Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #35

Summary

It Could Happen Here – Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #35 (September 26, 2025)

Podcast: It Could Happen Here
Hosts: Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, Mia Wong, James Stout
Episode Theme: A weekly rundown of the latest executive actions, controversies, and crises emerging from the White House, with a focus on political violence, immigration, anti-left crackdowns, tariffs, right-wing “civics” campaigns, and anti-trans panic.

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1. Episode Overview

The hosts deliver a rapid-fire but in-depth examination of key news and executive orders from the Trump administration in mid-September 2025. The program dissects the facts behind viral shooting incidents, analyzes new government moves against both immigration and leftist activism, and unpacks right-wing efforts to dominate public education and government rhetoric targeting trans people.

The tone is equal parts exhausted, darkly humorous, and deeply concerned, focusing especially on how “unreality” and conspiracy-mongering are corroding political discourse and hamstringing resistance.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

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A. The Dallas ICE Facility Shooting

(02:54–15:35)

• Incident Summary: Shooting at a Dallas ICE facility by an individual wielding an inherited WWII-era Mauser rifle, killing 2 detainees in an ICE van before dying by suicide.
• Online Aftermath: Immediate conspiracy theories labeling it either a right-wing false flag or a state op.
  • Robert Evans [04:12]: “Liberals and leftists casting doubt on the authenticity of this.”
• Weapon & Motivation:
  • Shooter used a Mauser likely inherited from family, not purchased recently—a type of gun usually exempt from proposed gun control laws [07:14–09:10].
  • Shooter’s political allegiance is unclear: Voted Dem in 2020, mother complains about GOP inaction on guns, online presence is ambiguous [09:10–09:57].
• Broader Pattern:
  • Mass shootings increasingly copycat in nature, with superficial “ideological” signifiers like “anti-ICE” written on ammunition, but these often mask primarily suicidal motives [04:43–06:13].
  • Media ecosphere’s reflexive narrative-building now bypasses evidence, fueled by “weaponized unreality.”
  • Garrison Davis [11:25]: “People are so quick just to point the ‘Black’s rule’ image to discount every single thing that might confuse you at first glance.”
• Family Perspective:
  • NBC interview with shooter’s brother: no political fixation observed, recent unemployment, life going badly—fit for “contagious” suicidal violence [13:42].
• Warning Against Conspiracism:
  • Robert Evans [16:49]: “...there’s a part of me that feels like caring about the reality of the situation is almost a vanity project... people are increasingly going to dig into the reality tunnel that’s most comforting...”
  • Reality distortion now common on both right and left, undermining reasoned response.

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B. Trump Declares Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Group

(21:26–27:29)

• Executive Action: Trump issues EO attempting to designate “Antifa” as domestic terrorists, urging federal agencies to pursue them under terrorism statutes [22:28].
• Legal Realities:
  • No formal “domestic terrorism” designation exists under US law—this is mainly rhetorical and procedural, not a new legal power [22:28–23:41].
  • Legal battles continue, but for now, some courts push back and fail to indict on weak federal cases [23:41–24:34].
• Contextual History:
  • Aggressive federal prosecutions of leftist protest activity predate current administration (e.g., Green Scare), often involving RICO and terrorism enhancements [22:28–24:16].
• Analysis:
  • Mia Wong [24:52]: “Authority is brittle, oppression is the mask of fear.”
  • Crackdown on dissent is a sign of government’s fear in the face of successful grassroots opposition (notably anti-ICE actions).
  • Everyday resistance, including basic filming of ICE raids by regular people, has disrupted government operations [25:20–26:54].
• Reassurance & Call for Action:
  • Systemic intimidation should not deter holding the line; legal defenses continue to succeed, and broad suppression is not inevitable [24:16–25:17].

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C. Immigration: “Gold Card” Sale, Judge Firings, and Guatemalan Children

(29:26–36:31)

• “Gold Card” EO:
  • Fast-tracked, million-dollar permanent residency for wealthy applicants. Corporations can pay $2M for workers [29:26–32:58].
  • Paid “donations” are accepted as evidence of “exceptional business ability”—bypassing normal standards [30:30].
  • Concurrently, a $100K H-1B fee hike devastates skilled worker immigration, representing a hard-right turn [32:07–33:24].
• Immigration Judge Purge:
  • The administration has fired or forced out over 150 immigration judges since January, leaving courts severely understaffed. Many cases now delayed until 2028 and massive detention backlogs growing [34:07–36:31].
• Child Deportation Case Victory:
  • A class action secures protection for unaccompanied Guatemalan children, rebuking ORR and DHS deceit regarding family “reunification” [27:30–29:26].

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D. Tariffs and the Midwest “Soybean Logistical Nightmare”

(40:37–47:00)

• Tariff Escalation:
  • New penalties remain on Brazil (for jailing Bolsonaro) and India (for Russian oil trade); U.S. Supreme Court hears tariff case in November.
• Agricultural Impact:
  • China has stopped buying American soybeans (over 50% of US exports), devastating Midwest farmers and storage capacity, triggering cascading losses through small towns [41:26–46:21].
  • Bailouts have started, but if the embargo persists, it may seriously damage Trump’s base and the larger agricultural economy.
• Cultural Distraction:
  • Real economic pain is being drowned out by culture war messaging—deliberately so, according to hosts [46:21–47:08].

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E. The New Civics Culture War: Education and “Patriotic” Indoctrination

(47:20–53:26)

• America 250 Civics Education Coalition:
  • Dept. of Ed, Turning Point USA, PragerU, Moms for Liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and explicitly Christian lobbying groups join to advance “God-centered, virtuous education” with direct state partnership [47:20–52:16].
• Promotional Video Lampooned:
  • Overwrought, AI-generated “lighthouse” imagery played for laughs by the hosts, but highlights deep revisionism and erasure of civil rights history [48:25–50:43].
  • Garrison Davis [51:04]: “70 years ago, education was segregated in this country. I’ve listened in person to Charlie Kirk argue that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. Like, that’s what these people want.”
• TPUSA Chapters in Every Oklahoma High School:
  • Announced by the Oklahoma Superintendent, explicitly framed as a takeover from “radical leftist” teachers [52:17–53:26].

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F. Trans Panic and Misreporting: FBI & “Trans Terrorism”

(53:48–67:32)

• Media Claims:
  • Viral reporting (notably from Ken Klippenstein) asserts the FBI is about to label all trans people as “nihilistic violent extremists” after the high-profile murder of Charlie Kirk.
• Fact-Checking:
  • No new leaked documents; reporting is based on a single unnamed source's suspicion that “trans individuals will be increasingly targeted...” [55:16–57:26].
  • The FBI's “nihilistic violent extremism” label predates Trump and is mainly for tracking child exploitation and school shooter fandoms [57:26].
• Heritage Foundation Petition:
  • Heritage's demand for a “trans ideology inspired violent extremism (TIV)” threat category equates “trans ideology” with half of all non-gang school shootings—a claim both factually and statistically absurd [58:41–59:34].
  • Even Heritage admits that not all trans people/allies would be classified as terrorists; it would apply only to those accused of actual violence or threats [59:45].
• Critical Warning:
  • Sensationalism endangers trans community mental health and safety; the real dangers lie in health care bans and physical attacks, not (yet) wholesale FBI classification [61:50–67:10].
  • Mia Wong [63:10]: “Don't panic, organize. That's the actual solution to this.”

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Jumping to “False Flag” Theories:
  Garrison Davis [11:25]:
  “If you cannot understand that someone who is suicidal would do a crazy thing like this, inspired by recent events and scribble something onto a bullet, trying to shoot at ICE equipment or ICE agents, ICE property, inadvertently killing actual ICE detainees... that is a way more disjointed and like broken reality to like force yourself to believe than just take the facts as they come and evaluate them slowly...”

• On Legal “Domestic Terror” Designation:
  James Stout [23:35]:
  “If you're going to be prosecuted for a federal crime, the U.S. attorney has to bring a case against you and there has to be a crime that you have committed... The executive branch does not make law, but they're sure trying.”

• On Executive Overreach and Crackdown Fear:
  Robert Evans [24:16]:
  “I'm not saying don't be afraid, because these are scary times. I'm just saying, like, don't assume that there's no point to fighting back or there's no way to do so, that you'll just, like, wind up in a fucking camp.”

• On Agricultural Impact of Tariffs:
  Mia Wong [43:02]:
  “There is a bunch of soybeans that are being—that are just sitting there... no one wants to buy them. And... there are basically stockpiles building up of these soybeans that can't be sold. And this is becoming an increasing problem because there's the corn harvest and you have to put the corn somewhere.”

• On Right-Wing Civics Push:
  Garrison Davis [51:04]:
  “70 years ago, education was segregated in this country. I've listened in person to Charlie Kirk argue that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. Like that's what these people want.”

• On Trans Panic Reporting:
  Garrison Davis [62:13]:
  “Spreading misinformation or unverified reports like this that just makes everyone panicked and freak out actually harms us and our community. The transpanic industrial complex is dangerous and people need to be very careful about this because it's an extremely dangerous time. And having an accurate assessment over what's going on is going to be crucial to survive the next few months to years.”

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4. Timestamps for Key Segments

• Dallas ICE Facility Shooting & Discursive Fallout: 02:54–15:35
• Antifa as “Domestic Terrorists” Executive Order: 21:26–27:29
• Immigration: Gold Card, Judge Firings, and Kids’ Legal Victory: 29:26–36:31
• Tariffs & Farm Crisis: 40:37–47:00
• America 250 Civics Education Coalition & TPUSA Push: 47:20–53:26
• Trans Panic, FBI Designations, & Media Fact-Checking: 53:48–67:32

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5. Summary Tone and Takeaways

The episode is a whirlwind tour through legal, social, and narrative battles being waged in America’s starkly polarized landscape. Hosts alternate between gallows humor and blunt warnings, making a strong case for critical thinking, methodical reaction, and mutual aid over panic or conspiratorial flights. Their central thesis: the collapse of “reality consensus” endangers not only fact-based resistance, but hope itself—unless people slow down, read carefully, and organize instead of spiraling.

Closing words:
Mia Wong [63:10]:
“Don't panic, organize. That's the actual solution to this.”

Transcript

[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Mia Wong]

Of psychopaths, murderers, sex offenders?

[Garrison Davis]

In this episode, I offer tips from them.

[Robert Evans]

I'm Dr. Leslie, forensic psychologist. This is a podcast where I cut through the noise with real talk.

[Garrison Davis]

When you were described to me as a forensic psychologist, I was like, snooze. We ended up talking for hours and I was like, this girl is my best friend. Let's talk about safety and strategies to.

[Robert Evans]

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[Mia Wong]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

I always had to be so good. No one could ignore me, carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling, the limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers@taylorpaper ceiling.org brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council Media. This is it. Could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This week, we're covering the week of September 8th to September 24th.

[James Stout]

Luckily, nothing that remarkable has happened. So this will be a short one.

[Garrison Davis]

Another famously slow news week in the United States of America and abroad. Only the most stable out of all democratic countries.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, of the democracies, we're easily the most democratic.

[James Stout]

Shining city on a hill.

[Robert Evans]

On a hill. That's right. That's Right.

[James Stout]

Elevated.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So let's talk about this guy who opened fire at an ICE detention facility to start off with then.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. That's the big news story today is that there's been a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas. This is not the first shooting at a North Texas ICE facility this year. Two detainees were killed and one injured, last I saw. They were in an ICE van, it looks like. And the shooter killed themselves pretty quickly, it seems like. Like fired a few rounds and then killed themselves.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Kash Patel, who's the director of the FBI, shared pretty quickly after shooting on X.com, the everything website, a photo of a stripper clip of what looks a lot like 8 millimeter Mauser ammunition. One round had the word Anti ICE written on it in blue pen in block capital letters.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, lazy. We can agree on that. Like, especially compared to etching them onto a bullet. This has been, I think, immediately adopted by God. I mean, it seems like I haven't done a deep survey, but most of the liberals and leftists that I follow on both Twitter and Blue sky and on just looking at friends on Facebook have pretty immediately gone after this as a false flag or something.

[Garrison Davis]

Liberals and leftists casting doubt on the authenticity of this.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I'm seeing both people be like, well, the shooter must have been a right winger who lazily put anti ice on the bullet. Or this is some sort of federal conspiracy. But a lot of conspiracies here.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We simply don't know very much about the shooting at this point. It's unclear who the shooter was aiming for. If they were just aiming at ICE property.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Like unknowingly shooting, like, migrant detainees inside.

[Robert Evans]

Did they think whoever was in that van was a cop?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Most of this lines up with the person being the sort of person who ends up being a high profile shooter. Right. Like they're not so much an ideologically motivated person as someone who, like you say, pretty, pretty low effort, wrote anti ICE on their bullets at the last minute. Not on the bullet, but on the casing that holds the fucking powder that the bullet goes in. Like, I understand how that works.

[Robert Evans]

And this just fits. And this is something I try to talk about pretty regularly. Shootings in the United States are heavily driven by mimetic spread. Right. This has been happening since Columbine. There have been more than 100 copycat shootings of Columbine. And you do have shooters who are, let's say, original. Right. Like the Christchurch shooter, where they have new ideas for things to do in mass shootings and then in the wake of those, because whenever someone does something really new, it gets a lot of attention. Right. Like if there's a mass shooting that like gets a lot more media coverage than other ones, there will be people who copy it and who copy specific aspects of that shooting. And what I'm seeing with this guy that kind of just fits into that pattern is you had a really high profile North Texas shooting at an ICE facility. Then you had a really high profile shooting where somebody with a hunting rifle shot at targets from the top of a roof. Right. And I'm seeing both of those things in this shooting. And I guess it's just like. Yeah, that kind of scans to me, you know?

[James Stout]

Yeah. I guess another thing that has been fueling this conspiracism is that the guy used a Mauser rifle, different type of Mauser rifle to the last one. It looks to me like a Kar98.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The previous one was a very old Mauser that had been re barreled. The.30 06, which is a very common American round. This one looks to have been an original KAR98K that was still an 8mm Mauser, which was the gun the Nazi that was the standard battle rifle of the Wehrmacht during World War II.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's not weird he would have access to that. He probably didn't have to buy it or pass a background check to get it. Looking at Garrison found his mother's Facebook. They'll talk some more about that. But one of the things that was on there is her talking about how she recently had to clean out like a barn and a farm that her grandfather and dad had owned and get rid of a lot of their stuff. It kind of makes sense to me. One of them very likely was a veteran. Could have brought back a car 98k as hundreds of thousands of GIs did from the war and it would have just gotten passed down under the family. Right. Not weird.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no weird at all. Like you say, there are probably hundreds of thousands of these in the United States.

[Robert Evans]

It was very common. And again, that's more or less probably what happened with the, the Charlie Kirk shooter. Why, why they had a Mauser, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Because it was their grandpa's rifle. Probably had it re re barreled or whatever, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, not, not uncommon at all for someone in, especially somewhere like Texas where, you know, those rifles, even if you didn't bring them back from World War I, like could have been obtained by private party transfer any time in 25 years. So he'd been placed on probation for a 2016 marijuana offense for which he pled guilty and received deferred adjudication. I guess in Texas it's considered dealing marijuana, but it just seems to be that he was in possession of an amount greater than a quarter ounce, but less than £5. Maybe that's. I'm not that familiar with Texas law in that regard, but that is a thing that we found out about him. I'll just add that I don't know if that affects his ability to obtain a new firearm by doing a4473.

[Robert Evans]

It's unclear, but it wouldn't matter in Texas because again, you can just meet a guy in a parking lot and buy a gun.

[James Stout]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's not relevant, as I did when I lived in Texas. Almost every month.

[James Stout]

Would be great to stay in Texas. Yeah, it's easy to get a gun in Texas.

[Robert Evans]

How did he get the gun? He could have gotten it by accident. He could have traded groceries for it. Like.

[James Stout]

We just don't know.

[Robert Evans]

But there's. There's no barriers to him owning this.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we still don't know very much about this guy outside of his, like, public arrest record. I have like a LinkedIn that hasn't been updated in a few years. Yeah, he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary. We know that from Texas voting records. His mom's Facebook has a few political sentiments, but not expressed very commonly. She's posted a few times about Greg Abbott's pro gun stances.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, she was definitely like anti nra, anti Abbott, anti nra.

[Garrison Davis]

Upset about Abbott and Senator Corin and Cruz not taking action for gun control.

[James Stout]

Damn. Yeah. This isn't the sort of gun that would ever be impacted by no proposed gun control legislation. Right. Like, this is kind of central to the gun that people generally feel is reasonable to people to own.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Assuming that it was something that he inherited from a grandfather or great grandfather. Even like gun control bills that are looking at stopping face to face sales wouldn't stop this because the Dimms always tend to include an exception for like, yeah, inheriting your dad's hunting rifle or something like that. Right, right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On an old Google plus profile that's cached Deep dive. His profile picture is like a Soviet communist caricature. But again, that is no indication of a recent political alignment. We still don't have a detailed look at this guy's politics, but people have been quick to call this a false flag. When I think this appears more like a manifestation of this reality brain rottenness that we've talked about vis a vis the years of lead paint, like brain rot inspires like ill thought or illogical actions that maybe appear akin to a half baked false flag. But this is like just a result of this weaponized unreality. Fiction inspires reality and then reality is seen through the lens of fiction. So people project onto the state this like 1950s CIA staging world events thing. Like everything's become so like Eddington pilled.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I remember there was. There was a really big example of this someone. I forget exactly what it was like, someone like graffiti, like Chuck Schumer's garage or something. And everyone that I knew was convinced it was a false flag. Like it was all over Twitter. It was all over blue sky. Everyone thought it was a false flag. And it's just like all of that has just accelerated alongside this process that Garrison you're describing, where you have the unreality tunnel of all this is a false flag. Then you have the other unreality tunnels that are like generating these people and they're just sort of like flowing parallel.

[Garrison Davis]

To each other, mashing into each other. Yeah, no, like people are so quick just to point the Black's rule image to discount every single thing that might confuse you at first glance. Like if you cannot understand that someone who is suicidal would do a crazy thing like this, inspired by recent events and scribble something onto a bullet, trying to shoot at ICE equipment or ICE agents, ICE property, inadvertently killing actual ICE detainees. If you have no way to understand that as a premise and the only way that you can see something like this happening is like a beat cop walking up to the crime scene realizing he has to alter it to fit an agenda. Like that is a way more disjointed and like broken reality to like force yourself to believe than just take the facts as they come and evaluate them slowly without jumping to a very quick assumption that satisfies your like, emotional reaction to a tragic event like this where multiple people have died.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

With Trump in power again, I think it's entirely possible that oppositional political violence will take a form that resembles, quote unquote, left wing attacks increasingly through the next few years. It's not 2018 anymore, and calling this guy a leftist right now doesn't make any sense. We don't have a clear look at his politics or if he really even had serious politics. But there are a lot of like seemingly normal people who are depressed, demoralized, and are angry and might not write a stupid Twitter brained manifesto and scribbling anti ICE gets A point across, whether that's sincere or some kind of ironic shitpost. If anti ICE sounds weird in comparison to Fuck ICE or abolish ice, again, not everyone is part of like the leftist Twitter brained terminology circle. It seems like he wasn't really thinking things through intently anyway, as is common with these like quick copycat style attacks. And attacks like this are also sometimes just partially driven by suicide. Wanting to like do something as a part of the suicidal act. And like who knows what this shooter was aiming for or what they thought they were aiming for. We do not have enough information yet.

[Robert Evans]

And it's worth noting NBC has interviewed his brother. Kind of sounds like from the text of the NBC article like they broke the news to him, which is oof, that's fucked up. Not great.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But he said the last time he'd seen his brother was two weeks ago. He was not particularly political. He had never mentioned anything about ice. As far as his brother knew, he had no hatred or particular feelings about ice. Either way, he was registered as political independent. His brother said that his parents had a rifle and that he knew that his brother knew how to shoot it, but that he didn't think he knew how to make a shot like that. I don't think he knew anything about the quality of shot and it doesn't sound like he did anything but shoot into a van and then kill himself. So he was recently unemployed and was looking to move to his parents land in Oklahoma. But he was raised in Allen. The whole unemployed didn't sound like he felt like he had a lot of maybe opportunity going forward. His life was not going great. Like I, I don't know, like I, I'm not having trouble seeing this all add up.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean the people who do some crazy shit like this often have a suicidal impulse running through an action like this. And sometimes it manifests through something akin to like, you know, this is like a bad term but like suicide by cop. Right. And like similar to what Robert said about like memetic and like copycat shootings. You can see some of what's on display here in the lineage of Luigi Mangione allegedly writing denying to pose on bullets, then the Charlie Kirk shooting with stuff written on bullets. Yeah, but this is something that's now like in our zeitgeist. It doesn't require you to be like an online communist to do something like this. Nor is it relegated to a cop trying to manufacture a fake narrative to cover up a murder of immigrants to frame it in this left wing violence spike that the right is currently really running with.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, look folks, if you are convinced that this is a conspiracy, I really doubt much that we say is going to convince you otherwise. Yeah, it's, it's kind of a, I don't want to go on too bleak of a rant here, but like, I almost feel like there's not really a point in trying to stand up for basic reality anymore because number one, people are increasingly going to dig into the reality tunnel that's most comforting to them and that's going to be the one where like they don't have to deal with the complexities of the world that like some people who on paper have espoused beliefs that are similar to you will also do fucked up shit. Right? Like that. That's just America that's living in a country with 400 million guns. That's living in a country where mass shootings go viral and where people act based off the virality of shootings that they watch or see or hear about.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And honestly like, there's a part of me that feels like caring about the reality of the situation is almost a vanity project that like, it doesn't win you anything. It doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't, it doesn't help you make the world better. Maybe just embracing a fall. Like the right has gotten very far in embracing completely fraudulent realities, so why do I even care?

[Garrison Davis]

I mean this is something I've talked about with like the flattening of tactics with the right adopting state sponsored cancel culture and the left getting more conspiratorial in, in like replies to, to tweets and blue sky posts, talking about how, you know, the bullying markings have to be a false flag. I'm seeing people share memes like Pepe, like psyop memes, but like, like leftists and like, like oh wow, yeah, liberals. Sharing, sharing these memes that you used to just see under like unhinged right wing accounts to talk about how big world events are all staged or the feds are faking everything and it's, it's just this complete like swap, more accurately, a flattening of tactics and, and yeah, like, sucks to be in a position where I'm trying to be like slow and methodical in how I evaluate things and not just jump to posting funny reaction images about how everything is a psyop and how everything is a false flag.

[Robert Evans]

Lmao, obvious psyop work done.

[Garrison Davis]

Because that seems so much more emotionally compelling and instead I'm just tired.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, just tired all the time. Anyway, Go on and believe whatever you want. Let's continue the episode. All right, let's talk about Antifa when we come back.

[James Stout]

Comes from our mind control partners.

[Garrison Davis]

Stop settling for weak sound. It's time to level up your game and bring the boom. Hit the town with the ultra durable LG X Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go. Elevate your listening experience to new heights because, let's be real, your music deserves it. The future of sound is now with LG XBoom. And for a limited time, save [e-mail] with code fall25.

[James Stout]

Bring the boom XBoom. There's a viral sickness in Abbas town.

[Mia Wong]

You must excise it.

[Garrison Davis]

Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged.

[Mia Wong]

Entire families have been consumed.

[James Stout]

You know how waking up from a dream, a familiar place can look completely alien?

[Robert Evans]

Get back, everyone.

[James Stout]

And if you see the devil walking.

[Garrison Davis]

Around inside of another man, you must.

[Mia Wong]

Cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes.

[Garrison Davis]

In the furthest corner of this town. As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manke, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

The Devil walks in abbostown.

[Garrison Davis]

In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.

[Mia Wong]

We had 30 agents ready to go.

[Garrison Davis]

With shotguns and rifles, and you name it. But what they find is not what they expected.

[James Stout]

Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.

[Garrison Davis]

They go, is this your daughter?

[James Stout]

I said, yes.

[Robert Evans]

They go, oh, you may not see her for like, 25 years.

[Garrison Davis]

Caught between a federal investigation and the.

[Robert Evans]

Violent gang who recruited them, the women.

[Garrison Davis]

Must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

Hey, this is Matt Jones and I'm.

[Robert Evans]

Drew Franklin, and this is NFL Cover Zero.

[Garrison Davis]

We're just here to try to give you an NFL perspective a little bit different.

[James Stout]

Did you see the Colts pretzel? That was my other big takeaway from that. What was that?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, my. We think NFL coverage should be informative and entertaining.

[Robert Evans]

And twice a week, that is exactly.

[Mia Wong]

What you're going to get.

[James Stout]

Listen NFL Cover Zero with Matt Jones.

[Garrison Davis]

And Drew Franklin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Toyota the official automotive partner of the NFL. Visit toyota.com NFL now to learn more. Speaking of false flags and Tifa Antifa, I hardly.

[Robert Evans]

No, that doesn't. Garrison, just continue.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't have anything to say about that.

[Robert Evans]

All right, listen, folks, we're going to be doing. Well, James is going to be doing with our collective lawyer, Moira Meltzer Cohen, an episode on what this actually means legally. And we will be doing that with a lawyer who is competent to speak on that more than we are. Yeah, I guess kind of what we want to do briefly in this episode is try and pull people back from a ledge if you're feeling like you're on one right now. Because it's bad. The current situation is bad. The administration is absolutely going after people on the left. They absolutely will be increasingly applying terrorism enhancements to charges for anything that can be deemed as politically motivated by the left. But this declaration, as people have pointed out, it's not like a thing, the president declaring something a domestic terrorist group. Like, it's not like none of this is anything that, like, has a legal force behind it. Which doesn't mean, again, that they're not going to continue to go after people. But this is stuff that started under the Biden administration, applying RICO charges and whatnot.

[Garrison Davis]

This is stuff that goes back to the 90s, like to the fucking green scare, right? Yeah. With, with environmental organizations. There is no real domestic terrorism designation. That's why they're trying to go after, like, funders and trying to find ties to, like, international groups to to have that terrorism like label make more legal sense. But Trump did actually sign an executive order to, quote, unquote, designate ANTIFA as a domestic terrorist organization. Quote, all relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions, against those who fund such operations, unquote.

[James Stout]

I mean, like anything in the United States, if you're going to be prosecuted for a federal crime, the U.S. attorney has to bring a case against you and there has to be a crime that you have committed.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

The executive branch does not make law, but they're sure trying Legislative branch makes law.

[Robert Evans]

They are.

[James Stout]

They tried a lot last time as well. Well, they did. I do want to remind everyone that right now we still have courts. And as we're seeing in Los Angeles and in other places, grand juries are not returning indictments. When the AUSA brings a shoddy case or tries to prosecute someone for something that isn't a crime, that right now is the case. I'm not saying it will be forever. I'm saying that that's where we're at. And we can take a step back from the ledge if we know that. I hope for people who are understandably, very afraid.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And I'm not saying don't be afraid, because these are scary times. I'm just saying, like, don't assume that there's no point to fighting back or there's no way to do so, that you'll just, like, wind up in a fucking camp. Because people are going to court right now and winning.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And. And those. Those court cases have not been invalidated by the administration. They're not just taking people into custody anyway. Like, people have repeatedly gotten off for charges of assaulting ICE officers because they were bullshit charges. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So that's all I'm trying to say right now.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. You know, in terms of what these people are actually worried about, I think if you read the executive order, you can see what they're scared of. Right. You know, to do the mildly cringe and or quote, authority is brittle, oppression is the mask of fear.

[Garrison Davis]

You JD Pritzker, God.

[Mia Wong]

Plane stole is stealing my shit.

[Garrison Davis]

You and prickster holding hands. Meme.

[James Stout]

Yeah, holding.

[Robert Evans]

Andor apparently he's a big Star wars guy.

[James Stout]

But if you.

[Mia Wong]

If you look at, like, what's actually in there, right? Like, okay, I mean, some of it's like, obviously 2020 stuff, but then they're talking about, like, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officials and routine doxing and other threats against public figures and activists. Like, they are very worried about the fact that everywhere ICE appears, a whole bunch of people, most of whom are just like, random people in sweatpants. I have seen so many pictures from every single city that there's, like, large scale ICE deployments are. There's just like, people in sweatpants who just, like, walk out of their houses and start taking pictures of ICE agents. They are very much concerned about this. Right. This is why they're trying to do this crackdown, because the resistance to this stuff is actually working well enough. You know, it's not that they, like, haven't been able to do ICE raids, but it has degraded their capacity to do it significantly. And that's why they're rolling this shit out so that they can, you know, as, as an, as an attempt to intimidate people and as an attempt to like, get people to stop doing the stuff that they've been doing, which has been like, effective enough to really shift the way ICE has been forced to do these things.

[James Stout]

And.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

Like if you go back to the, like one of the first incidents of people like opposing an ICE raid, it was in south park in San Diego.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

These people are not like, like organized members of Antifa. Like, south park is a pretty bougie place. It's like a vegan small plates restaurant and cocktail place.

[Robert Evans]

There are people who are pissed their neighbors are getting abducted.

[James Stout]

Yeah. 100%. They're just people who were there and were like, no, fuck you, this seems wrong. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And again, like we talked about this last week, like this is happening in Wheaton. Like people in evangelical college towns are seeing, are seeing ICE trucks roll up and like just walking over to them and yelling at them and filming them. And that sometimes is enough to make them just run away. And that's what this is. You know, they're terrified of the fact that they live in an entire country of people who don't like that you're dragging their neighbors away at gunpoint and that's a sign to do more and not, you know, sort of give in to fear every time there's some executive order bullshit that happens.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

Talking about things where the regime has not been as successful as it wanted to. Right. Let's talk about the case of the Guatemalan children. We spoke about this on Ed, I think last week, potentially the week before.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

These were the kids who were grabbed from their beds over Labor Day weekend. And in that time, Judge Sparkle Soup Nananan issued an emergency protective order. But we've now seen a class action which would bring a more permanent protective order for these children. In Judge Timothy Kelly, I'm going to quote him here, he was talking about the government's case and he said it had, quote, crumbled like a house of cards. This is in part because a whistleblower's account contradicted the government's claim. And this claim was made by Acting Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Angie Salazar. Salazar said under oath that the children had been screened to ensure they would not be subject to abuse or neglect. The whistleblowers claimed that at least 30 of these children had been deemed ineligible for return or because they have indicators of being victimized by child abusers before. So returning them would obviously return them to that situation of abuse or potentially do so.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

The whistleblowers further stated that this was in an ORR database, Office of Refugee Resettlement database and such that the acting director would have access to that information. Right. The print had a lot of other evidence to Judge Kelly, who granted protection to the children in the case, and to quote, all unaccompanied Guatemalan children who have received neither a final removal order nor permission from the Attorney General to voluntarily depart the United States. So if you remember, the government had previously said that, like, they were resettling these children and that the DHS had nothing to do with it, that it was an Office of Refugee Resettlement operation.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And that their families wanted them home and the families didn't want them home. Right. They dropped that claim later. So this is a win.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They couldn't take these little children away in the night and spirit them off to somewhere where they would be in danger. Let's move on to executive order number two for this week's episode. This is one that you probably heard less about than the antifa one, but this is the quote, unquote, gold card executive order. God. Yeah. So the gold card Trump has been truthing about this, right? He trust about it. In June, also in June, Howard Lutnick announced that there were already 70,000 people waiting for these gold cards. Applications could be [e-mail].

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[James Stout]

And though the original stated price was 5 million, the executive order signed this week slashed the cost to just US$1 million.

[Garrison Davis]

One million.

[James Stout]

One million American dollars. And as our currency continues to crush it, that will only get more affordable for folks elsewhere in the world. So that's great. It's good. This is Trump's promised plan to sell permanent residency.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

When he first announced this, we kind of wondered, how's he going to do this statutorily? Right. How's he going to do it legally? Well, it turns out his plan is to consider the donation as evidence that the person is, quote, of exceptional business ability, and that makes him eligible for an EB2 visa.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So like, you could. You could have never engaged in business in your life. Right. You could receive a small loan of $1 million from your parents.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[James Stout]

And that would allow you to get one of these. Now, people will go through all the usual background checks. Right. Which, according to the eo, will be expedited. Right. You can't be like Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi is dead now. But like you couldn't be him with a million dollars. Right. And do this. For example, I like the idea that.

[Robert Evans]

Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi would like try to move to the US but would put his real name and his application for a visa.

[Mia Wong]

He'll never see it coming.

[Robert Evans]

No one's going to check for this.

[James Stout]

But everyone's like, oh damn, it's unfortunate, man. He shares that name with a bad.

[Robert Evans]

Guy and there's like a 50% chance that it would have gotten approved. That just like no one would have liked, would have had his name on a list.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's ticked out. Well, the guys, the Caliph of ISIS.

[Robert Evans]

Is like fucking living in Brooklyn.

[James Stout]

Oh yeah, he's going to all those founders meetings, you know, with other CEOs to discuss managing a large organization.

[Robert Evans]

I'm excited for his TED Talk.

[James Stout]

He's put his address as a tunnel in an HCS controlled area of Syria. No. Okay, so Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, to be clear, is dead. It was killed in the first Trump administration.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[James Stout]

A corporation donating for an individual would pay 2 million.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

So it's more expensive if a corps doing it on your behalf. And the cards will supposedly be gold and have Donald Trump's face on them, which is nice. At the same time, the Trump administration added a hundred thousand dollar bill to the H1B visa application. So it's a visa application fee. The H1B, if you're not familiar, it's an immigration scheme for skilled non immigrant labor. I'm particularly interested in this because this was one of the moments that the Trump coalition began to fracture in the early days of the Trump administration. Like, we saw the kind of tech right, as exemplified by Elon Musk, going like, no, H1B is a good. They allow them to bring people to this country and pay them not very much and take advantage of their skilled labor is what they allow the tech industry to do.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[James Stout]

Sure. And then we saw the more straight up white nationalist right being like, but those people aren't white. We don't want them here. And it seems like it is that cadre of the, the Trump coalition that, that, that part of his, of his ideological sort of support base which has won out in this instance. Right. Because companies cannot save money paying someone 20 grand less if they have to pay 100 GS to get them into the country.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like individuals could make that donation, I guess, and get the visa that way. Like if they came from a wealthy family and in another country and wanted, just desperately wanted to work in the US but generally H1BS are used because employees, they can't leave. Right. Your visa is tied to your employer, so the employment can be much less favorable, especially in the tech industry, where people are always shopping and changing jobs to try and get a better wage, better benefits, et cetera. They can't do that. And so that will be coming to an end. Finally, I want to talk about immigration judges. The Trump administration has fired even more of them. According to NPR, when Trump came into office, there are about 735 of these judges. There are now fewer than 580.

[Garrison Davis]

What?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's quite a remarkable cut, right? Not all of them were fired. Some of them took advantage of the quote, unquote, fork in the road offer. If we remember, like early. Right, early, early Trump 2.0 doge stuff, immigration judges, just so people understand, like, people are like, what, they fired a judge? How can they do that? Immigration judges are not part of the independent judiciary. They are. A better way of seeing them would be as civil servants. Nonetheless, they have in many cases, I guess, worked to bring the trappings and the procedures of due process to the immigration world. Right. Like in many cases, they, they have, you know, they're not just rubber stamping deportation orders. Right. People do have a chance to make their case in front of immigration judges. And Even in Trump 2.0, people are still getting asylum in the United States. The courts right now are extremely backed up.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

People are getting hearing dates in 2028. As we heard earlier this week, some courts, I read that one court is now running at 25% of its capacity. Like it's supposed to have 21 judges and it has five.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

So this means that people will be in detention for longer.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, that's like kind of intentional, right?

[James Stout]

Like, yeah, well, one could make that case very. Yeah. The DOJ has reduced requirements for staffing these positions and the Trump administration has authorised about 600 JAGs to military lawyers to take on the role. I don't think they're going to get the rubber stamp on deportations from those people that they expect to get. It depends on if they sort of hand pick those Jags or they just got a bunch of people from the National Guard. But sure, I don't think that that's going to be the just like straight up deportation factory that some people might assume it's to be. But nonetheless, right now, what we have is 580 judges, tens of thousands of people in detention and detention numbers and detention overcrowding growing every single day. So that is not good. Detention facilities are terrible at the best of times and conditions are pretty awful from the thing I've heard right now. Talking of things that are pretty awful, here are some products and services.

[Garrison Davis]

Stop settling for weak sound. It's time to level up your game.

[James Stout]

And bring the boom.

[Garrison Davis]

Hit the town with the ultra durable LG X Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go. Elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real, your music deserves it. The future of sound is now with LG x boom. And from a limited time, save [e-mail] with code fall25. Bring the boom x boom. There's a vile sickness in AM.

[Mia Wong]

You must excise it.

[Garrison Davis]

Dig into the deep earth and cut it out.

[Robert Evans]

The village is ravaged.

[Mia Wong]

Entire families have been consumed.

[Garrison Davis]

You know how waking up, up from.

[James Stout]

A dream, a familiar place can look completely alien? Get back, everyone. And if you see the devil walking.

[Garrison Davis]

Around inside of another man, you must.

[Mia Wong]

Cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes.

[Garrison Davis]

In the furthest corner of this town. As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manke, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoctown on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

The devil walks in abbostown.

[Garrison Davis]

In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.

[Mia Wong]

We had 30 agents ready to go.

[Garrison Davis]

With shotguns and rifles and you name it. But what they find is not what they expected.

[James Stout]

Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.

[Garrison Davis]

They go, is this your daughter?

[James Stout]

I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see.

[Robert Evans]

Her for like 25 years. Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women.

[Garrison Davis]

Must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcast.

[Mia Wong]

Hey, this is Matt Jones and I'm.

[Robert Evans]

Drew Franklin, and this is NFL Cover Zero.

[Garrison Davis]

We're just here to try to give you an NFL perspective a little bit different.

[James Stout]

Did you see the Colts pretzel? That was my other big takeaway from that game. What was that?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, My. We think NFL coverage should be informative and entertaining.

[Robert Evans]

And twice a week, that is exactly.

[Mia Wong]

What you're gonna get.

[James Stout]

Listen NFL Cover Zero with Matt Jones.

[Garrison Davis]

And Drew Franklin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Toyota, the official automotive partner of the NFL. Visit toyota.com NFL now to learn more.

[Robert Evans]

We're. We're back. And next, I think we're talking about tariffs. Wait a second. Do y' all hear that music?

[James Stout]

Oh, wow. We haven't had the song for a while. That was nice, wasn't it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that was good. That was good.

[Garrison Davis]

Just like old times.

[Robert Evans]

Bring it back. Just like old times Several months ago.

[James Stout]

Garrison has their alarm clock.

[Robert Evans]

Do you, Garrison?

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Okay, good. Why did you believe that would be. That would be too much. That would be too much. I. I would. I would need. We would need to intervene.

[James Stout]

Listen, if you're listening and you do.

[Robert Evans]

Stop all mia how are tariffs b do.

[Mia Wong]

So we have some tariff news. One is that we have a Supreme Court date for the case over whether a whole bunch of the tariffs are going to be allowed to continue or not. That is going to be on November 5th. We also have something a no movement, which I think is pretty interesting. So when last we spoke of tariffs, we mentioned that there were two countries that had gotten political tariffs on them. Brazil for arresting Bolsonaro and prosecuting him, and India for buying oil from Russia. And there was a lot of speculation that these would be fairly quickly resolved. They have not been. They are both still into effect. This is having massive consequences on a whole bunch of stuff. And the place that I want to focus on with this is US Agriculture because we have been seeing some extremely alarming things out of the American agricultural sector that has really not broken out of, like, Midwest agriculture circles very much. So one of the major consequences of, in some sense also the tariffs on Brazil, but one of the major consequences of the US tariffs on China is that like China did in 2018, China has simply refused to buy any American soybeans. The US grows for export 52 million tons of soy every year, and more than half of that is sold to China.

[Robert Evans]

And again, if you're conspiratorial and believe that, like, you know, the soy is ruining people, you should support this.

[Mia Wong]

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You should be opposed to this because you should be wanting to export soy to China so that you can make the Chinese woken soy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, yeah, There we go.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you should support the Export of soy to China, we're getting it out of the US and to our greatest geopolitical enemies.

[Mia Wong]

The other people who support the export of soy to China are American farmers. So, God, I guess this is like. This is like the farming thing that I say on this show. I did technically. There was technically a farm behind my house growing up. This is something that's very common in Midwestern agriculture, is a soybean corn root rotation. Doing a soybean corn rotation is good for the soil. So it's very, very common in American agriculture.

[James Stout]

Sure. You can fix nitrogen in soil with legumes.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. But in order to do this, you have to be able to sell the soybeans. And when this happened in 2018, this was kind of. Kind of behind the scenes. So there was a whole big trade set off in 28, in 2018. And one of the things that played a big role in ending it was the fact that China just didn't buy soybeans from the US For a year. And it was really, really, really messed with the American agricultural market. I'm going to read an account from the progressive farmer. This is a quote from a guy. For most soybean farmers in North Dakota, you're Looking at about 100 to $150 loss per acre on every acre of soybeans planted. Grackle said on his own farm, he expects losses could top $400,000 this year. Grackle said the losses are not just tied to individual farmers. It's the small businesses, local grocery stores, hardware stores, or local schools or financial institutions. They're all feeling the hurt from this.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So what is happening right now is that there is a bunch of soybeans that are being. That are just sitting there.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You know, like no one wants to buy them. And I've seen a few things talking about, like, okay, they're, you know, there's processing plants opening up. We can turn them into, like, soybean oil and use, like, in the US and do that. But, like, this is becoming a really serious logistical problem. Because the thing about corn and soybeans is that it's not like you store them in different things. Right. Because if you're a farmer, you're growing both of them.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The sort of storage hubs that they use are the same ones. And the problem is that there are basically stockpiles building up of these soybeans that can't be sold. And this is becoming an increasing problem because there's the corn harvest and you have to put the corn somewhere It's a good example of the kind of little miniature logistical nightmares that are cropping up all up and down the supply chain as these tariffs sort of continue to roll in and as the instability of them continues to roll in that you and I aren't seeing yet, or we haven't seen much of the effect of, other than some small price increases. But down the supply chain, there are increasing parts of the population who are just dealing with these just horrific logistical nightmares. This is going to be. We're going to see the acceleration of this with the de minimis exemption being eliminated. And in the meantime, China is just basically going to the country that the U.S. slapped 50% tariffs on. They're going to Brazil and attempting to basically supply their entire soybean demand, largely from Brazil, which is like the other major soybean exporter. So this is also very important politically because the American farming sector is very, very powerful. There have been some bailouts already, but they're not going to be able to sustain the American farming sector, especially if this goes on for more than one year. It only. There was only one year in 2018 when they didn't buy it and it was a fiasco. If this goes on for an extended period of time, it is going to cause significantly larger problems. Also, the economy was doing a lot better in 2018 than it is right now. I mean, it was still kind of a mess, but. Yeah, so this, this is going to turn into an increasing sort of political thorn for Trump among a bunch of people who are supposed to be his base because people are very, very frustrated about this and it is getting very little press attention. This is, this has been the American farming tariff update question mark.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, why would we want to hear about farming tariff news when instead we can just keep the culture war machine going to have everyone just gobsmacked over that instead? Like, that's the whole point of their political machine. It's not that everything is a distraction from something else, Right. It's that if you keep everyone engaged with this with like culture war nonsense, left wing terrorism, Charlie Kirk, whatever, like all of this stuff, no one's going to care about farming tariff news, even.

[James Stout]

If you're a big liberal outlet, right? You put this out there and like half your fucking audience is going to be like, Lola Mao. They voted for Trump. Sucks for them. Like, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And the question effectively is, are the people who previously had been kept in line by woke bathroom anti dei, like trans women in sports stuff going to be able to be kept in line when the soybeans are rotting in the field. And we will.

[Garrison Davis]

We will see.

[Mia Wong]

We shall see.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of some Charlie Kirk culture war, the Department of Education has partnered with the America First Policy Institute and Turning Point USA for a new civics program. This is called the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. They'll work with over 40 national and state organizations to, quote, spearhead nationwide initiatives to engage students, educators and communities in conversations about liberty, citizenship and America's enduring values, unquote. Other organizations a part of this coalition include PragerU, Moms for Liberty Alliance, Defending Freedom, Heritage foundation, and three explicitly Christian lobbying groups. Now, all of these groups are basically Christian lobbying groups, but three with like Christian or religious like names in the title of the organizations now partnering directly with the state for this educational coalition. Let's play a video from the new website explaining the initiative. American education was once a shining light.

[Robert Evans]

Guiding generations built on faith, heritage, patriotism.

[Garrison Davis]

But over the past 60 to 70 years, that brilliance has been dimmed.

[Robert Evans]

A great institution has been crumbled from within.

[Garrison Davis]

Playing footage of the civil rights era.

[Robert Evans]

Hatred for America, false revisionist history and.

[James Stout]

Division from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. Oh, that's a triggering phrase for me.

[Garrison Davis]

Critical race theory, gender queer drag queens. Now on the 250th, Linda McMahon emerges.

[James Stout]

The Department of Education, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition and partners across America.

[Robert Evans]

Are reigniting that light, restoring understanding and.

[Garrison Davis]

Returning education to the States where it belongs.

[James Stout]

For this was bunch of white kids.

[Garrison Davis]

That inspired the world.

[Robert Evans]

And under the leadership, leadership of President.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump and Secretary McMahon.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, my gosh.

[James Stout]

Are you kidding me? AI generated lighthouse.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. Stand in our way because we are Americans.

[Garrison Davis]

The future is ours.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Garrison Davis]

It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Garrison Davis]

So the framing of the video is that this lighthouse has gone out. And Linda McMahon emerges, polishes and fixes the lighthouse, which now shines across the nation, igniting our patriotic education.

[James Stout]

They couldn't find a lighthouse in America, so they, they aied one with audio.

[Garrison Davis]

From WWE Secretary McMahon. It's like the most hyper reality American brainwash.

[Robert Evans]

What do you even say to that?

[Garrison Davis]

This is, this is like the years of lead paint thing that we're talking about, like, yeah, talking about how American education's been like, totally destroyed. And they're playing footage of like, civil rights era protests and like, leaders. You can't parody this.

[Robert Evans]

Nah, no. And it's all set to the. To the soundtrack. And edited in the manner of like a big budget Hollywood Summer blockbuster from 15 years ago.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which I guess, you know, fucking conservative Christians are always about 15 years behind.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And they culture shit like, so that scans. But yeah, like, this is like. It sounds like a fucking. Who's the guy who did Independence Day? God damn it. You know what I'm saying?

[James Stout]

I don't know shit about popular culture, but yeah. We should just know that 70 years ago, education was segregated in this country.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, yeah, that's.

[James Stout]

By race, which is. Yeah. Yes. I just want. I just want to just sort of drop that nugget.

[Garrison Davis]

And I've listened in person to Charlie Kirk argue that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. Like that's what these people want.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I just want to join the dots for folks who haven't. And history is inherently revisionist. That's what we do. We don't just like, go like, oh, we've done it all now. We've worked it all out. No need for any more historians that said that. That's not how history works.

[Garrison Davis]

The chief education officer of Turning Point Education, this is his real name, Dr. Hutz H. Herzberg. Triple H said that quote.

[James Stout]

That was also WWE character. Is he the same guy?

[Garrison Davis]

No, this is a. This is a Christian educator.

[James Stout]

Oh, okay.

[Garrison Davis]

He says, quote, turning Point USA is more resolved than ever to advance God centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation. With that in mind, we are honored to partner with the distinguished organizations that comprise the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to restore, revive and reclaim robust American civics education for all students throughout our country, unquote. Earlier today is Wednesday. The state of Oklahoma has announced that they will be establishing TP USA chapters in every high school across the state.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, great.

[Garrison Davis]

Here's the superintendent, Ryan Waters of Oklahoma.

[James Stout]

I'm excited to announce today that every Oklahoma high school will have a Turning Point USA chapter. We have seen the outpouring from parents, teachers and students that want to be engaged in the meaningful work going on at Turning Point. They want their young people to be engaged in a process that understands free speech, open engagement, dialogue about American greatness, a dialogue around American values. We're so excited to partner with Turning Point USA with this initiative. For far too long, we have seen radical leftists with the teachers union dominate classrooms and push woke indoctrination on our kids.

[Robert Evans]

They fight parents rights, they push parents.

[James Stout]

Out of the classroom and they lie.

[Mia Wong]

To our kids about American history. What we're going to continue to do.

[James Stout]

Is make sure that our kids understand.

[Mia Wong]

American greatness, engage in civic dialogue, and.

[James Stout]

Have that open discussion. We will continue to do all that we can to make sure Oklahoma students have the best education possible.

[Garrison Davis]

Part of this announcement, he's written on Twitter, quote, radical leftist teachers unions have dominated classrooms for far too long, and we are taking them back. I think. Robert, we talked with this guy last year at the rnc.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Yeah, we sure did.

[Garrison Davis]

We might do something with that interview at some point.

[Robert Evans]

I wish he'd got. He'd been out of a job by now, but life. Life, huh?

[Garrison Davis]

The last thing I want to discuss today is quote, unquote, transgender terrorism, something I've seen many friends and. And posters across the Internet be really, really concerned about for, you know, a lot of good reasons. Ken Klippenstein has released a few articles the past few days. The first one from last week, quote, the FBI readies a new war on trans people. The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as violent extremists in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. That is how Ken framed that on the headline and for his tweet alongside the article, other outlets like them US has spread this reporting even further. Quote, FBI to categorize trans people as nihilistic Violent extremist Threat group report says the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as violent extremists. This framing is incorrect, and I will explain why in. In. In great detail shortly. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not getting ready to categorize transgender people as like, a category, as like. As like a class of people, as violent extremists. There is no evidence that this is currently what they're doing. There's no internal communications arguing this. Even the Heritage Foundation's proposal to create a new category of trans terrorism is not arguing this, as I will quote from here shortly. But let's get into what. What the. The first article from Klippenstein actually wrote based on a source inside the government. Quote, the senior official explains that there is no process per se, for dealing with trans people as a, quote, unquote, threat group, but feels that trans individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of violent extremism. Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender subjects as a subset of the Bureau's new threat category, nihilistic violent extremists, unquote. We've talked about nihilistic violent extremists on this show before, back in spring. And we all know that the Trump administration has been targeting trans people like this is something that everyone who listens to this show is aware of. This is, this is a real thing. But there is not actually any new verifiable information in this report. There's rhetoric from people like Donald Trump Jr. And, and, and right wing influencers talking about transgender terrorists and this trend of transgender terrorists as they have been for the past two years. Me and Mia did that piece about fake trans terrorists like almost two years ago.

[Mia Wong]

That was two years ago.

[Garrison Davis]

Now. We've been, we've been tracking this rhetoric for a long time. So stuff like that fills up a lot of the space in articles like this. But new verifiable information is actually quite short. In, in this article, Ken has a single unnamed official who quote, unquote feels like trans people could be labeled nihilistic, violent extremists. Now in, in Ken's previous reporting about this label, he misunderstood the NV E label. This label exists just essentially for 764, the childish exploitation group that operates around like Discord and Telegram and branch off groups from that. We've talked about them on the show here before as well. And the nihilist violent extremism term predates the Trump administration. This is, this isn't a Cash Patel thing. This, this predates the Trump admin. This was active last year. And it primarily is to categorize and map these child sexploitation rings and some overlapping communities like the school shooter fandom. But in Ken's article here, there's no like leaked documents in this report showing like current memos or communications on this topic. Ken's great for leaks, but there's, there's not leaked documents in this report. Now.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

As we all know and we've reported, the right wing hate campaign against trans people is a real thing. It's, it's real coming from the Trump administration, from state level government, as well as the entire conservative media apparatus. But I think right now especially it's really important to read reports like this very carefully. Yeah, trans fear mongering massively boosts social media engagement, which then can encourage people to use framing like this that might actually kind of be irresponsible. Now, a few hours before Kilpinstein published this first article, the Heritage foundation and their Oversight project released a petition to have the FBI designate a new category of violent extremism, which they call trans ideology inspired violent extremism, or tiv. Quote, TIV is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. It has led to an increasing Trend of TIV domestic terrorist events across the country. In recent years, TIV has played a role in the majority of mass shootings at schools. That is the Heritage Foundation's claim. The petition includes a list of quote, unquote, TIV motivated attacks, including multiple attackers who either were not trans or were clearly not motivated by trans ideology, as reporting at the time and government documents have shown, including acts from the past like six or seven years. But Heritage writes that, quote, experts estimate, no citation, that 50% of non gang related school shootings since 2015 have, quote, involved or likely involve trans ideology. Unquote. 50% have involved or likely involved. Yet in this list, they can only listen. Three school shootings. They can only list three. Even in their own list, which they say 50% likely involve trans ideology. There's been more than three school shootings this year.

[James Stout]

This month.

[Garrison Davis]

There's been more. Three school shootings not involving trans people this year. This. This is a wild, wildly atrocious stat.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's just fabricated, right?

[Robert Evans]

Like, and again, like, reality doesn't matter. Like, that's. That's the point.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, no, this is the Heritage Foundation. Like, come on.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But importantly, like, a violent extremism designation would not mean that all trans people as a class are deemed violent extremists. What it would do is it would create a category to use for investigations into violent acts. Graph patterns of violence, argue in court documents, and possibly include some preemptive surveillance on people or groups that are deemed as threats as a part of this threat group. But in the petition, Heritage says that, no, not all transgender individuals or their allies are domestic terrorists. Quote, they are even free to engage in offensive and hateful speech under the First Amendment so long as they do not stray into unlawful incitement, defamation, true threat, obscenity, or some other category of non protected speech. The domestic terror destination becomes relevant only when individuals or groups, 1, are motivated by an ideology that encourages, promotes or condones violence, and two, take or incite unlawful violent action or threats based on that ideology. Both criteria must be met. Unquote. That's from the Heritage's own petition. It's not. There's nothing in Heritage's own petition or Ken's article that says that trans people entirely are going to be deemed terrorists or. Or a domestic, like, extremist threat group. That's not what either Heritage or what the actual details of articles like Ken's is saying. And to further kind of show this divide, the Heritage petition also addresses the nihilist violent extremism label. As a completely separate thing, unrelated trans people that they do not want combined into one single category. I don't know why Ken keeps pushing on this, this label so much. It's really important to understand how trans people are actually under threat right now because they are. Right. The biggest threats to trans people right now are access to health care, specifically for people who are under the age of 18, and things like bathroom bans and trying to restrict transgender people from public life. But the other, you know, biggest threat to trans people right now is like, ourselves. And we don't need to do the government's work for them to keep us so demoralized. Spreading misinformation or unverified reports like this that just makes everyone panicked and freak out actually harms us and our community. The transpanic industrial complex is dangerous and people need to be very careful about this because it's an extremely dangerous time. And having an accurate assessment over what's going on is going to be crucial to survive the next few months to years.

[Robert Evans]

No. And again, we've seen this on the right and this has played a role in radicalizing a lot of people on the right and getting them to do fucked up shit is years of like, they're coming for you, they're coming for you. They're going to be coming for you tonight. Right. Like you're already dead. You know, there's money in pushing and there's clout in pushing hopelessness.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I don't want to be telling people everything's good because it's not. Things are very dangerous for trans people right now in a way they have not been at any point previously in very recent history. Things are much worse. Right. Nobody's denying that. But you, you have to look at like, the facts of how they're worse as opposed to not reading an article or analyzing what the article actually says or analyzing what the Heritage foundation says and saying they've. They've. They're declaring all of us terrorists. Right. Because that's not going to end well.

[Mia Wong]

No. Yeah, don't panic, organize. That's the actual solution to this. I also want to briefly note on. I've seen a lot of comparisons of this to the black identity extremism designation. And I want to bring this back to something that Garrison mentioned earlier about the way that the nihilist extremism category was like, specifically designed to target, like a specific sort of complex network of.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Pedophile discord servers.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. This is the same methodology that was used for black identity extremism. Black identity Extremism wasn't a category they conjured out of nowhere to go after all black people. It was a category that was specifically designed to go after specific activists in the wake of Occupy and the wake of Ferguson.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is completely just not the process that is happening for this. Right. Like, we're not. We're not dealing with. Okay. There is a specific group of trans activists that the government wants to target, so they're creating a label for it.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

We don't have any evidence of that at all. What we have is anonymous sources saying they feel like something might happen, that.

[Garrison Davis]

Trans people could be targeted. And you're like, yeah, trans people have been targeted. Like, that's. That's. That's what's happening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Are they going to be labeled denialist violent extremists at this point? Unlikely. Could the FBI consider adopting something like the Heritage proposal for. For tiv? Yeah, possibly. Yeah. That is. That is absolutely a possibility. Would that come into reality the same way that people are talking about it online or the way that headlines are framing it? No, it's not about designating all trans people as terrorists as a class.

[Mia Wong]

It's not about that. And it also wouldn't function like the black identity extremist thing, because, again, that was a. Like, they already had people they were going after, and they wanted a legal category that they could deploy in order to go after them. That's not what's happening here. They don't have, like, a list of, like, trans discord servers that they're about to round up for, like, doing a protest. Like, that's not what's happening here.

[Garrison Davis]

No, but they could go after people who make threats online, and that's something that I'm sure Cash Patel's FBI.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Would love to do. And if they can sort those people into a category like TIV to argue in a prosecution or to. Or to make, like, a flowchart to direct investigations, then that's the realm they're gonna use.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but. But even that we are so far away from them, even, like, starting that process, that you should be concerned about the actual threats from, like, I don't know. I mean, just, like, literally there.

[Garrison Davis]

There's. There's.

[Mia Wong]

There's been a series of attacks on trans people, just, like, in neighborhoods in Seattle by just, like, gangs of dudes.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

That's like an actual substantive thing that is happening. That is not this. That is not so sort of nebulous. Like, we are relying on opinions of unnamed officials we can look at and evaluate and Figure out what we're going to do about it instead of just giving into the panic industrial complex and panicking about it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, things that are framed bombastically like this go super viral and they spread a lot. And that's what the algorithms are encouraging. I mean, same thing with the algorithmic boosting of, you know, false flag conspiracy theories, because those are so much more satisfying. They, they spread like wildfire across blue sky and Twitter and like, even things like Instagram stories. And just be very careful about anything that goes viral because that claim is trying to influence your brain. It's trying to worm its way into your brain to take the form as a thought that you had yourself. And be super careful because this type of weaponized unreality has been used so successfully the past 10 years against the right. This is how the whole like, you know, migrant panic wave started. Lies about immigration, this, like, panicked framing, these things spread like wildfire online. And now you have large swaths of the country believing in this genuine like, like, you know, migrant crisis. And this is how social media functions to influence how your brain thinks and how your brain processes fact from fiction and forms like a collective sense of reality. And you are also being targeted by the same process in different ways than the right is, but this process is still targeting you as well. And it's like super important to like, read things critically and take time before jumping to conclusions because I don't think we need more quick, emotionally satisfying conspiracy theories in our life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, that's the news this week.

[Garrison Davis]

We sure did report it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's the news this week.

[James Stout]

We reported the hell out of it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, go away.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

It could happen.

[Garrison Davis]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Robert Evans]

Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Robert Evans]

Thanks for listening.

[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[James Stout]

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[Garrison Davis]

You must excise it. Dig into the Deep Earth and Cut it out from iHeart podcasts and grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. This is Havoc T, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio universe starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to hear the secrets.

[Mia Wong]

Of psychopaths, murderers, sex offenders?

[Garrison Davis]

In this episode, I offer tips from them.

[Robert Evans]

I'm Dr. Leslie, forensic psychologist. This is a podcast where I cut through the noise with real talk.

[Garrison Davis]

When you were described to me as a forensic psychologist, I was like, snooze. We ended up talking for hours and I was like, this girl is my best friend. Let's talk about safety and strategies to.

[Robert Evans]

Protect yourself and your loved ones. Listen to Intentionally disturbing on the iHeartRadio.

[Mia Wong]

App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

I always had to be so good no one could ignore me, carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling the limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through [e-mail] brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart podcast.