They're mysterious me in the same sense that like, if you make a car that had always just been a simple ice engine, if you make that a hybrid and you throw like a computer screen and a bunch of shit in it, you're going to have a bunch of problems with your car as like a manufacturer that you'd, you, you didn't expect to have because you've added complexity.

[James]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

We can't predict every single outcome of machine learning. I. Right, yeah, but, but the way that, but the way this Anthropic guy is using, you know, basic, basic facts about like machine learning and neural networks, but framing them in a way to.

[B]

These are mysterious. Like the human brain is mysterious and.

[Garrison Davis]

No, yes, yeah, but, but it's, but

[Robert Evans]

it's also like, of course you can't predict what the output is. Your entire process is. You're just multiplying matrices against each other over and over again and then checking to see if the output of the random matrices multiplication you've done is what you want. Like, yeah, no shit.

[B]

A good dumb person comparison might be if I were to buy an empty house and I were to fill that house with random shit for 30 years, for so long that I've forgotten what I've put in the house. And then I sent you into the house to grab something at random from it, I might be totally surprised by what you bring out. That doesn't mean anything mysterious or sacred has occurred. It just means, yes, I'd forgotten all the shit I put in that house, you know.

[James]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Or it's like, it's like if you make a machine that just like spits out a random output. Yes. You don't know what it's going to Be like, yes, this is, this is what you have done.

[B]

Exactly. It's a random output when it was been trained on the corpus of like human knowledge. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[B]

And one of the things that I find very frustrating is that Ola made the statement that AI systems are made from us and from our words. Right. And he says that in a way as to like. And that's good. It means that like we all are a part of this and it's a part of us and so there's humanity in it. No, no, no. AI isn't like made from our words. They stole our words without our consent in order to monetize them for themselves. That's different. That's real different.

[James]

Yeah. In the same way that back in the day when I began teaching people would plagiarize by copying and pasting things from books.

[B]

Yeah.

[James]

Those are also made by people's words. It doesn't make them sacred.

[B]

Yeah.

[James]

Makes them stolen.

[B]

Now Ola lists in here three questions for discernment and he phrases this like, and I hope the Catholic Church can like help us figure out how we should move forward with these things. These are the big questions behind AI. I want to quote again from that piece in the register because the author of that, Clapford has a funny bit here.

[Garrison Davis]

Hola.

[B]

How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. We have many. One is called taxes, another is litigation, already ongoing. We also have the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution among others, as wealth sharing models when nothing else works. It's a good piece. I recommend reading.

[Garrison Davis]

That's good. Yeah, that's good.

[B]

That's what I've got to say on this.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, yeah, obviously the sandrapa guy is going to frame certain things as marketing for the company. Right. He's. That that's going to determine the way that, that he uses certain words and the way that he discusses machine learning and neural networks. Right. When he's saying that this is like based on the human brain. Roughly. It's because. Yeah, it's because it, because it's a machine learning neural network.

[B]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So it's. That's going to frame the way that he's doing it. I think it makes sense for the Catholic Church to try to enter into dialogue with a company like Anthropic.

[B]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Especially if they can, you know, unite against Thiel's efforts and even maybe some of, some of the efforts of, of OpenAI. But obviously anthropic has their own motivations for doing this, which is to enrich themselves.

[B]

Yes, yes.

[Garrison Davis]

But I don't think it's surprising that the Catholic Church will also try to enter into dialogue to influence the outcome of these things. I think in general, the Pope's statement is fine.

[B]

I think the Pope's statement is fine. I do think this might be a data point in terms of in the future Church may need to recognize that you can't actually work with these guys. Perhaps that will be the outcome we'll see.

[Robert Evans]

Well, but I mean, I think that's part of what's happening here though, right? Is that the reason the Church is taking anti AI positions while working with them is that they're trying to have it both ways in terms of co opting both the anti AI movement and also work with these companies to sort of build their influence base.

[B]

I don't see it fully there. I think for the Pope's cause, he's been very consistent about being horrified by the growth of the arms industry and the idea of AI weapons and war. I kind of suspect from the Vatican standpoint when that all erupted with anthropic pulling out and saying they weren't willing to work with the Department of Defense on the things the DoD wanted them to do, that that's probably when the Vatican made the call. But I don't actually know. You know, I'm not gonna say that the more sinister outcome is definitely not what's occurring, but I think there's a number of ways to kind of, of look at what the decision that was made and why it was made.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, the Catholic Church is one of the most globally influential bodies on the planet. They do have like their theological reasons for opposing AI as well as sort of ethical reasons that it's illuminated by the Pope in terms of like worker protections, in terms of the anti war stuff. And I, I do believe he has like actual, you know, legitimate spiritual beliefs about like what humanity is. And it was something I appreciate is that he doesn't just take this like, AI skeptic point of view and just to deny that like AI will, you know, significantly transform our world. Right. Because I think AI is transforming production in some pretty significant ways. The Pope's not just hoping that AI will go away, he's affirming that we actually need to do something about this to protect our own humanity. And even though AI is not human, it. Humans do determine how it will be developed and therefore we should act. And I think that makes sense for his position.

[B]

Yeah, I don't, I'm not surprised as to the fact that he's doing it. I guess my long term doubt is I don't think any of these companies have the ability on their own to make responsible choices. No, certainly not the future of these, of these. And I don't think they have the ability to contribute to responsible decisions.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[B]

Need to be manhandled. Yeah, totally by armed agents of the state. Otherwise armed us are going to have to do it. You know, that's, that's the reality.

[Garrison Davis]

Like no 100%.

[B]

And that's the reality not just with AI. That's the reality with every mega corporation. Right. If the government does not stop them from destroying life for large numbers of people, then large numbers of people are going to do crazy things to them. You know, and if you want crazy things to stop happening to for example the CEO of OpenAI, maybe he should stop saying his technology might kill everyone.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On a related note, Wired has recently obtained thousands of documents from the dhs, FBI and state level info sharing anti terrorism. They're called fusion centers where information is shared between the feds, the state and local, local law enforcement.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And a report from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau has warned of widespread upheaval in response to the adoption of AI and has coined a new term, quote, anti tech violent extremism, unquote. This is, this is a, this is a quote from this report. Quote. The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City, unquote. This is interesting. Also according to Wired, the Intelligence Bureau report referenced the Zizians and warned that quote paranoid views regarding AI may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians trial thanks to their quote, attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent and belief that humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality or face existential consequences for failing to do so, unquote. God, this is really interesting. This stuff that Robert's been talking about for quite a while.

[B]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And like I, I, I think this report was actually written before the Sam Altman Molotov cocktail attack or at least was written around the same time. But I, I think probably a little bit before, but considering the Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman's property and the gunshots fired into the home of a pro data center city council person, like it makes sense that law enforcement is considering Anti AI violence as an emerging threat vector. But it also makes sense to be concerned that non violent opposition may get caught in a federal or state level dragnet.

[James]

Yeah, that's what fusion centers do, right? They dragnet a whole bunch of shit.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's exactly what fusion centers do. And most of this Wired report is talking about documents from fusion centers. And like as we have already seen, law enforcement surveillance capacity and scope has been empowered and extended by the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number seven. And public organizers and protesters are much easier to target than the small minority of people that actually end up up committing violent crimes. Wired reported that federal, state and local agencies are gathering and circulating intelligence about alleged threats to data centers. The intelligence documents that Wired quotes from outline a variety of threat actors and models, not simply data center protests. Quote, adversarial actors, including state sponsored entities, criminal groups and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists may target U.S. data centers. These actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the US economy, using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining or leveraging third party entities such as front companies to gain access to US data and infrastructure, unquote. So that outlines not just like environmental or like the general anti data center beliefs held by the American public. Like this, this shows like actual, you know, like threats to national security by hostile state actors or criminal groups as well as people with their own environmental or ethical reasons for opposing AI domestically Though Wired also reported that a fusion center in Northern Virginia created a report on Tesla takedown protests and in person assemblies like demonstrations at an Arlington county budget meeting and a Fairfax county school board meeting where people voiced opposition to AI.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and this is again also like historically what these fusion centers have been used for as James was talking about. I mean like all the way back to like God, I mean like I probably should have worked out in what order I wanted to talk about these, but like yeah, fusion centers have been used to target everything from like anti Iraq war protest stuff in like the mid-2000s through like yeah, like fusion centers were like one of the big coordinating agents for like all of the repression in 2020. They've been used in like anti Palestine protests in 2024 during the campus occupations. So like, yeah, like these sort of like intelligence reports are talking about like different threat factors, but going after protesters is like what these fusion centers in a lot of cases are designed to do. So yeah, yeah, it's definitely a thing to be concerned about given what these things Are. And what they do.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of cryptocurrency mining.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, boy. So, yeah, yeah, speaking of using large entities for crypto bullshit. So last week we talked a bit about Kevin Warsh, the new Federal Reserve Board chairman's, like, ties to the tech. Right, Right. Ties to Thiel, ties to Andreessen, ties to this whole sort of world of, like, tech, venture capital, money. And today I want to talk about. There's an executive order from May 19 from the Trump administration that orders the Federal Reserve to consider allowing crypto companies and other non FDIC insured entities to use Fedwire. Okay, so what is Fedwire on a macro level? Fedwire is the reason the entire American economy functions. It is the payment service that banks in the U.S. use to both send money to each other and to the Fed. If you wanted to do an analogy, right, you. You could say that Fedwire is PayPal for banks. But, like, the reality is not that, like, PayPal is like, Fed Wire for people. Right. FedWire is maybe the single most important infrastructure piece of the entire American economy. I was going to talk about this a bit later, but the surface. On average, the Fed estimates that it moves $1.1 quadrillion per year.

[James]

Whoa, where does a quadrillion fit in the number bigness scale?

[Robert Evans]

That's a million million dollars a lot per year. Right. Like, the entire American financial system moves, moves through this service. You can also, like, move money to the government through this. So you can, you can do exchanges with the Federal Reserve itself or the different Federal Reserve banks. Now, in order to get access to fedwire, you have to be an actual bank, right? You have to be like an FDIC insured bank. And crypto has not had access to this system. Like crypto. I really don't want to call them crypto banks because they're not banks. And that's why they haven't had access to the system, because they're not banks. Crypto is not money. And it's not. None of this stuff is subject, I mean, it's subject, I guess, to a little bit of, like, securities regulation, but it's not subject to actual, like, FDIC regulation or importantly, deposit insurance, because, again, these are not banks. Now, crypto has been trying to get access to the Fed wire system for years because in, in, in order for crypto companies to sort of like, interface with the rest of the banking system, they have to, like, basically, like, get a bank to act as a partner for them instead of being able to like, move the stuff around because they can't access the system. And so Trump has at least given an executive order for the Fed to consider doing this. Now Trump cannot actually force directly. Like he can't just sign an executive order that says you have to let crypto do this because of Fed independence. But the Fed had already sort of like opened a period of public comment on this. And this is something that I think Warsh is, this is, this is why it's important that this is happening after like the appointment of like Kevin Warsh or like after he'd been, technically speaking before he'd been confirmed, but like after. Or like, like before he'd been sworn in, but after, like they knew he was gonna, he's gonna get through because he is extremely friendly to these groups. This is also a thing that's sort, that's sort of important for the crypto industry because one of the issues that crypto has is that actually trying to like move cryptocurrency around is just a nightmare. That's like one of the reasons why no one, no one actually like uses it to purchase things because it's, it's such a disaster. And getting access to the Fed's payment system suddenly kind of, it gives you a sort of like you, you can use the Fed's payment platform, which actually works, unlike theirs, which do not. Now the, the other reason I'm bringing this up so it, it's worth mentioning that even if the Fed were to allow them to create accounts with the Federal Reserve, they wouldn't, wouldn't for now have access to a lot of the services that the Federal Reserve provides. Like, they wouldn't be able to do like, they could take advantage of like repo injections and like, stuff like that. Like a lot of, a lot of the stuff that the Fed uses to stabilize the economy through like injecting money into the banking system and injecting bonds and stuff like that into the system they wouldn't have access to. But it's pretty clear that these crypto groups want that eventually because that gives them access to like the actual sort of banking capacity of the federal government, which allows them access to things like very low interest, short term loans and liquidity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what I want to close on is that this is what Warsh's thing is, right? He wants there to be more integration between this sort of like, they call it like fintech, right? Like the financial tech things. But you know, between these very fascist right wing tech companies, they want them to be more and more directly integrated into the payment services and into the banking capacity of the US Government.

[James]

Government.

[Robert Evans]

I mentioned earlier that Fed wire moves, again, $1.1 quadrillion a year. Now this, this is also what's very dangerous about Trump's people being in control of the Federal Reserve, because there is so much infrastructure inside of the Federal Reserve that if it breaks even a little bit, things that we don't think of at all, like, no one, like, literally no one thinks about, like, even, even. Even if you do banking stuff, you tend not to think about Fedwire because it just works. And this is, this is less of a risk now that, like, Doge Gripers aren't running around. But one of the dangers of Trump attempting to take control of the Federal Reserve is that his people will break something like this while doing something like attempting to integrate crypto companies into it. And so that's just going to be a continuing risk that we all sort of have to deal with, because tech companies and Trump administration, and now the president of the Federal Reserve want to. With these systems on which everything in all of our lives depends on in ways that we never see.

[James]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

All right, speaking of the things that all of our lives depend on, here are the products and services that support this podcast.

[B]

Products and services. That's right.

[James]

Lovely. Yeah.

[B]

All right. And we're back. So I have to, unfortunately, talk about Wikipedia, or at least the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously. I think everyone here is pretty big fans of Wikipedia, which is at this point has gone from the thing my teachers used to tell me I couldn't use in projects to, like, by any objective measure, one of the most significant projects in the history of human knowledge and, like, storage of things that human beings know and have learned. It's one of the last, like, gasps of the promise of the old Internet. And it's also the thing that underpins all of the AI chatbots alongside Reddit in one way or another, and the answers that they give people like, Wikipedia's incredibly important for AI, which is why, like, the Wikimedia foundation has made deals, like, with the AI industry in order to get money for letting them scrape like Wikipedia, which is kind of part of why the Wikimedia foundation is currently doing really fucking well monetarily. They've got a little under $300 million in reserves, which is about a year and a half worth of money for them.

[Garrison Davis]

So, first off, wait, so you're saying those little banners that fill half of the screen every time I use Wikipedia are lying?

[B]

I don't want to, actually. Right Now I do want to discourage people from donating to Wikipedia. Historically I have not. But yes, you should first off know if you've been feeling bad about not donating, they don't currently need it, they're okay right now and they shouldn't get more of your money until they stop doing the shit that I'm about to tell you about. Because over the course of 10 days in May, the Wiki foundation has engaged in what you could call major union busting, firing employees who are trying to organize their fellows and trying to like represent those values within the Wikimedia Foundation. And my source for main source for this is a pretty good article that Jake Orlowitz put out on Medium recently. Big Tech's anti labor playbook has come for Wikipedia and it starts with the firing in mid May of Brooke Vibberg. She was the very first full time employee of the Wikimedia foundation and its first CTO, the chief technical officer. And for more than 20 years she's like one of the main engineers that has made Wikipedia work. Right? And she's also a union organizer. So she's a very important person. She's the lead developer for MediaWiki, which is the platform that runs Wikipedia and had been in since 2003 and is just a very big person both in terms of how Wikipedia works and in terms of like the way in which like their unionizing efforts have gone. She was laid off without any like real costs given. And then a week later, on May 21, the foundation disbanded the community tech team, which consisted of five engineers and a manager. The community tech team had the job of listening to Wikipedia editors, which are number one, the reason Wikipedia has content, and number two, volunteers. Right, so these are regular employees whose job has been to hear what Wikipedia editors want to and then help make sure that the salaried employees on the team fulfill those desires in as much as that is possible. Right. And so when you fire these people, you are saying we don't really give a shit about the volunteer community. And it's also noted in this, in Jake's article that most of those engineers were union organizers. Now there is currently a solidarity petition for Wikipedia editors. So if you are an editor of Wikipedia, I think it would be great if you signed that solidarity petition. This is the first time that editors have had to do an organized solidarity action with paid foundation staff. And yeah, it's a whole thing. The salaried staff there are not on one side about this. This is extremely controversial. It has a lot to do with the Fact that a number of the old guard, including, you know, the folks who are like a number of like some of the oldest people at Wikipedia, have a kind of libertarian bit to them, you might say. And in January 20th of 2026, Bernadette Meehan was recruited as CEO of the foundation. And her prior career included work at JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers, as well as a spokesperson role for the nsc, the National Security Council. She was on the Obama foundation. She was the U.S. ambassador to Chile. Oh great. So this is someone who comes from a background in which fucking with union attempts are very like normal and accepted. The union's demands are not extreme. They would not have any meaningful impact whatsoever on the pile of cash that Wikipedia has. There's no excuse for the Wikipedia foundation doing this. You should be pissed at them and not give them more money until they make things right. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm done.

[James]

Nice. All right, so we need to update once again the situation with the United States war in Iran. The USA this week again bombed Iran in violation of ceasefire, calling it a self defense strike. I mean, still a violation of ceasefire. The negotiations are ongoing. Both sides remain a long way apart. There have been various leaks and reports of where negotiations were at. One suggested that Iran would exchange, freeing up its assets. Either sanctions relief for removing highly enriched uranium. Iranian state TV leaked details of a supposed memorandum of understanding which would be like the memorandum that they would sign in order to say like, hey, let's get back at the table. Until then, these are our rules, kind of. This is the rules we're operating under while we negotiate. The MoU said the blockade would end and the strait would be reopened, but the USA has denied that mou. I don't want to go into the blow by blow of like leaked and denied things because it's just a waste of time. None of that's real.

[Robert Evans]

It's all stock market manipulation. Like it's, it's, it's all, it's all just trying.

[James]

That's. Yeah, sorry, that's literally my next sentence. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't stop people killing. It doesn't stop people dying. It does change the oil price and it does change the stock market. And I think if we report on this too credibly, we miss the fact that it, that, that like that is the real impact. And that is how we should frame this in our reporting. Not do the Barack Ravid thing of rushing up eight bullet points of something that someone told you and never consider why.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, James, you will never have a career at Axios with that attitude.

[James]

Yes, I. I think that that bridge has been burned. Garrison. But my path in life has been lit by the bridges I burned. One thing I do want to note is that Trump has attempted to. He appears to want to tie a peace deal to having other countries in the region sign the Abraham Accords. Abraham Accords. You're not familiar. 2020 agreement in which the UAE, Bahrain, later Sudan and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Interesting. That is unlikely to happen. You killed the Ayatollah.

[Robert Evans]

Now you think they're gonna sign the Abraham Accord? Like, what are we doing here?

[James]

Yeah, I mean, he's just going through a wish list of. Of shit, I guess, that he or people close to him want.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James]

Meanwhile, Iran is continuing to attack southern Kurdistan. Right. I think this offers a very clear vision of, of what Kurdish groups could expect if they decide to ally with the US and serve as a ground force. And of course, there are very reasons that they would want to do that. Right. To include liberating themselves from an oppressive regime. But the United States, as it has done every other time, would probably abandon them and they would be subject to this. They are already subject to this. Just because of rumors that they were associating with the United States this week. One strike injured. Nine Pak Peshmerga, several of them very critically injured. Talking of strikes, let's pivot to Nigeria, where AFRICOM is claiming its strike have killed 175 or more ISIS members. I know that I am like the lonely voice on this. The second I and the second s in ISIS stand for Iraq and Al Sham or Iraq and Syria.

[B]

Yep. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. It's constantly frustrating.

[James]

Isis, Khorasan Province. That's not what it means. Isis, West Africa, not what it means.

[B]

So it's the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham in Africa.

[Robert Evans]

What are we doing here?

[James]

Yeah. Incredible. It's now made it into like.

[B]

Well, it would be like if there was like a Christian fundamentalist, like the Georgia Baptist School of London or something like that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Or it's like the United States of America.

[B]

Yeah, the United States of America. Japan.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, come on.

[James]

Not what the word means.

[B]

Yeah, I mean.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. In the new counterterrorism doc, I think they almost exclusively refer to it as isis. K. Yeah.

[James]

So that's Khorasan province. Right. Which again, not in Iraq or Al Sham, in what we would call Afghanistan today.

[B]

It's fine. It's fine.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James]

This is where we're at with the fucking acronym is not an acronym. It's just a word, I guess Now I remain angry. Meanwhile, fighting between Boko Haram and Iswap, which is what I'm going to be using in Lake Chad, continues to threaten even worse famine in the region. And Hexseth is claiming that these strikes were part of a campaign to defend Christians.

[B]

And I just want to note one

[James]

more thing to give you a sense of how committed this president is. Maybe a year ago he heard the call of Nigerian Christians who were being targeted and killed by ISIS in Nigeria.

[B]

And he said, pete, I want the

[James]

War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians.

[Garrison Davis]

Partnerships like that can take time behind the scenes.

[James]

But he never wavered on it and we got the assets there.

[B]

And over the last month, and there

[James]

hasn't been much coverage of this, we killed ISIS number two in Nigeria, who

[B]

is most responsible, responsible for killing Christians and trying to target the US Homeland

[Garrison Davis]

and have since, because of the intel

[James]

we gathered, killed hundreds of ISIS members

[B]

who were targeting and killing Christians in

[Garrison Davis]

Nigeria, creating a whole new opportunity there. So there's a lot of things we do that the media pays attention to

[James]

and a lot of things that the president empowers the department to do on behalf of the American people that he deserves great credit for. So here we are paying attention. As Pete asked, you will notice that the Africom claim of 175 is not hundreds. However, Hegseth in that statement claimed hundreds. Maybe we are missing something. Or maybe he's referring to the December 2025 strikes and including all of those and rolling them up together. It's of course worth pointing out that Nigerian government has pushed back on this narrative that these strikes are to defend Christians. There are Christian bishops in Nigeria who have pushed back on this narrative because. Because as with many Islamist terror groups, the majority of people these people have killed are not Christians. Right. Many of them are Muslims. Many of them are people of various other faiths. Like Boko Haram. Right. The name roughly translates to like Western style education is forbidden. It's Haram. Right? Like they're going after people who are in that community who have sought out Western education. Like there are many, many, many instances I could cite of these people killing Muslim people. Hes wants to make this a crusade and that's just not how things are on the ground. It's a very simplistic understanding of a much more complicated reality. But yeah, that is what I have on Nigeria this week. He is right that the US media covers Africa much less than it should. But trying to do our best here,

[Garrison Davis]

we have one more story, big story before we close. But first we should mention the Republican primary in Texas on Tuesday. After gaining Trump's endorsement last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the runoff election in the Republican Senate primary race. Paxton won by almost 400,000 votes, beating the four term incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn at 64 to 36% of the vote. This is the second week in a row where Trump has successfully intervened to steer a congressional primary win away from incumbents and toward staunch MAGA loyalists. Paxton will now go up against Talarico in the general election this November.

[Robert Evans]

Should we mention Paxton calling Tariko transgender?

[James]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, it's not just Paxton, it's Miller.

[Garrison Davis]

Miller.

[James]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. There seems to be a whole GOP move to brand him as trans potentially as part of their. Which I kind of see as some degree of desperation. Although I can't really imagine Paxton losing this election. So maybe it's just that they're completely out of other ideas.

[Garrison Davis]

Paxton does seem to have more liabilities than Cornyn would.

[B]

Sure. But he's. He's Paxton and this is Texas. You have to keep that in mind.

[James]

Like, he's.

[Robert Evans]

They're not gonna take Texas.

[B]

This guy has been charged with crimes and the GOP tried to get rid of him. Texas refuses.

[James]

Yeah.

[B]

Absolutely not.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I never am putting my faith in Texas as. As we all know. Yeah. But if, If I were to set up a pairing.

[B]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Calorico v. Paxton pairing is the one I would pick. As opposed to Talarico v. The Cornyn or, you know, Crockett v. V. Paxton.

[B]

Sure. I'm not going to say there's no way that Telo wins.

[Garrison Davis]

It would be an astonishing.

[B]

Yeah, it would be. Really.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[B]

Look, I'll come on here and admit I was wrong and I'll be thrilled.

[James]

Yeah.

[B]

I just spent too long living in Texas.

[Robert Evans]

I'll say this as like the person who's been the most consistent. Like, assuming there's an election that even sort of functions normally, this is going to be like a 2008 style wave. They're not, like, they're not going to win Texas. And until I'm proven wrong, I've been saying this the entire time I've been doing this show and I've been right every single time. So, like, prove me wrong. Texas.

[B]

You know, when I see a flip for Texas coming, I'll call it out. But I don't right now.

[Robert Evans]

Nope.

[B]

Yeah.

[James]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm not saying it'll never happen because demographically probably will at some Point, like, unless they, they really succeed at their genocide dream. But that ain't happening now.

[James]

Yeah.

[B]

Now this cycle.

[Garrison Davis]

Finally, let's talk about another one of these redistricting cases and one related to the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On Tuesday, a federal court blocked an Alabama congressional House map drawn by Republicans. In 2023, a three judge panel found that the drawn map was intentionally discriminatory based on. Race. Race. Just two weeks ago, the Supreme Court cleared the way for this same map to be used in the 2026 midterm elections. Alabama Republicans have since labeled the district court panel activist judges. It's worth taking a look at who these judges are. I think the 11th Circuit judge was first appointed to a district court by one Ronald Reagan. The other two district judges were appointed by Trump. Trump.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And this exact same three judge panel had already found this exact same map to be intentionally racially discriminatory years ago. This new district court order also rejects the state's claims that the 2023 map was just drawn with partisan, not racial, intent, writing, quote, the purpose of the 2023 plan was to distribute black voters across district districts to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are black, unquote. This latest ruling is part of a specific redistricting battle that has stretched on for five years, with Republican maps being repeatedly struck down, appealed, redrawn, and struck down again. Now, I've seen some confusion on the exact series of events here, like what the Supreme Court has ruled on which maps are being used. So I want to just briefly go over the. The sequence of events as I understand it. In 2021, a district court ruled that a new map drawn after the 2020 census likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld this decision in 2023, barring the use of this 2021 map. After the Supreme Court decision, the Alabama legislature adopted a new map map in 2023. But a federal court again found that this newer 2023 map also likely violated Section 2. And the Supreme Court let a ban on the use of this map go through by declining to block the order. But they did not rule on the map itself. So the court appointed a special master to draw a new Alabama House map to use going forward. In 2025, following a trial, the district court officially ruled that Alabama's 2023 congressional map did in fact violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights act, finding the map was, quote, an intentional effort to dilute black Alabama's voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way, unquote. Importantly, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on the actual 2023 map itself. After the district court's ruling in 2025, Alabama did appeal to the Supreme Court court, but they delayed consideration until after the Louisiana case. Now, as we know, that ruling effectively nullified much of Section 2 of the Voting Rights act, establishing that intent of racial discrimination must be shown, not just discrimination as an effect in the drawing of voting districts. But after that ruling, Alabama asked the Supreme Court again for a quick appeals decision before the state's scheduled primary and to put the lower court's order barring the use of the 2023 map on hold considering their recent ruling in the Louisiana case. And on May 11, the Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency shadow docket appeal, vacated the order blocking the use of the 2023 district map, and sent the case back to the lower court for further review in light of the Louisiana ruling. So that's a lot. But remember that the district court court already ruled that the 2023 map intentionally discriminated based on race, the very requirement set by the Supreme Court's Louisiana ruling. So when the district court reconsidered the case this past week, they found that the Louisiana decision only strengthened their original ruling that the Alabama GOP map was intentionally discriminatory and deluded black voters. This is pretty much what Sortimer wrote in her dissent when she argued that there was, quote, unquote, no reason to send the case back to the district court because that court had already concluded that Alabama, quote, violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of black voters in Alabama. That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of and unaffected by any of the legal issues discussed in the Louisiana case, unquote. So that's essentially what happened. That's essentially what the district court court found. The three judge panel also rebuffed opposition to the court ordered map in Alabama on the basis that it bears similarity to the map at the center of the Louisiana case, writing that it's their understanding of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that race as a districting criterion cannot be used when drawing maps, but that quote, unquote, relevant racial data may be considered for a lawful purpose, like checking that the drawn maps comply with Voting Rights act precedent. It's not that racial data is used in the drawing of maps, but after the maps are drawn, they can be checked against racial data to make sure they comply with Voting Rights act law. The district court wrote that Louisiana's black population is not as concentrated as in Alabama, requiring a black majority district to slice through multiple metropolitan areas to scoop up black voters. Whereas in Alabama it's, quote, unquote, relatively easy to draw a reasonably configured majority black district, quote. We are unsurprised that race blind relief is available here, but was unavailable there. Here. It has been consistently obvious to us from our visual assessment of the geographic dispersion of Alabama's black population and statistics about black population centers in the state state that black voters in Alabama are relatively geographically compact, unquote. So essentially, it's actually pretty difficult to draw a map that separates out the black population to be a minority force in all voting districts. As for demonstrating intent, the district court found that the Alabama legislature only enacted the discriminatory map after knowing it would dilute the impact of black voters and by having prior knowledge of the disparate racial impact, including from federal court findings, and then passing the map anyway, that itself shows intent. Furthermore, the judges wrote that the case's quote, enormous record contains no evidence of a partisan motive, unquote. In the drawing of the 2023 map. I'll quote again from the recent order quote. In the simplest terms, the sequence and substance of extraordinary legislative events against the backdrop of the legislature's knowledge compels us to conclude that the legislature doubled down on racially discriminatory vote dilution after we and the supreme court found that it was racially discriminatory vote dilution. The same evidence leaves us no room to conclude that when the legislature did all this, it had party politics in mind. Mind, the only available intent evidence tells us that consideration of race were the key reason, unquote. So the court ordered Alabama to use the alternative court ordered map already used in the 2024 election for the rest of Alabama's 2026 congressional elections, after which the legislature can then create a new congressional district plan. And of course, the state of Alabama has already appealed this to the supreme court and we will wait and see if they decide to hear this case.

[James]

Yeah, this will continue to be a thing we're going to have to report on, we should say for some time. Right? Like, yes, this is going to result in massive changes and yeah, we will continue to cover them.

[Garrison Davis]

I guess it is interesting that this is the first time I've seen a court really, like, interpret the Louisiana ruling for like another case to a. Like, this is. This is like an over 70 page, like, like ruling.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And they discuss like where the Louisiana case does apply and where it doesn't and what it means to quote Unquote, consider race in the evaluation of these districts. And it would be interesting, you know, if the Supreme Court decides to hear this, if they're going to affirm this court's interpretation of their ruling, or if they're going to say, no, you got it wrong, and strike down their interpretation. But, you know, right now they, they did really outline, like, what, what it means to. To, to use race in reference to these districts and how it cannot be used in the drawing of the district.

[James]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

But that it can be considered to make sure that it complies with the Voting Rights act, and that does not mean that it was used as a instrument in the actual drawing of the district.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And I think that that specificity is, Is an interesting part of the new ruling.

[James]

Definitely. I think, like, it's just like any other Supreme Court decision. Right. Things tend to sort of bounce around before they're entirely clarified.

[B]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like I said, this is like a five. A five year long case, all stemming from the 2020 census.

[James]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And the, and the maps that the Republicans have tried to. Tried to draw after that, which, which as multiple courts, Supreme Court and, and the district court have already concluded, the GOP tried to intentionally dilute the. The votes of black Alabamans. Right. And because of the way that the black population is concentrated in Alabama, there needs to be an intentional effort to do that. Right, Right. Whereas in this Louisiana case, the drawing of districts had, you know, had to, like, looked more gerrymandered to create these black majority districts. Whereas in Alabama's case, that's not really necessary. And in fact, a lot of the maps that were referenced in testimony were like, algorithmically generated.

[James]

Huh. That's interesting that it wasn't like they didn't get the crayons out and like, draw lines like Elbridge Jerry did back in the day.

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[James]

Great, great. I love that. I'm sure we can expect much more wonderful, algorithmically generated elections. Well, yeah. Content. What a time to be alive. If you want to email us coolzonetipson me, hold off for now. If you're with the Ferrets, I've heard from the black footed ferret community and I. I do appreciate that. Unless you can get me on one of those ferret accounts, in which case,

[Robert Evans]

please email put a trans girl on your couch.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[James]

We reported the news foreign.

[B]

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

[Robert Evans]

out on the iHeartRadio app.

[B]

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Jana Kramer]

This is an I heart podcast.

[B]

Guaranteed human.