It Could Happen Here Weekly 216

Summary

Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here Weekly 216

Date: January 24, 2026
Hosts: Robert Evans, Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, Margaret Killjoy
Featured Guest: Ellie Bell (Community Organizer)

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Main Theme

This episode is a compilation of several recent recordings, structured as a weekly digest. Its primary focus is the intensifying wave of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and state-led ethnic cleansing, alongside deep dives into the implications of Trump administration policy on the Federal Reserve, global trade tensions, and a high-profile left-wing terrorism prosecution. The episode’s through-line is the continuity and escalation of state violence and the varied forms of community resistance, especially on-the-ground organizing and grassroots solidarity efforts.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Escalating ICE Raids and Their Human Toll

(Starts ~01:32, Deep dive: 02:46–48:00)

• Rolling Ethnic Cleansing & Community Trauma:
  Mia Wong opens with the grim reality of ethnic cleansing in the US, perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol with police assistance. There is focus on a series of ICE shootings and the lack of data transparency, intentional obfuscation, and lack of public outcry, particularly for non-white victims.

  • "One of the many, many, many, many, many crises that are unfolding in this country right now is a rolling ethnic cleansing carried out by ICE in border patrol with the assistance of the cops." (01:32, Mia Wong)

• Personalizing the Crisis – Alberto’s Story:
  Ellie Bell shares the story of Alberto, an asylum-seeker father detained in Indiana after an early morning ICE raid in Chicago. The account emphasizes the randomness of ICE targeting, the trauma to families, and the community’s attempts to secure his release.

  • ICE agents are described as targeting non-white people indiscriminately, often without proper warrants.
  • Alberto, described by his neighbors as "a shining beacon in a community," represents countless others disappeared by ICE.
  • "I want to be very clear that people are watching, people care, and more people need to be watching and more people need to care when it happens to people who are not white." (11:11, Ellie Bell)

• Systemic Racism and the Response Gap:

  • Pointed contrast drawn between the national fundraising support for a white victim (Renee) versus Alberto, highlighting entrenched racial empathy gaps.
  • Detention regimes described as deliberately brutal, with medical neglect (Alberto’s seizure disorder as recurring example) and psychological torment.
  • "These are not numbers. These are not just names on a page. These are real people's lives. This is a real man whose three children... don't know where their dad is." (13:09, Ellie Bell)

• Calls for Solidarity and Proactive Action:

  • Organizers urge leveraging privilege, broader community involvement, and micro-to-macro collective action.
  • “Rest as resistance” is discussed alongside practical organizing advice – logistics, mutual aid, and digital campaign support.
  • Direct action, pressure on legislators, crowdfunding, and information dissemination promoted.
    • "The more of you that there are at a thing, the less likely they are to kill you." (15:26, Mia Wong)
    • "We need everyone who can possibly do anything, whether that's putting your bodies on the line in person or... post something online." (18:34, Ellie Bell)

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2. The Federal Reserve Showdown and Trump’s Economic Power Grab

(Starts ~84:57, Deep dive: 98:44–122:51)

• Powell vs Trump – An Unprecedented Power Struggle:
  Mia Wong unpacks the escalating clash: Trump’s attempts to remove Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, the unusual public resistance by Powell, and Supreme Court pushback on Trump’s efforts to fire Fed board members.

  • "Fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with the money." (approx. 90:00, Mia Wong)

• Explaining the Fed in Depth:

  • The Fed’s public/private hybrid nature explored—a “quasi private entity,” with confusing and contradictory public-facing explanations.
  • The Fed’s functions (setting interest rates, printing money, managing assets and payments systems) are explained in direct, irreverent language.
  • Discussion of how the Fed’s (currently) technocratic independence is the lynchpin of American and global capitalism—and why threatening this alarms not only technocratic elites but also the financial sector.

• Implications of Losing Fed Independence:

  • Historical examples (e.g., Turkey under Erdoğan) cited as warning signs.
  • Trump’s stated desire for a Greenspan-like chairman—read as a recipe for renewed speculative excess and possible economic collapse.
  • Consensus that Fed control is the “red line” which could unite even capitalists against Trump.

• Critical Perspectives:

  • David Graeber quoted at length, connecting money, central banking, and war.
  • The panel emphasizes that neither the current Federal Reserve nor Trump’s regime serve the people, framing this as a battle between two sectors of capital with little hope for ordinary people unless the economic elite stands aside at a breaking point.
  • "The only way you can find out if the action that you are taking is going to be the one that knocks everything over is by doing it." (52:30, Mia Wong referencing Andor)

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3. The Turtle Island Liberation Front Case – Left-Wing Repression and Prosecution

(Segment by Garrison Davis, ~56:38–84:57)

• FBI Entrapment and “Antifa Terror” Narrative:
  • A deep-dive into the arrest and federal prosecution of four alleged members of a direct-action group accused of plotting bombings.
  • Detailed facts from court documents recounted, with focus on informant involvement, opsec failures, and the performative terrorism discourse by officials.
  • Skepticism voiced about the group’s origins, genuine activist credentials, and how the state leverages these cases to chill dissent and frame left activism as terrorism.

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4. International Escalations – Greenland, Tariffs, and Global Order

(~144:14–174:19, plus Davos segments)

• Trump’s Greenland/Iceland “Crisis”:

  • Recap of transatlantic tensions over Trump’s Greenland ambitions, his tariff threats against EU/NATO allies, and eventual backdown.
  • Dramatic escalation/de-escalation cycle described, with contextual analysis of EU countermeasures—including the so-called “trade bazooka” and threats to dollar hegemony.

• The Shifting Global Order – Canadian PM at Davos:

  • Canadian PM Mark Carney delivers unexpectedly frank analysis: the “rules-based international order” was always a fiction for US convenience and is falling apart under weaponized economic integration.
    • "This fiction was useful... but this bargain no longer works. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." (168:08, Mark Carney via Davos speech)

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5. Rapid-fire News and Community Reaction From Minneapolis

(123:38–138:34)

• On-the-Ground: ICE Killings and Community Defiance:
  • Latest on the ICE shooting of Julio César Sosa Selles in Minneapolis. Contradictions between government accounts and family/witness testimony highlighted.
  • Military and police occupation, with National Guard on standby—attire now so similar to police that high-visibility vests are needed.
  • Notable: an overwhelming wave of community solidarity, mutual aid, and everyday resistance visible on the streets; citywide unity against ICE described.
    • "Every neighborhood here feels like the neighborhood most in lockstep... everyone is watching out for each other... of every age and demographic." (137:01, James Stout)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the ICE crackdown and racial disparity:

• "Nobody deserves to be treated this inhumanely. Unless, of course, you're a fascist, then I think, you know, fair game." (09:26, Ellie Bell)
• "Not just white women, because obviously Renee's murder is horrific... but Alberto's campaign has been at $14,000 for more than a week. We can't raise more money because people have so much more sympathy and empathy for white people." (11:36, Ellie Bell)

On resistance and organizing:

• “We owe each other everything and we owe each other witnessing… There are so many people who are not doing any of the labor, all of that labor gets distributed so unevenly among a few people.” (16:30, Ellie Bell)
• "If you showed one of the people in the Seattle 1919 General Strike... a computer, they would have a heart attack. And they did this. So I believe in all of you." (24:02, Mia Wong)

On the Federal Reserve and Trump:

• “Fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with the money.” (90:00, Mia Wong)
• "The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism." (117:00, quoting David Graeber via Mia Wong)

On the changing global order:

• "We knew the story of the international rules based order was partially false ... This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." (168:08, Mark Carney)

On hope and collective action:

• "Solidarity forever. Okay. I believe that we will win. If what you do is make memes, make a meme... the more you speak out, the more you make it possible for other people to speak out." (48:47, Ellie Bell)
• All Star by Smash Mouth quoted as a motivational anthem. (53:04, Ellie Bell)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:32–48:00: ICE ethnic cleansing, Alberto’s story, organizing, and community response.
• 56:38–84:57: The Turtle Island Liberation Front case: details, FBI press conference, legal landscape.
• 84:57–122:51: The Federal Reserve battle: Trump’s power grab, what the Fed is, economic implications, historical context.
• 123:38–138:34: On-the-ground reporting from Minneapolis: ICE shootings, community defense, National Guard.
• 144:14–174:19: Greenland tensions, trade war threats, the “trade bazooka,” global economic order, and Davos analysis.
• 176:12–184:13: Update on Iran, Syria/Kurdistan, ICE warrant escalation, calls for support and fundraisers.

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Action Items & Calls to Action

• Support for Alberto and other detained immigrants:

  • Donate to crowdfunding campaigns (links in episode description).
  • Share stories; sign and share petitions to pressure Congress for ICE releases.
  • Activate community networks, spread information, and participate in mutual aid.

• On Organizing:

  • Recognize the uneven burden on vulnerable organizers. White and/or privileged listeners urged to actively participate and share the load.
  • “The more you speak out, the more you make it possible for other people to speak out.” (49:35, Ellie Bell)

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Tone and Language

The tone throughout the episode is urgent, irreverent, and insistent on moral clarity. Hosts oscillate between humor (often dark or absurd), analytical deep-dives, personal storytelling, and direct calls for solidarity and action. Technical explanations (e.g., of the Fed) are delivered in accessible, frequently profane language.

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Summary

Episode 216 of "It Could Happen Here" blends frontline immigration reporting, economic analysis, and global geopolitical commentary in a cohesive narrative of a world in advanced crisis. State violence—especially via ICE—serves as the central motif. The panel contextualizes these developments within both immediate tragedy (disappeared immigrants, community trauma) and broader historical-political frameworks (capital’s need for technocratic stability, shifting global alliances). The episode offers a spectrum of resistance tactics, from mutual aid to direct advocacy, and insists that only deep, collective transformation can meet the scale of the ongoing collapse.

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Additional Resources

• [Alberto's Crowdfund & Petition] (Refer to episode description)
• Resources for Minneapolis mutual aid and Kurdish refugees mentioned near episode end
• For more analysis, check out back episodes of Executive Disorder and It Could Happen Here

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“We owe each other everything.” – Ellie Bell (52:46)

Transcript

[Ellie Bell]

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[Robert Evans]

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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where so many things are happening here that we frankly have worn out the bit about trying to use this as our introduction. I am your host, Be A Wong. One of the many, many, many, many, many crises that are unfolding in this country right now is a rolling ethnic cleansing carried out by ICE in border patrol with the assistance of the cops. And we have talked about this from a lot of angles. But a thing I want to sort of draw attention back to in this moment where there's increased attention and scrutiny from truly a series of really hideous ice shootings is what it's like to be in detention right now and how possibly people can be gotten out of detention. And with me to talk about something that I feel like I can't even describe as the horrors because it's simply worse than that is Ellie Bell, who is a community organizer, does many things, wears many hats. Welcome to the show.

[Ellie Bell]

Thank you. Hello, I'm Ellie. And the reason I am here right now for this specific podcast conversation is that I am on a team that is trying to help many immigrants. But one in particular that I will be talking about tonight, Albero, who is a father and a husband and is currently detained in an ICE detention center in Indiana after being transferred from his home in Chicago. And, you know, we are trying to get him out and to get his family's story out there and his story out there, and, you know, among many other things that ICE is doing and the way that fits into all of that, that's what I am here to talk about today.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So let's begin. So I guess one thing that I want to sort of lead off with here is obviously the sort of the most intense ICE repression and raids have shifted to places like Minneapolis right now. I mean, who knows? As you're listening to this, maybe they've pivoted it to another place. I don't know. Everything is moving so unbelievably fast and horribly. But also, raids are still continuing in the places where ICE has nominally pulled out. Now, the frequency of those raids has decreased because they simply don't have the personnel to run these kind of. I don't know, they describe it as operational tempo. I describe it as they don't have the people to kidnap this many people at once.

[Ellie Bell]

They can't kidnap or kill us all.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Which, you know, not enormously happy to see people chanting that here. I have a bunch of visceral memories of the last two times that I saw people chanting that and didn't go great. So let's not go on the, like, Sudan 2019 tangent. Yeah, actually, no, no, sorry, sorry, I am wrong. The Sudan one was we are not afraid to die, which is in some ways bleaker.

[Ellie Bell]

There is so much. There's so much history packed in here.

[Mia Wong]

Moving to the presence of, you know, our version of the ethnic cleansing. Can you go to sort of the start of this and talk about what the specific raid here looked like?

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah. So, I mean, I think I want to zoom out for a moment before I get into the specifics of what happened with this man, this father and husband and his family, and then get into it. But, you know, as I'm sure you know, we are all talking about, we are being ice, escalating their tactics in just an egregious way. They killed a woman in cold blood and just executed her in the street the other day, Renee. And good. Now, of course, this is not the first or only person that they've killed recently. It's one of many I think there are now 11. It might be 12. The number just keeps rising every day.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So we still don't have very good information about what happened. But literally the next day in Portland, someone either ICE or Border Patrol at the time I remember recording this, It's Tuesday the 13th. We still don't know whether it was ICE or Burgersville, but someone shot two people in Portland. So. Yeah, and I think they're being charged right now for terrorism because this is just what happens now.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah, these are all connected. But. But you know, we know that there are. I believe there's been. It was nine two days ago. Then it. Now it's like 11 or 12. It just keeps rising. The number of people that we know of. I want to be really clear that we know of. And as you. We don't have good data on this. We do not have correct data on this, which is also an intentional tool of the state to obscure what is happening. But there are so many people who have been killed by ice, and those are the ones that we know of since, let's say in the last two or three months. There are so many more. There are so many people missing from Alligator, Alcatraz. What we saw happen in Minneapolis last week is horrendous. And you know, the same way that Albero, who I am part of this team trying to help get him out of detention. He did nothing wrong. He has had no criminal activity. There was nothing to warrant the excuse that he must be detained or treated violently. It's the same as how Renee did nothing wrong and nothing to deserve being murdered. He was witnessing. He was witnessing and being there for her neighbors and she was sitting there in her car and that is what we know. But her murder, the same way that these raids and everything going on, it's an escalation tactic used by ICE that's part of deep rooted, old school fascist and authoritarian measures to test what they can get away with while people remain complacent in times of genocide and ethnic cleansing and forced societal upheaval. You know, they just want to see what they can get away with and how much control they can exercise. So that being said to get into what happened to Alberto and his wife is they are in Chicago and they've been there for a little over a year since they came here to seek asylum. And they were first in a shelter and then they finally were able to get the work they needed to have a home with their three kids. You know, I want to be really explicit that this person is a father, a Husband. He has other family members here who look up to him, who he is, a father figure or an uncle to. He is a community figure and a leader. After he was taken, you know, I was told by a family friend who is part of the team that I'm working with, they told me that the women in the neighborhood, the other, like, immigrant women who all, like, work together and know each other, called him a panda Dios, like a loving term for someone who is just like a community member, like a shining beacon in a community. And that is. That is who he is. And I also really want to emphasize that it wouldn't really matter if that wasn't who he was and if he was somehow, quote, unquote, lesser than that or not a saint, because there's no such thing as, like, a good or bad immigrant. Nobody deserves to be treated this inhumanely. Unless, of course, you're a fascist, then I think, you know, fair game.

[Mia Wong]

Hey, look, I'm gonna put my foot down there and say we are more than capable of dealing with fascists internally.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We can.

[Mia Wong]

We can simply hold the line on no deportations and simply deal with them here. I believe in us.

[Ellie Bell]

But, but so. So what happened was it was early, early morning, the morning of Monday, December 29th. Okay. It's officially been two weeks since this happened. Monday, December 29th. It's like somewhere between maybe 5 and 6am 6:30, it's still dark out. He and his wife, whose name I'm not going to use to protect her anonymity and her identity, but he and his wife got into their car and the windows were rolled down the slightest bit. They were getting in their car to drive to work so that then she could go back home and be with her kids after taking him to work. And I want to be really explicit that we know that when ICE agents came to do this raid, they didn't have their names when they approached them. They didn't know anything about them until they took them in in the Chicago area. You know, you can talk about this a little if you want, but I have to have a warrant for the people they're picking up. They can't just pick up anyone based on the NAVA consent decree, which was just extended by the appeals court. We know that in Chicago, this is something that has been continuously happening.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

And as we look at this from a broader context, they go after non white people, kidnap them and ask questions later just because they think no one is going to care. And part of the reason that I'm talking about all of this is because I want to be very clear that people are watching, people care, and more people need to be watching and more people need to care when it happens to people who are not white.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Not just white women, because obviously Rene's murder is horrific, and I saw her be able to raise $1.4 million in less than a day. And Alberto's campaign has been at $14,000 for more than a week. And we can't raise more money because people have so much more sympathy and empathy for white people. And that is actually so tied into why ICE does the things they do. Because of that same whiteness, that same, same white supremacy, where they think we can do whatever we want to immigrants and brown people. Who's going to care?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And that's. That is one of the major constituent elements of this entire, like, rolling ethnic cleansing is that, you know, and this is. This has been a thing in Chicago and, like, since the raids really kicked off, is that every fucking day someone just disappears and everyone just goes about their lives.

[Ellie Bell]

Absolutely. And they count on us to do that, and they count on us. On us to not be paying enough attention that we can't keep track of how shitty their data is and how inconsistent their data is and all of the numbers we don't have.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Well, and the other thing they're relying on is they're relying on there not being any intent to stop them.

[Ellie Bell]

Right, Absolutely.

[Mia Wong]

What they're relying on is, you know, once. Once they grab someone, everyone just going, okay, well, that's just. You know, this is. This is a statistic counting up on a counter and not. This is a life that needs to be fought for.

[Ellie Bell]

Exactly. And that is why I find it so important and why I am doing the work that I am doing alongside everyone else who's doing this kind of work to uplift stories and tell them because they can't be told by the immigrants themselves right now because they're being tortured inside detention. And. Yeah, it's so crucial for people to understand that, like, these are not numbers. These are not just names on a page. These are real people's lives. This is a real man whose three children, whose three young children have now gone to bed without him every night for two weeks. They don't know where their dad is. They don't know why he's not there.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

They don't know why he's apparently being tortured. They just know that their dad isn't there. And I need people to understand, you know, think about, can you imagine can you imagine being away from your family for two weeks and counting, not knowing when you're going to come back, if you're going to come back, if you're going to die in detention? Can you imagine being the child of someone? And a lot of people don't have to imagine. I'm saying this for like, you know, white people and privileged people who don't have to think about these things or can get away with just going about business as usual because there are a lot of us who have immigrant family and have loved ones who this has been done to, and we don't get to go about our day's business as usual because it's just not possible. It's just not possible. It would be like asking me to go about my life business as usual when my family in Lebanon and Palestine are being bombed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Like, it's not possible. It is not possible. All of these things are connected. Our lives are connected. And we owe it to each other to pay attention and to witness, especially because we are seeing that they will kill you for paying attention and witnessing because they don't want you to be able to exercise that. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Well, and, and you know, the secondary thing, and this is something that's been pretty well known for a very long time, is that the more of you that there are at a thing, the less likely they are to kill you.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this has been a thing with, with, you know, US Police killings are protests forever, which is the US doesn't like, fire regular bullets into crowds because it's a terrible idea. It's. It's how you get uprisings. Right. Like, you know, I mean, I. I say this on the show all the time. This is how the Mexican government lost control of the city of Oaxaca. Like, they literally accidentally started like a pseudo anarchist revolution in that city by doing that. Right. So normally what they do is they pick off people when they're on their own.

[Ellie Bell]

I'm going to be totally honest. I kind of wish that the government would make a ridiculous mistake right now that lends itself to people being able to get justice. That's all I'll say. I'm not going to give specifics, but.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, you know, but.

[Mia Wong]

But it's also the other thing I'll say about that, right, is like, whether or not they get away with this is also up to us.

[Ellie Bell]

It is. It absolutely is. And that is. That is why I say we owe each other everything and we owe each other witnessing. Because the thing is the job of telling these stories, of trying to Help get people vulnerable. Vulnerable people out of detention is also falling to a select few people who are the most vulnerable already and who have things on the line and things we're risking to do this because we know it's the right thing. And there are so many people with so much privilege who could be doing something, whether it's really, really small, like donating $5 or sharing someone's story or calling Congress to have them pressure ICE to let immigrants out, whatever it is that you could be doing. There are so many people who are not doing that. And when there are so many people who are not doing any of the labor, all of that labor gets distributed so unevenly among a few people. You know, I always think about the. What is it, James Baldwin quote about how it is the job of, you know, like, a few people. It's only a few people on this earth who are, like, doing the job of, like, loving people. Well, I'm completely butchering it right now because it's late at night and I can't think of it, but it's something like that, and I think about that all the time. And something that I'm thinking about right now a lot and having a lot of conversations, mostly with white people about is, hey, you need to start doing something because you have a lot of privilege that you're not utilizing. And when you don't utilize it, you actually are doing a lot of harm. Not in necessarily the same way that the ICE agents are, but you're still kind of capitulating to what they want you to do by putting all of this labor on vulnerable people who have so much to lose and so much to risk. And we can't afford to burn out constantly because we don't have the support and the more equitable division of labor that's needed. Like, we need everyone. We need everyone who can possibly do anything, whether that's putting your bodies on the line in person or. Or if you're a disabled person and you're in bed and you can post something online or you can tell someone, like, we need to activate our community networks for each other.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And there's also a lot of sort of logistical stuff. You know, I mean, there's like the old line about the army that, like, five or 10 to 1, like, logistics people for every, like, person who's out on the front. And that's also the way that if you're going to have an organizing thing that works, there's a massive sort of logistical tail behind everyone who's out doing stuff.

[Ellie Bell]

Absolutely. Right. You need safety people too at home. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There's a lot of stuff to be done.

[Ellie Bell]

I'll finish telling the story of what happened to Albero too because I want to, you know, center that because again, you know, this is a community issue and this is a community member who is missing now, who can't do his part as a part of a whole community because he has, he's been taken. And, and like when he was taken, they had guns. They had one pointed right at his wife. Yeah, he was saying, you know, they were saying, we're not resisting. But they, they kept ganging on the car window and they reached inside the car window and they like, you know, he and his wife emphasized that they were just going to work, they weren't doing anything and ICE didn't care.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

They see a non white person and they grow hungry for violence. And after detaining her, you know, they asked her to sign a document so that she could go get her kids. She refused because she didn't trust them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

And she told them that she wasn't going to sign anything. And then later they found out, I think the lawyers found out that what it was is that they were giving her a voluntary deportation paper for the whole family. And that level, they do this all the time. They do this all the time. That level of deceit and trickery is just horrible because they did it. They gave it to her in English and she doesn't speak English. They thought they could just get her to sign it to get them out.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

This is being run by like the same people who are banging doors down and just going into houses in Minneapolis. Yeah, it's all connected. They use the same tactics of violence and fear mongering and it's terrible. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I mean they've been moving personnel around so like there's like a non zero chance it was literally the same person. Like that person could be in Minneapolis now. We don't know.

[Ellie Bell]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And this has become the sort of background noise of American life. And it used to fucking not be the background noise because they're fucking grabbing people out of cars.

[Ellie Bell]

It shouldn't be. I mean, every day I see people post some type of video on TikTok or Instagram reels or Twitter or Blue Sky. Like I just see people, everyday people post. God, you know, it feels so horrific to watch all of this happen and have to go to a 9 to 5. And I have empathy for that, especially as someone who does community organizing. And I mean, I think there is a lot of sacrifice. I know there's a lot of sacrifice in the types of things that I do. And there's also a lot of privilege in the fact that I even have community and loved ones who helped me to pay my rent so that I can do this kind of organizing without worrying about not having shelter. And it's like we were saying before we, you know, started the recording. Like, I take it very seriously that I need to rest and I need to feed myself and I need to take care of myself. Because rest is not resistance, but me getting the rest that I need and the care that I need allows me to resist in a way that helps someone else to get free. And that's like, what we all need to be doing for each other.

[Mia Wong]

I'm just gonna say this because, you know, there. There used to be a thing people would do whatever, whenever there was a large social upheaval. It was called the occupation of the factories.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You could go read Bella Testa writing about it in, like, 1921. Very old thing. See, the Seattle General Strike was, like, the most famous example, people doing this in. In the US but it was like, okay, so there's some shit going on. We need to stop something from happening. So we are going to take over our workplaces and run the parts of it that need to be run so that people can get food. And then otherwise we're not. And otherwise we're just getting control.

[Ellie Bell]

You don't actually just have to go to your 9 to 5.

[Mia Wong]

The people in Seattle, those people didn't know what a television was.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And they were able to do this. If you showed one of the people in the Seattle 1919 General Strike, people who. Who did this, like, if you showed them a computer, they would have a heart attack. And they did this. So I believe in all of you, you have seen things that would have obliterated these people's minds. Like, it's.

[Ellie Bell]

I have. I have, like, a slightly different take. I don't know if this is like, a hot take or a cold take or a lukewarm take, but my perspective is one who said that you just have to go to your 9 to 5 while you watch all of this happen? Who said that? You are saying, oh, I have to do that? No one is actually making you do that. The consequences of that are that if you don't go to your 9 to 5 or you take a sick day or something, you might get fired and you might be in a similarly vulnerable position to someone whose life is already on the line. But if we all stood in solidarity with each other. That would be less dangerous. Like, if we chose each other over capitalism. That would be so radical. But that's my take there.

[Mia Wong]

There are not enough cops to evict us all. There simply aren't.

[Ellie Bell]

There really just aren't. I think that people forget or conveniently compartmentalize the truth that we as a collective, when we band together, when we refuse to participate in individualism the ways that they want us to, we are so powerful. And I think that that scares people because that's a lot of responsibility. But again, that's really only so much responsibility. If you see yourself as an individual as opposed to part of a collective, if you see yourself as bearing a piece of responsibility as part of a collective, the same way that ants all move in a colony and carry, like a piece of bread together, maybe you wouldn't feel so much overwhelmed because you would understand that we are in this together. And I think that we really owe that to each other, to reframe that in our minds and in our nervous systems as well, so that we can just, like, maybe shut up and show up.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Now, speaking of showing up. Okay, yeah, we're locking back on.

[Ellie Bell]

We're locking in.

[Mia Wong]

We're locking the fuck in. We can do this. I believe in us. So going back, I guess, from the sort of macro perspective to the micro individual perspective of the exact specific ways that one individual person gets treated, totally so sure.

[Ellie Bell]

Locking back into what is happening on a more micro level. Giving an example of how ICE is dehumanizing immigrants in detention, whether they are here, quote, unquote, illegally or not. Albero is not here illegally. Okay? He's going through the asylum process. When the immigration attorneys on our organizing team spoke with Alberto and specifically asked about his conditions at Clay county, he said that. And granted this, I believe, was sometime in the last week, I think they haven't spoken to him in maybe a week. It's been hard to. But when they asked about his conditions, he said that he had all the basics, is now being given three meals a day and was at least at that point, being administered medication. We don't have very good context and accurate data on how often that's actually been happening. He has a severe seizure disorder and he requires medication to be administered at least, I think, twice a day. And even one missed dose can be fatal. It's been a while since they've been able to talk. I do know that he checks in with his family and a family friend every morning, only briefly. I spoke to them Just before this call to get any updated information, there was a day this week where he didn't text first thing in the morning. And we were all really worried, and we had no idea what that meant. It turns out that the WI fi just was down, but, oh, my God, how horrifying. Every day I wake up and I just. I don't know if he's still alive. And he's only one of many, many immigrants that I have worked on cases for and that I am trying to bring attention to. And it's terrifying to never know if he's going to be one of the many, many people who have died in there, because it's been weeks or months for a year. And so, you know, as far as conditions go, we don't have a lot of information about his specific condition. We know that he has been struggling. We know that it's been very hard on his health. It would be hard on anyone's health whether they were disabled or sick or not, because the conditions are inhumane. We do know, as reported by other clients of the immigration attorneys on our team, we. We know that at different detention centers, many have told her that it's very cold. One who was with the gen pop and could only speak with her from a tablet in the room while other detainees were around, several have told her that they were denied access to nurses and medical care when they had headaches or a sore throat.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

I also want to tie this back to, you know, the global pandemic. We've seen a lot of people die of COVID or other illnesses while in detention. This is a public health issue. This is a public health and safety issue. Just the same way that people who are in prisons are treated poorly and not given the medical care they need and that. That cruelty is part of the point. Immigrants in detention are also completely deprived of medical care that they need. And again, that would be really dangerous for anyone. But for Alberto, he has a severe seizure disorder. Like, one thing could go wrong and he would be gone.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Like his life hangs in the balance. There's another client she has with gastrointestinal problems. Told her that they basically can't eat anything because the food quality is so poor. And coupled with their condition, they just vomit and have diarrhea constantly. This is what is happening in ICE detention facilities. They are just completely overrun with these public health and safety disasters, and they don't have the care or attention because those conditions happening are orchestrated.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Like they don't give a shit.

[Ellie Bell]

Or they're orchestrated. They're A part of the cool feed. They don't care.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

What's worse is they do care, but they care about creating the suffering.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, it's like, like for them, it's like these people's ultimate goal is to not have non white people in the U.S. right? You. You could. You could look at, like, you know, Stephen Miller's wife, like, yeah. Last week was like, posting shit about what will happen when they deport 100 million Americans. It's like, yeah, right.

[Ellie Bell]

They want enough. No state, absolutely no.

[Mia Wong]

Like, they. And they don't. It doesn't really matter to them. Like, you know, it's. It's kind of bad PR if people die in their. In their fucking camps. But they don't give. These people don't give a shit whether these people die or, like, are sent away. Like they don't fucking care. Like, they care about hurting people. They don't care where they live or die.

[Ellie Bell]

They don't care about bad priority either, to an extent. Because, I mean, you know, this is what the show is about. Authoritarian regimes and fascism is about control.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

I mean, sure, I guess, maybe if there's enough bad PR and they can't literally control people on the streets who are overtaking the situation and fighting back because they've gotten bad pr, that's a problem. But in and of itself, I don't really know if they care about the bad pr. They should care about the results of the bad pr, which is why we should all keep giving them bad pr. We've seen a lot of that. There are so many things that have happened since the escalation in Minneapolis last week where Renee and Good was shot and killed. Okay. I was collecting notes before this call, and I'd already had many. And then when I was collecting notes, just from today alone, I was like, oh, my God, 20 things have happened.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Ellie Bell]

We found out in the last day alone. There was a huge piece published in Slate today that ICE is doing zero background checks on their applicants. A journalist got officially hired despite being a prominent person who speaks about leftism online. They failed a drug test. They didn't even complete all the proper paperwork. ICE has literally no idea who they're hiring. And they don't care because they'll take anyone who is willing to terrorize people. Yeah, like that's going to. Cause it's already causing a lot of community ruptures. It's going to ruin communities. And the reality is they don't care if it does, because it's actually the point. If this were about accuracy or real, quote, unquote, justice for Americans who are, you know, quote, unquote being wronged by immigrants or whatever their narrative is. They would have a vetting process. They would want the best of the best, but they don't, because it's just about annihilation and control.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Well, and the other part of that, too, if you want to look at the sort of more positive angle of it, is like, part of what's going on here is that they can't find enough people who want to commit an ethnic cleansing.

[Ellie Bell]

Here's my thing. I'm a little concerned that's not true. They are incentivizing people to betray their values. And part of what's going on in this country is that people are out of work. People need to stay fed and housed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but here's the thing. Like, if they were able to really easily, like, recruit those people into doing this, then they wouldn't be continuously upping the bonus rates and they wouldn't be trying to, like, steal cops from other agencies. Like, I. I think they seem to be having legitimate problems even in a shitty job market.

[Ellie Bell]

And we should. We should give them more. I think we should give them more. I think that we should incentivize. I personally would love to figure out how to incentivize ICE agents to quit their jobs. Like, I don't know what I have to do. Maybe I'll gather my, like, sex worker friends to organize some kind of campaign. I don't. I don't know. I. I don't know.

[Mia Wong]

Well, you can.

[Garrison Davis]

You just.

[Mia Wong]

Just make their lives miserable until they quit? Like, that's the. That's the easy, like.

[Ellie Bell]

Sure. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I.

[Ellie Bell]

And by the way, I say sex worker friends specifically because DOMs are tough and they would bully ICE agents to no end. And I say this as a former dom.

[Mia Wong]

I. I believe in us. I believe in us. We can. We can. We can make these people's lives hell. We could do this.

[Ellie Bell]

I really think that if we take collective action and we all take stock of what are my skills, and then use that to put the pressure on the people who are making this terror possible. I think that we can. I think we can take them all down.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

I think that we truly could convince people to quit if we make their lives a living hell. Do not let them stay at hotels. Do not let them buy groceries. Don't let them show their faces anywhere in public. Okay. This is also another thing that happened today. I think it was. There was the largest data breach ever. There was a data breach today or Yesterday. That was 4,500 names got leaked.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Ellie Bell]

With info in them so they can't be anonymous. We have to take that and run with it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Now, legal disclaimer. We are not advocating illegal actions here. We are simply not doing this.

[Ellie Bell]

I'm just saying anything is possible. If you believe.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

However, comma, what other people do with this data is not something we can really control. It exists now. Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

I actually think it would be a shame if we did something with that data.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You know, now, speaking of doing things with our data, I don't know, I was probably supposed to have taken like two ad breaks right now. But fuck it, we're gonna, we're doing one here. I believe in us. And we are back. Now, one of the bleak things, something that you wanted to talk about, Ellie, is that the conditions that we're seeing here are things that have already killed people. And the danger here compounds, the more risk you're at, the more you know for. If you. Again to take it. To take a completely non abstract example, if you need seizure meds twice a day or you might die, the odds of terrible stuff happening to you increases. But yeah, can we talk a bit about the other people who this has already fucking happened to?

[Ellie Bell]

I mean, yeah, there's so many and we can't name them all because we don't know all of their names because again, we don't have all the proper data. We only know some things. But that's why we're part of. A big part of this campaign has been asking people to put pressure on congresspeople to release Albero to show that we're not going to give up on him.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

The way that other people have just been given up on and died in detention and that we're going to work relentlessly to get him out because he matters. But you know, as ICE escalates its attainments across the country and in the Midwest, specifically in Ohio and, and Minnesota and all these places, Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus. What happens to him sets a precedent for others. The same way that what's been happening to other immigrants has set the precedent that this is going to keep happening. You know, showing that ICE can't just take someone and disappear them and get away with it really matters for everyone else. People are watching for every immigrant detained recently and everything that ICE is rolling out and this is. God, the. I don't even know. I've lost track because the numbers keep changing and growing. I wanted to say that the second person that we know of that, that Renee was the second person that we knew of that I had murdered since New Year's Eve. But it wouldn't be surprising if there are, you know, so many, there's just so many immigrants who have died in custody and are currently dying in custody, which is what we're trying to prevent for Alberto. And like in la, ICE killed Keith Porter in his own home. Meanwhile, you know, in Chicago or now, I guess Indiana, because that's where they're keeping him. They're violating and detaining families like Alberto's who have done nothing to deserve this treatment. We saw a 44 year old woman, Marie Ange Blaise from Haiti, who died in a U.S. iCE facility two or three weeks ago after being detained since February of 2025, I believe, who was captured and taken into custody at an airport outside of U.S. territories. And you know, once again showing ISIS lack of regard for the law, just total lawlessness. She was transferred to Louisiana and then somewhere else where she died after vocalizing chest pain. And as far as I know, she didn't go in with a disability, she didn't go in with a health condition, but the conditions are so horrifying there that that is just to be expected, which is terrible. And this dangerous pattern can't continue to unfold. We don't want this to be Albero and his family's reality, nor any immigrants living nightmare. You know, like this is such a community issue across the world. Like every one of the people connected to anyone who has died in ICE detention is impacted for the rest of their life by this. You know, like it's what I was saying when I said we people who have immigrant family, we can't just go about business as usual.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Every day I wake up and I don't know if something is going to happen to one for all of my loved ones who might be targeted by virtue of having dark skin, which is not a crime, but in America we're trying to make it one. And like again, we don't want this to happen to Alberto. He's a community member. Everyone in the community is saddened. He's a father, he is an uncle, he is a husband. His wife is so upset and so worried and doesn't understand why this is happening because to her he is a man who goes to work day and night to help his family, to provide for his family, and there just is absolutely no reason for him to be in there. And she was originally in detention too. They were both detained, but they let her out. And that Also feels like part of the cruelty, you know, Part of the cruelty. And the conditions of dying in ICE custody are also rooted in being separated from hair.

[Ad]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

And love. They let her out. You know, probably. We don't know. We have no idea why. We can't begin to imagine or guess, but it probably has something to do with separating them because it makes the experience more excruciating.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And, you know, as. As bleak as the situation is, and it's really, really fucking bad, we do in terms of being able to. To turn this. A, try to save one person's life, and B, use this as a precedent we can use to fucking try to get other people out. There is a legal advantage we have here that we don't in most places, which is that. Yeah, as you're talking about earlier, this stop was so illegal. They literally did a whole bunch of things that they were specifically ordered by a judge not to do.

[Ellie Bell]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

And that gives us.

[Garrison Davis]

That gives us a little bit of.

[Mia Wong]

Hope in a situation where it allows us to put pressure in ways that normally, like, would be very, very difficult to see. Can you talk a bit more about that?

[Ellie Bell]

The NABA consent declaration cream.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Or like. Or how. How it can be deployed here.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah. I mean, so. Right. There was nothing remotely legal about what they did. The NAVA consent decree that exists in Chicago specifically, you know, limits ice's ability to carry out warrantless arrests and vehicle stops. They require predetermined probable cause, with the most recent rulings enforcing that despite constant violations by ice. But, you know, groups like the National Immigrant justice center have used that to successfully challenge those violations, leading to potential releases and actual releases for people who have been detained and orders for officers being retrained, which, I mean, they're just.

[Mia Wong]

Gonna keep doing it. Right.

[Ellie Bell]

But, like, they're just gonna keep doing it. But, you know, with. With what happened in Minneapolis, for example, with Renee and Good, they got in trouble, actually. The officers had something sent to them to remind them, like, hey, so you actually, like, can't do things the way that you did. And things like the NAVA consent decree. Right. They cause problems because you can wave around a paper and say, hey, like, you. You can't do this. And, like, is it kind of as fake as the Constitution in some ways? Yeah. Like, they. They kind of don't care about it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

But it is a tool that can be used by lawyers, like the wonderful immigration lawyers that we have on our team, and we have Paula and Ange, who are the immigration attorneys, helping Alberto and his wife and they can use that like they've filed a habeas and they can use all of this evidence of how they were illegally detained and violated without any grounds to push back and say you need to release him immediately.

[Mia Wong]

The piece of paper from the judge does give us a little bit of openings here. And could you explain to people like what, you know, what people listening to the show right now can do to help here?

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah, I mean, I would say twofold. If we are looking at Alberto's case and his family's case, there is a crowdfund that they can donate to. I can send you the link that you can share.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we will link it in the description.

[Ellie Bell]

We really need people to donate to that. Again, Renee and Good was able to. Her wife was able to raise $1.4 million in a day. And while I am hoping and have faith that they will redistribute that to other people in need who are impacted by situations like this, it doesn't really feel great to see white people get all that money when we can't even push past $14,000 for Alberto. So we really need people to donate. There is also a Change.org petition for people to sign. We have a few thousand people who have signed it, but we need more. Asking for Congress to pressure ICE to release him. This would also be monumental for other immigrants in detention.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Okay. If we can use this as a case study, we know what we can get done through people power, through sheer will and through not allowing things to just fall through the cracks of social media because you're too busy doom scrolling. That being said, what people can also do is they can post. I mean, I think that people should doom scroll less if it means that their nervous systems will be more regulated so that they can show up to defend community members and protect community members. But if what you have is your phone in bed and you're scrolling, post share. Let people know what is happening. Refuse to be silent, refuse to just go about your day, business as usual. Talk about things. Let them know that people see what's happening and they're paying attention. And we are not going to just let people be disappeared or killed and die in detention. We are not going to abandon vulnerable people. Every single one of us has the opportunity to use our voice. You don't have to be me. You don't have to be a well known person who has large platforms. Every single one of us has a community that we can activate at any time. You text five people and tell them about something that is being done. To someone. And they text five people. And they text five people. That's the entire world, baby. Like, we got this shit.

[Mia Wong]

I believe we can appropriate pyramid scheme tactics to help people. I believe in us.

[Ellie Bell]

Pete Seeger said, solidarity forever. Okay. I believe that we will win. If what you do is make memes. Make a meme. Make a copy pasta. Make a copy pasta and send it to people. Like, if your method is shit posting, sure. Take whatever you got and find a way to spread the news and, you know, do it for other immigrants too. You know, do it for. Do it for whoever. But the more you speak out, the more you make it possible for other people to speak out.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

Because they realize they're not going to be the only ones, even if they're afraid to say something.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And it's hard. It's harder to crack down on everyone.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Ellie Bell]

And also the more you show people, like, I actually have no idea if he knows how much support he has. I would love for him to know that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

So that it helps him to get through. I know he knows that he has his family support and that's a lot. That's more than enough. But I would also, you know, love for people to just really like, care for immigrants and non white people in general right now who are on this soil that we call, you know, the land of the United States. Because basically anyone who is not white right now is terrified of what might happen to them if they're on the wrong street at the wrong time and they're rolling out these terror campaigns in Oregon and Columbus and Minneapolis and Chicago and New York. I knew they were going to escalate things in New York after Zoron took office because it's a great excuse. Everyone is terrified right now. And the best thing that you can do is show up every day and be human to each other. Buy someone a coffee, like offer to just listen to a non white person in your life. Take an anti racism course. Show up as a human being who cares about other human beings, because that is the thing that matters most. When I think about stories that we have from way back in history, like, I'll just flag, you know, Anne Frank, because that's the one that everyone knows. The thing that mattered for her, the thing that kept her alive for longer than she could have maybe been alive, is people being human to each other. Like, I think that's such an underrated way to show up. And we take it for granted every day because we don't consider always how our smallest actions impact each other. And the truth is that your smallest actions could be the difference between someone losing their life or not.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna close this by doing.

[James Stout]

As.

[Mia Wong]

Is tradition, about one in every 12 episodes. I do end through something from the fucking Andor Namek Manifesto.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You know, this is the. He has this lie where he goes, remember that the frontiers of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And it does. Right? It's impossible to know until it happens what the single push that makes the dam break is going to be. But it will be something.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it is literally impossible to tell what it's going to be until you know. The only way you can find out if the action that you are taking is going to be the one that knocks everything over is by doing it. So go do.

[Ellie Bell]

Absolutely. Yeah. We owe each other everything. And I'm going to do something kind of silly because I am who I am. But this is one of my favorite songs in the world, and this is a Shrek reference.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[Ellie Bell]

All Star by Smash Mouth. Like, you know, all that glitters is gold. Only shooting stars break the mold. You'll never know if you don't go. You'll never shine if you don't glow like that. That's a directive. That's a directive. I think we should listen to Smash Mouth and we should try. We should just try for each other. I take that song very serious.

[Mia Wong]

You know, I really, really, truly. When I was planning this episode, like, a week ago, I did not think it was going to end with Andor and Shrek. But, you know, this is why you could never look. You. You never know how things are going to go. And sometimes they end well.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Ellie, do you have anything else that you want to make sure people know and where can people find you?

[Ellie Bell]

I don't have anything else that I think people should know. People can find me on Instagram. Itrelli. L I T E R E L L Y. Like, literally, but with my name. E L, L Y.

[Mia Wong]

Incredible. We'll have this in the description, too.

[Ellie Bell]

Great. That's been my username everywhere on social media since I was 15. So it's been 16 years. People are always like, how did you get that username? Gil. Gil, baby, you had to. You had to be on Twitter as a kid. But, yeah, it's my same username everywhere. I have a newsletter that you could find on my social media where I write about community, care and what we owe to each other. I'm way less concerned about people being able to find me, except to just, you know, go, go share the campaigns that I've shared on my page for Alberto and other immigrants. Because I am constantly sharing things. If, you know, this helps me to get more of a platform so that people share more of the clearance crucial campaigns that I share, that is great. My main concern is I don't need to be seen or heard or listened to any more than is necessary to get people to take action to help more vulnerable people than me. But if people also want to listen to things I have to say, sure, go for it. I quote mash mouth a lot and I'm very gay.

[Mia Wong]

We love to see it. Okay, this has been It Could Happen Here, a podcast done by the girl who posted I supposed to be destroyed after every single post for eight goddamn years. And now we're here. So let's go fight.

[Ellie Bell]

And now we're here. And for its ebooks, everything happens so much.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Hey, Sal. Hank. What's going on? We haven't worked a case in years. I just bought my car at Carvana and it was so easy.

[Robert Evans]

Too easy.

[Mia Wong]

Think something's up? You tell me. They got thousands of options, found a great car at a great price, and it got delivered the next day. It sounds like, like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank. Yeah, you're right. Case closed.

[Ellie Bell]

Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

[Garrison Davis]

Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last September, President Trump announced a federal crackdown on left wing radical terrorism by signing an executive order dubbing, quote, unquote, antifa, a domestic terrorist organization, and directing federal law enforcement to investigate potential federal crimes related to political violence, especially stemming from, quote, anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity and hostility towards traditional American values, unquote. Last month, the FBI claimed one of their first big victories against so called antifa terrorism since Trump's national security directive. On December 12, the FBI arrested four people in Southern California who the government claims are members of a far left group called the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The criminal complaint, signed on December 13 by an FBI agent working at the Joint Terrorism Task Force office in Los Angeles, alleges that these four individuals conspired to construct and detonate a series of bombs in Southern California on New Year's Eve 2025. The four defendants were first charged with conspiracy and possession of an unregistered destructive device. Then on December 23, a federal grand jury indicted them on additional terrorism related felonies. Here's a brief clip from the FBI press conference announcing the arrests where First Assistant U.S. attorney Bill Asale compared the Turtle Island Liberation Front group to antifa.

[Mia Wong]

This case is another reminder about the dangers that radicalized antifa like groups pose to people, public safety and the rule of law.

[Garrison Davis]

In court documents, the defendants are not just referred to by their legal names, but also by their direct action or signal code names. Audrey Eileen Carroll, AKA Osanak or Black Moon, Zachary Aaron Page, AKA AK Ash Carrington or Cthulhu's daughter, Dante Garfield AKA Nomad and Tina Lie, AKA Kickware. The criminal complaint states that after forming the initial bombing plan, Carol and Paige recruited additional co conspirators who participated in further planning meetings and helped procure bomb making materials. On December 12, the four defendants traveled to a remote location in the Mojave Desert with the alleged intent to build and test explosive devices. An undercover FBI agent was present at the testing site and a surveillance plane observed from overhead. Before the defendants completed assembling a functional explosive device, the FBI arrested Carol, Paige, Garfield and Lai. From the court documents that are currently available, the earliest allusion to this New Year's Eve bombing plot is in a signal message dated November 24, 2025, allegedly from one of the defendants, Audrey Eileen Carroll, to whom they believed was a genuine co conspirator but was actually a confidential human source working with law enforcement. According to the indictment, this alleged signal message from Carol stated that she and quote, unquote Four comrades were planning to go to the desert from December 11 to December 13, 2025 to quote, test the items we are going to use for those party plans. Unquote. This message references pre existing quote unquote party plans which any prior origin of has not yet been elaborated on. This confidential human source appears to be an individual embedded in the Los Angeles activist scene. The criminal complaint describes them like this, quote, the confidential human source is cooperating with law enforcement and is a validated and vetted source. The confidential human source has been a reliable source of information since in or around August 2021. The confidential human source is cooperating for financial compensation. The confidential human source does not have any criminal history. The confidential human source provided past reliable reporting on other cases and has provided reliable reporting in this case, unquote. The quote unquote Turtle Island Liberation Front appears to be a relatively new group with a social media footprint that only goes back to July 2025. The Instagram bio for their LA chapter reads quote, liberation through decolonization and tribal sovereignty. Unquote. Their most recent post from December 12, the day of the arrests is promoting a quote unquote Palestine pop up market in Culver City. A post from November 28 reads, quote, if they hurt you, they hurt me too. Our destinies are intertwined. Liberation for one must mean liberation for all. The empire must fall, and from within the belly of the beast we must be the ones to dismantle it. Revolution is the only way. Stop. Quote unquote Peaceful protesting Rise up. Fight back. We are not outnumbered, they are. Organize and be ready. Unquote as news of this group and the bombing plot spread around the Internet last month among the left, there was a lot of skepticism pointed at the authenticity of the story and the Turtle Island Liberation Front group itself with questions pointed at its name and some of the language used in their social media posts. The name derives from a term that some indigenous tribes used to describe the North American continent and is common language among a certain sect of quote unquote land Back activists. The Liberation Front moniker has been used by a collection of direct action based groups, most notably the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation front in the 2000s. Though the turtle Island Liberation Front group doesn't seem to have been a formalized activist group for very long, there were genuine people involved with this group, as evidenced by there being four defendants in this criminal case. The Turtle Island Liberation Front Instagram account was run by one of these defendants and the language used in their posts is not uncommon among the quote unquote anti imperialists whose ideologies garner influence among the American left during Israel's genocide in Palestine. And though both an FBI informant and an undercover employee played a part in this investigation, the group seems to have contained a collection of genuine individuals who have participated in the wider Los Angeles activist scene and especially anti Israel protests. The indictment and criminal complaint outlined the material steps that defendants allegedly took to detail the plans of this bombing plot and procure materials to construct explosive devices without material support from FBI sources or undercover employees, all the information in the indictment and criminal complaint is alleged and all the defendants should be considered innocent until proven guilty. The indictment claims that Carol set up an in person meeting for November 26 to discuss the bombing plot with another alleged Turtle Island Liberation Front member, Zachary Aaron Page, and the confidential human source who were instructed to, quote, wear casual, block no devices. If you can't leave it at home, have it turned off and wrapped in tinfoil makeshift Faraday bag, unquote. During this in person meeting, Carol allegedly distributed an eight page handwritten document titled Operation Midnight sun outlining the plan for the bombing to Both the Confidential Human Source and co defendant Zachary Page Carroll allegedly retained two to four additional copies of the handwritten plan. The indictment says that Carol explained that the document was handwritten because she, quote, did not want any traces of the attack plan on a computer, unquote. After this meeting, Carol allegedly sent an encrypted message to the Confidential Human Source about the bomb testing camp out in the desert. Quote, this trip is very spicy. Lol. We'll be testing the things we're gonna make for December, like the things in the instructions on that document I gave you. Testing first is important so we know how well they work. Lol. Unquote the plan was for teams of four on the ground participants to plant backpacks containing, quote, unquote, complex pipe bombs or IEDs, improvised explosive devices, outside of buildings at five locations, targeting two US companies and then simultaneously detonate the bombs at midnight on New Year's Eve 2025. There would be one off the ground member assisting the teams remotely by listening to police scanners or stationed in a vehicle in case, quote, an emergency getaway is needed, unquote. And one member of each on the ground team would create graffiti of, quote, a red triangle and one message of the team's choosing on the sidewalk closest to the building while the other three are placing the devices, unquote. The indictment claims that the handwritten plan also instructed co conspirators, quote, once you plant your IEDs, if there is any time to safely do so, dump an accelerant around the premises, such as gasoline, for added effect. We want to do as much damage as possible. Unquote. The plan identified five target locations as, quote, unquote marks with five more blank slots, captioned add more if enough, comrades. The criminal complaint states that these targets were, quote, property and facilities operated by two separate companies that are used or engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce. Unquote. I'm going to quote from three sections of the criminal complaint that outline some of the opsec, or operational security precautions that are allegedly included in this handwritten plan. Quote the plan described multiple operational security measures the co conspirators should take to conceal their identities, such as the use of a burner phone that would be disposed of after the bombings by, quote, submerging it in a concrete brick after destroying the SIM and then disposing of the brick in a body of water, Unquote. The target date of the operation, New Year's Eve, was identified as an opportune time because, quote, fireworks will be going off at this time, so explosions will be less likely to be noticed as immediately as any normal day. Unquote. The plan emphasized that quote absolutely no mistakes can be made. Unquote. The plans outline the use of quote unquote black block over top of a layer of quote gray slash casual block on top of normal street clothes and noted to keep hair very tightly concealed and to wear gloves for the purpose of avoidance of leaving behind DNA. The plan further instructed that participants should leave their personal devices at home and to make sure the devices were set up to stream a long movie during the time of the attacks as so to craft an alibi or quote unquote plausible deniability by having it appear as though the actor was actively using their devices. The plan discussed pre operational surveillance of targets, identification of D block or D clothing locations, and not leaving, quote anything other than the IEDs behind unquote as they could not, quote risk any evidence tracing back to us. The plan also noted the benefit of placing a small pebble in a shoe to alter natural gait to obfuscate their identification. Instructions on how to purchase materials to construct a pipe bomb suggested using cash only, purchasing in small quantities to avoid suspicion, and splitting purchases amongst a team rather than individually. In addition to the plan of action and operational security tactics, detailed instructions were provided on the components required to build a pipe bomb as well as how to create homemade gunpowder. On December 2, there was another in person meeting between the law enforcement source Carol and Page as well as two other co conspirators to go over the plan. They met again on December 7 to review the bombing plot and allegedly discussed intent to conduct future attacks against federal offices. This meeting was also attended by an undercover FBI employee who was being recruited to join the operation. The undercover asked Carol about the black powder instructions in the handwritten plan and Carol responded that she conducted the research herself and discussed wanting to test several different types of bomb to determine which could quote unquote completely pulverize their assigned building on New Year's Eve. To quote the criminal complaint, quote, Carol stated that she had acquired some components 13 PVC pipes and that she had bought potassium nitrate on Amazon using a burner account that was scheduled to be delivered on December 11, 2025. During this in person meeting, Carol confirmed that she operated the Turtle Island Liberation Front Instagram account and that she had met a co conspirator through said Instagram account. The indictment claims that Carol told co conspirators in this meeting, quote what we are about to do that's gonna be like a Luigi level situation. Unquote and that it was time for America to fall and that America falling will make Israel fall. According to the indictment, during this December 7th meeting, Page told attendees, again, including an undercover FBI employee, that they were doing everything, quote, to be as clean as possible, because 100,000% the FBI is gonna be like on that shit. Yeah. So we all know what we're getting into. Unquote. In person, Page outlined some of the operational security precautions to avoid law enforcement detection, like covering shoes with socks to cover shoe prints and burning shoes after the bombing, Page also allegedly asked attendees if they would like to receive firearms training from a group that held a training about a month prior. And Carol said that she had a contact who could obtain unregistered ars. This wasn't the first time Turtle Island Liberation Front members allegedly brought up firearms. The indictment claims that on, quote, December 3, 2025, defendant page, using an encrypted messaging application, asked the confidential human source if the human source was interested in receiving firearms training. Explaining his plan to shoot ICE officials. In a voice message to the confidential human source, defendant Page stated, quote, I just had this daydream. I was like, we're just patrolling or whatever, and we're strapped, right? And we see ICE trying to pull up on someone or a group of people, and we just, like, roll up on him, like, strapped up, and we're like, nah, get the fuck out of here. They're gonna get shot if they try to do anything. Like, we shoot first, we ask questions later. That's the policy. I told that to, in brackets, defendant Carroll. Defendant Carroll knows all about this. And brackets, defendant Carroll was like, yeah, let's fucking do it. But I'm like, seriously? That is what's needed. Maybe if ICE agents, they're like, wait, I don't want to get shot right now. They ain't gonna do it. And if they still try to do it, well, guess what? Welcome to the dirt, motherfucker. Unquote. After sending this voice message, Page told the confidential human source, quote, let me know when you listen so I can delete it. Unquote. Small lines like that are part of what I find really interesting in this Turtle Island Liberation Front case because the indictment and criminal complaint are just full of the defendants recommending these security folklore practices, like setting up your phone to stream a long movie to create an alibi and placing a small pebble in your shoe to alter your gait, Deleting these messages after you send them, which they're trying to do, all while working with not just an FBI informant, but also an undercover agent. During the December 7th in person meeting, Paige and Carol discussed plans for future attacks after this New Year's Eve bombing plot. Specifically a plan to target ICE agents and vehicles with pipe bombs starting around January or February 2026, with Carol noting in the meeting, quote, that would definitely take some of them out and would probably scare the rest of them, unquote. Following this meeting, more co conspirators, including an undercover FBI employee, were added to the signal group chat called the Order of the Black Lotus, which Carol described as the radical faction of the Turtle Island Liberation Front and which Paige described as, quote, unquote, super underground. The indictment contains some alleged messages sent to an encrypted group chat. It's unclear if this is specifically the Order of the Black Lotus chat or another Turtle Island Liberation Front related chat, but I will read through some of these messages. Quote, Page messaged co conspirators, including defendants Carol and Garfield, quote, death to Israel. Death to the usa. Death to colonizers. Death to settler colonialism. In response to defendant Page's message, defendant Carroll stated, quote, death to them all. Burn it all down. Three burning heart emojis, unquote. Defendant Carroll messaged co conspirators, including Page and Garfield. Quote, I identify as a terrorist and I am a Hamas fan girl, unquote. Garfield messaged co conspirators, including Carol and Paige, quote, I am here to destroy Zionism by any means necessary. Real activism equals destroying Zionism by any means necessary, even if it's risky. If you aren't willing to die for or lose your freedom, then you're just another toy in the machine. Unquote. Carol messaged quote, glory to the martyrs. Death to Israel. Three salute emojis. And on December 3, defendant Carroll told the Confidential Human source, quote, these fucking SJW peaceful protest libs are insane. Like, it's wild to me that I've seen state violence enacted on some people like that and they still think they can keep going with peaceful protest BS and indirect routes, unquote. Defendants used the Black Lotus group chat, what Carol described as, quote, our group for everything radical, unquote, to discuss sourcing bomb making parts, including cotton string and PVC pipes, as well as coordinates for the explosives testing site in the desert, quote, where we will set up camp and where we will test, unquote. On the afternoon of December 10, Page messaged the group about just having acquired two parts for the bomb recipe and that starter would be picked up later that day. Paige was under FBI surveillance around the time this message was sent and 15 minutes prior to sending this message, Paige was seen grabbing a package from an Amazon pickup location. Hours later, FBI agents watched Paige buy pistol primers from a store in Irving, California, quote dressed in a manner to obscure Page's identity, namely wearing a medical mask, gloves, ball cap and long sleeve shirt. To quote the criminal complaint, Carroll replied to Page's messages about obtaining more items from the ingredients list, writing that another package was quote already delivered. Gotta pick it up tomorrow, but yay with 4 y's unquote the criminal complaint says that quote According to Amazon Records, on December 7, 2025, Carol purchased two 5 pound bags of potassium nitrate, 99% pure prilled KNO3.5 pounds for industrial and technical applications to be delivered to the Amazon counter at the Whole foods located at 3377 South La Ciena Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. The potassium nitrate was delivered on December 11, 2025, unquote in early December, Carol messaged the confidential human source on signal a list of components, chemicals and tools, along with prices of the required items. Several of these components were either listed as already purchased or designated to be acquired by another quote unquote Comrade Carol advised the confidential human source quote with the list, write it down when you have some time, then I'll delete that message so it's no in the chat. Lol Unquote Carol also told the confidential human source that they should get some burner phones, quote unquote bought with cash only for the bomb testing camp out in the desert. Page instructed the group to only bring two burner phones to use in case of emergencies and for directions on the way out. To quote the complaint, quote Once everyone arrived, their phones would be put in a small cardboard box completely sealed with aluminum. The phones would not be returned until the caravan was out of the campsite and back on the main road, unquote for getting to the desert, Page wrote that each Navigator should have a burner phone and quoting Page in the complaint, quote no phones besides burners and all phones except navigators to be wrapped in foil or a Faraday bag for the entirety of the trip and install OSM and it is an open source maps so no corporate tracking unquote Garfield wrote, quote, I have a few burners but I'm saving for the big event, the big party celebrate emoji unquote. On December 10th, Carol sent the confidential human source a message on signal reading quote I kind of had this notebook where I wrote down multiple plans that never happened or got delayed. So it's like my terrorist diary LMAO I have to get rid of that. On the morning of December 12, 2025, Carol, Paige, Garfield and Lai traveled to the desert in two vehicles. The confidential human source in one car and the undercover in the other. To quote from the complaint quote, in the undercover vehicle, page discussed using cigarettes as a delayed fusing device for the explosives. Once they arrived in the desert in the other vehicle, Carroll explained to lie that the day's events were meant as a test run for the New Year's Eve bombing plot, which Carol described in detail stating, quote, what we're doing will be considered a terrorist act, unquote. In response to Carol's detailing of the New Year's Eve plot, Lai asked if there would be any people at the bombing target locations. Carol responded in the negative, but noted that if they saw any people such as a security guard at any of the locations, they would warn them. At approximately 10:00am the co conspirators arrived at the desert and began setting up a campsite including tents and tables. Based on information from the undercover and confidential human source, Carol, Paige and Lai all brought bomb making components to the campsite, including various sizes of PVC pipes, suspected potassium nitrate, charcoal, charcoal powder, sulfur powder and material to be used as fuses, among others. After the undercover alerted law enforcement with a predetermined signal indicating that bomb testing was imminent, FBI personnel intervened and placed Carol, Paige, Garfield and Lai into custody. Unquote. This is a clip from the law enforcement press conference announcing the arrests with Akil Davis, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI Los Angeles field office.

[Ad]

On December 12, a group of individuals, again members of this, this anti government group traveled out to the desert to test their explosive devices. They had precursor chemicals there and they were going to, they were going to create these, these bombs in the desert. What they are starting to do is put their chemicals and, and wares and the components out on the, on the table. On the table there. This footage that you're watching is from our surveillance plane. And then what happened after this is the Los Angeles FBI SWAT team, along with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team moved in and arrested all four subjects without, without incident.

[Garrison Davis]

The criminal complaint notes at the end that quote, based on conversations with the bomb technician, while no quote unquote end caps were found at the campsite, the co conspirators could have improvised using other material to plug the end of the PVC pipe, though such method would have been less effective than using a proper end cap. As noted above, there were also sufficient parts to create several Molotov cocktail devices. Unquote after the arrests, law enforcement also raided the homes of the Turtle Island Liberation Front members. In Page's residence, police found a copy of the handwritten attack plan, Operation Midnight Sun. That same day, December 12, another Turtle Island Liberation Front related arrest was made all the way in Louisiana. A former Marine who was a member of the Order of the Black Lotus Signal group under the name Dark Witch, she her who was also planning to instruct the group on, quote, urban tactics, accuracy and combat shooting, unquote. She was arrested while driving from New Iberia to New Orleans with a rifle, handgun, gas canister and body armor. The FBI believes that she was going to carry out an attack based on a Facebook post commenting on a Border Patrol rest in New Orleans. Captioned quote Time to recreate Waco, Texas with these ice, unquote. Three of the defendants in the Los Angeles case, Paige, Carol, and Lie, have pled not guilty. Garfield is set to be arraigned the day that I'm recording this, and the Turtle Island Liberation Front trial is currently scheduled for the end of February.

[Mia Wong]

Foreign. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about which calamity this country and many others are going through this week. I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about the Federal Reserve. Now, those of you who have listened to Executive Disorder are aware that a bit over a week ago, as this episode is being released, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell released what, again, I can really only describe as someone escaping from a kidnapping and releasing a video about it in which he discussed a Justice Department grand jury subpoena and a threat to indict him over cost overruns on a new Federal Reserve building. Now, Jerome Powell has claimed that these charges are really about removing him and about eliminating the independence of the Federal Reserve. He also claims that he was directly threatened with these charges unless he was willing to adjust Federal Reserve policy to fall in line with the Trump administration. And this is an astonishing video for a number of reasons. One is that it's in a lot of ways, one of the most direct points of defiance that a government official has taken directly to the president. It's also astonishing because it is actually technically the second time that Trump has tried to do something like this to a member of the Federal Reserve Board, because as you're listening to this, the Supreme Court has been hearing arguments about Trump's attempt to fire one of the other members of the Federal Reserve Board, a woman named Lisa Cook. Now, obviously, I don't know yet what the outcome of that deliberation is going to Be it seems right now that the Supreme Court is uncompelled with Trump's ability to fire a Federal Reserve Board member over really, truly very trumped up charges about mortgage fraud. I'm going to quote here from the Supreme Court in what has become a very important statement, quote, the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi private entity that follows in the distinct tradition of the first and second banks of the United States. The importance of this statement is that the Supreme Court has been willing to allow Trump to fire the heads of other, you know, what are supposed to be independent entities. Right, or fire members of what are supposed to be independent federal agencies. He's been able to just completely illegally, by the way, but with the approval of the Supreme Court, been able to fire a lot of people who were appointed under the Biden administration to posts in independent regulatory agencies. However, so far, the Supreme Court has balked at doing this for the Federal Reserve. Now, why is that and why is this entire thing so important? To understand that question and to understand why I've spent so much time talking about what, in the grand scheme of things, seems like a kind of minor, you know, just like another example of Trump attempting to use the judiciary and investigations to go after his political enemies, we need to talk about what the Federal Reserve is and what it does, because this is arguably the central institution of global capitalism. And its importance in maintaining the global capitalist economy is to a large extent the reason why. This is the point at which US Senators who are aligned with Trump on every other issue have actively taken a stand against this sort of prosecution of Jerome Powell. It's why the Supreme Court seems to not be interested in allowing Trump to wield the executive power. And this is because fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with the money. So what is the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve, to put it mildly, is an extremely confusing entity. So if you remember back to a few minutes ago when I said that the Supreme Court said that the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured quasi private entity, we can ask the question, okay, so it's a quasi private entity. Is it a public entity or is it a private entity? This is a relatively simple question. Here is the answer provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve's. The Federal Reserve banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. Their purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed private or public? The answer is both. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold stock in the Federal Reserve and earn dividends. Holding this stock does not carry with it the control and financial interests given to holders of common stock and for profit organizations. The stock may not be sold or pledged as collateral for loans. Okay, so here's the Federal Reserve's answer to is it a public or private entity? Is both. The Board of Governors is an independent agency. The Federal Reserve banks are set up like private corporations. So it's sort of both. Okay, questions settled? It's both. We can move on. Wait, hold on. I am receiving word that the Federal Reserve has comments on this idea. Hold on, hold on. Let me, let me, let me turn to the Federal Reserve, the national Federal Reserve's website, which has a comment on the idea of that the Federal Reserve banks are private entities. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Quoting them now. Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve banks are organized similar to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 reserve banks operates within its own particular geographic area or district of the United States, and each is incorporated, is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their district's Reserve Bank. Now, okay, let's look at what we have here. These are two different websites run by two different parts of the Federal Reserve, one of which says that the Federal Reserve banks are not part of the. Of. Of the federal government, but they exist because an act of Congress. So is the Fed public or private? The answer is both, because the Federal Reserve banks are set up like private corporations. That's the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Now, the national Federal Reserve says, quote, some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve banks are organized similarly to private corporations. So you can see that we are dealing here with an absolute goddamn mess. Because if you read the two websites of different federal versions of the Federal Reserve, national and sort of branches of the Federal Reserve, they say different things about what it is and they sound like they're arguing each other. Now, okay, I am doing this because it's funny. Technically, both of these agree with each other. But this is a shit show because part of the purpose of the Federal Reserve is to be an entity that does research and distribute information to the public. And its websites can't agree on what it is. Now again, I'm being slightly pedantic here. Technically, both versions of this story do say that this is both a public and a private entity, sort of. Now, again, and this is a, this is a basic question about the Federal Reserve Is it a public or private entity? And they can't agree on it. And this is, to use a technical term, a fucking nightmare, because again, the actual answer is that it is sort of both. The banks themselves are like technically private, but they're run by the Board of Governors, which is technically a government agency and they were established by the government. So attempting to sort out this colossal mess has inside of academia, this has caused a change in the conception of what the state is, because what is this crap? So, okay, let's actually run through the structure of the Federal Reserve. So importantly, the Federal Reserve is kind of three entities in a way. You could think about this like the Holy Trinity, right? You have the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and those banks are collectively managed by what are called governors who serve on what is called the Board of Governors, which is the second entity. And then there's also the Federal Open Market Committee, which for our purposes we don't care about that much, but is composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors. This is the quote to Fed itself is composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors, the President of the Federal Reserve bank of New York and four of the remaining 11 Reserve bank presidents who serve one year terms on a rotating basis. So, okay, we have three entities, right? We have the decentralized Federal Reserve banks, which there's 12 of them. They cover different geographic regions of the country. We have the Board of Governors which oversees them. And the Board of Governors is the part that is technically a government agency. And these governors are importantly for our purposes, nominated by the President and confirmed by Congress. And this Board of Governors, the purpose of this Board of Governors is to sort of run all of it. Now they're running all of this at a macro level. Each of those 12 Federal Reserve banks also have their own Board of Directors and their own structures that each run all of the different banks. So this is complicated. And again, why talking about the Federal Reserve is so complicated, if you just like start looking at political stuff people have written about the Federal Reserve, it's a nightmare. Like if you try to like do your own research, your options are, unless you know where to look, right? Your options are the Federal Reserve itself, which is actually not a terrible resource for the most part, because again, conducting economic research is one of the points of the Federal Reserve, but it's not ideal. And then also immediately you get a bunch of very weird anti semitic conspiracy theories about sound money and the sort of Rand Paul people who want to eliminate the Federal Reserve because they're, they're mad at the US dollar not being based on gold. Nightmare. Terrible. 0 out of 10. We absolutely hate it. Now speaking of things that we absolutely hate, it is not buying these products and services. We are back. So, alright, we've gone over the structure of the Federal Reserve. So what does the Federal Reserve actually do and why are we talking about this at such length? If you know one thing about the Fed, it's that the Fed can print money. You may or may not. You remember the Fed printing money memes from 2020 and that sort of era. And this is one of the conceptions of the Fed that is true. The Federal Reserve is the entity given power by the US government to print money. So when dollar bills are created, the treasury commissions the Fed to print the bills. Technically speaking, coins are submitted by the treasury, which is a whole sideshow tangent that I had to cut out of this story because it's like 20 minutes long. But you know, if you are holding a US dollar, basically the odds are very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very good that what you are holding is technically a Federal Reserve note. Now what does that mean? Mio, what is happening here? Why is it the government doesn't print money? Why is it this quasi private public entity that's printing the money? Now what's happening here is slightly more complex than Fed money.

[Garrison Davis]

Printer.

[Mia Wong]

An American dollar is US debt, right? What you are holding in your hands is a promise from the US government to pay $1 to the federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is having this money distributed and is having this debt distributed. And this is what US currency is. It is based on debt held by, in this case the Federal Reserve banks which have been given a monopoly to print this debt as Federal Reserve notes. And the Federal Reserve can just sort of create this. It's also worth noting that, you know, when we talk about the Fed creating money, I mean obviously like it prints money for stuff commissioned by the treasury so you can have more bills in circulation. But most of the actual money that's being created or not created is, you know, this is all happening digitally. It is funds appearing in the bank accounts of the banks that use the Federal Reserve. So the other thing you may have heard about the Fed is the Fed funds rate or what's called the Fed interest rate or you know, you'll hear a bunch of talk about the Fed setting interest rates. So to understand what this is, we need to kind of take a step back and look at what these banks actually are. The way this is commonly described is that the Fed is the bank of Banks, right, which is when a bank needs a loan, they go to the Federal Reserve and banks put their money in the Federal Reserve and they use it to move their money around. That's true enough for our purposes. I should also state here that a lot of what I'm going to be saying, this episode, particularly from here forward, is technically probably a simplification of what's actually happening, because the mechanisms here are very, very complicated. But, okay, so the Fed interest rate, right? This is the thing that is the source of all of the tension here, right? What Trump is pissed about to a large extent is that he thinks that Fed interest rates are too high and he wants them to be lower because he thinks this will cause the economy to grow more. So, okay, what does that mean? What, what is, what is the Fed interest rate? The way this is explained to the public is that the Fed sets the cost of borrowing. That's like true, kind of. Basically there is a rate that is decided on by the Federal Reserve Board. On a more technical level, though, it's slightly more complicated than that. So when you hear someone talk about the Fed's interest rate, what they are talking about is the federal funds rate. And technically what they're talking about is the target federal funds rate. So I'm going to quote from the Federal Reserve itself. The effective federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions, banks, savings institutions, thrifts and credit unions, and government sponsored enterprises borrow from and lend to each other overnight to meet short term business needs. The target for the federal funds rate, which is set by the Federal Open Market Committee, has varied widely over the years in response to prevailing economic conditions. So, yeah, also, by the way, it is technically the Federal Open Market Committee that sets the funds rate. But okay, when we're talking about the Fed setting the interest rates, right, there's kind of two things going on. So the effective federal funds rate, which is the thing that they're trying to control, is the interest rate at which all of these different banks that have their money in here are all using it to lend to each other overnight through the money they have. The Federal Reserve, they're all lending it to each other. The average of the rate of interest in which they're lending to each other overnight, the average of that rate is the federal funds rate. When people talk about like the interest rates, like 3.2% or whatever, what the Fed is trying to do is make sure that at the end of the night, this effective federal funds rate, which is the rate that all these banks are lending each other money at is at that rate. But they don't actually technically, directly have control of this. Because it is to be clear, the average rate of which all of these banks are lending to each other, what the Fed is manipulating directly usually is the interest on reserve balances or irb. So this is the thing the Fed does control, the interest on reserve balances is how much interest they pay out for just putting your money in the Fed and leaving it.

[Ellie Bell]

There's.

[Mia Wong]

I'm going to quote the Fed again. The Fed's primary tool for influencing the federal funds rate is the interest the Fed pays on funds that banks hold as reserve balances at their Federal Reserve bank, which is the interest on reserve balances rate. Because banks are unlikely to lend funds in the federal funds market for less than they get paid on their reserve balances at the Federal Reserve, the interest rate on reserve balances is an effective tool for guiding the federal funds rate. Okay, Mia, you've been spouting gibberish for many minutes now. What the fuck does that mean? So what the Fed is normally doing is, all right, so you put your money in a bank, right? And that bank has an interest rate and it pays you out that amount of interest at the end of the year, right? And that's the money that you are making for putting your money in this corporation. The Fed also has their own interest on reserve balances so that they have their own interest rate for how much money you can get from just leaving your money in the Federal Reserve. And the theory, and this is like, you know, true, is that banks aren't going to lend each other money at interest rates that are lower than what you can get from the Fed, because otherwise you just leave your money in the Fed and you get that amount of, amount of money. So if you're going to, you know, loan someone something, right, the interest that's being charged here is going to be higher than the Fed rate. And that's when we talk about Fed setting interest rates. That's what's happening on a technical level. And this is actually very important in the global economy because what this does, and this is where everything gets extremely murky. And I'm going to go to a very, very high level of abstraction down from sort of the very low technical details. Now, in theory, what this means is this is how easy it is to obtain money to invest in stuff, right? This sets the rate at which you can borrow money. And in theory, if you have a very, very low interest rate, right, the Fed, if the Fed funds rate is really low, then it's very, very cheap and easy to get a bunch of money, and that money flows to the economy. And theoretically that money will, you know, be used to invest in stuff and that will increase economic growth. Okay, so why wouldn't the Fed rate just always be zero? And the answer to that is that the Fed as an institution and this, this is part of its legal framework that established it, is also trying to control inflation. And the theory effectively is that if you leave these things for too low, for too long, it will cause inflation and it will cause economic bubbles that are not actually supported by the return on investment. Because if you can just always continuously borrow money for $0, then you can just invest in anything as long as the return is like, slightly more than like nothing. However, comma, raising interest rates is used as a way to try to slow economic growth in order to not have inflation result. Right? And also to not have there be sort of speculative bubbles. And right now we've entered a period in which interest rates have been rising after a pretty prolonged period of interest rates being effectively zero, like following the 2008 financial collapse. They've been really low for like a while for some stuff in the 90s that we're going to get to later. But this is basically the primary dispute, which is that, okay, now obviously the Fed is to some extent a political actor, but the question here is who is going to get to set these sort of interest rates? Right? Is it going to be the President of the United States? Right. Is it going to be that Donald Trump can just be like, oh, economy look bad, turn down the interest rate? Or is it going to be the Federal Reserve itself, which is how it presently functions, running this. That's what Fed independence means. So what is at stake here is one of the defining, the defining mechanisms of sort of economic control, of control over the function of the economy. You know, this is called like a macroeconomic policy lever, right? This is one of the largest, most important and most powerful tools that exists in the entire world economy for managing and regulating the American economy. And the question is, is this going to remain with this sort of quasi technocratic independent staff, or is it going to be directly set by the presidents? And that is a huge fucking deal. Because as we mentioned the last time I talked about this, there have been times where presidents have gotten control over central banks. For example, the sort of scare story that everyone is talking about is Turkey, where Erdogan, their effectively dictatorial leader, managed to break the independence of his own central bank. And inflation rates are now merely 40%. So this is what's at stake. It's who gets to control this thing. Is it Donald Trump or is it the Federal Reserve? Now, we are going to go to ads and we are going to come back and talk a bit more about some of the nightmares that can happen here. Foreign. So we've been talking mostly about the Fed interest rate, because that is most of what it does, or that's not most of what it does. That's the most important thing that it does on a political level in terms of, you know, this is why Donald Trump wants it. However, comma, the Fed does a bunch of other shit. Like, for example, a whole bunch of the world's gold supply owned by a bunch of countries across the world, sits in a vault under the Federal Reserve building. The Fed has a balance sheet, right, of, like, the assets that it owns. And that balance sheet is right now about six and a half trillion dollars. The payment system that the Fed maintains has two trillion dollars a day moving through it, right? This payment infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Federal Reserve is the core of the functioning of the entire American banking system. Like, I cannot emphasize this enough. And this is also, you know, important on a macro, international level, right? Like, this institution functioning sort of normally is the difference between capitalism working kind of normally, which is not good, but is working, and it not working. And Trump is trying to take control of it. And again, this is a guy who wants to invade Greenland and he is trying to take control over one of the most powerful economic institutions that has ever existed in human history. So these are the sort of the stakes of the fight that's happening here. Because, again, the Fed is supposed to be an independent entity, right? The president is not supposed to be able to order the Fed to just do whatever it wants. And this is what's at stake with Trump trying to fire one of these Reserve Board presidents, with Trump trying to prosecute the current head of the Federal Reserve and use that threat to bring the Fed into line with doing what he wants to do. Now, Trump is also again attempting to install his own guy when Jerome Powell's term as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board ends. And okay, in terms of, could the Trump administration actually run this? Right, I'm going to read this quote from actually a very good Yahoo story about the search for Trump's new like, who he wants to run the Federal Reserve. This is starting with a quote from Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessett, who's been the guy who is running the candidate search, quote, who can Bring the board along with them. Who has the gravitas, Besset said. Who is going to have an open Greenspan like mind that we could be going through a productivity boom like we did in the 90s and not just throw the brakes because we're alarmed at a high GDP number. Okay, if you have spent your life closely following American macroeconomic policy, that is nuts. That is a terrifying statement. Utterly horrifying. Now, Mia, why, why, why is it scary to say that he wants a Greenspan like mindset that doesn't throw the brakes on the economy because they're alarmed by a GDP number? Why is that scary? And this is also, you know, why is it scary for the Trump administration to have direct control of the Federal Reserve? Part of the reason we haven't had a full scale economic collapse since 2008 has been that there has been a bunch of very, very careful management of the economy by the Federal Reserve.

[James Stout]

Right?

[Mia Wong]

They have done a lot of technical stuff. You know, I'm saying they've done a lot of technical stuff. Well, when I say well, I mean for the functioning of capital, like you and me and everyone listening to this. Is it working for us? No, not really, but it's working for capital. Right? And they've been able to prevent an economic collapse through a lot of sort of technical means in 2020. And you see this now, they did these things called overnight repo injections where they would pump like a hundred billion dollars in liquidity into the bank markets overnight in order to make sure there was liquidity to. Because that was one of the things that caused the 2008 collapse. So they've been doing a bunch of very careful management, some of it in these large swings that have very little public attention, some of it in just the way they've been doing policy. What these guys want to do is the Greenspan stuff from the 90s. So. Okay, Mia, what the fuck is that? So what he's talking about is the Greenspan put. Now what happened in the 90s to simplify the story a little bit, but I'm not even really simplifying it much. Every time the market went down, Greenspan would just lower the interest rate to make the market go back up. Right? So every single time it even sort of looks like the market might be going down, he makes the cost of borrowing from the Fed cheaper. So you can just take more money out of the Federal Reserve and plunge that money back into the stock markets. Right? That's the theory here. The economist Robert Brenner called it asset Keynesianism. This is something we have talked about on the show many, many, many times. And it is to a large extent the thing responsible for the 2008 economic collapse and also the dot com bubble before that, and arguably also the Asian market collapses in the 90s. Okay, you know, you're dealing with a problem which is that you don't have a manufacturing economy that can support economic growth. So what are you going to do instead? Okay, we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so they can do speculative investing in stocks, and we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so that they can go invest in the housing market because housing prices will only ever go up. And that's the thing that these people want to do. Right? And in terms of why, okay, why should you be scared about this? Right? This is like saying that, ok, we need to bring back the guys who did all of the like, mortgage backed securities in 2008 that went up and put them in charge of like the world's most powerful economic institution. So the candidates that Trump is talking about putting in place, I don't know if any of them are going to make it right now because I think the kind of person Trump is looking for is not the kind of person who like runs this kind of thing normally. In terms of like what Trump would do with the guy that he sort of installed there, we can look at who they've already installed. Right? And the one Federal Reserve Board member that Trump has successfully gotten in place is Stefan Mirren, who, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I talk about how nuts this guy is all the time. This is the guy who wants other countries to pay taxes on holding U.S. bonds. And this is the guy that again is now one of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board because Trump put him there. I could spend another 40 minutes ranting about how bad of an idea his Mar a Lago Accords, which is his version of the Plaza Accords, would be. It's gibberish, it's atrocious. And these people are simply not good enough at technical economic management to be put in charge of the Federal Reserve, the most powerful economic agency in the entire world. And again, as I've been saying, right, this economic management has been good for capital. Has it been good for us? Like, no, not really. However, comma, putting that power directly into the hands of Donald Trump is an even worse idea. But it's also very important that this has been good for capital because Fed independence is the red line for a lot of very, very powerful sectors. Of capital who would be fine with things like.

[Garrison Davis]

Like you could.

[Mia Wong]

Like Trump could do public executions in the streets and, like, J.P. morgan eventually would be okay with it. Right. J.P. morgan is, like, panicking over this Federal Reserve stuff. So this is actually a line at which segments of capital are willing to break with Trump because this is an existential threat to them. Now, before I sort of close this out, you know, I've been giving what is essentially a very conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is, because to some extent, you need a conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is to understand what the fuck is going on with these board things. But I want to give the final word to the anthropologist David Graeber. This is from his book the first 5,000 years. One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts. That is the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to make money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun. True in one sense. He's been there from the start. I have already pointed out that modern money is based on government debt and that governments borrow money in order to finance wars. This is just as true today as it was in the age of King Philip ii. The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism. And this is something that's very, very important. Right. We've been talking about how important the Fed is as an economic institution. And obviously the importance of the Federal Reserve is tied in with the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency, which makes it the most important currency on Earth. It means that every other country is doing a bunch of transactions denominated in American dollars. And it turns out when you can make American dollars, that is an enormous advantage for you. But this is all based on American military power. Right. The reason that the dollar is the world reserve currency is because all of the countries that had competing currencies that could have been the international standard were sort of annihilated during World War II. And at the end of World War II, it was the United States left standing with the richest and most powerful economy on Earth.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

But also like it was the country with nukes and the largest army that wasn't the Soviets. Right. The element here that Graeber is pointing out. Right. Is that the debt that you and me and everyone is like, carrying out our day to day stuff with is war, debt. Literally. The thing that we used to, like, buy groceries is to a large extent, it's a tiny bit more complicated than this, but, like, it's loads that were taken out to like, go bomb Vietnam. And part of what's happening under the Trump administration is that all of the things that used to be under the table, right, the U.S. you know, always had the kind of military power that Trump is sort of throwing around to try to, you know, invade Greenland or just kidnap the president of Venezuela and, like, run the country by gunboat. The US has always had the ability to do this. It's just that it was largely agreed upon by everyone involved running the system, that using this power under the table was more effective than using it openly. The Trump administration thinks that, you know, using soft power or not explicitly, just like saying we're going to invade you is like womanly pussycuck shit. Like, that's effectively what's happening here. And these people think that these relationships need to be drawn out into the open. Right? And so what we're left with here is a war between two sectors of capital, one of which wants to immolate the world to satisfy the ego of a tyrant, and the other of which wants to let climate change immolate the world slightly slower, because doing anything about climate change would hurt their bottom line, but allowing the God King to immolate the world by himself would hurt their bottom line, too. And this is effectively the problem with the moment that they're in, which is that neither of these institutions, right, Donald Trump is not on your side. The Federal Reserve is also not on your side. What is necessary here, though, is not for sort of Comrade Federal Reserve to join us. What is necessary here for our purposes is that enough sectors of capital, when the time comes, when Trump finally does something, and when there's a popular reaction, enough, that forces a confrontation between Trump and the American people when that time comes, what is necessary is that these massive and powerful economic institutions stand aside and not defend the regime. This is, as I've talked about to a significant extent on this podcast already, this is how the Bolsheviks won their revolution. It's also how the February revolution won, which was that large portions of the populace, large portions of the ruling class, and to some extent, large portions of the state, simply sat the conflict out because they didn't particularly like the revolutionaries, but they also weren't going to go die for some random tyrant. And that, in the end, is what's important about this conflict. Right. There is on the one hand, the possibility of Donald Trump just immolating the entire economy, and on the other, there is the possibility of these people standing aside when we attempt to build a world where we are not being lit on fire for profit. This has been. It could happen here.

[Robert Evans]

What's getting assaulted by federal agents.

[Ellie Bell]

No, we don't. We don't.

[Garrison Davis]

I love when we start episodes both sleepy and I'm wired.

[Robert Evans]

I'm awake. I'm wide awake, baby. I'm a wide awake, like, political party.

[Mia Wong]

Will you do our.

[Robert Evans]

We already started. We already started. We have. This is Executive disorder.

[Garrison Davis]

This is. It could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and Margaret Killjoy. This episode, we are covering the week of January 14th to January 21st.

[Robert Evans]

You know, a lot of news organizations don't go woot woot.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's wild.

[Mia Wong]

They're cowards.

[Robert Evans]

Fucked up.

[Hank]

That's because they don't drink faygo.

[Robert Evans]

I know. That's right. The official beverage of journalism.

[James Stout]

This episode's presented by Four Loko. Actually, Margaret, you're not allowed to. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of drinking, actually, we will start this episode with a big glass of whole milk. Everyone has one, right? Let's all go up at the same time.

[James Stout]

Let's finish it as we leave for the toilet.

[Garrison Davis]

There we go. Delicious, delicious whole milk.

[Robert Evans]

I drink a gallon every hour.

[Garrison Davis]

We are not sponsored by the dairy lobby. There's nothing fishy going on whatsoever. We're all drinking whole milk now. Not at all.

[Robert Evans]

Not at all. Garrison, Heifer, Davis.

[James Stout]

Heifer.

[Robert Evans]

Even.

[Mia Wong]

Even Margaret.

[Hank]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Who's been a vegan for how many decades?

[Robert Evans]

Look, you can be a vegan and still have a lot of money in the dairy industry, so.

[Hank]

Well, all I'm saying is that if I increase my meat diet by 25%, it will stay the same.

[Mia Wong]

Look, that's.

[Robert Evans]

That's accurate, statistically.

[Garrison Davis]

We love. We love that math humor. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And also thanks to some of the new changes in the way the Food and Drug Administration works, I can guarantee you that American whole milk has almost no dairy in it. It's mostly chalk and baby laxative, just like our heroine.

[James Stout]

I have a theory about this. Can I share my vogue theory? I think the grand unifying principle about which we could bring American people together is that there are too many milks. Everyone agrees on this principle.

[Robert Evans]

That's Right.

[Garrison Davis]

This is what should take over from class. Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Milks.

[Garrison Davis]

The great unifying milk principle.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Hank]

The milk reductionist.

[Robert Evans]

You know what place loves milk? Minnesota.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Let's turn to Minneapolis. The continuing ICE raids in the fallout from ICE killing Renee. Good.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On Wednesday, January 14th, ICE agents attempted to pull over a vehicle whose tag was registered to someone illegally in the country. The driver was not the owner of the vehicle and tried to evade arrest. After a 15 to 20 minute car chase, the driver crashed into a light pole but continued to run on foot. The man ran towards a nearby apartment building with agents now chasing on foot, catching up with him after the man tripped and fell. A federal affidavit claims that another man watching from a porch named Julio Caesar Sosa Sales used a broom to assault the agents while an unnamed individual hit the agents with a snow shovel. After the man they were chasing freed himself, one of the ICE agents fired his pistol hitting Sosa Sales, who was then hospitalized with a non life threatening injury.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

This information is from an FBI report which contradicts initial statements made by DHS which claim that ICE was conducting a targeted traffic stop for Julio Cesar Sosa Sales, a Venezuelan national.

[Robert Evans]

Cool. I think it's worth noting that this is essentially ICE shooting the guy who saves the day at the end of Home Alone. Just as a. As a quick note, that's all I've got to say.

[Mia Wong]

So we haven't gotten very much good information about the shooting that's not from the government. What we do have is there is a livestream Facebook video of some of the 911 call that the family members made. And I'm just going to quote from CNN here. In the video, the family tells a 911 dispatcher that agent shot Sosacellas as he tried to enter his home. They were following my husband for about 30 minutes. They were trying to crash into him. He arrived at home and because we closed the door to them, they shot him. A woman can be heard telling the dispatcher it's not clear who was speaking or whether Sosa Selles is the person referred to as being followed. So that's the only kind of independent thing that we have on this right now. Which also significantly contradicts the story that they got attacked by a guy with a snow shovel or broom.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I don't think it necessarily contradicts that there was a shovel getting moved in the direction of an ICE agent at some point.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

Attacked as a. Yeah, it may have.

[Robert Evans]

Just been a guy trying to create distance and space between Himself and an armed man. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Knocked it over as he ran past it.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And then they tripped over it.

[Robert Evans]

Like there's a wide variety of things that police officers have framed as I was assaulted with this. And then if you look at the video, it does not look like someone assaulting a police officer. Officer.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hank]

It might have just literally been a snow shovel on the porch, honestly.

[Robert Evans]

Or they might have assaulted a police officer.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I don't care either way. I'm just saying we don't know what happened.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The main report, which is in federal court documents that were unsealed on Tuesday, have this FBI agent giving his report based on his knowledge of the incident, which had ICE chasing someone. Then bystanders used a broom and a shovel to try to get the agents off. A man who was tackled on the ground. One ICE agent deflected a shovel blow and it created a small gash in his hand. The man that they were chasing was able to like free himself from being held. And as that man was running away, an agent fired a pistol. That is the, the like most detailed report that we have at the moment.

[James Stout]

Yeah, sure. And like we can't categorically say what happened.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

You can't report on law enforcement testimony as your only source. Or you shouldn't. Yeah, sure, shouldn't. I guess I can say that. Like I'm in Minneapolis right now. Right. And so is Margaret. You're comfortable with me saying you're also in Minneapolis?

[Hank]

It's true. I am in Minneapolis right now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Co located, as they say. It is very hard to report on these things because essentially they happen extremely quickly.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And like on almost every corner in most of the like dense urban parts of town, there are people hanging out, just trying to, trying to keep their neighbors safe. And these things happen so fast that big crowds aren't even able to gather for the most part. If you combine that with the fact that these ICE agents generally aren't wearing body worn cameras, you're only going to get a couple of accounts and it's going to end up in a he said, she said.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right.

[James Stout]

And then they're going to go with the law enforcement testimony, which is what they want. Exactly.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

And I think it is also worth noting that the last three shootings that we've gotten, like the federal agents lied about what happened.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And we got the videos later on and it showed that they were lying about it.

[Robert Evans]

So at this point my default assumption is that absent other information, they are not telling the truth.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Also, they're framing the Asians, framing his decision to fire as related to being afraid of his life. And. Yeah, in the document, his. The. The fear would be based on the presence of a broom.

[James Stout]

Handle based fear.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. So it is a. It is a broom based assault that cites as the reason that he fired.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hank]

Someone running away.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And the. The woman who says that her son was the one being pursued by ice. I'm just going to read the quote here because this is something that does directly contradict the testimony, but in an interview with cnn, Mabel Adjourno, the mother of Alfredo Alejandro Algerno, disputed both of those claims on the basis of her connection with her son. Immediately after the shooting, Aldrona said her son told her he was the one being pursued on foot by ICE and that the other guy was already inside the building when the agent shot him, not outside where ICE said the agent fired the shot.

[Robert Evans]

Mm.

[James Stout]

Geez. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So that's the testimony that we have that's not from the ICE people. And I think we'll. We'll figure out in the coming weeks, like, what happened.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Maybe.

[Mia Wong]

Maybe.

[Garrison Davis]

Three people were arrested after this incident. The person they were chasing, who they have claimed is two different people at some point. The man that Mia just referenced, as well as the person who was shot. And there's also this third individual who is allegedly the. The shovel wielder.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is not named in the FBI affidavit.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But all of these three people have been arrested.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

During a protest that same night, dozens of people broke into two parked FBI vehicles finding challenge coins and US Marshal documents. One person has been arrested for stealing a rifle from one of the vehicles.

[Robert Evans]

Bad challenge coins. Much safer to take.

[Garrison Davis]

On Saturday, Governor Walls mobilized the Minnesota National Guard and placed them on standby to assist local law enforcement. If deployed, the guard will be wearing yellow reflective vests to distinguish themselves from federal forces.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's. This is an interesting moment in and of itself. Just the acknowledgment from the. Both the military command and the governor that, like, yeah, you can't tell the difference between a soldier and a cop anymore. Like, we have to do this so that people don't think the army is the police.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Hank]

And it's a very, like, ouroboros moment, too, because you have just, like, the cops are dressing up like the soldiers, so the soldiers are like, oh, well, I guess we gotta change how we dress now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This could actually fuck up our ability to carry out our mission. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Further complicating matters, 1500 soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division at 4 Fort Wayneworth in Alaska have been placed on standby, with Pentagon officials telling CBS News that they are preparing to deploy to Minneapolis due to the 11th Airborne Division's Arctic forte. There has also been public speculation that this activation may be related to rising tensions over Greenland, but that has no basis based on what officials are saying at the moment. Yeah, a Sunday protest in St. Paul disrupted a church service because protesters believe that one of the pastors is also the head of the St. Paul Ice Field office, David Easterwood. Easterwood's profile on the church's website does appear to match the identity of the head of the local icefield office. Later that day, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement, quote, attacks against law enforcement and the intimidation of Christians are being met with the full force of federal law, unquote. The Department of Justice announced that it was launching an investigation into the protesters, including TV journalist Don Lemon, who was streaming inside the church for possible violations of the FACE act, which makes it a federal crime to interfere with people trying to access reproductive clinic services or exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of worship. Harmet Dillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, has also invoked the Klan act as a justification to bring conspiracy charges against protest attendees. Darkly ironic since this very protest was partially put on by Black Lives Matter Minnesota.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it. That's also particularly wild given, like, we've been driving around today and seen multiple churches with, like, ice go home kind of messaging. Like, obviously those people are not going to be protected in the same way. Right. If they, if they choose to take care of migrants. Like, I don't think I've seen any churches with, like, anything other than that messaging in our time. Cruising around today, I haven't seen any.

[Hank]

Pro ice messaging anywhere. Any pro Trump messaging, period. I have never seen a more united city in my life.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's genuinely remarkable, like, to see people whose I don't think they would, like, identify as having radical politics, but they are, like, out standing on street corners in the freezing cold just to try and keep their neighborhood safe.

[Hank]

Yeah, this is the warmer day of the week and I went and got all this, like, extra snow gear. And I live in the mountains, right? That is, like, where I live. And I'm standing there in most of my, like, extra snow gear, and everyone's like, today's the warm day, everything's fine. And I'm like, I need to get inside soon.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, I will die. Welcome to Minnesota Winter. It's Done.

[Hank]

And we're talking to a 76 year old with no hat on.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

20 degrees. Incredible.

[James Stout]

Incredible. Warmed by pure anger.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, that is warm.

[James Stout]

But she was ready to take on the world. It was really genuinely, really wonderful to see. We went out, we talked to these people for a while. Some folks stopped by and insisted on feeding everyone. It's really nice to see a community entirely in lockstep taking care of one another.

[Hank]

And I feel like to me, so far, like the actual headline around Minneapolis is that like, obviously there's like these instances of really horrific violence coming from the state or coming from the federal government. Right. But the actual story that so far the people we've talked to want to get across is this.

[Garrison Davis]

They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Hank]

Journalists come here and just want to cover all the bad stuff that's happened here. But this horizontal organizing and this feeling of togetherness. And also, more than anything else, I think even when you talk about the bad thing that's happening, it's federal occupation. And people are very, very aware of the fact that this is an outside force occupying the city. And so even anything that's happening, individual bad actions taken by the federal police, I think it needs to be understood that no one here is buying any other line besides. No, this outside force is here to steal our neighbors and us.

[James Stout]

You'll go past fancy coffee shops and random businesses. I've seen businesses before having signs that say, refugees welcome. We cherish our migrant neighbors. But the ones here also say, ice, get out of town. Ice, go home. We don't want you here. Yeah, yeah. Like, like people are not having it to a degree, which, like, I don't think I've seen. You know, I, I wasn't in Chicago during the time that ICE were there. I was in Los Angeles. But like, every neighborhood here feels like the neighborhood sort of most in lockstep in those cities. Right? Every neighborhood we've been to. Right. Like in, in heavily Latino neighborhoods where I live. Yeah. Everyone's watching out for each other. And in San Diego, that is. But like here and every single neighborhood, everyone is watching out for each other from what we've seen. And like, it is folks of every age and demographic standing on street corners in the freezing cold, just pulling a shift to keep an eye out. It's remarkable. Yeah.

[Hank]

I was like, there's no way. People are like, oh, every neighborhood has like a neighborhood watch. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know, there's like two people per neighborhood wandering at any given time. Like, I was like, how can you watch a whole city? And like, oh, the answer is everyone in the city does it.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That's a story that I want people to take from this, is that, like, nobody here wants this. And they're not just, like, angry and going on the Internet. They're angry and getting to know their neighbors, going and organizing each other, taking care of one another, and doing the things that they can do to keep each other safe.

[Garrison Davis]

During Trump's 365 days in office press conference this past Tuesday, he discussed the killing of Renee Good and expressed hope that Good's parents would continue to support President Trump.

[Robert Evans]

Let's watch. Amazing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Come on.

[James Stout]

I haven't seen it.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you are unlucky enough to see it now.

[James Stout]

No, let's do it live.

[Garrison Davis]

It's, it's, it's gross. It's weird.

[James Stout]

Garrison's booting up x.com, the Everything website.

[I]

And, you know, they're going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or, you know, they deal with rough people. They're going to make a mistake sometimes. It can happen. We feel terribly. I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was had the tragedy. It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing. Everybody would say. ICE would say the same thing. But when I learned her parents, and her father in particular is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know. Was a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump, loved Trump, and, you know, it's terrible. I was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh, he loves you. He was. I hope he stayed. Feels that way. I don't know. It's a hard, hard situation. But her father was a tremendous. And parents were tremendous Trump fans. It's so sad. It just happens. It's terrible.

[Robert Evans]

What is there even to say?

[James Stout]

Yeah, what do you. How do you.

[Mia Wong]

The fuck?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's interesting that he seems to be capable of, like, legitimately being upset at the thought of one of his fans not liking him anymore. Like, that's weird. The fact that he, like, he brings it up in a way that suggests, like, there's no artifice there, right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that's, that's the genuineness of, like, oh. He actually seems to be slightly disturbed at the thought of one of his fans no longer liking him, even though his secret police murdered that guy's daughter. That's fascinating. It doesn't change anything. Like, I don't know. There's nothing to do with that information, but it's A fascinating understanding. Donald Trump's mind. Data point.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, it is one of the weird things where you kind of see him be sincere and genuine briefly, but it's for such a fucking weird thing.

[Robert Evans]

Such a weird.

[Hank]

Like he understands that you're like, well, you know, maybe, maybe he doesn't like me anymore, but I hope he does.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this would be a reason to change his opinion of me, but yeah.

[Hank]

I murdered his child.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, I don't either.

[Garrison Davis]

So part of the whole reason why ICE is doing this operation in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge, this was started in part due to allegations of COVID relief fraud among the Somali community in Minnesota. ICE director Todd Loynes went on Fox News earlier this month in the lead up to ICE's mass deployment to address this.

[Mia Wong]

You know, one thing I, we're really focused on is the fact that unfortunately, with Minnesota's sanctuary laws and jurisdictions, it attracts these type of fraudsters. It attracts people that do take money away from the hardworking Americans and the people of Minnesota. We, we want to help root out these people that are committing fraud. And you look at the billions of dollars that potentially could have been stolen that could have gone to foreign terrorist organizations that we're really focused on. So we're hoping to get to the bottom of that.

[Garrison Davis]

So as ICE is currently hoping to get to the bottom of this fraud problem in Minnesota, just this past week, Trump has pardoned at least 11 white collar fraudsters.

[Hank]

I think we can all agree the biggest problem with that clip was the typo in ICE at the bottom where they, Fox News didn't put the period after the E in ice, but they put the period after the I in the C. I think we can all agree.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, get on it, Todd. Actually, Fox News is hiring a, is hiring a graphic design position in New York right now. So if you want to apply to fix the ethics.

[Robert Evans]

See you later, losers.

[James Stout]

Yeah, can you use Chat GPT?

[Hank]

They probably did.

[James Stout]

Here's a job for you.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, let's go on break and then talk about, as Trump calls it, Iceland.

[Ellie Bell]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. First off, if you need to tell the difference between Greenland and Iceland, just remember the words of wisdom from either the first to the second Mighty Ducks movie, Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Quack, quack.

[Robert Evans]

Greenland is icy and Iceland is nice. Is the way to remember the two.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you can't spell nice without ice, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[James Stout]

That's why they call it Niceland.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. That's how you tell the difference. That's a little tip for the President and everyone else, I guess. Trying to remember.

[Hank]

That's probably. That's how I've known the difference my entire life. And it's almost certainly because of watching the Mighty Ducks movies.

[Robert Evans]

The Mighty Ducks. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The Mighty Ducks films. Sorry.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Shout out to my Iceland friends. I enjoyed Iceland very much.

[Robert Evans]

Shout out to whoever made the Mighty Ducks. Yeah, I know. The knowledge of their creation has been lost in time.

[Hank]

It was actually. The whole thing was actually a propaganda film by the Iceland tourist industry. Little known fact. That's right.

[James Stout]

Big Iceland.

[Robert Evans]

We are reporting this on the day that it looks like Donald Trump may have just blinked. He put up a truth, announcing that he had reached an arrangement with NATO and that tariffs would not be necessary against all of Western Europe. Basically, it's kind of unclear the details of this deal. He's saying that it's a big permanent thing. The US has sorted out its security needs. It doesn't seem like we're going to be invading Greenland, but, you know, it's also Donald Trump. So we could be in a very different position tomorrow. But that's kind of the big update right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, let's. Let's talk about kind of the lead up to this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Moment.

[Garrison Davis]

I suppose.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Multiple EU nations and Denmark have sent troops to Greenland the past two weeks for the Arctic Endurance military exercise aimed at countering Russian security threats and to demonstrate that European NATO countries have the capacity to defend Arctic territory without the US Needing control over Greenland. Now, Trump took this military deployment as a personal slight and levied tariffs in retaliation. Posting on Truth Social quote, denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland have journeyed to Greenland for purposes unknown. This is a very dangerous situation for the safety, security and survival of our planet. Those countries who are playing this very dangerous game have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable. Therefore, it is imperative that in order to protect global peace and security, strong measures be taken so that this potentially perilous situation end quickly and without question, unquote. He then announced 10% tariffs against all of these nations, which would increase to 25% next month.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I guess my gut feeling is, you know, tariff meno like it. But beyond that, this is kind of just what Trump does now, right? Is he threatens everyone with like, whatever the nuclear option is short of the literal nuclear option, which in this case is nuking global trade, and then it kind of blows up in his face because the EU actually has the ability to Collapse the dollar's status as a reserve currency. And the money wardens of the world are aware of that, which is why The DAO plunged 800 points yesterday and probably why Trump felt pressured to come to an accommodation with NATO. I don't know that he ever literally planned on invading, although at this point, I think you can't take that out of the equation. But, like, this is just what he does now, Right? Like, none of this is it. Like, it's wild because he might have literally bombed a fucking NATO member. But I don't know what to say other than that.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I can explain a little bit more about the unhinged series of messages that Donald Trump has been sending to various world leaders. God, we know about these because they have all been released.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Fantastic. From Planetary Security.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

What?

[James Stout]

Not just that, Right. The Norwegians released the text that was sent by him to Norwegian Prime Minister.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like the Norwegians, they're not normally, like, an impulsive nation.

[Robert Evans]

That's not what people know. The Norwegians for now.

[Mia Wong]

No.

[James Stout]

They don't make big swings on the international scale very much, but they have done this time. So I'm just going to quote right from his message to Norwegian Prime Minister, quote, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars, plus plus is all in caps, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Then Trump released a text from Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General, that read, quote, Mr. President, dear Donald, what you accomplished in Syria today is incredible. We will get onto that. Returning to the quote, I will use my media engagement to Davos to highlight your work there in Gaza and in Ukraine. I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland. Can't wait to see you.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you have the French text as well? The French text that came up.

[James Stout]

I do. I don't have it in here, but yes, the Macron text message I'm more than happy to read because that one was pretty funny, actually. So we are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things in Iran. Interestingly, none of these sentences end with any punctuation.

[Garrison Davis]

No punctuation.

[James Stout]

No punctuation.

[Robert Evans]

Macron joicing it unnecessary, not helpful.

[James Stout]

So I'll just read them in one continuous breath. I do not understand what you're doing on Greenland. Let us try to build great things. One can set up a G7G meeting after Davos in Paris on Thursday afternoon. I can Invite the Ukrainians, the Danish, the Syrians and the Russians in the margins. 2. Let us have a dinner together in Paris together on Thursday before you go back to the U.S. emmanuel. Lots of lowercase in there. Actually. None of the. None of the countries getting uppercase.

[Garrison Davis]

Imagine sending your situationship this text and then he just posts it on True Social. Yeah, it's so violating.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's what's so weird to me is that this is almost word for word the text I sent James last week.

[James Stout]

It's true. I've posted it on a new website.

[Garrison Davis]

Very odd. I do not understand what you are doing on Greenlit.

[James Stout]

Yes, that sentence just floating on. So, like, it's. It's magnificent.

[Robert Evans]

It's magnificent. And it's also like, yeah, that is fair enough. Basically everyone feels like, man, I don't know what you're doing on Greenland. Like, what, what, what is actually happening here?

[Hank]

I mean, what do you do when, like, there's a petulant child who also has a handgun or a nuke, you know, and you're just like, shut up, kid. Oh, wait, no, you could shoot me. No, it's time for a nap.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is why I have, like. You know how hotels have those like little sprinklers in the roof? I've got one of those just for CS gas. Yeah, yeah, just to keep. Just to clear out the house in case, you know, you got to calm everybody down. That's what we need for the country.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah. We all need a little holiday.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about Greenland.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[James Stout]

Greenland's a semi autonomous territory of Denmark. It was a colony and then over the 20th century, Greenlanders became Danish citizens. And now they have like this semi autonomous situation where they have a lot of home rule, but they are still part of Denmark. Denmark, of course, is part of the EU and of NATO. So therefore they are part of the EU and part of NATO.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

As we said earlier, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK have all sent very small numbers of troops to the territory in the past couple of weeks. But the US is the one that has the most troops on Denmark.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Because the United States has a base. They've kept this base there since World War II. It was there in World War II because the Nazis occupied Denmark.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And then the United States garrison Greenland because it does have, like. They're not wrong in saying it has an important strategic position.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Where it is.

[Robert Evans]

No, it's really well located. And the reality of, again, this is another mark in the column of, like, conservatives pretending Climate change isn't real and acting based on the realities of climate change. Because of the warming oceans in that part of the world, it's going to become much more navigable. It used to not be as strategic because there was just less possibility of moving naval assets through the area. And now that. That's not going to be a problem because the world's warming and there's going to be less ice there. Greenland has much more, a much higher, like, strategic value just in terms of like, as a place to have as a potential naval choke point. Right, yeah.

[Hank]

Are you saying that the people who named it were actually being prescient, ahead of the curve?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, they were ahead of the curve. They weren't just trying to stop people from coming to Iceland.

[James Stout]

They foresaw it in the ruins.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So the US it used to be called Tula Air Force Base. And essentially the US has the right, according to defense treaty with Greenland, to use Greenland to defend itself and to defend the Arctic.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

So what they previously had there during. They kept the base during the Cold War because it was where they would be able to identify missile launches coming from the former Soviet Union or what was at the time the Soviet Union. Right. And then they could intercept from from there with their Air Force base. They now. It is now a space force base. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[James Stout]

It's now the Pitufix Space Force Base. Yeah. And the US can expand or garrison this base as it needs to. Right. Like the majority of Greenland, it's all occupied.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

But it is not like, I guess, urbanized or built upon.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

The US could expand this base. It could add more assets to this base, but the United States has decided that it's not enough and that it needs total sovereignty over Greenland.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So there are a few ways it.

[James Stout]

Could achieve that, and we should just be explicit about those.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

The first is obviously by direct military action. That still seems relatively unlikely, but who knows these days? Hopefully, yeah, there is an influence campaign that they're trying.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They're attempting to influence Greenlanders into wanting to become American. The polling data I've shown shows that Greenlanders do favor independence, but they do not favor joining the United States. They wouldn't mind leaving Denmark.

[Robert Evans]

And also overwhelmingly, when presented with a choice between the United States or Denmark, would prefer to remain part of Denmark.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That situation right now, it's one that they don't want to go out the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. I guess. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

For reasons that make no sense to me as I text my friend about the doctor visit they can't afford.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's interesting seeing those interviews where they're like, why would we want that? We've seen what you people have for healthcare.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This sucks.

[Robert Evans]

What is the appeal of being American?

[James Stout]

If Denmark has any spaces, California will join you. So, yeah. The other option would be to purchase it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[James Stout]

Which is not on the cards. Greenland is not for sale. So, yeah. Mia, do you want to talk about this tariff campaign they've been suggesting that they're going to leverage.

[Robert Evans]

Wait, wait a second. What's that? James, did you say.

[Mia Wong]

By God, it's Mia Wong's music.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hank]

I bet you would have picked that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We asked Mia what she wanted. She wrote. It's amazing. She went into a room, she wrote down music notes on a piece of paper and she came out with something.

[James Stout]

Turned out someone else had done it before.

[Mia Wong]

Well, we couldn't license Barracuda, so this is what we got.

[Robert Evans]

We actually were not trying to make a parody. This is one of those things like the evolution of the bow and arrow. We just kind of independently recreated Rock the Kasbah, but based around tariffs from first principles.

[Hank]

It's the carcinization of songs.

[James Stout]

That's right.

[Robert Evans]

Carcinization of songs. All music becomes Rock the Kasbah.

[James Stout]

If you give it enough time, give it long enough. On the Galapagos Islands. That's what we sent me to write a song on. She was on the Galapagos Islands for a long time.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Mia Wong]

Very nice there. So. So speaking. Speaking of things changing very, very quickly. So two days ago, as we are recording this, Trump was interviewed about these terrorists he was going to impose by. I think it was NBC and he said, quote, I will 100%. It is now Wednesday and he has backed off of the tariffs tomorrow.

[Robert Evans]

Truly, it's another day. Yeah. Who knows?

[Mia Wong]

Who knows? I think it's kind of worth noting as of right now when we're recording this, everyone is kind of treating this as if this is over, but except for the German finance minister who said, quote, it's good they are engaged in dialogue. We have to wait a bit and not get our hopes up so soon.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which is significant.

[Robert Evans]

That's. That's the smart play too.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And this is significant because Germany, as we'll get to in a second. Germany has been one of the major EU countries that does not want to deploy what is being called, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the trade bazooka. So it's called the. Every single article today is Called what is the trade bazooka?

[Robert Evans]

It's okay. We're all asking ourselves that, aren't we?

[Mia Wong]

Okay, so before we get to the trade bazooka, it's worth noting that in terms of the retaliation that has been being planned by the EU against the US for trying to do this, there's actually two different things on the table. One is a package of tariffs that we've actually talked about before on this show. That was the package of tariffs the EU developed as part of the trade negotiations. Well, basically, it was developed in response to Liberation Day tariffs. Last year, they'd been suspended as part of trade negotiations with the U.S. and the U.S. and the EU had finally reached an agreement. And then Trump said this, and the EU backed out. So who knows what the tariff status is going to be and if the EU and the US are going to continue to have come to this agreement that was supposed to stave these things. So these retaliatory tariffs were supposed to go into effect on February 7th. We had just negotiated it not coming in. These are a bunch of targeted tariffs on a bunch of US Goods that are specifically designed to hit red states. The most famous of these is, for example, there's. There's specifically specific tariffs on, like, Kentucky bourbon and whiskey and stuff, but it also hits Boeing, a bunch of random consumer goods, which is like chewing gum. It's on roughly $100 billion of U.S. goods. I think the biggest pressure points here are Boeing in General Dynamics. There's tariffs on car companies. There's also very importantly, there was a 25% tariff in here on soybeans, which I think is a major leverage point because the US Continues to need a market to sell all the soybeans that China not buying.

[Robert Evans]

And, yeah, China ain't buying them right now. We just had another month where they bought none of our soybeans.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So these were the tariffs that the EU was going to put into effect on February 7th in response to the Greenland tariffs.

[Mia Wong]

No. Okay, sorry. Let me. Let me back this up. This is a tariff measure that was originally designed back in May of last year in response to Trump's original right of tariffs.

[Garrison Davis]

A Liberation Day tariffs.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So they've been suspended until now, and they were about to just not go into effect at all. However, the EU immediately has been like, okay, maybe we are going to impose these ones.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, got it. Because of Trump's new because Greenland leverage tariffs.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I see. So this is. This is one of the two options. The EU has the other option, and this is. Okay. Getting Those tariffs would be a little bit difficult, but that's significantly the more likely option. The other option, the thing you've been hearing about, which is the trade bazooka.

[Garrison Davis]

Which was also my, my grinder screen name at the rnc.

[Mia Wong]

Trade bazooka.

[Garrison Davis]

You either get it or you don't.

[Mia Wong]

You can. This is great. This is great. Okay, so, all right, what is the trade bazooka? We're just going to move past that.

[Robert Evans]

So that's what a lot of Republicans were asking themselves in 2024.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God.

[James Stout]

Diego trending in Minneapolis or wherever you go.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, so the trade bazooka is an anti coercion instrument that was originally by the EU in the early 2000 and twenties as a response to some bullshit that China pulled with Lithuania over embassy stuff in Taiwan. It's a whole thing. I'm not going to explain it here, but these measures are, I think, maybe the most extraordinary measures that I've seen. These measures, if they went into effect, would be more serious than Liberation Day tariffs. They are very, very difficult to enact. They require 15 of the 27 EU members. There has to be an investigation process. There's a whole thing. And the negotiations have to actually break down. And this is where it's really difficult because Germany in particular does not really seem to want to do this. However, Trump has played this very badly in the sense that two of his natural allies in the EU are the UK and Norway, who he just was threatening to leverage tariffs on.

[Robert Evans]

Well, so the UK is not part of the EU anymore, but yeah, well, forward.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but those are his are his two European allies.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And the UK still has significant leverage inside of there. Now, what is interesting is that Macron has called for its deployment if Trump presses to, you know, move on Greenland. So the question sort of is, what does this thing do? And the short answer is everything. The long answer is incredibly long. And the medium answer is if you go read the document. I read it. I'm going to roughly base my description of what it can do on Wheeler Hale, which is a law firm's version of it. So there's 10 things they can do. They can put on tariffs. They can do import export restrictions on goods. They can impose trade restrictions in general. They can impose restrictions on government procurement and contracts and what goods are bought by governments. They can do services restrictions. They can do foreign direct investment restrictions. They can can do restrictions on intellectual property. Right. Protections. They can do capital controls of financial services restrictions. They can do chemicals restrictions and like sanitary goods restrictions. So they can stop The US from importing goods to the eu. They can prevent EU governments from giving contracts to US companies or buying anything from the us. They can restrict American intellectual property rights, which I don't even know what that would do.

[Hank]

I think that means that they could all pirate whatever they want, Right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know that rules.

[James Stout]

Spain did this for a long time.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It's like we're firing the trade bazooka and now you can use every Disney character.

[Garrison Davis]

Disney would rise up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Just flood the market with Mickey Mouse pornography. That is part of the EU's response package.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, no, that already falls under fair use. Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Not the way I do it. Garrison. Not the way I do it.

[Mia Wong]

These are technically two different Mickey Mouses. Technically, this is. No, no, no.

[Robert Evans]

I've been very clear about which Mickey Mouse is in my pornography. So.

[Mia Wong]

So the reason this is being called like the trade bazooka or the nuclear option is that the actual. Once this is enacted, which is very difficult, the actual limits on what they can do are almost non. Existent. They can, once they've targeted it, it can kind of do whatever you want it to do to the extent that they could, in theory, basically shut down all trade with the us.

[Hank]

Why didn't they call it the Trade Death Star?

[Robert Evans]

I honestly.

[Hank]

Bazooka's not thinking big enough like that takes out a tank.

[Mia Wong]

Danny. Widely. I think it's being called the Bazooka because the people reporting on this haven't actually read it and have not thought through the implications of what this thing does, which is that like. Jesus Christ.

[Hank]

The Trade Mutually Assured Destruction Device.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hank]

Is it Mutually Assured destruction? Is that what this whole thing is built around?

[Robert Evans]

Kind of. I mean, like. Yeah, because the EU's economy will also plunge. But.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So this was originally designed around China specifically, but it's designed effectively as a nuke. Right. You're not supposed to have to ever get to the point where you're invoking it. It's designed to be a set of trade things that is so damaging that no one in their right mind would possibly risk it happening. Unfortunately, our President is Donald Trump.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Here we are.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's, that's the sort of nuclear option here. I want to mention one other thing which Robert briefly touched on earlier, which is there's been a lot of discussion of a quote from a report by the guy who is Deutsche Bank's head of foreign exchange research, and he's talking about how much treasury bonds is owned by the eu.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, a Lot. There are primary treasury bond holders. Right. In terms of foreign treasury bond holders.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. Between that and stocks, it's like $8 trillion dollars. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And treasury bonds, by the way, the fact that the EU is like our primary foreign treasury bond holder, like treasury bonds and foreign countries holding them is why the dollar is the reserve currency.

[Ellie Bell]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

It's why if you are wanting to like ransom someone or buy illegal guns and drugs anywhere in the world, they're more likely to use dollars than euros. That is changing, you know, in the, in the international crime game. But the dollar is still the default foreign currency. People around the world need a currency that's universally valued. The dollar is, is the best bet. And it's because of how treasury bonds work. Right. Like that's. I'm oversimplifying, but that's a big part of it. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So, okay, I'm going to read the actual quote here. In an environment where the geo. Economic stability of the Western alliance is being disrupted existentially, it is not clear why Europeans would be willing to play this part. To translate this from like banking into what is he actually saying? What he is arguing here is that there is the potential for these countries to stop buying U.S. treasury bonds and effectively pull out of American assets. It's not quite that easy. But this, this, this would be the. What he's talking about is like, is the, is the end of the US Dollar as a reserve currency. And he's also very specifically, this is about the fact that the dollar status as reserve currency is a thing that is allowing the US Military to carry out these kind of operations.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Up until yesterday when he said this, the only people I have ever seen actually say this are, you know, I mean, economists who I like is people like David Hudson, David Graeber talks about this, but like this is a thing that you could only say if you were like a Marxist or an anarchist. And now you have Deutsche bank analysts saying it. And this is something that was impossible like two days ago that there would actually be serious discussion of using as a geopolitical tool like getting out of US treasury bonds, which means ending the US Dollar as a reserve currency. And this was a big enough deal that the US Secretary of the treasury is claiming that Deutsche bank called him to disavow the analysis.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Wow.

[Mia Wong]

It's unclear if that's true or not. But this I think is one of the things that really panicked them in terms of why Trump backed off was there are multiple nuclear options that are being put on the table for the first time Ever. And I think that that and the DAO route was enough to just panic them for at least one day, and we'll see what tomorrow holds. But this is a really significant shift in what is able to be discussed in terms of reactions to what the US Is doing.

[Robert Evans]

Well, you know, what else is the United States? These ads.

[Garrison Davis]

Another flawless Robert Evans moment, everybody.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. All right, what else we got to talk to? Anything else happen in the entire world?

[Hank]

I don't think so.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, there actually, there is two more Davos things very briefly that I think we should get to before we kind of end with some other updates on ongoing stories and situations that we've been covering on the POD for a while. But when Mia was talking about how this, this sort of analysis was only used by, you know, like Marxist or certain types of anarchists before that is now getting kind of paid lip service on a national stage, that reminded me a little bit of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech yesterday, which addressed some similar things on the fiction of the quote, rules based international order.

[Mia Wong]

Christ.

[James Stout]

Holy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that description of the rules based international order, Mark.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Connie's been reading my book.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, let's, let's, let's take a listen.

[Ad]

We knew the story of the international rules based order order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

[Mia Wong]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's really remarkable to hear the political leader of Canada being like, it was always very clearly a lie, the rules based international order, where the United States exempted itself because it had power. But we pretended to that this wasn't happening. We like acknowledging that like we ignored them breaking the rules because it was convenient for Canada.

[Hank]

Yeah, it totally worked out well for us until now it doesn't work out so well for us anymore.

[Mia Wong]

Like invading a rock, it was fine, but now like, yeah, they might invade us one day.

[Robert Evans]

So. Oh fuck.

[Garrison Davis]

It's really interesting, just totally pulling back the curtain on this type of neoliberalism here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I love too, every time you get someone who would never ever give, like anarchists or anarchist political theory, the light of day, like independently come to a conclusion very late that is like that anarchists have been yelling about for like, yes, it's a fiction. The rules based international order is a fiction. Everyone's playing lip service to these ideas, knowing the US has exempted itself because hiding behind the Big Guy is convenient. But that's a bad idea. The thing that people who knew anything were saying when we invaded Iraq, which was, if you let them get away with this, no one will ever be safe. That's the way. And all those people got pushed aside as like, no, you're just being hysteric. Like, you're just being like that. You don't have like a real understanding of politics and how it works. And the. There will never be any kind of reckoning of people being like, oh yeah, all of like the, all of the people who were like inconveniently critical were right 20 something years ago. They'll never say that, but it's fun to see them admit it. Like, you know, kind of obliquely.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, it sounds like he's been reading Charles Tilly. It's kind of, kind of remarkable.

[Garrison Davis]

Carney did write this speech himself as something that he has come out and said that this was not like some speechwriter who's pulling from like whatever. Like, you know, neoliberal bookshelf is popular right now. Like he specifically wrote this himself.

[Hank]

Yeah, I mean he just cribbed from that book I read as a kid. The emperor has no clothes like, or new clothes.

[Garrison Davis]

So before the announcement of this ambiguous Greenland deal, which neither the European authorities nor Trump has really given any details of yet. But before this, Trump did speak at Davos on Wednesday where he confused Greenland for Iceland and said that they called him, quote, unquote, daddy.

[Mia Wong]

God. God damn it.

[Garrison Davis]

Play the clip.

[I]

I'm helping Europe, I'm helping NATO. And I've until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me Daddy. Right last time. Oh God, very smart man, said he's our daddy. He's running it. I was, like, running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being.

[Garrison Davis]

Very cool, Mr. President.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Based on the reporting acknowledging that he, multiple times, not just in this clip, said Iceland when he meant Greenland, Carolyn Levitt, the press secretary, responded by saying, no. His written remarks referred to Greenland as a, quote, unquote, piece of ice, because that's what it is, unquote. So saying that, he was literally calling Greenland like an ice land.

[Hank]

Anyway, the emperor's totally wearing clothes. I don't know what you're talking about.

[Mia Wong]

What's that Mon Mothma quote about? They don't even bother to lie badly anymore.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's the final indignity. Yeah.

[Ellie Bell]

That's the worst excuse I've ever heard.

[Garrison Davis]

It's incredible. Iceland.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I mean, you gotta. It's gotta be a remarkable thing to be in her position, right? And just be like, what the fuck am I gonna come up with? Like, how do I. What are we gonna spin here?

[Ellie Bell]

Ice.

[Mia Wong]

Pause.

[James Stout]

Land.

[Garrison Davis]

Space. Land. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Land.

[Robert Evans]

One word.

[Garrison Davis]

It's incredible.

[Mia Wong]

Wait, you go, girl.

[Ellie Bell]

Go off.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

Later, at the CEO reception dinner, Trump said this.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God.

[I]

We got good reviews in that speech. Usually they say he's a horrible dictator type person. I'm a dictator. But sometimes you need a dictator. But they didn't say that in this case.

[Ellie Bell]

Sure, my guy, sure. Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

Of course they didn't.

[Mia Wong]

I wonder why.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Multiple times during this speech, he was like, if it weren't for the United States, you'd all be speaking German and maybe a little Japanese. It's like, incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. How did he think, like. Yeah, how did he think that, like, control was going to break down between.

[Mia Wong]

Those two countries globally, giving Japan.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right. Well, on Sundays it's Japan, and the rest of the time it's German.

[Garrison Davis]

Incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Japan pulling up like your deadbeat dad to be like, look, this weekend you're mine.

[Mia Wong]

If he wasn't a horrific mock to be really funny.

[Robert Evans]

We're eating sushi.

[Mia Wong]

He's so funny.

[Robert Evans]

He is really. He's our funniest president by a wide margin.

[Ellie Bell]

Evil.

[Mia Wong]

But he's so funny.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The way he pronounced dictator where there.

[Ellie Bell]

Was like a slight pause, like, he.

[Robert Evans]

Legitimately has good timing as a presenter.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's actually two words, Sophie. He was saying dick and then tater, like the contraction of potato.

[Ellie Bell]

Yeah, I like.

[Mia Wong]

It sounded like he was giving a random recipe.

[Ellie Bell]

I was like, what are we doing here?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my. Oh, my gosh.

[Ellie Bell]

Gary, do we have anything else from devos?

[Garrison Davis]

No, I think that's all for Davos. One of the funnier Davos is in. In recent memory.

[Mia Wong]

I agree.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Now we just have some sad news that James is probably going to say.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. So I guess if we start with Iran. Right. Protests are continuing. The BBC had a piece today where they were leaked to photos of hundreds of the people who have been killed.

[Mia Wong]

Jesus.

[Margaret Killjoy]

There's 326 victims, including 18 women. The reason that they were able to get these images is it seems that people went to the mortuary and had to look through a slideshow of the faces of people who have been killed, many of whom are so disfigured that they're unrecognizable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And they have to flick through hundreds of images of these brutalized human remains in order to try and identify their loved ones.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It is unimaginable the, the scale of state violence. Gorain had an interview on his Twitter or his X.com right. That with. With someone inside Iran, which I'd encourage people to read and which we'll link in the show notes. But like people continue to be in the streets there and the state continues to meet them with absolutely horrific violence.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And talking of horrific violence, I want to move now to Syria. Right. Specifically to Syria and Kurdistan and the, I guess majority Arab parts of Syria that had previously been part of the autonomous administration of north and East Syria.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Last week we talked about fighting in Aleppo and then we spoke about like fighting moving towards Euphrates. Right. Fighting has now moved past where it was last week and it's moving dangerously close to Qamishlo and Hesika, which are the two biggest Kurdish cities. Hesika is not just a city where Kurdish people live. Right. Arab people, I mean, neither of these are. Right. Arab people. Assyrian people, Armenian people.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Yazidis.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The AANES was a multi ethnic project. Like that's what distinguished the SDF from the YPG and the ypj.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That they were multi ethnic. They weren't just Kurdish. The way that this has occurred is that the Syrian Transitional Government has been able to flip multiple tribal groups who are mostly Arab who had previously fought alongside the SDF as part of the sdf. Right. But have now flipped to the side of the Syrian Transitional Government. So this leaves the SDF with previously units that have been there suddenly flipping and they have lost huge amounts of territory to include Raqqa, you know, famously.

[Robert Evans]

Former capital of the Islamic State. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The former capital where thousands died both as a result of is violence and in the fighting for the city and as a result of civilians died as a result of coalition bombing during the fighting for the city range, there have been absolutely horrific images of the brutalization of the remains of captured YPG and YPGA fighters.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Men and women. We have seen executions. This is not just that executions are happening. It is that people who are fighting, not necessarily in the Syrian Arab army, but in at least alliance with the Syrian Transitional Government, have been so comfortable carrying out summary executions if they have decided to film and share them. So on. On Monday, Masloom Abdi, Right. The. The general of the Syrian Democratic Forces traveled to Damascus to attempt to negotiate a peace and was not able to do that. It's. It seems that he was offered some kind of position, but he didn't want the position. There was not also some kind of autonomy backstops for the remaining areas of the aanes. Right. And so as a result, there was a general mobilization in the aanes. People from Bakur. So people from northern Kurdistan have crossed the border. There's a border wall, fence wall, depending on where you're at, in between Turkish Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan. Right. And at one point people have broken that down and young people have entered into Syrian Kurdistan to fight to defend the cities that are still part of the aanes. The counterterrorism group of the PUK has entered Syrian Kurdistan. That's quite surprising. Right? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is an Iraqi Kurdish political party.

[Mia Wong]

Effectively, that is not aligned.

[Hank]

Oh, yeah. And they're not lefty, Right. Or they're not democratic and federalist.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, they were at some point like.

[Robert Evans]

They are now today, basically like an arm of the Kurdish quote, unquote state in northern Iraq. Right. They were originally more of an actual political party and did have some socialist elements. That's not really super relevant to what's going on.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. The ideology is not the same as the ideology that you have seen in Roshava. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But like I have not since Kobani have you seen more unity of Kurdish people regardless of politics. Right. Like, I saw a statement from, like, you'll see stuff from Barzani, from Talibani. So these are the two major political figures in Iraqi Kurdistan. I've seen Kurdish religious leaders making statements. Right. Because people are afraid of an ethnic cleansing. Because they have seen the ethnic cleansings of the Druze and the Alawites that have already happened under the stg.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's worth noting, I guess, at this point, like for whatever reason, they have not chosen to remove the name Arab from the country's name like the Syrian Arab Republic. And I think like, that Syria is a multi ethnic and very diverse country. And if it is to succeed under any form of administration, it needs to acknowledge that. Right. And it's really worrying to see this horrific inter ethnic violence and it is being massively accelerated by people in the media. Right. To include a lot of people who might be referred to as experts. I don't think that's a reasonable appellation. Like, their expertise is pretty limited. But nonetheless, people who like to include journalists, telegram influencers, and then think tankers in the west, people are sharing things that are either not true or that have not happened in this time. Like telegram videos are actually not taken in Syria this week. Right. That are taken different places and times. And we are careening towards this not becoming a fight between two different administrative projects, but becoming an inter ethnic conflict. Right. And I think we're pretty much there at this point and nobody seems to be looking for an off ramp.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Which is tragic. Like, I was in HESseq two years ago and I was conducting interviews there. And I remember there was a little kid whose father had died fighting isis. And like it was dark outside. You know, this was during a time when Turkey was bombing the region quite heavily. And the little kid, I think, had been struggling to sleep because he was sleeping in the middle of the day. And then when he woke up, we were just hanging out with his mother. And I gave a little kid some toys to play with that I bought with me. And like, I can't help but thinking how scared that poor little guy is now, you know, and he. His dad's not there, right. Because like 12,000 members of the STF, he died fighting the Islamic State.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And now another state is coming to put his family, his kid, in danger. Like, that's horrific. What people have gone through in Syria already is too much and like, to see more killing and dying there is heartbreaking for me.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Just very briefly, on the immigration update, it appears that Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now under the impression or that they believe that they can enter homes without the consent of the homeowner. So they can use force to enter in order to remove someone with a final removal order. So long as they have an administrative warrant. That is a different thing from a judicial warrant. Right. This is often what people talk about when they talk about, does ICE have a warrant? They're looking for a judicial warrant as opposed to a warrant that they have issued themselves an administrative warrant. And so this will obviously broaden the amount of places that they can enter and times when they end up entering people's homes by force. Right. So we will likely be seeing more violence here as well.

[Hank]

Yay.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I'm going to put a link to a Haversour fundraiser at the bottom of this. If you. If you'd like to help people in Kurdistan, there are people who have been displaced four times now in the last few years. Right. Since 2018. So if you'd like to help, you can do that. We'll also include a fundraising link for Minneapolis. If you'd like to spend some money closer to home.

[Ellie Bell]

Great.

[Margaret Killjoy]

If you'd like to email us, you can do so by emailing coolzonetipson Me. If you want the email to be encrypted, you should send it from a Proton address.

[Robert Evans]

Well, we look forward to hearing more from Margaret and James in Minneapolis. And I don't know, I guess that's it.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Hank]

Did we? We reported the news.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yep.

[James Stout]

All of it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's kind of how it feels.

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We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Ellie Bell]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Ellie Bell]

Can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.