It Could Happen Here Weekly 203

Summary

It Could Happen Here Weekly 203

Date: October 11, 2025
Podcast: It Could Happen Here (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Hosts: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout
Featured Guests: Raven (journalist, Unraveled), Dr. Kaveh Hoda

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Episode Overview

This intense weekly episode documents America’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism with a focus on federal law enforcement crackdowns on immigration and dissent, government overreaches, the impact of new anti-vaccine narratives, and the implications of the Trump administration’s domestic and international policies. Chicago and Portland become battlegrounds for immigration enforcement and protest, while the federal apparatus leverages misinformation and state violence to further its aims. Woven throughout is the chilling normalization of military force in civilian spaces, the erosion of civil liberties, and struggles over truth in the press.

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1. Chicago Under Federal Siege: ICE and Border Patrol Crackdown

[02:45–44:33] Field Report: Raven (Unraveled) on the Chicago ICE Raids

Protests Turn Violent

• Raven's first-hand account of being shot in the face by riot munitions while covering an anti-ICE protest outside Chicago’s Broadview detention facility.
  • “I have like some swelling still in my jaw. I'm going to the doctor... But nothing's broken.” (Raven, 03:57)
• Feds indiscriminately firing “pepper ball” rounds that are leaving protesters and journalists injured.
  • “These guys, like, fucking ambushed them... shooting them in the face.” (Raven, 05:18)
• Broadview, a majority Black, working-class Chicago suburb, has seen routine, peaceful protests for a decade, but nothing as militarized as now.
• The local Black police chief and mayor express shock as ICE sets up illegal barriers and disregards city authority.
  • “ICE is disrespecting me as the police chief…” (Robert Evans, 18:59)

Federal Killings and Media Complicity

• ICE killed a man at a traffic stop with no clear justification; official explanations contradict available video evidence.
  • “They claim he had some traffic violations, which is true, but I mean, like, who doesn't?” (Raven, 07:57)
  • “People will just keep printing [DHS press releases]... and so that's the first... version of the story.” (Robert Evans, 08:48)
• Reports of ICE and Border Patrol units from across the US, notably Bovino’s LA Border Patrol, rounding up whole apartment buildings—a clear escalation.
• Mainstream Chicago news was slow to cover egregious raids; alternative and independent media rushed to fill the gap, but the flood of news outpaces newsroom capacity.

Raids, Detention Horrors, and Community Terror

• Description of massive night-time raid on a South Shore apartment—hundreds of armed feds, tenants of all backgrounds detained, children pulled out naked.
  • “I am still... trying to wrap my head around this raid because it's just... so horrific...” (Raven, 27:24)
  • “They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and... throwing them into U-Haul vans.” (Robert Evans, 28:02)
• ICE detention center at Broadview crammed far beyond intended capacity; horrid conditions, lack of resources, and no oversight.
• Whole neighborhoods now gripped by fear, reminiscent of historic ethnic cleansings (“Anne Frank hiding in her attic” comparisons).
  • “People are... hiding in their homes... worried that if they go to Sam's Club, they will be kidnapped by secret police.” (Raven, 13:16)
• Local police are reduced to traffic control as federal forces operate with total impunity; sometimes even local law enforcement is victimized by federal tactics.

Protest Suppression and Lawless Federal Agents

• Protester and press face escalating chemical weapons (tear gas) and riot munitions; no accountability, no ID; feds “like proud boys with badges and gear.”
  • “All policing is violence. All cops are violent... but there is something different happening here... zero accountability.” (Raven, 14:11)
  • “It's kind of like... if you just gave a bunch of chuds a bunch of military and police gear...” (Raven, 15:17)
• Raven: While all police are violent, the accountability gap for feds is especially dangerous.
• Local protest culture lacks “autonomous organizing” strength seen in Portland/Seattle, but response is evolving and no one feels safe.

Media, Narrative, and Ethnic Cleansing

• Mainstream, especially national, coverage often relies on DHS talking points or even fringe “UFO news” outlets used as regime mouthpieces.
  • “Their big thing is that they, like, quote, unquote, take UFOs seriously. And these are the people... who were given... the exclusive scoop…” (Robert Evans, 31:08)
• US founding violence—genocide and slavery—being openly iterated in present-day Chicago.
  • “The founding violence of the United States is the genocide of indigenous people and slavery. And you look at what they're doing right now... that violence just being replicated over and over again...” (Robert Evans, 34:57)
• The deliberate creation of “atrocity fatigue”—so many horrors, so fast, no one can keep up or organize an effective singular response.

Organizing Amid Terror

• Raven: In Chicago, autonomous organizing culture is newer; activists are adapting to a much more violent and less structured federal response.
• Calls for sharing information and breaking through media blackout—raising awareness is resistance.

“As bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just resign ourselves to total doomerism... We have the moral high ground.” (Raven, 49:09)

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2. The Weaponization of Political Violence and Media

[80:59–99:12] Political Violence, Partisanship, and Manufactured Narratives

• Garrison Davis covers the Grand Blanc, Michigan church shooting: perpetrator was a right-wing Christian, not a “leftist terrorist” as initially portrayed.
  • Both mainstream media and politicians quick to weaponize violence—picking and choosing incidents as partisan cudgels.
  • “The conversation… is such an open display of... picking and choosing shootings to care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies.” (Garrison Davis, 85:28)
• Recent high-profile shootings and their partisan framing:
  • Manhattan mass shooting, ICE facility shooting, Catholic school shooting—all with complex personal rather than clear political motivations.
  • “The state just tries to take advantage of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives…” (Garrison Davis, 93:12)
• False attributions and misinformation rampant across social media:
  • Right-wing influencers post false imagery and donations tied to shooters to falsely pin ideological motives.
• State rhetoric and new Trump policy targets anti-ICE, anti-Christian, or “leftist” dissent as terrorism.
  • “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced... undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot, quote, leftist terror cells in Texas.” (Garrison Davis, 95:28)

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3. New Anti-Vaccine Campaign: Institutionalizing Misinformation

[103:55–138:34] The Collapse of US Medical Institutions & Anti-Vax Policy

Anti-Vaccine Propaganda Goes Mainstream

• Dr. Kaveh Hoda discusses the systematic dismantling of public health and the rise of anti-vaccine cranks to positions of power.
  • “You can't put a hater in charge of the thing they hate the most. And that is what has happened…” (Dr. Hoda, 106:52)
• Trump parrots classic anti-vaccine tropes (MMR-autism lies, “split the shot” nonsense); no medical basis, just rehashing dubious Wakefield claims.
  • “If you delay vaccines, if you split them up… there is a much greater chance you will miss that. Measles is bad.” (Dr. Hoda, 110:46)

Hepatitis B Vaccine Under Attack

• Trump and RFK Jr. falsely paint Hep B as solely a sexually transmitted disease, urge to delay infant vaccination—a dangerous public health myth.
  • “There's just so much the fire hose in this... of nonsense.” (Robert Evans, 113:33)
  • “If you are exposed to [Hep B] as a baby... you're like 90%+ likely to get chronic infection.” (Dr. Hoda, 117:18)
  • “Why would you give an infant a vaccine for something they could only get through sex? … but it's just wrong.” (Dr. Hoda, 127:10)

Undermining Health Bureaucracy

• Dr. Marty Makary (new FDA head) responsible for popularizing “medical error is the third leading cause of death” – a misleading, unrigorous claim that's fuel for anti-medical narratives.
  • “It's like the herpes of medical misinformation… it always comes back.” (Dr. Hoda, 131:11)
• Anti-vax policy as both top-down (bureaucratic sabotage) and bottom-up (grassroots disinformation).
• “There are more of us than there are of them. Their ability to shape the world is disastrous, but... always in danger of simply being reverted first.” (Robert Evans, 137:44)

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4. Portland, ICE, and Federalizing the National Guard

[143:45–169:34] Militarization, Propaganda, and Resistance in Portland

• Right-wing influencer’s arrest outside Portland ICE facility triggers demands for military intervention; Trump admin seeks to deploy National Guard to “crush” anti-ICE protests.
  • “I’m calling on the Trump administration to launch a legal challenge against Oregon... and if necessary, deploy National Guard.” (Tim Pool, 147:00)
• Federal judge (Imbergot) blocks Trump’s attempt to federalize state National Guard, stating: violence elsewhere is no justification for federal troop deployment here; protests do not meet the legal definition of “rebellion.”
  • “To accept the defendant's arguments... would be to render meaningless the extraordinary requirements of 10 USC 12,406…” (Garrison Davis, 152:22)
• Administration tries workaround by sending out-of-state Guard (Texas, California) in defiance of injunction; judge expands TRO to block these deployments as well.
• Trump and Stephen Miller deploy “insurrection” language to justify potential invocation of the Insurrection Act for suppressing domestic dissent.
  • “His use of the word insurrection... is important.” (Garrison Davis, 155:11)

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5. ICE Surveillance, Suppression of Rapid Response, and Weaponizing the Law

[177:23–189:52] Criminalizing Dissent and Eroding Press Rights

• ICE shooting a woman in Chicago who was part of legal observer/rapid response teams; DHS claims she was “armed with a semi-automatic weapon,” but all evidence points to her just driving a car and being licensed to carry.
  • “The only thing we 100% know is that ICE shot this woman. That’s it.” (Robert Evans, 175:20)
• Tech activist tools (People Over Papers, ICE Block) face targeted takedown after right-wing pressure—ICE equating filming officers with “doxxing” and conflating it with “acts of violence.”
• Independent Atlanta reporter Mario Guevara deported after filming law enforcement at protests; press rights, especially for immigrants, in grave danger.

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6. Public Lands, Tariffs, and Economic Authoritarianism

[189:52–204:49] Roadless Rule, Logging, and Tariff Regimes

• Trump admin seeks to rescind Clinton-era Roadless Rule, opening millions of acres of national forest to road building & logging; overwhelming public opposition in comment period.
  • “Cutting roads into forests provides more ignition opportunities... forests with roads were four times more likely to have fires…” (James Stout, 191:23)
• Admin imposes stiff tariffs on Canadian lumber, furniture, and kitchen cabinets; talks of 100% tariffs on pharmaceuticals and foreign films, most of which serve as nationalist bluster as much as actionable policy.
  • “On November 5, the Supreme Court is going to start hearing the case against... tariffs that Trump has been doing...” (Robert Evans, 204:13)
• Trump proposes funding social programs like WIC with tariff revenues—a move that is dubiously constitutional and reveals an erosion of Congressional fiscal authority.
  • “Trump is going to fund this program with the money from one of the tariff programs... just very unconstitutional.” (Robert Evans, 199:29)

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7. Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the horror of the Chicago raids:
  “The last three weeks, four weeks has just been a gradual progression of like the most evil you've ever seen in your life. I don't even know what to say about it anymore...” (Raven, 28:35)
• On the violence of US founding being replayed today:
  “You're just, like, watching... that violence just being replicated over and over again every night. And... this conception of what democracy is like... is going to change completely, or... it’s going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide.” (Robert Evans, 34:57)
• On the relentless pace:
  “It feels like screaming underwater and no one can hear you.” (Raven, 11:04)
• On keeping hope:
  “We do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just resign ourselves to total doomerism... We have the moral high ground here.” (Raven, 49:09)

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8. Calls to Action and Closing Reflections

• Listeners are urged to break out of the media blackout by amplifying stories, correcting disinformation, and refusing to normalize these horrors.
• Despite overwhelming violence and the stifling pace of events, hope is anchored in public opposition to authoritarian policy—“there are more of us than there are of them.”
• The episode closes by honoring resistance, both historic (the liberation of Turin) and present, emphasizing the power of collective action even against great odds.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:45–44:33] Interview with Raven on ICE raids, protests, and federal violence in Chicago
• [80:59–99:12] Garrison Davis' monologue: church shooting, media framing, and state response to violence
• [103:55–138:34] Dr. Kaveh Hoda: the new anti-vax regime and hepatitis B vaccine
• [143:45–169:34] Portland update: National Guard, “insurrection” narrative, and federal overreach
• [177:23–189:52] Anti-dissent legal strategy, surveillance, and journalism under attack
• [189:52–204:49] Environment and economy: Roadless Rule, logging, and the world of tariffs

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9. Final Note

This episode is dense, harrowing, and urgent—a chronicle of policy, violence, and resistance as collapse becomes daily life. There is no rest, but perhaps in collective action and solidarity, there remains a pathway out.

Transcript

[Raven (Journalist)]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu. Every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop.

[Raven (Journalist)]

What?

[Ed Helms]

Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app app podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better wake the hell up.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Apostown. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out.

[Ed Helms]

From iheart Podcasts and Grim and Mil 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]

Welcome to Decoding Women's Health.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and and bringing vital information about.

[James Stout]

Midlife women's health directly to you.

[Mia Wong]

100% of women go through menopause.

[Robert Evans]

Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it?

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Robert Evans]

Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the it is the authoritarian takeover of the city Of Chicago. I have your host, Mia Wong. And today is an episode that was significantly delayed by the fact that our guest got shot in the face by riot munitions while attempting to cover an anti ice protest at an ice facility. And then her co worker was fucking grabbed by the feds the next day, which she was also still out at for reasons that are semi incomprehensible to me, because again, she was just shot in the face.

[Mia Wong]

This is.

[Robert Evans]

This is Raven, a journalist with the independent outlet Unraveled, which really, truly is doing a lot of incredible work on the incredible proliferation of ice raids around Chicago. Raven, welcome to the show. Oh, boy.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Oh, boy is right. Thanks for that intro. Yeah, we're in the shit right now. We're in it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I guess I want to immediately start this with. You are mostly. You're basically okay. From my understanding, from getting shot in the face of the right ammunition like a week ago.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I am. I am basically okay. I have like some swelling still in my jaw. I'm going to the doctor. We'll see like, if there's any soft tissue, like lingering effects later on down the line. But nothing's broken.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Which.

[Robert Evans]

Thank God. Holy.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Thank God.

[Robert Evans]

That stuff can really fuck you up permanently. Like.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. I mean, it's been several weeks now of the feds just pummeling people with these stupid little pepper ball rounds.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And like, the core of it is like metal. You know, it's like this little bullet thing with like, the pepper powder on the outside. So if you shoot someone in the face with those. I mean, like, we've seen horrific injuries these last few weeks among protesters. And also, like, people getting concussions from, like, you know, tear gas canisters exploding right by their heads and other things. Broken bones.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

From these really violent arrests.

[James Stout]

And.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, it's just been awful. Not gonna lie.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I was shot at, like, literally, I was like, taking a photo of a fed, like, in a press gaggle. We were all hiding behind this van while we're just like, being shot at. And this guy, I mean, he stared right at me and, like, right down the barrel of my lens like he knew what he was doing.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. Another reporter. It was like a similar situation where these guys, like, fucking ambushed them. Like, it was just two reporters, like, hiding behind a van. And these guys came up along the side of the fence and just started like, shooting them in the face with these rounds.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

So.

[Robert Evans]

And this has been at the protests at the ICE facility in Broadview.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, Broadview is like just a tiny little Suburb, like just outside of Chicago. It's still in Cook County. Majority black suburb, actually. Black working class. The mayor's a black woman. And now this ICE facility has been there for a while, obviously. Yeah, people were protesting there weekly for like over a decade, but nothing like what we've seen these last few weeks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Okay, let's go back in time a little bit because in between the last time we spoke to you and thou, there has been so much unbelievably horrible stuff in Chicago. I guess let's go back a couple of weeks and talk about the guy they murdered.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. So shortly after this latest ICE surge began, they killed a man at a traffic stop. Two ICE agents who were seemingly operating completely alone, didn't seem to have any backup with them. It was just these two guys in this car who jumped down on the sky and. Yeah, it feels, it feels like forever ago, but of course it was only a few weeks ago.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And you know, that's, that's an example of just like a police killing that we may never learn more about because, you know, it involves the feds.

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know, there's no timeline under which they have to release any information or like tell us anything about their, their own investigation into it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

So that is of course, really horrifying and horrifying to know there's kind of these, these missing few seconds of video. Right. Where we don't see the actual shot fired.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Or shots. Excuse me. We can sort of piece together what happened. But you know, this happened in a working class Latino suburb, a heavily Latino suburb, not very far down the road from the actual ICE facility.

[Robert Evans]

Like, as you were saying, part of what's really frustrating about this is we can't tell you why they stopped this person because they won't tell us. Right. We know very little about this other than they stopped a guy, he tried to drive away and they shot him. That's all we know effectively.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right. I mean, they, they claim he had some traffic violations, which is true, but I mean, like, who doesn't?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, I don't know if we're shooting people for traffic violations. This country is going to have like 10 people in it by the end of it. Like.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. He wasn't suspected of any, like, crime. No, I believe that it was just opportunistic. Yeah, that, that they were just looking for an easy target and these guys were acting like cowboys. I mean, like just doing this jump out by themselves. And, and, and also to be clear, I mean, like when they say he drove away from them. I mean, some of the video that we do have, it shows him slowly reversing backwards away from them. It's not like he just drove over the agents.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no. Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Which is. Was of course their initial narrative that he, like, hit one of them with his car and all this stuff. That of course, turned out to be false.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's also frustrating too, because, you know, in the. Well, I would say in the absence of better information, but it's the media. They will just straight up print, you know, no matter. No matter just how unbelievably absurd the lies are, they will just straight up print Department of Homeland Security press releases as if they have anything to do with reality whatsoever. Even as it becomes increasingly clear, even more than it's ever been, that you simply cannot rely on police press reports to understand what happens in a situation. People will just keep printing that. And so that's the first. That's the version of the story that goes out first, which is what everyone sees. Yeah. And they don't see the video where it's very clearly not what happened.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yep. It is a maddening situation. So, yeah, I mean, like, that happened and then almost immediately and like concurrently, of course, all of this other ICE activity started ramping up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And then around a week and a half ago, Bovino showed up and Border Patrol showed up. And now it's amped up even further because they're even worse than our regular ICE guys.

[Robert Evans]

Bovino and the Border Patrol people. Those are the people who seem to have been pulled out of Los Angeles and deployed to Chicago.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, Bovino moved this sort of larger Border Patrol operation here to Chicago. So there are Border Patrol units here from, you know, Arizona, from California, different places. And they've been doing sort of a combination of like, just strictly corny ass propaganda ops, you know, like driving around on their boats for photos combined with like actual terrors. Like a few nights ago, hundreds of feds raiding an entire apartment building of people in the middle of the night.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and I think we'll get to that raid in a second because it was unbelievably sort of gruesome and horrible. But yeah, I wanted to talk to you just about sort of what the general sort of ICE operations and then the Border Patrol operations have looked like in the city and what it's been like being in a place where there's just guys in masks dragging people off the street.

[Raven (Journalist)]

It kind of feels like screaming underwater and no one can hear you. Yeah, Just sort of witnessing this every day. And it is still highly dispersed. Right. Like Chicago and the metro area and the suburban counties where this is happening. It's a huge, huge area. So like we talked about last time, it's a real challenge to focus people's attention on because it, it can appear like the waters are calm like where you live. You know, like they're doing it in these very fast strike teams in this very dispersed way. So by the time you even hear about it, they're already gone. So many cars abandoned on the side of the road with like windows smashed out.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like landscapers. Work vans and stuff. You know, like people are just.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Rapid responders are just getting to sites where someone's reported something happening and all they find is like a busted out car.

[James Stout]

God.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And then they have to piece together like potentially what happened.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And additionally the broad view. So, like this, this ICE facility where people are protesting regularly, you know, it's, it's not set up to be a permanent detention center. It's just supposed to be like a temporary stopping point because Illinois doesn't have overnight immigration detention. So additionally, there are like so many extra people crammed into this facility that wasn't designed to hold them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And of course the conditions are horrible. You know, like, they don't have privacy, they don't have enough bathrooms. They're not getting fed, they're not getting medication. You know, like after the kidnappings, after the disappearances, then there's this pipeline of, of detention horrors that people are enduring. So this is, this is why people are protesting. Yeah, you know, I mean, this is why people are, are out there yelling at the fence. Because the people who are, who are brave enough to go out there and yell at the fence or to take the pepper balls or, or what have you, they, they are in agony. They, they're aware of what's happening. They're witnessing all of this and feeling like this needs to stop. And there are a lot of people hiding in their homes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know, like, like it's, it's true. Like, I don't always want to make like Holocaust comparisons because I feel like that that's what we always go to. But I mean, like, that's the most apt comparison that people comes to most people's mind. You know, they think of like Anne Frank hiding in her attic, like those kinds of things. And it's like that is literally where we are at right now. People are in hiding because they are worried that if they go to Sam's Club, they will be kidnapped by secret police.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I Think the. The behavior that they've been exhibiting against the protesters, too, has been very, very similar to what they've been doing to the people that they're grabbing off the street. I wanted to talk to you a bit about, like, what it's been like dealing with the way that the feds have been attacking the protesters constantly.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Well, these guys are fucking monsters.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm trying to thread this needle for people of, like, all. All policing is bad, right? Like, all policing is violence. All. All cops are violent. But there is. There is something different happening here as a result of the fact that there is literally zero accountability. And. And I'm not suggesting that, like, police accountability isn't a sham, because in general, it kind of is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. But.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But I think, like, you know, when you take away every single guardrail, these guys don't have to identify themselves and they don't have to answer to anyone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Their bosses aren't going to write them up. You know, it's. It's kind of like with any other job, Right. You know, take a city cop here in Chicago. Of course, it's rare that any of them ever actually get fired for the horrible shit they do.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But, you know, there's this sort of base level of knowing, like, well, I got to show up to work every day with my name on my vest.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And I also have, like, all these other bosses and all these other people who are going to, like, you know, maybe make my day harder if I, like, really fuck something up. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And so when we're talking about the feds, there's just nothing. There's just nothing there. They can literally do whatever they want on top of, like, just not having the same level of, like, quote, law enforcement training. I mean, we've been watching these guys for weeks, like, hurt themselves with their pepper ball guns. Like, they literally are, like, dropping shit as they're, like, running around the process, like, like, watching people have made, like, Call of Duty comparisons or, like, Proud Boy comparisons. And, like, it is kind of like that. It's like if you just gave a bunch of chuds a bunch of, like, military and police gear, and we're like, all right, go out and, like, pretend to be a cop. And that's, like, literally what it feels like. And so I'm trying to thread this needle for people of, like, yeah, all cops suck. But, like, what's going on with this is, like, so much worse. Like, they're just out there, like, shooting at people randomly, like, and, you know, for no reason. Like, it is just one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I also. I want to put this into perspective. Like, you have also covered a lot of protests in this city.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, I've covered a lot of cop violence. I've been to a lot of protests. I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at this point. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And there's just certain, like, things that you're used to seeing and certain. There's a certain predictability sometimes to, like, a lot of their movement.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And what's interesting, too, is, like, in some ways, they are actually more militarized just in terms of, like, their riot formations and, like, how tightly coordinated their units are because they practice and they train for, like, crowd control stuff all the time. And then you have these just, like, ice sheds running around with, like, way more gear, and they look way scarier, but they're, like, way less organized and way more chaotic.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And there's not enough of them.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Raven (Journalist)]

So, like, they're not even, like, doing a good job of, like, backing each other up, you know, like, in the field. Like, I'm just watching them, like, leave their own backs unwatched and, you know, doing. Doing things that are, like, dangerous.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

For.

[Raven (Journalist)]

For them, like, they want to act like a military unit, but they're, like, definitely not.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I mean, people have made the comparison of, like, proud boys, which I think. I don't know, it kind of works in a sense. Like street fighters.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like, is what they're acting like, you know? Yeah. It's just. It's just been super violent, super awful. Chicago does not have really any experience with, like, these just feds in general, like, to this level. I know that out in Portland for years now, like, there have been various protests outside of the ICE or something. Like, there's just. There's been, like, a lot more. A lot more fed presence out in Portland. Seattle.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Throughout the past few years of protests, I've seen, you know, people interact with them, and we just. We've had nothing like that here. So this is also, like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Very unprecedented, like, for this region.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Because usually CPD is, like, brutal enough that they don't. You don't end up with, like.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Federal deployments. And now it's like, oh, boy.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. Well, and also, keep in mind, this is all happening in broad view, so, like, they don't even have. I mean, there's been. There's been tensions and arguments and discussions around what's happening with their local police department and just sort of the interface here too, because it's like this tiny little police department is now having to sort of manage what's going on with this ICE facility. And they're not directly like assisting ICE with fraud control, but they are like basically setting up a perimeter around the area.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And so then like their guys are getting tear gassed and like complaining about it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Was. Was it Bronzy the police chief who like finally was like, oh, holy shit, I've never been treated this racistly by a police officer before. And I was like, oh my God.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

God.

[Robert Evans]

Like you're just now realizing that you're the baddy, like when it finally like happens to you, like, come on.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Oh yeah, he, he went on, on like ABC or whatever and was just did this whole interview about like, well, ICE is disrespecting me as the police chief and it's just like, like, what did you expect?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, man, you signed up for the racism organization and you were like, ah, but I'm in charge of my local, my local chapter of the racist association, so it'll never happen to me. Was like, oh, you mean there's other people who are higher up in the racism police? Like, oh God.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. So that's been, that's just been like a weird side story to this of kind of like the mayor and the police chief and the fire chief are not thrilled about what's going on. And they're like looking into the legality quote of the fence that ISIS put up just like across this street that goes past their facility, which is in this kind of like tucked away sort of industrial park thing. But there are homes like right on the other side and you know, they've just blocked off this entire street and there is like a business on the other side. You know, it's like obviously a huge fire hazard to just like block a whole road like that. They didn't ask permission to like put this up.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Not to mention a hazard for the people in the detention center, which is now boarded up and has this huge fence across the street. It's like, oh my God. If there was a fire or like an emergency and they needed to evacuate the people inside.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I mean, like, obviously people would die.

[Robert Evans]

It's this incredible mix of both blatant disregard for the safety of anyone involved and also just wanting to hurt people. And it's, it's this incredible fusion of they are both incompetent and malicious, which is. Yeah, right.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Which is not a great combination.

[Robert Evans]

No. Let's talk about this raid in South.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Shore Yeah, well, you know, we don't have a. We don't have a ton of details on the true extent of this because it happened at 1 in the morning. So two nights ago, hundreds and hundreds of federal agents showed up to an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood, which is a predominantly black neighborhood, where a number of newly arrived migrants settled because there's cheap housing there. So when Governor Abbott started busing people here a few years ago, that is one place where, you know, a number of people found housing. And unfortunately also too, there's like a lot of slum lords down that way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, cheap housing means shit in Chicago.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, like, of course, I used to.

[Robert Evans]

Tenants organizing that shitty. I have seen shit that, like, I have seen people sewage, like, running out of their bathtubs. I have seen. I have seen places with no electric, like, literally no electricity, no lights, no running water, like actually literally like frozen solid in the winter and no one can contact the landlord. And those were in parts of the city that were like, not even that badly off. The apartment that I had there almost fucking killed me from dust inhalation. And like, that's like. That's like a. Like a normal cheap apartment. It gets so much fucking worse. The pictures from like inside of the apartment, not even just the parts where like, yeah, all the doors are blown off. It's like these apartments fucking suck because they're run by. They're run by fucking slum lords. And yeah, like, the housing situation in Chicago, so much of it is so it's never going to get repaired because these landlords don't give a shit because they can just keep extracting money from it because, you know, one can go anywhere else. And.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, these people were living in really bad conditions. I've heard that like, a lot of people were like scribbled quadrupled up in units, you know, I don't. I don't know what it looked like before it was rated.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But it's like virtually empty now. I mean, like, there. There were some. And to be. To be clear, like, what happens to back up a little bit, you know, they. Hundreds and hundreds of feds showed up at this building in the middle of the night and reportedly detained everyone in the building. So there were like, yeah, you know, people in the building who aren't immigrants, like black people who live in the neighborhood. You know, there was one woman being interviewed on broadcast who was like an older black woman, you know, who was just like, yeah, I was like, detained. The FBI, you know, like in the middle of the night, like, asking me if I'm a citizen, you know, like, it's just absolutely fucking wild that this happened. Also as of today. Granted, this might change by the time your podcast is out.

[Robert Evans]

Importantly. So we're recording this the night of Wednesday, October 1st. Who fucking knows what we'll have learned about this or what will happen in between this. And when it comes out, probably Monday, probably there will be new horrors. If you've heard about, like, the horrors in Chicago, and it's not in this episode, it's probably because it happened after we recorded. Things are happening at a terrible rate.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. So as of today, Wednesday, October 1st, I could not find a story on the Sun Times or the Tribune website about this raid. And I think, of course, a lot of people want to indict mainstream media for not covering things, which, like, is fair sometimes. Don't get me wrong. They've been trying. Things are happening so fast now, and there are so many horrible things happening every day that, like, no newsroom can keep up.

[Robert Evans]

Wait, red alert. Red alert. They did finally get a story up five minutes ago. So mid recording.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I checked the book.

[Robert Evans]

They got one up. They got one up.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Is it the Tribune or the Sun Times?

[Robert Evans]

Sometimes. Sometimes.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Okay. Okay. Well, it only took them two days. Okay, sure. I haven't read it yet. Maybe, maybe it's a good story. I don't know. Maybe they went really in depth.

[Robert Evans]

It's not terrible. Yeah, it does actually seem. I mean, it's pretty long. I mean, I, I, I, I, I'm gonna read one quote from it to get people and unders. And this is, like, I actually think is pretty representative of, like, the independent media coverage that I read of it. Our own federal agents and military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments. Some naked residents, witnesses said that is the thing I've seen in every report about this is that a bunch of the people just literally didn't have clothes on because they were dragged out of their bed. They were like, naked children. Like, naked. Like, people holding naked babies being pulled out of their fucking apartments. Like, Jesus fucking Christ.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

God.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And, and this was, like, such a huge number of beds that, like, the buses were rerouted around the scene. I mean, like, there's questions. There's questions right now over, like, the level of CPD involvement in, like, protecting the scene. And this was not just ice. There were a ton of FBI and a ton of atf.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, it's like, okay, what, what, what, what is the FBI doing right now they are fucking dragging naked children out of their fucking homes. Like out of their fucking apartment at one in the fucking morning.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And they were, they were in, in fucking moving vans. Like Patriot Front. Like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Fucking horrible. I mean, like I got, I remember seeing a statement where it was like they were denying that they had loaded any immigrants into moving vans.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. Which, like, maybe that's true.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Maybe only the FBI.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like I, I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I wasn't just like haunted by like, what are the reports that I saw? They're talking about like they separated all of the black people into like one van and all the non black people to another one. And it was just like, oh God, like these people. There's another one thing. I think this is in the story that you, that you wrote about this. Or they literally, like fed literally said fuck them kids.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Oh my God. I don't, I definitely didn't write that, but I believe that someone said it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was. Oh my God.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I believe it. I'm, I'm, I mean, I'm glad to hear that. Five minutes ago the sun signs covered it, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They finally got around to it.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Good for them.

[Raven (Journalist)]

To be clear, like, they probably interviewed a lot more people than we had capacity to. You know, it's been obviously a huge challenge to even cover all this stuff like as this tiny, random, weirdo ass news outlet. Like, yeah. And we're still figuring out as we go. But yeah, I mean, this, this, I am still. It has been two days and I am like still trying to wrap my head around this raid, this specific raid, because it's just, yeah, so horrific that this happened. And of course, like the timing, like they knew what they were doing by timing it in the middle of the night. Of course.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm going to fucking read the Times article because I've just been reading it while you were doing it. Like Watson, someone who lives across the street said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes and into U Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers. It was heartbreaking to watch, said Watson. Even if you're not a mother, seeing kids come out buck naked and taking from their mothers, it was horrible. They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and throwing, apparently allegedly throwing them at U Haul vans.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like, yeah, I mean this is like psycho. The last three weeks, four weeks has just been a gradual progression of like the most evil you've ever seen in your life. I don't even know what to say about it anymore, honestly. Because it feels like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Feels like our only way of grappling with things like this is by making comparisons to other things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And I don't know that that is really helping anybody right now, but, you know, it's. It's, it's ethnic cleansing. It's genocide. It's like literally.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I was just saying earlier today when, like when you drill down to it, like they're disappearing like vast majority Latino men. There are, there are some women, it's not only men, but like they are definitely targeting like mostly Latino men. And like these are people who are migrating here from Central America who are like, if you look at their lineage, mostly like indigenous to this fucking continent, unlike white people. You know, it's just an extension of like the American project, like, of the white nationalist, like extermination of the people indigenous to the Americas. Like that is literally what's happening like right now.

[Garrison Davis]

So it.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, it does not feel like, I don't know, like, like enough people get it to the level that they should.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, and that's, I think, like one other thing I wanted to talk to you about was like the way the press bubble has worked around this where again, the fact that federal agents dragged naked children from their homes at one in the morning in the third largest city in the United States. That is a story that is hitting the mainstream Chicago press today two days later. And I think the only national coverage of it that I've seen are from people who are basically like repeating the scoop that was given to this like, unhinged UFO outlet.

[Garrison Davis]

What?

[Robert Evans]

Who were the people that got the exclusive? Oh, have you not ran into this yet?

[Raven (Journalist)]

No, I have no idea what that is.

[Robert Evans]

Hold on, hold on. Let me, let me. God. Fuck. Okay. I'm very excited to tell you about this. This is so unhinged.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I saw like the propaganda video that they made about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So the group that got like the exclusive like press release thing from the feds, which is basically being like reprinted by Newsweek, who are just a joke at this point. Like their description of it is like federal agents repelled from Blackhawk helicopters in the rooftops of Chicago residential buildings, targeting trend agua gang members.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

According to News Nation. And I was like, what the fuck is News Nation? Like, I've. I have a pretty good grasp on like all of the weird right wing news outlets. I'd never heard of this one. I looked them up and the first like big thing that I saw about them was that, well, A. They're the people. They're the person that Chris Cuomo went to after he was, like, publicly disgraced as a journalist. And the second thing I saw about them was that their big thing is that they, like, quote, unquote, take UFOs seriously. And these are the people who were given, like, the exclusive scoop on. This is like, the UFO outlet.

[Raven (Journalist)]

That is so funny. That is what I watched the propaganda video that we were watching about it. Yeah, it was News Nation. I just thought it was like, I don't know, some right wing outlet, like any other.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's right. That too. I looked at it and, like, the Wikipedia article was like, there's a section titled UFOs. I was like, what the fuck?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Great. Great. I didn't know about the UFO connection. I mean, I saw them. I saw their reporters, like, actually at the protests, like, interviewing, like, the one guy in a maga hat who showed up to counter protest. Like, of course that's who they interview.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, of course. Of course.

[Raven (Journalist)]

So that's good to know that they. UFO weirdos.

[Robert Evans]

Regime approved. Regime approved media outlet. The UFO guys.

[Mia Wong]

Oh.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I mean, the.

[James Stout]

The.

[Raven (Journalist)]

The official, like. Like, DHS line on this entire thing. Is that trend Aragua? Was this, like, this entire apartment building was a trend Aragua hideout.

[Robert Evans]

Just like.

[Raven (Journalist)]

No, it wasn't like, like, it's literally just the same fucking thing that Israel does about Hamas, right? When they're like, oh, yeah, this hospital that we're bombing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's a Hamas hospital.

[Raven (Journalist)]

There's Hamas tunnels underneath. I mean, it's like the exact same shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the. The connection you made earlier to this functioning as an extension of, like, the genocide that founded this country. I think it might have been Hannah Arendt.

[Mia Wong]

I.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, I. I want to attribute this to her Hannah Arendt, which, like, it's kind of a mess because of her.

[Garrison Davis]

Don't.

[Robert Evans]

Do not ever look up Hannah Arendt stuff on segregation. Or actually maybe do, if you want to see the worst argument you've ever seen in your life where, like, famed intellectual Hannah Arendt says that segregation is, like, a defining quality of, like, a free society.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

Awful, horrible, rancid.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm not like, a super expert on Hannah Arendt, but I definitely did not know that, so.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, no, that people don't. I'll say this. White people do not be bringing that shit up. Everyone el like, oh, God.

[James Stout]

Holy.

[Robert Evans]

You were like, a major segregation, like, intellectual who got brought out to be like, segregation is actually good. No, because it's free association. But I Think it might have been her. It might have been someone else I've been trying to look for who had this idea, and I haven't been able to find who it was. And I vaguely remember being a rent, but her. This has all been a very long wind up saying, like, there's. There's an idea that I ran into back when I was in my sort of, like, days in the academy about the way that societies reflect their founding violence. And, you know, the founding violence of the United States is the genocide of indigenous people and slavery. And you look at what they're doing right now, you're just watching sort of in miniature, that violence just being replicated over and over again where, like, you're tearing fucking mothers from their children in the dead of night. And it's the same people, right? Like, this is an apartment building where almost everyone is black and the people who aren't black are immigrants. Yeah, Right. And obviously, like, some of them are both.

[Mia Wong]

But, like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you know, but like, you're just, like, watching the founding violence of this country just being played out over and over and over again every night. And it's this thing where, like, I don't think on a fundamental level that this thing that we've built, this sort of, like, this conception of what democracy is like, this conception of what the state is, this conception of, like, what this country is, is going to survive this moment. Either it's going to change completely, or the part of it that was nominally a democracy is going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide over and over again.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

I quote this song a lot. Song of choice by Peggy Seeger. That's about the rise of fascism that I think about a lot that has. One of the lines is, today the soldiers took away one, tomorrow they may take away two. One April, they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And, yeah, they're just fucking taking people away in the night right now. Like, that's. That's the stage of this, where we're at. And either something fundamentally changes or.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

You know, like, the end of that song is either, like, they take you or at the end, they don't take you because they know you didn't care.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right. And, yeah, I mean, look, I've been. I've been covering civil conflict and violence, you know, like, more or less for the last five years. Right. I was at January 6th, like, literally in the middle of the mob. I've seen a lot of shit reporting on it.

[Robert Evans]

Make this very clear reporting on it.

[Raven (Journalist)]

To clarify, I was there as a reporter. I was not cars. Although my fascia stalkers might insist that I was part of, like, an antifa conspiracy to infiltrate.

[Robert Evans]

But.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know, I've seen a lot of shit the last five years, obviously, and I think this particular moment feels like. Yeah, yeah. Like we're kind of, you know, like we're a marble at the top of, like, a spiral. And it's like either we're going to keep rolling down or somebody, like, jams it or takes the marble up. You know, like, there's just. This is a. This is a spiral. Like, there are so many factors that are going to contribute to this getting worse if we do not significantly alter course. And I think, you know, this feeling that we have locally of, like, we're screaming underwater and nobody can hear us, I'm sure is share a sentiment that is shared in la, that is shared in dc, that is shared in. Yeah, all of these cities all over where ICE is doing similar shit. It can make us really angry. I mean, I've been really angry at times in the last last month about the lack of, like, attention, whatever. But then I think about how everyone is overwhelmed because there's so much horrible shit happening every day on so many places.

[Mia Wong]

Like.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like we just can't keep up anymore. Like, none of us can keep up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, I mean, like, I'm in Portland right now and, like, it's my job to keep track of this, and I can't tell you at this exact second whether a federal deployment to Portland is on or off. I think it's currently off. But also, by the time you're listening to this, who the fuck knows? And, like. Yeah, like, right. I don't know. There's an andor line about how it's easier to hide a thousand atrocities than it is to hide one because you can just keep ramping the tempo up.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Exactly. I don't know. I'm not a historian. I'm just a journalist, so maybe. Maybe you would know better than me.

[Mia Wong]

But.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But I feel like we are literally already in a civil war. We just don't know it yet. Or, like, we're waiting for, like, some specific thing to, like, prove it, you know? Like, I don't. I don't know. Yeah, I think generally nobody knows until it's like, already.

[Robert Evans]

You're.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You're already in it. To me, it feels like we're in it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And. But I. But I also wonder if that's just the cognitive effect of, like, us being Here, literally in it, because so much is going on. And then thinking like, well, if the ice surge subsides two months from now, is it gonna still feel this way? I don't know. I mean.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

To me, it feels like we've got several more years of the Trump regime at least.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

If we look at this in the sense of like, well, they're escalating and then also this is going to keep going for several more years. Yeah. That's a terrifying concept.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Where do we go from here if it's just going to get even worse?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I don't know. I think I've been there a lot recently. I don't know. It's the thing I've been telling listeners of this show is that, like, the upside of all of this is that everyone hates them.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, their proof of ratings are so bad, everyone fucking hates them. And all of this stuff is hideously unpopular. And the giant economic collapse that is very obviously going to happen when the giant AI bubble that is like, that is like a third of the US GDP pops when it inevitably dies because it doesn't make any money. They're doing all of this in a situation where the economy still appears to be functioning. And when that shit implodes on them, shit is going to be even worse for them than it is now. But also, on the other hand, unless people do things about it, then it doesn't really matter how popular or not they are, as long as no one is willing to stop them. And I guess that's the last thing I kind of want to close on is about. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen organizing wise, that you can talk about that have been effective?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Well, I think people here are still figuring it out. These protests outside of the ICE facility, you know, there has been a lot of autonomous organizing. Chicago does not have the same entrenched autonomous organizing culture that you see in, like, Portland or Seattle for, like, a ton of reasons.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Which are, like, beyond the scope of this episode. And the minute.

[Robert Evans]

The minutes that we have left, like 15 part series of the history.

[Raven (Journalist)]

The history of organizing and Chicago and, like, how we're in this specific moment. You know, it's important to remember, like, this is a city where, like, the FBI murdered Fred Hampton right in his bed.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

So there's a lot of tension between different organizing factions about how they want things done. And a lot of it is fear driven.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

For good reason. Because people are terrified.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And, yeah, they're still figuring Stuff out. I mean, I think, for lack of a better term, last Saturday, people got their shit rocked by border patrol. You know, they were so violent. They were so aggressive. They were just so out of hand. Just, like, immediately, too. I mean, it was just like. Yeah, zero to 60 instantly. Like, there was just Saturday, we saw them just immediately tear gas and. And shoot at people over nothing. Like, nobody was doing anything. And they just assaulted the crowd with, like, the most tear gas I've ever seen in my life. So I think folks were definitely underprepared for that. But that doesn't mean that it's, like, insurmountable to resist something like that. I think there are questions surrounding the best way to protest this specific building because of the location. And it's tough because it's not in Chicago. It's hard to get to for some people.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Yep.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But I don't want to. I don't want to write anybody off. I mean, I think people are just still figuring things out. Like, it's. It's. It's ICE is adapting, border patrols adapting. And so then organizers also have to adapt. Like, it's like this tennis match, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

And so, you know, we are. We are also very much here, our activists are not used to, like, a huge. And our press also, by extension, are not used to, like, a huge amount of chemical weapons.

[Robert Evans]

Chicago doesn't use tear gas. Like, historically, like, they just beat people.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Or, like, shoot them with, Right. Munitions. Like, they don't tear gas. The thing I was literally always told, like, growing up in the city as an activist was like, if they start using tear gas, they are one step away from shooting you.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And they finally did it in 2020, which is the first time anyone had seen it in, like, decades.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And the fact that, like, they're just doing it all the time now, like, Jesus Christ.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Well, the feds. I mean, we saw this in L. A at the beginning of this summer where, like, border patrol specifically, like, just has this enormous amount of chemical weapons that they, like. I don't know, maybe they're gonna expire soon and they have to use them all. Like. Like, I don't know. I don't know what the rationale there is other than just being evil.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But it's like, literally their first choice of, like, they're just. I mean, they're fucking enjoying it. They're fucking enjoying it. They're enjoying.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Shooting at people, tear gassing them, playing G.I. joe, like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, I will say it does also raise the question, like, how much of this stuff do they actually have? Because, like, 2020. They went through decades of stockpiles. Right, right. And, like, this is the thing that, like, I don't know, someone who has a lot of time and is an investigative journalist should try to go track down how much of the, like, country's tear gas supplies they've been able to replenish, because they used a lot of it on us in 2020. And.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I mean, this is. I don't know if it is famous. I guess in my circles, it's kind of a famous story that one of the. One of the South Korean military dictatorships was taken down by a student protest movement that calculated exactly how much tear gas the police had and did this thing where they would do these marches where a whole bunch of people would show up and the police started asking them, and they would just slowly keep retreating and keep retreating until they ran the state out of tear gas.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I mean, I. I hope to see that level of strategy in America at some point.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, inshallah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Inshallah. Like, you know, like, nothing. Nothing, nothing is impossible with the power of really, really pissed off students.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the. I'm not familiar with the manufacturing process for these chemicals. Like, how long does it take to, like, revision, replenish, and where do they source it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this is. This is 100% A. Hey, I know a bunch of journalists listen to this podcast. If one of you wants to go do this, you would be doing a great service to everyone in this country.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like, right? I'm, like, assuming that it's not made in the United States and they're, like, importing these things.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of it is a huge, huge amount of it. Maybe I'm wrong, because American. American tear gas ends up, like, all over the world because we're, like, one of the big suppliers of it.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Okay, well, then I was mistaken. The Popper Ball gun dispenser company apparently is based in Lake Forest, so it's actually local.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, interesting.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's in Chicago. Ooh. Well. Oof.

[Raven (Journalist)]

It's just like a glorified paintball gun, basically.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The thing I've been getting from listening to you talk about this and from talking to other people, is that, like, both part of what's making this so horrible and also maybe where they fail is that these people don't know what they're doing. They just like violence.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And liking violence and being willing to hurt people is a very effective short term strategy for causing violence.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

But it remains to be seen whether it's an effective long term strategy for like holding power and accomplishing their goals.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. It feels like, it feels like their operation is brittle, like it wouldn't take a lot to impede it. But because they are so violent and so out of hand at just the slightest resistance, it's still really challenging to figure out. I mean, and to your point earlier about everybody hating them, I mean, that is palpable. I have heard the anger and the rage pouring out of people at these guys, you know, like, yeah, of course it's palpable how much people hate them, how much what's going on. Of course they're struggling to hire. Of course they're all wearing masks because they're fudgeing, terrified they're going to be docs, you know, like, yep, they know that they're hated.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Raven (Journalist)]

But that's also a double edged sword because I think knowing that everybody hates you anyway, well, that's just also sometimes going to make you even more violent because you don't care anymore. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I mean, I think the traditional social movement gambit has been like, the more people can see how violent they are, the more people will go out to resist them. And I think right now we're in this scenario where because of the sort of media blackout and like the media bubble that's been put around this, it just hasn't been getting out the things that they've been doing. And I think that is also a thing that, that you random listener can do things about in terms of like, hey, tell people, you know, that like, yeah, there's like a federal occupation of a city and they're like dragging naked children screaming from their homes, like tearing them away from their parents. Like that's a thing that you can, like that's a thing you could directly do that is a very, very low lift.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Yeah. And also countering this like, like National Guard misdirection thing that is just like constantly going on where it's like every fucking two days Trump and Pritzker are arguing about, you know, 100 troops coming to town who are essentially just infrastructure for ice. They might block some roads, but like they're not the main threat.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to tell people? And then also, where can people find and support your work as you go? Hopefully not get shot again?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Well, I've resigned myself to the fact that I get shot again. But they can find us at unraveled on all the social platforms. Unraveledpress.com and I think the only other thing I want to say is as bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just resign ourselves to total doomerism. We have the moral high ground here. We are doing the right thing and they are not. And we can win this.

[Robert Evans]

I want to close on the story that came to mind when you said that, which was the story of the liberation of Turin in World War II, where Turin was one of the great industrial cities of Italy and it's directly under the occupation of the Nazis. By the end of the war and ahead of the Allied advance, the city plans an uprising and the SS commander who is running the city explicitly tells them if you do this, we will turn this into another Warsaw. And they do it anyways and they beat them. All of these factory workers who had guns smuggled in successfully do an uprising and defeat an SS Panzer division and just kick the shit out of them and liberate Turin. And you know, those were people facing odds that were so much worse than the ones they were facing today. They were facing a straight up military occupation by the SS and they beat them and they freed themselves. And you know, history is replete with dictators who thought that their occupations would last forever until one day the Americans were withdrawing from a rock and the only thing that's eternal is their fear of the uprising that will one day destroy them.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

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[Robert Evans]

All I know is what I've been.

[Ed Helms]

Told and that's a half truth is.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

A whole lie for almost a decade. The murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Mia Wong]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[Raven (Journalist)]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better wake the hell up.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

What?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid snap.

[Ed Helms]

70S basketball player who still wore knee pads.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Amestown. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know how waking up from a.

[James Stout]

Dream, a familiar place can look.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Completely alien.

[Mia Wong]

Get back, everyone.

[Robert Evans]

Let's go, Dax. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town.

[Ed Helms]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

The Devil walks in Abbostown Foreign welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here. Reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riyadh, I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and presenting our special report, Robert Evans.

[Mia Wong]

I am so happy to talk about our favorite time of the year, which is, of course, the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which occurs from September 26 to October 9.

[Garrison Davis]

It's the highlight of my year each year.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

Happy to say all of Cool Zone will be there performing in Riyadh immediately, getting arrested. It's gonna be really good. Very much excited. Like all of your comedy favorites. Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Aziz Ansari. We will be getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidents, reporters, civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison. Yeah. So that. That's what's happening this week. There's been a big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians. Louis ck it's like a mix of guys. Louis CK Is all in the Oval.

[James Stout]

Not his first rodeo.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. Not surprised David Chappelle. I'm surprised that old David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that current David Chappelle would do this.

[Garrison Davis]

Bill Burr is disappointing.

[Mia Wong]

Bill Burr is disappointing. That one hurts. Mo Amer, who is a Palestinian American comedian who lives in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riyadh and perform. Not great.

[Garrison Davis]

Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, Shane Gillis said yes and then said no. Let's be real fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did, okay? I believe he's the one that said yes and then said no. You get a variety of responses from people who were invited to this fucking thing. And I'll make it clear kind of where my moral line stands. I don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what you're doing and how you do it. And this is the wrong way to do it because these are not just people. If someone had just shown up at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a standup set, I don't particularly care about that, even though there are les Majest laws. Like, I wouldn't care if someone did a standup comedy set that couldn't make fun of the king of Thailand. Right. Which is a crime in Thailand. You know, people perform in parts of the world that have different or bad laws. The US has bad laws. We do bad things. I don't think it's inherently evil to just perform at a random club there, which is not what the people who are performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival are doing. This whole convention is being put on by a guy named Turki Al Sheikh. Turki is the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, which is a Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammed bin Salman playing League of Legends. And he's kind of like, key to Bin Salman's plan to like, make Saudi Arabia ya cool. To like, bring it into the global entertainment and like, social network without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know, make fun of Muhammad bin Salman or his friends. For an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill Burr and all of these other guys and paid them so much money. There is an entire wing of the Al Hayr prison called the Tutu wing, which references Al Sheikh's nickname, Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out, often people who made fun of him or made jokes that he did not appreciate are put in, tortured. This guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad died in 9 11. It's fucking shocking the fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing and he's been like, questioned about it. And his answer, basically, I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but there's a lot of money, right? And I'm separating in my head to a degree. I think it's bad to take money from the Saudi government to do something like this that is being used to like, whitewash their human rights record to make them look like a cool part of global society, even as they this week executed another journalist. I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion about Theo Vaughn, who sucks. And it's like, yeah, he'll take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm just. I'm not surprised. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And there's some other guys in this that I'm not necessarily, like, shocked about.

[James Stout]

Did you see Theo Vaughn's beef with ICE this week?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, does Theo Vaughn have beef with ICE this week?

[James Stout]

Yeah, they used video of him without his consent in one of their marketing videos. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Great. So Jim Jefferies on August went on Theo Vaughn's podcast to talk about agreeing to do this show. And he said, one reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I'm gonna die on. Jesus. And argued that freedom speech machines like himself would do good by, like, you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and keying them in on the freedom of speech thing. Basically, it'll be a net positive for freedom if I go speak at this thing. And in the funniest possible follow up, he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged that they killed a reporter.

[James Stout]

And that's not okay at all.

[Mia Wong]

To Saudi Arabia. You can't even do that on your own fucking podcast or fucking Theo Vaughn's goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed to show up and perform at this. This fucking nightmare event. And Dylan is why we know kind of how much money is on the table at this thing, because he has said that he was paid 375,000.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Mia Wong]

He was offered 375,000 for one performance to be there. He said that kind of the lowest number people were being offered was about 150,000. And the most, like, highly paid people were being offered up to $1.6 million. So, I mean, it's possible some people are getting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer to, like, where the Bill Burrs and the Dave Chappelle's are getting, right, like, in the 1.6 million. So these guys were offered an insane amount of money. And Tim Dillon went on and, like, talked about this on a podcast, talked about, like, why he agreed to do it and defended. And it's very funny. He, like, brought up, like, slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has slaves as a way to, like, to segue into a defense of why it's fine for him to do this. And this is just one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

[Robert Evans]

Well, they have slaves and they kill every.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

[Robert Evans]

Get over it. Get over it.

[Mia Wong]

So what?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So what?

[Robert Evans]

They have slaves. So what?

[Mia Wong]

My friend? I.

[Robert Evans]

Not a friend.

[Mia Wong]

Somebody I don't even know.

[Robert Evans]

I bumped into them in Tribeca, and he goes, I would never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves. I'm like, well, why not?

[James Stout]

I.

[Robert Evans]

They'd be deferential.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I imagine the slaves in those countries are good at what they do.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, so that's. That's the clip I just wanted to have.

[Garrison Davis]

That's one of the most off putting things I've ever seen.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, and it got him fired from the show. He's good bending them. He's big. Like, slavery's not so bad. And he still got fired.

[Garrison Davis]

That's the level of censorship. That's like, yeah, it's nuts. Oh, my God. Like, it's really bad. To cleanse our minds of whatever that was. Here's an ad break. Okay, we're back.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Robert.

[Mia Wong]

The degree to which everyone involved in this has just nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking. I want to read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of 2010.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, it's gonna make me sad.

[Mia Wong]

This is from a set he did at the time. This talking about Beyonce. She's out there singing about girl power, telling you to put a ring on it, all that crap. And then what she do? She takes a million bucks to go sing at some private party for Gaddafi's kid. Muammar Gaddafi, you know, the guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever. Like, what the hell? You're gonna jet off to St. Bart, shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pocket a million, and then go back to preaching about empowerment? Come on, man. That's the hypocrisy of this whole thing. These celebrities, they'll take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, oh, I'm all about the people. Until some crazy dictator waves a stack of cash and then it's, where's my private jet? It's ridiculous. This sucks. Yes, Bill, it is.

[Garrison Davis]

This sucks to be a Bill Barr defender for you.

[Mia Wong]

I love.

[Garrison Davis]

This is truly the first. The first actual stain on Bill Bear's legacy, which I'm sure someone's a very good comedian.

[James Stout]

Well, quite a remarkable fucking stain.

[Robert Evans]

All comedians are evil.

[Raven (Journalist)]

It's just.

[Robert Evans]

It's that easy.

[Mia Wong]

He addressed. You know, part of it is that. And if all. Unfortunately, I kind of think the response of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair, where they're just like, man, it was too much money. It was just a shitload of money. Like, I'll do fucked up shit for a crazy amount of money. And it's like, that's bad. But at least you're honest.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Bill's response to this was like, it was great to experience that part of the world and to be part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia. The royals loved the show. Everyone was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the audience wanted it. They wanted to see real standup comedy. It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I've had. I think it's going to lead to a lot of positive things. Now. He did talk a little bit about, like, the rules that they had to abide by and said that, like, when they were first handing around contracts, he pushed back and was like. Or people pushed back, or like comedians did and were like, you can't have all these restrictions. And that they whittled them down to just a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't make fun of royals and religion right now. As pointed out by the fact that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking positively about slavery in the kingdom, there were more restrictions than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood Reporter article talking about, like, Bill's response to this because it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing standup in the region and gave him grief about it. When I was landing in Bahrain, like, I'm fucking nervous, right? And then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle east, you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded, right? After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided, I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language, but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia, Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to be screaming, death to America and they're going to have fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right? Because this is what I've been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense and I'm thinking, like, is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger king next to McDonald's, they've got a fucking Chili's over. And yes, man, they have stores in the Middle East. You can buy food, has restaurants that.

[Robert Evans]

Specific combination of countries like the Saudis the reason the current government of Bahrain is in power is because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to crush the uprisings there in 2011.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Like, hideous.

[Mia Wong]

There's so much that's fucked up. Just being like, well, to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking royal family of Saudi Arabia, I went to Bahrain. Like, they're not the same place.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I went to check out some brown Muslim people. Turns out they're people like. That seems to be the gist of what he said. And they like pizza too. Fuck me.

[Mia Wong]

You could go to again, like Iraq and perform in fucking.

[James Stout]

You could go to Erbil and it's nice, it's nice.

[Mia Wong]

And you're not going to be performing at the behest of the fucked up government, Right. You'll just be performing in a country with a fucked up government. And there is a difference, Right. I'm not angry at the idea that some rando might perform at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing at the behest of the Saudi government at the behest of the regime.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's a different thing.

[Mia Wong]

I do think there's an argument for like, well, people in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh. That doesn't mean you have to take the money from their fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart was also a part of this show and he posted a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi royal Turki Al Sheikh is. And Turki Al Sheikh has now been sharing that video on all of his social media accounts. Like you're holding water for people. For a guy who was a wing in a torture prison named after him, that crosses a line for me. You know, when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad supported, all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with. Right? Like if you're talking about, you know, making a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's, you know, fucking streaming division, right? Well, there's, there's a degree of moral compromise there. And I think depending on what you're doing and whatnot can be justified by the fact that that number one, like, that's just the way television works. There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company that has the ability to fund, you know, a production like that. But taking money directly from the hands of the guy with the torture Prison. I think that crosses a line. I think that crosses the line for a free speech activist. It should have crossed a line for Pete Davidson, whose dad died in 9 11, but apparently not.

[James Stout]

That is a wild one. I.

[Mia Wong]

That's the craziest one to me that Pete Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man.

[James Stout]

Are you going to wonder. It's his mom sit on the scene.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, man. She's probably getting a lot of money if she is. So it's fine. Me, it's fine. I don't know. Like, yeah. How much? And it is one of those things. I, I get the people who are like, okay, but, you know, the US Is up too. And it is. And so if somebody is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to perform at the White House, I'd say pretty fucked up. But, like, that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know? Yeah.

[James Stout]

And none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay to like, entertain the fucking prison guards, right?

[Garrison Davis]

Like, like, yeah, well, hopefully none of us will be going to Guantanamo Bay for any reason as long as we keep playing these ads.

[Robert Evans]

Foreign. We're back. I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective because they have been doing really, for the last half a decade, a fallout PR blitz, right? We've seen this in wwe. We've seen this with a whole bunch of professional sports stuff. Like most of the esports is run out of the esports World cup in Saudi Arabia now. Like the, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund just helped Jared Kushner buy ea, right? Just one of the largest video game companies in the world, right. They've been, you know, they've been doing this sort of whole sports watching strategy of using these things to sort of normalize the regime. And I think the actual genius of this right, was not that you can buy legitimacy with like, sports and with comedians. The genius of it was that they were able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash to it would be done by sports journalists, entertainment journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their, you know, horrific domestic human rights record. And they were to some extent. But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record is a victory for the Saudis because it means that nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like, for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying in their war in Yemen. These Sudanese child soldiers were Drawn from their connections, bolstered by the uae, to the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfur. So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen are Sudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did the genocide in Darfur in 2018, which was not that long ago. Like I remember 2018. So do you. Statistically, if you're listening to this show, they carried out an airstrike on a school bus that killed 26 children, right? No one is talking about the airstrikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do. Like, for example, there was a huge one in 2016 where they killed 140 people in one Airstream strike, after which the area was described by a rescue worker as a, quote, lake of blood. And this is, this has been the really successful thing about, about the Saudis specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment is that the people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right? And this is also partially what was going on with Bill Burr, because they're just racists or they're attempting to do a backlash and they're trying to do a backlash with things like, okay, they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right? But like, Jamal Khashoggi was one guy out of thousands and thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen, right? And this is one of the reasons people have been able to get away with this, right, is that no one has been walking up to them and going, what do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers? Because nobody knows about any of that. And this is one of the things that I want to just say at the end of this, which is I know for a fact that journalists and editors listen to this show and please, for the love of God, find someone who knows literally anything about the Saudis war in Yemen and have them write this piece on sports washing for you. Literally anyone. This is what, this is what makes me insane about all this coverage is that like if you even a little bit paid attention to what they were doing in the 2010s and what they are continuing to do now in Yemen, you know, about so many war. I'm not even, I'm not even, I'm not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are so many things that they did, you know, and like one of the common defenses is like, oh, like, you know, like we live in the US It's a fucked up country, right? Like, who cares about authoritarianism just Like, I don't know, it's harder to make that argument when it's about Sudanese child soldiers.

[Mia Wong]

Well, it's just again, we're not pissed because some guy performed at a nightclub in Riyadh. It's, it's that you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.

[Robert Evans]

No, it's because they took money from the government. All of these, all of these things, all of these, all of like wwe, like all of these sports events. These are funds directly by the Saudi Sovereign wealth fund, which is the wealth fund of the Saudi government. The people who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child soldiers to fight their war in Yemen.

[James Stout]

Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing. I will say, like Ian Trello's done some excellent stuff.

[Mia Wong]

The Guardian has a good article on this where they really collate some of like the very worst responses written by Seth Simon. So I liked that. This does seem to be blowing up. Hollywood Reporter's piece was pretty good too.

[James Stout]

Hollywood Reporter, my friend was editor of that publication for years and they have consistently done some stuff that you wouldn't expect looking at the title of the publication.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like I think this is going to cost any of these people their career because I don't think it is. But it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment. So I don't know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I mean they got get called out on it and shamed like it's. Yeah, it's a pretty shameful thing to do.

[Mia Wong]

It's a shameful thing to do. It's a bummer. I wish people had not made these choices because man, it's depressing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, luckily I have some news to lift our moods. After this depressing episode. I am pleased to report that Cool Zone Media will be headlining at Viktor Orban's new comedy festival, Hungry for laughs next year. 2026 Market in your calendar. Cool Zone Media presents with Victor Orban Hungary for laughs. That's all for us today. Edit could happen here. See you next year in Hungary. Goodbye everybody.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

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[Robert Evans]

All I know is what I've been.

[Ed Helms]

Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Mia Wong]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[Raven (Journalist)]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

From Lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better wake the hell up.

[Ed Helms]

Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop.

[Mia Wong]

What?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah, Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid.

[Ed Helms]

70S basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show.

[Ed Helms]

Sorry Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Abbott's Town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know how waking up from a.

[James Stout]

Dream, a familiar place can look completely alien?

[Mia Wong]

Get back everyone.

[Robert Evans]

And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town.

[Ed Helms]

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.

[Robert Evans]

The Devil Walks in Abbostown.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On the morning of Sunday, September 28, a 40 year old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc, Michigan church. The man started shooting people inside and then set the church on fire, burning the building down. Four churchgoers died, eight others were injured but have survived and police killed the shooter on the scene. The President, the Vice President and the rest of the right were quick to call this yet, quote, another targeted attack on Christians in the United States. To quote Trump on Truth Social. White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt went on Fox and Friends the day after the shooting and said this.

[Raven (Journalist)]

It's unfathomable. And as the President rightfully put in his Truth Social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted attacked on Christians.

[Garrison Davis]

As the church was still burning. Right wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who recently rode with ICE in Chicago, posted on X the Everything app quote, church is on fire. Christianity is under attack. Pray unquote. What Benny Johnson neglected to mention this was a Mormon church and pretty soon it became clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist antifa, but a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormons were, quote unquote the Antichrist. According to Burton City Council candidate Chris Johns, who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days prior. While canvassing, one of the shooter's friends told the New York Times that the shooter believed that Mormons, quote are going to take over the world. Unquote. This guy obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormons stemming from a breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago. After the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became more clear, the Trump admin quite quickly stopped talking about this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity. But this attack was more deadly than any recent school shooting or any instance of targeted violence, which the administration has then framed as political violence happening this year. After the shooter was identified, Rather than talk about his apparent motive, people online argued about his political orientation. A picture spread online of him wearing a Trump 2020 camo shirt that read make liberals cry again. The right wing outlet, the Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic was photoshopped with the Daily Caller sharing a version of the shirt that they alleged to be the original unedited photo without the Trump graphic. Except that version without the Trump graphic is in fact the doctored photo. The Trump one is the authentic version. Right wing users on X the Everything app spread a list of political donations to progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio that read politically active Democratic socialist. Except that account and those donations were from a completely different person, just with a similar name. Now, just because it's pretty clear that this shooter supported Trump doesn't mean that we should frame this as partisan political violence. This was a classic American shooter, a Marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative experiences with the Mormon Church, moved to Michigan, but continued to have very strong anti Mormon sentiments which he held until he acted on those sentiments leading to his death and the deaths of four other people. An extremely tragic yet extremely American sequence of events. But the conversation and coverage surrounding this Mormon church shooting shooting is such an open display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies. Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker went on Fox News to discuss this shooting where he laid blame on politicians rhetoric, calling people Nazis.

[Robert Evans]

So you know, this is a situation of you find a manufactured grievance if you will, and then a whole lot of stimulus from from people either on.

[Ed Helms]

The Internet or even politicians, irresponsible politicians.

[Robert Evans]

We know, we all know who they are. You know, they're talking about Nazis and anarchists and existential threats. You know, they need to crawl back into their dark places. These people are out there.

[Ed Helms]

That has to be taken into account.

[Robert Evans]

When you start firing off your mouth.

[Garrison Davis]

That simply has nothing to do with this specific attack. But both politicians and the media have this obsession with only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party and then weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the oppositional political project. Following Charlie Kirk's assassination and the media blitz around it, fellow far right commentator Stephen Crow Daughter has revived his long dormant college debate series Change My Mind now with the prompt. The Left is Violent. Propagandists collapse political violence into a simple binary, which is just a very limited way in trying to actually understand public acts of violence. The idea that things can only happen because of ideology, not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions or class. This year there's been one other targeted attack that ties the Mormon Church shooting for the highest fatalities and attacks this year, and that was the midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July where the gunman attempted to shoot up the NFL offices motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school. No clear ideological motivations here. Lots of shooters aren't typically ideological in like the ordinary political sense. The only recent shooter that could be accurately categorized as leftist is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy staffers in May of 2025. Now, under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Bill Maher, but this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro just two days after the Charlie Kirk assassination demonstrates this point about how media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of violence through ideology long before we have any actual clear indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.

[Robert Evans]

There's a shooting at a synagogue.

[Mia Wong]

It is very likely to be either.

[Robert Evans]

A white supremacist or a radical Muslim.

[Garrison Davis]

If it is a shooting of a Republican politician, it is very likely likely to be a trans antifa Marxist.

[Robert Evans]

That is just not. That is. We don't know. We don't know what this kid is. We do know this kid was of the left. We do know that. We do know what that this kid.

[Mia Wong]

Was of the political left. That is according to contemporaneous reporting from the Guardian as well as Tablet magazine.

[Robert Evans]

Today, it's two days out. We don't know shit. But here's we don't know shit. They never do. The Internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with. It's not about the Internet.

[Mia Wong]

That's about the. That's about the actual reporting by mainstream.

[Robert Evans]

Except the Guardian is not a right wing. Here's what we heard. Here's what I was told so far, and I'll tell you what was wrong. First I heard he's a registered Republican. Not true.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Not true.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, then. He was a donor to Trump. Not true. His father works in the sheriff's office. Not true. There was a picture of him wearing a pro Trump shirt. Not true. Member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Not true.

[Ed Helms]

We don't know what he is.

[Robert Evans]

Well, how are you so sure he's of the left now. I agree. When you write on a bullet, what did he write on the bullets?

[Mia Wong]

Catch his fascist.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is also a gamer thing.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, but now I'm hearing he may have been part of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right wing enough.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, the groipers.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, so that would.

[Robert Evans]

But you're sure he's not that. I'm not sure that he's not there. A minute ago you were sure. Hold on, hold on, Bill, hold on.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Because I've been. You were.

[Garrison Davis]

Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just because the target of violence is a political figure does not mean that it's political violence. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is a key example of this. And for the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a personal motivation based on romantic attraction a la Dog Day Afternoon over any larger partisan political motivation. It doesn't even make sense to view the first attempted Trump assassination as political violence. Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting, he did more than 60 Internet searches related to Biden Trump and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions. Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to fall into the right place at the right time. The mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August who shot two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the right branded as a trans terrorist, originally planned to do the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared that trans girls attending the concert would be armed for self defense events. As I've previously reported on this show, this shooting bears similarity to TCC or true crime community. Not as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters. Akin to neo Columbiners who encourage each other online to then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or replicating those of previous school shootings or mass shootings. This pseudo mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the role of the shooter can be its own motivating force beyond any culture war issues or ordinary partisan politics that might get sprinkled on top as Seasoning on Wednesday, September 24, the 29 year old opened fire with a bolt action rifle targeting an ICE field office, Dallas, Texas. This attack claimed the lives of three immigrants who were detained by ICE in a copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare CEO assassination. This shooter allegedly wrote anti ICE on unfired bullet casings. In the immediate wake of this attack, the right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed Democrat politicians for spreading anti ICE rhetoric. At a North Carolina event, JD Vance said, quote, here's what happens when Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part of an authoritarian government. When the left wing media lies about what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they are doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence. Here's a brief Fox News report.

[Robert Evans]

We have a problem America. We are living through a scourge of.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Left wing political violence that three weeks into this month has made it bloody September.

[Robert Evans]

Today, another attack on ice.

[Garrison Davis]

As is not uncommon with mass shooters, this guy was a registered independent and the shooter's brother told NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics. I find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other Gen Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or cnn. Journalist Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter who described him as a libertarian leaning 4chan edgelord who hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians conditions. Friends believed that the bullet inscriptions could have been written as a joke intended to rile people up. They told Kleppenstein. The shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted away due to his continuous anti social edgelord behavior in regular day to day interactions. Nancy Larson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas said the shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE operations as human trafficking. Larson says the shooter did not mention any government agency besides ice, but left a note for police reading Good luck with the digital footprint. This shooter killed himself after the attack and these public acts of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for self annihilation while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a violent act. What causes someone to do this can be a mix of many factors including access to guns, individual motivations, social alienation, self annihilation, insofar as there's an overtly political element, it's often the result of a political alienation. Usually the type of person who commits a bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat Republican binary. With there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across the left right spectrum. Mass shootings which are accompanied by express political motivations usually stem from anti Muslim or great replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people in Western culture will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants. But throughout the next three years under Trump's federal government and the right wing anti woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture, nihilistic self destructive acts against American society may take a form which could be characterized as left wing violence violence. Despite most of these shooters being far from your average DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist. Considering the Mormon Church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the ICE detainee shooting, and the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting in the year of our brain rot 2025, I think it's pretty clear that the current US state apparatus does not need to stage false flags. The state just tries to take advantage of naturally emergent events, events twisting them to fit narratives in an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality. No crude fabrication of physical reality is needed. They are more than happy to simply pick and choose and magnify and obscure various events to fit their preferred version of reality. The night before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq War veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina which did not result in nearly as many national headlines. The shooter targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people, injuring six others. The suspect rode a boat up to the bar, fired with an AR mounted with a scope and silencer before speeding off on water. Police have also deemed this a targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues, this event will be quickly forgotten. As I'm recording this episode, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot, quote, leftist terror cells in Texas. Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead, unquote. This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum Number seven, which targets, quote, unquote, domestic terrorism indicators like anti Christianity, anti capitalism, anti Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration and hostility towards traditional American values. All this partisan rhetoric on targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition. Meanwhile, this past Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former state senator, and their son. The judge was out of the house at the time. Last month, the judge temporarily blocked a voter suppression executive order signed by President Trump. In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge had received death threats. This has been a good happen here. See you on the other side.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

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[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

All I know is what I've been.

[Ed Helms]

Told and that to have Truth is a whole lie.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm telling you, we know quintessential killed her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Mia Wong]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or.

[Robert Evans]

Burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[Raven (Journalist)]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better work the hell.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Out up Bad things happens to good.

[James Stout]

People and small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley. Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcast.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop.

[Raven (Journalist)]

What?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s.

[Ed Helms]

Basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know how waking up from a.

[James Stout]

Dream, A familiar place can look completely alien.

[Mia Wong]

Get back, everyone.

[Robert Evans]

Let's go, Dax. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town.

[Ed Helms]

As a warning from I Heart 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.

[Robert Evans]

The devil walks in Abbott. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast beset by horror horrors of such magnitude that sometimes you have to go back to a thing that you just talked about because there were more horrors in it that you didn't have time to cover. The first time you went through the horror. Sorry, the first two times you went through the horrors. And with me to talk about the horrors is Dr. Kavehoda, who is a doctor, I guess, as you probably could have guessed from the title. You know, I, I, I, I scripted this out very poorly.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

No, this is great. Great. You're doing great. Keep going.

[Robert Evans]

I say scripted this out literally. The only part of this introduction that was in my notes was Kave Hoda, doctor and host of House of Pod and friend of the show, which was not in my notes either, but that's right, friend. The energy is chaotic today, friend.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Most importantly, it has to be. That is the normal response to what is happening in this world. If we don't embrace a little chaos, then we will lose our mind. So I. I am loving how this is going so far.

[Robert Evans]

I am so glad because there is so much chaos and one of the chaos things that we have been tracking and that you spend a hideous amount of time tracking. Too much on your show.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Far too much.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. It's not good. It's very bad. Please stop doing this stuff so we can all go back to doing normal things in our lives.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I would love to just do more fart jokes and. And episodes on Poop, but people in power keep saying and doing terrible things, Crazy, terrible things that make me feel like I'm losing my mind. So I have to keep doing this for multiple reasons. One, because someone's got to talk about it. Two, it's sort of therapy for me. Like, if I just internalize this, I'm going to be a miserable person. So. So thanks. Thanks for having me on.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm excited to talk to you about. Well, okay. See this, Literally every single time I do an episode, it's like, I'm really excited to talk to you. And also, Jesus Christ, I wish we didn't have to talk about this. That's how everyone feels.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

That's how my patients feel. That's how my patients feel when they see me.

[Robert Evans]

It's terrible. God, really, Truly. We gotta stop meeting like this.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

One day. We'll do a fun episode one day.

[Robert Evans]

I swear to God. Okay. But the thing that I've been talking about that we've both been covering is basically the annihilation of the entire US medical establishment at the federal level. It is being systematically dismantled. And one of the ways that it's being systematically dismantled is that a bunch of people have been put in charge of it who are, I mean, two years ago were fringe anti vaccine cranks and are now running like, the most sophisticated, like, public health institutions that have ever existed.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah. As producer extraordinaire Sophie Lichterman once said, you can't put a hater in charge of the thing that they hate the most. And that is what has happened completely and fully, almost at every step of this government.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

They find the person that hates it the most, they put that person in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And one of the Big sort of. I don't know if turning points is the right word, but one of the major events we've been covering from this was the announcement by RFK Jr. And Trump that they had found what causes autism and also ADHD too, which got very little coverage. I think I said this last time I talked about this, it was very baffling. But there's just, there was so much in that whole thing that, that I think a lot of the stuff kind of fell through the cracks inside of like.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Well, there was a lot. There was a lot to digest.

[Robert Evans]

There's so much. There's so much. And so I guess I wanted, we wanted to talk about mostly the Hepatitis B thing, but also just sort of the broader anti vax stuff that was in this.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Before we get into, I don't know, like the weirder, more boutique anti vaxx stuff, which is like the anti Hepatitis B vaccine stuff. A thing that I didn't. People were against children getting until like now. And like, I follow these things decently closely. Yeah, let's, let's start a little bit with like, let's, let's ease the audience into this by, by going back to the classics. The, the greatest hits. They really only have one hit. The, the one hit of the anti vaccine movement, which was Trump's stuff about separating the MMR vaccine.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So, yeah, recently during that press conference where he really threw Tylenol under the bus, he also really, it was weird because there's no new evidence, I want to make that clear. There was no new evidence that they presented about vaccines. But Trump actually really harped on vaccines and his thoughts, his medical opinion and his advice on how to manage vaccines is truly bizarre. Never seen a president say or do those sorts of things. But one of the things he mentioned was the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps, rubella. And he said that it should be split into three separate shots. Again, medically unfounded. It really, as you have alluded to, echoes these long debunked claims, these Wakefield like claims from starting from back in 1998. Again, Wakefield was the disgraced author of that vaccine study that tied it to autism. Lost his medical license for that, but that has persisted and carried on. And the seeds of that are still growing terrible, terrible plants and trees today. And one of them was this fruit of Trump saying we should break up the MMR vaccine. So just, I'll just say it up front. One, there's no reason to do that. There's no reason that shows improved safety. There's no Credible evidence to suggest that at least. And more importantly, the more you split these things up, the more likely you're gonna end up missing doses. That is like a known fact. If you delay vaccines, if you split them up more than they need to be, there is a much greater chance you will miss that. In case this is not clear, measles is bad. It is one of the most contagious viruses out there. And lower vaccination rates quickly lead to outbreaks, as we're already starting to see. And when there's already some hesitancy in the community pushing it, like, this is a terrible thing. So even though that was a throwaway statement from the President of the United States, it could have serious repercussions. And it's in, it's, it's very concerning.

[Robert Evans]

And I've also, I have committed myself every single time this comes up. The Wakefield study, which is where this, this whole separate. The thing.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like came up a. It's not, it's, it's not even a conclusion that even, even if you take his, his completely fake premise that he made up.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It doesn't actually follow that you should split the vaccines up. It's baffling. But the second thing is the reason he wanted to split the vaccines up was that he was trying to sell his own vaccine.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Correct.

[Robert Evans]

He was just trying to sell his own vaccine. It makes me insane every single time this is talked about. Because this whole thing is medical. It's literally an industrial complex. It's like the anti vaccine industrial complex. They're all trying to sell you some. Something. That's the whole thing.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I was watching Trump give this talk, this press conference and I think I said this on another show here on this channel. I started to disassociate. I'm like, this can't be real life. Am I dreaming? It felt like I was having an out of body experience. It did not feel real to me.

[Robert Evans]

To be fully transparent, I did not make it through that press conference. Watching it on video about four minutes in, I was like, fuck this, I'm going to read the transcript. So I have to sit where. Turning off the transcript because I was like, I can't.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

It was tough.

[Robert Evans]

I can't do this.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So on my podcast, the House of Pod, you should all listen to it. I played a clip from Trump talking about Tylenol and another clip of him talking about hepatitis B. And when you listen to it, when I listened back to it, as I was editing it, it sounded like I edited his clips to make him sound crazy. I did not. I just took straight from what he said and the way he was talking, it's hard to listen to. I mean, it's hard to read, too. But the way he talks, it's so disjointed. And he just goes from one thought to the next. He does this weave thing that he thinks is so clever, but it's just lost. The threads are never brought back together. It's just an unraveled, terrible rug of lies. And that is why it's so hard to listen to him. I totally understand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this has also been. One of the things that most of the media has done, is that in order to be able to. To listen, like, play a listenable clip on air. Right. And then also, in sort of in service of power, they edit the clips to make him sound like a normal human being.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So the version of it that people are seeing is not the version where he's just sort of completely ranting incoherently and like.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

You know, you just see these cliffs. But then also because they're. Because they're. They're editing it down progressively more and more. Like, just more stuff. Like, more just, like, information. Content gets lost every time, which is a problem because there's just like, so much the fire hose in this.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Of nonsense.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Title of my. My first album. Fire hose Nonsense.

[Robert Evans]

Incredible. Incredible. Oh, God. Okay, so you know what? All right, we're going to a second fire hose of nonsense. This is slightly early to be doing this, but fuck it, it's chaos week. We're doing it. Do you know what else is the fire hose of nonsense? Nonsense.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Oh, well, I wouldn't say it's nonsense. I would say it's very important and pays bills. So it's very, very important. I believe in. I don't. I'm just kidding. I'm assuming ads and services.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is the products and services to support this podcast. We are back. So amidst the torrent of, you know, the MMR stuff, which also, I do want to say very briefly, is sort of a baffling thing to be talking about in a thing where you're not blaming the vaccines for autism, you're blaming Tylenol, but then you're still also mad at the vaccine. It's very weird.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah, I had thoughts about that. You know, I felt like what Trump was doing with that by bringing up the vaccine. Vaccine stuff was. I felt he was trying to console RFK Jr. In a way. I felt like he was like, okay, hey, we're moving away from the vaccine Stuff to focus on this Tylenol stuff. But I know how much you love the vaccine stuff, rfk, so let's talk about that. So I felt like he was just throwing that out there to placate RFK Jr. That was my guess. But I don't know how to read sociopaths very well. So I could be wrong.

[Robert Evans]

This could also just be like what comes into his mind when he thinks about medicine.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So, you know.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Oh, yeah. Again, weird to me that this president was giving medical advice. I mean, he was making statements, do not take Tylenol. He said that multiple times. He talked about breaking up the hepatitis B vaccine, changing the hepatitis B vaccine, the times of which I think we're going to talk about because that is very important to me. And things that doctors would have have a little pause to say so strongly. And even the people whose paper he's citing would say, ho, slow down a little bit with that. You know, it's very important. I think it's super impactful. And I. And you're right, it's slipping under the radar. So I would love to talk about the hepatitis B stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, let's do this.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So I'll give a little background for your listeners who don't know me. I am a gastroenterologist and hepatologist. That's liver, not herpetologist, which is study of snakes, which sometimes people think online. I am a doctor that looks at the liver and hepatitis B has an important place in my heart. It's a disease that can be incredibly devastating. It's incredibly common. It has so many complications, it has such long term ramifications on someone's life if they have it. So many things they have to consider, do follow up up so many possible things that can happen with it. And the thing about it is we have a vaccine for it that is very safe and super efficacious and works really well. And when we use it, it works amazing. And Trump, during this conference threw that a couple of passing shots as he was doing this whole rant about Tylenol, et cetera. And those passing shots can have a huge impact on uptake in this country. I think it really needs to be discussed. So I'll stop there. I'll let you see what questions you have for me about hepatitis B, because I could talk about hepatitis B for a long time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Okay, let's go back to the very basic. How would you explain hepatitis B to our dear listener who knows many things but what hepatitis B is, is not one of them.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yes. So hepatitis Just means inflammation of the lungs, liver. Anything with itis means inflammation. And there are different ways of getting hepatitis or inflammation of the liver. They range from alcohol, medications, autoimmune problems, to viral things. And there are viral things that can cause bad hepatitis, affect the liver, primarily hepatitis A, B, C. You've heard of some of these hepatitis. And hepatitis B is a very common one in the world. It's about 2 billion people in the world have either had it or presently have it. About 880,000 people in the US alone have chronic hepatitis B. But if you actually look at studies that include more immigrant populations, that number can go up to about 2.2 million. It is something that can, when you get it at an early age, when you're young and you're a baby or an infant, you're young and your immune system is not super robust yet, it's very likely about 90% or more, that if you are exposed to it, you'll get chronic infection from it. If you get it when you're older, it's a little different. You can have a pretty strong reaction to it. You'll get really sick potentially, sometimes to the point where the liver fails. But most people are, when they're older, able to clear it. They're going to eventually get rid of the virus to a point where the liver is fine and it manages, but it lives in the liver liver indefinitely. Once you get the hepatitis B, there's a very good chance you will have it forever. Whether or not it's causing you problems is another thing. A lot of people can live with it, not have any problems, but a lot of people will get it and they will be very sick in the beginning. And when you get it as an infant, you have a very good chance of having it for the rest of your life. And that can be a major problem because like all viruses that go into the liver like this, all these viral hepatitis, what can happen is it can cause scarring, which you might have heard of when it's really bad, called cirrhosis. When that happens, the liver can stop working. You can get cancer of the liver. You can get big blood vessels in your esophagus called esophageal varices and vomit up blood. You can get a lot of bad things that happen. Now, what makes hepatitis B particularly insidious, it makes it a little bit even. My opinion more dangerous than a lot of other viral hepatitis is that you don't always have to go through these phases to get to the really bad part, like when you have hepatitis C For example, you get bad scarring over a long time. That can cause that cirrhosis, and that cirrhosis can lead to cancer. But since hepatitis B is a DNA virus, that DNA can get into the DNA of your liver cells and it can cause cancer without even having to go through those steps of cirrhosis. That's obviously terrible. And that can happen to young people, and I've seen it, and it's awful. So I'm saying all these terrible things about hepatitis B because it's one of these things that does not need to be. I didn't mean to say that like that.

[Robert Evans]

No, you didn't.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I didn't mean to make a play on words there. But it doesn't need to happen because we have this great vaccine that can manage this, and when we use this vaccine, it works. In fact, in the US they looked at it between 1990, it was introduced in this country, like, for infants in 1991. And when they looked from 1990 to 2004, they saw a 94% decrease in kids and adolescents who have hepatitis B. That's incredible. That's amazing.

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

That's really good. Like, this is a great success story. And part of the reason people like Trump don't recognize that this is an issue is because it's done well, because this vaccine works and it does a good job. Now, the other thing to discuss is how it is transmitted, because that's a big part of what Trump was saying during this press conference.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

And he said it's sexually transmitted, which is true. That is one of the ways that you get it. But you also get it from the mother. The mother. When you're having a pregnancy and a delivery, it's a messy, bloody process, and that is a huge risk factor for the infant, getting hepatitis B from the mother. There's also household things that can happen. You know, people share razors. That's a risk factor. Toothbrushes, small things, bites at daycare centers, all these things are small risk factors. They're not as common as sex or the childbirth ways of transmission. But there are other modes of transmission for getting hepatitis B, not just sex, like Trump was saying. So I think that's super important to be clear that I think that is one of the major things he said that was wrong. He said a lot of things are wrong. But that's probably the biggest, easiest one to point out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I think also it was interesting because that was one of the things that got followed up on by reporters. But the reporter was like, well, you can also get it from reuse needles, which, like. Yeah, but like, not. Not mentioning the whole you can get it from being born, a thing that everyone has to do statistically. And this is true.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

The statistics bear that out. That is true. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's a percent rate of being born in order to exist.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

That's exactly. That's exactly right. You know why I realized why Trump says this? This is the realization I came to. To. He doesn't even think about this as a possible mode of transmission. If you've ever seen a delivery. I don't know if you have mia, but if you've ever seen someone give birth, whether it's natural, vaginal or cesarean or whatever. Whatever method, there's a lot of fluids, blood, mucus. There's a lot of fluids happening during this time exchange between mother and baby. And if you saw that, I think you'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense that you would get it that way. If you could get it through sex, why couldn't you it.

[Garrison Davis]

Get.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Get it through that? You know, if you could get it by putting a penis into a vagina, for example, why couldn't you get it from being birthed from one? So you would see that and it would make sense to you inherently and automatically. My guess is that Trump has not seen any of his kids delivered.

[Robert Evans]

That would not surprise me.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I mean, if he was in a nearby room, I would be impressed. He doesn't want to cast aspersions on our president. I don't know. Maybe he was there, you know, cutting the umbilical cord or. I know, don't know. But I get the sense he was not. And I feel like that's why in his mind, he doesn't even register it. And then the other thing that's weird about this is he's like, oh, it's just me. I say that they get the shot at the age of 12 because it's sexually transmitted. And that makes me wonder, and I'm surprised no one's brought this up. Why does he think that's okay then? Does he think that kids are having sex at the age of 12 and that's okay? Why did 12 become the number for him?

[Robert Evans]

It's so weird, and I don't know that's truly one of the. There is something just deeply evil going on in his mind, but I have no idea what it is. And I can't follow the path of logic because I'm not like, a billionaire who was born in, like, the 50s or whatever. Like, I don't know that Guy is serious. That guy has gotten brainword from things that, like, don't exist anymore. No, he's born in the 40s. Sorry. My. My apologies for thinking he was born a full decade later than he actually was. Good lord.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah, I mean, I. I think the results are still the same.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But it's like, prep. You know, there's just like, there's prejudices and weird stuff that he picked up rattling around there that, like.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Who knows where they came from? And I think also, you know, one of the other angles about this that's sort of really distressing is this, like, what feels like the sort of stigmatizing aspect of it of just being like, oh, well, there's something you can only get, like, sexually transmitted. So, like, why are we giving this to kids? And it's like, well, yeah, but like, there's just like a bunch of other ways that you can get it. And like, only talking about that one and then having it as an excuse to. Yeah. Like, raise the vaccination age for no reason.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

And that, you know, again, goes back to the MMR thing because, you know, when we talk about giving These doses, the WHO, the CDC, they recommend the birth vaccine within 24 hours or the first at least. Then the current schedule is you get at birth and follow ups at 1 to 2 months and then again at 6 to 15 months. And part of the thing of stretching that out out, pushing that out further, again, same thing as the mmr, which is the more likely you are to not do it at all and to have decreased uptake.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So this is the real reason why that's a concern.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's this sort of decreased uptake is their goal.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that's what they want. Like, that's why RFK Jr. For example, is making it increasingly difficult to get like, the COVID vaccine and the flu vaccine and stuff like that. And it's, you know, they're doing this sort of like, double pronged approach of both establishing it from the top down through the medical bureaucracy of taking control of. And also just like, spreading it among their supporters and among people who are like, oh, the president wouldn't just, like, lie to me about medical stuff.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

That's unreasonable.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

And I mean, if you didn't know, if. If you didn't know that there was another means of transmission, what he said is reasonable. Why would you give an infant a vaccine for something they could only get through sex? I mean, yeah, you'd be like, sure, that makes sense, but it's just wrong.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's kind of pointless to ask the question, does he know he's lying on this one?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

But I don't think he is. I honestly don't think he understands. I think he probably did hear that there are some other modes of transmission, and in his mind it requires some sort of blood contact or some sort of mucosal contact in his mind. And that's how he interpreted it. And I think he just doesn't, doesn't equate that with childbirth. I think he assumes it, like, because the child he sees comes out like perfectly wrapped and cleaned and, you know, looks like a little baby in like a blanket when he sees it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So I think, I think that's the thing. I think he believes this. I don't think he's lying on purpose on this one.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

I think the interesting aspect of this is that this is like, was kind of just a Trump thing.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this is like one of the parts of it that like, RFK Jr. And Martin Makari didn't really talk about. It was just Trump kind of just like started talking about it for reasons that are deeply unclear.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah. I mean, Marty Makari is an interesting guy and I think he did some good things in the past and done some not so great things, some bad things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Would not be serving in this administration anyway.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

This may shock you, Mia, but Trump picks somebody for a high level position that might be a little problematic.

[Robert Evans]

Well, especially this version of the administration too, where it's like in Trump 1, it was possible for them for him to appoint someone random and it kind of be like Department of Energy. Right, Right. They put Rick Perry, who famously would call to a. Well, forgot that it was the thing that he wanted to abolish, but then he got in charge of it and the Department of Energy people, people like, explained to him this is, this is where the nuke stuff is. And then he was like, sure, whatever, go run this. I'll just stay out of everyone's way. And that kind of worked fine. That is not happening. This administration. You are not getting, you are not getting Rick Perry going to like a make work job, letting the bureaucrats run the actual stuff.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

How wild it is that we long for the days of Rick Perry.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Like.

[Robert Evans]

The days when someone could explain to you, hey, this is the department that does the nukes and they'd be. And they would change their opinion about it. Staggering. Incredible.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So let me tell you a little bit more about this Makari character.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

So he is a surgeon. I don't think he practices as a surgeon anymore but he's sort of a health policy expert, at least self fashioned as one. And he's the person that was tapped by Donald Trump to lead the fda. You've seen him on Fox News a lot and he's been very outspoken about pandemic policies in the past. He was noted as a one one of the greatest perpetrators of COVID misinformation during those times when the people fact checked him again and again found that he was wrong. But the thing about him that, that you may or may not know how I first learned of him and how he popped up on my radar a while back was he is the person that's responsible for this claim that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Sometimes that's cited as second. Yes, that's him. He's the person.

[Robert Evans]

Oh boy.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Right, right. Which there's a lot of issues with this claim. It is at best controversial. It's based on extrapolated data. There was no formal methodology that went into him doing this. It totally misrepresents the complexity of healthcare and healthcare outcomes. But it's like the herpes of medical misinformation because it always comes back. No matter how many times it gets disproven or people talk about it, it always comes back and it's always used as this. It's an inherent part of the belief structure of these anti vaxxers. It is is taken as gospel now but back in 2016 basically he wrote this BMJ paper that estimated something like 250,000 deaths per year in US hospitals were due to medical errors. But again was not a formal study. It presented no new data and it didn't have any sort of real rigorous statistical method behind it. It kind of averaged figures from different sources and it doesn't actually even work because death certificates don't capture medical error. So it's hard to really study that even if you wanted to. But anyways, long story short, no matter how many times people disprove this or make arguments that work against it, it never goes away. So that's him. That's Makari.

[Robert Evans]

Oh boy. Oh boy. And he's now running the fda, which is. Oh yeah, which is great.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

We put the worst people in charge of quite possibly the most important part part of our country.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean just the Health and Human services run by RFK Jr is just when he first took office, my line on it was millions will die and we are so incredibly on track Right, right.

[Mia Wong]

For.

[Robert Evans]

For millions to die from just this guy. Yeah. And his people being put in charge.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah. I. I mean, I should say one more thing about. About Makari before we move on from him, that claim. I wouldn't say that medical error isn't an issue. I think it is a very serious issue. Even if it's one or two cases in the whole country, it's a serious issue and that should be addressed. But what he's doing is, I think, harmful. I don't think that is helping in any way. I think it's only made things worse by contributing to where we're at today with our anti vaxx stance, our whole anti intellectual approach to medicine. And that's a thing that they do. This is a thing. They take a little kernel of truth. If there is any lack of knowledge, if there's any slight vacuum in understanding, it gets filled with these bad actors, these people. And he is, in my opinion, one of them, but still somehow not the.

[Robert Evans]

Worst, you know, not the worst is one of those bars in the Trump administration where it's not even. Even the bar so low. It's on the ground. The bar is so low that, like, you have to go digging. Yeah. To get under the bar. And it's not like a little bit of digging. It's a lot of digging because the. The bar truly is below hell. There's like a second hell down there. To find this bar for where these people are, It's.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Oh, God, it's second hell.

[Robert Evans]

Every. Every time I look into any of these people, people just.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah, no, no, you. You're never gonna be surprised.

[Robert Evans]

Hezkin hit a Marine with an ax.

[James Stout]

Like.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this guy's just the Secretary of Defense now. He's like. He's the guy going in, yelling at the generals. He's the guy who was on Fox News just throwing an ax, and he threw it over the target and it hit a bunch of Marines. Like, wait, what are we doing here?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Well, whom amongst us hasn't done that? Maybe he's the reason. Antifa.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I have never hit a Marine with an axe.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Well, there you go.

[Robert Evans]

Tragic. Do you have anything else that you want to tell our dear listeners about this whole debacle?

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Get your vaccines.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

You know, get your vaccine, get vaccinated. Now's the time to start doing it for flu. And Covid, if you can, talk to your doctor, if you're having difficulty getting your vaccine from your local places, your regular places, talk to your doctor about getting it. You should still be able to in most cases. So do it while you can. And if you want to hear more about this stuff, make sure to check out my podcast, the House of Pots, where we're going to talk about this stuff a lot more. We'll also talk about other stuff, too, but you'll hear more on this along the way as well. And I like that people are questioning some of these things. I don't think it's unreasonable. Some of these topics are not unreasonable to have, as I discussed earlier on another podcast on this channel. I don't know channel. Is that what you say on this network? I should say the Tylenol autism question is not like a totally wacky crazy one. It was a decent question to ask. There was some correlation, but the evidence, when you look at it, shows that it is very likely not a causal relationship when you look at the evidence. And I think it's okay to have some of these conversations, and sometimes it takes a little nuance when you look at them. But I encourage people to continue to do so and to keep reading and to find trusted sources and look at those and learn about them yourself. Think if nothing else good comes from all this, it's that people are starting to have an understanding of antibodies and the science behind vaccines. And I think that's not a bad thing. So, I mean, things are terrible. Things are terrible. There's so many bad things in the world. But I will say this. I see bright spots constantly. I see more and more people who care about science. I see more and more people than I ever have before care about important topics across the world. They're not scientific, like Gaza, for example. I've seen more people care about things that I've ever seen before in my long life. And I feel like that's a good thing. There are bright spots out there, and that's what I cling to. And I see more people interested in this. People want to talk to me about hepatitis B and what it is and how to avoid it. And I think that's great. So there is some good coming from this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is, I think, the fundamental thing that both the media apparatus and the regime are trying to conceal, which is that there are more of us than there are of them. There always have been. And especially right now, there are way more of us. And their ability to shape the world is disastrous. But their ability to shape the world as fundamentally a minoritarian force in this country, right, with like 30 to 40% of the population, is always going to Be limited and always is always going to be in danger of simply being reverted first. Yeah. And we can be that reversal one person at a time.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah, I love that.

[Robert Evans]

Well, Kaveh, thank you for being on the show and go listen to House of Pod. It's great.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Oh, thank you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're okay.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

You could do worse.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

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[Raven (Journalist)]

All I know is what I've been told.

[Ed Helms]

And that's a half truth is a whole lot.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the Citizen investigation on national tv.

[Mia Wong]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[Raven (Journalist)]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say. Say that I poured gas on her.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better wake the hell up.

[Ed Helms]

Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley. Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop.

[Mia Wong]

What? Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s.

[Ed Helms]

Basketball player who still wore knee pads.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched.

[Mia Wong]

You're.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Amber's Town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Raven (Journalist)]

You know how waking up from a.

[James Stout]

Dream, a familiar place can look completely alien.

[Mia Wong]

Get back, everyone.

[Robert Evans]

He's got d. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town.

[Ed Helms]

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 Watts. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

The devil walks in Abbott.

[Mia Wong]

You know, quite frankly, if you ever do anything on accident that leads to a police officer falling over, even if you had nothing to do with them falling over, it's time to leave. It's time to go. If you. Even if all you did was make.

[Garrison Davis]

A joke, this is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our 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 October 1st to October 8th.

[Mia Wong]

That's right, baby.

[James Stout]

Prime big deal day as October 7th, 8th are known in history.

[Mia Wong]

The first week of October, you know, Glocktober, Glocktober. I mean, who doesn't love a good Glock?

[James Stout]

Not in California.

[Mia Wong]

California doesn't love a good Glock.

[James Stout]

Gavin Newsom in the California legislature, Gavin.

[Mia Wong]

Newsom doesn't love a good Glock. I mean, honestly, Band em Beretta fans don't love Glocks. Still sore about that.

[James Stout]

SIG guys. The surviving Sig guys.

[Mia Wong]

Oh boy, it's rough being a Sig guy out there these days.

[James Stout]

It's gotta be tough.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

That's why we're selling armored boxer shorts. For those of you who enjoy the Sig Sauer P320.

[Mia Wong]

As long as you get our new. Our new hard class 4 body armor boxer shorts, you can appendix carry a Sig Sauer without blowing your jug up.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm going to quickly put on my ceramic boxer briefs here so that I.

[Mia Wong]

Can carry a fucking M18. M18. Thank you.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's Stay Hard by Cool Zone Dropping next week. You can find them by tagging Robert on social mediaysophy.

[Mia Wong]

We're finishing our 20 part series. People have asked for episodes on how to be a gun owner and so we're putting together a 20 part series on how not to shoot your own penis off. So law enforcement officers in the audience, you'll want to check that one out.

[James Stout]

I just got a notification that Sophie had canceled ed which I think is probably a response to what we're doing right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's start because there's a lot of news this week by talking about frankly the most important news story in the whole nation right now. On Thursday, October 2nd, right wing influencer Nick Sorter along with two other people.

[Mia Wong]

I know, I know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I can't.

[Mia Wong]

It's stupid. It's really stupid.

[Garrison Davis]

Along with two other people were arrested by the Portland Police Bureau in connection with a fight outside of the Ice building during a protest. Sorter was provoking reactions from protesters when he was then chased down the street by a woman in a bird costume. A bird costume, quote, swinging a large stick covered with feathers, big swords are.

[James Stout]

Assaulted by Big bird.

[Garrison Davis]

According to court documents. The three people were arrested at all, charged with disorderly conduct, though Sorter's charges have since been dropped. Sorter's arrest ignited a right wing firestorm the likes of which I have not seen since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

[Mia Wong]

I'm glad people are finally waking up to the antifa police department that rules Portland with an iron fist for a long time.

[Garrison Davis]

Tim Pool posted on X the Everything app. I'm calling on the Trump administration to launch a legal challenge against Oregon following the arrest of Nick Sorter and if necessary, deploy National Guard. Oregon's failed to uphold federal and state law and we should not tolerate it.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, and like, yeah, there was like a fight and they detained people and then the DA didn't press charges against Sorter her. And it's, it's just, it couldn't be more of a nothing burger as an actual story.

[Garrison Davis]

Nothing, nothing burger.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh boy. But not According to the AG's office, who quickly responded on it to Tim Pool's request. And by Friday morning, the White House, the Attorney General and the Justice Department announced a quote, unquote, full investigation into the arrest and the conduct of the Portland Police Bureau. Finally, conservative influencer Benny Johnson, who's been embedded with ICE this past week, posted on X the Everything app, quote, important news. I spoke with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. She's been briefed on the attack and arrest of journalist Nick Sorter. Secretary Noem tells me DHS will surge ICE resources in Portland, quote, antifa is a terrorist group and will not control our streets, unquote. Thank you, Secretary Noem. Benny Johnson later shared a video capturing mentioned breaking. DHS Secretary Christine Ohm has announced the Department of War will deploy to Portland and Chicago within 24 hours to crush left wing violence, unquote. And here is the video with Christine Ohm talking about the quote, unquote, antifa affiliated anti ICE protests.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Well, you've got a presence in Portland that as that is antifa affiliated. And so that is a situation where you have known professionals, targeted violence that want to tear down America and will apparently attack anyone, even journalists that are just trying to report the truth of what's happening on the streets. So we're not just going to be rolling out of Chicago here, but we're sending in the Department of War at the request that I made to Secretary Hagsett. They're going to be rolling in here within the next 24 hours. They'll be coming to Chicago too. I put a request in in today for them to come to Chicago and we're going to not only have our officers that are out there with HSI and ice, but we're also going to have backup from our military because everybody deserves that. And so what we saw happen to that journalist last night will not happen again.

[Mia Wong]

Okay.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Betty Johnson showing a very professional journalism there by just saying, wow, a lot.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a pretty wild scene having like troops walk behind. Find Christy Gnome as this podcaster grills. Grills are on sending the military to cities.

[James Stout]

Yeah, in front of a bad cat.

[Garrison Davis]

The reactions from the right after after Nick Sorter's arrest were pretty wild with journalists going on Fox News claiming that the Portland police are affiliated with Antifa and popular right wing influencers on X like Amuse saying quote, the Portland police are now colluding with Antifa to prosecute federal officers protecting protecting the ICE facility.

[Mia Wong]

When has that happened?

[Garrison Davis]

Each time federal officers engage with antifa, Portland police liaisons collect statements and videos from Antifa to facilitate state criminal charges against DHS. So somehow in the year of our Lord 2025, the Portland Police bureau is now Antifa which is a truly miraculous state of affairs. After his release Friday morning, Nick Sorter hosted on X X quote, you've proved what we've all been saying for years. You're corrupt and controlled by violent antifa thugs who terrorize the streets. Referring to the Portland police, I have been in direct contact with top officials at dhs. What's coming in Portland is unprecedented. All thanks to Portland police exposing themselves by arresting journalists. Great work Portland unquote. A day later on October 4, a Trump appointed federal judge granted the state of Oregon and the city of Portland a temporary restraining order order blocking Trump and hag says federalization and deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard. Against the wishes of Oregon Governor Tina Kotak, the judge found that existing local and federal law enforcement were sufficient to police protests that the Trump admin had mischaracterized the reality of the current protests outside of the ICE facility and that violence against ICE in other parts of the country is not sufficient justification for a local military deployment.

[Mia Wong]

It's worth noting this judge, Judge Immerget number one, not a woke judge was literally if you go back and you watch the Monica Lewinsky hearings or the I mean this is the Clinton sex scandal hearings but this is the part of it in which Lewinsky was being grilled immigrant was the female lawyer that they brought out to be incredibly cruel to Monica Lewinsky because it wouldn't look as off and it wound up she wound up part of why Monica Lewitzi became so is she immigrant. Imbergot looked fucking nuts and Imbergut is the person who is looking at who is going through all of the claims made by the administration and going there's literally not only is there no justification for the deployment of troops in Portland but everyone calling the shots at FPS And ICE is like, everything's under control. We have no need for additional people. Yeah, there's no real danger here. Like, this is not a leftist Judd judge. This is not a judge with a political axe to grind. This is a judge that 30 years ago you would have called a far right extremist.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I will quote a little bit from her ruling here. Quote, to accept the defendant's arguments, that's the federal government would be to render meaningless the extraordinary requirements of 10 USC 12,406 by allowing the President to federalize one state's National Guard based on the events in a different state state or mere speculation about future events. In other words, violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using non military federal law enforcement, unquote. On the Trump Admin's argument that the President's authorized to federalize state National Guard in the case of rebellion or invasion, the judge concluded that the legal definition of rebellion requires, quote, first, a rebellion must not only be violent but also armed. Second, a rebellion must be organized. Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed. Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole, often with the aim of overthrowing the government rather than in opposition to a single law or issue. Here the protests in Portland were not a rebellion and did not pose a danger of rebellion, especially in the days leading up to the federalization, unquote. The judge found that the President's federalization of the organ National Guard without proper statutory authority under 10 USC 12406 exceeded the President's constitutional authority, undermined Oregon's sovereignty and violated the 10th amendment by infringing on Oregon's constitutional power to control its own National Guard. Writing that the Trump Admin quote interfered with the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state government governments, unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Is that the one where she, she said their argument was untethered from the facts?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think that was a pretty good, good summary of what's going on here.

[Garrison Davis]

Later that day, Stephen Miller went on News Nation to talk about the quote unquote insurrectionists. Interesting word in Portland and the new national security presidential memorandum to investigate and dismantle so called left wing terrorist network networks.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

We're the federal government.

[Robert Evans]

We are not going to tolerate a lawless insurrection.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

We are not going to tolerate domestic terrorism.

[Robert Evans]

And we are going after the antifa rioters, the insurrectionists, the violent assaulters, and.

[Mia Wong]

We are not only going after them.

[Robert Evans]

We are going after their network. We are going after their funders. Every time we make an arrest, we are initiating an investigation into the entire domestic terrorist network. The President issued a national security presidency, presidential memorandum and NSPM making clear that it is the national security priority of United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks.

[Mia Wong]

And that is exactly what is taking place.

[Robert Evans]

It is what we are doing. It is what will happen.

[Garrison Davis]

His use of the word insurrection there is important.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A day later, President Trump also used the term insurrectionists to describe protests in Portland and complained about the federal judge who blocked the deployment of National Guards Guard saying, quote, portland is burning to the ground. You have agitators, insurrectionists. All you gotta do is look at the television. It's burning to the ground. The governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives. That judge ought to be ashamed.

[Mia Wong]

Again, nothing's been burnt down. Nothing was burnt down in 2020. Most of the big nights at ICE lately have been maybe 200 people. You know, you've had some more on a few occasions, but, like, it's usually a lot less. It's probably just unnecessary for me to correct all this, but I guess I can't fight the urge to be like, none of this is accurate to what's happening.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The simulation is more important than the reality.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

Miller's done this before, right? Like, he kind of likes to use these words that exist in legislation and sort of point to the direction he wants things to go, I guess.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like, he did this by calling antifran enterprise. We saw this to an extent with Title 42 and his reference to migrants of the public health threat. This is kind of a. A trademark move for him.

[Garrison Davis]

Almost now, hours after the federal judge blocked the federalization of Oregon National Guard, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered 300 California National Guard to be deployed to Portland. And the next day, Texas Governor Greg Abbott authorized 400 Texas National Guard to be sent to Oregon and Illinois in coordination with the Department of War. On Sunday night, the federal judge that previously blocked the Oregon National Guard federalization made another ruling blocking the deployment of troops from California and Texas. Texas finding that it was, quote, in direct contravention of her earlier tro. This secondary TRO halted any federalization, relocation, or deployment of any Guard members to Oregon from any state. The Trump administration has appealed these rulings and oral arguments will be heard on Thursday, October 9, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Stephen Miller called this ruling, quote, one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order. We have ever seen and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat, unquote. By Monday, Miller told reporters, without going into specifics, that the president, quote, has a very broad range and set of authorities when it comes to deploying federal assets, unquote. That same day, Monday, Trump discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection act in a White House press conference.

[Raven (Journalist)]

The Insurrection act, under what conditions or terms would you.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I'd do it if it was necessary. So far, it hasn't been necessary, but.

[Ed Helms]

We have an Insurrection act for a reason.

[Robert Evans]

If I had to enact it, I didn't. I'd do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I do that. I mean, I want to make sure that people aren't killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe. And it's turning out. And we started with D.C. it's been so successful.

[Ed Helms]

You look at what's happened with Portland.

[Robert Evans]

Over the years, it's a burning hellhole.

[Ed Helms]

And then you have a judge that.

[Robert Evans]

Lost a way that tries to protect that like there's no problem.

[Ed Helms]

Actually, she's not even saying that.

[Robert Evans]

There's a huge problem in Portland. I'll tell you what the problem is.

[Ed Helms]

Crime.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Crime.

[Ed Helms]

It's a huge problem. In Chicago, it's called crime, and we.

[Robert Evans]

Want to put out the crime, and they want to inflame the crime. Oh, boy.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

That's the clearest statement we've gotten from the President on the conditions in which he would invoke the Insurrection Act. I think specifically pointing towards governors, mayors, or court courts that prevent ICE from completing immigration actions in those cities and counties.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And that. And that's the thing that we've gotten from him. That's the most specific indication of things that are happening right now that could cause him to do it. We still don't have a direct. I'm going to do it, but I think it's pretty clear from this that he wants to. These people in these circles have been talking about wanting to do it for a long time, and I think this is in some ways the closest we've gotten to it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And that's why you have people like Miller and Trump himself using the word insurrection when describing what's happening to establish a pretext to actually follow through on that and declare the Insurrection act when it suits them.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think it's worth noting Miller's doing like Miller is often the originator of many of these kind of legal theories, this one has made its way to Trump.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm going to declare an ad break and then we will return to, to finish our reporting on war ravaged Portland. Okay, we are back. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has made some pretty, pretty fantastic claims about the nature of these protests and the threat threats facing ICE agents both in Chicago and Portland. And I'm just going to play her clip from Fox News here talking about the threats to ice.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Our intelligence indicates that these people are organized. They're getting more and more people on their team as far as attacking officers and they're making plans to ambush them and to kill them. We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It's been $2,000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them. They've released their pictures, they've sent them between their networks. And it's an extremely dangerous situation and unprecedented. So we've put protective detail around those individuals, changed some of our operations to keep our officers safe. But make no mistake, this isn't just about, you know, protesting free speech or that they don't like that people out here are upholding the law of our country. They're actually going out there and saying, kill these people and we'll give you this much money to do it.

[James Stout]

It's quite a specific claim, isn't it?

[Garrison Davis]

What she's doing there is conflating alleged Cartel Bounties on Ice agents with protests happening outside of ICE facilities, making it sound like the protesters are putting $10,000 Kill Bounties on Ice officers.

[Mia Wong]

Man, let me tell you, nobody who's out at ICE right now now has collectively 10 grand to put towards a bounty.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. What are we doing here?

[Garrison Davis]

On Tuesday, October 7, Kristi Noem arrived in Portland, Oregon along with her conservative podcaster sidekick Benny Johnson, who has been live streaming ICE operations in Chicago with nome. Benny posted on X the Everything app breaking DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stares down army of antifa and a guy in a chicken suit from the rooftop of the ICE facility here in Portland.

[Mia Wong]

Finally, someone took that chicken guy down to size.

[Garrison Davis]

I want to play the video that I that I think one of us should like set the stage for like what we're seeing.

[Robert Evans]

Secretary, do you have a message to.

[Ed Helms]

The protesters, especially the man in the chicken outfit?

[Garrison Davis]

The man in the chicken outfit.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I just see him now. Goodness sakes, we can do better. Our goal is that people would peacefully protest, but that we would still be allowed to enforce the law in this country. So too bad they're uneducated and ill informed.

[Garrison Davis]

If you look at this protest, there's about what, 20 people on the street corner adjacent to the ICE facility. Nearly, nearly as many journalists and photographers as there are protesters. And this is what Benny Johnson is describing, describing as an army of Antifa. It's these 20 people holding signs across from like a police line on the edge of the ICE facility. At a later point, Benny zooms into another street corner which similarly has about a dozen people over one block away from the ICE facility. This is the army of antifa that Benny Johnson is referring to as he, along with Nick, sort of stand with Kristi Noem on the roof of the ICE facility surveying the area, which is just a fantastical sequence of events. We time traveled and told me that five years ago that Kristi Noem and Betty Johnson are going to be on the roof of the ICE facility calling a man in a chicken outfit an army of antifa. I guess I could believe you, but it would still be upset. I guess it would still be upsetting.

[Mia Wong]

I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't like. I wouldn't like argue with you. I'd be like, yeah, I mean, that sounds like a natural extension of where things are at this point in time.

[Robert Evans]

Time.

[Garrison Davis]

On Tuesday night, Noem went on Fox News to talk about a meeting she had with local law enforcement and the mayor where she threatened to send four times as many federal forces into Portland, Oregon.

[Mia Wong]

Sure, man.

[Raven (Journalist)]

I told them what we wanted. We wanted more security here at the building, a bigger buffer zone to keep our officers safe. We wanted to have their streets opened up again and not let the anarchists run this city anymore. That we would ask them to continue to back us up like we've been asking for instead of what they've been doing the last several months, which is just leaving our officers hang out to dry. The chief asked if I wanted to meet with the mayor and I said absolutely. Came back and just met with the mayor and I'm so extremely disappointed. He's continuing to play politics, did not commit to any of those promises and said that he'd give me an answer by tomorrow and I'm hopeful that he will. What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some of these security measures for our officers, we were going to cover him up with more federal resources and that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so that the people of Portland could have some safety again.

[Mia Wong]

Almost no one's even there. Like, I can't exaggerate the degree to which this is not a major factor in 99% of people's day to day. Because number one, one, where the ICE facility is is cordoned off from the rest of the city.

[Garrison Davis]

Like pretty isolated chunk.

[Mia Wong]

It's isolated, you might say. And number two, just like most people that I know who were out in 2020 don't really have a clear idea of what they should be doing right now or what the most useful thing to do is right now and have spent a lot of time in front of federal riot lines and aren't right now now. And like it, it's this, this complete disconnect between what's actually going on in the city and like what's, what's being reported which doesn't matter really. Like it doesn't impact anything that everything they're saying is a lie.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Because their people believe it. It's just kind of frustrating.

[Garrison Davis]

No. And this information is all in the TRO document that blocked the deployment of National Guard. Quote, Plaintiffs provided all of the PPB call logs in the month of September which showed that Portland Police Bureau worked in close coordination with federal Protective Service supervisors and regularly checked the status of the ICE facility as detailed above. They also show that protest activity in September generally did not involve violence against federal property or personnel, unquote. Portland Police Bureau have been working in coordination to manage the protests outside the ICE building. They've not abandoned ICE officers. That's, that's not, that's not actually what's happening. A federal judge has deemed that local law enforcement are more than sufficient to handle handle the protests outside of the ICE facility. The Trump government just really wants to send the military into cities as they've already done with D.C. as they were wanting to do with Memphis, Chicago, Portland, eventually, like New Orleans. This is just something that they really want to do. On Tuesday, October 7, Texas National Guard arrived in Illinois and are currently stationed at an Army Reserve center in a suburb south of Chicago. Sunday night, Governor Pritzker made a statement reading, quote, this evening, President Trump is ordering 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon and other locations within the United States. We must now start calling this what it is. Trump's invasion, it started with federal agents, will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes and it will now involve sending in another state's military troops. There is no reason a president should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent or coalition Cooperation, unquote. The State of Illinois announced that they would be seeking their own TRO against Trump's military deployment. The Illinois Attorney General said in a statement, quote, the American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly for the reason that their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president's favor, unquote. And on Monday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order establishing city property and unwilling private business businesses as ice free zones and discuss the deployment of troops from out of state by warning, quote, the right wing in this country wants a rematch of the Civil War, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And so we have it. We have a kind of breaking news update which is. So this is being recorded on Wednesday, October 8th. It's possible this will again change by the time this comes out. The most recent information we have is this is reported by CBS per a statement from U.S. north Northern Command, which is part of the Defense Department, War Department. But yes, they're sending 500 troops. I'm just going to read the direct quote. Illinois, approximately 200 soldiers from various units of the Texas national guard and approximately 300 soldiers from various units of the Illinois National Guard were activated into a Title 10 status and have arrived in the greater Chicago area. The National Guard were mobilized for an initial period of 60 days will be under the command and control of the commander of U.S. northern Command.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So that's where we are right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. There is out of state guard deployed into Illinois.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like they are. They are in this borders of the state right now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

When Haigs has tried to deploy California National Guard to Oregon, it's unclear how many of them actually arrived in Oregon. But we do have confirmation and photos of Texas Guard in the borders of Illinois.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

This morning Donald Trump truthed on truth social media official that quote, Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also, unquote. This is the President of the United States calling for the jailing of a mayor and governor.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. He's also more recently calling for the jailing of everyone who burns American flags in a minimum of a year in prison. Again, the legality here is deeply unclear. There's not a legal underpinning for that other than he's instructed the DOJ to start going after those folks.

[Garrison Davis]

But yeah, this is just words that he's saying. But I think the words that he's saying are sometimes, not always, but sometimes important.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So I want to turn from here to the other occupation of Chicago or the one that has been doing significant damage already in the city as we have been covering, which is the ICE and Border Patrol deployment in Chicago. There's big more escalations that we are going to spend a small amount of time talking about. ICE has begun detaining unhoused people.

[James Stout]

Shit.

[Robert Evans]

We have reports of 11 total people they've detained so far. Most of them have been released. But the most prominent, and this is something that Brandon Johnson specifically mentioned in his speech was four people who were taken in Chicago neighborhood called Broadview who were outside a shelter. According to Chicago Reader. We don't know where they are.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

At the as if they're just gone. No one has been able to trace them down. Yeah, and this seems to be part of a broader trend of ICE agents taking action against people who, I mean appear to be US citizens. We saw this a couple like last week with and this is another thing that Brendan Johnson specifically mentioned with him with ICE agents just choking a black man out on the street. The major story is that there has been a second shooting by ICE in Chicago on but what we know for sure about this shooting is that on Saturday morning an ICE agent shot a woman named Maramar Martinez who appeared to have been part of a group that was following ICE vehicles around the city. Martinez was shot and drove herself to a nearby auto repair shop where medics and police showed showed up. I'm going to read the Sun Times's account from the shop managers who they spoke to of what happened when she got to the body shop. Quote, the shop Manager spoke with a 911 operator and said send somebody quickly because this lady is bleeding profusely. I mean it was instant puddles. Police and paramedics showed up a few minutes later, he said as paramedics place a turn kit on Martinez's leg and arm. A bullet fell out of her arm and onto the shop floor. The manager said Martinez thankfully does not seem to have been really, really severely injured. She is like she is in stable medical condition. Now DHS put out a press release almost immediately claiming that their agents were quote, ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. And that, quote, Nortinez woman they shot was quote armed with a semi automatic weapon and has a history of doxing federal agents. Now it is worth noting that best practice when looking at Department of Homeland Security statements, especially under the Trump administration, is to simply assume that they are not telling the truth until any details they have mentioned are corroborated. What the exact situation was before the shooting is Very unclear. Both Department of Homeland Security and federal prosecutors have claimed that a group of cars basically boxed in an ICE vehicle. And there have been repeated claims that they were ramming the ICE vehicle and that's why the ICE agent opened fire.

[Garrison Davis]

That's the DHS's claims.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This is the DHS's claims and these are the claims that are made in court documents. I want to read from the. Sometimes also Martinez's lawyer's description of, of what's going on because it is significantly different from the government's account. And it's, it's also, it's also worth mentioning that there's already been some deviation between the court documents and the DHS statement. For example, the court, the, the DHS statement mentions a semi automatic weapon and there's just simply no mention of that in like, in, in any of the sort of charging documents. The deadly weapon that she's being accused of doing an assault with, which is what she's been charged with, is the car. Yeah. So here's, here's from the Sun Times. So Parenti, who is her attorney. Parenti also offered to play an agent's body cam video that shows the shooting, noting prosecutors did not show the video that he claims disputes the government's version of the shooting. Parenti said the video shows an agent turning a federal vehicle left into Martinez's vehicle, after which the agent says, quote, do something big. The agent then exits the vehicle and shoots Martinez. The attorney said Martinez had, quote, seven holes in her from the shooting and that agents were in such a hurry to take her into custody at the hospital that they had to return later when Martinez began bleeding from her wounds.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this is a significantly different portrayal of the shooting. We do not have access to this body cam footage yet. It has not been released to the public. There is a video that we do have that does not show the shooting, that shows some of the stuff leading up to the shooting from that sort of auto repair shop that she went to. It is still very unclear what exactly happened here other than the fact that I shot this woman. That's the only thing that we 100%.

[Garrison Davis]

Know she does have a concealed carry license and had a handgun in the car with her.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The lawyers have claimed she never brandished the weapon and it was in the passenger seat.

[Mia Wong]

And there's no evidence that she did brandish the weapon.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no.

[Garrison Davis]

Nor is ICE even claiming that. Like, like ICE isn't even claiming that she brandished weapon. ICE isn't claiming that she fired a Weapon.

[Mia Wong]

No. Ice's specific claim is that when she was arrested later, she had the weapon on her, which could refer to the vehicle or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, and, and I, I, I, I, I will say so. The, the initial Department of Homeland Security press statement said that she.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Correct.

[Robert Evans]

I think a lot of people took that to mean, you know, because DHS was implying stuff by saying that she was armed with even though she was not.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they're inhabiting the ambiguity of that verb. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, right.

[Garrison Davis]

They also said that they fired defensively, which makes you infer that this person may have fired at ice. Even though DHS has never actually claimed that. They are trying to selectively use words to make people infer things that they're not even actually explicitly claiming.

[James Stout]

Claiming.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And we're going to have to get more details and we're going to have to wait to see exactly what happened. But what the evidence supports right now is that ICE shot someone who was doing rapid response work and it is frankly a miracle that she wasn't severely injured or killed. And this is again the second time they have done this since ISIS deployment in the city. The first time they did just straight up kill a man. So we'll be following the story as it develops. We'll be following the continued actions of ICE in Chicago and other places.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And we will continue to talk about stuff after these ads.

[James Stout]

All right, and we are back. Mia was talking about rapid responders there. And I want to talk a little bit about one of the tools that they were using, which was called People over Papers. There are many of these apps that have sprung up since the January of this year. Right. Since we saw much more visible immigration enforcement on the street streets. Padlet, which was the, I guess bulletin board type service that was People over Papers relied on, has removed people over Papers. Right. Padlets say it violated their terms of service. The removal comes just a few days after a Laura Looma tweet which tagged the CEO claimed that people over papers was violating the terms of service by quote, harassment, stalking, privacy violations, inciting violence and other unlawful for activity. Luma Therei is noting things in the terms of service that she perceives people to be doing with people over papers. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This has happened after the another of these apps, ICE Block, was removed from app stores last week. Also involved some Luma posting, notably Trisha McLaughlin, the DHS assistant Secretary for Public affairs has claimed, and this is in contravention of what's widely held to be court precedent and the law. She has claimed that videotaping ICE agents is doxing them. And separately, Kristy Noem has claimed that doxxing is an act of violence. We can join the two dots there. Videotaping ICE agents as an act of violence seems to be what's being suggested here. We can see the consequences of this argument in the deportation of Atlanta area reporter Mario Guevara. Mario was held for more than 100 days in detention. Attention. He was arrested in no Kings Day protest, if you can remember back. Back when people were doing those things. But the charges against him were dropped. However, since then, the government has argued that his filming of law enforcement constitutes a threat to public safety. Murray has now been deported back to El Salvador. He's an Atlanta area reporter. And like, I guess to editorialize, it would be really nice to see a fraction of the advocacy we saw for Jimmy Kim Kimmel as someone who's actually doing reporting.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Not just trying to be funny.

[Mia Wong]

He's not as big as Jimmy Kimmel. Doesn't have as many followers.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, but he's also been sent to El Salvador, whereas Jimmy Kimmel was.

[Garrison Davis]

Sent back to his mansion in Hollywood.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. For like less than a week. So I'm going to link in the show notes both to an advocacy campaign and the Freedom of the Press foundation piece about Mario, and you guys can, can check that out if you'd like to. Second character for this week is Tom Homan. You guys will remember Tom Homan. Borders are a guy who famously, well, relatively recently has become famous for seemingly accepting a bag with $50,000 of cash in it in an FBI sting operation. Let's play this clip of Pam Bondi, who is answering questions in front of Congress here about what happened to the literal bag of cash.

[Robert Evans]

What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI paid to Mr. Homan in a paper bag, evidently.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, my God. Tom and Jerry. Ass.

[James Stout]

She's looking through her notes right now. She's selected a page.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Senator, as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Holman was subjected to a full review by the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any wrong wrongdoing.

[Robert Evans]

And that was not my question. My question was what became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI delivered, evidently in a paper bag, to Mr. Homan?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Senator, I'd look at your facts.

[Robert Evans]

Are you saying that they did not deliver $50,000 in cash to Mr. Holman?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Senator, as recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review.

[Robert Evans]

Different question.

[Raven (Journalist)]

By FBI agents That's a different Department of Justice prosecutors, they found no evidence of wrongdoing.

[Robert Evans]

That's a different question. What became of the $50,000? Did the FBI get it back?

[Raven (Journalist)]

Mr. Whitehouse. Excuse me, Senator Whitehouse, you're welcome to talk to the FBI.

[Robert Evans]

The report to you. Can't you answer this question?

[Garrison Davis]

First of all, this guy's name is Mr. Whitehouse.

[James Stout]

Yeah, this guy's name is Senator Whitehouse. Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

That surely is a little confusing.

[James Stout]

Yeah, maybe he gets some emails for the wrong person. Sheldon Whitehouse apparently, is his first name.

[Mia Wong]

Theoretically, if he got a job for the administration, his email would be whitehouseitehouse.gov.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

That's cool.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's gonna happen, given the line of questioning that he pursued here. But, yeah, you can hear, right? She seems to be unwilling to answer where the paper bag of cash money.

[Garrison Davis]

Of $50,000.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Has gone. Incredible stuff.

[Mia Wong]

Look, it's easier to lose that than you'd think.

[James Stout]

One would assume that the FBI would have some kind of tracking capability when giving someone $50,000 in a paper bag, but here we are.

[Mia Wong]

Maybe it's a no country for Old mint kind of situation. Whoever found it was smart enough to dump the transponder for a first. We will probably never know if they're smart. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Well, building on that, what ProPublica is now reporting is that Homan went into business with a Pennsylvania consultant named Charles Sowell and that Sowell has been offering consoles on how to obtain contracts at the Department of Homeland Security. So Homan consulted for Sowell's firm during the Biden administration, and during that same period, Sowell became the chair of Homan's Border 911 Foundation. According to their reporting, ProPublica has called into question the extent to which Homan has actually recused himself from contracts, saying that he participated in meetings with executives about government contracting plans. So normally, a government official would be bound to steer clear of their former business associates for at least a year. Year when they enter office. Right. I can't, like, consult for Garrison, Inc. And then become procurement for DHS and immediately buy a thousand of whatever Garrison Inc. Is selling. You can tag Garrison on blue sky, where they will read what you think they're selling.

[Garrison Davis]

If this will result in me getting $50,000 in a paper bag, then, you.

[James Stout]

Know, maybe, yeah, in this instance, I would be the one getting the $50,000 from Garrison, Inc. In return for buying whatever it is that you are selling. Orbs. Maybe. Maybe.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. That's not a Great deal.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, seems like it was a great deal in this instance for Tom Homan.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Well, their reporting suggests that Herman went from a relatively modest income in 2017 to being a multimillionaire by the time he filed his 2025 disclosure documents. When you assume federal office, you have to file these disclosure documents, disclose your assets. Guess the famous one is Jimmy Carter's peanut farm. But it seems that during that time, his personal net worth increased significantly. Right. He did a lot of consulting. He became like a talking head on Fox News in the Biden administration. It's difficult to summarize the intricacies of the story. I'd encourage you to read it. For instance, there was a third person called Mark hall who appears to be doing some work on behalf of Homan, but also retaining relationship with Sowell's clients. It looks a lot like what's happening is that the people who Homan had been doing consulting with are now trying to make money saying that they have special access to DHF based off that consulting. This kind of builds on some of the stuff that we'd already seen and spoken about last week.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Finally, on the immigration beat, I want to talk about a case where the petitioner's attorney has stated that the petitioner. I'm not going to name the person. I don't think it's necessary. Was taken to hospital by CBP after they severely injured his leg on a raid in a car wash in Carson, California. He was booked into the hospital under a pseudonym and kept there under armed guard from August 27th until October 4th.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So this person, they weren't coming up on the detainee locator.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

They hadn't apparently been allocated an A number, which is what you'd normally use to look someone up on the ICE detainee location. And I guess the argument there was that they weren't booked in until they left the hospital. So this person basically disappeared for more than a month. The judge has granted that petitioner an attentive restraining order in that instance. Right. But I think I have been receiving a lot of messages about a Chicago older person who was detained by ICE at a hospital. And I have seen a number of reports that suggest that that's because ICE were detaining people in the hospital. To my knowledge, the only person they detained in the hospital was the older person person. They were not detaining patients at the hospital. They were there because they had bought somebody to the hospital in order for that person to be a patient, because that person was in their detention, in their care and needed medical assistance. I have seen outlets, I don't. Should I name them? Like Democracy now got this wrong and said that they were arresting people. So like Democracy now is one example. Right. I've seen outlets reporting this as I in the hospital detaining people, people. Nothing I have seen leads me to believe that and lots of things I have seen lead me not to believe. That doesn't mean it's great for the people who are brought into hospital by ice. I'm sure it fucking sucks. I'm sure it has a chilling effect on other people going to hospital to know that they are there. But so does reporting that suggests that you can be picked up in hospital if you're an inpatient or if you're in the emergency room. That stops people accessing medical care. That actively puts people in danger. We need to be real, really, really fucking careful when sharing this shit. Yeah, that includes people who are journalists or claiming to be journalists.

[Mia Wong]

People are so upset, rightly so, with what ICE is doing that there, there can be this attitude, and I've encountered it before, of like, well, by under cautioning people, that's the biggest risk. And it's like not when we're talking about whether or not people go to the hospital for life saving care. Like not. I'm sorry, it's just not like these are not equivalent risks. Risks. More people are going to be in a position where they would be scared off from going to the hospital and not in any danger from ICE going to it than might possibly be in danger going to the hospital. Like you were just endangering people by trying to get them to believe it is not safe for them to go receive life saving emergency medical care at this stage. Now is it possible that's going to change? Good God. I'm certainly not going to say no. Right. I'm certainly not going to say no 100%. Yeah. But that's not where we are right now. Just over cautioning people is not a net good in this instance.

[James Stout]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Mia Wong]

Sometimes it is, but not here because again, if people don't go to the hospital on time, they die.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm aware of cases where people with, with genuinely life threatening medical emergencies have, have been had to be persuaded to go to the hospital by people. Right. Because they had seen this. Because these rumors don't just spread via social media but also by WhatsApp groups and things. And it can be very scary for people.

[Mia Wong]

Well, and people largely construct their beliefs on reality by like what the weight of the people that they know directly or follow are saying is true. And when you see 50 people, some of whom you kind of know, some of whom you've at least followed to an extent online, all say this is unsafe, then there's a tendency to get really angry when people are like, well, I don't know, maybe it isn't actually.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Like, I mean, I care about the safety of migrants in this country. I think anyone who looked at the totality of my work would believe that. Right. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. That means I want them to go to hospital when they're fucking sick. And that means that people who are saying things that are not true, I understand why.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

It lines up with the other things that we know to be true. ICE is doing terrible shit. Shit is terrible. But it is still an area where we need to exercise extreme caution when reporting on things until we know, know that it is true that ICE are coming into hospital and taking people out of the beds, which, again, not a thing that I think is happening. Let's pivot a little bit to public lands. Something that I think about a lot, but we don't always report on here. But that I think is very important. I want to talk about the roadless rule today. So September saw the end of the comment period. It was a very short comment period on the Trump administration's proposal to resist the roadless rule. The roadless rule, if you're not familiar, protects over 58.8 million acres of national forest land for road building, logging and other industrial activity. According to the center for Western priorities, 99% of the comments submitted, of which there were more than 180,000, were opposed to rescinding the rule.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

The redness rule has previously had broader bipartisan support. It was not a particularly controversial thing. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rawlins announced a proposal early in the summer saying it would increase logging and decrease wildfire risk. Research suggests that the opposite is true. Cutting roads into forests provides more ignition opportunities. Right. By allowing people to go into those forests, you allow those people to do things which lead to fires happening.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Right.

[James Stout]

Their cars overheat, they smoke cigarettes, they fucking shoot steel targets in the middle of the summer.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, we just had a guy brought in for the Palisade fires and he was like a 29 year old Uber driver who had, was having clearly a bad mental health day. Called in after he set a fire, but kind of made weird denials about it and like fled to Florida. And it, it kind of just looks like he was listening to a song where there were people lighting fires and decided to light a fire. And it got way out of control way too quickly.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it wasn't even the same night. Like it took like a week because like they put out the initial fire, but it kept burning through thick underbrush which eventually got re be caught. That's my understanding, based on the articles that I've read. But like, yeah, it's, it's, it's. I mean, in that case, it's just a guy who's not super.

[James Stout]

Well, yeah, sure. And like the other thing that cutting rose will do is it will change the foliage. Right. You'll cut down the big trees and you'll have smaller shrubs and those are easier to burn, the big trees. Right. The Wilderness Society has some data on this. I think they found that forests with roads were four times more likely to have farmers.

[Mia Wong]

Myers.

[James Stout]

I will link to that Wilderness Society data. And the roadless rule was passed under the Clinton admin and it's being rescinded as part of a March executive order which sought to increase U.S. timber production. I want to note that there will not be guys with chainsaws rolling into your favorite national forest like next week or next month. Right. Like building these roads would have to be financed by the United States Forest Service, which is of course currently.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Currently.

[James Stout]

Well, if you go on the forest website, Forest Service website, it'll tell you that radical left Democrats have shut down the federal government right now in a pop up.

[Mia Wong]

We did it, guys.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So the Forest Service finally coming out against the woke left. But yeah, the Forest Service would have to finance these and it's currently understaffed because of the voluntary and doge based layoffs. It's not particularly well funded. I don't see the Forest Service going in for a lot of road construction. But I might be wrong.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Trump Kelly seems to see not importing timber as a major issue. I'm not quite sure why. Like I guess this was an issue in Britain when they had to respond to the Spanish Armada. Cut down a lot of trees back then. Not familiar with Very, very similar national security issue. I think we can agree, right? The Spanish.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I'm just excited that now I can finally drive my ATV through these, you know, environmentally protected areas.

[Mia Wong]

God damn right, Garrison.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Without getting harassed by the Park Service.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they woke left.

[Mia Wong]

I'm going to be the drunkest guy on an atv and Joshua tree. I'm going to drive straight for the biggest tree I can find. Anything over a thousand years old is Fair game for my bumper, baby.

[James Stout]

Sit close to home, man. If I see anyone, I'm sorry, James.

[Garrison Davis]

James is seething right now.

[Mia Wong]

James is going to fucking cut me.

[James Stout]

I have genuine. If I see anyone stealing or destroying a Joshua Tree, I will insult.

[Mia Wong]

I would never harm a Joshua. I would never harm a Joshua Tree. There's one kind of tree I will harm indiscriminately, and it's a tree of paradise, but that's good for the environment. Fuck those trees. Kill them wherever you find them.

[James Stout]

I think the only Joshua Tree it's okay to hate is the album by U2.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that's also. Burn every copy of the album, Joshua Tree.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I'm okay with. Destroy it. Erase it from the earth.

[Mia Wong]

Run over those with an atv.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I wouldn't mind if that became extinct. Why not? Yeah. Mia, do you want to talk about tariffs? We're talking about timber. And of course, there has been recently a tariff on Canadian lumber woke trees coming in from our neighbors to the north. So perhaps that's why we need to destroy our national forest.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, Canada kind of is destroying theirs and they still have trees to export.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I do, I guess. One thing I haven't said about public land, that you should always say when you're talking about public land, is that it's all native land, actually. And the framing of public land is a place for white folks to recreate, create. It's not the correct framing. It's not how we win this fight.

[Mia Wong]

And you should also, if you care about not just the damage that fires do, but conservation in general. And you ever get the opportunity to go through, like up here in the Pacific Northwest, you can go through chunks of the forest that are managed by the state and that are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. And then you can go through chunks of forest that are managed by the indigenous communities. And the way in which forests are managed is very different.

[James Stout]

Different. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And different in a way that one is the right way to do it and the other two aren't. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

The other two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is land that was all stolen from its indigenous stewards by means of genocide, and we should give it back.

[Mia Wong]

And it's not just a matter of that's the right thing to say, but also that is the right way to preserve those lands.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The people who have been in stewardship of those lands so much longer than America has been at the.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway, watch The, I think, 1991 movie Clear Cut, which is set in Canada, but a fucking banger Real good movie. Check it out.

[James Stout]

I don't know if those two things are compatible.

[Mia Wong]

What?

[James Stout]

Canada and a banger. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Hey, come on. It's good.

[James Stout]

Okay, I'll watch it.

[Mia Wong]

It's about an indigenous activist and a white lawyer who.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't like Cronenberg, James, what's wrong with you?

[Mia Wong]

His Cronenberg's a beer because he's fighting this. Canadians make great moves movies. It's really good. It's about this, like, okay, I'll watch liberal white lawyer who's fighting like, a logging company and this indigenous activist who takes him and kidnaps the head of the logging company and takes them into the forest. And that's all I'll tell you about the movie. It is a fucking banger.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't go on this podcast and make fun of your home country.

[James Stout]

James Garrison Davis. That is not easy.

[Mia Wong]

You will all, by the way, like Clear Cut. Watch that fucking movie.

[James Stout]

It rips. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Tariff talk.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

What movie?

[Mia Wong]

Tariff.

[James Stout]

Look at that for a segue.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, lightning round. We have two. We have two pivot points here.

[Mia Wong]

We're.

[Robert Evans]

We're, We're, We're.

[Mia Wong]

We're.

[Robert Evans]

We're going to go for the timber pivot instead of the movie, but pivot. Okay, so lightning round. Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on softwood lumber, a 25% tariff on upholstered furniture, and 25% tariff on kitchen cabinets and vanities.

[Garrison Davis]

IKEA is the thing.

[James Stout]

IKEA is open shades long. Industry is collapsing in Canada as we speak.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So this is. This is going to be in effect October 14th.

[James Stout]

Get him now.

[Robert Evans]

And then also, these tariffs are scheduled to increase at the beginning of next year. Year. The upholstered furniture tariffs are increasing to 30% and the kitchen cabinet and vanity tariffs are increasing to 50% at the beginning of next year.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah, the idea that there's a vanity tariff is very funny to me. Like, not as a noun, but just like, as a concept. Vain people.

[Robert Evans]

These are nominally lumber industry tariffs. I think there's some kind of housing development brain inside of traffic Trump's head rattling around as to why there's suddenly tariffs on vanities and uplifted furniture. Who knows? Baffling. The Canadian government has been attempting to lift the tariffs. It has not worked. Negotiations once again failed today, which is October 8th.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Bouncing from that to something that's also very important. Well, actually way significantly more important. So one of the issues with the current government shutdown is the threat to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which is Nor called wic. WIC funding is extraordinarily important because it feeds several million people. And okay, this story is very, very weird because we haven't gotten any direct thing about how this would work outside of just the press secretary saying it. But the press secretary is saying that Trump is going to fund this program with the money from one of the tariff programs.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now it is worth noting that this is just very unconstitutional. Exceptionally unconstitutional is a violation of the part of the separation of powers where they say that Congress is the thing that levies taxes and decides where the money goes. But it's also, it's not clear if this is even happening or how it could even remotely happen. But it is being reported. WIC has been a program that Trump has been using to push his narrative about the government shut down.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think 40% of children are on WIC right now. Like, this is an extremely important program. It's one of those things where again, there was complete bipartisan support, apart aside from complete lunatics, until very like you would never have heard like a fuck WIC statement. It's done a lot of good for a lot of people who need a lot of, of help. I did see a statement from the WIC Council that basically asserted that like, look, we'd be excited if you would keep us keep WIC funded, but using tariff money is not a sustainable or reliable approach to do this. Just fund it by playing for government programs in the youthful way.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So the other major tariff news that we have is basically for the last couple of weeks, Trump has been threatening to impose 100% tariffs on pharmaceutical. This was originally supposed to go into effect on October 1, and then Trump started cutting a bunch of deals with drug manufacturers to exchange sort of lower price agreements. And also, and this is the major significant element, as we've seen, with a whole bunch of companies that have made deals with Trump pledges of large scale investments in US Manufacturing and production. These tariffs have sort of been staved off and the administration is now saying that they won't do it because they don't need to because they have reached agreements for drug companies. Pfizer was the first major company to sign a deal. This has been part of an initiative called Trump Rx, which is supposedly coming in 2026. Man yeah. And the plan is to have direct to consumer drug sales by forcing these companies to give the US Most favored Nation status, which like basically the, the, the, the thrust of this is giving specifically this Trump RX thing the prices that these drug companies charge to Undeveloped countries, however, comma, and this is extremely important and not being reported very much. Trump rx, assuming this comes program comes into being, you can't use insurance on it. It is only you. You can only buy drugs off there. You would only be able to buy drugs off there without insurance. So it probably doesn't lower your drug costs at all. If you have really any kind of.

[James Stout]

Insurance, it certainly lowers the cost your insurance company has to pay. Right. Like if you're insured badly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, right. You know, and so the actual good that this could even potentially do, I think is very, very limited. Yeah, but that's, that's sort of what's going on. This is the part of the initiative. If you see people talking about how he's lowering drug prices, it's specifically for this weird Trump RX thing, which again, you can't use insurance to use. There's been a few other tariffs that he's talked about and I kind of want to set a spectrum of how real a tariff is because there's a whole bunch of different kinds of tariffs that Trump announces and then nothing happens on. So for example, you can have a kind of tariff where he announces it on social media, but there's no date.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So the 100% tariff on foreign made movies, this is the second time he's talked about it. There's never been a date attached to to it. It seems to be something that he tweets about and then forgets about. It never happens. On the more real end, there are tariffs like the one that is currently being proposed is 25% tariff on heavy trucks. That's supposed to go into effect on November 1, but there is no executive order. So that one we can't treat as real as for example the lumber tariffs which have an executive order, although also again, you have to wait for these to actually go into effect. Effect, which would be category sort of three and four. Are. Is there an executive order and has the date of the executive order doing the thing passed?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So we have a couple of floating tariffs. From there we have those 25% tariffs on heavy trucks which are supposed to go into effect November 1, assuming it was an executive order. We have this film tariff which is.

[Garrison Davis]

The, was the scariest tariff by far. 100% tariffs on foreign made films.

[James Stout]

What do they tariff?

[Mia Wong]

Time to hoist the black flag again, my friend.

[Robert Evans]

No one has any idea what that means.

[Garrison Davis]

We have no clue.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely not.

[Garrison Davis]

We have no clue how this would be baffled.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, he just said 100% on foreign films.

[James Stout]

Okay, Sick Good. I'm glad that everyone's equally clear on that.

[Mia Wong]

Get back to torrenting, people.

[Robert Evans]

I think the final thing we should talk about is. So on November 5, the Supreme Court is going to start hearing the case against a bunch of the tariffs that Trump has been doing. We've talked about this before. The Trump administration has also stated that even if these tariffs are found unconstitutional, they are going to continue to apply tariffs themselves using other laws.

[James Stout]

That's good.

[Robert Evans]

Even if they lose the Supreme Court case, that doesn't mean that all the tariffs are suddenly just not going to happen anymore. He will probably try to reimpose a whole bunch of them under different tariff authority and we'll go through this whole process again. But yeah, this has been tariff talk.

[Mia Wong]

Great.

[James Stout]

Okay, so I have a fundraiser for you. We're doing Bouquet. And again, Bukit Tan is an Alavi Kurdish woman. Because of her beliefs and her ethnicity, she found it very hard to live in Turkey. We've documented Turkey and Kurdish people's relations quite a lot on this podcast. She is now living in Southern California and she needs to raise money to pay her lawyer for her asylum case. And the website for that is gofundme.com f urgent help 4 buket b u k E T S asylum case. Or you can just click it in the show notes. If you would like to contact us with a news tip, you can do so by emailing coolzonetipson Me. It will be encrypted if you use another proton email address from one end to the other end. So if that is something that is a concern for you, that is how you can reach out.

[Mia Wong]

We reported someone's news.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we reported the news.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Robert Evans]

It Could Happen.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu. Every single episode.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

30, 32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Garrison Davis]

You're like, wait, stop. What?

[Ed Helms]

Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna Nick Kroll Jordan Klepper listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentuck, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Robert Evans]

America, y' all better wake the hell up.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

There's a vile sickness in Ambas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut.

[Ed Helms]

It out from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Mankind. 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.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

In early 1988, federal agents raced to.

[Garrison Davis]

Track down the gang they suspect of.

[Robert Evans]

Importing millions of dollars worth of heroin.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Into New York from Asia.

[Robert Evans]

Had 30 agents ran with shotguns and rifles and you naked.

[Raven (Journalist)]

Five, six white people pushed me in the car. I'm going, what the hell?

[Ed Helms]

Basically your stay at home moms were.

[Robert Evans]

Picking up these large amounts of heroin.

[Garrison Davis]

All you gotta do is receive the package.

[Robert Evans]

Don't have to open it, just accept it.

[Ed Helms]

She was very upset, crying.

[Dr. Kaveh Hoda]

Once I saw the gun, I tried.

[Garrison Davis]

To take his hand and I saw the flash of light.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to the Chinatown sting on the.

[Narrator/Host (Various Podcasts)]

Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Raven (Journalist)]

This is an iHeart podcast.